The Last Soul Among Wolves

Book 2: The Echo Archives

by Melissa Caruso

Genres: Dragons & Mythical Creatures

Synopsis

The Last Soul Among Wolves is the brilliant second installment in Melissa Caruso's Echo Archives series, a whip-smart adventure fantasy featuring cursed relics, sapphic romance, and a magical murder mystery. 

All Kembral Thorne wants is to finish her maternity leave in peace. But when her best friend asks for help, she can’t say no, even if it means a visit to a run-down mansion on an isolated island for a will reading. She arrives to find an unexpected reunion of her childhood friends—plus her once-rival, now-girlfriend Rika Nonesuch, there on a mysterious job. Then the will is read, and everything goes sideways.

Eight potential heirs, half of them Kem’s oldest friends.

Three cursed relics.

The rules: one by one, the heirs will die.

The prize for the lone survivor: A wish. And wishes are always bad business.

To save their friends, Kem and Rika must race against the clock and descend into other realities once more. But the mansion is full of old secrets and new schemes, and soon the game becomes far more dangerous—and more personal—than they could have imagined.

Release date: August 19, 2025

Publisher: Orbit

Print pages: 400

Sample

Like so many things, it was Jaycel’s fault.

It’d be an exaggeration to say it was always Jaycel Morningray who got me involved in trouble, but not by much. We had a long history with an established pattern: She got us into scrapes, and I got us out. It was a natural rhythm, like breathing.

So when she asked me to come with her to our old Southside neighborhood for a moderately urgent personal matter, I brought my sword. I considered bringing two swords, but that seemed alarmist.

It was weird, strolling with Jaycel through streets we’d haunted as kids. I hadn’t been back much since my parents moved away, and the heart-achingly familiar mixed everywhere with the new and therefore jarringly wrong.

The cobbled plazas and soot-stained brick storefronts snapped into their waiting places in my memory with a deep, satisfying click, down to the gritty shine on the stones from the light misting rain. Scents wafting from street carts awakened a deep nostalgic hunger: fried cheese rolls and sweet sticky buns, some hawked by the same old Viger immigrants. But for every detail that unpacked perfectly from my memories, something else had changed: shops come and gone, houses painted the wrong color, a broken water pump replaced with a planter full of flowers.

I’d changed, too, an adult and a mother and a guild member. I felt like an outsider in my new red coat and my Damn Good Boots, with a sword on my hip and the keys to a Tower townhouse in my pocket. My old neighborhood and I were two puzzle pieces that didn’t fit together anymore.

We passed a certain right turn to an achingly familiar little plaza with a dried-up mermaid fountain, and I averted my eyes. The narrow building across the far side would no longer bear a sign that read THORNE’S MINIATURES, and the window of the smallest bedroom above the shop wouldn’t have purple curtains lovingly hand-painted with a spangling of crude golden stars. I didn’t need to see that; I had enough feelings to grapple with these days, with Emmi still not sleeping, and my memories raw from the blood-soaked year-turning party ten weeks ago—not to mention Rika and I navigating the complicated new territory of our relationship.

Besides, this place hadn’t really been my home in… Holy shit. Seventeen years? My math must be wrong.

I eyed Jaycel, who bounced along bright-eyed at my side. She didn’t look seventeen years older. Did she?

I pulled up my collar for a little more protection against the chill of the miserable late winter drizzle and tried not to think about it.

“Are you going to explain what’s so important that I needed to hire a babysitter and come all the way out here with you?” I asked.

Jaycel waved an airy hand. “It’ll all be clear in time.”

“You only say that when you know I won’t like the answer.”

“Which is exactly why I need your help, darling. If you’d like this situation, I could manage it on my own.”

I instinctively glanced northward, but too many buildings lay between me and the great clock in the Tower district to read the time. “This had better not be one of your more involved and dangerous bad ideas. Achyrion is expecting me back in five hours.”

