WHAT DWELLS WITHIN

Geck and I headed through town toward the Unnatural Quarter Public Library main branch and the Vault of Secrets. We made a side trip to his dank lair, a communal subbasement where other newts shared the rent, with mud and moss for carpeting and a steady drip through the ceiling for running water. Not a good place to keep an overdue library book, I thought. At least he had it on a high shelf, away from the drip. Geck hauled over a stepstool so he could retrieve it.

“So, tell me about this book you checked out, ” I said. “How long is it overdue, and why is it so important? ”

“A month overdue. I kept putting it off, Mr. Shamble. And then it got worse and the fines built up. ” He held the thick volume close.

“How much? ”

“Ten bucks. ”

“Better take twenty. We may need to pay off the Spider Lady, but we’ll get you back on the straight and narrow. ”

He looked down at the heavy volume that seemed too big for him to carry. For the sake of efficiency, I took it from him and we set off, while two other newts were waiting to stand under the ceiling drip for a shower.

“Never even finished it. ” Geck sounded guilty. “I went to the library for something to read in a puddle on a sunny day. I really enjoyed all the Harry Potter books, and I heard that the Harry Dresden novels by Jim Butcher were excellent, but they were all checked out.

“Then somebody said Shakespeare in the same sentence with Butcher, so I decided to look into that Shakespeare guy as my second choice. The only copy available was a rare special edition, The Complete Pre-Humous Writings of William Shakespeare. It was even autographed. ”

I frowned, knowing that someone who purported to be Shakespeare’s ghost had been publishing new posthumously written plays and sonnets, but his claim had been debunked. He was, in fact, just another aspiring ghostwriter with a good costume and literary airs, but apparently the library hadn’t caught up yet.

“I tried to read the Shakespeare stuff, but I couldn’t get into it, ” the newt said. “It wasn’t like Harry Potter at all. It was boring. But I kept trying. And then the book was late and I felt guilty, so I kept trying to read it. The fines piled up, and then I started getting threatening letters, so I was afraid to come to the library. And then. . . ” He self-consciously touched the bandages covering his right eye.

“You need to bring the book back, and you’ll have to make amends to the librarian, ” I said. “That may be the only way we can keep you intact, more or less. When we get to the library, let me do the talking. And bring your twenty bucks. ”

On our way across the Quarter, we passed vampires sitting outside under sun umbrellas at a blood bar. Two werewolf women offered discounts on “full claw treatment” pedicures. A mummy rode by on a bicycle, wobbling and unbalanced; he was taken completely off guard when one of his unraveled bandages caught in the chain, and he and the bicycle tumbled into the gutter.

We passed Ghoul’s Diner, where I often liked to sit at the counter with an abysmally bad cup of coffee and a disgusting miasma of a daily special. The diner and its unfortunate food were upstaged now, however, as the entire block had been barricaded for the final rounds of the Stone-Cold Monster Cook-off. A grandstand had been set up for the culinary acrobatics, and spectators gathered around, hoping for—or dreading—free samples.

I assumed the diner’s business had suffered due to the event, but the ghoul proprietor never seemed to pay much attention to the outside world or his customers. It was business as usual.

In fact, everyone in the Unnatural Quarter—monsters and humans—got along about as well as anybody got along in the rest of the world. Ever since the Big Uneasy more than a decade ago, the world had been settling down from the change. The event had been caused by a strange alignment of planets and a completely coincidental spilling of virgin’s blood on an original copy of the Necronomicon, which resulted in cosmic upheavals, rifts in the universal continuum, and a shift in reality.

But after all that was over, naturals and unnaturals had to learn how to coexist, and everyday life returned with surprising stability. It could have been a real zombie apocalypse, but it wasn’t so much an apocalypse as an awkward reunion.

Back then, I was a private investigator who hadn’t seen much success in the real world, but I found a whole new clientele among the unnaturals. My business partner, Robin, joined me because she insisted that downtrodden unnaturals needed legal representation, too. Everything had been going fine—until one of my cases went south and I ended up being shot in the back of the head.

These days, that isn’t quite as final as it might sound. I rose from the grave and got right back on the case, eventually solving my own murder, then moving on.

It goes to show how much the world has settled into a new normal if a crowd of naturals and unnaturals can get excited about a cook-off.

Up onstage, after a round of digestive elimination, the Stone-Cold culinary marathon had settled on its three finalists. On the left side of the grandstand was Leatherneck, a burly man in a leather apron, leather mask, and upright shocks of greasy hair. He used a rusty shovel to scoop mangled animal remains into the hopper of a meat grinder that was about the size of a wood chipper.

“To make Texas chain-saw chili, ” he said, “any sort of roadkill will do—as long as it’s been seasoned with hot sun and asphalt for at least four days. ”

The meat grinder whirred and spat out a brownish red paste flecked with hair and fur that glopped into an already bubbling cauldron. The big chef added a pinch of salt, bent over to sniff the pot, then held up a gigantic razor-edged butcher knife. He raised his left forearm, which was a network of white scars. Without flinching, Leatherneck drew the blade down his forearm, opening up a wide gash that bled profusely into the pot. He held his arm over the chili as red dripped into the sauce, then with bright eyes behind his leather mask, he said, “And now for the special ingredient. ” The crowd fell into a hush, and the big man lifted a jar of green spices with his nonbleeding arm. “Oregano! ” He sprinkled a third of the jar into his pot.

The vampires in the audience had become extremely attentive when they watched him shed blood for his chili, but the oregano left them with sour frowns.

Next up was a heavyset, matronly woman whose beehive hair had a white lightning stripe, like the Bride of Frankenstein. Her skin was chalky and pale but her eyes were fiery red. Sheyenne sometimes watched her TV show, Kitchen Litch, and she complained that the Kitchen Litch considered herself superior to her viewers. “The sort of person who would say ‘tomaaahto coulis’ instead of ketchup, ” Sheyenne had described her.

The Kitchen Litch held a large sauté pan over a gas burner. “Every ingredient must be frrrresh, ” she said with an exaggerated roll of her r’s. “First, we start with clarified butter. ” She ladled a greasy yellow pool into the pan, then reached inside a wicker basket and rummaged around. “And the frrreshest of frrresh is an ingredient that is. . . alive! ”

She pulled out a black beetle as large as her hand. It squirmed and thrashed, but she threw it onto the sizzling pan. “And I always keep a special container of fresh bloodsucking gnats for garnish, but that will be for the finish. ” She reached into the basket to grab another beetle, while the first beetle flopped and hopped, dancing on the hot pan surface. Its black carapace cracked open, and it buzzed its wings to fly away.

“No, no! ” The Kitchen Litch swatted with a spatula as the second skittering beetle also tried to take flight. She smashed that one into a pulp, and it sizzled in a little beetle patty in the frying pan. The first beetle, though, got away, winging up from the stage. Three more beetles escaped from the still-open wicker basket, and the flustered Kitchen Litch slammed the lid back down. Trying to recover her composure, she said to the audience, “Of course, frrresh ingredients also pose certain challenges. ” She busied herself nursing the beetle patty with her spatula.

The third chef, a loud green-skinned man, the Ragin’ Cajun Mage, cooked flamboyantly beside two large glass aquariums filled with thrashing ingredients. He looked at the Kitchen Litch with scorn. “I agree with my incompetent rival: fresh ingredients are key, but so are secret ingredients, and I have about a dozen secret ingredients. ”

The Cajun Mage rapped his knuckles against the aquariums filled with silty gray-brown water. Swarms of thrashing tentacles writhed at him like a wrestling match between a squid and an octopus. Armored claws clacked in another aquarium. “We have a live mutant-crawdad tank and a live assorted-tentacles tank. They’ll wait, though, until my nightmare é touffé e is ready. It takes half a day to simmer properly. First, we make a nice roux, starting with some perfect sassafras filé. ” He dumped a gray-green powder into the bottom of his stockpot. “Then some toadstool filé. ”

His eyes twinkled as he lifted a crystalline vial. “And for the perfect seasoning, the tears of heartbroken girls. Two tablespoons will do. ” He poured the vial into the pot, then whisked it around as he increased the heat.

Geck and I had paused to watch the show. The smells wafting around the grandstand were an odd mix of appetizing and disgusting. My client glanced around the crowd, fidgeting and nervous, as if afraid someone might attack him right there out in the open, but I was sure he would be safe here. The Spider Lady from the library would not make a move on him at the Monster Cook-off. She had already delivered her ominous message.

One of the escaped black beetles buzzed through the air toward us, wobbling like a drunken bumblebee. Geck’s yellow eye brightened, and he swiveled his salamander-like head, poised, tense. . . . Then he lashed out with his tongue. But he missed the beetle entirely, which buzzed away unaffected.

