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“You’re just mad that I’m right,” she teased as she jabbed a finger into his side.

“As always.” He smiled. Leaning his head back, he shut his eyes. At least he could get trashed on the plane and sleep for a while. Squeezing her hand, he let out a breath. “Think she’s okay?”

“What, Maggie?” Ally chuckled. “I think that girl has the necromancer on a leash by now, if you want to know the truth. If this goes the way I hope it goes, we’ll be dealing with her as the threat before long.”

“Fantastic. Just what we need. Another undead maniac on the loose.”

“I like her, though. I think she’ll be reasonable. We’ll have to see. There’s no telling how this all turns out in the end.”

No telling, indeed.

* * *

“You have gotto be fucking kidding me.”

“This is not my fault.”

“How the fuck was I supposed to know this would happen?”

“Keep your voice down, Marguerite.”

Maggie sighed heavily and put her head in her hands. Shit, shit, shit, shit!

Drop a piece of a fragment of some magical, all-powerful talisman into a glorified underground water tank. Sure. No one would ever find it there. It’d sit in the cistern underneath Istanbul for the rest of time. Right?

Right?

Or maybe the whole fucking thing will turn into a tourist destination two hundred years later.

The cistern was just as she remembered it. Except for the fact that the water was only a few inches deep, and a series of walkways had been erected for gawkers to come through and snap photos of all the strange architecture and oddities that had been built into the manmade underground lake.

And there, in a glass case, right on display in one of the main rooms, was the quarter of the talisman she had dropped in hopes it would never be found again. It was sitting next to other bits and pieces they had found in the lake when they had converted it into a museum.

She sighed, her shoulders drooping.

“What’s the problem?” Harry walked up, slurping loudly on a lemonade through the straw.

Gideon glared at him and grimaced. “Where did you get that?”

Harry jabbed a thumb back toward the entrance. “Shawarma vendor.”

“Let me rephrase. Why did you get that?”

“So I can do this.” Harry sucked loudly through the straw again. Sluuuuuuurrp.

Gideon clenched his fists.

“Both of you, shut up for a second and let me think.” She rubbed her forehead, as if that might help jump-start the wheels. “Can you just—like—reach in there with your lich powers and get it?”

“In public? Do you want to start a stampede? No.”

“How about coming back after this place is closed?”

“Possibly. I would rather not put us at risk for another attack from the Order. Crowds are doing us a great deal of benefit at the moment. But if we have no other option, yes, that will work.”

Studying the glass case, she looked for anything that might be useful. It was locked from the front, so reaching in and snatching it wasn’t possible. But there was a small hole on the back of the case—for the electrical wires to get in for the lighting, and maybe air flow. It was small enough that she couldn’t get her hand inside, but it was big enough that the fragment of the talisman could fit through it.

She smiled. “Perfect.”