“Ah, your mysterious babysitter! I’d like to point out that Achyrion is a very odd sort of name.”

“That’s his business. He takes great care of Emmi.”

Jaycel gave me a smug sort of grin. “Well, if you can be secretive about your babysitter, I can be secretive about where we’re going.”

Her gaze slipped sideways, a guilty glance that my own eyes followed with an alarmed leap.

She’d taken us to the far edge of our old neighborhood, within a couple blocks of the river. There was nothing in that direction but a final row of buildings and then a stony jumble sloping down to where the mouth of the river met the sea. It was too rocky on this bank for ships and piers, though locals tied up small boats in places, and at low tide a bit of mucky beach emerged. That beach was a great place to find crabs, mussels, and the occasional oyster. A sometimes-submerged permanent rip to the first Echo made it an even better place to mudlark—and far too dangerous an area for kids to mess around. So of course we’d spent countless hours there.

“We’re not heading to the Echo portal, are we? Because if we are—”

“Oh, no, of course not!” Jaycel waved a reassuring hand, but she wouldn’t meet my eyes.

There was nothing else over that way, except a few houses, a fried fish shop, and—oh.

At the lowest tide, for about an hour, that bit of mucky beach turned into a sandbar reaching out partway into the mouth of the river, dividing it from the sea. At the far end of that sandbar sat a little island, just a pile of rocks and jumbled trees, crowned by a crumbling old mansion every child in Southside swore was haunted. Some of the bravest and most reckless claimed to have run across the sandbar to touch its bramble-clad walls before racing the tide back to safety. I was never sure whether I believed them, but I absolutely believed the stories about the kid who’d failed to make it before the sandbar vanished beneath the hungry waves. Or the ones about the drunken youth who’d gone into the water too near the rip in the Veil trying to impress a girl and gotten eaten by sea horrors. The place was plenty dangerous without ghosts, though of course that didn’t stop us from making up countless ghastly stories—and never mind that Ravens still debated whether ghosts were even real, or just Echoes of deceased people passing through the Veil to Prime.

“Don’t tell me we’re going to the old Lovegrace house,” I said.

“You will note that I am already going to commendable lengths to avoid telling you this very thing.”

I stopped in the damp street. “Come on. You can’t just leave it at that. Why are we going to the Lovegrace place?”

She waggled her fingers. “It’s a mystery.”

“Jaycel.”

“Oh, fine. It’s a bequeathal. All official and everything. I do hope I’m dressed for it.”

I blinked. “Wait, old lady Lovegrace was still alive? And she died? And she bequeathed you something?”

“Apparently.” Jaycel suddenly wouldn’t meet my eyes. “You know how sometimes when you’re a kid, things happen, and later you convince yourself they weren’t real, and that’s usually the end of it? Emphasis in this case on usually.”

“You’re not making me feel better about this.”

“Oh, I’m sure it’ll be fine, with you there.” She flashed me a bright smile. “You always did keep us out of trouble. But then you went off to join the Hounds, and trouble stayed behind with the rest of us. And now here we are!”

“Here we are.” I stared suspiciously between the buildings, toward the water. It was possible, of course, that Jaycel just wanted company during boring legal proceedings. But I doubted she’d describe that as urgent.

“Come on, darling. It’ll be easier to explain inside, where it’s dry, and the others can help.”

“Others?”

“I would never want to spoil the surprise!”

I muttered some uncharitable things under my breath. “Five hours, you hear me?”

“Five hours at most,” she agreed. “You know you’re too curious to back out now.”

The worst part was that she was right. Sure, I wouldn’t back out regardless—even setting aside that Jaycel was my friend, I owed her too much after the year-turning—but I wanted to know what in the Void was going on.

I huddled deeper into my coat and followed her, ignoring the fluttering of old candlelight story ghosts in my stomach. I wasn’t a kid anymore; I was a grown Hound who’d faced far worse things in the Deep Echoes than could possibly be waiting in some run-down old house on a rock.

