Lunchtime at the Baby Blues BBQ, one of Venice’s more prominent home-grown eateries, was as crowded as ever. The hunched-over man known as Rooster and I had gotten one of the last tables in the joint. “Jeez, Samantha,” he growled. “You get more hardboiled every time I see you. Was there some Sam Spade film festival on TCM last night, or what? Why not let a guy get a few bites in before you grill him?”

“It’s hot,” said one of the restaurant’s two bald-headed owners as he dropped a blue Fiestaware dish covered with lunch in front of my companion. “And here’s your takeout order,” he added for my benefit, sliding a box my way before ambling back behind the counter. The fellow sitting opposite me ignored the warning and grabbed for the buttery, cheese-encrusted cob of corn sitting on the side of his plate. Immediately he swore, yanked his hands back and blew furiously on his reddening fingertips. “Told you it was hot!” the owner called back, without even looking over his brawny shoulder.

“I don’t know why I keep coming here,” he growled, flipping off the owner’s back.

I looked at the man and shook my head. And when I say man, I mean it in the most generic of senses, because although he looked normal enough, genetically, he wasn’t at all human. “From what Cor tells me, just about anyone from your race emigrating to California comes to the Baby Blues,” I reminded him. “It’s practically the first tourist stop outside the gates of Resht for any self-respecting Peri, isn’t it?”

“It used to be,” grumbled Rooster. How he’d gotten that nickname, I had no idea. Perhaps it was his red face or the flap of jowl hanging beneath his chin. “Then Venice got gentrified and the prices shot up. Freakin’ Los Angeles, man. I keep saying I should move to San Diego.”

“Yeah, well, lunch is on me, remember?” I tossed him a couple of the wet-naps from the little bowl at my side. “Provided you’ve got the goods.”

“You don’t trust me?”

I shrugged. Trust is for crazy folk. That’s my motto. I believe what my eyes see.

“I’ve got them, I’ve got them.” At the sight of my expectant, raised eyebrows, Rooster sighed and reached into his sports coat to pull out a packet of papers stuffed into an oversized manila envelope that had seen better days. It looked like an artifact from the crash site of a small-craft midair collision. With dirty fingertips, Rooster pushed the envelope across the table, so that it slid next to my takeout container. I used the salt-shaker to move gently it to a less contagious position. “All my notes. Everything I remember them saying.”

“And how good is your memory these days, exactly?” He seemed offended by my question, but I pressed on. “The last time that I used your services . . .”

“Yeah, and I gave you a refund for that, didn’t I?” he said, stuffing three of the large-cut French fries into his piehole at once.

“The last time,” I emphasized, “Cor went flying into what he thought was going to be a cabal of border smugglers and ended up busting the Venice United Methodist Church Crafty Ladies Annual Crochet Challenge.” I crossed my arms and dared him to dispute that one.

Through a mouth full of potato, he added, “Okay. I might have gotten the street number of that one wrong. My bad. No trust, Samantha! No trust at all! It’s not like I can carry a pen and paper with me when I’m on recon, is it? No,” he said, answering his own question before I could half-heartedly agree. “I have to keep it all up here. In my noggin.” The fellow rapped the knuckles of one hand on his skull—I half-expected it to make a hollow sound—while he nibbled intently on his corn with another. “In my brain.”

Honestly, from the way he chowed down while he spoke, I would’ve guessed Rooster hadn’t eaten in a week. “Yes, but it’s a rodent-sized brain. No offense.”

“None taken,” he granted. How could he mind? I hadn’t meant it as an insult. Rooster was of the Kin, as his race informally termed it. Officially, they were known as the Peri,  shape-shifters with whom I’d become entangled six months before. It was because of some nasty Peri that I’d lost three years of my life. With the help of some of their nicer representatives, however—and with especial thanks to the sexiest individual I’d ever met—I’d managed to get back on track. Rooster’s ability was to shift into a rat, giving him an opportunity to infiltrate spaces ordinary people couldn’t, and to eavesdrop. “But it’s not like my head fits less stuff when I’m smaller, you know.”

I’d never seen my hired informant in his vermin form. I wasn’t really sure I wanted to. Rodents and I just don’t get along—something about those pink-ringed tails really creeps me out. Since my first encounter with the Peri, though, I’d taken up a career sniffing out little criminal irregularities affecting both their sphere and my own. Having a plant among the dirty underbelly of a race to which I didn’t belong helped pay the bills. If Rooster’s ratty self resembled in any way his humanoid form when he ate, particularly in the way his nose twitched and his oversized front teeth gnawed away at the cob of corn he held between his quivering fingers . . . well, I could do without witnessing his particular transformation.

