It’s nearly impossible to get hobgoblin slobber out of raw silk.

I know this because I had been standing in the bathroom, furiously scrubbing at the stubborn stain for at least forty-five minutes. If I could do magic, I would have zapped the stain out. Heck, if I could do magic I would zap away the whole hobgoblin afternoon and be sinking my toes in the sand somewhere while a tanned god named Carlos rubbed suntan lotion on my back. But no, I was stuck in the Underworld Detection Agency women’s restroom—a horrible, echo-y room tiled in Pepto pink with four regular stalls and a single tiny one for pixies—when my coworker Nina popped her head in, wrinkled her cute ski-jump nose, and said, “I smell hobgoblin slobber.”

Did I mention vampires have a ridiculously good sense of smell?

Nina came in, letting the door snap shut behind her. She used one angled fang to pierce the blood bag she was holding and settled herself onto the sink next to me.

“You’re never going to get that out, you know.”

I huffed and wrung the water from my dress, glaring at Nina as I stood there in my baby-pink slip and heels. “Did you come in here just to tell me that?”

Nina extended one long, marble white leg and examined her complicated Jimmy Choo stilettos. “No, I also came in to tell you that Lorraine is on the warpath, Nelson used his trident to tack a pixie to the corkboard, and Vlad is holding a VERM meeting in the lunchroom.”

I frowned. “This job bites.”

Nina smiled, bared her fangs, and snapped her jaws.

Nina and I work together at the Underworld Detection Agency—the UDA for those in the know. And very few people are in the know. Our branch is located thirty-seven floors below the San Francisco Police Department, but we have physical and satellite offices nationwide. Word is the Savannah office gets the most ghosts but has the best food. The Manhattan office gets the best crossovers (curious humans wandering down), and the good ol’ San Francisco office is famous for our unruly hordes of the magnificent undead, mostly dead, and back from the dead. However, we’re rapidly becoming infamous for a management breakdown that tends to make incidents like the fairy stuck to the corkboard barely worth mentioning. Some demons blame the breakdown of Underworld morals. I blame the fact that my boss and former head of the UDA, Pete Sampson, was killed last year and has yet to be replaced. Thus, we’ve been privy to a semi-permanent parade of interim management made up of everything from werewolves and vampires to goblins and one (mercifully short) stint with a screaming banshee.

So am I a demon? Nope. I’m a plain, one hundred percent first-life, air-breathing, magic-free human being. I don’t have fangs, wings, or hooves. I’m five-foot-two on a good day, topped with a ridiculous mess of curly red hair on a bad day, and my eyes are the exact hue of lime Jell-O. My super powers are that I can consume a whole pizza in twelve minutes flat and sing the fifty states in alphabetical order. And that I’m alive. Which makes me a weird, freakish anomaly in an Underworld office that keeps blood in the fridge and offers life insurance that you can collect should you get the opportunity to come back to life.

“There you both are!”

My head snapped to the open doorway, where Lorraine stood, eyebrows raised and arched, her emerald green eyes narrowed. Lorraine is a Gestalt witch of the green order, which means that her magiks are in tune with nature and are deeply humane. Usually.

Her honey blond hair hangs past her waist and her fluttery, earth-toned wardrobe reflects her solidarity with natural harmony.

Unless you got on her bad side, which, today, I was.

Lorraine glared at my slip. “Can you wrap up your little lingerie fashion show and meet me in my office, please? And you”—Lorraine swung her head toward Nina, who was holding my damp dress under the hand dryer—“can you please break up Vlad’s empowerment meeting and get out to the main floor?”

I looked at Nina. “Vlad is still into the Vampire Empowerment Movement?”

Nina gave me her patented “Don’t even start” look, punched her fist in the air, and bellowed, “Viva la revalucion!” while slipping out the bathroom door.

I pulled my dress over my head under Lorraine’s annoyed stare, and then worked quickly to rearrange my mass of unruly hair. When Lorraine sighed—loudly—I wadded my curls into a bun and secured it with a binder clip, following her down the hall.

“Okay,” I said as we walked, “what’s up?”

Lorraine didn’t miss a step. She pushed a manila file folder in my hand with the blue tag—Wizards—sticking out.

“Nicholias Rayburn,” I read.

“Ring a bell?”

I frowned. “No. Should it?”

“How about ‘Three-Headed Dog Ravages Noe Valley Neighborhood’?”

“Mr. Rayburn did that?”

“No,” Lorraine said flatly. “You did.”

I raised my eyebrows, and Lorraine let out another annoyed sigh. “Nicholias Rayburn was here last week. Old guy, blue robe, pointy hat?”

I cocked my head. “Oh yeah. Now I remember him.”

“You should, because you allowed him to renew his magiks license.”

My stomach started to sink.

