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know.”
    “Does something have possession of my sister?”
    “In a way, but what it is and why it’s acting like this is still a mystery to me. It doesn’t seem to be harming her . . . any more than she’s already been harmed, but it’s not helping her heal, either. It’s a lot of angry and confused something—it might even be Julianne herself.”
    Goss grabbed the hand I’d laid on her sister’s, her head enveloped in hopeful shades of blue with white sparks. “Can you help her? Can you figure out what it is?”
    “I will, one way or another, with Mr. Stymak’s help. You and Ms. Wrothen need to keep her safe and well until we do.”
    Wrothen made a soft snorting sound in the back of her throat, but didn’t say anything while giving me the evil eye, her aura spiking out in an annoyed shade of pumpkin orange. At least she seemed to be back to her normal grumpy self—which was better than conflicted and confused—and I had the impression she didn’t like me much. Not that that’s new: A lot of people and things don’t like me.

FIVE
    I didn’t see Quinton that night, but I did talk to him on the phone while the ferret played the clown and tried to hide one of my boots under the living room bookshelves. I had been poking, searching, and sneaking around databases trying to get information on Kevin Sterling and Jordan Delamar, so while I was pleased to hear from he-who-dislikes-the-phone, my mind was not quite on his track at first.
    “Hey,” he said. “Just a heads-up: Your friends with long teeth might have attracted unwanted attention.”
    I puzzled over it for a moment before I connected what he was saying to what he meant. Quinton was busy making trouble for his father’s project because he didn’t want to be sucked back into the covert machine; he was also dead against the project on moral grounds, since it had something to do with “investigating” paranormal creatures and using them in horrible experiments for purposes that I wasn’t quite clear on. Among other things, Quinton didn’t want his father to discover that I was a sort of paranormal creature myself, because the gods only knew what James Purlis would do if he thought he had a “freak” so close to hand, much less one who had access to monsters and the deep secrets of the Grey. He was still thankfully ignorant of it, though he must have been close to figuring out that there was an interface between the normal and the paranormal. So if Quinton was warning me about trouble for folks with fangs, Purlis must have been close to or actively targeting vampires.
    The local blood-sucking society wouldn’t like that and since they were still making the transition to new management—the fall of the old regime was three years ago, but vampires don’t like change—and if Quinton’s father was messing with them, that would put certain people on the spot, which could upset the current calm among the life-challenged and lead to a hell of a lot of mess that would spill out into the normal world in the guise of gang violence and murder. I hadn’t heard anything about this from them, so it might not be an issue yet, but with my almost-father-in-law involved it would come my way eventually.
    “Great,” I muttered. “Any idea what the problem is?”
    “Not in a position to discuss it. If they don’t know, they will soon.” He sounded harried and nervous.
    “OK. I’ll look into it. And you do remember there’s a meal-thing in a couple of days, right?”
    “Meal . . . ? Oh. Right. I’ll make it.”
    He disconnected without further conversation. I sighed—I hadn’t mentioned Stymak’s digital recordings to him. I wouldn’t be able to run the same sort of high-end analysis on them that Quinton could have. I’d have to muddle through it on my own, since it sounded like Papa Purlis’s plans were dangerous and advanced far enough to require a lot of Quinton’s monkey-wrenching to derail. I hoped he’d be safe and that he would