something move behind the bar. He turned.
Wyrm said, "I want the booksss. Quit wasssting my time."
"I thought I saw a reflection in the mirror," Hiram said. But there was nothing there now. The polished silver surface gleamed softly in the dim light, but no one moved.
"Where are the booksss?" Wyrm demanded.
"I'd like to know the answer to that question myself," another voice added.
He was standing in the door, a black hood pulled over his face, a complex bow in his hands. An arrow was pocked and ready.
Wyrm's hiss was pure poison.
Hiram gaped. "Who in damnation are you?"
As he spoke, a young woman wearing a black string bikini and nothing else stepped out of the mirror behind the bar. "Oh, shit," Popinjay offered.
Wvrm grabbed Chrysalis by the arm. "You ssset usss up, cunt. You'll pay for thisss."
"I had nothing to do with this," she said. She wrenched her arm free of his grasp, and looked at the masked man in the door. "Yeoman, I don't care for this," she told him.
"My regrets." He raised the bow, drew back on the arrow. "Unless the book is handed over, I'm going to put an arrow in the right eye of the gentleman in the three-piece suit." Latham regarded him emotionlessly.
"And you're always telling me to dress better," Jay Ackroyd said to Hiram. "See what it gets you?" He turned to the bowman. "The book isn't here. You don't think we'd be dumb enough to bring it with us?"
"Wraith, pat them down."
The woman in the bikini walked right through the bar and approached the table. Suddenly Hiram recognized her. She'd been wearing rather more clothes at Aces High, but he was sure she was the same young woman who'd vanished through his floor when Billy Ray had tried to apprehend her. It made him sad. She was young and attractive, far too lovely to be a criminal. Undoubtedly she'd been corrupted by evil companions.
She frisked Jay first, then Hiram. When she touched him, her hands seem to go insubstantial, sliding through the fabric of his clothes and even his skin as they moved up and down, searching. It gave him a shiver. "Nothing," she said. The archer lowered his bow.
"You know, I'm a little slow," Popinjay put in. "You're the bow-and-arrow vigilante, right? The ace-of-spades man. How many guys have you killed? Gotta be in double figures, right?"
Wraith's eyes went to her partner, and she looked a little startled. An innocent in over her head, Hiram thought. His heart went out to her. He had read the accounts of the ace-of spades killer in the Jokertown Cry and the Daily News, and he couldn't imagine how a sweet young lady like her had gotten involved with such a homicidal lunatic.
"Where's the book?" the archer said.
Hiram stared at the arrow. He ought to have been cold with dread, but curiously, he felt nothing but annoyance. It had been a very long day. "In a safe place," he said. He took a step forward, his fist clenching his side. He had had entirely enough. "Where it's going to stay." He began to walk toward the door, his bulk shielding the others behind him. "I've gone to a great deal of trouble to set this up, and I'm not having Gills hurt or Bludgeon freed because you want these books for your own undoubtedly criminal purposes."
The eyes behind the mask looked absolutely astonished as Hiram strode forward. The archer hesitated, but only for a second. Then the bow came up again, Hiram tensed as the string was pulled back smoothly, pulleys turning, and Hiram clenched his fist as the gravity waves shimmered around the arrow, invisible to all but him, the moment of truth almost at hand, and--
--there was a pop, and the archer was gone.
Hiram heard Wraith gasp, and then Wyrm screamed in sibilant triumph. The lizard-man shoved at the table that trapped him inside the booth, and it came out of the floor with a metallic ripping sound. Wyrm hurtled over it toward the woman, who back-stepped away from him. "Leave her alone!" Hiram yelled.
Wyrm ignored him. He lunged, hissing, clawed hands grasping to embrace her, and passed right through her body, smashing hard up against a barstool. Popinjay laughed.
Wraith spun around wildly, wide eyes searching for her ally for a moment before she gave up and ran. She dashed through the bar again and vanished back into the mirror, its silvered surface closing over her like a pool of mercury.
"Nice of you to drop