A siren wailed in the distance. I looked up and saw uniformed officers questioning people near the skating rink. One of the people pointed in our general direction. They looked at us and I knew we were running out of time.

Chapter 5

I looked back at Dad. "You can't go chasing after Mom anymore. You're a marked man. Your family, the Slades, can find you, and god only knows who or what else is looking for you now." I turned back to Shelton. "Can you cut off the signal?"

"Maybe." He sighed. "I'll need some time, though."

I motioned my head at the cops as they stopped to talk to someone else. "We don't have much time. We need to do something and we need to do it now."

Shelton looked at the cops and chuckled. "You don't do anything without raising a ruckus, do you?"

"If people would just leave us alone—"

"Believe me, I know the feeling." He gave me a meaningful look before pulling out his smartphone again and looked for something. I sidled up to him and watched as he scrolled through a list of files before opening one called Disruptor 5.0. Computer code of some sort filled the screen. It looked vaguely familiar although a lot of the symbols on the screen didn't exist on any keyboard I knew of. "I hate to use this," he said. "But it's all I got on short notice."

"What's going to happen?" I asked.

"Just don't try to use your cell phone until I tell you otherwise."

"Should I power it off?"

"Nah. Just don't make any calls." He stepped up to the circle where Dad stood. "Once I break the circle, the tracking spell on the death mark will be able to transmit again. I'm gonna need you to stay real still while I arm this disruption spell."

Dad nodded, turned, and dropped to one knee to give Shelton a better angle on his neck. "Ready when you are."

I stayed at Shelton's side, curious to see what was going to happen. He gave me pained look. "You gonna stay glued to my side or something?"

"I want to see what you're doing."

"Fine. Then you rub out the circle so I can run the spell."

I nodded and stepped up to the chalk outline. "Ready?"

He nodded.

"Go." I wiped part of the circle out with my shoe. A rush of magical energy whispered past my ears like static as it was freed from the circle. Some of it seemed to soak into my skin, leaving goose bumps and standing hairs on end.

Shelton aimed his phone's infrared port at the tattoo and pressed the Execute symbol on the screen of the phone as he concentrated his full gaze on the offending ink. The phone beeped and flashed Processed in big red letters. A man sauntered past, chatting away on his phone while he walked his dog. Shelton's phone flashed, Complete. The man with the dog yelled in surprise as a burst of static roared from his cell phone. More cries of alarm sprang up all over the park as radios and phones burst into high-pitched wails and static. The man's phone smoked where the speaker was before the screen on the phone cracked and died.

"What in the hell did you do?" I asked.

"Told you I hated to use this spell. It's for emergencies only, but this qualifies, wouldn't you say? The spell distorts and overpowers all wavelengths for a period of time."

"But why would a cell phone signal have anything to do with a magical one?"

"I don't know what frequency the tracker is operating on. It could be using anything." He motioned for us to follow. "We gotta get out of here fast, though. The spell uses a lot of power and won't last long."

I glanced back at the cops frantically dancing about as they tore smoking and sparking radios off their belts and threw them to the ground. "Where are we going?"

"I know just the place," Shelton said.

Katie stared dumbfounded as people all over the park tossed their screeching, hissing smartphones on the ground, running from them like they were live grenades. A Pomeranian dog yapped at his master's phone until it made a loud popping noise, then yelped and ran in circles until his leash wrapped so tightly around his owner's legs, the guy toppled over. I tapped Katie on the shoulder to get her attention.

"We're moving out."

She nodded and followed behind me wordlessly.

Elyssa fell into stride next to me. "I know this is a bad time, but, well, I'm starving."

"Blood?"

She nodded.

"I need some sustenance myself." My legs were still weak and trembling from our long run. The demonic source supplying my supernatural abilities howled for relief. My throat felt parched and my stomach growled over and over again. I'd been too hyped with worry to think about it until now.

I glanced at Elyssa. "How will you, uh…you know?"

"My parents have packs. I know of a few other places I can get them, but…" She trailed off.

"But what?"

"I don't want to leave you. You'll probably get killed without my help."

I laughed. "You're such an optimist." I looked at Shelton's back as he led us out of the park and into an alleyway across the street. "Can we trust him?"

