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around them."

I did. Nobody glanced my way. Now that I concentrated, I could feel something hanging around me- a kind of gray veil, a don't-see-me that wasn't quite invisibility. Rahel's doing. I was getting better at figuring that out, anyway; I couldn't even sense it before. I waited until there was a pause in people going through the detector and darted in, zipped through, and felt the weirdest sensation, a kind of burn deep inside. Whoa. Weird.

The dog was looking at me. At first I thought he was just staring in my direction, but he watched me as I walked across the lobby, and as Rahel joined me I nudged her and jerked my chin in the direction of our furry friend.

She nodded. "Animals see us as we are," she said. "Dogs don't feel threatened, but beware of cats. They can be unpleasant."

"O-kay."

She pressed the button. We waited. Eventually a likely candidate arrived, and we crowded in fast, cutting off the flow of tourists with a fast-closing door. Rahel pressed a button-which floor, I didn't see- and then turned and stared into the empty corner of the metal box.

"Um ..." I was at a loss for words, for once. "Is there something ..."

"Quiet," Rahel snapped. "I'm thinking."

I was quiet. I listened to the creak of the elevator, the hiss of cables as they hauled us up toward heaven. Distant voices dopplered past one floor at a time, snippets of conversation that wove in and out too fast to catch.

I became aware of something else. A low-level hum somewhere in the far corner of the elevator, a sound where there should be no sound. No presence.

"What's that?" I asked, but before I got more than the first word out, Rahel was moving. Spinning away from me, slamming into the empty space of the corner, grappling with something that was shadow and darkness and then . . .

And then I saw it. Definitely not human. Black, fluid, like an spilled shadow, a stain on the world. Rahel was trying to hold it, but it slid away from her like oil, oozing past her, flowing toward me.

"Go up!" she shouted to me, and her talons changed colors from neon orange-yellow-blue to diamond, and she slashed at the thing between us, tearing deeply. I heard it scream in a high, metallic, screeching voice. "Idiot! Go up!"

She meant up to the aetheric. I let go of my human form and went instantly into fog, vapor, mist . . . into nothing that could be gotten hold of. But that meant I went up into the next plane of existence, and there, the battle was really going on.

Rahel-fog and fire in the aetheric, a bright glowing ghost-was inside of a black, crackling cage of fire. As I watched, she howled and slashed at it, but the wounds she made faded within seconds.

It was ... it was eating her. Consuming her, bleeding off power, feeding it through that cage of fire and into something else, something that I couldn't even see for the darkness. God. The thing was looking at me, not at her. I could feel its hunger vibrating the world between us.

I didn't think. I just reached out and grabbed hold of that black cage of fire. I guess I intended to rip a hole in it big enough for Rahel to escape, but that wasn't what happened. The second I touched it, it bonded to me, made me a circuit in that huge flow of current. I was locked in place.

"Joanne!" Rahel shouted, and I felt her reach through the bars that separated us and touch me. "Draw on David! Fight!"

I didn't have a choice. The sensation of being sucked dry was so overwhelmingly revolting that I would have used anything, anybody to pull away. I grabbed hold of that silvery cord that connected me to David and felt power cascade into me, heady, brilliant, hot, pure. It was like introducing a circuit breaker into the flow. The cage around Rahel fell apart into writhing black spikes of energy, and I reached to pull her free. When I touched her, I left silvery contrails of power behind. She grabbed hold and dragged me down, through aetheric, rocketing back into the real world. We slammed back into the elevator cage with enough force to rock it on its cables, and Rahel didn't waste any time with niceties;