“So what’s in here?” I asked. Much as I disliked doing it, I picked up the envelope by the corners and looked inside. True to form, all of Rooster’s notes had been written on torn scraps of paper, rolled into a wad and fastened with rubber bands that looked on the verge of snapping. Poring over them was going to be a bacterial bloodbath. “This is all the information about the border crossings?”

“The deals I overheard, yeah. Couple of Kin making promises to a crazy-rich Hollywood type about smuggling humans through the gate into Resht, telling them they’ll live forever once they’re in the Kinlands, that kind of crap.” He put down the corn and with relish began chomping away at a glistening beef rib. “Making them pay up front all kinds of money for a shot at the fountain of youth, eternal life, all that bull. Hell’s bells if they don’t buy it, too. Two million, this agent guy has paid. Four installments of five hundred thou, for some guy on basic cable.” He jabbed at the envelope with his index finger, adding a fresh, dark stain to it. “And that’s just the cash he’s put out so far. When the Kin who’s selling him lies disappears—either because you and Corydonais pick him up or because he decides to move on to the next mark—the Hollywood guy is just going to start looking for a new contact.”

“Fantastic.” I grimaced. “And there’s nothing we can do about Mr. Hollywood, because there’re no human laws against throwing away your money to stay young forever. If there were, there’d be no Rodeo Drive.” Persian lore had it that the Peri came to earth as fallen angels—or at least so said my mom, a professor in the classics and an ordinary (if slightly screwy) woman as far removed from this crazy business of mine as I could possibly leave her. Persian lore would also probably have it that the Kin were mythical, but here I was, neck-deep in their schemes and dirty dealings. Not that they were any worse than we humans were, really. Some were better. The one I lived with, for example. He was good. Very, very good.

As if reading my mind, Rooster raised his head from his frantic gorging to ask, “So how is ol’ Corydonais? Haven’t seen him for a while. Yeah, yeah, I know,” he added, before I could answer. “He’s too recognizable to make his own social calls. Besides, you’re his lapdog now.”

Oh, that was beyond the pale. “I am not his lapdog.” I made little air quotes around that terrible phrase. “Cor and his Storm Ravens deal with investigations of the royal Peri court. I sniff out the little stuff for them to follow up on.” Did I sound discontent with that arrangement? In case I did, I added, “And that’s fine. It’s a living.”

When an inexperienced youth fresh out of the capital city of the Kinlands called Resht fell in love and talked too much about the Kin to a homegrown California mall rat, I was the one who appeared with a settlement and a binding nondisclosure contract for the girl to sign. When a group of adolescent Peri (and the Kin had an adolescence that lasted roughly well into the third century of their lifespans) snuck through the hidden portal leading from Resht to Venice to go on an all-night bender, I was the one visiting the bars the next morning to get descriptions and settle the skipped tabs and bills for damages. Before I’d run into these people—this race that lived among us but that weren’t of us—I’d been an insurance investigator. My current job wasn’t much different, though the pay was better.

And, I had to admit as I thought about Cor, the benefits were glorious. “I like it,” I finished, lamely.

“Uh-huh.” Rooster simply studied me as he picked up the cup of coleslaw at the plate’s side and let some of the contents slide into the black hole he called his mouth. “I didn’t know he went for dishwater blondes. His last lapdog was a redhead. What happened there? He ditch her?”

“If you’re talking about Ginger . . . Jinjurnaturnia,” I said, hastily amending my sobriquet for Cor’s second-in-command to her actual name, “she’s still very much in the picture.”

“Kinky.” The single word managed to conjure up an entire room of bound editions of Penthouse Forum.

“You are disgusting.” I couldn’t take the gorging anymore; it was too much like a feeding frenzy in the shark tank. I grabbed my takeout container with one hand and my bag in the other so I could stuff the notes inside. “Enjoy your lunch.”

“Hold, hold, hold on there, lady.” Rooster’s expression of enjoyment at my discomfort couldn’t have been more obvious; he wore it as plainly as the smear of barbecue sauce across the lower half of his face. “We’re not done here.”

“Oh, yes we are. You’ve got your cash, I’ve got my information, and I’m not paying extra for the abuse. Later, gator.”

I was halfway to my feet when Rooster’s arms shot out and grabbed my wrist. I recoiled at his touch, mostly because he kept his fingernails sharp and long. “You aren’t going yet,” he said, his nose twitching with amusement. When I wrenched my arm out of his grasp, he yanked back his own hands, seeming to know he’d gone too far. They hung, limp and twitching, in front of his chest. “I mean, there’s more. I have a message for you.”

“A message?” I cocked my head. “If it’s about more money, forget it.”

Rooster rolled his eyes. That mischievous grin crept back onto his face. “Open your mind, wouldja? It’s not about money. Sheesh. Give me a little credit. This is about a message someone told me to give you.”

