I nudged Kye, and nodded toward the guard. He seemed to get what I wanted, because he said, "My time isn't up yet."

"All monies will be refunded, sir." He walked over to the door and pressed his hand against the scanner. After a beep, he leaned forward, letting his eye be scanned. There was a soft click, and the door opened.

I turned him around and walked him back out the door. As I retreated from his mind, I left the image of us walking away from the room.

As the hall door clicked shut, I blew out a breath and lifted a sweaty strand of hair from my forehead.

So you're one of the guardians who could walk into this club and freeze the mind of every man and woman in this club, Kye said, eyeing me with an odd expression.

As if he was suddenly rea.s.sessing me. I wasn't sure whether that was a good thing or a bad one.

There are vamps more powerful than me at the Directorate. I replied absentmindedly, my gaze on the hall beyond. It was small, pitch black, and smelled of dust, damp, and magic. Dark, distasteful magic.

Which is warning enough that even one such as me should never get on the wrong side of the Directorate. Or her hunters.

If you want to continue living the free and easy life of a killer for hire, then that's a mighty good idea.

I don't always kill, he said mildly. Sometimes I guard.

Guarding killers isn't that much of a step up the ladder. I slipped off my stilettos, then blinked on my infrared vision and stepped into the hall. The faint, metallic scent of blood flavored the air, and with it the stench of flesh beginning to rot. Maybe they hadn't had time to get rid of Billy's body after all.

Well, when it comes to Blaise, your pack alpha, I'd have to agree. He let the door close and darkness swamped us. Not that it mattered to me.

Then why did you take the job? I moved forward cautiously. I might be able to see in this inky blackness, but magic was crawling across my skin, pinp.r.i.c.ks of fire that sent a continuous shudder of revulsion through the rest of me.

Because he paid more than the usual rate, and because I was intrigued to meet the woman who had him so scared.

I snorted softly. Blaise was never scared of me.

Then why did he hire me?

You know why-to protect his precious son, Patrin, from the death threats he was receiving.

Kye smiled. It swirled across my senses.

There were never any death threats. It was you and Rhoan he feared.

I snorted softly. Blaise and his precious sons spent most of their lives using the two of us as their expendable punching bags. Why the h.e.l.l would he be scared of us before we beat the c.r.a.p out of him?

Because he feared what you could become-what you did become. He hesitated. There is magic up ahead. And Blaise will seek his revenge for what you and Rhoan did to him.We'd guessed that. Blake wasn't the type to forgive people-especially when they'd embarra.s.sed the h.e.l.l out of him. So is this ability to sense magic another skill you're siphoning from someone?

I felt Kye smile again. No, this time it's a talent that's inherited from the pack.

This would be the pack that supposedly has no psychic skills whatsoever?

That's the one. I'm sensitive to the presence of magic, but I cannot use it like I can psychic talents.

But that's how you tracked that sorcerer to the warehouse?

That and the smell of death.

I nodded. At least it explained how he'd come to be watching the sorcerer from within the shadows of her black wall rather than walking straight through it and getting sprung as I had.

But then, I hadn't expected to find h.e.l.lhounds or a sorcerer-just a dead man walking. Kye obviously had a better idea of what was going on than I did when he'd walked into that place.

The farther we moved down the hallway, the staler the air felt, and I had the odd sensation that we were moving down into the earth itself. There was little noise in this place, and the silence felt heavy, as if it was carrying a weight that it didn't want and we couldn't see.

The floorboards beneath my feet gave way to colder concrete, then to a mix of dirt and stone. Grit wedged in between my toes, forcing me to pause every now and again to shake it lose. Despite the earth flooring, the walls and ceiling were still concrete- although it was rough looking, as if it had been slapped on in a hurry, and without care.

The crawl of magic began to get stronger, its touch stinging like angry gnats. Something stark and white appeared in my infrared.

I switched to normal vision, saw a flickering golden glow begin to seep through the darkness ahead. It framed a rough-hewn archway that had only been half concreted.

I couldn't sense anyone or anything waiting, but my uneasiness grew.

Looks like the sort of light you get from a torch, Kye commented. Though his mind voice was flat and without emotion, his tension rolled over me, increasing my own. It's an odd choice when were under the earth and there seems to be little ventilation.

I cant smell any smoke, though. And I don't think our sorcerers would be too worried about air quality.

Or life, for that matter.

