Free Dark Currents by Jacqueline Carey Page B

climbed onto the Dumpster, then jumped down and run away, scared off by Mogwai’s caterwauling and Mrs. Browne’s wrath.
    My tail twitched with nervous energy.
    Fishing my phone out of my pocket, I glanced at the time. A quarter hour short of three o’clock in the morning. That meant it could have been nothing, an energetic drunk meandering home unusually late from the bar, hopped up on vodka and Red Bull and bent on idle mayhem. I squatted lower and studied the footprint, measuring it against my own. It definitely belonged to either a man, or a woman with unfortunately large feet. Given the odds, I’d bet on the former. The imprint had been left by a sturdy industrial tread, maybe a work boot.
    Or a motorcycle boot.
    Oh, crap.
    I knocked on the back door of the bakery kitchen before poking my head inside. “Mrs. Browne?”
    “Eh?” She cocked her head at me.
    “You said you thought it was a mortal,” I said. “Any chance it could have been a ghoul?”
    I was hoping she would say no.
    Instead, she looked thoughtful. “Well, now, that would depend on its diet, Daisy, lass. Those what exist on pure emotion, more often than not they reek of misery. But there’s ghouls that walk among us and pass for ordinary folk. They can eat and drink like mortals; it’s only that they take no sustenance from it. One of those . . .” She shrugged. “Aye, one of those might have fooled my nose.”
    I sighed.
    Her expression hardened. “Don’t tell me you’re mixed up with the likes o’ them, Daisy Johanssen!”
    “No, no.” I willed away a quick vision of Stefan Ludovic and his disturbingly patient ice-blue gaze. “Just checking.”
    Back outside, I stood uncertainly before the Dumpster, thumbing through the contact list on my phone.
    I wanted to call Cody.
    But lingering guilt stayed my hand. Also, I didn’t have the first piece of evidence that my late-night maybe-would-be intruder had anything to do with this case. Hell, we didn’t even know whether it was a case yet.
    So I settled for splitting the difference. Treating it as a possibility, I used my phone to take photos of the dented Dumpster lid and the dusty boot print.
    “Good enough?” I asked Mogwai.
    Mogwai answered with a low, distressed howl followed by a gagging sound, his sides heaving as he hunched over in the alley, opened his jaws, and barfed a prodigious mixture of kibble and rich cream all over the boot print. Distancing himself from the mess, he shot me an embarrassed look.
    I’d had a feeling that bowl of cream was a bad idea, but so is refusing a brownie’s hospitality.
    Oh, well.
    “Never mind,” I said to him. “At least you puked outside, big guy. C’mon; let’s go back to bed.”
    Approximately two hours later, my alarm rousted me from the warm confines of my bed, Creedence Clearwater Revival informing me that there was, in fact, a bad moon on the rise.
    “No shit,” I mumbled, slapping at the snooze alarm. “Tell me something I don’t know, huh?”
    Seven minutes later, Mick Jagger told me that while he was so hot for me, I was so cold, like an ice-cream cone.
    “As if.” This time I turned the alarm off and hauled myself upright. “You’re an old man, Mick Jagger. When’s the last time you had an ice-cream cone?”
    The clock radio remained silent. Nestled into a tangle of sheets and blanket, Mogwai purred obliviously.
    It was a bit after five o’clock in the morning and still dark outside. Yawning, I dragged myself into presentable clothing. Naiads are particular about appearances. A short skirt of summer-weight gray wool, check. A sleeveless white cotton shirt, check. Freshwater pearls looped around my neck, check. Given the hike ahead of me, I opted for sensible footwear, shoving my feet into a pair of white Keds and hoping the naiads would overlook them.
    My old Honda Civic hadn’t been driven for a couple of days, and it whined in protest when I turned the key in the ignition before catching. It wasn’t that far to