“Someone?” I asked, raising my eyebrows. Being around Rooster made me uncomfortable enough as it was. I liked keeping our meetings short and sweet, leaning to the short side. “Someone like . . . who?”

The Peri shrugged and resumed eating. “I don’t know him. He said he had a message for Samantha of the DeRengiers.”

When I was a little girl, I used to have a toy marionette that I took an unholy pleasure in making crumple to the ground by keeping the strings slack. Suddenly, I knew exactly how that marionette felt. I slid back into my just-vacated seat, letting gravity drag me down. “DeRengier?” I said, repeating the word. “You know my last name is Dorringer, right?”

The question was a test. He simply shrugged. “Can’t say I ever really thought about your last name.” Now it was my turn to twitch. Shortly before he’d died, one of the Peris who had abducted me and taken away three years of my life, all in the name of the death cult known as the Order of the Crow, had called me a DeRengier. I’d found out from my mother that it was her family’s original name before they’d emigrated to the U.S., but other than a cursory look in the white pages to see if there were any DeRengiers in the greater Los Angeles area, I hadn’t investigated it further. To hear the name coming from the mouth of yet another of the Kin left me sagging. Rooster cocked his head at my silence. “Maybe it’s not for you, then?”

“Just give me the message!” I snapped, impatient and weirdly, more than a little frightened. Of all the places to feel apprehensive, too—the Baby Blues BBQ couldn’t have been any more everyday. But just the merest reminder of the night I’d had to confront my mortal enemy and nearly lose the man I’d begun to love gave me an unshakeable case of the creeps.

“Fine, fine.” Rooster still seemed to be relishing his hold over me. In his tiny little head, it was probably some kind of revenge for all the times Cor and I had asked him to scuttle into out-of-the-way places in rat form to do a little reconnaissance. “He wants to meet you.”

“Who wants to meet me?”

“This guy.”

“What guy?”

“The guy who wants to meet you.”

It is a pity that God gave me sturdy, strong hands, yet conscience enough to prevent me from strangling anyone. My voice was gargled in my throat as I intoned, “Who is this guy . . . who wants to . . . meet me?”

For some people, a little bit of power is an ugly thing. Rooster shrugged again, grinning. “I told you, I don’t know him.”

I made a quick decision. If he wanted to play some variation of a seventh-grade guessing game, bully for him. I’d had enough, though. I raised my right hand and flipped the fingers in a definite farewell.

“I know you’re not gonna walk away,” he called out to my back, but already I was smiling at the second of the restaurant’s brawny, bald-headed owners as I handed over the tab along with a couple of bills. “You’re bluffing,” Rooster shouted, oblivious to the stares from the other midday diners. I continued to ignore him as I received my change. “Aw, come on,” he groaned, when I made a beeline for the door. “Come back, already!”

I paused at the exit, hands on the glass, waiting a moment. The question I meant to ask was expressed in my eyebrows, arching toward the ceiling when I turned.

“Fine, I’ll tell you,” he called. Now it was my turn to enjoy the irritation on his face as I marched back to the table. I rested my hands on its edge, leaned forward, and waited. “Whatever. You win!”

“I always do,” I commented, trying not to sound smug. “Now, who is this guy?”

“I don’t know.” Before I could make another dramatic exit, he waved his hands and stopped me. “I honestly don’t. All I know is that he said his name was Azimuth, and that he had a message for Samantha of the DeRengiers. He wants to talk to you.”

One of the things I’d picked up from working in the field of insurance claims investigations for a few years before my abduction was a good sense of who was lying to me. Rooster wasn’t—at least, not now. His eyes weren’t shifty. When he talked, he didn’t stare at the salt shaker or anywhere else other than me. “So this human. . . .”

“He was of the Kin,” Rooster corrected.

“Ah. So this Peri just approached you and said he wanted to talk to me. And out of the goodness of your heart. . . .”

“Please. He gave me money.” My informant looked pained that I’d suggested otherwise. “What do I look like, a chump? I don’t do diddly for charity, Sam. The fellow wants to talk to you.”

“Just wants to talk, huh?” I didn’t buy it. “What’d this guy look like?”

I was expecting a description of a shadowy figure in a cowl and robe, face obscured by dark alley shadows, but instead Rooster replied, “Oh, you’ll recognize him.”

The comment was about as unhelpful as I could have gotten, really. “All right, great,” I replied, fishing in my bag for my keys. “Get him to give you a phone number or something and I’ll call sometime during the week.”

I noticed Rooster was munching on a french fry and shaking his head at me. “He didn’t seem that type of guy. If you agree to meet, he’ll find you.”