I should have known better than to even think that.

It was low tide, and the lumpy ridge of the sandbar had emerged from the restless dark water, scattered with driftwood and seaweed on the wave-sculpted oceanward side and calm on the sheltered riverward one. Gulls stalked the sand, busily searching for crabs and snails left stranded during this brief hour before the sea reclaimed its scuttling secrets.

Near the place where the curve of the sandbar merged with the wide stretch of mucky beach, a blur like a heat shimmer hung above the water, a glimmering subtle smear in the air with its bottom edge beneath the lapping waves. The rip in the Veil our parents had endlessly warned us about as kids—the one Jaycel had thrown rocks through on a dare. It stood in dangerous wading distance of the shore at the lowest tide. I’d done a few retrievals through there, bringing back kids who’d been less cautious than our crew. Once I’d helped dispatch a dangerous Echo that had wandered through, a thing like a pony-sized, ten-legged crab with a dozen fanged mouths gaping from its shell. When we were little, I’d seen the gap between worlds disgorge a slick of oily tentacles into the water once, thin as glass noodles, which had tentatively caressed the surface of the waves and then retracted back through the portal.

“We should never have played around near that thing,” I muttered, thinking of Emmi. “They should fence it off, or something.”

“Oh, come on, you know a fence would just be an invitation.” Jaycel gave me an amused sidelong look. “You sound like our parents.”

“Yeah, well, maybe they knew what they were talking about. Just keep an eye out, all right? Nasty Echoes live in the water, and something could come through.”

“Yes, mom.”

Damn right I was a mom. It meant I listened to common sense now. But it spoke in a language Jaycel had never learned, so I grunted to acknowledge the hit and started out onto the sandbar.

The Lovegrace mansion hadn’t changed. The intervening years that had seen other derelict buildings in the neighborhood fixed up or torn down had passed this house by without touching it. I expected to find it stripped of the looming spooky significance of childhood, looking a bit run-down and lonely on its island but otherwise pretty normal, the exaggerating fog of years dispelled. But no—it still looked absolutely, aggressively haunted.

The island itself was one of a scattering at the southern lip of the river; ships steered wide of them as they came into Dockside at the north edge. Jagged rocks girdled the little mound of land like broken teeth. Beyond a few patches of trees, its bramble-choked slopes rose up to an overgrown garden behind a spiked black iron fence; dark scraggly bushes half obscured the soot-blackened brick of the mansion’s walls. Sharp-crowned turrets reared against the grey clouds, surrounding a lonely widow’s walk, and empty windows gaped below, several with cracked panes. Gulls wheeled overhead, letting out mournful cries.

The only thing that had changed was the gate, which stood open. It had always, always been chained shut, the thick links visible even across the water, a message to local kids not to even think about it. That open gate felt like a dangerous aberration, as if it could let hungry Echoes through from the deep and nasty cellars of reality. I couldn’t help pausing as we reached the end of the sandbar, reluctant to cross that forbidden boundary even with the grey waves creeping closer and the rainy wind stinging my face.

Jaycel’s sharp elbow nudged my ribs. “Scared?”

“You went out to the island once, right? And no hungry ghosts ate you.”

“Ha! I’m too tough for ghosts to eat. They’d spit me out.”

There was an unusual edge to her tone. Was she nervous? Jaycel Morningray, who feared neither shame nor pain nor death? All right, now I was progressing from suspicious to concerned.

“What did you get into? What are you getting me into?”

She bit her lip. “Come on in, and I’ll tell you. The day isn’t getting any longer.”

She was right about that; sunset ruddied the westward clouds. The wet sand dragged at my Damn Good Boots as we took the final strides from the sandbar to the island. A flight of barnacled stone steps led up to the gates, the black iron weeping rust. We passed between their teeth and climbed the hill.

