I'd practiced a few shaky tracking spells with the women in the Ordo, playing a silly but strangely gratifying game of hide and seek in Burnham Park while I tried to track each woman down in turn. We'd safely disposed of the hair and gone for ice cream afterward.

What Huber and I were about to track was significantly less innocent.

After so long silent, Lasciel had become a regular old Chatty Cathy. Too bad none of it was what I wanted to hear.

"This is a foe too dangerous for you, Molly," she insisted, using my name for once.

There was almost a plea in her mental voice, but I couldn't be sure if this was another act, meant to manipulate. After all, she'd already tried to entice me into using black magic once this week. That psychomancy stuff sounded like serious business, and the knowledge just sat there in the back of my mind, like a poisonous little Easter egg, waiting to be collected.

"I'm not going to face it, Lash. Just track it to the right location. Then I'll slip a note to Harry, just like I said I would."

"You do not understand, Molly," she insisted. "Wendigos are incredibly dangerous. They are Wyldfae and pay no allegiance to any court, though if a war were to break out, they would most certainly align with Winter."

I frowned. "I thought that it was a Native Spirit."

"Yes and no. Belief shapes us, Molly, like a river inexorably smooths stone. But it's a cumulative process. The Wendigo embodies the worst fears of the Algonquin-speaking peoples because it has preyed upon them exclusively for many centuries. It confirmed the fear that greed and selfishness would turn man into a monster and doom the whole tribe."

"Because you become a Wendigo if you're greedy, right? That doesn't really slim down my suspects, Lash. If all that it takes to become a Wendigo is to be stingy and snub your fellow man, Chicago should have Wendigos out the wazoo."

"The spirit of a Wendigo invades and transforms a human host when that human has committed the ultimate act of selfishness. Ending the life of another to ensure their own survival."

"Because there ain't no party like a Donner party, right?"

Lasciel's image actually rolled her eyes at me. "Indelicate and inaccurate, my host. The Donner Party did not kill to eat. They consumed the already dead."

"So you're saying that my joke was in poor...taste?"

Lasciel had enough decorum not to groan at the bad pun. Barely.

"The point is, there's not a safe way to track the guy. Most people aren't going to fess up to cannibalism, are they?"

I'd been sitting still in the middle of a circle of power, silently arguing with my personal fiend for a few minutes while preparing what I'd need to track the wendigo. Going on the assumption that its little owl friends were still being drawn to where the killings took place, I was aiming to find the secondary location by tracking this particular screech owl.

I tied the leather cord firmly around the end of the feather and then slipped my crudely fashioned necklace over my head, taking the feather in hand, holding it gingerly in my palm.

When I'd been learning thaumaturgy from the limited selection of books on magic the Ordo possessed, I'd been taught that you could attach ideas to objects, letting them represent the different parts of the spell. Lasciel had shown me in fairly short order that this was mostly just a crutch for the just learning or the exceptionally lazy wizard. I figured with Harry, it was more a way to conserve energy for the fights he regularly instigated.

Magic is totally in the mind. So I gathered up the different parts of the spell in my head, infused them with an effort of will, and then murmured a word, allowing my magic to flow through my fingers and into the feather balanced in my palm.

Using a piece of chalk and a compass, I mapped out magnetic north. Then, following the tug of the feather against my magical senses, as they were, I mapped out the direction that the source was coming from. Using my own footsteps as a measure wasn't totally accurate, but it got me within a four to five-mile radius of where I'd need to be, as opposed to trying to follow the damn owl in a circuitous route all over Chicago. The day was still young, and I wanted to get this done quickly so I could finish the Kentucky route and come one step closer to shaking Torelli.

Consulting the mental map that Lasciel had projected handily in the air for me, I thought I could safely say where we needed to head. Maybe I should have saved myself a little trouble and gone for the very freaking obvious.

"He was or is in the Fulton River District."

The Fulton River District used to be dominated by meatpacking plants and warehouses, but in recent years it's become one of the fastest-growing residential areas in Chicago. Perched near the Chicago loop, it was one of the fastest ways to get downtown if you were in a hurry.

More and more of the warehouses were being purchased and torn down by savvy businessmen, looking to capitalize on the influx of suburbanites by crafting condos and lots where wholesale slaughter used to take place. It left a lot of that part of town with what amounted to an unpleasant spiritual residue. The perfect spot for a murderous wyld fae to drag its victims.

Huber nodded and swung his keys around one finger. "Ready to go kid? I've got my camera fixed up with a telephoto, so we don't have to get close. Hopefully, we can wrap this up by lunchtime and catch a bite while the photos develop before we drop in on your detective friend. I'm starved."

"Sounds great. Give me a minute to clean this up, Mr. Huber."

The map disappeared and left the scowling visage of Lasciel in its place. "You're going to get us both killed."