I’d become to the otherworldly activities of the Kin over the previous few months, but I still didn’t like the sound of Rooster’s promise. Knowing that my hometown of Venice, California was the absolute epicenter of Peri activity on this continent didn’t bother me. In fact, it more than amply explained why the boardwalk was littered with freaks. Hanging out with Corydonais and the Order of the Storm Ravens meant that many times I’d watched them transform and fly off to fight evildoers, like a troop of feathered superheroes. It might have been a little disconcerting the first few times. I coped, though. I was even used to it, now.

Agreeing that some shape-shifting stalker type could simply appear out of nowhere to visit me, however, sounded like the kind of thing I typically advised against in the self-defense classes my mom had roped me into teaching down at the local senior center. Yet I’d be fibbing if I didn’t admit to some intrigue. What if this Azimuth guy was on the up-and-up? What if he had some kind of information I could use? “Let me talk to Cor about it.”

“Nuh-uh.” Rooster shook his head. “That was the other thing. He forbids you to tell Corydonais.”

Well. If that was the condition, I’d had enough. “Forbid me? You’ve got to be kidding! Cor and I don’t keep secrets.” I picked up my carry-out box again. This time, I wouldn’t be persuaded to come back.

“Oh, don’t you?”

I didn’t like the tone of slimy insinuation Rooster used. He really was a repulsive little creature, and the fact that I had to deal with him at all rubbed me the wrong way. After today, though, I might cut the ties completely. There had to be other among the Kin who could do what he did with less back-talk and familiarity. “No, we don’t,” I told him. “He knows everything there is to know about me, and I know all about him.” Or at least what portions of his multi-century lifespan I’d been able to learn about in six months. There were definite disadvantages to dating an older man, even if he looked only thirty. “That’s the way we roll.”

“Oh, that’s the way you roll, huh?” The echoing thing was getting on my nerves, particularly since he did it so mockingly. “So that’s why he told you all about his dame? And his great-dame?”

“What about them?” I asked, shrugging. I didn’t know what his mother and grandmother had to do with anything. True, I hadn’t met them, nor did I necessarily think I ever would, given how uncommon a Peri/human romance was. Our worlds colliding seemed unlikely. “I mean, there’s nothing unusual, is there?”

Rooster’s reply was a snort. He regarded me levelly while he continued to down his lunch. “Is there? I don’t know. If you and Corydonais don’t have any secrets from each other, any, you know, unspoken confidences that you shouldn’t be keeping, it shouldn’t be hard to ask. Right?” His sharp incisors loosened another hunk of meat from a rib bone. “Isn’t that what Dr. Phil says about good relationships? What’s that look for? I like Dr. Phil.”

My eyes narrowed. “Tell your friend I’m not interested.” I stood up straight once more so I could pretend to have missed his low blow. This exit would be the last.

“Oh, he’ll be waiting around,” Rooster said while I stomped toward the door again. “Probably where you least expect it.” He raised his voice as I reached the door. “A pleasure doing business with you, Sam!”

After being inside the dim Baby Blues BBQ with an even dimmer personality, the California sun was so dazzling that I had to don my shades. Once my vision was properly adjusted to the polarized lenses and I’d dug out my car keys, I tucked my bag beneath my arm, hefted the carry-out order I’d been clinging to for the last several minutes, and began walking to my Mini Cooper, parked down the street. Ridiculous, the notion that I would agree to meet some perfect stranger—one of the Kin, no less—on command. I wasn’t any Peri’s to direct or forbid; even Cor had learned, the hard way, that I responded to suggestions better than to outright directions.

Still. I marched along the pavement, passing some of the odd strays of Venice and trying out my fledgling Kin-dar to attempt to figure out exactly to which race they might belong. Blue eyes were often a tipoff, but not a guarantee. Many of the Kin clans wore elaborate tattoos on their backs and shoulders, but this was Venice, where every storefront that wasn’t a coffeehouse was a tattoo parlor. No, the only guaranteed way to tell one of the Kin was to look at their midriff. They wouldn’t have a navel.

I couldn’t help wondering what anyone named Azimuth might want from me. No one else had ever called me a DeRengier. Maybe he’d know something about the Order of the Crow and its one remaining leader, the women I once knew as Agnes Jones. Cor and his followers had been looking for leads in that direction.

But still! The high-handed attitude of this Azimuth guy would have to change if he wanted to meet. He’d find me? People didn’t find me. They made appointments, like civilized beings. They called. Sometimes they sent letters. They didn’t just find. . . .

It was at that moment, a mere twenty feet from my little black Mini Cooper, that from the corner of my eyes I saw movement from the alleyway behind the restaurant. A masculine hand shot out and clutched my arm. Before I could yell, it was yanking me off the sidewalk into the shadows.