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“It’s the first time I’ve ever shown anyone, aside from local people, what I can do,” I said.

“Me, too.” Barry wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. “You should have seen that guy’s face when he finally believed that we could find people. He thought we were psychics or something, and he couldn’t understand that what we were doing was registering a live brain signature. Nothing mystical about it.”

“He was all over the idea once he believed us,” I said. “You could hear in his head that he was thinking of the hundred different ways we could be of use to rescue operations, to the government at conferences, police interrogations.”

Mr. Cataliades looked at us. I couldn’t pick out all his snarly demon thoughts, but he was having a lot of them.

“We’d lose control over our lives,” Barry said. “I like my life.”

“I guess I could be saving a lot of people,” I said. I’d just never thought about it before. I’d never been faced with a situation like the one we’d faced the previous day. I hoped I never was again. How likely was it I would ever be on-site again at a disaster? Was I obligated to give up a job I liked, among people I cared about, to work for strangers in far away places? I shivered when I thought of it. I felt something harden within me when I realized that the advantage Andre had taken of me would only be the beginning, in situations like that. Like Andre, everyone would want to own me.

“No,” I said. “I won’t do it. Maybe I’m just being selfish and I’m damning myself, but I won’t do it. I don’t think we’re exaggerating how bad that would be for us, not a bit.”

“Then going to the hospital is not a good idea,” Cataliades said.

“I know, but I have to, anyway.”

“Then you can stop by on your way to the airport.”

We sat up straighter.

“There’s an Anubis plane flying out in three hours. It’ll go to Dallas first, then Shreveport. The queen and Stan are paying for it jointly. It’ll have all the survivors of both parties on it. The citizens of Rhodes have donated used coffins for the trip.” Mr. Cataliades made a face, and honestly, I couldn’t blame him. “Here’s all the cash we can spare,” he continued, handing me a short stack of bills. “Make it to the Anubis terminal in time, and you’ll both go home with us. If you don’t make it, I’ll assume something happened to stop you and you’ll have to call to make some other arrangement. We know we owe you a great debt, but we have wounded to get home ourselves, and the queen’s credit cards and so on were lost in the fire. I’ll have to call her credit company for emergency service, but that won’t take much time.”

This seemed a little cold, but after all, he wasn’t our best friend, and as the daytime guy for the queen, he had a lot to do and many more problems to solve.

“Okay,” I said. “Hey, listen, is Christian Baruch at the shelter?”

His face sharpened. “Yes. Though somewhat burned, he’s hanging around the queen in Andre’s absence as if he would take Andre’s place.”

“He wants to, you know. He wants to be the next Mr. Queen of Louisiana.”

“Baruch?” Cataliades could not have been more scornful if a goblin had applied for the job.

“No, he’s gone to extreme lengths.” I already told Andre about this. Now I had to explain again. “That’s why he planted that Dr Pepper bomb,” I said about five minutes later.

“How do you know this?” Mr. Cataliades asked.

“I figured it out, from this and that,” I said modestly. I sighed. Here came the yucky part. “I found him yesterday, hiding underneath the registration desk. There was another vampire with him, badly burned. I don’t even know who that one was. And in the same area was Todd Donati, the security guy, alive but hurt, and a dead maid.” I felt the exhaustion all over again, smelled the awful smell, tried to breathe the thick air. “Baruch was out of it, of course.”

I was not exactly proud of this, and I looked down at my hands. “Anyway, I was trying to read Todd Donati’s mind, to find out how hurt he was, and he was just hating Baruch and blaming him, too. He was willing to be frank, this time. No