We bolted down the hall, eschewing the elevator for the fire stairs. Outside, into the car, tires squealing as vertigo pulled against my stomach. Dmitri drove for a long time, through twisting back streets, past Orthodox churches with steeples flying like hot-hair balloons against the gray sky, fountain squares that could have been snapshots at high speed on a postcard, old Soviet blocks that had their own square, postmodern beauty.

"We sightseeing?" I asked. Dmitri checked his rearview mirror.

"Making sure that we don't have a tail. The mob is tenacious, even more than American cops." He gave me a pointed look.

"I'm not really in the mood for banter," I said. Lola, Anna, Red, Deedee, even Charlie. "They're all still in that place. Those girls."

"And now we have evidence," Dmitri said. "Isn't that what you live for? The evidence?"

"You know, Grigorii and Ekaterina aren't just going to let us have this," I said. "We can't go back to your pack house."

"Kirov will meet us at a hotel room," he said. "The Redbacks have a few safe houses scattered around."

"And we need someone who can break into this computer," I said.

"I'll see if Kirov knows anyone," he said.

"Trustworthy," I said. "No one weird or fly-by-night. Chances are the Belikovs have some kind of dead man's switch on the hard drive. If we screw up cracking it, the whole thing will wipe."

"Always the optimist," Dmitri said, pulling in to the parking lot of a small hotel.

"I do my best," I told him.

CHAPTER 19.

The hotel was a small pocket of civilization in the long parade of urban underbellies that had become my life. It was boutique and old, stuffy and full of velvet and Persian rugs, but it was clean, warm and didn't smell like bodily fluids.

The old man minding the front desk passed over a key without a word, giving me the eye. I gave it right back, until he dropped his eyes down to his Ukrainian-language celebrity magazine. "Come on," Dmitri said.

The elevator was the old-fashioned kind that had a gate and a guy in a monkey suit to press the button for you. "Third floor," Dmitri told him. The gate rolled shut and we started to move, at roughly the speed of a glacier.

"Did that seem easy to you?" I said. Dmitri lifted his shoulder.

"Nothing easy about getting attacked and assaulted by a witch, Luna. But you hit him a good one. He'll live, but he won't be pretty."

I leaned against the gate and rubbed my forehead. "It's just ... We broke in. We got the jump on him and his goons, and we got his computer. Aside from the gunshot, it was like some movie snatch-and-grab, total smooth sailing. He's a witch, Dmitri. They never give anything away for free."

"Luna, you want to know what I think?"

"Am I gonna hear it, anyway?"

"I think you're overanalyzing things," he said. "We got what we wanted. Now forget about the Belikovs and let's find my daughter so you can go home and I can get her back to her mother."

I sighed, but I let it go. Dmitri would never admit that he was wrong-another one of his charming traits. There had been good ones, too, don't get me wrong, but the stuff that stuck with me was the temper and the stubbornness, the alpha-male attitude that made me feel like I was suffocating when we lived together.

The hotel room was small, European-style, with a sink in the corner and a shared bathroom down the hall. I went to the window and checked the street out of habit. A few cars were parked along the curb, but no one I recognized was on the street.

"I think we're safe," I said to Dmitri. "For now."

Kirov knocked on the door and came in, trailed by a thin girl with lank blonde hair and a laptop case. "This is Jocelyn," said Kirov.

"Yo," Jocelyn said. I cocked my eyebrow at her.

"You're American."

"Canadian," Jocelyn said, slinging her case onto the bed. "Where's the machine you need me to crack?"

"Jocelyn is a freelancer," Kirov explained. "She kindly helps out the pack in exchange for our protection."

"Protection from what?" I asked her.

"I'm not just a programmer," said Jocelyn. "I was a technomancer back home, before some caster witches decided they didn't like my look and chased me out of Toronto. Americans, naturally. I blame your country entirely for me living in this shithole."

"Well, at least she's pleasant," I said to Dmitri. Jocelyn heaved a sigh.

"Do you want me to crack this machine or not?"

Dmitri handed her the laptop. "We need the password, and the files."

Jocelyn sniffed. "Amateur hour. You really got me out of bed for this?" She booted up the machines and attached a USB cable from her laptop to Grigorii's.

"Hmm," she said after a minute. "Maybe we're not dealing with a complete moron. He's got a working on his hard drive."

I blinked. "He enchanted his hard drive?"

"Or had another technomancer do it for him. We're common around here. Must be all the radiation or something."

"Can you crack it?" Dmitri said. He paced, too big for the space, and I grabbed his arm and jerked him into a chair.

Jocelyn sighed, punching in commands on her own. "Give me a few minutes of peace, all right? I need to program a working to crack his security, and offensive spells take time." She started typing, her keyboard the witch's alphabet, and I felt a prickle of magick down my back.

I retreated to the window again, keeping watch. I knew I was being ridiculous, hyper-vigilant, but seeing Grigorii again and feeling his hand against my skin had stirred the primal anger that lived deep in my hindbrain.

"You all right?" Dmitri said at my shoulder. His hands traveled to my neck, massaging. "You look twitchy."

I jerked away from him. "Don't do that."

He frowned. "I'm just trying to keep you calm."

"I am fucking calm," I snarled. "I don't want to be touched, all right?"

