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andall knelt on the gray penthouse carpet and dug through the main compartment of his olive drab tactical pack. He pulled out two small cork-stoppered, unlabeled stainless-steel bottles about the size of Red Bull cans.
    “Twenty-four-hour energy potions,” he explained, offering them to me. “Shouldn’t make you anxious or overly jittery, and they’ll give your magic a boost, too. You can kinda burn through them, though, if you’re doing a lot of spells and … these are a
little
old at this point. So you might not get the full effect. My rec is to take one before you head out and keep one on you for after.”
    “In case I need to run from the Virtus Regnum?” I took the potions from his hand.
    “Yeah, exactly that.”
    I stared at the shiny, featureless bottles. “So what’s in these?”
    “Oh, you know … stuff.”
    I raised my eyebrows at him. “ ‘Stuff’?”
    “Um.” Randall closed his eyes, frowning, apparently trying to remember. “Ginseng, guarana, molasses, sea salt, jalapeño juice, black dragon bile, monarchbutterfly wings, phoenix ash … couple of other things I’m forgetting.”
    “Like unicorn poop? It might help the flavor.” Despite my misgivings, I stashed the bottles in my backpack.
    “It does have a bit of an aftertaste,” Randall admitted with a shrug. “But it gets the job done.”
       I woke up Pal, and we went downstairs to say our good-byes. Cooper and the Warlock were already in the lobby with Randall and his team. When he saw me step off the elevator, the Warlock cut his eyes away from me, staring at the shiny floor, his fists clenching anxiously. He was looking more and more upset every time he saw me. Big, strong, cool-as-a-shark Warlock was afraid, and that didn’t make me feel like a badass—it made me feel horrible. How could I ever fix things between us?
    Cooper, who had a distracted, faraway look, didn’t notice his brother’s distress, but when he saw me he seemed to regain his focus and smiled at me, looking genuinely glad to see me. Out of it or not, Cooper was still damn hot. My heart beat faster, and I wished I could just take him up to the room and spend the day under the covers with him. But that wasn’t going to happen, at least not anytime soon.
    He leaned in to give me a serious kiss, and as much as I wanted to feel his lips against mine, I gave him my cheek instead.
    “Why are you turning away?” He looked hurt.
    I winced, hating to have to explain in front of Randall’s team. They were all still looking at me like I was Wonder Woman and I didn’t want them to realize Iwas a whole lot closer to Typhoid Mary.
Hey, guys, I got hepatitis! Two kinds! And tick fever, too! Woo hoo!
    “Germs,” I whispered. “Remember? Don’t want to get you sick.”
    “Oh. Yeah. Sorry.” He gave me a light kiss on my forehead, then pulled me close. I could feel his strong heartbeat, and I hugged him tightly, wishing I could just melt into him.
    “You
will
wait for us to come back, right?” he asked.
    “Um.” My gut was telling me I had to try to get to Miko as soon as I could, but even if Pal and I were both 100 percent healthy, having the guys around for backup might mean the difference between success and failure. This wasn’t an algebra final—failing with Miko could mean we’d both end up as scattered bits of charnel for the vultures. And we were far from 100 percent.
    I felt my anxiety build as dueling voices in my mind shouted
Do it now!
and
You’re gonna die if you screw this up!
There had to be a sane compromise. And I’d already promised him once that I’d wait.
    “I’ll stay here until morning, like I said.” I stood up on tiptoes to kiss his cheek. “That’s the best I can do.”
       Once the guys left for the bordello portal, Pal and I went outside to see if we could help with corpse cleanup. Three Talents in stained medical scrubs—two men and an older woman, their faces covered with red bandannas that appeared to have been