Geck groaned. “Bloody depth perception! I’m going to starve! ”

As the green-skinned Cajun Mage moved to the next stage of his highly complex recipe, I nudged the newt along. “Come on, then. It’s off to the library. This is a matter of life or death. ”

III

The Unnatural Quarter Public Library and Vault of Secrets was not meant to be a terrifying place, but Geck looked as if he would rather have been going to the dentist—and I didn’t even know if newts had teeth.

The large stone building was impressive in one sense, looming in another sense. A poster in one of the dust-specked windows said “Come for fun in the library! ” in dripping-blood letters. Because the stone steps were so widely spaced, I had to help Geck up each one.

As we climbed to the pillared entrance, he seemed more and more nervous. “You have to face this, ” I said. “If we can resolve your overdue library book, the Spider Lady will take you off her hit list. Then you won’t have to worry anymore. ” The newt swallowed and moved on.

At the top of the broad steps, two fierce-looking stone lions crouched on pedestals. Just as we reached the top of the platform, a nervous-looking vampire scuttled out of the library entrance with a book hidden under his arm, and the two stone lions woke up. The ferocious living statues snorted, snarled, and rose on their heavy paws.

The nervous vampire clutched his book and scuttled backward, looking from side to side, trapped. One lion bounded off its pedestal and pinned him to the ground. He flailed and screamed. “I’ll check out the book, I promise. I’ll check it out! ”

The vampire had been trying to smuggle out a hardcover copy of Twilight.

With a snort, the stone lion smacked the vampire and sent him careening back into the library. Though uninjured, he was extremely embarrassed to have his reading material revealed.

The incident did little to calm Geck’s nerves. I tried to reassure him. “I’m here to protect you and negotiate on your behalf. ” I did not point out that even the most highly skilled zombie P. I. could do little to protect against giant stone lions or demonic head librarians.

The main library smelled of books, that weighty, dusty aroma that always brings back nostalgic memories. The patrons included humans, particularly college students doing reports on the social changes brought on by the Big Uneasy. Mummy scholars worked with large stacks of papyrus, jotting down notes in hieroglyphics. Vampires developed family trees, while full-furred werewolves stood muttering together in the pets section.

On the high shelves, accessible only by rickety ladders that looked more dangerous than the evil-spell books themselves, a cleaning crew of goblins skittered about, stringing cobwebs. In the middle of the floor, two large spinner racks held paperback bestsellers.

Geck looked around nervously, scanning the library. He whispered, “I don’t see the rock monster or the golem. They’re usually guarding the doors. Maybe they’re off stealing someone else’s eye. ”

“Or maybe it’s their day off, ” I said.

“Or maybe they’re waiting to pounce on me again! Keep your eyes open, Mr. Shamble. You have more of them than I do. ”

At the main reference desk sat a withered, prim old woman who looked as if she suffered from chronic hemorrhoids. Her hair was pulled back into a bun so tight she didn’t need a face-lift, and she wore cat’s-eye glasses that were large enough to be used as a weapon. She scanned the library like a high-tech targeting system, and when a young college couple began talking too loud, she suddenly reached out with a freakishly long, multijointed arm that held a ruler. Even though they were twenty feet away, she rapped on the table in front of them. “Quiet, please, in the library! ” The old woman folded her extra arm back down under the desk.

Her nameplate said, “Hi, I’m Frieda. I’m here to help. ”

I nudged Geck, and we walked up to the desk. The newt was far too short, and I had to lift him up so he could meet the cat’s-eye glasses with his remaining eye.

I looked behind the counter and saw that Frieda the Spider Lady had a nest of additional multijointed limbs all curled up beneath her flower-print dress. One set of hands was typing, while another paged through a printed book; behind her, two more limbs reached out to pluck volumes off a shelving cart. She gave us part of her attention. “How may I help you? ”

“I’m Dan Chambeaux, private investigator, ma’am, and this newt is my client, Geck. I’m afraid there’s been some misunderstanding, and I’m here to help resolve it. ”

The librarian frowned. “Misunderstanding? If words and sentences were stated clearly, there would be no misunderstandings. ”

“My library book is late, ” Geck blurted out, sounding ashamed.

The Spider Lady practically recoiled, as if he had hurled a terrible insult at her. “That changes things. Substantially. ”

I interjected, holding up the Shakespeare Pre-Humous Writings volume I had carried from his dank quarters. “My client has incurred library fines, which he is willing to pay, so long as he stops receiving threatening letters from the library. As you can see, he has already suffered a great deal of physical harm. ” I used my “be reasonable” voice, which rarely worked against villains; even so, the detective-training handbook suggested being reasonable as a first step.

Frieda’s voice was filled with venom. “And what is this book? How valuable is it? ” Beneath the counter, her hidden limbs twitched. Many of them ended in claws. “And how despicable are you? ”

Geck stammered and held out a rumpled receipt, while I slid over the book. The Spider Lady nudged her cat’s-eye glasses, and her face seemed to wither even more. “This was part of our special Shakespeare collection—do you have any idea what sort of damage you’ve done? How many college treatises have been delayed because the authors had no access to this wonderful tome? ”

“I. . . I’m sorry. ”

“And it’s autographed, too! ” said Freda, as if that were the last nail in the coffin.

“You do realize that the autograph is fake, ma’am? ” I pointed out, hoping that might mitigate her ire. “The author of the posthumous works is not the real Shakespeare’s ghost. ”

The librarian sniffed. “It’s still of historical and popular interest. ” She shuffled papers and withdrew a formal parchment document that looked like a death-sentence decree. A dozen names were written on it, seven of which had been crossed off, as if terminated.

Geck the Newt was on the list, third from the bottom. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! ” he blubbered, then quickly slapped a moist and rumpled twenty on the counter next to her nameplate. “I’ll pay the fine—I’ll pay double! —just please don’t send your goons after me. Don’t take my other eye! ”

Now it was the Spider Lady’s turn to look off balance. “Take your other eye? Why on earth would I wish to do that? My sole reason for existence is to encourage reading. If I took your other eye, that would be against my principles, although the library does have a large selection of unabridged audiobooks. ”

I stood up for Geck. “My client was recently accosted in an alley by a rock monster and a golem, both of whom are known to work here in the library. If you didn’t send them to steal his eye, then who did? ”

The Spider Lady seemed flustered. “You must mean Rocky and Ned. They’re just part-time contract security guards. It’s so hard to find good security guards in the Unnatural Quarter—they tend to suffer unfortunate ends. But I had to let Rocky and Ned go. I caught them eating in the library, which is inexcusable. ”

She snatched the bill and used one folded arm to squirrel it away in a small cash box, while another arm took the book and stacked it on the shelving cart behind her. With a third hand, she stamped PAID on her hit list next to Geck’s name.

She reached out with another one of her long arms and slapped a zombie reader who had unconsciously folded down the corner of a page in order to mark his place. “Damage to library property! I will write you up. ”

I got her attention again. “If you didn’t put out a contract to take my client’s eye, then who did? ”

“How should I know that? ”

I indicated the sign on the desk. “It says you’re a reference librarian. ”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to do your own research, Mr. Shamble. You might begin by asking whether this action was a punitive measure against Geck specifically, or if someone actually needed the eye for some other purpose. ”

I knew we could get worthwhile advice from the Unorthodox Lab Equipment and Organ Boutique, a small specialty business that catered to a broad clientele ranging from hobbyist mad scientists to evil corporate research centers with underground monster-development programs.

An imp named Gunther managed the place and kept all his wares in total disorganization on the shelves, like a secret code that only he knew how to interpret. His business had picked up dramatically after the demise of Tony Cralo’s Body Parts Emporium, a giant organ superstore run by an obese zombie mobster. After I had exposed Cralo to justice, his business completely collapsed. Score one for the good guys. That annoyed many of the Quarter’s mad scientists, however, because they could no longer do one-stop shopping.

The little imp was climbing a set of shelves and stacking glass jars filled with specimens preserved in formaldehyde. The jars themselves were as big as the diminutive imp, but he was strong. Gunther nearly lost his grip on a jar filled with intestines labeled with a sticker that said “Great for decorating! ”

Seeing us, he swung down with simian agility and dropped with flat feet on the countertop. His gaze turned immediately toward the newt, and he focused on the bandages. “Looks like somebody’s in the market for a new eye! I have a wide selection. ” He clucked his pointed tongue. “I’ll have to take socket measurements, though. Would you like to match the original color, or should we try something more fashionable? ”

Geck said, “I’d rather have my own eye back—and I want to keep the one I still have. ”

When I explained how my client had been attacked, the imp proprietor seemed very disturbed. “The Unnatural Quarter is going down the tubes. Sure, people used to get roofies and wake up in hotel bathtubs, missing a kidney or two, but that was just an expected part of the business. Taking an eye out right on the streets? ” The imp shook his head in disgust.

“Have you had any customers asking for an eye of newt? ” I asked.