"Recon only, Lash," I assured her, stuffing my supplies into the small messenger bag I'd brought along.

"You should leave it be. It will only kill for a season, my host. Wendigos hibernate. It will only be active during the winter months."

I snorted quietly to myself, ignoring the strange look I got from Mr. Huber. Anyone who stayed around me for any length of time was going to have to get used to the crazy or get the hell out. Things these days only seemed to run on three speeds. Crazy, insane, and what the actual fuck.

"Yeah, and leave countless women to die until winter decides to release its icy grip from Chicago. That could be anywhere from March to May. It doesn't start getting properly warm until June."

"You will help no one if you get yourself killed. The general location and a hint will be enough to give the wizard what he needs to foil the wendigo."

I smudged the chalk line and stepped out after Huber, ignoring Lash's continued protestations. When she continued the spiel into the car I hastily slapped a pair of mental cuffs and a gag on her before shoving her out of the mental spotlight. I felt a little bad for doing it. After all, she'd been grudgingly helpful thus far. Still, she was channeling the spirit of my mother a little too hard these days, and I wasn't having it. I had a plan. We'd be at a safe distance the whole time and once we snapped a few pictures we'd be gone. We'd have lunch, I'd sneak into Harry's office building beneath a veil, and then I'd never have to dabble in this business ever again. I could start my boring job with my conscience clear, knowing I'd done everything in my power to stop a monster.

I hopped into the passenger's side of Huber's vehicle, trying to ignore the guilty twist of my stomach. I shouldn't feel so badly for gagging a fallen angel. But I did.

And that scared the living hell out of me.

In theory, it should have only taken us about ten minutes to get from our portion of Bucktown to the Fulton River District. But of course, this was Chicago, so nothing ever went as planned. We ended up in slow-moving traffic and it took another twenty minutes of logistical hell to figure out where to park that wouldn't give us a big fat ticket.

All the while, the feather on my neck continued an insistent pull toward a line of warehouses near the edge of the district. I waited impatiently, hopping from foot to foot as Huber paid for his parking spot. The magic tingled against my fingers, urging me silently forward, growing ever more insistent every second I delayed.

Huber and I kept close together, adjusting every so often as geography demanded, Huber busying himself with putting on a pair of gloves when the wind picked up. The feather didn't seem to be moving, which was good. I'd been afraid that the owl would take off and lead us in circles.

We ended up in a lot full of self-storage units. Each was about ten feet by ten feet. Not a lot, in the grand scheme of things, but it was a large enough space to store, torture, kill, and carve up girls. I vaguely recognized this as the place where Claudia spent her last moments furiously running. There was still glass on the ground, spread out like a thousand glimmering diamonds over the pavement.

Huber had a brief word with the owner of the lot, who was about to go on lunch break before we were let inside. Just being here was making my skin crawl. I could feel the precise location Claudia met her end when I passed through it, the thick, horrible miasma stole my breath and stopped me cold.

I sucked in a deep breath after a few unpleasant seconds, forcing myself to step away from the spot and continue forward down the narrow alleyway between the rows. Still no sign of the owls. Surely they weren't inside the units?

A panicked female shriek caught my attention and had my head whipping around toward the opposite end of the lot. My feet were moving before my logic could catch up. The wendigo had another victim and she was still alive. I had to help her.

I left Mr. Huber in the dust, sprinting as fast as my legs would carry me toward the sound. I rounded the corner out of Mr. Huber's sight and paused only to grab a hammer from a tool bag left by a maintenance worker at the base of one of the lights overlooking the lot. I tucked it into my waistband beneath my overlarge sweater, ready to draw it if I needed to. It wasn't much, but it was what I had handy. The steel should at least count for something against a fae, according to my limited research.

Running became harder and harder as the temperature inexplicably dropped, as if winter itself were descending onto earth at an accelerated pace. Goosebumps broke out on every exposed patch of skin. The air in my lungs burned like fire and I slowed little by little.

The sound came again, but from a different direction. And then another, until the cry was echoing off the metal walls of the storage units like a nightmarish cacophony of sound.

Only then did one fact from my earlier research penetrate the panic-induced flight. Something I should have thought about before taking off after a sourceless cry. Lash would have beat me for my stupidity if she'd been capable.

Wendigos could mimic human voices.

I spun on one heel, facing back the way I'd come, only to find myself face to face with Huber. He had apparently been thinking along the same lines as me because he held a heavy pipe wrench in one hand. I flinched away from him so hard that it hurt.

"Jesus, Huber! Don't scare me. We have to go. It could be anywhere."

"Closer than you think," he said with a benign grin, tapping a gloved palm with the pipe wrench.

That eerily calm smile was the last thing I saw before the head of the wrench collided with the side of my face. I was unconscious before I even hit the ground.