Honestly, if she were going to pick between hunting down a homeless man or scoping out an closed auction house, Blythe would have picked the auction house. She understood. If anyone were going to convince some random, likely half-scared-shitless guy to talk, it would be Kolratheth. Still, she would always be first and foremost a librarian, and there was no telling what treasures of scholarship might lie hidden within those storage shelves, far away from the more deserving eyes of academia. 

[I]If you want to so badly, come back at night. I could get you in.”[/I] In the aftermath of their run-in with the pharmacy manager, the demon sounded petulant. Like a lover who had wanted three great orgasms and gotten one mediocre one instead. [I] “Maybe there will even be a guard to deal with.”[/I]

Somehow, Blythe couldn’t see herself turning cat burglar. Even if it was for the sake of knowledge.

[I]”You’d do it to find Leone Cordova’s murderers.”[/I]

And like that, the grief was back. A downpour. A yoke of stone. She could feel it in the muscles of her forearms and between her shoulder blades like deep-tissue ache. [I]She will never be back. She died alone, and in pain.[/I] An endless atrophying wound. And beneath it? An even greater rage.

Perhaps she was not a librarian first and foremost after all. 

Blythe swallowed, adjusted her blouse, and beckoned to Adri. “Come on. Time for more good cop, bad demon.”

It wasn’t difficult to find the homeless man’s camp behind the dumpsters in the ally where Alcander and Teajay had found the strange, ancient dagger. It smelled vile—little more than a pile of discarded clothes and an overturned shopping cart. It was abandoned for the moment, but had obviously been recently inhabited.

She turned away, heading in the opposite direction of North Wells Street towards the near-empty parking lot shared by the pharmacy and a few other small businesses. The far side opened into yet another alley, this one behind an Olive Garden, and was home to two particularly ripe dumpsters. The homeless man hadn’t yet made a new camp there, but there was someone leaning at the far end of the alley, holding a cardboard sign and smiling awkwardly at people walking past on the sidewalk. 

Blythe had a feeling that this might just be who they were looking for. She reached into her purse and palmed a couple tens as they approached. The man turned—she hadn’t been trying to be quiet and the click of her heels rang loud against the brick walls ringing the alley—and smiled uncertainly. He had all his teeth, though they were crooked, and his skin was an uncomfortable pink beneath a crop of unkempt red hair receding from his forehead—more likely from malnutrition than age. She put him somewhere between 19 and 22. He was skinny and nervous, and Blythe had the sinking feeling that he would tell them whatever he thought was most likely to make them happy. 

She dropped the first ten in his hands. “Something weird happened by the auction house last night. Wanna tell us about it for the paper?”