The salt-weathered front doors swung open as we reached them. I half expected the old lady’s shrouded corpse to glare at us from the gloomy entryway, hissing Trespassers at us with vengeful sibilance.

Instead, it framed a woman with a thick chestnut-brown braid whose pointed chin and wide brown eyes I’d know anywhere, even in a face far more sun-weathered than I remembered it. She still wore the blue that had always been her favorite color, but instead of a faded dress with the skirts tied up for better scrambling, it was a sharp royal-blue coat with knee-length swishy skirts.

Linna Vycross. The youngest member of our little gang of friends, a fiercely determined tagalong we’d all embraced and protected after initial attempts to shoo her away with the cruelty of youth had failed. (I still felt bad about that.) It was difficult to reconcile the wide-eyed kid I remembered with the sharp-edged face before me now, an old scar slashing a cheek that used to be baby soft. I hadn’t seen her in ages. I’d always meant to get together with the old gang more often, but the Hounds had kept me so busy that years slipped by—and then suddenly Vy had jumped on a ship chasing adventure and sailed away from Acantis. Stars, it must have been ten years.

She blinked at us as if we were a tremendous surprise, then broke into a shy smile.

“Morningray! You’re here! And Moon bless me, is that Kem?”

“Vy! Look at you!” I pulled her into a quick, fierce hug, feeling weirdly displaced in time. “Little Vy! You’re half a foot taller than me. I used to have to give you a boost to climb up on that statue of a horse in Pennyworth Market.”

She laughed. “Now I’d have to give you a boost. Did you get smaller?”

“Come on, I’m not that short.” I grinned. “What are you doing here?”

“Oh, you know.” Her smile went suddenly sheepish. “Same thing as all of us.”

Jaycel shook her head. “She wasn’t with us, Vy. It was after she moved to the guildhouse dorms. Remember?”

“Oh! That’s right.” She raised a hand to her lips. “I’ve got the memory now. You made me swear not to tell her.”

“I’m having an increasingly bad feeling about this,” I said.

“Oh, just you wait!” Jaycel clapped my shoulder. “Can we finish the reunion indoors? I want to get out of the rain.”

“You don’t like the rain? I love it. But of course, come in.” Vy stepped aside, letting us into an expansive foyer with a grand ceiling lost in shadows and cobwebs, the marble tiles of its floor chipped and stained with worn-in grime despite someone’s brave attempt at sweeping. “Petras, look who’s here!”

A slim gentleman in a charcoal-grey tailcoat turned from an open doorway with the casual ease of power in his movements and a glass of red wine in his hand. His cravat and the silk shirt beneath it showed a daring deep red that matched his drink; rubies glinted in his ears. A sleek dark ponytail fell halfway down his back, and a neat line of beard edged his jaw.

An incredulous grin stretched my face. “Petras! Looking good as always.”

“Kem.” His low, velvety tenor still surprised me, even though I’d seen him a few times over the years since I’d left Southside; his voice had gotten so much deeper when he finished his gender transition. “And Jaycel, of course. Always a pleasure.”

I liked adult Petras just as much as I’d liked the nimble-fingered, quick-witted boy who’d always beaten me at tiles—a skill he’d apparently capitalized on, since he now ran a string of questionably legal gambling houses and Moon only knew what else. It was always strange but satisfying to see the nervous kid I remembered now radiating so much confidence and strength.

I hadn’t done quite as rotten a job keeping in touch with Petras as I had with the others; he’d hired me once to recover his bartender’s kid who’d slipped into an Echo, and had helped me navigate the underworld for jobs a couple of times. Still, there was a certain distance between us now, the closeness of our youth worn away by the erosion of years. I envied Jaycel’s seemingly effortless and eternal friendship, which by the grinning arm clasp they exchanged was as warm as ever.

“So what is this?” I looked between the three of them, half expecting some prank to drop like a belated punch line. “Did you lease the place for a reunion of the old crowd? If so, I have to say it’s a weird choice of venue.”