“Not in particular. Yes, newt eyes are rare, but I have a selection of perfectly adequate toad eyes and salamander eyes. They’ll do in a pinch. ” He clucked his pointed tongue again, and touched Geck’s bandages. “I could make do, find something that’ll fit you, though it might look a little odd. Any decent scientist could install one, so long as it’s in good condition. ”

“But is there a reason why someone would particularly want Geck’s eye? ” I asked. “What are newt eyes used for? ”

“I used mine for seeing, ” Geck snapped.

“I meant, what would someone else use it for? ”

The imp pondered. “Various organs have potent sorcerous aspects, particularly the organs of magical creatures. Livers, spleens, pituitary glands, testicles, and the like. Rare, ancient magic books listed eye of newt as a vital ingredient for every sorcerer to have in the pantry, but it was never used to work magic. Those tomes weren’t spell books. ” Gunther gave an impish grin. “They were recipes, you see. ”

“Recipes? ” Wheels began to turn in my mind.

“Yes, ” said the imp. “Eye of newt is primarily used in cooking. ”

With a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach, like the aftereffects of a bad pepperoni pizza, I hurried with the newt back to the Unnatural Quarter’s Stone-Cold Monster Cook-off.

We bumped into Officer Toby McGoohan, who was walking the beat and presumably maintaining order. The only orders, though, were being taken by shuffling zombie waitresses at the outside tables of Ghoul’s Diner.

“Hey, Shamble! ” McGoo tipped his blue patrolman’s cap. “Just another day on the job. There’ve been reports of culinary unrest. ” He nodded toward the grandstand, where the three finalist chefs were finishing their hours-long preparations for their masterpiece dishes. Runners dispersed small samples among the spectators, who would then vote on the winner. No doubt there was illicit gambling, with bookies taking bets as well as exchanging family recipes.

“If the wrong person wins, McGoo, there’ll be some digestive upset among the crowd. ”

I noticed he was eating something wrapped in dripping paper, a meal from one of the food carts that catered to the human audience members: a hot dog wrapped in bacon and stuffed inside a glazed jelly doughnut. McGoo took a bite, then frowned at the show onstage. “I don’t know how anybody can eat that stuff. ” He wiped the congealing mess from his lips.

“We already have enough to make our stomachs queasy, McGoo. A couple of thugs roughed up my client, Mr. Geck. They took his eye last night. At first we thought it was payback for an overdue library book, a contract taken out on him by the Spider Lady herself. ”

McGoo paled, which made the freckles on his cheeks seem more prominent. “The Spider Lady? ”

I held up a hand. “But it wasn’t that. We think these thugs stole Geck’s eye. . . for some nefarious purpose. ”

“There’s always some nefarious purpose. Did you get a description of the perps? ”

“Just general details. One’s a rock monster; the other’s a golem. Names are Ned and Rocky. ”

“That’s enough to go on. ” McGoo pursed his lips. “I’ve been patrolling the crowd here. Lots of spectators, but I think I noticed that rock monster. Now that you mention it, he was with a golem. They were sitting at one of the outdoor tables at Ghoul’s Diner. I only noticed them because the rock monster was eating a bagel—a toasted onion bagel, but with strawberry cream cheese on it. ” He frowned. “That’s the sort of thing an attentive cop will notice. ”

To the roar of the crowd, Leatherneck ladled out samples of his Texas chain-saw chili and passed small cups around the crowd. He had reopened the big gash on his forearm so he could spruce up each bowl with a splash of blood. The vampire spectators crowded forward, eager to get their sample, even with the addition of oregano to the pot. The persistent Kitchen Litch had managed to fricassee enough of the large beetles that she was prepared to serve, though she had not yet garnished the meal with her bloodsucking gnats.

The three of us hurried off to the diner at the edge of the cook-off crowd. Albert Gould had set up rickety card tables and temporary benches to take advantage of the additional customers, even though they were all watching the cook-off. McGoo pointed. “There’s the bagel! ”

I did see the onion bagel covered with strawberry cream cheese—which was certainly out of the ordinary—being held by a lumpy rock monster, a creature composed of assembled stones and a large yawning mouth just made to pulverize bagels. Next to him sat a gray clay golem sipping a tiny cup of espresso. I was shocked because I hadn’t known Ghoul’s Diner served espresso.

Geck hopped up and down, trying to see. “That’s them! ”

On the stage, with his big booming laugh, the green-skinned Ragin’ Cajun Mage stirred his cauldron of nightmare é touffé e. “Almost finished! Enjoy those other morsels while you can—and be prepared to surrender your taste buds to the Mage. ”

McGoo and I stepped up to the table, interrupting the rock monster and the golem. I tried to be as tough and determined as a zombie detective can be. “Are you Rocky? We’d like to have a word with you. ”

The rock monster turned its blocky head so I could see blazing red eyes deep within cavelike sockets. “I’m Ned. He’s Rocky. ” He gestured to the golem, then took another big, grinding bite of his bagel.

“We need to talk with both of you, ” I said.

McGoo puffed up his chest. “We’ve heard reports that you assaulted a citizen of the Quarter. ”

“Me, me! ” said Geck, bouncing up and down. The newt was so short, he didn’t come up to the edge of the table, and the two thugs hadn’t noticed him. I gave him a hand, lifting him up so the two could see him. “You stole my eye! ”

“You got proof of that? ” grumbled the rock monster. “It was dark in that alley. How can you be sure it was us? ”

“So, you admit you were there, ” McGoo said.

Rocky the golem said, “Considering this person’s condition, he’s unreliable as an eyewitness. ”

Ned the rock monster snickered.

“It was them! ” Geck said. “I’d point them out in a lineup any day of the week. ”

The rock monster rose to his feet, towering over us. “We took a job; we got paid. We’re just blue-collar workers. ”

Rocky stood up to join him. “A golem is required to follow whatever commands a master issues, even a temporary master. There’s been a legal precedent. We’re not responsible for whatever we allegedly did or didn’t do. ”

Ned added, “Besides, five bucks is five bucks. ”

“And assault on a newt is still considered assault, ” said McGoo. “I’m going to have to—”

Geck suddenly cried out as he jumped onto the table, disturbing the tiny cup of espresso and knocking the half-eaten bagel to the ground. “Look, look! That’s my eye! ”

Onstage, the Ragin’ Cajun Mage stood over his noisome vat of nightmare é touffé e. He tried to impart a sense of awe on the spectators. “And the last, the rarest, the most special secret ingredient—not available at stores! —we add for the finish: eye of newt! ”

The crowd gasped.

Geck shrieked.

The green-skinned Cajun chef dangled the vial containing the stolen amphibian eye and let the silence hang for a long and dangerous moment. Even the large aquariums of live mutated crawdads and live assorted tentacles thrashed and churned, either applauding or dreading the imminent moment when they would become part of the cooking performance.

“That’s my eye! ” Geck yelled again, and bounded toward the stage.

The crowd stopped munching on their fricasseed beetle samples or Texas chain-saw chili. Many dropped their cups on the ground.

McGoo withdrew his service revolver and pointed it at the Ragin’ Cajun Mage. “Stop right there! That eyeball is private property. Everyone else, stay calm. ”

Of course the spectators panicked.

Knowing the crowd could turn ugly—well, the crowd was already ugly, but it could get worse—I pointed at the golem and the rock monster. They were both mercenaries to the core. “Five bucks if you help us resolve this, ” I offered.

“Each? ” asked Ned.

I hesitated only a second and considered it a worthwhile investment. “Each. ”

The two large gray forms lumbered into the crowd.

The newt dashed up onto the stage with the speed of a sun-warmed lizard. Geck threw himself with full fury at the Cajun Mage, attempting to tackle him and seize his eye before it fell into the cauldron of é touffé e. Alas, unaccustomed to his lack of depth perception, Geck missed. He only brushed against the green-skinned cook and instead careened into the live aquariums, which the mage chef had opened, preparatory to serving. Both glass cases toppled over, dumping out a menagerie of edible horrors. Hundreds of mutated crawdads and assorted live tentacles went thrashing into the crowd. People began screaming.

McGoo yelled, “Watch out! The ingredients are loose. ”

Tentacles flung themselves on fleeing mummies. Crawfish clipped their pincers on the spiky fur of a punk-rocker werewolf, who clawed his own cheeks in an attempt to get them off.

The Kitchen Litch quickly evacuated from the grandstand, taking the last samples of fricasseed beetles with her, but in her alarm, she bumped the sealed container of frrresh, live bloodsucking gnats that she had reserved for garnish, and the swarm of black biting things flew up, indiscriminately buzzing around everyone on the stage.

Next to the cauldron, the Cajun Mage flailed, trying to beat back the frenzied one-eyed newt.

Rocky and Ned cleared a way through the crowd with all the finesse of two bulldozers, knocking people aside on their way to the stage. I followed them.