"You want my professional opinion?"

"You're obviously a better judge of character than I am."

A smile lit her face. "I think we can trust him to an extent. But Shelton looks out for Shelton. Don't expect him to deliver more than he can."

"Then why is he helping us?"

"I have a feeling we'll find out."

My stomach clenched at the thought.

After a twenty-minute walk through a warren of narrow service roads, alleyways, and pot-holed streets in a bad part of the city, Shelton stopped in a narrow alley and examined an iron door set into the side of an old red-brick building. It might have been a storehouse at some point. A dozen or more identical doors lined this alley and the next one over, but I didn't see what made this one different. The front of the building faced a cracked and rutted one-way street across from a graffiti-covered convenience store with more bars on the windows than the state penitentiary. A bum in a cardboard hut groaned and rolled onto the filthy alley floor. An empty alcohol bottle rolled from his fingers and into the gutter. In front of the convenience store I saw a group of men laugh raucously, drinking from containers covered with brown paper bags. I almost wished I could hear them swap stories—probably about killing people in prison.

"Nice neighborhood," I said.

He smirked. "Quaint, ain't it?"

The inside didn't look much better. Dust covered a bare concrete floor. A filthy mattress with stains I didn't care to identify occupied a corner of the room. "You're keeping Dad here?" I asked, horrified at the prospect of anyone sleeping on that mattress.

"First-class all the way," Shelton said waving his arms grandly around the room. He pulled out a familiar ebony stick—his wand—mumbled something, and pointed at the floor. A section of the floor dropped down, the concrete turning to stairs as it did.

"That's so cool," Katie said, eyes wide with wonder.

"Not bad, eh, green eyes?"

"Does this mean Harry Potter really exists?" she asked.

"You're looking at him," I said, nodding toward Shelton. "He wears contacts now."

"Ha, ha, real funny," Shelton said as he went down the stairs.

"Why are you so mean to him, Justin?" Katie asked as we filed down the stairs.

I grunted. "He deserves it."

"You seem really ungrateful for all he's doing."

"You don't know Shelton."

"And you do?"

I tossed a glance over my shoulder at her. "Better than you."

"You can be really obtuse." She rolled her eyes.

"Did you miss the entire conversation I had with him in the park?"

Her brow furrowed. "You mean the one where you accused him of being the bad guy and then suddenly changed your mind?"

"Oh, whatever."

Katie's eyes narrowed. "If Shelton is a magician and Elyssa is a vampire—"

"Dhampyr, actually," Elyssa said. "I'm half human and half vampire."

"That sounds totally made up."

"Google it." Elyssa bared her fangs with a cold smile.

"I'll take your word for it, thank you very much." Katie turned her eyes back to me. "What I really want to know is, what are you, Justin?"

"Oh, she's gonna love this," Elyssa said, an amused glint in her eyes.

I looked away from Katie, remembering all the hell I'd gone through for this girl. How much I'd thought I'd loved her. But anything I felt for her was a lit match in a tornado compared to the blaze of love I felt for Elyssa. So telling her what I was even if it made her fear and hate me shouldn't matter. Except being half demon spawn and half human was something I'd sooner nobody knew. Being a vampire sounded a lot sexier, especially considering how many teeny-boppers loved what they saw on TV and in the movies. Demon spawn, on the other hand, had a pretty bad reputation.

Katie tugged my sleeve. "Are you going to tell me?"

Elyssa's concerned eyes met mine and narrowed as if she were trying to figure out what was bothering me. I tried to smile but it faltered.

We stepped out of the narrow confines of a gray concrete tunnel and into what looked like a perfectly normal two-bedroom apartment with a big-screen TV, a kitchen, and all the amenities. Our surprise at coming upon this place saved me from having to respond to Katie's question.

"Back here," Shelton said, leading Dad into a fair-sized room with a bed in the middle of a metallic-looking circle set in the floor.

"I don't like the look of that," I said, unslinging my duffel bag and dropping it on the floor. "Why would you put a bed in the center of a circle?"

Dad stepped inside it anyway and took a seat on the bed. Shelton pressed his thumb to the circle, made a little wiggling movement with it, and the air snapped and crackled.