had it trained on the far end of the hall when the dark figure reappeared, lit by a faintly glowing green crystal she carried in her left hand. Her dark hair was tied back from her perfectly expressionless, motionless face, and her eyes were unreadably reptilian.
The Stygian.
“Balera, isn’t it?” I asked her. The second ghoul’s momentum had carried it to the ground beside me, and it lay there on his back, the handle of my knife sticking out of the center of its face, the interior of his skull open to view. One of his legs was still quivering. “Or are you Janera?”
“It matters little to us,” she replied. Her voice was hollow, empty of something vital. It sounded about as much like a human voice as the old sixties electric pianos did like actual pianos. “You cannot win, Venator. The Lexicon Malos will be renewed. Depart now. Live to fight another day.”
I leaned down and jerked my gore-soaked knife out of the dead ghoul. Then I started a steady, deliberate walk toward her. “That’s what the other two members of the Stygian Sisterhood I’ve met have said. So far, it hasn’t worked out that way.” I started planning my shot. Every schmuck who can conjure up a shield that bounces bullets thinks he’s hot stuff. But it takes concentration to do it, and the shields aren’t omnidirectional. A ricochet shot can bounce right around a conjured shield—and besides, if I could get her focused on the gun, she might not realize I was using the knife on her until it was too late.
There was a nice, smooth, polished metal surface behind her, the cover to what must have been a heating unit or a lighting control panel or something. The steel looked heavy enough to suit my purpose. If I could put part of a shot into her back, even just a few fragments from a shattered bullet, it should be distraction enough to let me put her down. “Let’s make this simple,” I told her. “Hold still, smile pretty, and your sisters can have an open-casket service.”
Her lower lip twitched down away from her teeth in a gesture that looked like something that had never been human attempting a smile. “But yours,” she said, her voice suddenly a purr, “will never know you.”
I stepped forward, ready to shoot, and caught a flicker of my own reflection in the metal behind the Stygian.
It wasn’t me.
The man facing me wasn’t me.
He looked older, rough faced, with shaggy greying hair and a scruff of a beard. His jaws were slightly distended, as were his lips, and I pegged him at once as a ghoul who had not quite managed to completely hide its true nature under a human outer appearance.
I lifted my left hand, and the knife in it, and the ghoul in the reflection did the same thing.
The Stygian gave me another not-smile and vanished around the corner.
It took me a second to recover and go running after her—but I needn’t have bothered. A heavy door clanged shut as I rounded the corner, and flickering motes of greenish light danced over its surface before leaving me in total darkness. I’m not a member of the elite when it comes to the use of magic, but I knew better than to try to force that door against whatever energies the Stygian had laid across it in her wake.
I cursed savagely.
The entire affair had been an ambush, and I had walked right into it.
This was the difference between Harry’s use of magic and mine. The link between our amulets was strong enough that his more sophisticated spells would never have been deceived. The Stygian must have used some kind of masking enchantment to trick my own grade-school version of a tracking spell, and then employed an illusion to give herself the appearance of my brother once she had lured me into position to . . . do whatever it was she had done to me.
Why change my face? The members of the Stygian Sisterhood were no amateurs when it came to dangerous, even lethal magic. Why had she done that instead of, for example, setting my intestines on fire? Even if my demon had been fully fed and at peak strength, I doubted I could have survived something like that.
Now that the actual fighting was over, I began to feel the fear. Had the Stygian wished it, I would be dead right now, and the knowledge was sobering, frightening. Harry had occasionally