Ned bellowed at the chef in his cavernous voice, “We’re going to need that eye back! ”

“I’m going to need it! ” Geck jumped up and down, grabbing for the vial clenched in the Mage’s green hand.

More large black beetles had escaped from the Kitchen Litch’s wicker basket, and Leatherneck, seemingly unfazed by the chaos, reached out with his big strangler’s hands and grabbed them to add to his pot of chain-saw chili.

McGoo stomped on the assorted tentacles and kicked away crawdads that nipped at his ankles. “Keep calm! ” he yelled.

The golem and the rock monster got themselves so entangled in the rebellious ingredients that I made it to the stage first. The cloud of bloodsucking gnats swarmed around me, but the biting creatures went away disappointed, with no taste for embalming fluid.

The Cajun Mage looked indignantly into his é touffé e. “But this would have been the perfect batch. You’ve ruined everything! ” He dodged the newt and opened the glass vial. “Without the secret ingredient, it might as well just be a casserole. I must finish for the sake of the culinary arts! ” He upended the vial over the cauldron.

As if in slow motion, Geck groaned, “Nooooo! ”

But I got there just in time, lashing out with my outstretched hand. I caught the detached eye of newt in my palm and it plopped there, sitting moist and squishy, unpleasant to the touch, but safe.

Rocky and Ned reached the stage just as I backed away cradling Geck’s eye. The golem and the rock monster grabbed the Cajun Mage, lifted him up, and dumped him into the large pot of nightmare é touffé e, where he stirred and whisked himself helplessly.

Geck hurried over to me, trembling. “You saved my eye! Do you think it can be reattached? ”

“There’s a good chance. We have the best mad scientists in the Quarter, ” I said. “Though from now on, you may need reading glasses. ”

Rocky the golem loomed over me. “That’ll be five bucks. ”

“Each, ” said Ned.

I carefully handed the jiggly eye over to Geck’s loving care, then dug in my wallet. By now most of the crowd had run screaming and the loose ingredients had dispersed.

The Kitchen Litch had run away, plagued by vengeful beetles, and the only one remaining on the stand was burly Leatherneck, who calmly ate his chili straight from the ladle. “Last chef standing. I guess that means I win. ”

McGoo handcuffed the thoroughly é touffé ed Cajun chef, who was still trapped inside his cauldron, although out of courtesy he turned the heat down to a slow simmer. The Ragin’ Cajun Mage struggled to lift a goopy finger to his lips and tasted it. “After all that, it still could use salt. ”

I called Sheyenne back at the office and asked her to look up the best eyeball replacers in the Quarter. I suggested that Gunther the imp might be able to give a recommendation.

Out in the wreckage in front of the grandstand, I saw Albert and two of his waitresses running around with shovels and five-gallon buckets, scooping up the dropped samples of Texas chain-saw chili and fricasseed beetles. I could guess what might be on tomorrow’s special board for Ghoul’s Diner.

Leaving McGoo to take care of the arrested chef, I led Geck back toward my office. I recalled that I had promised to take Sheyenne out for a dinner date, but I realized I didn’t have much appetite.

Maybe we would go dancing instead.

WHAT DWELLS WITHIN

by Lucy A. Snyder

We should not be out right now. The telepathic voice of my ferret familiar, Pal, was strained with anxiety. He peered out our borrowed Toyota’s passenger-side window, whiskers twitching. Scanning the late-afternoon clouds for signs of the Virtus Regnum, no doubt.

I couldn’t blame him. If my protective spell failed, the Regnum’s huge enforcer spirits would tear the Ohio sky open and burn us to ashes. And they wouldn’t care too much about who else got expunged in the process. Humans were little more than vermin to them at the best of times. Whatever greater power in the universe had put them in charge of protecting the Earth from all the eldritch horrors out there must have done it to punish their species. On the bright side, their distaste for humanity left them totally unimpressed by any bribes that even powerful wizards could think up. So most of the time you could count on them to treat everyone the same: with near-complete contempt. But at least we were all equal in their law-abiding eyes.

Except me, Jessie Shimmer. I’d slain one of their kind. Entirely in self-defense, mind you, but that detail didn’t matter to them. I’d done something no human was supposed to be able to do, and so I was a threat to be dealt with. Public enemy number one. Dead woman walking.

“It’ll be fine, ” I said aloud as I turned south on High Street, passing Graeter’s Ice Cream and a couple of upscale wine and candle shops in trendy brick storefronts.

I could have answered him telepathically. But that required a bit more concentration, so I saved it for when we were around other people. A seemingly one-sided conversation with a ferret tends to make folks think you’ve had a psychotic break, and then everything gets awkward.

Vague premonition itched like hives in the back of my mind, worse now than it had when I woke from a nightmare at five a. m. I couldn’t remember the alarming dream, not even one detail, so I’d tried to ignore the whole thing. But the psychic irritation just kept building until I wanted to slam my head through a wall. Something was up, but neither meditation nor the couple of divination spells I’d tried gave me any clarity. My boyfriend, Cooper, was off with his little brothers and I didn’t want to interrupt family time with something I figured I could handle fine by myself. Eventually.

Sometimes having Talent sucks. Magic is seldom straightforward when you need it to be. So I gave Mother Karen—thank God she’d been willing to give us a place to stay—a bullshit story about wanting to take a jog around Antrim Park, and borrowed her Corolla to see if being out and about on a mild Sunday evening would give me any relief or get me any answers. Karen’s a sharp witch and normally she’d twig to my lie right quick, but a couple of her foster kids were having a fight over the TV and she was so preoccupied with them that she just handed me the keys.

I’d put my shotgun in the trunk, just in case, but it wouldn’t do any good if the Regnum paid us a visit.

We should be staying put until the meeting with the Governing Circle, Pal fussed.

“I know. ” He wasn’t wrong; if Circle leader Riviera Jordan were willing to offer us safe haven, we’d be relatively okay staying in the city. Relatively. Riviera seemed like a fair lady, and she knew I’d gotten a raw deal. But she hadn’t made her decision yet, and going against the Regnum was an awfully big one. If I landed us in some kind of mess before the meeting and pissed off anyone else in the Circle, she would almost certainly wash her hands and tell us to get the hell out of Columbus.

This is really quite dangerous, Pal said. And if you wanted to go to the park, we should have gone north.

“I know. We’re not going to the park. ” The buzz of premonition had moved from the back of my head into my chrysoberyl eye, and the scars around it were starting to itch a little. A flashback memory of fiery demon’s blood spraying across the left side of my face made me wince. My enchanted stone ocularis was damned handy for seeing all manner of things that normal humans couldn’t spy, but getting my eye melted out of my head was a memory I wished I could purge.

My left hand and forearm were getting a pins-and-needles feeling, too. The same demon had bitten that arm off just below the elbow, and one thing led to another, and that arm became a torch of hellfire for a while. No more fire—thank God; constantly setting off smoke detectors is not a good way to keep a low profile—but now I had an eerie white replica of my lower arm that I couldn’t definitely say was flesh. I’d undergone an hours-long healing and exorcism ritual in Switzerland, and the ceremony was supposed to regrow my arm and restore it to normal, but the magic just couldn’t quite get there. Too much demonic residue in my system.

Eerie or not, I wasn’t about to complain about getting a working limb back. Sure, it was cold as a refrigerated corpse and glowed faintly blue in the dark, but I could feel through it just fine. I kept telling myself that functionality was what mattered. Most days I told myself I still wore my magically flameproof gray opera glove just in case it flared up again, but, frankly, seeing that creepy white thing at the end of my arm made my skin crawl.

Besides, if I touched anyone with the glove off and I wasn’t paying attention, there was a chance I might drag the both of us into my personal hell dimension. Awkward. Very awkward.

Where are we going, then? Pal asked.

“Trust me—I’ll let you know as soon as I figure that one out. ”

He made an exasperated squeak and curled up on the gray passenger’s seat in a tight, frustrated ball, his nose buried under his fluffy sable tail. He looked completely adorable, but now was not the time to tell him that. Probably he was wishing he were in his grizzly bear form so he could wrestle me for the wheel and get us turned around. But then he’d be far too big to fit in the compact car, and, besides, he needed a strong electrical jolt to trigger his shape-shift. We kept a stun gun around for that, and it wasn’t pleasant. I’d recently worked out an electroshock spell, but that wasn’t any nicer than the zapper.

I’d have hated to be in his position. He was my first and only familiar, and when I got him, I didn’t realize that intelligent familiars are all indentured souls trapped in animal bodies. It’s kind of a horrifying system if you learn much about it, but familiars are so handy that nobody wants to know that part. Pal would have gotten freed eventually, once he’d served a fairly long sentence for a mistake he’d made when he was young, but I’d screwed that up by getting on the Regnum’s shit list. We were both outlaws now. Sticking by me meant his life was always going to be in danger. And in many ways he had to stick by me. We were still magically linked as master and familiar, and nobody but I could hear his telepathic speech. The magic binding familiars is powerful, and I didn’t know how to fix things so he’d be entirely free. And I couldn’t ever pay him back for everything he’d already done for me. If I thought about it too hard, I had Beck’s “Loser” playing as the soundtrack inside my head, and that wouldn’t do either of us any good, so I just tried to not think about it.

