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the person behind the desk where she could look up old newspaper articles, then followed his directions toward the back.
    The place was not very busy. He searched for Crescents, who would be able to see him. A Deuce was checking out. Sed ducked behind the aisle as the man left. A handful of Mundanes. Easy to dispense with.
    That was what had gotten him into trouble in the first place, relegated to a prison on the Dark Side. He had been sprung to carry out a task, the kind he most enjoyed.
    The object of his task took a seat in the back of the building, the perfect location. If he could get rid of the rest of the inhabitants, he would be done and allowed to play as his reward.
    Mundanes couldn’t see him, but they could feel him. Sed moved up close to one male who was reading at a table. Mmm, would love to eat him, torment him. All he was allowed to do was send him a feeling of dread.
    The man shivered and looked around. He closed his book and left. Several others were just as easily dispensed with. Some took the time to check out, while the more sensitive ones left their stacks of books behind.
    Now, the workers. Sed made two of them violently ill by flooding them with negative energy. They staggered out, sure there must have been something toxic in the coffee they had shared. One became unaccountably angry and stormed out. Which left the man who appeared to be in charge, and who was accountably angry that his entire staff was gone. He did not respond to the demon’s emotional blasts because he already held anger and hopelessness.
    He reached for the phone and looked at a list of names and numbers. Before he could call replacements, the demon reached into the man’s chest and squeezed his heart. He gasped, shock on his face.
    The demon inhaled his pain. Die, Mundane. Die by my hand, and no one will know any better.
    The man dropped to his knees and collapsed, claimed by the heart attack. Sed ran to the door and locked it just as someone approached with a stack of books. The woman tried the door, peered in, and then dropped the books into the metal bin. The demon thought about sliding his hand out of the rotating bin and grabbing her. How amusing it would be to see her expression of horror.
    Alas, he had to follow the rules if he hoped to gain freedom. He flicked off the light switches at the front and made his way to his target. The one he could torment.
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    Ruby’s brain was literally buzzing. Hah, I knew he put some funky drug in the air.
    Except that didn’t explain the killer orb. That was no hallucination, nor was Mon’s death. And she didn’t feel high or dizzy or otherwise altered. Her rash was flaring big-time though.
    She’d barely taken time to enjoy the smell of the books, a scent she found oddly comforting, on her way to the bulky machines at the back of the building. Why had she never thought to look at the old newspaper stories dating back to the time of the boating accident?
    She stopped at the headline: FAMILY PERISHES AT SEA .
    This was it. To the side was a picture of all three of them, posing at what looked like a picnic. She plunged in. Her father was obviously doing well in whatever job he’d been working on—something to do with physics—as the boat was described as a yacht. The Yard certainly wouldn’t fund such a thing.
    The press played it up as another mysterious Devil’s Triangle disappearance. Investigators speculated that it was either an accidental explosion, rogue wave, or pirates.
    The family’s disappearance. It hit her then, that she was included in the missing. There was no mention of her rescue. At the time, she was Ruby Winston. Mon adopted her and, as Cyntag had pointed out, immediately changed her name for some legal reason she had never questioned.
    Because he was hiding you?
    She’d been a distraught nine-year-old and had just gone along: name change, Mon’s move into a new neighborhood, and his continuing touring,