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rain had started to fall, miniscule silver meteors streaking through the illumination. Tendrils of fog rose from the sun-warmed asphalt. The tendrils twisted and curled around his steel-toed boots as though he stood in a Gorgon’s nest of transparent snakes.
    He stood several feet away from the building and scanned it and the surrounding area with a hypervigilant gaze. The motel building had a couple of floors, rows of identical doors stacked on top of each other. He had secured a ground-floor room that opened directly onto the parking lot, so they could leave in a hurry if they had to. It was late enough that the motel was quiet, and the cars that dotted the parking lot were cool to the touch. He pivoted at the curb to start another lap.
    “What do you need?” Dragos asked.
    “You should send a cleanup crew to the Motel 6 where she was hiding. Oh, and she said she left a stolen car in a Wal-Mart parking lot. She said she wiped her prints off the steering wheel and car door handle, but she admits she’s been pretty rattled since the attack and hasn’t been thinking very clearly. The car needs to be cleaned and returned to its owner.”
    “I’ll get Tucker on it. Hold on.”
    He waited while Dragos relayed orders. Then Tiago said, “Dragos, you’ve got to help me get a handle on her before there’s a murder-suicide here. She’s bawling her eyes out. I’m here to tell you, there’s nothing worse to be around than a forlorn faerie.”
    Dragos coughed. “Oh-kay. Hold on.”
    Tiago’s sharp ears caught Pia in the background, saying, “You’re all Neanderthals, what else did you expect? What, me talk to him? Oh no—” The phone must have exchanged hands. Pia sighed, “Hello, Tiago. I’m so glad you found her. What’s going on?”
    Another female. He nodded. Smart. Speaking in rapid sentences, he filled her in. “You’ve got to help me get her to stop crying,” he demanded.
    “You just told me she’s drunk,” Pia said. “Don’t you think she’ll stop as she sobers up?”
    “That’s not soon enough,” he growled.
    “Have you tried talking to her?” Pia asked.
    He pulled the phone away from his ear to give it a quick glare. Was that sarcasm in her voice? He said, “Of course I have. I came all this way to help her, and she keeps insisting I go away. She didn’t even want me to look at her wound. What the fuck is that about?”
    There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Pia said, “You want me to deal with this in a five-minute conversation.”
    He told her in a grim voice, “Does it have to take that long? I’m just looking for a way to survive the night.”
    He glanced at the door to their motel room, which he had left cracked open a few inches. He could still hear her crying. The worst of it was how quiet she tried to be, sneaking sobs into her pillow. She probably thought she was hiding it from him. Argh. He wanted to stab something in his ears.
    “Alrighty,” Pia said. “Gray and I have been discussing Niniane today since she’s been on all our minds. Did you know she barely escaped with her life when Urien led the coup that slaughtered her family?”
    Tiago stopped pacing. His hand tightened on the cell phone. “I knew Urien had killed her family and she had escaped, but I don’t know the details.”
    “She was seventeen years old,” Pia said. “Seventeen. Did you know she saw the bodies of her twin brothers, and she watched Urien’s men as they gutted her mother?”
    His stomach clenched. Her mother, gutted before her eyes. He wondered how old her brothers had been. How they had been killed. He had to clear the gravel out of his throat before he could reply. “No,” he said. “I didn’t.”
    “So, here’s my five minute fix,” Pia said, her voice soft. “Niniane is under a lot of stress. When she was just a child, a family member, maybe even someone she had cared about and trusted once, slaughtered everyone she loved. Now she’s survived an assassination