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“Oh, so you’re telling me architects get their own keys to government buildings?”

“No, I didn’t say that. I’m friends with the City Clerk.” Greg also happens to be a wolf shifter, but I don’t mention this to Nikki.

“And he’s allowed to just hand out keys to government buildings?”

“Probably not,” I admit. Finally, I find the key and let us into the building. I punch in the security code.

Nikki flips on the lights, and I quickly turn them back off.

“What? We need to be able to see.”

“We don’t need that light. I don’t want to draw police attention.”

Nikki shrugs and follows me back to the main offices, away from the street facing windows. I flip on the lights and take our food to a long empty table. We eat and then get to work.

I turn on a couple of computers and consult the map Selene gave me, praying she isn’t sending me on a wild goose chase. If she is, I’ll kill her. It’s almost the full moon, and if she causes my mate to die due to petty jealousy, I will end her before my own slow descent into madness can take hold.

“This will take all night,” I say.

“Isn’t there a database you can search? Like: houses with basements.”

“It’s where we’ll start but we need to account for every house inside this radius and not all of them will be in the database.”

“Why not?” Nikki says, swirling a french fry in her chocolate shake.

“Some of the older house plans are filed in boxes in the records room in the basement.”

“And we think it’s an older house?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. Marcus could have had this safe house for a while.”

I decide to run a quick search for basements in the area anyway. Nothing.

“Does that mean there are no basements in the database?” She’s hovering over me, slurping the last remnants of her shake.

“Not necessarily. This search feature isn’t the best in the world.” I don’t tell her that I also suspect that if Marcus botheredto put strong wards up, he probably doesn’t want anything about his house to be in any kind of searchable database at all.

I pull up Google Maps and take a look at the area in question. “I think we can eliminate a third of this area,” I say.

“Why?”

“It’s not upscale enough. Part of this radius is a very wealthy neighborhood. Vampires tend to be extravagant, so there’s no way he’ll live in a middle class neighborhood, even as a temporary residence.”

I set Nikki up on one of the computers and show her what we’re doing. She takes half of the streets on the remaining map, and we compile a list of all the houses.

It’s tedious work, but finally we’ve got a list of thirty-six homes, and with any luck Marcus is inside one of them. I’m grateful for the nicer neighborhoods with generous lawns. If we were dealing with anything else, we’d have a lot more houses to eliminate.

No basements are found, and fifteen of the houses aren’t in the database.

“So that leaves the records room,” she says.

I nod, grimly. The records room isn’t the well-oiled machine that the database is, and even finding one set of house plans in this dimly lit dump is going to be nearly impossible.

The search drags on for hours.

“Hey, I found it,” Nikki says.

I bolt upright. It’s light outside. “What time is it? How could you let me fall asleep?”