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things.
    “Over there.” I tipped my head toward the buildings across the street. “Do you see anything? A dog, maybe?”
    Zay tipped his head down, and his body language looked like he’d just heard something funny or embarrassing. Nice act. With his face at that angle, he could look across the street without whoever was over there knowing.
    After a moment, he said, “No. Do you?”
    I didn’t even try for discreet. I stared across the street. No shadow. No one. Nothing.
    A chill plucked down my arms and magic stretched in me, pushed at my skin, heating my right hand and chilling my left.
    Just what I didn’t need to deal with right now.
    I took a breath, cleared my mind, and relaxed, letting the magic move through me, up through the ground, back out of me to fall into the ground again, an invisible, silent loop.
    “Someone was there,” I said. “Something. Maybe hurt.” And the image of Davy or one of the other Hounds, too drunk to think straight, maybe stabbed, mugged, or, hell, chewed on by a stray dog flashed in front of my eyes.
    My heart started beating faster. There was no way I could drive off and leave one of my Hounds in danger. I started around the front of the car.
    “What are you doing?” Zayvion asked.
    “We’re close enough to my house; we can call 911 if someone needs help.”
    “Allie,” he warned.
    “It will just take a second.” It came out like I didn’t care if he followed me or not, and the truth was I didn’t care. If one of my people was hurt, I wasn’t going to stand by and leave him on his own.
    I wondered if this was what a mother felt like and quickly pushed that away. Didn’t matter. What mattered was making sure whoever was over here was okay.
    Zayvion shut up and followed me. I only knew he paced next to me because I could see him out of the corner of my eye. He was walking, breathing, moving, like an assassin again. Silent.
    I was not nearly so smooth. I stomped over in my boots, making noise on purpose.
    Grunts accompanied the smacking and slurping, and I had a weird feeling there was more than one person back there.
    I almost turned back, because, seriously, I had no desire to walk in on some dirty lovin’ going on in the alley. But the whimper, the stink of pain, drew me forward.
    “Hey,” I called out once I stepped up on the sidewalk. “Everything okay over here?”
    Silence.
    The fog in the alley did not stir. There were no lights down the narrow passage, just two buildings standing so close together I didn’t think Zayvion could walk in there without losing jacket, shirt, and an inch of skin off both shoulders. Plus, the brick foundation of the apartment bulged outward at the bottom, sagging under the weight of years and making the alley even narrower.
    I could see maybe ten feet into the alley. Something shifted back there. Then an almost-human moan rose to a keen, was muffled, silenced.
    The familiar smell of strawberry bubble gum and cheap wine hit my nose. Those scents belonged to Tomi Nowlan. Tough girl, cutter chick, she was a Hound who didn’t like me stepping into the boss job now that Pike was gone.
    I didn’t care how much she hated me. She was one of Pike’s pack, my pack, and that meant I looked out for her. Especially when it involved a dark night and a dark alley.
    “Tomi?” I called out a little more quietly.
    Okay, dark night, dark alley, me with no gun—not that I ever carried one—and Zayvion with no gun, or at least I didn’t think he carried one. All systems go for getting hurt or killed.
    Except we both had magic.
    I recited a quick mantra, just the first lines of a Beatles’ song, set a Disbursement to choose how I’d pay for the magic—I was going with the tried-and-true headache in a day or so—and drew a glyph so I could pull magic up into my senses of sight and smell. Magic licked across my bones, warm, heavy, and poured out of my skin, filling the glyph.
    The world burst into layers of old magic, caught and tangled like