Because the magic wasn't the only thing that was getting stronger. The stink of blood and death rode the air, so powerful that even my wolf soul was turning her nose.

We approached the arch cautiously. Dust stirred the air with each step, but little else seemed to be moving.

I cant feel or smell anyone, Kye said.

No, but they may have laid traps of the magical kind. We need to be careful.

Then you go low, and I'll go high.

There was a whisper of movement, and suddenly I felt the burn of silver across my skin. How the h.e.l.l did you get a weapon into the club undetected? And how come I didn't sense it before this?He raised an eyebrow. You have a psychic sense about guns?

No, I'm allergic to silver.

We all are. We're werewolves. Amus.e.m.e.nt laced his mental tone.

Well, yeah, but I've been hit too often by it and I'm now extrasensitive to its presence. So how did you conceal that weapon?

The weapon is in a lead-lined holster, and if you know whom to pay, you can get anything you like into this club.

So whom did you bribe?

His smile flashed. There's no need to bribe when the manager is f.u.c.king a stripper, and the wife knows nothing about it.

And how do you happen to know that?

Because I bugged him. Made for interesting listening, I have to say.

Perv.

And as a telepath, you've never listened in to other people's thoughts or conversations, he said dryly. It's all the same, Riley.

We'd neared the archway, so I didn't answer, just wrapped the shadows around me and moved with vamp speed to the far side of it. Then I shook off the shadows, glanced at him, and nodded.

Go, he said, and we moved as one into the next room.

Which was actually a cavern. It was small, dank, and the air was putrid with the aroma of blood, death, and rotting flesh. The torches that lined the walls and provided the flickering light had to be battery powered, because they certainly weren't real. Nor could I see any power outlets or electrical cords. But at least they provided enough light to see by, although deeper darkness still haunted the more distant corners. Without them, and with no natural light, even my infrared would have been useless.

A stone table sat in the middle of the cavern, its top stained a dark reddish-black and its side streaked with the same heavy color. I had no doubt that its source was blood-blood that must have been spilled over years and years rather than merely the few months they'd been here in Melbourne.

Black candles sat around the base of the table, each one marking the point of a pentagram that had been etched into the stone flooring.

Which meant this wasn't the hideaway of the sorcerers.

It was their place of deep magic.

Nice setup, Kye said. His gaze paused on the b.l.o.o.d.y table, then he looked at me. This where they raise the zombies?

It feels like the same sort of magic. I stopped at the end of the wide ramp, right on one of the pentagram points. There didn't seem to be any magic coming off it, so maybe it wasn't active, but the room itself still burned with energy. With death.

My gaze moved across the stone table to the rough-hewn wall on the far side. Hollows had been carved into the stone, and in each one sat several items. A little pile of hair and a football in one. A brush and a football sweater in another. A pair of Nikes and a hubcap in yet another. All things men would generally have owned, not women.Had these things belonged to the men raised from the dead? Did part of the ritual require something that was precious to them?

My gaze went back to the table. All I knew about zombies came from fiction and Hollywood, and I had firsthand experience at just how wrong they could get it. But there was one thing that remained absolute, regardless of the truths and half-truths that might abound-and that was the fact that life required blood. h.e.l.l, even unlife required blood.

The question here was, whose blood was she using to reanimate her dead?

Kye walked past me, his clean musky scent like heaven against the foul stench of the room. Though he was careful to avoid the pentagram and candles, his attention seemed to be on the ground itself.

Which piqued my interest. What's wrong?

These, He squatted and pointed a finger toward the dust-covered stone.

I walked over and stopped beside him. What he was actually pointing at looked like two wheel marks.

It's probably tracks from Jessica's wheelchair, I said, dismissing it.

He glanced up at me. One of our sorcerers is paralyzed?

The zombie raiser is. That's why she was resting on her belly when she was in crow form at the warehouse.

At least it explains the ramp getting into this place. He rose and followed the tracks around the room. There's a lot of tracks going from the pentagram to these hollows in the wall.

Meaning this is her workplace, not Hanna's. I walked around the opposite way.

Maybe. His voice held an edge of doubt. Trouble is, the pentagram doesn't feel active.

And maybe we should be grateful for that. The stink of rotting flesh got stronger once I'd pa.s.sed the ramp again, and I studied the shadows intently. I couldn't see anything resembling a body but, given the smell, it had to be here somewhere.

