Just when the throbbing in my head had dulled to an excruciating but nonstabbing ache, a shrill voice sliced through the air straight to the center of each and every pain synapse Barbara had.

“Someone stole my body!”

Oh, my god. I slammed my lids shut and gritted my teeth in agony. She’d scared Artemis off, too. The big baby.

The offending woman stuck her head through the shower curtain. “It’s gone! You have to find it!”

I scrubbed my face and turned off the shower. Clearly the day was going to proceed as usual: hectic and slightly bizarre.

“Do you remember where you last saw it?” I asked her, reaching for a towel.

A young girl – perhaps sixteen, with shoulder-length hair dyed the dull color of charcoal – stood back and let me dry off before answering.

However, the second I slid the curtain aside, she started in. “You have to find it. I think my ex-boyfriend stole it. He was cray-cray.” Her clothes were modern and a touch dark, so she couldn’t have been dead very long. And the slang would suggest a recent death as well.

“Okay, but really, where was it when it was stolen?”

She blinked at me. “In my grave at the cemetery. Where else would it be?”

“Oh, so you’re not an unsolved homicide or anything?”

She held out her wrists, her shoulders rounding as she tucked her chin. Several cuts marred her perfect skin. A few were deep enough to sever the arteries, and blood streaked down from them and over her palms.

“I’m sorry I did it, if that helps. I had no idea what it would do to my family.”

I wrapped the towel around me.

“I’m going to hell, aren’t I?”

“No, hon. If you were going to hell, you’d already be there. Don’t even get me started on that all-suicides-go-to-hell crap. There are always loopholes. Extenuating circumstances, so to speak.”

“That makes sense. I was adopted. I don’t know anything about my birth parents, but I think they were crazy, too.”

“You think you’re crazy?”

“Yeah, but not like drama queen crazy. I mean like literally. I could never keep my head right, you know? I could never keep facts straight or remember things like others could. They put me in special education when I was a kid, and some girls called me stupid.”

She was still a kid, though I kept that to myself.

“Even my best friends growing up turned against me and laughed at me.”

I knew the feeling.

“I think maybe my mom was on drugs or something when she was pregnant with me, you know? Anyways, that’s why I did it, I think. My head just didn’t work right. But my mom —” She hid behind her hair and wiped the back of a palm across her eyes. “My adopted mom. I just didn’t know how much I meant to her.”

“I’m so sorry, hon.”

“I wish I could tell her I’m sorry.”

Caving completely, I wrapped an arm around her. “We’ll figure out a way, okay? She’ll know how much you loved her. But for now, what’s this about your body?”

“It’s gone!” she screeched again, and a searing knife pierced my delicate skull and plummeted into my head to scramble my already exploded brains. Poor Barbara. I didn’t know how much more she could take. She wasn’t the most reliable of brains to begin with.

“Yes,” I said, holding my head to keep it from falling off, “I got that the first time.”

I hurried and dressed so Reyes and I could make a quick pit stop at the bar before heading off to interview the suicide-note victims’ families and to check out Lacey Banks’s missing body. But stepping out of the apartment building, the one that had been blessed by a priest and thus offered some protection against the Twelve, proved more difficult than I had expected.

“We can go back inside,” Reyes said, a sexy smile playing about his mouth as he stood behind me.

“And do what, exactly?” I was getting frustrated. I had a job to do. I couldn’t be cowering around every corner, worried about one of the beasts of hell filleting the flesh from my bones.

“You have to ask?” he said, teasing.

“Please. I know exactly what you’d do.”

“What?”

I did the deadpan thing before explaining. “You would call Osh over to stand guard while you went in search of the Twelve. I know you would.”

He looked across the parking lot, totally busted. “I would, but I can’t trust you. Or him.”

“Then work, it is.”

I forced my leg past the threshold of the building and waited a second for it to be ripped off. When nothing happened, I eased out into the open, praying we were right about the sunlight. After a few steps, I grew more confident. Reyes checked on things downstairs as I ran up to the office to check on Cook before we set out for the day. She’d seen a lot that morning. Not everyone could handle that kind of violence without some kind of side effect. Like horrendous nightmares or a twitchy eyelid. I hated when that happened.

But she seemed fine. A little traumatized by the demon showdown that morning and the newswoman implying Reyes was going to sue her honey bunny. Other than that, she was ay-okay. We went over my schedule for the day before I set her on the task of finding a connection between the suicide-note victims. “And I want to know more about that newswoman. Do a background on her.”

“Blackmail?” Cookie asked just as Reyes walked in.

I smiled and laughed, dismissing her statement with a wave. “I’ve never blackmailed anyone in my life,” I explained to my affianced.