“Jane, don't be selfish. I have to focus. I can't be worrying about you getting hurt…”

“Selfish?” I interjected. “Seriously? How is my wanting to help catch the person who nearly fried me, twice, selfish? And I can take care of myself, Ryu. I'm not a weakling.”

“Honey, I know you're not a weakling,” he soothed, as if I were a preschooler throwing a tantrum. “But Con is very strong, and you're just not there yet. So stay here, like a good girl.”

My jaw plummeted, and I saw, from the corner of my eye, Julian and Caleb shake their heads as Camille winced. Daoud dropped his face in his hands.

“Like a good girl?” I wheezed. “Like a good girl?” Ryu stared at me, clearly at a loss for why I was suddenly so pissed.

“All right, that's it. Hit me.”

Ryu blinked.

“I'm serious, Fangs. Hit me.”

“Jane, come on. I'm not going to hit you, fercrissakes.”

“Not with your fist, numpty. With your power. Hit me. I can take it. Hit me.”

Ryu rolled his eyes. “I'm not hitting you.”

“Hit me!” I roared.

Ryu shrugged, lifting his hand and petulantly throwing a little mage ball at me. It was the magical equivalent of a shuttlecock.

I narrowed my eyes at him. Despite everything I'd gone through in my twenty-six years, I knew I looked young, small, and vulnerable. I'd dealt with people judging me because of that fact all of my life, and it would have been one thing for Caleb or Daoud or Camille not to take me seriously. I wasn't fucking them. But this was Ryu: the man who kept giving me anxiety attacks by hinting he wanted me to be a bigger part of his life. For him to treat me like a child was infuriating.

So I did what I'd been told a thousand times not to do and reached into my power with all that fury. I built up a shield wall so strong even I was a bit surprised, as I let my emotions take over what happened next. I'd never consciously built a mage ball, but I poured my strength and ire into four big-ass mage lights that I sent arcing out, knocking over a lamp and forcing Julian to dive out of the way, where I let them hover for a moment. I met Ryu's eyes with mine, hoping he couldn't see that I was as shocked at the power of my performance as he was.

“If you ever treat me like less than an equal again, Ryu Baobhan Sith, you can find yourself another bedmate. I will help you in this investigation. I may not be much, offensively, but I can certainly protect myself.”

And with that I let the power-filled mage lights fly toward me. One clipped Ryu's ear and he yelped, before reaching up a hand to heal himself. As they hit my shields, they fizzled out harmlessly. Then I dropped my defenses, glaring at Ryu and daring him to argue.

“Fine, Jane,” he said, obviously ticked off. “I don't have time for games. But at least have the good sense to stay close to one of us at all times.”

Then he stalked toward the door. I allowed a small smile of triumph to cross my face before a wave of weakness swept through me and I felt my knees nearly buckle. In a flash, Julian was at my side, supporting me by my elbow but using his own body to keep that fact from anyone else.

He grinned at me, as I felt a flood of elemental water energy surge into me.

“Way to stick it to the man,” he said, clearly thrilled at what he'd just seen. “That rocked.”

I tried to be pleased, but I was still mostly angry that I'd had to create such a scene in the first place. I nodded toward Julian's hand on my elbow. “Yeah, well, thanks for the top-up.”

“No problem. Seeing everyone's face when you did that was awesome. I'm so tired of everyone assuming halflings are weak.”

“Well, I think I overdid it a bit,” I admitted.

“Nah.” He shook his head. “It was spot on. You've got to prove yourself in our society. And power is the only thing that's respected. Just try not to let your emotions trick you into using too much juice.”

I nodded glumly. Damned feelings… At times I envied the Alfar their preternatural calm. Not least when my boyfriend was being a complete dickhead.

“Are you ladies ready?” Ryu griped from the front door, shooting Julian a vicious glare. My fellow halfling dropped my elbow, turning toward where the others waited.

“Yes, sir,” Julian replied, agreeably, as I resisted the temptation to give Ryu the finger.

Once outside and walking to our cars, I wondered if I'd finally gotten a taste of the “real” Ryu.

Which left me a little worried at how much I preferred the fantasy.

