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We reentered Zheng’s office sometime later, without encountering Hassani’s vamps. I didn’t know where they were, but was grateful that they were gone. I wasn’t even sure what the hell they were doing here in the first place. Did Hassani think I wasn’t going to track down my sister’s kidnappers? Or that I was going to let them off with a slap on the wrist? And if he did think that, what exactly were two guys going to do about it?

I mean, yeah, they were pretty good in a fight, but still. Two guys. I couldn’t really see them taking on a whole contingent of fey on their own.

But damn, if they weren’t sticking like glue.

“Tossed your buddies out,” Zheng said, answering my unasked question while cradling a phone under his chin. “Lily was getting pissed. They’re waiting outside.”

“Did anybody find Bertha?” I asked.

He rolled his eyes. “Whoever did probably went screaming down the road. Can you give me a minute?”

We nodded and sat back down.

“Yeah,” he told the phone. “All of them, even the creepy mage. Yeah, I know, but he’s sneaky. He might have something up his sleeve . . . No, gimme an hour.” He eyed us. “I think I’m about to make a deal.”

He tossed the phone in a drawer and looked at us.

“What Louis-Cesare said before,” I told him, because I hadn’t objected to the terms, merely to being excluded from having a say in them. “The alliance is contingent on getting Dorina back, and is defensive only until we see how things go. But that does not mean defending you because you attacked someone and they attacked you back. It means unprovoked.”

“I know what defensive means.” Zheng took out another cigarette and lit up. “And I got fire power. I don’t need more boots on the ground.”

“Then what do you need?”

“Information and contacts. I don’t know your territory any more than you do mine. You needed help in Hong Kong, and you came to me, which was the smart move. Well, I need help in North America. I got some contacts there, sure, but not at the higher levels. I saw a senate seat go up for grabs, and I grabbed it. It was only afterward that I realized—shit. I might have just put my head in a noose.”

“So, we’re supposed to keep your head out of the noose,” I clarified.

“That would be nice,” Zheng said sardonically. “And I’ll do the same for you, if I can. But I’d settle for knowing that it’s being prepared.”

“And you think you wouldn’t?”

He shrugged and sat back with his cigarette. “I keep my eyes open, but they’re messing with us newbies at court. Rumors, rumors everywhere, but who knows what to believe? I’ve been walking around with goose flesh up my back for months now, right over the spot where somebody’s probably planning to plant a stake in it. I need information I can believe.”

“And Cheung?” Louis-Cesare asked abruptly.

“What about him?”

“Does this deal include him, or are you simply going to inform him of everything we tell you?”

Zheng’s eyes flashed dangerously through the smoke. “You got a mouth on you.”

“It’s a fair question—”

“It’s not the question,” Zheng said, sitting up. “It’s how it’s asked!”

Louis-Cesare started to get up, but I put a hand on his arm. “How would you like us to ask it?” I said.

“With some respect!”

“I have respect for you,” I told him truthfully.

“Yeah, but does he?” Zheng stabbed his cigarette at Louis-Cesare, who was still bristling. Master vamps did not take a challenge well, even an indirect one. But I didn’t think that was what this was.

Zheng hadn’t even noticed my hubby’s hand going to his shiny new rapier; he was too busy going off.

“Mr. Aristocrat, looking like he smells something bad, just like everyone else at that damned court! I thought it would be different from Ming-de’s,” he said, talking about the East Asian Consul, who headed up the Chinese version of a senate. “But some things never change. Be part of the wrong family, and no matter hard you work, you’re never—”

There was a knock on the door.

Zheng called out something in Cantonese, and Lily came in backwards pulling a rolling cart. She seemed to be in a better mood, and the cart’s contents put me in one. I didn’t know what time it was, jet lag having done a number on me, but every time is tea time in China.

Lily bustled in and served everyone their choice of tea and sandwiches and little cakes, which mostly meant serving me because the vamps only took tea. I ate anyway and something about watching me stuff my face seemed to calm Zheng down. “If you want something more substantial, we got a full kitchen,” he told me.

“This is substantial,” I said, around a cucumber and tuna paste sandwich. Lily had brought enough high tea for a family of twelve. “Thank you,” I told her.

“Your friends at night market,” she said. “They get fed, too.”

Well, I hoped they were discreet about it.

She bustled out and everybody sipped tea for a moment, before the conversation resumed.

“I have respect for you, as well,” Louis-Cesare said to Zheng. My hubby was quick tempered, but he wasn’t stupid, and he wasn’t belligerent. If he had time to think, he was a better diplomat than me. “If I indicated otherwise, my apologies. I am merely trying to protect the family interests.”

“Yeah, I get that,” Zheng said. “But you have to understand that I’ve spent months getting flak from a bunch of butt-hurt, would-be senators who didn’t have the guts to face me in the ring for the seat they wanted, but are happy enough to disrespect me at every turn. Half the time I don’t even know when senate meetings are being held, and when I do show up, nobody explains anything. I’m a damned gangster to them, a low life smuggler and an outsider who doesn’t deserve what he got. But I bled for my seat, risked my neck for it, like I’ll bleed for this alliance—”

“You think you’ll have to?” I asked.