“I’m not crazy, ” I told him. “Well, okay, I am sort of having the crazies today, but this is me trying to fix that. I’m having a premonition I can’t figure out, and I’m hoping something jumps out at me. ”

Why didn’t you just say so? He sounded cross.

“Because I figured it would sound dumb when I said it out loud. ”

When has that ever stopped you before?

“Oh, bite me, ” I said affectionately. If he was snarking at me, that meant he couldn’t be too angry.

I followed my itchy instincts and turned left onto North Broadway. Soon we were approaching the bridge over I-71.

Wait. There was something on the overpass fence. But I caught a glimpse of it only through my ocularis; my flesh eye hadn’t seen a thing. I clicked on my hazards and pulled over to the side of the road, annoying the driver of a little yellow Volkswagen Beetle behind me. He honked indignantly and zoomed around me. Nobody else was coming from either direction.

I stared at the spot; through my ocularis it was an indistinct blur slowly moving up the fence. Man-sized, maybe? I started blinking through other enchanted views through the stone. Blur. . . blur. . . darker blur. . . bright blur. . . And suddenly I saw a thin, shirtless white guy with brown dreadlocks and blue basketball shorts struggling to climb the chain-link fence, his flip-flops giving him little purchase on the galvanized wire.

“Holy shit, that’s Kai, ” I told Pal.

Where? my familiar peered around, confused.

“On the fence. Someone turned him invisible. Mostly invisible. Come on. ”

Pal hopped onto my shoulder as I killed the engine. I hadn’t seen Kai in months; I’d sublet a room in his run-down Victorian rental for a few days while I was recuperating after the demon fight. I was seriously messed up in pretty much every way you can imagine, but he had a little crush on me anyhow, and he’d really been a huge help when I’d sorely needed it. Bit of a stoner, but a good guy. A little naive, but he was still a teenager after all. As far as I knew, he didn’t hang out with anyone else who knew magic. Who could have turned him invisible?

“Hey, Kai! ” I stepped out of the car, pocketed the keys, and shut the door. “What are you doing out here? ”

“He said. . . He said. . . ” Kai muttered. His voice was slurred, like he was drunk. Or under a magical compulsion.

I waited for a silver Honda Odyssey minivan to pass and then jogged across the street. Kai still seemed determined to get up the fence. “What did he say? ”

“He said jump off a bridge. . . . He said jump off a bridge. . . . ”

“Whoa, no! ” I reached up and grabbed his hairy leg. “Come on down from there. Let’s go get some coffee. ”

Well, I can see him now, Pal remarked inside my mind. The spell fails at close range. Whoever cast that didn’t do much of a job.

Fast and sloppy, I thought back. But it had to work only well enough to keep anyone from seeing him until he’d thrown himself over into traffic.

It would be a quick death, maybe, but I cringed to imagine the massive freeway pileup that would follow. What if he splattered across the windshield of a car full of little kids? Jesus. Even if they survived the wreck, they’d never get over seeing something like that. Whoever did this definitely wanted Kai gone, but they were both too lazy to do it themselves and perverse enough to want his death to cause mayhem. That was a kind of twisted you didn’t see every day. I liked Kai and owed him a solid. But even if I’d hated his guts, I wanted to get to the bottom of all this, because whoever would cast a spell like this deserved to get their ass kicked. A lot.

“He said jump off a bridge, ” Kai insisted, clinging to the fence with white knuckles, trying to pull his leg from my grasp.

I had to do something to break the enchantment and free him. But I didn’t have any spell ingredients on me. What could I use? I scanned the ground and spied a brown sparrow’s feather sticking out of a wind-drifted pile of dead grass and dust in the gutter.

“Bingo. ” I released his leg, plucked the feather, and stepped back to concentrate on the chant.

Ubiquemancy is the art of finding and using magic in everyday objects. It’s just a little tricky. And I hate performing it out in the open, where random people can see. It isn’t just that public displays of magic are of those universally verboten things. It’s that ubiquemancy looks hella goofy. It’s the magical equivalent of speaking in tongues, and once I start a chant, for all I know I could end up barking like a dog or clucking like a chicken. I don’t have an overabundance of dignity, but some things you just feel better about doing in private.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, trying to center myself.

“Don’t you dare start laughing at me if this falls flat, ” I muttered to Pal.

Perish the thought. He was gazing at Kai struggling up the wire. At least the kid wasn’t making fast progress, so we had a bit of time. Serious situation is serious.

I closed my eyes, focused on the feather in my cupped hands, took another deep breath, and started speaking words for freedom and release. The magic kicked in smoothly, and ancient, lost words started spilling from my lips. I could feel the little feather heating on my palm, smell it starting to burn. My chant grew louder, stronger, and I could feel the magic it carried pushing against the spell binding Kai. Tension rose, higher and higher, as the invisible forces torqued against each other.

Suddenly the feather exploded with a pop! and Kai gave a startled yelp.

“Whoa! What the hell? ” His eyes were huge and panicked. It looked like I’d managed to nix both the compulsion and the lazy invisibility.

“Where am I? ” he asked.

“You’re on the North Broadway overpass, ” I told him, trying to sound soothing. “Just come down from there, but go easy. Your body might not do what you want it to for a little while. ”

I helped him down off the fence, and he stood there, gasping, on shaky legs, looking gray faced and frail. Like a confused old man. For the first time, I noticed that his right eye was purpled and swollen, like he’d taken a solid punch in the face sometime in the past few hours.

“What happened? ” I asked him. “Who did this to you? ”

“I. . . I don’t. . . ” He shook his head, but then his eyes seemed to focus and I could practically see the memories swarming back into his mind. “Oh, shit. Oh shit, shit, shit. ”

“Dude, stop panicking! ” I put a comforting hand on his shoulder. “Deep breaths. Tell me what happened. ”

“They took Alice! Oh, Jesus, we gotta find her, Jessie. They’re gonna do something terrible to her! ”

“Slow down, bro. Who’s Alice? Who took her? ”

“She. . . I met her a few weeks ago. She’s like you; she knows magic. I figured from the start she knew some dangerous dudes, but. . . Well, we got this jeweled statue of Santa Muerte that we were trying to sell off. I mean, the thing creeped me out and I wanted to just leave it in an alley someplace, but she was all, ‘We can get good coin for this, ’ so—”

“Wait. ” There were some perfectly nice people in the world who prayed to lovely Saint Death, but most of the ones I’d met personally were either necromancers or hired guns working for the narco cartels. And nice wasn’t part of their job descriptions. “What were you doing with a statue of Santa Muerte? ”

“Uh. ” He scratched his scalp nervously. “After you left, I rented your room to this guy named Halulu, and he came up with the idea to do a deal with some gangbangers to make some cash for the rent. I thought it was just going to be weed, but it was meth, and the whole thing went sideways. ”

Oh, Mensa is bereft of this lad, and its members weep, Pal intoned from my shoulder.

“A drug deal? ” I said. “For God’s sake. Really? ”

“Yeah, okay, I know. Okay? ” Kai looked embarrassed. “Halulu had this way of making it seem totally reasonable, but I know it wasn’t. I’m not stupid. ”

He rubbed his arms as if he were remembering something terrifying. “Some really freaky shit went down. One of the gang dudes got shot; I spoke to his ghost, and there was this thing in the room with us. . . . ”

He trailed off, looking horrified, but shook himself and continued. “Alice sort of took charge afterward and helped us get out of the mess. We were able to pay back the guys in Detroit, and it was all good. I mean, except for the dead guy. But all we had left over from the deal was the statue, and we still needed to pay the rent. So Alice started checking around—friends of friends, you know? And someone was interested in the statue. And they came to the house this afternoon and. . . Oh, god. ”

He went pale, his lips a clamped line.

“Could they have been friends of the dead guy? ” I prompted.

Kai shook his head, his dreadlocks brushing his shoulders. “He was a murderer—his ghost told me so—but he was regular, you know? Maybe a sociopath or whatever, but he was just a guy. But the ones who showed up. . . I don’t think they were even human. They were just trying to look like people. They wanted the statue, but they also wanted Alice, and when I tried to stop them, the boss guy backhanded me across the room like I was nothing and told me to jump off a bridge. And. . . I don’t know much after that. ”

I paused. Kai didn’t know any Talents before me. He hadn’t been mixed up in anything more dangerous or illegal than a pair of sad marijuana plants he and his roommates were growing in the basement. Could my brief stay at his house have made him vulnerable to darker forces and set all this in motion? I didn’t voice my concern to Pal; he’d tell me that I couldn’t think that way or else I’d drive myself crazy and blah, blah, blah. But I was thinking that way, and consequently I felt even worse for Kai. Even if he had been a dumbass.