Caleb parked the SUV on a quiet side street lined by slightly shabby apartment buildings. Bits of family detritus—half-inflated soccer balls, rickety-looking picnic tables, brightly colored plastic toys, and the like—were washed up on the front lawns like litter on a beach. It seemed a strange place to have a secret laboratory devoted to studying the supernatural, and I said so.

“Good camouflage, cheap rent,” Ryu suggested, shrugging. It was the first time he'd spoken to me since we'd left the house, and he still wasn't meeting my eyes. “Who knows why they picked this location.”

Waiting for us on the corner, underneath a streetlight, stood Camille and Julian. Together, we all walked toward Conleth's former prison. The building was large and might once have looked impressive. It was hard to tell with all the damage. One side of the glass doors had been shattered, but the other side was intact. That door was emblazoned with a sign: FOCUS ON FAMILY: SPECIALISTS IN IN-VITRO, GIFT, AND ZIFT. I stared at the sign, narrowing my eyes as my brain started to fire off possible connections.

“The laboratory was a fertility clinic?”

“Well, it operated under the auspices of a fertility clinic,” Ryu said. “And it seems to have been a real fertility clinic at one time.”

I gave him a pointed look, which he finally returned. He shrugged, again, knowing I was suggesting a link between this clinic's stated purpose, Conleth's identity as a halfling, and the fertility problems facing the supernatural community.

Basically, as it had been explained to me, the supes had trouble making babies with each other. They could do it, but it took tremendous amounts of concentration and resources. I had my own theories about why this trouble existed, although I hadn't shared them with anyone. But I knew contact with magic kept us healthy and relatively immortal. Since I'd started my training, I hadn't had a cold or a hangover or even a pimple. Which was great, but I couldn't help but think that the purgative qualities of our magic—cleansing us of all irregularities—had something to do with the supernatural fertility problems.

Wrapped up in my thoughts, I followed the others as they made their way into the building. When it was my turn, Ryu stopped me. He gently wrapped his hands around my waist and carefully lifted me over the jagged glass still lining the bottom of the door. When he put me down, he kissed me on the forehead, his way of attempting to mitigate the tension between us. After a moment, I leaned into his lips, accepting the gesture.

The front of the building wasn't too badly damaged considering what had happened there. Besides the broken front door, and water damage from putting out the fire, the entry room to the facility must have missed the brunt of Conleth's attack. The only significant Conleth-related damage were the doors that led to the rest of the lab, which had been blown entirely off their hinges, and what must have been the receptionist's station, which looked like it had been blasted with blowtorches at five paces.

“The secretary survived the initial attack by hiding, but Conleth took quite a bit of time firing away at her station, as if to scare her, before making his escape. And he caught up with her a few days later—killed her and her boyfriend.” Ryu dug around in the file he was carrying, snapping toward Daoud at the same time. The hawk-nosed man walked forward, and this time I definitely wasn't seeing things: Daoud reached into the front of his tight black jeans and pulled out a large flashlight. He handed the flashlight to Ryu, who nodded appreciatively. Daoud then pulled three more large flashlights out of his pants: One he passed to Caleb, one he stuck under his own arm for safekeeping, and one he passed to me. I accepted it without thinking, too shocked to do otherwise, until I remembered where it had come from and scootched my shirt sleeve down to cover my hand. I shook my head, about to ask Ryu why Daoud had a general store in his underwear, when I was cut to the chase by Ryu's showing me two photos: one of a young couple smiling behind a birthday cake and the other of two crispified corpses. The receptionist and her boyfriend, my brain reminded me as my body responded with a wave of nausea. I told my stomach, quite firmly, to settle. It obeyed with a petulant rumble.

We kept walking forward, through the blasted doorways and into the rest of the laboratory. There were still thick stalactites of melted steel warping off where the doorframes would have been, the resulting Daliesque shapes testimony both to Conleth's enormous power and to this laboratory having been a prison. As we progressed farther toward the back of the facility, the damage increased, as did the body count. The first rooms were relatively body-free, except for the nurse's break room, which had been broken into. In the pictures Ryu had shown me, the two “nurses” who were killed in that room looked more like the type of bouncers who are fired from motorcycle bars for being too violent. In their “after” pictures, both had been roasted like chestnuts.