“Don’t I wish.” Petras raised one dark brow. “Jaycel, didn’t you tell her?”

“Not exactly,” Jaycel said evasively. “I just mentioned it was a bequeathing.”

The three of them exchanged a long glance. It was the same What are we going to tell Kem look I remembered from when they tried to explain how they’d lost my kite, or why they needed to hide in the back of my father’s shop from an angry grocer.

Vy gave me her big brown eyes. “You won’t be mad, will you?”

“Just tell me what happened already. You’re killing me.”

Petras had mercy on me. “Not long after you left the neighborhood, Jaycel got the idea that we should sneak into the Lovegrace mansion.”

“I remember. She invited me.” I shifted, a bit uncomfortably. “The Hounds had a curfew for the youngest apprentices, and I couldn’t go.”

Petras shook his head. “Only you would actually consider a curfew binding and not try to sneak out.”

“So you broke into the mansion. And what? Found some horrible head in a jar and got cursed?”

“Basically,” Jaycel agreed. “Only it wasn’t a head. It was a book. And I’m still not sure we’re cursed.”

“Oh, we are,” Petras muttered.

“Are we? It was just a lark.” Vy’s brows pinched. “I don’t feel cursed.”

Petras lifted an eyebrow. “You touched the book with your scraped palm and your name appeared written in blood.”

I pressed a hand to my temple. “Tell me you didn’t do that, Vy.”

“Okay,” Vy said cheerfully. “I didn’t do it.”

There was a pause while everyone stared at her.

“Well… not on purpose.”

Times like this I wished I could drink. “What about the rest of you?”

Jaycel drew herself up. “I couldn’t let her be cursed alone. She was so upset.”

“She was crying,” Petras clarified.

Vy flushed. “I don’t remember crying.”

“You did,” Jaycel declared. “You were sobbing. So I told you whatever happened, we’d face it together, and I cut my hand and put it on the book, and my name appeared in it, too.”

That sounded like something Jaycel would do. “Two cursed people is not better than one cursed person.”

“That’s what Petras said you’d say. But you weren’t there, so we all ignored you.”

I turned to Petras in despair. “You too? You actually had sense sometimes.”

He shrugged. “Well, after Jaycel did it, and Mareth did it—”

“Mareth! He should have known better!” Mareth had always been obsessed with Echo stuff, a lanky kid who flitted around like a moth and wore a lot of black. It was no surprise that he’d wound up a Raven. He’d lectured us enough about not touching anything that might be Echo flotsam when we went mudlarking; he had no excuse.

“I’ll bet he just didn’t want to be left out if anything magical happened,” Jaycel said.

“All right, I can see that. So wait, all four of you bled on some Echo relic book? Out of solidarity?”

“Nothing came of it, though,” Vy said, a bit defensively. “I think.”

“Until now,” Petras amended.

“Until now,” Jaycel agreed, “when a Wasp guild advocate sent us messages asking us to come to a special bequeathing of certain possessions of the late Auberyn Lovegrace. And I thought to myself, you know who I wish we’d had with us back when we got into this mess? Kembral. And you know who I want with us when we have to face the presumed consequences some seventeen years later? Also Kembral.”

Lovely. I’d left my childhood friends alone for a few days and they’d immediately found an Echo relic to bleed on and probably gotten themselves cursed, and I was only finding out about it now, when Jaycel wanted help cleaning it up. I couldn’t even be mad, given that I’d done basically the same thing at the year-turning. Stars, if it had happened a few months earlier, before I got whisked off to live with the Hounds, I’d have been right there with them—though I liked to think I’d have stopped things from getting out of hand.

Which made it somewhat my responsibility if they were cursed, in a backdoor sort of way.

I rubbed my forehead. “You don’t need a Hound. You need a Raven.”

Vy brightened. “Well, as it happens, there’s one in the drawing room!”

