him was roughly the same as what Raphael had already told me. They offered simple biological facts that could help, but their own research hadn’t pointed to anything, or so they claimed.
I didn’t believe a damn word of it, but I couldn’t force the issue anymore. The Tribunal was allowing Mygi to wall themselves off. They did too much good for the rest of the supernatural world for everyone to get up in arms about one mostly-human man.
It pissed me off but let me know they were still my enemy. Mygi wanted to keep secrets, and I was dedicated to discovering them. Too bad I had no idea where to start.
I had learned very little since the Sinclair situation was handled. Raphael and I had finally found time to talk about other things he remembered, but none of it was helpful.
Raphael had escaped from a lab located in the Rockies, then moved down to the desert because he knew the area and the people. He bounced around, running from them, but he couldn’t remember how to get back to the lab or point me in the right direction. That indicated some magic—a spell, charm, or glamour—which erased someone’s detailed memory of its location. Both witches and fae could pull it off, but it would need someone very powerful or a group to pull it off on a large location. There were probably very few people who knew how to get to that mysterious lab. I was playing cautious about asking anyone in the Tribunal, or even Cassius, to get Mygi’s cooperation. The head honchos at Mygi were already pissed at me, and I didn’t want to give them any more of a reason to hate me, not now that I knew what they were capable of.
Once I have something, I can unravel this entire fucking thing, but I don’t have shit. The fuckers at Mygi are probably laughing at me every damn night.
I finished my set on the bench press and sighed. I was working out to take my mind off it, yet it was the very thing I thought about every night. It kept me awake most of the time. One of the reasons I sat out on my patio in the cool evenings was to let my mind go quiet in the chill. Anything to take my mind away from the questions I was struggling to answer.
I grabbed a small, clean towel from my bag and threw it over my neck, checking the time as I walked out of the gym. I had been working out for two hours, and Raphael was probably waiting on me upstairs to get something started or give him some task to do. I didn’t have much. Normally, we spent our nights either trying to get him to remember more or just going over supernatural knowledge he needed to know.
Walking back into the penthouse, my nose caught the scent I loved and hated. I followed it into the kitchen, where Raphael was sitting at the bar over an empty plate. He was reading something, but I couldn’t catch the title.
“How was your workout?” he asked, not looking up.
“Good. What do you want to do tonight?” I asked, suddenly uncomfortable. I hated when he tried small talk. I wasn’t very good at it, and I didn’t want to be good at it—not with him. Every day he was in my space, the more used to him I became, and I didn’t like that. I didn’t like how my fangs dropped every night and need curled in my belly when I saw him. I didn’t like the trouble surrounding him, when I had enough of that in my own life.
“I think I want to go out,” he said, sighing. “Other than errands, we never leave. I’m going a bit crazy, to be honest.”
I sighed and sat down three seats from him. My penthouse was designed to host parties and have guests, not that I ever had either.
“There’s only one place I go to on a Friday night, and that’s The Jackalope. It’s a seedy little bar where most of the city’s bounty hunters hang out between jobs. Paden, the owner, is a fae who makes most of his money dealing in information. If that sounds interesting, sure, we can go and have a couple of drinks.” I wasn’t feeling up to a night out, but this was the first time Raphael showed any interest in going out. We had established a new identity for him,