Page 112 of Roguefinder

Jesse wrapped tight arms around me, rooting me in place. “It’s too late, Caleb!”

She ran faster, and the fire engulfed her, flames lapping around her head. Her scream rose to a wail and cut off.

Smoke crashed over us in a black wave. Jesse hauled me toward the doors, and we burst through them just as another section of ceiling let go behind us, the crash chasing us down the steps.

We stumbled into the street.

Night air hit my face, cold and clear. I gulped it in as Jesse and I ran down the opera house’s steps. Glass shattered behind us. When I glanced back, the rooftop conservatory was no more.

We crossed the street. Noise hit me all at once. Sirens wailed in the distance. Flames roared at my back. Tourists stood with their phones out, recording the burning opera house. A woman sobbed into her hands, an abandoned grocery bag at her feet.

I waited for someone to point at us, two sweating, soot-stained men rushing from the flames. Jesse was naked. My jeans were fighting for their life. But we passed through the chaos like we didn’t exist.

“I can’t hold this much longer,” Jesse muttered, breathing heavy.

He’d created a ward. I really had to learn how to do it.

“I’ve got you,” I said, slipping an arm around his waist.

A car tore from a side street and stopped in front of us. A man jumped out, and my jaw dropped.

He could have been Jesse’s brother. Same height, same dark hair, same stubble. Even the set of his shoulders was the same. Copy, paste.

He looked at the opera house, then at us. He popped the rear passenger door and waved an impatient hand.

“Well?” he demanded in thickly accented English. “Get in.”

Chapter

Twenty-Three

JESSE

Iclimbed into the backseat. Caleb scrambled in after me and slammed the door on the smoke and the sirens. Emile flung himself into the driver’s seat.

“Where have you been?” I asked.

He gave me an exasperated look in the rearview mirror. “I could ask you the same. I endured four hours of Fiumicino’s hospitality before I gave up and got a car. I tracked you to the opera house, and then your scent disappeared. I’ve been waiting. Couldn’t find a cigarette anywhere.” He said the last like this was the most major inconvenience he’d encountered in his life.

Which, for a Frenchman, might have been true.

Emile yanked a duffel from the floor of the passenger seat and dropped it into my lap. “There are clothes. What the fuck happened with Gesualdo?”

Caleb took the duffel and rooted through it.

“Dead,” I told Emile. Caleb started working a T-shirt over my head. When I emerged, I leaned in and kissed his cheek. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.” His blue eyes dropped to my makeshift tourniquet. “We should probably get you some…antibiotics or something.”

I smiled. “Werewolf.”

“Right.”

Emile stared at the opera house through the windshield. Flames had taken the roofline. The building shimmered against the night sky, every window lit up like a jack-o-lantern. “You did this?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Something else.” Magic I didn’t understand. But the name Alessia had given us circled my mind, knocking loose things I’d read. She’d called him Dun. If my suspicions were correct, Carlo had been doing business with Donn of the Dead, a Fae lord and rumored Umbral. In Irish mythology, he gathered human souls on their way to the afterlife.

Like the other Fae, he was supposed to be in Undersomm.