Inked

killed her anyway?”
    Jamie nodded. “Didn’t want to risk being identified. But it wasn’t her death that sent Toby over the edge. It was the fact that they killed her using one of his own wards.”
    “Jesus.”
    “What could they possibly have hoped to gain by that?” Caleb asked.
    “Nothing. That was the devil of it. We caught them eventually and one of them cracked. Said they’d thought it would be quieter than shooting her or some such. It was pure coincidence that the ward they used to suck the life out of her was one made by her father.”
    “And afterward?” I asked, pretty sure I already knew.
    Jamie shrugged. “Toby went off the rails. He started drinking, lost his practice, disappeared for a few years. The next time I saw him, he’d hung out his shingle in Tartarus. Turns out he’d been studying with some Native American master out in Arizona—healing spells, defensive wards and the like.”
    “And weapons. I didn’t find any in his shop, but I’m pretty sure he was killed over some wolf tats. And I didn’t think they were used for defense.”
    “They’re not. But Toby didn’t make weapons. He swore he’d never again allow his energy to be used to destroy the innocent.”
    “Are you sure? Because—”
    “He’s dead, isn’t he?” Jamie snapped. “I warned him when we had to pull out that Tartarus wasn’t safe—not with his inventory and with the price of wards these days. I practically begged him to at least make a few weapons for his own use. He flat-out refused.”
    I frowned. This case was getting murkier, not clearer, as I went along. I needed some answers, and I knew of only one person who might have them.
    “What are we waiting for?” Jamie echoed my thoughts. “Let’s go!”
    “Go where?” I asked, starting to worry.
    “Don’t tell me you don’t know who did this!” He glared at me, hands on hips, red-gray hair flying, face fierce. His whole five-three frame was quivering with emotion.
    “I have an idea, yes.”
    “Or where to find him?”
    “Yes to that, too. I was waiting around to ask if you know anything about the drain over on Decatur.”
    “I know everything about it,” Jamie said impatiently.
    “Can you draw me a map of the interior?”
    “I’ll do better than that. I’ll show you!” He hopped back into the drain, splashed over to where I’d left my bike and threw a leg over.
    “Jamie!” He waved, started the engine despite not having a key and took off in a cloud of dust, leaving Caleb and me staring after him.
    “I didn’t know he could ride,” Caleb said, as Jamie ripped through a median, slung across the path of an oncoming truck, jumped the sidewalk, clipped a streetlight, wobbled, corrected, and tore away in a squeal of my tires.
    “He can’t.”
    “Maybe we can get a ride with the ambulance,” Caleb offered after a moment.
    Well, crap.

9
    THE ambulance let us off on a patch of raw desert by Decatur Road. Jamie was nowhere to be seen, but my bike was leaning against a chain-link fence. The fence protected what had been an open air channel and was now a raging river.
    A few dust-dry areas still ringed the sides of the channel, but through the middle, the wash seethed. Water with a skim of oil and gas rushed past a corroded stove, lying on a rapidly diminishing sandbar. Trash—beer bottles, cigarette butts, and fast-food wrappers—bobbed in the current, swirling madly toward a tunnel protected by a large grate and a patch of weeds.
    I stared at it dubiously. This had seemed simple enough in my head: the gang lost their old hideout this morning, so they burnt out their rivals in the shantytown to make themselves a new one. But the reality wasn’t looking so cut and dried. I glanced around, but there didn’t appear to be any lookouts. Maybe they thought that with Were hearing they didn’t need any.
    Or maybe no one was crazy enough to want to hide out in the middle of a river.
    “Could we have the wrong address?” I asked hopefully.
    “My luck’s not that good,” Caleb muttered, swinging himself onto the fence. I hauled myself up after him and we dropped to the other side.
    Even standing on the bank, I could feel the ground tremble. Angry gray floodwater rushed around my legs and threatened to sweep me off my feet as we angled into the channel and sloshed across to the grate. It was festooned with newspapers and old crime scene tape, which it was attempting to keep out of the maybe four-by-four tunnel opening. Caleb