I didn’t particularly want to, but I triggered the Sight as I spoke, glancing upward. Amaury’s hideaway was the center of a damned vortex, magic twisting in myriad shades toward the bordello and blackening as it reached it. That was how amalgamated magic tended to work, at least in my world. Either it was born of good intention and all those blended colors went to white, or it was bad news and it all turned black.

“Amaury’s a cesspool,” I said to the sky. “Oil spill. Whatever you want to call it, his aura is bubbling with evil, and I can’t read it, Jane. I have no idea if he was telling the truth. Do you know how long it’s been since I couldn’t read an aura?”

“Most of forever,” Jane guessed, which was actually completely wrong, but also hardly worth correcting. “He smells like blood and sex and lies to me,” she said, “just like any vamp. I figure they’re all lying, all the time.”

“He wasn’t wrong,” Lazarus rumbled. “You, me, d’big cat lady, we all from somewhere else, and somebody brought us t’rough. Maybe it’s dis voodooine. We find her, we get answers, whether Mister Amaury like it or no.”

I said, “I like the way you think,” and heard Jane make a sound that said she didn’t like anything about Lazarus, but that he probably had a point. I didn’t know why I got a free pass from her and Laz didn’t, except for maybe our weird physical similarities overrode her suspicions. I generally trusted the person I saw in the mirror, after all, and although Jane and I weren’t quite that carbon-copied, it was pretty close.