Well. I couldn’t argue with that, but the words made Anastasia’s eyes narrow dangerously.

Lara leaned the heels of her hands on her desk and faced me, her words clipped and precise. “You think you can simply walk into my home and issue commands and threats as it pleases you? The world is changing, Wardens. The Council isn’t changing with it. It’s only a matter of time before it collapses under its own obsolescent weight. This kind of high-handed arrogance will only—”

She broke off suddenly, turning toward the window, her head tilted slightly to one side.

I blinked and traded a glance with Anastasia.

An instant later, the lights went out.

Red emergency lights snapped on immediately, though they weren’t needed in the office. A few seconds after that, a rapid, steady chiming sound filled the room, coming from speakers on the wall.

I looked down from the speaker to find Lara staring intently at me.

“What’s happening?” I asked her.

Her eyes widened slightly. “You don’t know?”

“How the hell should I know?” I demanded, exasperated. “It’s your stupid alarm system!”

“Then this isn’t your doing.” She gritted her teeth. “Bloody hell.”

Her head whipped toward the window again and this time I heard it—the sound of a man screaming in high-pitched, shameless agony.

And then I felt it: a nauseating quiver of wrongness in the air, a hideous sense of the presence of something ancient and vile.

The skinwalker.

“We’re under attack,” Lara snarled. “Come with me.”

Chapter Twenty-five

Justine knocked and entered the room, her eyes wide. “Ms. Raith?” “Security status?” Lara asked in a calm voice.

“Unknown,” Justine said. She was breathing a little too fast. “The alarm went off and I called Mr. Jones, but the radios cut out.”

“Most of your electronics are probably gone. You’ve been hexed,” I said. “It’s a skinwalker.”

Lara turned and stared hard at me. “Are you sure?”

Anastasia nodded and drew the sword from her hip. “I feel it, too.”

Lara nodded. “What can it do?”

“Everything I can, only better,” I said. “And it’s a shapeshifter. Very fast, very strong.”

“Can it be killed?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s probably smarter to run.”

Lara narrowed her eyes. “This thing has invaded my home and hurt my people. Like hell.” She turned, drove her fist with moderate force into a wooden wall panel and dislodged it completely. In the empty space behind the panel was a rack hung with a belt bearing two wavy-bladed swords and a machine pistol, like a baby Uzi. She kicked out of her expensive shoes, shrugged out of her coat, and began strapping on weapons. “Justine, how many of the blood are in the house?”

“Four, counting you,” Justine replied immediately. “Your sisters, Elisa and Natalia, and your cousin Madeline.”

She nodded. “Wardens,” she said. “If you would not mind delaying our argument for a time, I would take it as a personal favor.”

“Hell with that,” I said. “This thing killed one of my friends.”

Lara glanced at the two of us. “I propose a temporary alliance against this invader.”

“Concur,” Anastasia said sharply.

“Doesn’t look like there’s any way to get out of it,” I said.

Gunfire erupted somewhere in the halls—multiple automatic weapons all going off at the same time.

Then there were more screams.

“Justine,” I said, holding out my hand. “Get behind me.”

The young woman hurried to comply, her expression strained but controlled.

Anastasia took up position on my right and Lara slid up next to me on the left. Her perfume was exquisite, and the surge of lust that hit me as I breathed it nearly had me turning to take a bite out of her, she smelled so good.

“It’s fast and tough,” I said. “And smart. But not invulnerable. We hit it from several directions at once and ran it off.”

A shotgun boomed, much closer to us than the earlier gunfire had been. It was immediately followed by the sounds of something heavy being slammed several times into the walls and floor.

The psychic stench of the skinwalker abruptly thickened and I said, “Here it comes!”

By the time I got to “it,” the skinwalker was already through the door to the outer office, seemingly moving faster than the splinters that flew off the door when the creature shattered it. Covered in a veil, it was just a flickering blur in the air.

I brought my shield up, focused far forward, filling the doorway to Lara’s office with invisible force. The skinwalker hit the barrier with all of its strength and speed. The shield held—barely—but so much energy had gone into the impact that wisps of smoke began curling up from the bracelet, and the skin on my wrist got singed. So much force surged into my shield that it physically drove me back across a foot of carpet.

As it hit, the energies of the skinwalker’s veil came into conflict with those in my shield, each canceling out the other, and for a second the creature was visible as an immensely tall, lean, shaggy, vaguely humanoid thingwith matted yellow hair and overlong forelimbs tipped in long, almost delicate claws.

As the shield fell, Anastasia pointed a finger at the thing and hissed a word, and a blindingly bright beam of light no thicker than a hair flashed out from her finger. It was fire magic not unlike my own, but infinitely more intense and focused and far more energy efficient. The beam swept past the skinwalker, intersecting with its upper left arm, and where it touched fur burned away and flesh boiled and bubbled and blackened.

The skinwalker flashed to one side of the doorway and vanished, leaving nothing behind but a view of the smoking pinprick hole in the expensive paneling of the outer office.

I pointed my staff at the door and Lara did the same thing with the gun.

For maybe ten seconds, everything was silent.

“Where is it?” Lara hissed.

“Gone?” Justine suggested. “Maybe it got scared when Warden Luccio hurt it.”

“No, it didn’t,” I said. “It’s smart. Right now it’s looking for a better way to get to us.”

I looked around the office, trying to think like the enemy. “Let’s see,” I said. “IfI was a shapeshifting killing machine, how would I get in here?”

The options were limited. There was the door in front of us and the window behind us. I turned to face the window, still looking. Silence reigned, except for the sigh of the air-conditioning, billowing steadily into the office from the—

From the vents.

I turned and thrust my staff toward a large air vent, covered with the usual slatted steel contraption, drew forth my will, and screamed, “Fulminos!”

Blue-white lightning suddenly filled the air with flickering fire, while a spear of blinding heat and force crackled forth from my staff and slammed into the metal vent. The metal absorbed the electricity, and I knew it would carry it back through the vent itself—and into anything inside.

There was a weird, chirping scream and then the vent cover flew outward, followed by a python-shaped blur in the air. Even as it arced toward us, that shape flowed and changed into that of something low-slung, stocky, and viciously powerful, like maybe a badger or a wolverine.

It hit Anastasia high on the chest and slammed her to the floor.

And on the way down, I caught a flash of golden-yellow eyes dancing with sadistic glee.

I turned to kick the thing off of Anastasia, but Lara beat me to the metaphorical punch. She slammed the barrel of her machine pistol into its flank as if driving a beer tap into a wooden keg with her bare hands, and pulled the trigger on the way.

Fire and noise filled the room, and the skinwalker went bouncing to one side. It hit the ground once, twisted itself in midair and raked its claws across Justine’s midsection. Using the reaction to control its momentum, it landed on its feet and hurled itself out of the room by way of the window behind Lara’s desk.