“Yeah,” she said, her word drawled out as long as his, but far more certain. Even in her dreams, she knew how to be decisive. And hadn’t she decided? This was no dream, though it might be some type of nightmare. There’d been magic used on them. Inimical stuff. Clinging to her mind and body. “You’re staying in the truck.”
He looked at her, frowning. “But—”
“No. It’s not safe. You sit tight. I’m going to see what’s happened. It has to have been some kind of sleep spell that hit us. No one got close enough for it to be gas.”
“So paranoid,” he said, but he slumped back against the seat gratefully. His face was drawn tight with shadow and fatigue. The spell had hit him harder.
Sylvie was briefly, annoyingly grateful for her family lineage. Lilith might have been a dangerous, power-mad anarchist with aspirations toward godhood, but she gave good genes. Sylvie was resistant to a lot of magic.
“Just stay here, okay?” She slid out of the truck on his complaining mutter and let the door slip closed, careful not to let the sound of its shutting carry.
Her body felt shocked, her muscles shaky, but she warmed with each movement she took until she felt more solid, more awake, less like a sleepwalker.
Watch yourself, the little dark voice said. Like her, it was weaker than normal. Tiny fingers of dread crawled along her spine, stroked her nape, set her to shivering even in the sultry night air. She reached for her holster, took the gun in hand, and let the weight soothe her.
Now she felt like herself.
She hesitated, wobbling foot to foot, torn between destinations. Head for the mall, where she might catch them in the act? Then what? There were four of them, armed with a magic that had put her out once, silently and swiftly. One encounter had left her vision blurry around the edges, her head swimming. Courting a second encounter with only a gun would be risky at best.
The voice whispered, Shoot fast enough, and their magics won’t matter.
This is not the Wild West, Sylvie reminded herself. Besides, she had a groggy cop in her car, and one thing she knew about cops was that gunfire tended to wake them up. And wake them up cranky.
She chose her second option. Make a quick sortie around the parking lot and nearby street, hunting the car the burglars arrived in. A license plate would go a long way to helping her out; even if they escaped tonight, she’d have a start at tracking them down.
Footsteps sounded behind her, cat-soft, a little uneven, and she spun, gun raised. Wright’s hand caught her wrist, a single moment of physical lucidity, and tilted the gun barrel away from him. His face was sober and still, his emotions masked for the first time since she had met him. “Don’t shoot,” he said. “It’s only me.”
She swallowed. Him, yes, but disoriented from the spell still? His pupils were blown in the low light, his voice gone husky. His hand on her wrist trembled but stayed tight. He seemed more a sleepwalker than her talkative client.
“I told you to stay in the truck,” she said. She could smell his sweat in the breeze: salt and fatigue, the acridity of fear held tight; she could smell the gun oil she’d used last night. He leaned an increment closer to her as if to join in on the scent parade, his mouth hovering near her ear.
“But then who would watch your back? Who would take your orders?”
She jerked free of him, twisting sharply against the thumb joint, and he stepped back, wordless and waiting for her reply.
Her heart thumped unevenly in her chest. Anger, pain, a raw spot unexpectedly touched; inevitably, Wright’s words had taken her to Demalion, to his compliance with her wishes, to his death.
She turned away from him. She wasn’t going to think about it. Couldn’t think about it. Not and do her job. “I’m looking for their car. You do whatever the hell you want.”
He tucked his hands into his jeans pockets and walked alongside her, slinkier than she had expected, given his prior twitchiness. “There are a lot of cars,” he pointed out.
“It’ll be a four-door. We heard that. And it won’t be on my list.” She finagled the sheet of paper, folded in eighths, out of her pocket. “These are the cars that were in the area when I started surveillance.”
“Organized,” he said. She would have bristled, but he didn’t attach any judgment to the word, not surprise or skepticism or amusement. Just a fact. She still wanted to explain, in small sentences, that this was her job—of course she was organized and good at it. It wasn’t the kind of job that suffered fools.
“Can I see the list?”
“Can you read in the dark?” Sylvie said. She wasn’t handing over her key-ring penlight.
She’d stopped moving for a moment, and he was back in her personal space.
“You might be surprised at what I can do,” he said, taking the paper from her. He tilted it this way and that, trying to read her pen scratches, and ultimately failed.
“Yeah, not so much,” Sylvie said. “There’s another penlight in the glove compartment. Why don’t you go get it?” She half thought, given his obvious disorientation, that he’d get back to the truck and pass out again.
“And leave you out here all alone in the dark?” he said. “I can manage.” He kept hold of the paper, drifted over to the nearest streetlamp, and read off the information by its dim light.
“They moved young,” Sylvie said, remembering the moment when they had first crossed the pavement. “Bar-hoppers, teenagers, gangs, or thieves. Or a fun combination of the above.”
“I don’t follow,” he said.
“Your words, not mine.” She left him there in the lot and headed farther out, trading asphalt beneath her feet for the damp grass of the medians between street and lot.
There were two new cars on the street, tucked a discreet distance from the mall but still close enough to walk to, even carrying heavy items. One was a sporty little Spyder, black in the dark, red when her flashlight hit it. She noted it and moved on, not bothering to take down the plate: She had heard more than two doors closing.
The next one was an Audi sedan, which gave her the requisite number of doors, and the space for four people. She fed her flashlight’s beam through the tinted windows, spotlighting a scatter of CDs over the dash, some fast-food bags on the floor. Sylvie took down the license number, juggling penlight, new scrap of paper, pen. She didn’t think it would pan out to anything much. For one thing, by the time you got four people into the sedan, there wasn’t that much room for loot. And these kids were greedy.
“Shadows,” he said, a hiss that carried easily in the night breeze. Her pulse jumped at the sudden summons.
Sylvie turned, found Wright two rows down on the far edge of the lot, standing beside an SUV. “Not on your list,” he said.
“And big enough to carry pretty much anything,” she said, joining him.
Wright nodded, bent over the list with his pencil stub, not only putting down the license plate but going around to the front and collecting the VIN. He passed the paper back to her, his numbers script-elegant at the bottom of her scrawled notes. She copied the information onto her own paper and passed it back before heading back onto her own circuit.
She finished her circuit, and her nerves began to complain. Maybe the burglars weren’t even there. Maybe they’d been and gone while Sylvie and Wright had folded into people origami. They’d been out the better part of an hour. That was more than enough time, if they had a specific target, if they weren’t just window-shopping.
She eyed Wright, a long, lean shadow wandering aimlessly about the parking lot. If she went toward the mall . . . She took a purposeful set of steps in that direction, and, as she had expected, he fell in just behind her. Being helpful. She bit back the command to return to the truck. He hadn’t listened to her yet, and she didn’t want him to get in the habit of ignoring her orders. Sylvie said, “Let’s go see what we can see. If we’re lucky, they’re slowpokes and choosy.”