“Let me guess. Is it Mareth?”

“You win the prize,” Petras said.

“What’s the prize? Do I get a curse, too? I’d better not get a fucking curse.”

“Just don’t bleed on the book.”

The drawing room was in somewhat better shape than the foyer. Old lady Lovegrace’s impeccable eye for dread-inducing decor seemed tempered here by the need for actual usable living space; the exceedingly dark wood paneling of the walls and the heavy brocade curtains could arguably not harbor ghosts, and in the massive marble fireplace crackled a fire that could almost be considered cheerful. Someone (probably the Wasp) had brought in some lamps to make the place a bit less dismal, and had set up a couple rows of chairs and a podium as well.

Mareth had a streak of silver in his hair now, and it was totally weird seeing grown-up man shoulders on someone who should be a gangly twelve-year-old. The silver earrings and studs climbing his ears were new, and his face had deep adult creases instead of the soft roundness of boyhood. But I’d still have recognized him anywhere. His angular slouch was the same, and the long robe-like black coat he wore with full split skirts and silver trim was totally something that young Mareth would have aspired to. About half a dozen different amulets hung around his neck, an assortment of runic rings decorated his fingers, and the only way his appearance could have screamed I am a Raven louder would be if he rolled up his sleeve to show his tattoo.

I couldn’t help a little twinge of guilt that he’d been right across Guildhouse Square from me for years and I’d never gone over to say hello. Come to think of it, it was a bit strange that I hadn’t seen him around town before now. I ran into most of the field Ravens now and then while I was on Hound business. Maybe he was the type that never left the library.

He was chatting with a tiny wisp of a woman with spectacles and a silver bun, wearing a crisp sage-green dress with a cream scarf. She clasped a well-worn leather portfolio full of papers against her side. The Wasp, then. They both looked worried, which couldn’t be good.

They weren’t the only ones in the room. A man and a woman sat in the double line of chairs, as far from everyone else as possible, their seats drawn tight together. The woman wore the kind of expensive bleeding-edge-of-fashion clothes you saw on Tower district merchants trying to impress each other; the man sported a large diamond brooch, a number of ostentatiously large rings, and a tailcoat of opulent burgundy velvet. Their hair was so carefully styled with the latest creams to perfect, glossy waves that you could have bounced a penny off them. They whispered to each other, heads close, casting dubious or downright hostile glances at the rest of us.

I couldn’t decide if they were Hillside aristocrats trying to look as fashionable as Tower merchants, or Tower merchants trying to look as patrician as Hillside aristocrats. They both had the dark hair, deep-set eyes, and warm brown skin of the old Acantis ancestry prevalent among the Hillside crowd, but that didn’t mean anything—so did Petras and Vy. The sprawling archipelago of the League Cities had lain at the intersection of all the major trade routes for ages; like her sister city-states, Acantis had welcomed immigrants from all over the world for centuries. Anyone might trace their Acantis citizenship back far enough to be a scion of one of the old ruling families—including people with pale, hawkish Viger features like me, or deep brown, sharp-cheek-boned Cathardian ones like Almarah and Marjorie, or the omnipresent hard-to-pin-down mix, like Jaycel, Mareth, and Rika.

“Maybe we shouldn’t bother Mareth, if he’s talking to someone. I think that might be rude?” Vy worried her lip with her teeth. That was new—both the gesture and the uncertainty.

“Bah. Nobody likes talking to Wasps. It’s all legally binding contracts and musty old archives and enough figures to make your eyes fall out.” Jaycel started toward them.

I hooked the back of her jacket. “Wait.”

The Wasp’s stern voice wasn’t hard to overhear in the dusty, quiet drawing room. “I’m sorry, but I can’t let you see them. The instructions are clear. No one is to enter the sealed room until after I read the statement.”

“But if there’s a risk to the safety of the people here…” Mareth suggested.

