Ready to call my guardian, I stuck my finger in my mouth, extracted a small amount of Heka-rich saliva, then wiped it on my guardian’s sigil. “Priya,” I whispered. “Come to me.”

A familiar wave of nausea rolled through my stomach. The air in front of me shuddered, and a wispy, glowing figure pulsed into view. Like other Hermeneus spirits, Priya has a birdlike head and a unisex body, too rugged to be female, too soft to be male.

Priya nodded at me, bending at the waist. Command me, it said inside my head.

“My parents are in trouble. They’ve been spotted by authorities in Texas and are no longer hidden. The Luxe Order will soon know that they’re still alive, if their wards haven’t already alerted them. Contact my parents’ guardians in the Æthyr and relay this message. Wait for a response. I need to know what they want me to do to help. Go.”

Priya nodded and disappeared.

My guardian was my solitary link to my parents. Only in an emergency was I supposed to send it out to contact their guardians; I thought this qualified.

When I sent Priya out on these errands, the return time varied. Sometimes the spirit would come back to me with a report after a few minutes, sometimes several hours later, I could never tell. So I plopped down on Kar Yee’s chair and hoped it would be a short trip.

Opening one of the desk drawers, I reached toward the back until my fingers skimmed a stash of hand-rolled valrivia cigarettes. Calming like nicotine, but with a mild euphoric kick, valrivia doesn’t trash your lungs the way tobacco does and is about as addictive as caffeine. Half the demon population has a valrivia habit. I picked up mine from Kar Yee in college. I’d already smoked two that day—my self-imposed limit—but under the circumstances, I thought I deserved another. I dug a lighter out of my jeans pocket and lit up.

It was hard for me to believe that it had been seven years since the so-called Black Lodge slayings had thrust my parents into the public spotlight, making them villains in the lead story of every news organization, half a dozen true crime novels, and God only knows how many television investigative reports. They even got their own trading cards, part of a collectible set of serial killer profile cards that included Charles Manson and John Wayne Gacy. Classy.

Their sensational story was everything that the American public craved: gory murders, witchy ritual occultism, and a Bonnie and Clyde escape from the law with their daughter that ended tragically in their deaths.

Only, the three of us weren’t dead, and my parents weren’t guilty.

A repeat of an American Killers episode played on the muted television screen on the desk. It had been only a few hours since they’d been spotted, and already the stations were rearranging their programming to capitalize on the news story.

I turned off the television in disgust and took a few drags off my cigarette before my guardian reappeared.

May I show myself? Priya’s voice inquired in my head.

“Yes.” I crushed the remainder of the cig into a chipped ashtray shaped like a monkey head.

Priya’s form took shape again in front of me. Enola’s guardian confirms that they are aware of the situation. The Luxe Order will try to hunt you down. She suggests you ward yourself. She will contact us when they are safe, and will give you a place and time to meet them. She also said it would be unwise to pursue any other communication with them at this time. It’s too dangerous.

After years of little to no contact with my family, I was finally going to see them again? My heart fluttered, but I was still puzzled. “Why did they come into the States without warning me?”

I do not know. Enola’s guardian was closemouthed.

I exhaled in frustration. “Was there anything else?”

Your father’s guardian refused my request to communicate.

“They’re probably just being cautious. The Luxe Order has been able to intercept communication between guardians in the past.”

Yes, it would be logical for your parents to be heavily warded at this time.

A I tried to make sense of everything I caught myself chewing my fingernails; all of them were down to the quick, so not much left to bite. I wondered if the local branch of our magical order knew more than my parents were saying; it wouldn’t hurt to check with them.

Do you require anything else?

“Just keep your eyes open in the Æthyr and let me know if you see anything unusual.”

Priya nodded and began fading. Before the spirt vanished, it added, Be careful.

Right. And now I had to walk back out into the busy bar and pretend that I really was Arcadia Bell, bar owner. Not the daughter of two alleged serial killers being hunted down by the FBI. For the first time in years, I was genuinely afraid that I couldn’t keep up the lie.

3

After my excruciatingly long shift at the bar ended, I spent the remainder of the night holed up in my house, watching for additional news reports and waiting for my local magical lodge to open its doors the next morning. They officially opened at nine, but sometime around seven I became impatient.

Morning traffic made a fifteen-minute drive twice as long and strained my already frazzled nerves. I parked my gunmetal gray Jetta near a warehouse two blocks away from the lodge in an area called Wildewood Park, an eclectic neighborhood composed of abandoned factories and a mixture of low- to middle-income ranch houses built in the 1960s.

Though I felt pretty confident about the security of my current identity and didn’t believe I was in immediate danger of being tracked down by the Luxe, walking into the local lodge in broad daylight made me slightly paranoid. For all I knew, people could be staking it out. I mumbled a quick spell and charged one of the sigils on my arm to further obscure my identity, just to be safe. I tugged my purse higher up on my shoulder after the nausea subsided, then slunk down the cracked sidewalk.