I came to a crouch and then carefully lifted the ball into my arms. It is an unfortunate testament to my total lack of fitness that despite my newfound angelic strength, the ball felt heavy to me.

I began to move through the house toward the back door. A moment later, Nathaniel was next to me, taking the ball from my arms.

“Where?” he asked shortly.

“Down the back stairs, to the yard and into my rain barrel,” I said. I was embarrassed that I was huffing and puffing, but it wasn’t all laziness. The smoke had obviously affected my puny mortal lungs more than it had affected his.

Nathaniel disappeared into the kitchen, streaming a trail of smoke behind him. I walked through the apartment opening windows and letting the frigid November air inside. Luckily, we hadn’t gotten into a period of deep frost so there should just be a thin coating of ice on the rain barrel. I just hoped that whatever was inside that ball would respond the way smoking things usually responded to water—by getting doused. If the item was magical, there was a good chance that it might blow up when it hit the water. You could never tell.

When I’d finished opening the windows and the air had cleared somewhat, I went back to the dining area to survey the damage. The ball had completely smashed the window—no surprise there—and rendered the back rest of the chair I had been sitting in to splinters. I put my right foot down and felt something sting. I stood on the opposite foot and looked at the oozing wound on the sole.

“Well, of course there would be glass on the floor, dummy,” I muttered to myself. I hopped down the hall to the bathroom and sat down on the toilet. There was a small sliver of glass embedded in the ball of my foot. “I don’t know how I survived this long on my own wits.”

I reached down to the cabinet underneath the sink, pulled out my nail kit and collected the tweezers. Then I grabbed some rubbing alcohol and cotton balls, all while twisting around on the seat with my right leg crossed over my left and my right foot dripping blood on the blue tile floor. I dumped a little alcohol on the cotton ball and swabbed the tip of the tweezers. Then I added some more alcohol to the other side of the ball and applied it to the wound. I hissed as the alcohol stung.

You would think that after nearly being killed by a nephilim I would have more tolerance for pain.

I bent over my foot and began the business of trying to extract the glass. I grabbed at the sliver with the tweezers and pulled, whimpering as it came free from my flesh.

“I am so not cut out for a life of adventure,” I muttered, wiping more alcohol on the wound to make sure it wouldn’t get infected. My eyes teared up as the alcohol did its thing.

I finished bandaging the cut and stood up to test my weight on it. I would survive. A moment later, Nathaniel slammed the remains of my back door. I stepped gingerly into the hallway to meet him and had to cover my mouth with my hand to stifle my laughter.

Well, I’d wondered if he’d ever get rumpled, and now he was. He looked kind of like that cartoon coyote after the dy***ite has gone off in his face.

Nathaniel’s blond hair stuck straight up in front and had been blackened by soot. So had his face and his formerly pristine shirt front. As I sniggered into my palm, a couple of blackened feathers fell from his wings onto the floor.

He raised an eyebrow at me and I schooled my face into seriousness. Then he wordlessly thrust a piece of paper into my hand.

I turned the paper over and saw that there was a message printed on one side. It said, simply, “I KNOW WHERE THEY ARE KEEPING HIM.”

I flipped the paper again, looking for further information. There was nothing but the message.

“Well, that’s really freaking helpful,” I muttered. “You’d think they’d have included a map or some flying directions or something.”

I looked back up at Nathaniel, who appeared to be gathering the shredded remains of his dignity around him. “What happened when you brought the ball outside?”

“It exploded before I managed to get it to the rain barrel,” he said tightly.

“I didn’t hear anything,” I said.

“It was a small explosion, and I held the bomb close to my chest so as not to cause property damage.” He looked as though he were regretting this act of charity.

“Well, thanks,” I said, touched by his thoughtfulness, however grudgingly given. “And where was the message?”

“Inside the bomb.”

I rubbed my fingers on the paper. It felt like perfectly normal standard bond notepaper. “How did the paper survive the explosion?”

“Perhaps there was an enchantment on the paper,” Nathaniel replied, shrugging.

He didn’t seem as interested in the mechanics of the message-delivery system as he was in straightening and dusting the cuffs of his shirt. I, however, was very interested. An enchantment could only mean that the message had been delivered by a magical practitioner. Okay, fine. Most things that go bump in the night have some kind of magic. Not all of them had the kind of fine abilities that would allow them to keep a piece of paper safe inside an incendiary device.

So that narrowed things down to a witch or a faerie. Probably. There was still a lot I didn’t know about the world, as I was discovering every day. But it seemed that your average Agent, demon, angel, vampire, et cetera, probably couldn’t have performed this kind of spell.

Of course, one had to wonder why a witch or a faerie would send this completely unhelpful message inside a bomb. Was the being that sent the message a friend? And if so, was it their idea of a funny joke to send it in a way that could have potentially blown off a limb?