He paused, but then he nodded. “Yeah, I think I’ll have to.” He glanced at Louis-Cesare. “I’m making this agreement for me. Cheung wants in, and he can deal with you separately. Which I’ll tell him to his face.”

Louis-Cesare looked at me. There wasn’t much to talk about, since we’d already agreed before we came back in. I nodded.

“We have a deal,” he told Zheng.

Zheng smiled and blew some smoke. And then decided that it deserved more than that, and laughed. “Well, all right, then! Let’s go.”

“Where?” I asked. I was still eating tuna.

“To meet your squad.”

* * *

In a few moments, we were back in the limo again, going where, I wasn’t sure. But I had a picnic basket and Zheng was finally talking, so I was happy. And he was talking a lot.

“Look, you have to understand a few things before we get started. Like the fact that there’s two different Hong Kongs right now, and I don’t mean human vs. supe. There are a few areas around the portals that are okay; there’s some stuff in the financial sector that wasn’t hit too hard, either. But then there’s the stuff you’ve been seeing since you got here—areas devastated by the battle that are probably going to take years to put back right, and that’s after we get all the pillars for the shield back up. And then there’s that.”

I hadn’t been paying much attention to what was happening outside the windows, since the back of the limo made for its own snug little world. But when he nodded to the left, I looked left, and then lowered the tinted glass to get a better view. It didn’t help much.

Instead of a neon lit cityscape, I found myself staring at what looked like a tide rolling in—one of thick, white fog. It was so dense that only a few, blackened and burnt tops of buildings broke the cloud cover. Or whatever it was, because I hadn’t noticed any fog tonight.

“What is that?” I asked.

“A problem,” Zheng said. “And why our consul has me stationed here for the time being.”

“Why does she care what happens in Hong Kong?” Louis-Cesare asked.

“I’m getting there.” Zheng settled back against the expansive seat. “After the battle, life was pretty disrupted for a while. We had the dark mages who’d attacked us, and the traitorous dogs from the East Asian Court who had helped them, to track down. Ming-de and her soldiers were all over the place, ordering people about and contradicting the commands of the local authorities, creating mass confusion. There was looting going on, there were droves of people clogging the portals, trying to get the hell out, and there were mages crawling everywhere, attempting to get the shield stabilized or to collect their dead or to do investigations . . .

“My point is, we were busy.”

I nodded.

“Then one day, out of the blue, we woke up to find that a third of the city looked like that.” He nodded at the swirling clouds of white. “Whole blocks were taken over by that stuff, and wherever it went, magic went haywire.”

“What do you mean, haywire?” Louis-Cesare asked.

“I mean huge clouds of free-floating, unattached magic, with no spells binding it.”

“Like wild magic?” I said, talking about the naturally occurring stuff that the world throws out from time to time.

But Zheng shook his head. “If by ‘like’ you mean in the vague ballpark of, sure. Otherwise, not really. You know how talismans store up power for months, sometimes years, to get enough for a single spell?”

I nodded. Me and my bank account knew all about that. Magic was expensive, which was why most magic workers normally used their own. Any spell you had to buy that was worth a damn cost the Earth, not because the spell itself was that hard to cast, although some were harder than others. But because of the power that went into it.

The amount of charms I’d expended staying alive in Hassani’s temple would have cost me . . . I didn’t even know. Years of hard work, probably, if I hadn’t had the senate’s reserve to draw from. And then Zheng said something that had me sitting up and forgetting my picnic.

“Well, there are clouds in there,” he gestured at the fog, “that have enough juice to run a major ward for the next thousand years.”

“What?”

He nodded. “And the problem is, when one of those connects to a spell—any spell—one of two things happens. Either the spell blows up, overloaded to the point that it can’t maintain integrity anymore, or . . .”

“Or what?”

“Or that,” Zheng said, looking out of the side of the car again, but not in any particular direction, because it had started circling.

Louis-Cesare leaned over and we both looked down, only at what, I didn’t know. It was big, though, maybe the circumference of an oil tanker, and was clogging a small street. It was round like a tanker as well, only not as long. In fact, it kind of looked like—

“A soup can?” I said, noticing a familiar blank spot on a nearby billboard.

We were nearing the edge of the billowing whiteness, but were still well out of the danger zone. Or we should have been. But smallish tendrils were creeping out of the main flow here and there, and one had snagged the billboard, curling around it like a fist.

And, sure enough, what had been a simple, animated ad, suddenly got up from where it had landed in the roadway and ran down the street, ahead of a bunch of mages that tore off after it.

They managed to get lasso spells on it, golden ropes of gleaming power that brought it down, just shy of an apartment block. It didn’t look like anybody was living there; in fact, I didn’t see anybody in the whole area except for the mages, and the kicking, screaming thing on the ground. Which was now trying to roll over and crush them all.

