I’d learned the art of wards from my grandfather. Roland loved to teach, and I’d been hungry to learn. Later my grandmother and her servants refined my education, but the foundation of my magic expertise was built by Roland. If you have to learn magic, studying under a brilliant megalomaniac wizard who thinks he’s always right and can’t wait to dazzle you with several millennia of knowledge was a really good choice.
In the few hours since coming back from the Central Market, I’d set three concentric rings of wards. The outer ward, undetectable by most of the people and creatures who crossed it, warned me that someone was coming, sampled the intruder’s magic, and flashed it in a burst of color invisible to anyone who wasn’t a sensate.
The middle ward wrapped around the building, shielding the front entrance. I’d chosen a rune ward, a simple defensive barrier that relied on Elder Futhark runes carved on bone stakes driven into the ground. Solid, powerful, and common enough to not raise any eyebrows. It was also the first ward the Order’s Academy taught to prospective knights, so it went along with my disguise.
The third ward sealed off the hallway leading to the front bedroom and to the secret door, protecting the entire inner chamber. I had raised Enki’s Shield in four hours instead of the full twelve it usually required and got a throbbing headache for my trouble. Still, Grandfather would be proud.
I missed him. He was the monster in our family of monsters, but he was still my grandfather, if not by birth then by choice. When my grandfather wanted to be liked, he was an unstoppable force, and he wanted me to like him. Roland wasn’t bored in his prison—he was far too brilliant for that—but he planned to get out, and Conlan and I were his link to the outside world. It had been over six weeks since my last visit. I was overdue.
Magic pinched me. I peeked out of the kitchen in time to see the street light up with green through the doorway. Ascanio walked out of the shadows and strolled up to my house. I’d thought that trail of grass-green magic I’d noticed at the murder scene looked familiar.
Someone from the Pack was interested in Pastor Haywood’s murder and they’d sent Ascanio to figure it out. Why? Had this order come from the top, or was this a Clan Bouda affair? Was someone pulling his strings or was he doing it on his own? All good questions.
Ascanio was never big on following orders. It wouldn’t be out of character for him to do this on his own, but he never acted without aiming for some sort of benefit.
He knocked on my doorframe. I walked out of the kitchen and to the front door.
“The shapeshifter hero. We meet again, and so soon.”
Ascanio froze.
Before I’d been on horseback, in the dark, a dozen yards away with my hood up. Now less than three feet separated us. He could see my face, and it burned a fuse in his brain. For a moment Ascanio forgot to be suave and simply stared with unnerving, focused intensity.
My timer went off.
Ascanio blinked. “Are you baking cookies?”
“Yes, I am. Excuse me.”
I went into the kitchen. Behind me, magic tolled through the house, like a gong. Ascanio had tried to follow and walked right into my second ward.
I pulled the batch of cookies out of the oven, slid the second tray in, reset my mechanical timer, and went back to the door.
Ascanio leaned in the doorway, arms crossed, a slight smile on his lips. It had to be his sexy, nonchalant pose. I wasn’t sure if I was expected to toss my underwear at his feet or just fall back with my legs in the air. He must’ve realized that he’d stared like an idiot and overcorrected, like a driver who drifted onto the shoulder and jerked the wheel trying to get back on the highway.
“Nice ward,” he said.
“Keeps out the riffraff.”
A ruby light rolled over his irises. “Can I have a cookie?”
“No.”
He gave a mock sigh. “I have a feeling this conversation has gotten off to the wrong foot.”
“Not just a hero, but a master detective as well,” I kept my voice quiet and friendly. In my head, I grabbed him and shook him until all the things I wanted to know about Pastor Haywood’s murder fell out of his shockingly handsome head.
He winked. “I’m not just a pretty face.”
“I don’t recall saying you were pretty.”
The smile stayed on his lips, but his posture lost some of its slouching. “Let me tell you what I’ve detected.”
I smiled back at him. “I can’t wait. Dazzle me.”
His gaze snagged on my lips. He blinked again.
Lost your train of thought for a second there, buddy?
“You pretended to be a lightweight on the bridge. You visited the Order and you have an Order ID, which says you are assigned to Atlanta, except you’re not, because the Atlanta chapter never has more than twenty knights and with you, they are up to twenty-one.”
Fair enough.
“You’ve used your brand-new ID to gain access to a crime scene, but you aren’t staying in the Order chapter. Instead you’re living in a hovel on the edge of the most dangerous area of the city, flirting with disaster and baking cookies with expensive chocolate chips.”
Here it comes, the brilliant deduction.
Ascanio hit me with a direct stare. “I have to ask why the Order is so invested in Pastor Haywood’s murder that they would bring a Knight-Crusader in for it?”
It wasn’t a bad assumption. When the Order had a particularly nasty mess on their hands, they threw a Crusader at it, who would either clean it up and disappear or die trying. Crusaders worked undercover, used unorthodox methods, and enjoyed a lot of leeway. If they screwed up, the Order had plausible deniability.
Crusaders were dangerous as hell and often crazy. They didn’t do what they did for accolades. They did it because they believed in their cause. Before Nick Feldman became the Knight-Protector, he was a Crusader, one of the Order’s best.
“No answer?”
I smiled at him again. “Did you expect one?”
Ascanio pushed away from the doorway and looked past me, at my humble abode. “This place is a dump.”
“Thank you.”
“Whoever rented it to you should be barred from owning real estate. Nick should’ve never let you stay here.”
Dropping the Knight-Protector’s name like you are bestest friends. “I like it here. Quiet, picturesque, but now that you’ve visited, I’ll have to put a ‘No solicitors’ sign up front.”
“I’m not here to sell you anything. But I can offer you better accommodations. You’re new to the city, and this really isn’t a good neighborhood.”
“People keep telling me that.”
“Because it’s true.”
My timer went off again. “Hold that thought.”
I went back to the kitchen, rescued my second batch, and turned the oven off. It was good that gas still burned even during the deepest magic waves.
“I can put you in a better house,” Ascanio called from the door. “Free of charge.”
Too crude for him. He was trying to gauge my reaction. I came back to the front and raised my head, inhaling deeply, the way shapeshifters did when they were trying to catch a scent on the breeze. His eyes widened.
“Do you smell that?” I asked him. “What’s that odor, I can’t quite place it…”