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the ogre and nodded. “Exactly the same.”
    “I know who hired them,” I said. “They were sent here by the Society.”

Chapter 5
    T he bodies of the two ogres began to melt into the grass. In a few seconds, their remains would be gone, leaving nothing more than a patch of earth where flowers and plants would grow faster than normal for a while. I stood watching the bodies break down, questions tumbling around inside my skull. Why was the Society trying to kill me? Why would they send faerie beings to do the job? Who had given the ogres the magical protection tattoos?
    “What do you mean they’re from the Society?” Felicity asked.
    The bodies were gone now. “Those particular designs are tattooed on all fully-fledged investigators. They protect us from minor magic, things like location spells and some enchantments. As far as I know, only the Society of Shadows uses those exact symbols.”
    A car drove past us on the highway. “We should get out of here,” I told Felicity. “The sight of a man standing by the side of the road holding a glowing blue sword might draw attention.”
    “What about their car?” she asked as we got into the Land Rover.
    “We’ll leave it here. It’ll be stolen. Faerie beings don’t own vehicles in our realm.”
    “When they drove up next to us, they looked like normal men,” she said. “Was that a glamor?”
    I nodded. “It’s how faerie beings walk among us.” I threw the sword onto the back seat and drove the Land Rover over the grass to the road, turning toward Leon Smith’s house. Was there even a point in pursuing this case if I was on the Society’s hit list? I had no idea, but right now, I had to go about my business as usual.
    The day was becoming hot now, the sun climbing in a clear blue sky. I put the AC on, grateful for the chilled air as it dried the sweat on my forehead.
    “Alec, it can’t be the Society,” Felicity said after we had driven a couple of miles. “It doesn’t make sense. Why would they send you here and set up the office in Dearmont if they were just going to kill you? None of it makes sense.”
    “What doesn’t make sense is that those ogres were tattooed with Society symbols,” I told her.
    She went quiet for a couple of minutes, lost in thought. Then she said, “What if it’s not the Society itself but someone inside the Society? Someone on the inside acting alone could have hired those ogres without the Society’s knowledge.”
    I thought about that. It was possible. I’d pissed off enough people in the Society that a lot of them wanted me dead. And there was the fact that the ogres hadn’t simply tried to shoot us—they had wanted to kill me with their bare hands in the woods, and that could be more than just their natural bloodlust. The bearded guy had tried to shoot me off the hood of the Taurus and his partner had told him not to shoot me. Maybe their job had been to make sure my death looked like the type of fate any preternatural investigator might meet: being killed by preternatural beings.
    When the Society investigated my death, as they did the deaths of all investigators, they would discover that I’d been killed by ogres. There was no way they would suspect those ogres had been hired by someone in the Society, because the usual transactions between Society members and preternatural beings involved a clash of swords, the casting of curses, and, ultimately, death for one or both parties.
    Was it possible that a Society member had formed a temporary truce with the preternatural world just to kill me and cover his tracks? Or her tracks, of course. There were plenty of women in the Society who would like to see me ripped apart by ogres.
    “You could be right,” I told Felicity. “Let’s say someone in the Society wants me dead. They make a deal with the ogres, hire them as hitmen. As part of the deal, they give the ogres the protection tattoos. They hide the wearer from location spells and protect them from minor