irises register on him. “I need your help,” she said. He spoke sharply in another language to the boys and they ran back into the apartment. Magdy, too, disappeared, but only briefly. Then he came out and closed the door behind him. Wordlessly, he walked down the concrete stairs. Sailor followed.
In the courtyard, they sat on a stone bench facing patchy grass decorated with a used intravenous needle, a deflated soccer ball and a tiny broken flip-flop. Magdy pulled a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. “So?” he said, exhaling and looking at her.
“I need to know where you get your síúlacht pills.”
“Why would I tell you?” He had a rough vocal quality common among were. The dishwashers were their own subculture in the bowels of the kitchen, so she’d never spoken to him, but now she could see that he was as physically powerful as he was socially insignificant.
“Because I’m trying to find a killer.”
He shrugged. What’s it got to do with me? his eyes said.
“Julio was murdered last night. Did you know that?”
Nothing to do with me, Keeper.
She opened her purse and counted out five twenties. “I can pay you. Not much, but it’s all the cash I have.”
“A hundred dollars.” He gave a short, derisive laugh. “It’s not much, period, to a dead man.”
“Are you saying someone would kill you if you gave me a name?”
“It’s what I’d do.”
“Then I have a problem.” She had more than one problem, she realized, because her temperature was rising, and Magdy was shimmering in the sunlight, looking less dicey and even friendly. She let him see it, knowing her eyes were pulsing and red, and might accomplish what her own powers of persuasion couldn’t. Especially as English was not Magdy’s first language and she didn’t know what was. Something she didn’t speak anyway.
Magdy’s large brown eyes peered into hers. “So this is it, the sickness?”
“Yes, in part. My body grows hot, I feel my blood flow faster.”
A thought struck her. With a sudden intuitive surge, she understood exactly what had happened to the Elven women. The Scarlet Pathogen had entered their bloodstream and made their blood circulate far too quickly, producing in them not just the warm and fuzzy feelings she experienced, but something much stronger: a fever pitch of passion. The sensations that came over her intermittently were for them a deluge. If Magdy looked appealing to her in this moment, then for an Elven woman he would have looked utterly irresistible.
“I have to know what it is the Ancients know about my sickness,” she said. “Can you just tell me, this source of the síúlacht, is he or she from the Underground?”
Above her, a crow called out.
Magdy looked at the sky. “She’s Elven, but she won’t talk to you.”
An opening, Sailor thought. “Where does she live?”
He took a drag on his cigarette. “Canyon.”
“Somewhere between four and seven hundred Elven live in the canyons, more if you count the multiracial,” she crooned into his ear. “Which canyon?”
“Lost Hills.”
Outside her district, Sailor thought. Reggie’s territory. And vast. “Narrow it down.”
“And what do I get?” he said, with a sidelong glance.
“What do you want?”
His face grew more wolfen. He grinned. It was an answer of sorts.
Sailor’s temperature was dropping, and he no longer looked friendly. She thought of the knife she carried and told herself to stay calm. “I’m just asking for a name. No one will ever know it was you who gave it to me.”
“The woman is Rath.”
“I need a name.”
“And what do I get?” he repeated, the words now a snarl. He could change, she realized. Right here, in broad daylight.
And then, in one swift movement, he moved in and pinned her arms against her sides, then started to suck on her neck. Shit, she thought. That was going to leave a mark. She couldn’t reach the dagger because he was holding her too tightly. This was twice in two days she’d let a guy in too close. The dagger could piss him off anyway, and that could bring on the transformation. And even armed she was no match for a full-on werewolf.
He kept nuzzling, and she looked around, belatedly thinking, situational awareness. She could scream, but that didn’t mean help would come. This looked like a courtyard where screaming women were routinely mauled by men.
“Magdy,” she said, summoning up all her bravado, “are you crazy enough to kill me? Because you mess with me, you better kill me, or I will make your life hell. Maybe