Department 57: Rubies of Fire Read Online Free

her. No, that couldn’t be possible. She’d read him, entered the forefront of his mind, and she found nothing there but lustful thoughts and work niggles. No sigil, the mental symbol all Talents had; no image of a shape-shifter’s other form, no family symbol that vampires used, no tense, electric tingling that she would have gotten if he’d had strong psychic gifts. Constant was just an extraordinarily handsome, sex-obsessed mortal. She had to be mistaken.
    She’d picked up his trail right after she’d stopped in a back alley to feed from a college kid looking for kicks in this doubtful area. Being a couple of security levels above Constant had given her access to his files, so she knew where to start.
    The district given as his address shocked her a little. Rather a lot, when she saw the stinking building it took her to in the middle of one of the worst areas of Manhattan, one of the few the authorities hadn’t cleaned up yet. Not so far for her to walk from her home on the Upper West Side, but a world away in every other sense.
    Groups of teens lounged in the street, probably working when they should rightly have been in bed. If she weren’t Talented, Roz wouldn’t have dreamed of venturing here alone. But she fuzzed her presence well enough, blurring people’s vision of her so she looked like anyone else in this godforsaken rat hole, her nondescript sneakers and ragged hoodie fitting right in with the general wear of people here. No one took any notice of her.
    She was beginning to think she had the wrong address, or that he’d lied, when a figure emerged from the block she was watching. She had to look twice to confirm the man really was Andreas Constant.
    He wore a pair of perfectly cut pants and a leather jacket with something dark underneath, a shirt or T-shirt. No sign of the practical but deeply boring clothes he wore to work. His dark hair was free of the gel he used during the daytime, brushed back off his face in short, tousled locks. She supposed everyone was entitled to his or her secrets. Some secrets, anyway.
    But not from her. If she was to work with him, she wanted to know more than he wanted to tell her, and that controlled touch to her mind this morning had made her wonder about him. She’d wait until he was off guard and read him deeper than she’d done so far. Before she began her assignment, she’d find out about her backup. Constant moved along the street with an easy stride, past people who should have mugged him for his jacket alone. Perhaps they knew him. Why he lived here, she had no idea. If he could afford to dress like that, he could afford a decent neighborhood. Perhaps it gave him some perverse pleasure to walk past these lowlifes every day.
    He moved at a brisk pace, so she had to lengthen her stride to keep up with him. She tried a gentle mental probe, but she found his mind shuttered, even more than at work.
    She paused, then had to hurry to catch up.
    Half an hour later, she stopped for breath outside a fashionable nightclub in Gramercy. He’d walked all the way, and her legs ached with the pace he’d set. Also, she wasn’t dressed for fashionable nightclubs. She’d just about pass if she took off the hoodie, in her plain pants and white blouse, but it wasn’t the outfit she’d choose to party in, especially in a swanky place like this. She took off the ragged garment and rolled it into a bundle.
    For New York, it was early, but she knew this club would be fuller than most others at this time. It was newly fashionable, and noncelebrities needed to arrive early. She fumbled in her pocket and found a credit card. She guessed the membership card would be about the same size.
    Ignoring the long line of people neatly corralled behind red ropes, she walked straight to the front and held up her card to one of the door attendants. She didn’t bother to smile. Smiles weren’t for the muscle at the door; it made them suspicious.
    Her standard white-blouse-black-pants looked