Duncan had been gone for two days, and the house had already started to sound wrong.
It was too quiet without him. He did not even make that much noise, but the house had learned the shape of his footsteps, the clink of his tea mug, the low brogue he used on the pups when he thought no one was listening. Now there was only the tick of the sprinkler down the street and Kimchi's snoring on the patio.
I sat by the fire pit with my coffee gone cold and my phone face-up on my knee.
Claude and Nicole were asleep. Fujin was around, as he always was, which meant he was nowhere I could see and probably on the roof. Duncan and Hades were not around at all. The two of them had gone down together, to the one place my phone could not reach, to sit with a girl named Tessa and ask her what she remembered.
"I'll no' be able to answer ye, lass," Duncan had said at the door, with his forehead against mine. "The dead dinna keep our hours. Dinna wait up."
So of course I was waiting up.
