Maybe Casanova had installed some new security measure; I didn’t know. But whatever it was, it was effective. The cloud screamed with the sound of a hundred voices, and writhed madly in the air, a twisting, burning black mass that reminded me of the maggots working on Saleh’s headless body.

The glare of the flames glinting off the armor shed more light on the scene, although I might have been happier in the dark. Rosier dropped from the ceiling to land in the middle of the corridor with a faint plopping sound. Then something jumped me from behind, sinking what felt like a rack of small knives into my back.

I shrieked and staggered back, hitting the wall and driving the claws in that much farther. I lurched back into the room and let my gaseous knives loose, but they took one look at the larger fight going on a few yards away and deserted me. I looked around frantically, but although there were about a hundred weapons of various kinds in the knights’ hands I didn’t see any that would help dislodge something that high on my back that I couldn’t even see.

Another of the things latched on to my left arm, piercing deep enough to hit bone, while another attached itself to my right thigh. I went down to my knees, blinded by pain and shock, only to realize that the things weren’t continuing the attack. Instead, they forced me onto my back, pinning me down, waiting. I raised my head a little to look between my feet, and saw why.

Rosier was crawling my way, dragging himself forward with those spindly arms, his rudimentary legs trailing behind. His face turned unerringly toward me, despite the empty eye sockets, and over the screeching of the burning demons I could hear the soft sound of scales whispering over the floor. He looked harmless, a vague, unfinished creature with a toothless mouth and small, barely formed claws. But I so didn’t want him touching me.

He flowed bonelessly over my feet and onto my legs, long, too flexible fingers curling around my calves, my knees, my thighs as he pulled himself along the length of my body. And already I could feel a faint echo of that horrible, draining sensation. He was beginning to feed.

Despite my every muscle singing with tension, I couldn’t even turn over to try to dislodge him. My arms were pinned by the weight of his servants and my strength was steadily flowing out, what little remained of it. Curled on the floor at my sides, my hands lay still and useless.

He settled heavily onto my stomach, his little claws ripping at the seams of my skirt, pulling it apart to expose the unprotected flesh of my belly. That obscene mouth opened and I could see right inside it, right into the corpse-like hue of his gullet. He licked a clammy line across my skin. “You taste sweet.”

“Get off,” I said thickly.

He couldn’t have grinned. But he gave that impression anyway as he pinned me with that blind gaze. “Oh, I intend to.”

I felt a claw bite into my side, sinking deep. And without words, without him opening that obscene mouth again, I knew what he planned to do. He was going to slit me like he had the skirt, opening me up so he could feed on something more substantial than mere power. He planned to eat me alive.

A feeling—not quite pain, more like raw nerve endings firing on automatic—crackled upward from my stomach to my mouth. I swallowed it down, refusing to scream again. But my eyes rolled up into my head as I felt that claw start to move through my flesh.

He withdrew it for a moment, to lick daintily at his red-stained skin, letting me watch as drops of my blood ran down his arm. One fell off his elbow onto my lower stomach, and he paused to lick it up, his tongue slick and cold against my skin. Then he inserted the claw again, and ripped me open a little wider.

He was deliberately going slowly, splitting flesh and skin a centimeter at a time, pausing every few seconds to lick the jagged edges of the wound, sending violent, sickened shudders through me. He wanted me to know that this was going to be a very long process. And I suddenly understood: he’d wanted the others to go after the kids so he could afford to take his time.

And he would have, except for the crazed djinn with the machete. “Saleh!” I was so happy to see him I cried.

“Hey, sweetheart.” He did a double take. “You look rough.” The machete swung, slicing off a rudimentary arm and knocking Rosier into the side wall, where he landed with a sickening crunch.

“It’s been one of those days,” I gasped, trying to strain my neck to see how much damage Rosier had done. It felt like a lot. It felt like too much.

“Tell me about it,” Saleh said. “You wouldn’t believe the trouble I had tracking this guy down.” He made another swing but missed. “Stand still, damn you!” he ordered, slashing at the demon. But the creature moved unbelievably fast, even without those skeletal legs, and dodged enough blows to keep himself in one piece.

Saleh might have found his prey, but it looked like he lacked the power to take his revenge. Even though Rosier didn’t seem nearly as interested in preserving his life as he did in ending mine. And Billy was right: there was no way the cavalry was going to get here in time.

