tunnel through the floor and come out on top of my head.
At my will, the tip of the staff I still held burst into light, illuminating the room.
"Harry?" Bob's voice came from the shelf. The skull's eyelights came on, and he swiveled around to face me. "What the hell is going on? Woo woo, who is the babe?"
Susan jumped. "What is that?"
"Ignore him," I said, and followed my own advice. I went to the far end of my lab table and started kicking boxes, bags, notebooks, and old paperbacks off the floor. "Help me clear this floor space. Hurry!"
She did, and I cursed the lack of cleaning skills that had left this end of the lab such a mess. I was struggling to get to the circle I had laid in the floor, a perfect ring of copper, an unbroken loop in the concrete that could be empowered to hold a demon in—or out.
"Harry!" Bob gulped as we worked. "There's, a, um. A seriously badass toad-demon coming down the ladder."
"I know that, Bob." I heaved a bunch of empty cardboard boxes aside as Susan frantically tossed some papers away, exposing the entirety of the copper ring, about three feet across. I took her hand and stepped into the circle, drawing her close to me.
"What's happening?" Susan asked, her expression bewildered and terrified.
"Just stay close," I told her. She clung tightly to me.
"It sees you, Harry," Bob reported. "It's going to spit something at you, I think."
I didn't have time to see if Bob was right. I leaned down, touched the circle with the tip of my staff, and willed power into it, to shut the creature out. The circle sprang up around us, a silent and invisible tension in the air.
Something splattered and hissed against the air a few inches from my face. I looked up to see dark, sputtering acid slithering off the invisible shield the circle's power provided us. Half a second earlier and it would have eaten my face off. Cheery thought.
I tried to catch my breath, stand straight, and not let any part of me extend outside the circle, which would break its circuit and negate its power. My arms were shaking and my legs felt weak. Susan, too, was visibly trembling.
The demon stalked over to us. I could see it clearly in the light of my staff, and I wished that I couldn't. It was horribly ugly, misshapen, foul, heavily muscled, and I compared it to a toad only because I knew of nothing else that even remotely approached a description of it. It glared at us and drove a fist at the circle's shield. It rebounded in a shower of blue sparks, and the thing hissed, a horrible and windy sound.
Outside, the storm continued to rumble and growl, muffled by the thick walls of the subbasement.
Susan was holding close to me, and almost crying. "Why isn't it killing us? Why isn't it getting us?"
"It can't," I said, gently. "It can't get through, and it can't do anything to break the circle. So long as neither of us crosses that line, we'll be safe."
"Oh, God," Susan said. "How long do we have to stand here?"
"Dawn," I said. "Until dawn. When the sun rises, it has to go."
"There's no sun down here," she said.
"Doesn't work that way. It's got a sort of power cord stretching back to whoever summoned it. A fuel line. As soon as the sun comes up, that line gets cut, and he goes away, like a balloon with no air."
"When does the sun come up?" she asked.
"Oh, well. About ten more hours."
"Oh," she said. She laid her head against my bare chest and closed her eyes.
The toad-demon paced in a slow circuit around the circle, searching for a weakness in the shield. It would find none. I closed my eyes and tried to think.
"Uh, Harry," Bob began.
"Not now, Bob."
"But Harry—" Bob tried again.
"Dammit, Bob. I'm trying to think. If you want to be really useful, you could try to figure out why that escape potion you were so confident of didn't work for Susan."
"Harry," Bob protested, "that's what I'm trying to tell you."
Susan murmured, against my chest, "Is it getting warm in here? Or is it just me?"
A terrible suspicion struck me. I looked down at Susan and got a sinking feeling. Surely not. No. It couldn't be.
She looked up at me, her dark eyes smoky. "We're going to die, aren't we Harry? Have you ever thought you'd want to die making