Page 26 of Paws & Order

"He's watching something."

I crouch, trying to see the room from cat height. Nothing. No movement. No scent, or magical residue. Just an empty corner. But Gomez remains fixed on it, tail flicking like a metronome.

"I've never seen him hiss at thin air," Liza says quietly.

The fear in her voice is gone.

What's left sounds a lot like curiosity.

I follow the cat's gaze across the baseboard.

That's when I see it. A tiny imperfection in the paint. Not a scratch or a scuff. A raised edge no bigger than my thumbnail.

I kneel and carefully pry at it. The paint flakes away, and something metallic glints beneath.

"Well," I mutter.

Liza crouches beside me. "What is it?"

I work it loose. A crescent-shaped piece of copper slides free from the wall. Very old copper. Its surface is etched with a spiral design worn soft by time. Something about it feels familiar. Not dangerous. Just old.

Older than the building. Older than the town, maybe.

Liza leans closer until her shoulder brushes mine. "Could that be how they're getting in?"

"Possibly."

I bag it with the rest of the evidence. Then I look back toward the corner. Gomez is still staring. Still watching and waiting.

The room feels different now. Not threatening. Occupied. Like walking into a conversation that stopped the second you entered.

Beside me, Liza goes still.

She feels it too.

"What?" she asks.

I scan the apartment again. The walls. The ceiling. The windows. Nothing. And yet every instinct I have says we're no longer chasing footprints. We're chasing someone. Or something.

Gomez hisses again. The sound cuts through the silence. This time he's staring directly at the hallway. At empty air.

I rise slowly. "Liza."

Her voice drops."What?"

I don't take my eyes off the hallway. "I think we're finally looking in the right direction."

CHAPTER 9

LIZA

Ifind Cassian exactly where I left him: half leaning against the battered kitchen counter in my apartment, folding bakery tissue into abstract origami.

He's making a crane that would make the local witchcraft guild cry, and I have a sudden, unhelpful urge to snap a picture of it just to prove to someone later that this really happened.

The Blackthorn Bay police chief, who once bench-pressed a feral minotaur, is now giving himself a paper cut on a pastry wrapper.

No one would buy it.