“I guess Alice means a whole lot to you? ”

“Hell, yeah. ” He had a dreamy look in his brown eyes that made me certain he was hard in love with her. “She’s great. You’d like her, Jessie. ”

“I’m sure. ” If she was as much of a loose cannon as I suspected she was, we’d either get on like a house on fire or want to stab each other in the face. “Let’s go back to your place, and we can start tracking her down. ”

Kai’s rental on East Avenue was a huge old Victorian single in desperate need of a fresh paint job; the glow of the setting sun didn’t make it look any better. The broad front porch had surely been stately a hundred years before. Now the floorboards were warped and the railings were as broken and gray as a meth addict’s teeth. Ragged lawn chairs surrounded a squat red plastic table covered in crumpled Pabst Blue Ribbon cans. Cigarette butts spilled from an old brown glass ashtray.

Ah, hovel, sweet hovel. Pal’s telepathic voice dripped with sarcasm.

“Your roommates around? ” I asked Kai.

“Nah, Mikey and Patrick went down to Athens for a house party. They’ll probably roll in late tonight. ”

“Just as well, ” I replied. “They probably couldn’t have stopped the guys who took Alice, either. ”

Assuming that they’d even try, Pal grumped to me. Neither of those two seemed to have an overabundance of bravery.

Shush, I thought back.

“Ah, shit, the door’s open. ” Kai ran up onto the porch and pushed into the house. “Dammit! ”

“What? ” I called.

“Someone stole our shit! ” He pulled at his dreadlocks, looking like he was going to cry. “The flat-screen and our game stuff are gone! Today is just fuckin’ fired. ”

No surprise that someone had seized the opportunity to loot the house. You could leave your door unlocked in some neighborhoods, but north campus was not one of them. “Deep breaths. I can help you with that, too, but let’s worry about Alice first, okay? ”

“Yeah. ” He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. “It’s just stuff, right? I should be glad to be alive right now. ”

“But speaking of stuff, do you have any of Alice’s I could use to try to track her? ” I asked. “Like a brush with her hair, or some piece of clothing she’s worn? ”

“Sure, yeah. Come on in. ”

I followed him into the living room. His battered thrift-store entertainment center was empty and toppled in the thieves’ haste to leave, as were the makeshift bricks-and-boards shelves that had held his movie and game collection. The rest of the room looked okay, or at least okay by college-bro standards. In some guys’ places, you’d be hard-pressed to know if they had been ransacked or not.

But a red gleam on the floor by the bricked-up fireplace caught my attention. I stepped closer and saw a glittering ruby surrounded by dark, faceted onyx on a shattered fragment of bronze. It was maybe as big as the lid of an Altoids tin and looked to be part of Santa Muerte’s dress. And it was lying in a puddle of dark ooze.

“Did anyone throw or drop the statue over here? ” I asked Kai.

He shook his head. “Sorry, I don’t remember. ”

I grabbed a ballpoint pen from off the cluttered coffee table and used it to flip over the fragment. The edges of the metal looked pale and twisted, as though something had wrenched the bronze apart. On the floor where it had lain, I saw a shred of grayish, leathery membrane, and I caught a strong whiff of amniotic brine and brimstone from the ooze.

Well, this is unexpected, Pal whispered.

“There was an egg inside the statue, ” I said to Kai. “And whatever hatched was strong enough to tear the metal apart. ”

“Whoa, ” he replied. “So that’s what was making that scratching noise we were hearing. We thought we had a mouse someplace. ”

What could have been hiding in there? I thought to Pal. My knowledge of Mexican magical lore is pretty rusty, but I don’t remember anything about Santa Muerte’s figures containing any icky little piñ ata surprises like this.

My guess is it’s some kind of devil larvae that survives through spiritual parasitism, he said inside my mind. It can slowly grow inside the statue, feeding off the prayer energy directed toward it by worshippers.

That’s pretty sneaky, I thought back. Even for a devil.

The question I’m most concerned with is, Where did it go after it hatched? Pal said.

Yeah. We don’t want whatever was in that statue running around loose, I replied to Pal before speaking to Kai. “Maybe the guys who grabbed Alice took the hatchling with them, but maybe they didn’t. Let me try using some of the fragments to track it. . . . ”

Kai lent me a pair of pliers to pick up the gooey bit of membrane. I’m not squeamish, but you just don’t want to touch fluids from any diabolic creature unless you know for sure what it can do. I’d been possessed before and it’s not fun.

I closed my eyes, focused on the membrane, and started chanting old words for find. I’d done tracking spells before to find devils; generally all my trouble came after I found them. As the words spilled from my lips, I started to get a hazy image of a two-story house—

Wham!

The blocking magic felt like an armored fist smashing into my forehead, and for a moment my vision went entirely white. I came awake sprawled on my back on the dirty wooden floor. Pal had leaped off my shoulder when I fell and was safe on the nearby ottoman.

What happened? my familiar asked.

“Junior’s protected, ” I croaked, hoping the room would stop spinning sometime soon. “We gotta try for Alice. ”

Kai peered down at me, looking worried. “Can I get you anything? ”

“A Coke or Pepsi would be great, ” I replied. “And some of Alice’s hair if you have it. Head hair, please and thank you. ”

Kai jogged into the kitchen and brought back a cold can of Faygo cola. “It’s all we got, sorry. ”

“Thanks. ” I sat up and took the drink, hoping he wasn’t secretly a Juggalo. Drug dealing and dark magic I could handle, but terrible taste in music might make me question our friendship.

Are you okay? Pal asked me, as Kai went upstairs to look for Alice’s hairbrush. You’re quite pale and rather sweaty.

“I’m fine. Just feeling kinda shaky from the spell block. Sugar and caffeine should fix me up, though. ” I took a long swig from the can, then let out the inevitable belch.

Kai soon returned with a foofy ball of ash-blond hair. “Will this work? ”

“It should. ” I cupped the blond wad in my hands and began the chant. Soon, that same mundane-looking two-story house came into my mind, sharpened. I saw a street sign: Kilmuir Drive. I knew the area; it was in the Hilliard suburb a mile or so to the south of Tuttle Mall. A far nicer neighborhood than the one Kai lived in, the kind of ’burb young professionals with kids settled in because of the modest home prices, nice parks and good school system.

The kind of place an unleashed devil could do a whole lot of damage in a hurry if it had the chance.

I looked at Kai. “You wouldn’t happen to have a gun around here, would you? ”

He nodded. “Yeah, I got a nine under my bed. Ammo, too. ”

“Go get it. And put a shirt and some real shoes on. ” I pulled out my phone and started texting Mother Karen and Cooper to let them know where I was going. “Better get some food if you haven’t eaten, because this could be a long night. . . . ”

We got to Kilmuir Drive well after sundown. I slowed the car, scanning the houses, looking for the one from my vision. And there it was, sitting innocently in the middle of the block. Developers probably built it sometime in the late eighties; it was the kind of two-story, two-car-garage place you could find in most any suburb in America. White aluminum siding. Picket fence. Red decorative shutters. Manicured lawn with a freshly mulched flower bed of chrysanthemums (white or yellow; I couldn’t tell in the near darkness). The porch light was on, and a fluorescent glow from the kitchen illuminated the first-floor windows. Everything else was dark.

The more I stared at the entirely pleasant-looking place, the more dread I felt. Something was desperately wrong, but there was no physical sign of it. I blinked through to the ocularis view that would show me hidden magic and enchantments.

Wham!

“Shit! ” The kick was to my eye socket this time, and I quickly blinked to a more mundane view.

“What’s the matter? ” Kai and Pal asked, nearly simultaneously.

“That’s a heavy block. No tracking, no viewing. For all I know, we’ll get fried the moment we set foot on the porch. ” I pulled out my cell phone and dialed Riviera Jordan’s number. It was only for emergencies, but this was starting to feel like one. Or it would be an emergency once we got inside.

The call went to her voice mail. I left her a quick message explaining the situation, and gave her the street address.

“Feel free to drop on by. Probably we’ll need help. Thanks, and good-bye. ” I ended the call and shut off my ringer.

I’ve never known you to willingly call for Circle assistance, Pal remarked. Are you sure you’re feeling all right?

I’m pretty sure I don’t feel like having my arm bitten off again, or getting my other eye burned out of my head, I thought back, irritated. Besides, if something happens and she finds out I could have warned her but didn’t, what do you think the odds are that she’ll kick us out of Columbus?

Rather high, Pal admitted.

