“Ja. Controlled by the Alchemists right now. I heard Fire wears the ring. Are they the djinn you banished?”
“Yep. Who leads the clan?”
“His name is Darius. He’s a good man in a bad situation.”
“Good man or not, he’s going to be dead if he hurts my girl.”
“He is as much a slave as you are.” Kas raised an eyebrow at me. “If you’ve gained a conscience, perhaps you can find a little sympathy for him.”
I grunted at that.
“Any idea where they hole up when not in Fire’s service?”
“Nein. Not even any rumors. But djinn in general like deserted places. Wastes and ruins and cemeteries. But if you destroyed them as you say, they are returned to the ring where they will stay until healed.”
We reached the top of the stairs, the limit of his domain, and he stopped walking.
“I owe you one, Kas, and you know I hate having a debt unpaid. What can I do for you?”
He dropped his head until his chin rested on his chest.
“Let me tell you a story, Harker. Once, there was a neph who made many bad choices in his life. Made many, many mistakes.”
Kasparian paused, then nodded to himself, like he’d decided to finish the story even though he didn’t really wanna.
“But he did one thing right. He had a daughter, a littlelieblingnamed Astrid, a single star in his dark world. Then, herfreshman year at university, she went on a date and never came home.”
“Oh, no.” I knew where this was going.
“Ja. They extinguished his star for points,Harker. For fun.”
He pulled his wallet out of his back pocket, opened it, and showed me his daughter’s photo. There was a worn spot over the plastic covering her face, right about the size of his thumb, and I scowled.
I didn’t like feeling sorry for him. I didn’t like feeling sorry for her. I didn’t like feelinganything, really, not when numb was so comfortable and kept me semi-sane and from killing anyone.
“It broke the man,” Kas went on. “He retreated into darkness and became little more than a mindless animal. He faded into the wall.”
“Did you ever find out who—”
“The Alchemists’ scoreboard posted her photo the next day.”
Adrenaline shot through my veins as I processed his words. If there was a scoreboard,someonehad to be posting to it, and that meant I could find them.
“Where’s their scoreboard? In the War Room upstairs? Is it still being updated?
“Nein. Not for years now.Ja, it was in the War Room. Zick Black ran the bets on it.”
Oh, I am definitely going to be paying Zick a visit.
I had an ace up my sleeve that he wouldn’t be able to trump. Maybe he still had a contact among the Alchemists. If he did, he was gonna give it to me if I had to beat him to his bony knees—
“They left her body for the rats to gnaw.”
Kas’s words slammed into me harder than a medicine ball to the gut. I cut my eyes over at him, but he’d turned to the wall and studied the old stonework as if he’d never seen it before.
“So I ask you, if you find theHurensohnwho hurt my little girl—”
“Oh, I’ll kill him, Kas.” The monster inside me grinned. “I’ll kill himslow.”