“Yeah. With his three-inch-thick cataracts and mild senility. You were supposed to withdraw his license and strip him of his magiks, but you didn’t, and he walked home, thought a fire hydrant was following him, and unleashed the hound of hell on the land of soccer mom. Not exactly great for our reputation.”

I felt my usually pale skin flush. “Whoops.”

Lorraine stopped walking and faced me, the hard line of her lips softening. “Look, Sophie, I know you’ve had a hard time. I understand that with all you’ve been through you’re going to make some mistakes, but you’ve got to be more aware.”

The events of the last year of my life flooded over me, and I blinked rapidly, trying to dispel the imminent rush of tears.

It had been rough.

While I had gone for nearly thirty years with nothing so much as an overdue library fine to raise any eyebrows, in the last twelve months I had become involved in a gory murder investigation, been kidnapped, attacked, hung by my ankles in an attempt to be bled dry—

“And I know it’s got to be hard, what with Alex out of the picture and all.”

—and I had fallen in love with a fallen angel who had the annoying habit of dropping into my life with a pizza and a six-pack when things were supernaturally awful, and dropping out when things shifted into relatively normal gear.

I sniffed. “Thanks. It won’t happen again. I promise.”

“Let’s hope not. But why don’t you head out a little early today?” she said, squeezing my shoulder. “Get some rest and regroup.” Lorraine bit her lip and danced from foot to foot, then leaned in close to me. “Okay. I’m really not supposed to say anything, so this is just between you and me, okay? The main offices have found Sampson’s replacement. We’re supposed to have the new management in place by the end of the week. But its super hush-hush so don’t tell a soul.”

I mimed locking my lips shut and then turned on my heel, heading out to find Nina.

* * *

Nina was perched on the end of her desk when I found her, legs crossed seductively, her shoe dangling from one toe. She was winding her long black hair around and around her index finger and interviewing a werevamp, who was sitting in her visitor’s chair. Nina was the only person I’d ever met who could make the sentence “Please tell me about your previous employment history” sound sordid. She was nearly purring as the werevamp—who looked dashing in a steel gray suit and had the chiseled profile of James Bond—ticked off a forty-seven-decade-long employment history that included being a project manager for King Henry the VIII and ended with “software programmer.”

I tried to catch Nina’s eye, but she glared at me—nothing is icier than a vampire glare—and I rolled my eyes, heading down the hall toward the elevator. I was skirting the hole in the linoleum where a High witch blew herself up when I ran chest to chest into Vlad and his Fang Gang—nine vampire staff members of UDA who were currently enraptured in the Vampire Empowerment and Restoration Movement. Loosely put, VERM members were dead set on bringing vamps back to their glory days (think Dracula, graveyard dirt, and ascots). Though UDA code was adamant about vampire/human relationships (the former was not allowed to eat the latter), I generally tried to steer clear of VERMers—Vlad, being Nina’s nephew (and a longtime resident of our couch), was the exception.

“Whoa, sorry about that, Sophie. Hey, have you seen Nina?”

I gestured toward Nina’s office door that had mysteriously closed. “She’s interviewing a werevamp.”

Vlad smoothed his perfect hair. “I didn’t think we had any open positions.”

I shrugged. “I’m pretty sure we don’t.”

Vlad fell in step beside me. “So, did you hear about that three-headed dog in Noe last week?”

“No,” I said quickly, stepping into the elevator.

I knew psychologically that there were only two things that could help the kind of day I was having, so I had a bottle of Chardonnay in one hand and a package of marshmallow pinwheels in the other in record time. The surge of chocolate and alcohol helped but not enough, so I beelined for the bathroom, filling my mouth with cookies and peeling my clothes off as I went.

I drew a bath as hot as I could stand it and upturned a bottle of cucumber-melon bath goo under the tap. Then I positioned my wineglass next to the remaining marshmallow pinwheels and eased myself into the tub. “Ahh,” I moaned, closing my eyes, breathing in the heady scent of cucumber and chocolate. “Much better.”

I dunked a washcloth, wrung it out, and placed it over my eyes, then sipped contentedly at my wine. I was reaching out for another pinwheel cookie when I heard the rustle of cellophane and felt a cold prickle of fear creep up my neck, despite the hot water.

Someone placed a pinwheel in my outstretched hand, and I sat bolt upright in the tub, the washcloth falling from my eyes, the poor pinwheel reduced to chocolaty, marshmallow ooze dripping through my fingers.

“Didn’t mean to scare you,” Alex said, perched on the side of my tub, his pincher finger and thumb hovering above my half-empty pinwheel package. “May I?”

Alex Grace was gooey, chocolaty goodness if ever there was. He was an angel—of the fallen sort—with cobalt blue eyes and hair the color of milk chocolate, swirling in wondrous, luxurious curls over his forehead, snaking over ears just perfect for nibbling. His build was fairly slight but wrought with wiry, rock-hard muscles that made his jeans look mouthwatering, and stretched out the chest and arms of his T-shirts mercilessly.

