Page 32 of Wicked Deeds

I grabbed the skirt with both hands, lifting it so I could move more easily and followed Maia as we headed for the building.

I should have let Damon mess it up after all. If we had to fight an afrit, I wasn’t sure it would survive in fit condition to be donated anyway.

But there wasn’t much I could do about that. If we waited for Cassandra or Callum, the afrit could be long gone. And I wouldn’t have spotted it in the first place, if I’d given in to back-of-the-limo sex with Damon.

The weight of the gun in my pocket was reassuring, but my heart was speeding up. Afrit usually traveled in groups. And those groups were usually being directed by an imp, if not lesserkind.

The Cestis hadn’t found any signs of imps or lesserkind when they investigated the afrit I’d killed with Callum, and last night’s call had been a false alarm according to Lizzie. But maybe not. Maybe the caller had seen something and the Cestis hadn’t arrived in time.

Not that the presence of an afrit downtown was proof there’d been one in Dockside.

“How do you want to do this?” Maia asked as we neared the entrance.

“I think the roof. It was climbing and there’s no reason to think it got inside the building.” Afrit might be the cockroaches of the demon world, but they couldn’t creep in through the kinds of tiny cracks and crevices actual bugs could. It would need an open door or window or an uncovered vent into a heating or cooling system. If Damon had bought this building I knew it would be all up to code. Which for office buildings required windows that didn’t open and a top-class security system.

“Okay, straight up then,” Maia said. She had one hand on the gun at her hip, ready to draw. I slid a hand into my pocket and closed my hand around the pistol’s grip.

The entrance into the building was floor-to-ceiling glass. A guard in a dark-green uniform waited inside the door. Mitch worked fast. The guard—a black man with his hair buzzed short—nodded as we approached and hit a button on the datapad he carried. The doors slid open smoothly and closed as soon as we were through.

He raised his eyebrows at my dress before he wrestled his expression back under control. “How can I help?”

“No one else gets in unless you get the okay from Riley Security,” I said.

“Sure thing, ma’am,” he said. “There’s a service entrance at the back, but we don’t have any deliveries scheduled tonight. So everything’s locked up tight.”

“Please keep it that way. We need to get to the roof,” I said.

He pointed at the elevator across the lobby. “You can take the elevator to the top floor and the fire door’s down the corridor, to the right.”

He handed me a security pass, old-fashioned, but faster than setting up a palm screen.

“This will let you up. Don’t lose it. The door will lock behind you.”

“Okay, thank you.”

I handed the pass to Maia, who slid it into one of the many pockets in her jacket. She was wearing the formal version of her uniform, a sleek black blazer and pants with a crisp white shirt that blended in better at black-tie events than their standard uniform. It looked like a normal suit, but it was made of some kind of tactical nano fabric and had a lot of concealed pockets and pouches to let the bodyguards carry all their gear.

“If you see anything odd, call Riley,” I said to the guard. “They’ll deal with it.”

“What kind of odd, ma’am? There’s a bunch of clubs a few blocks down from here. This time of night, the foot traffic leans rowdy.”

“Anything other than your usual,” I said. I had no idea where he stood on witches. Plenty of humans lived most of their lives ignoring us, and some actively disliked us. Regardless of his stance on magic, there was no way I wanted him to find out about demonkind tonight. That would be a whole other level of trouble. “Do you have cameras on the roof?”

“Only one, by the exit.”

“Can you show me the feed?” I nodded at the datapad.

“Sure.” He pulled it up. I studied it briefly. No sign of an afrit. But the field of vision showed a wide stretch of the roof. Which was a problem. I didn’t want him watching us if we did have to deal with an afrit. And if we didn’t, I didn’t want any chance of the papps hacking the security to get footage of me running around like a crazy person in the middle of the night. “Okay. You need to cut that feed.”

His mouth flattened. “Ma’am?—”

“You won’t get in trouble,” I said. “This building is owned by Riley Arts, right?”

He nodded slowly. “Since last year. Gaming company. They run the building management through a subsidiary. But they don’t have any offices here.”

“No.” I pointed out the window. “See the limo? The guy in there is Damon Riley. And I have his permission to do what I need to do in here. So cut the feed, please. If there’s any trouble down here, call the Riley head office security team. Don’t try to intervene.”

He bristled slightly, but nodded, “Yes, ma’am.”

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