"What's the matter with you?" Dmitri said quietly. "If you're cracking up, don't do it in front of someone from my pack. You're embarrassing me."

I looked back at him, saw the black spilling out from his irises, covering the green and white. Turning his eyes into the deep, fathomless oceans of inhumanity that let the daemon look back at me.

"Dmitri," I said quietly. "Look at yourself."

"You're mine," he hissed. "Whether you believe it or not. That man can put his hands on you, but he can never erase my mark."

Something about the voice triggered a memory in me, a daemon staring at me, hungering for me ... and then backing away.

Good parting, one who wears the mark of Asmodeus.

My jaw set, and I took a step back from Dmitri, only to bang into the window.

"Asmodeus?"

"I warned you, Insoli," he whispered, bending close to my ear. Dmitri's hands reached out and grasped my arm, squeezing hard enough to bruise. "I warned you that we'd see one another again."

I was paralyzed, as much as if Grigorii still had me under his working. The last time I'd seen Asmodeus, the terms had been less than civil. The daemon had saved my life, and I had wiggled out of our bargain in return. Maybe not very sporting of me, but it was a daemon we were talking about, not a homeless orphan.

"Nothing to say, Insoli?" the daemon whispered in Dmitri's voice. His eyes danced, gold flaming up in the depths.

"Leave," I snarled. "Leave him alone. You don't have a fight with Dmitri, you have a fight with me." I shot a look at Kirov and Jocelyn, but they were absorbed in Jocelyn's working. Not that they'd see what I saw. Asmodeus was shy.

"You are so wrong, Insoli," he purred. "So very, very wrong."

I raised my chin. "If you don't leave Dmitri alone, I am going to summon you and exorcise you back into the Dark Ages. You know I will."

He laughed, low in his throat. "You aren't a witch, Luna. You'll kill him if you try and we both know that that to be the truth." to be the truth."

"Why are you doing this to me?" I demanded. "What is it you want?"

"To see you," he said with a grin, fangs glimmering in the low light. "To tell you that I'll be seeing you again. Sooner than you think."

I opened my mouth to threaten him again, but then Dmitri blinked and his eyes were his own.

"What happened?" he asked. "What did I do?"

"Nothing," I said, easing myself out of his grasp. "Nothing happened at all. You just faded out there for a minute."

He rubbed his forehead. "I've got a bitch of a migraine. Kirov." He walked over to his pack mate and got a pull from Kirov's flask.

I dropped into a chair, gripping the arms to stop my hands from shaking. I had never seen a daemon take possession of a person like that.

Of course it was possible. Dmitri had been standing close enough to kiss me, speaking in the voice of the one daemon who wanted to take a pound of flesh out of my hide.

My panic attack was interrupted by Jocelyn, who snapped her head up. "We're in."

"That was fast," Dmitri said.

"Technomancer who put the wards on this machine wasn't careful," she said. "Left a hole as big as my head in his working. You really want people to stay out, you get someone like me to write a custom spell for your needs."

"We're looking for business records," I said. "Sales, financial transactions, that kind of thing."

"That's your department, peaches," said Jocelyn. "I'm just a locksmith. And I like to be paid promptly."

Kirov drew an envelope out of his pocket and passed it to her. "There you are, my dear."

Jocelyn saluted with the envelope of cash. "Pleasure doing business with you."

"That laptop belongs to some nasty people," I spoke up. "Watch your back, Jocelyn."

"Dude, if the caster witches couldn't catch me, some chain-smoking gangsters who can scribble spells aren't going to be a problem," Jocelyn said with a smirk. "I am that good. Catch you later, Dmitri." She dropped him a wink and walked out.

I snarled. Did every woman in Kiev know him intimately?

Dmitri turned the laptop toward me. "Take a look."

"The records are in English," I said in surprise.

"Not the first language around here," Dmitri said. "Smart, when you think about it."

There were hundreds of spreadsheets on the hard drive, all coded with initials and strings of numbers that meant nothing to me.

"This is absolutely no help," I said. "Look at this."

Dmitri frowned over my shoulder. "Code."

"Well, we knew that was coming," I said. "These notes in the column must be where they took the girls, or who bought them, or some sort of relevant information. You don't just leave gibberish."

The notations were one or two words, nothing overtly threatening.

Bad weather.

Underground.

Charm school.

"And the numbers?" Dmitri said.

I blew out a puff of frustration. "I'm a cop, not a mathematician, Dmitri." I scanned the columns. "Three numbers in one, two in the other," I said. "Locations and girls, I'm guessing, but I can't crack this. I'm not a cryptographer, either."

Kirov pointed at the two-number notation. "Latitude and longitude," he said. "Simple. A way to find a location that anyone knows. All you need for an address is a GPS."

"Perfect," Dmitri said. "Now we just need to crack the names and we'll find Masha."

"But it wouldn't be names," I murmured, thinking of Lola and her insistence that she not know me. "We gave them fake ones, and they never bothered to learn our real ones. How do you keep track of a bunch of women with no names?"

I pressed my finger against the screen. 1-23-140 1-23-140. Not a birth date. Not a state ID number. No one cared when the girls were born or who they were before. They only cared that they looked good enough to make a buck ...

"N-1," I said. Dmitri cocked an eyebrow.