“What the hell—why are you—” I fluttered and floundered, splashing bits of cucumber-melon-scented fluff and bathwater all around.

I worked to get my panicked breathing under control. Alex and I had shared some steamy moments and every glance or touch of his skin electrified me, but he was bad news—fallen angels always are. And his whole disappearing-reappearing thing really got on my last nerve.

And then I realized I was naked.

I sunk lower into the water, pushing the bubbles over my girly bits and glowering at Alex, who looked at me, that obnoxious, adorable half smile playing on his lips. He helped himself to a cookie.

“What are you doing here?”

He chewed thoughtfully. “I needed to talk to you.”

“I have a phone. Or an e-mail address. Or, hell, a carrier pigeon. Do you always have to show up in the bathroom?”

“I needed your undivided attention.”

I raised an annoyed brow. “Or you needed a naked-lady fix. And did you lose your ability to knock along with your wings?”

He grinned, took a swig from my wineglass. “Is that a ninety-eight?”

“Get out!” I screamed, “I’m not going to talk to you while I’m naked.”

Alex’s grin widened. “So you are naked …”

“I’m in the bathtub,” I snarled. “What did you expect?” I was sitting forward now and vaguely aware of the cool air touching my breasts. I hunkered down in the water again. “You’re a pervert.”

Alex shrugged, finished my wine, and poured himself some more. “Hey, I’m no angel.”

I rolled my eyes and snatched my wineglass out of his hand. “Get out.”

“I still need to talk to you.”

“And I still need you to get out.”

“Can I have another cookie?”

“Out!”

Once Alex was safely on the other side of the bathroom door I slipped out of the tub, hastily dried off, and wrapped myself in my baby blue bathrobe. I was tightening the belt and padding into the kitchen when I was treated to a view of Alex’s rump poking out of my fridge.

“Can I help you with something?” I asked his butt.

Alex backed out of the fridge, frowning. “There’s nothing in here to eat. Are there any more pinwheels?”

I crossed my arms in front of my chest. “No. I threw them away.” Threw them down my throat was more like it.

I edged Alex aside and peered into the fridge, coming out with a half loaf of bread and a stack of Kraft cheese slices. “Grilled cheese?”

“Tres gourmet.”

“You’d better believe it.”

Alex handed me a frying pan and got to work buttering bread.

“So, what are you doing here anyway? I mean here, here, in this realm. In my kitchen.”

Alex peeled the filmy cellophane from a piece of cheese and crumpled it in his hand, popping the cheese in his mouth.

“Go ahead,” I said. “Make yourself at home.”

Alex gave me a sarcastic smile and snagged a couple of beers from the fridge. He handed one over, clinked mine, and took a long pull. I did the same. “Okay, what do you want to talk about?”

“I need your help.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Is that so?”

“Remember when I told you about the Vessel?”

“The Vessel of Souls? The one that got you banned from Heaven? Stripped of your wings? That Vessel?”

Alex pursed his lips in annoyance. “Are you through?”

I sniffed. “I guess. What about it?”

“I need to find it.”

“I know that. But why now? And why do you suddenly need me?”

Alex let out a long sigh. “The Vessel of Souls houses all human souls that are in limbo. If the fallen angels get their hands on it they can take over everything—the angelic plane, the human plane—even the Underworld. We need to keep the Vessel out of the hands of the fallen.”

I looked at Alex. “You’re fallen. Why should I help you get it?”

“You know that if I can restore the balance of the planes and get the Vessel back, I can get my wings back. I’m not going to jeopardize that … again.”

I picked up a spatula. “And you need me why?”

Alex raised his eyebrows expectantly, and I flipped a sandwich, sighing. “Because the Vessel is charmed,” I said, answering my own question.

“Even the angelic plane uses magic. They like to hide things in plain sight.”

“Really?”

Alex nodded and took a swig from his bottle. “Yeah. Last I heard the Holy Grail was actually a tanning bed in Manhattan Beach.”

I narrowed my eyes at Alex’s little-boy grin. “Really, Sophie. You’re the only one I know who will be able to see through the charm.”

Along with my superior pizza-eating and state-reciting powers, I was also magically immune. My grandmother was a seer, my mother was a mind-melder, and nothing could be used on me. Veils, charms, spells, happy endings—anything that could be conjured, wanded, or abracadabraed was lost on me. The magical immunity helped working in the Underworld. The occasional fire-breathing dragon singe or High witch explosion rolled off me like water off a duck’s back. Warlocks couldn’t use glamour spells to make me fall in love with them and give them extra magiks freedoms or process their paperwork any faster, and I could share a cup of coffee with Medusa and stay perfectly, humanly pink.

“Okay,” I told Alex, “where do we start?”