“Then I expect you will be well suited to deal with it, as the Raven present. I am the Wasp presiding, and my duty is to follow the instructions of the deceased as laid out in the documents entrusted to the care of my guild.”

Jaycel’s eyes lit up, and she turned a grin on us that meant trouble. “A sealed room! Could you get us in, Petras?”

“I’m hurt that you feel the need to ask.”

“Hey,” I protested. “This is exactly what got you into this situation in the first place. It’s probably even the same room.”

Petras gave Jaycel a narrow look. “You had to bring her.”

I cleared my throat. “So, what have you all been up to?”

Petras rubbed his knuckles modestly on the lapel of his jacket. “Let’s just say business has been good.”

Vy straightened. “I’ve been on a ship!”

“Just like you always wanted!” Jaycel slapped her back, and Vy jumped a little. “You used to play at being Captain Vycross, remember? I was your dashing first mate, but I kept getting mutinous.”

Vy gave a surprised little laugh. “That’s right, you did! I didn’t mind, though.”

“Ha! You hit me and ran off crying once.” Jaycel shook her head. “I deserved it, naturally. What kind of ship? Are you a pirate?”

“No, no. That would be a grand adventure, though.” Vy looked dreamy at the thought. “It’s a courier ship, running the express route between Acantis and Cathardia.”

“The express route!” Petras gave her a keen, assessing look, and I wondered whether he might be involved in a little smuggling on the side. “So you’ve got a Dolphin guild tide skimmer?”

“Of course!” Vy bounced on her toes. “A tide skimmer can really get you places.”

“Isn’t dipping down an Echo on the open ocean like that risky, though?” I asked dubiously. Almarah had always told me never to touch the Veil at sea.

Vy’s grin didn’t fade. “Oh, yes. Terribly dangerous.”

I shuddered. “Yeah, no thanks. I’ll travel the long way.” The ocean was full enough of strange horrors in Prime; it got exponentially worse as you descended through layers of reality. Plus the Veil was always thinner near water, so even though tide skimmers only took their ships down one Echo, things could wash up from much deeper.

The fashionable couple in the back corner seemed to conclude a whispered argument. The woman straightened, radiating disdainful impatience, and called out to the Wasp.

“It’s two minutes past the hour. Are you ever going to get started?”

The look the Wasp leveled at her was unimpressed. “Not everyone is here yet. We’ll wait a little longer.”

“I see no reason we should have to suffer for their lateness.”

“If you experience suffering when sitting still for a few minutes, I recommend you speak to a physicker. In the meantime, we will wait. If we’re still missing anyone at a quarter past, I’ll start without them.”

Vy shrank a bit in her chair, eyes wide on the Wasp. “Maybe we should follow the rules here.”

“Maybe we shouldn’t get caught breaking them,” Petras countered. “Speaking of which…”

He gave me a guarded look, and I had the feeling he was weighing whether to mention something I wouldn’t like.

“Oh, spit it out,” I grumbled. “I can already see things are going to keep getting worse, so no sense trying to spare me.”

Petras glanced to Jaycel. “I had the same thought you did, about inviting a guest in case things turned out dodgy.”

“Oh, did you bring a bodyguard? Maybe that one with the incredible shoulders you had with you at the club last time?” Jaycel glanced around eagerly.

“No. I hired a different kind of professional.” Lips twitching, he nodded toward the door.

I turned, curious, and froze as if I’d been turned to stone.

Standing in the doorway—looking for one brief instant as surprised as I felt—was Rika Nonesuch.

It wasn’t that seeing Rika was a shock. I’d seen her that morning. She’d come by my place almost every day while I was recovering from my wounds after the year-turning, and the habit had stuck in the two months since. She showed up at my door with the unpredictable frequency of a well-fed stray, sometimes stopping by for a few minutes between jobs, sometimes staying half the day. She played with Emmi, cuddled up and read to me while I nursed, and made sure I ate. She insisted I get out of the house, dragging me to cafés and p