had packed to run for it—but they’d already reached the house.”
“They captured her as they did Omen,” Thorn filled in.
I shook my head. “I don’t know what they were planning. At the time, I thought they were trying to kill her for being a shadowkind passing as human. They came at her with those whips of light like you said, and one of them had the star symbol on his clothing… They’d almost managed to bind her up when she must have decided she’d rather die on her own terms than theirs—and distract them so I’d have more chance to escape.”
That knowledge came with a pang of guilt. I swallowed hard and managed to go on. “With her magic… She burst apart, like a firework.”
It had been stunningly beautiful and horrifying at the same moment. I’d been so stunned myself that I’d frozen in place. Thankfully Luna’s last act had also literally stunned her attackers, who’d stumbled around dazed for long enough that I’d remembered I needed to get the hell out of there if I’d wanted her sacrifice to mean anything at all.
“Maybe they were only going to capture her, though,” I added. “If they were the same people who ambushed your boss. Hell, if they’ve been up to some kind of larger scale illicit dealings for even longer, it could have been their operations my parents disrupted—they could be the ones who murdered them too.”
“Are you sure your parents are dead?” Ruse asked, his voice carefully gentle.
“Yeah. Luna wouldn’t have kept me away from them. And, my dad at least… They cut off his head.”
I had no visual memory of that moment anymore, only the fact of what I’d seen and the thunk of it hitting the ground after it’d been flung out the window. After I’d woken up nearly every night for weeks sobbing hysterically from nightmares of that moment, Luna had used some of her magic to wipe the image itself from my mind. I don’t want to take all of it, she’d said. You need to remember why it’s important that we stay cautious. But the whole thing is too much.
All three of my guests were silent in the wake of that comment. The weight of their hesitation filled the room. I motioned my hand vaguely as if I could wave their reaction away. “If it’s the same people, then all the more reason I’ll be happy to help you track them down. I just wanted to see if any impressions from Luna’s things might be useful.”
Snap took my cue to move along. “Let me try the others, then.” He picked up the CD case and swiveled it in his hands.
Luna had indoctrinated me with a lot of her tastes, but I’d just never been able to get behind Def Leppard. Whenever she’d put that album on when I was a kid, I’d groan until she gave in and turned it off. I suspected she only liked them because of their name—she’d had a thing for big cats too.
Yet of course she’d kept it in the assortment of “essential music” that stayed in my emergency duffel bag. One of her top twenty, apparently.
Snap gave the case the same thorough examination as he had the scrunchie and frowned. “I hear a little laughter and the sense of her opening it on a couple of spots, but nothing more than that.”
“That’s okay. I knew not to get my hopes up.”
He’d left the sneakers for last. I wasn’t sure whether to have the most or the least hope for those.
Luna had adored them, called them her “fairy dust shoes”… but I’d also worn them for the most traumatic moment of my near-adult life. Sixteen-year-old me, with typical teenage rebelliousness, hadn’t left my shoes where I could easily snatch them up the night we had to flee. It’d started to seem so ridiculous that Luna insisted on so many precautions. Instead of waiting for me to search the piles of clothing around my bedroom, Luna had tossed that pair of hers at me on the way to the door.
They were too small for me by at least one size, maybe two. My recollection of the run away from the house she’d been renting was punctuated by the pinch of my constricted toes, sharper with each step.
No doubt Snap tasted that fraught impression first. He glanced at me again, his divine face haunted by a brief sadness, and then went on with his investigations. I resisted the urge to fidget.
“It’s