Besides, given how careful these women tended to be, it wouldn't surprise me if they hid their victims in walled-up hollows and with magic.

I stepped closer to the cavern's wall, and felt the firefly press of magic against my skin. It was a magic that was slightly different from the other magic fouling the room, yet it was one I'd felt before.

I raised a hand and watched my fingers disappear into blackness. It was another wall like the one I'd encountered in that first warehouse-the one where Kye had rescued me from the h.e.l.lhounds.

I followed my hand into that blackness, and once again the air had the consistency of glue. The blackness pulled at me, resisted me, making every step difficult and progress minuscule. As before, I pushed forward as hard as I could. This time it didn't take as long to get free of it. Maybe it simply wasn't as deep.

Beyond it were the bodies. Not just one, but several, all in various states of decay. Like the trophy items, most of these bodies each had their own little hollow, but none of them were stretched out comfortably. Some lay curled into a fetal position, while others simply looked as if they'd been stuffed into their holes any old way, leaving bones jutting out and body fluids staining the stone. And unlike the trophy holes, some of these s.p.a.ces remained empty. Although nine cavities had been carved into the stone, only six had occupants. And there was one body still sprawled out on the floor.

I squatted down beside him and tried not to gag at the wretched smell of decay that, for some odd reason, seemed stronger near the floor line.This body was young-maybe no more than eighteen or nineteen-and I swear there was a look of terror frozen onto his slack features and wide-open eyes. Blood had matted his dark brown hair and splattered down his white shirt. His dark blue pants were similarly stained, but smelled slightly of urine. It had to be Billy. From the look of it, the poor kid had taken quite a beating before he'd died.

But why was he here, on the floor, rather than in one of the holes like the others? Was it simply a matter of not having the time to stuff him in, or did they have something else planned for him?

Given it was a question I was never likely to get an answer to, I searched through his pockets, finding his wallet and car keys.

Neither looked to have been touched in any way, though I guess I wouldn't know for sure until we got them to the lab for fingerprinting.

I reached forward and gently closed his eyelids. As I touched his skin, magic caressed my fingertips. It was the magic of the room, magic that burned my skin and made it crawl in revulsion.

Maybe Billy wasn't quite dead, after all.

Maybe none of them were. Maybe this was Jessica's emergency supply of bodies should resources start drying up elsewhere.

h.e.l.l, for all I knew, these bodies could be the remnants of interstate kills and graveyard robbings. Some of them certainly looked as if they'd been kept in this half-animated state for a while.

I glanced back down at Billy. There wasn't a whole lot I could do to prevent the reactivation of his flesh, if indeed that was what that magic was about. That was a job for the Directorate magi.

What I could do was stop him from becoming a problem if he did rise while we were still here. It wasn't something I really wanted to do, but at least the kid was dead and his spirit had moved on. He'd never know-and probably wouldn't care- about what I was about to do to his cold, unresponsive flesh.

I blew out a breath, then grabbed Billy's right leg, one hand on the ankle, one hand just above his knee. Then, as sharply as I could, I pushed-one hand down, one hand up. The knee cap shattered, the sound making me wince. I did the same to the left leg, then grabbed his wallet and keys and retreated back through the black wall.

Kye was standing within the pentagram, examining the b.l.o.o.d.y table.

Find anything? he said without looking up.

The source of the decaying flesh scent, I put Billy's items down beside the ramp, then dug the bottles of holy water out from underneath my bodice. I don't think you should have done that.

Done what?

Step into that pentagram, I uncorked one of the bottles and began sprinkling the water onto the pentagram etched into the floor. Steam began to rise and the stone itself began to bubble.

The magic wasn't active.

But there is magic here, and we have no idea how any of it might be activated, I emptied one bottle over three quarters of the pentagram, then stepped into the ruined circle and uncorked the second bottle. I raised it above the stone tabletop, then let the water pour down along its entire length.

As the stone began to bubble and steam, something shrieked. A high, inhuman noise grated at my nerves and made me want to cover my ears. I spun around, looking for the source of the unG.o.dly sound. Nothing appeared to have changed. We were alone in the room, and the shadows remained empty of life or movement.And yet... something had changed, but I couldn't define what. Maybe it was just the air. It felt heavier. Angrier, if that made any sense.

The uneasiness that had been riding my insides since we'd stepped into this room suddenly increased, and I had a bad feeling we'd just overstayed our welcome.