“Okay, so let’s do this, ” I told Kai. “Quietly. Follow my lead. Keep your gun holstered until I tell you different. ”

He nodded, white faced. “You’re the boss. ”

Kai shouldered a black nylon backpack laden with rope, flashlights, kerosene, a first-aid kit and sundry tools. I retrieved my twelve-gauge Mossberg 590 shotgun from the backseat. It was fully loaded with cartridges that contained eighteen pellets of mixed silver and iron buckshot: a little something for any sort of hostile creature I might encounter, magical or mundane. Ubiquemancy wasn’t ideal for rapid attacks. I had done a few offensive spells often enough that I could get them to work with a fast phrase—trip and shove were good quickies, and I was still tweaking zap to change Pal—but killing words were considered one of the worst kinds of necromancy by pretty much everyone. As much trouble as I was in with the Regnum, I didn’t want to make my situation any worse with serious dark-side stuff.

We shut the Toyota’s doors as quietly as possible and crept toward the front door, hoping none of the neighbors would see and call the cops. There were very few magical combat situations that mundane police forces couldn’t make two hundred percent worse.

Should we wait for Riviera to show up? I thought to Pal as we reached the cover of the front porch.

I am quite concerned about this newfound prudence of yours, he replied.

No, seriously. Should we wait? Or will waiting get Kai’s girl killed?

“Do we go in? ” Kai whispered, his voice shaking.

There’s no guarantee that Riviera checks her voice mail promptly, Pal thought to me, and I doubt any of her people are as effective at killing devils as you are. Our lack of apparent support may lull our opponent into a false sense of complacency.

He paused. Or it could get us killed. One or the other.

Wow, you’re a help, I thought to him.

I knew he meant his words to be encouraging, but they made me feel a little sick. Because, if I was honest with myself, I knew he was right. I was very, very good at killing devils. And I might have felt okay if my destructive talents had stopped there. But it seemed I was pretty good at killing damn near anything. Way better than I was at keeping people alive. My avoiding murder words had nothing to do with the Regnum’s rules. It was because I really didn’t need them.

I hated being good at something so fundamentally rotten. And I hated that I lived in a world where those particular skills came in so very handy. I wanted to be a good person, and I wasn’t sure that was really possible once I got enough blood on my hands. Even if most of it was ichor. But I didn’t feel right walking away from people in trouble, either, and I wasn’t about to back down from a fight someone else started.

“Yes, we’re going in, ” I replied, voice low. I leaned my shotgun against the white vinyl porch railing and pulled off my opera glove. Shoved it in the pocket of my jeans. I stared at the doorknob. “Odds are the house has some kind of protection, but maybe not. Pal, go to Kai, just in case. ”

He hopped over onto Kai’s shoulder. I took a deep breath and gently touched the front doorknob with my flesh hand.

A hot blue bolt of magical electricity arced through me. My muscles spasmed painfully, and I peed myself a little. And then I dropped like a sack of potatoes onto the Astroturfed porch boards.

Kai knelt beside me. “Are you okay? ”

“Crap on a cracker, that hurt. ” I sat up, trying to shake the buzzing numbness out of my fingers. I didn’t see any new lights coming on in the houses around, and nobody seemed to be peeking through blinds. “No surprise, though. ”

“What do we do? ”

“Get insulated. ” I looked around. “You got a candy wrapper? Something made of plastic or wax paper? ”

“Lemme check. ” He dug through his pockets and found a wadded-up cough-drop wrapper. “Will this work? ”

“It should. I need it to work for only a minute or two. ” Heck, I wanted it to work for only a minute or two. I held it in my hands and began my chant, as quietly as I could, and as the old words began to summon magical forces, I felt a plasticky film start to shroud my skin.

Still chanting, I got to my feet, motioned for Kai to follow, and grabbed the doorknob. Locked. I switched up my chant and spoke an ancient word for rust. The metal crumbled when I gave it a third hard twist.

And then we were standing in the dimness of the living room.

“Stay behind me, ” I whispered to Kai. Already I could feel the filminess disappearing. “I can see in the dark; try to leave your flashlight off. ”

Adrenaline surged in my bloodstream. Being pretty good at killing didn’t mean I wouldn’t get killed myself. I took a deep breath, blinked through to the night-vision view and stepped into the living room. My flesh eye showed me only the rough details of the dim room, but through my ocularis I saw a drip of blood spotting the pale carpet. The dark trail led to a door beneath the stairs.

You see that? I thought to Pal.

The basement, he replied. Of course it’s in the basement.

We did a quick sweep of the first floor and upper floor, stepping as gently as possible to avoid squeaking the floorboards. Kai followed close behind me, quiet as a ghost. The rooms were mostly empty; what furniture was there seemed like the kind of stuff Realtors placed to stage houses for sale. There were few signs that anybody was actually living there.

I went back to the basement door and tried the knob. No jolt. Not locked. I pushed, and it swung inward with a creak that seemed far too loud. Immediately, the stench of decaying flesh made my eyes water. The bloody drip continued down the carpeted stairs; it and the stairs ended at another door. I held my breath, listening. Nothing.

“What now? ” Kai whispered, barely audible.

“We go down, ” I whispered back. “Get your nine out. Don’t shoot me in the back. ”

His “Okay” was an anxious exhalation, syllables swallowed by dread.

We descended.

At every careful step, I wondered if I should ease the basement door open or kick the thing in. If they didn’t know we were there and weren’t watching the door, a stealthy opening would give us an advantage. But if they knew we were coming, kicking it open might work better. Assuming the slam didn’t startle someone into firing a weapon. Assuming they wouldn’t just start firing at us whether they were startled or not. Shit. I hated this part.

Instinct took over when my hand was on the knob. I swung it open, fast and hard enough to bash anyone lurking on the other side. Nobody was.

I took in the whole scene in just two heartbeats. The basement was unfinished and had no furniture or appliances besides the furnace unit in the corner. Someone had smeared a yards-wide, complex necromancy diagram in the middle of the concrete floor with blood. It looked to be the kind of thing you made to open an extradimensional portal. To either side stood a pair of gangly figures in dark clothes; their faces had a shiny, unformed fetal look, and their arms and legs seemed just a bit too long for normal human proportions. A hairy, naked middle-aged guy, blindfolded and ball-gagged, lay crucified in the middle of the diagram, his hands and feet staked to holes in the floor with rebar. I couldn’t tell if he was still alive or not.

Above the crucified man stood a pretty blond girl, maybe eighteen or nineteen, also naked. . . . And her eyes were the inflamed purple of the recently possessed. Alice, but not really. Not anymore.

And all around us were a dozen reanimated dead guys. The source of the terrible stench. Some of them were maybe just days dead, bloated and crawling with maggots, but others had been gone a long time, their desiccated flesh stretched and ragged over dry bones.

Not-Alice hissed and made a “Get them! ” motion. The zombies lunged toward us with surprising speed; I had to admire the necromancy. The gangly figures pulled pistols from their waistbands but hung back, waiting.

Take ’em! I tossed Pal up in the air and spoke an ancient word to trigger my electroshock spell.

A tiny, bright bolt of lightning sprang from my fingertip and hit him in the flank as he approached the apex of my throw. His fur went poof! —I’d worked the spell to steal the required energy from his hair. His tiny naked legs and tail windmilled in the air for the briefest moment. In the space between two of my own jackhammering heartbeats, his tail shrank, his legs and body lengthened and thickened faster than gravity and a new, thick pelt of heavy brown fur sprouted on his expanding hide.

His entire transformation took less than a second. When his paws landed on the concrete floor, he was no longer a slinky little ferret but a grizzly bear. Eight hundred pounds of muscle and bone and righteous fury. He reared back, thunderously roared and took the head off the nearest rotter with a single paw swipe.

I started blasting the zombies with my shotgun. Aimed for the neck and not the head. Decapitation’s what stops zombies if the brains are already rotted away. The boom of my weapon made my ears ache. The air filled with a choking haze of smoke and stinking rot.

In seconds, my shotgun was empty. Kai had drawn his 9 mm and was plugging away at the zombies still standing. Pal swiped the head off another of the creeps.

In the back, the ganglers were taking aim with their pistols. I dropped my spent shotgun and shouted an ancient word for shove as I pushed into the empty air. I felt the slam in my arms as my spell connected and they stumbled backward, their gun arms shoved to their sides.

This was my chance. I sprinted forward, sprang over the crucified guy and slapped not-Alice on her shoulder with my cold white hand. And dragged us both into my personal hell.

This was what remained of the nightmarish world my boyfriend Cooper had been enslaved in when he fell into a trap laid by a powerful, pain-consuming devil called a Goad. It was a pocket dimension, an extradimensional space whose reality I controlled completely ever since I’d killed the Goad that had created it and rescued Cooper. The hellement became a permanent part of my magical landscape.