Saleh did manage to hack the thing off my left arm in passing, although I would have preferred him to free the right, given the choice. But I wasn’t about to argue. I got a grip on one of the nearby window shards, one that looked a lot like a claw itself, red and glittering, tapering from a wedge base to a needle-fine spike. Pritkin had said that Rosier had to lower his defenses to feed. It looked like I was going to get a chance to test the theory.

Rosier jumped for me, a misshapen white blur against the dark, landing with enough force to knock the wind out of me. I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t see, but I could feel. Before the lethargy started again, before he could render me completely helpless, I reached out for the slick surface of his skin and drove the shard as deep as I could into his side.

He screamed, but there was little blood, little bodily fluid of any kind. And the spongy flesh closed up around the wound almost immediately. So I plunged the shard in again and this time I left it, while feeling around for others. Some were too blunt to use, but here was a nice blue one with a jagged edge; there a deep green with a fissure making it into a double blade; and over there, almost at the end of my reach, was a pearly white, so cracked and splintered along the edge that it was almost serrated—and cut about as well, too.

One of the black things was trying to grab my free arm, while its master screamed and thrashed about and tried to eject multiple knives all at once. “You will pay for that,” he told me, blood dripping from his mouth onto my stomach, mingling with my own.

“Maybe, but not today,” I gasped, as Saleh rose up behind him. I didn’t even have time to flinch before the wide blade took off Rosier’s head.

Blood spurted out then, a river of it, as if something much larger than the tiny body slumped across me had been killed. I lay in a pool of it as the whirlwind started up again, its sound almost immediately overshadowed by the familiar scream of air that signaled a ley-line fissure. Or, in this case, a portal.

“You better run,” Saleh told me, as the stream of fire holding off the demon cloud halted abruptly. But I couldn’t run, could barely crawl, and there was no time in any case. The cloud dove for me, a screaming mass of hysterical hate, only to be hit by a hail of bullets from the stairwell as a dozen vamps flowed into the room.

“Is this a private party?” Alphonse asked, crushing the black thing hanging off my thigh under a heavy motorcycle boot. “Or can anyone join?”

Sal pried the creature off my back and stomped heavily on its center. It screeched and writhed and melted away, leaving only what looked like a scorch mark on the stones below.

“You do know how to throw a party,” she said as she pulled the last creature from my right arm and slung it against the wall. She looked me over. “But you were right. Elegance isn’t your thing.”

I lay back against the fake stone of the floor, listening as the demons and vamps fought it out all around us. It didn’t sound like the demons liked automatic gunfire any more than they did fire. I watched the last of them being pounded into nothingness by Alphonse’s size twelve boots while Sal examined my various wounds. What was left of Rosier’s body was nearby, a wasted scrap of bloody white flesh. I thought seriously about throwing up, but decided it was too much trouble.

Sal checked out my thigh and shoulders and pronounced them only flesh wounds. The stomach was worse, wide enough to need stitches, but I borrowed her belt and bunched enough of the skirt under it to serve as a makeshift bandage and to keep me decent, all at the same time. Multitasking, that’s how you get things done, I thought, and burst into giggles.

“None of that,” Sal said reprovingly. “Have hysterics later. The Consul’s on her way and she’s gonna want to know—did you get it?”

“Hell, yes, I got it. And if she’s coming, maybe she can get off her ass and help with some of the dirty work for a change!”

All the blood drained from Sal’s face, and her eyes fixed on a point just over my left shoulder. “And with what ‘dirty work’ precisely do you require aid?” a husky voice asked from behind me.

God knows what I would have said, but before I could even turn around, Jesse ran out of the dark and jumped in front of me. “I got it!” he yelled, and sent a plume of flame straight at the Consul.

She met it with the blinding wall of sand, dry as a desert, hot as hell, that I had once seen eat a couple of vampires alive. Only she wasn’t throwing it outward at us, I realized after a moment, when my flesh stayed on my bones; she was using it as a shield. I got Jesse around the middle and screamed in his ear. “Cut it out! She’s a friend!”

The fire abruptly vanished, and he stood there looking a little sheepish. “Uh. Sorry?”

“Not strong at all?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Well, maybe a little strong.” I guess now I knew who had taken on a cluster of angry demons.

“Why weren’t you with the others?” I demanded.

“I was on my way down here when two of those things attacked me. I fried ’em,” he told me happily.