But it made my heart skip a beat, nonetheless.

“They run out of the dead zones, as we’ve started calling them, from time to time,” Zheng explained. “We’ve taken down all the magical ads and graffiti we can find out here, but occasionally one slips past us. And inside the fog . . . well, there aren’t too many people willing to go inside the fog.”

“That’s why all the billboards were blank, or text only, on our way here,” Louis-Cesare said. Because I guessed he’d noticed, too.

Zheng nodded. “The easy ones are the graffiti,” he continued. “Most of them are too weak to survive an infusion of that much magic, and just explode. Or the advertisements that somebody did construct well enough to take it, but which were designed to be fairly benign. They’re mostly just a nuisance.”

I thought about the gun that Ray and I had devised, which had been based off of magical ads that we’d encountered during the battle for this city, and which we’d overloaded with power to help us out. I’d seen them slow down, and in some cases stop, a troop of war mages, the magical equivalent of tanks. I thought Zheng was kind of underselling the combat potential of animated soup cans.

But he was already going on.

“Others—the more dangerous kind—are protection wards and spells that used to guard bank vaults, weapons’ shops, and jewelry stores, places where people were serious about others not getting in. Unlike the ads, those were designed to be mean, and now they got the power to back it up. But the worst of all, the ones that really ruin everybody’s good time, are the arsenals.”

“What . . . arsenals?” Louis-Cesare asked, looking like he didn’t want to know.

“A lot of the triads and such had arsenals in the dead zones. Thy needed someplace to put all the stuff they . . . creatively acquired . . . on jobs, or that they were planning to sell or use themselves, if the situation warranted it. There are disputes from time to time between rivals, and it’s always a good idea to have a reserve. Cheung had a storehouse in there himself, for emergencies, and for wards and weapons he was planning to trade to the fey.”

I started to get the picture. “But now, with all this free-floating magic . . .”

“They’re running loose. And sometimes the weapons encounter an ad with the arms and legs they lack, and merge with it. Making a hybrid with tons of power and a really bad attitude. The good thing is, they largely stay in the dead zones, ‘cause that’s where the magic clouds that feed them are located. But you’ll notice I said ‘largely’.”

“The monsters,” I said, remembering what Lily had said.

Zheng nodded. “They get out sometimes, and prowl around the streets down there. But most of them can’t fly—”

“Most of them?” Louis-Cesare repeated.

“—so elevated real estate has become real popular.”

“I bet,” I said.

“But what causes all this?” Louis-Cesare demanded. “Wild magic is usually found in minute amounts in nature. It takes a thunderstorm and a witch who knows how to ride its power, or a talisman to make it usable. It doesn’t look like that!”

“It’s found on minute amounts on Earth,” Zheng corrected.

He sat back against the seat and poured us some whiskey. I had finished my tea, so I was happy enough for it, but I had a feeling that it was less hospitality and more a leftover from his human days. A here-you’ll-need-it kind of thing.

I took it anyway, because I did need it.

I wasn’t liking where this conversation was going.

“The shield that protects the city does double duty,” Zheng said, and since he didn’t sound as if he was changing the subject, I assumed this was relevant. “See, nobody else sits on top of a ley line vortex the way we do. It’s considered, well, insane. The thought, before we proved everybody wrong, was that no shield could possibly withstand that kind of constant pressure. That it would buckle for sure.”

“Why doesn’t it?” Louis-Cesare asked.

“Because it’s made up of the energy of the lines. And, yeah, I know, that’s supposed to be impossible, too,” he said, before Louis-Cesare could object. “That’s what everyone was always told: the lines are too powerful; try to tame them and they’ll tame you instead, and by tame I mean dust to ashes. But our vortex is different.”

“How different?” I said. “The one here is said to be more powerful than anywhere else, with more lines crossing and crisscrossing than at any other point on Earth—”

“Exactly. It’s ironic, but ours is usable because it’s so powerful. So many lines run together here that their energy gets jumbled up. Instead of pooling, like in other vortexes, it’s more like a volcano erupting, all the time. Only you ever see magma, the kind that floats to the surface of a lava flow?”

“I guess,” I said, not really seeing where this was going.

“It’s black, right? That’s because the crust is cooler than the stuff underneath. The same is true here. The ley line energy piles up, higher and higher, until it forces some of it closer to real space than anywhere else that we’ve found. And that kind of . . . cools it off . . . over time.”

“Cools it off?”

“Okay, technically thins it out might be better, but it wrecks the analogy. The point is, it’s like the crust on magma as it encounters the air. Hot and burning underneath, but cooler, and thus less dangerous on the top. That’s what we use, the very top most layer, forming part of the energy of the lines themselves into the shield that protects us. The rest goes into the phase that keeps us out of alignment with real space, and able to live without having to hide what we are. And the remainder, a relatively small amount—”

“You skim off for yourself,” Louis-Cesare said, looking like something had finally made sense.