I’d tried to mask the evil of the place by turning it into a perfect replica of my childhood bedroom. Perpetual late-afternoon sunlight streamed in through the mini blinds, my stuffed animals lined up at attention on the dresser, my Buzz Lightyear comforter draped the bed. Beneath the pink dust ruffle, a thousand horrifying memories from the Goad’s many victims slept in glass jars.

“What have you done? What is this place? ” growled not-Alice, looking furious but a little uncertain. I’d managed to throw the creature for a loop. She appeared as a strange double image now, the possessive devil visible as a kind of dark twin right behind her.

“You’re in my house now. ” I reached under the bed, pulled out my longsword and pointed it at her. “Talk. What are you doing in Alice’s body? ”

“Useful. It has magic, ” the devil replied.

“For what? ”

“To bring Mother here. ”

“And why does your mother want to be here? ”

“Souls, ” the devil hissed wistfully. “So many delicious souls. ”

I sighed. That’s all devils ever seemed to want. Human souls were apparently the popcorn shrimp of the spiritual world. I kept hoping a devil would tell me it was here for gambling, or to drink all the whiskey and download a bunch of porn, or steal the secret recipe for Coca-Cola. No such luck. It was all souls, all the time.

“Let Alice go and I’ll be as nice as I possibly can, ” I said.

The devil shrieked and lunged at me. I spun aside like a matador and grabbed the darkness clinging to Alice with my left hand. She/it fought me, clawing at my arms, but I held on, wrestled them both down to the floor.

Ignoring the stinging blows she was landing on my face, I tightened my grip and yanked as hard as I could. The darkness ripped clean away from her with a scream that could have shattered glass. Alice tumbled forward, jerking in the throes of a seizure. I was left gripping a dark, squirming mass that reminded me of an enormous liver fluke.

“I get it. You’re still just a baby and you don’t understand, ” I told it as it struggled to break free. It was clammy, frigid through and through. Devils tend to be creatures of heat or cold. I was glad that this one was cold, because I worked better with fire.

“This is my place. ” I stared at the wall and willed a blast furnace into existence. Mount Doom didn’t burn half as hot. “I don’t need to do magic here. This is my magic. ”

I flung the boneless devil into the boiling metal. The thing writhed, shrieking and jerking and steaming. It tried to haul itself out of the inferno, but I slammed the grate on it. The furnace shook as it struggled, but I held fast. Through the bars I watched it burn. Watched it die. When I was satisfied it was nothing but ash, I erased the furnace and knelt beside Alice to see how she was doing.

She was pale, breathing shallowly. Clearly suffering from shock. Exorcisms take time for a reason. It’s a trauma to your system to have another entity take over your mind and body, but it’s even worse to have that control suddenly torn away.

“You’re lucky you didn’t stroke out and die. ” I brushed a sweaty strand of hair out of one of her wide-staring blue eyes. She really was lovely; I could see why Kai had fallen for her. A tiny little thing, thin and pale and maybe just over five feet tall. So vulnerable, especially here in my hell. I could do whatever I wanted in here. I could tie her down and slowly pull her guts out and listen to her scream. . . .

“Jesus! ” I jerked back, suddenly aware of how hideous my thoughts had turned.

Not my thoughts. Those can’t be my thoughts. I stared around at the room; suddenly all the replicas of my toys seemed to be silently mocking me.

Magic always had a cost. And the cost to me in this place was my humanity and sanity. I couldn’t stay, or I’d become just like the devils I’d killed.

I quickly gathered up Alice, carried her to the big red portal door in the corner and took us back to the real world.

When we rematerialized in the basement, I saw that Pal in his grizzly form had decapitated the remaining zombies and mauled the ganglers. The uncanny pair lay in pieces scattered across the concrete, molasses-thick ichor pooling around their torn limbs. Definitely not human.

“What are they? ” I asked Pal.

Some kind of sidhe, I think. Hired minions, regardless.

Kai hurried over, sweaty and spattered with blood and ichor. “Oh, god. Is she okay? ”

At the sound of his voice, Alice’s eyes fluttered, and she began coughing and gagging. I quickly set her down on the concrete and turned her head to the side. She started vomiting up the dead hatchling. It looked much as it had in my hell, though thankfully it was much smaller.

“Oh, god! ” Kai looked like he might start puking himself.

“She needs a healer, ” I told him. “But at least she’s alive. ”

“So does this fellow. ” Pal was peering down at the crucified man. “I think he’s one of the Governing Circle agents. I think I remember seeing him at the meeting we had with Riviera. ”

“He’s still alive? Wow. ” I pulled out my cell phone. No service.

“Guys, I’m going upstairs to call Mother Karen, ” I told them. “She’ll know what to do. ”

I ran up the stairs, out of the house and onto the front lawn and had just lifted my phone to my ear when the wind kicked up and I heard an ominous rumbling.

Oh, shit.

The sky opened, a bright lightning gash in the black firmament, and a creature that looked like an enormous crystalline replica of some alien solar system cruised through. A vast cloud of fiery plasma in which a dozen jewel organs circled a glowing magma heart. A Virtus, one of the prime enforcer spirits of the Virtus Regnum.

I stood there very still, feeling like an inchworm seeing the sole of a giant boot coming down. At first I felt nothing but gut-churning terror: I was so, so dead. So incredibly dead. And so were my friends, if the Virtus spotted them. I prayed Kai would stay put in the basement.

But then I felt hope: maybe if I did some first-class fast talking, it would leave Kai and Pal and Alice alone? Then came a squelch of despair: mercy was not part of the Regnum’s program, and I damn well knew that. I was the worst kind of idiot to think for even a moment that it might care the teensiest, most minuscule bit that I’d just stopped an invasion of soul-devouring devils. This creature respected only the letter of the law, and the rule book wasn’t on my side.

And that’s when frustration and anger started skipping in circles through my mind. Goddammit, I was so close to making things right here. Why did the Virtus have to show up and screw up everything? Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit!

I mightily resisted the urge to scream and flip double birds at the spirit in the sky. And that moment of self-restraint was a mistake. I’d let my adrenaline ebb just a little, and suddenly complete exhaustion flooded through me, suffocating my rage and will to fight and everything else. My bones suddenly felt like they’d turned to concrete. I was completely beat. And probably the Virtus knew it.

Its icy diamond eyes fixed on me, beholding me like an exterminator sizing up a fire-ant nest. It had probably been shadowing me for a long time. Probably it had hoped that the devil would do its job for it and it wouldn’t have to bother with killing me itself.

“You have disobeyed the law, ” it boomed. The ground shook. “You have violated the prohibition against grand necromancy. You have murdered. You shall be destroyed. ”

I’d heard it all before, but this time I didn’t have the power to defend myself. When I killed my first Virtus, I was flush with the magical energy of a very powerful devil. And, frankly, I’d had more than my share of blind shithouse luck that day. I couldn’t jump up and drag this new Virtus into my hell, and even if I did, I wasn’t sure the power I wielded there would be enough. And I couldn’t run back into the house; the Virtus would just burn it all to ashes and consider it a job cleanly done.

So I did the only thing that seemed reasonable to my exhausted self: I fell to my knees on the grass, shut my eyes and waited to die.

“Stop! ” I heard a woman shout.

I opened my eyes. Riviera Jordan stood by the curb, looking fashionably stern in a dark designer suit a lawyer might wear to some big trial, backlit in the headlights of a big gray SUV, her short silver hair a bright halo around her face.

“I have authority here! ” She held up an ivory tablet inscribed with some kind of ancient runes. “You may not harm Miss Shimmer. She’s under my protection. Leave now! ”

The Virtus glared at Riviera. “If you deny me my duty, we will not return to Columbus. Your city will be without the protection of the Virtus Regnum. Do you truly want that? ”

“I think we need her more than we need you, ” Riviera drawled in her upper-crust Southern accent. “And you lot weren’t doing much to protect us anyhow. ”

“Insolence, ” the Virtus grumbled, but it disappeared back into the night sky, the lightning gash sealing behind it, leaving behind only the smell of ozone and a faintly glowing ring of smoke in the air.

I slowly climbed to my feet. “Two people in the basement need a healer. One is your guy. They were gonna use him as a sacrifice in a portal-opening ritual. He’s in bad shape. ”

“Devil or necromancer? ” Riviera asked.

“Devil. ” I stretched, and my spine popped.

“You kill it? ” She pulled a pack of Marlboros from her suit jacket and tapped out a cigarette.

“Yes, ma’am! ”

“Good girl. ”

Riviera turned her head to call over her shoulder: “Rafé, Loretta, grab your kits and head down to the basement! ”

Two Circle agents in dark suits with armbands bearing red crosses and white canvas shoulder bags piled out of the back of the SUV and hurried into the house.

“Thank you, ” I said to Riviera. “I guess this means Pal and I get to stay in Columbus. ”

She smiled and lit her cigarette. “Just don’t make me regret this. ”

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