It was nearly eleven o'clock in the evening as Ember sat at a table in the Chesarie tavern in a middle-class neighborhood in Bucharest. The sky was cloudy, so no stars nor moon were visible from the window she had sat next to for the past couple of hours.

Nothing particularly interesting had happened in what seemed to be a regular night of drinking and laughing in the tavern. Earlier Ember had asked a few of the bartenders if they'd seen a man with Donovan's ...