The gray stone of the FIB tower caught the late afternoon sun as we parked in one of the reserved slots right in front of the building. The street was busy, and Glenn stiffly escorted me and my fish in through the front door. Tiny blisters between his neck and collar were already starting to show a sore-looking pink against his dark skin.

Jenks noticed my eyes on them and snorted. "Looks like Mr. FIB Detective is sensitive to pixy dust," he whispered. "It's going to run through his lymphatic system. He's going to be itching in places he didn't know he had."

"Really?" I asked, appalled. Usually you only itched where the dust hit. Glenn was in for twenty-four hours of pure torture.

"Yeah, he won't be trapping a pixy in a car again."

But I thought I heard a tinge of guilt in his voice, and he wasn't humming his victory song about daisies and steel glinting red in the moonlight, either. My steps faltered before crossing the FIB emblem inlaid in the lobby floor. I wasn't superstitious—apart from when it might save my life—but I was entering what was generally humans-only territory. I didn't like being a minority.

The sporadic conversation and clatter of keyboards remind me of my old job with the I.S., and my shoulders eased. Justice's wheels were greased with paper and fueled by quick feet on the streets. Whether the feet were human or Inderlander was irrelevant. At least to me.

The FIB had been created to take the place of both local and federal authorities after the Turn. On paper, the FIB had been enacted to help protect the remaining humans from the—ah—more aggressive Inderlanders, generally the vamps and Weres. The reality was, dissolving the old law structure had been a paranoiac attempt to keep us Inderlanders out of law enforcement.