The creature howled and came at me again. It was vaguely humanoid despite the claws. Which clanged off one blade—but the staff was working hard, humming to itself contentedly as if it had finally found something to wake it up and exercise it a little. My arms ached, especially the scar that was a knot of fire against my wrist, etheric energy humming through it; but the fierce high excitement beating behind my breastbone didn’t let up, and I knew who was making that terrible sound under the snarling and foul nails-on-chalkboard howling of the creature.

It was a high chilling giggle, clear as crystal and cold as midnight in a moon-drenched room. It was my own voice, laughing, crazed with bloodlust. The scar turned blood-warm, strength like wine flooding my limbs, and the charms in my hair rattled and struck together with cracks like lightning.

The creature backed up and snarled. I snarled back, almost twitching in my eagerness to kill, ice painting the air as my breath froze. It was human-shaped, and I was so far gone by then that I peered underneath its scrim of hair and blinding blur. Only for a moment, trying to decipher the silver glimmer at its throat—a chain? A leash? Who knew?

Then it backed up, holding its front left limb up as if I’d wounded it. Black sludge dripped on the floor, smoking in the cold.

I laughed again, that chilling tinkling sound that broke glass and shivered the wooden flooring into splinters. Kill it. Kill. Kill.

A crackling bolt of blue hellfire lanced through the shattered air, splashing against the thing’s side. It howled again and streaked away, its footfalls heavy and off-kilter now. I heard it drumming the surface of the earth as I whirled on the balls of my feet to meet this new threat.

The scar turned hot and hard. I felt Perry like a storm front moving through, a change of pressure that meant lightning. But that wasn’t what made me freeze. Standing amid the shattered wreckage, his eyes dark and infinite, Saul shoved his hands deep in his coat pockets and regarded me. Steam drifted up from his skin. The couch was a shambled mess, the kitchen was torn all to hell, every mirror and window in the place was shattered and crusted with ice.

And still, my hands tightened on the staff. The blades hummed, alert, vibrating with bloodlust. Kill? the slim length of iron, old when Atlantis was young, hummed in its subsonic language. Kill? Kill? Destroy?

What civilization the staff was an artifact of, I didn’t know. Mikhail hadn’t known either. But ever since that highly advanced people had shaped this length of steel into a long wand with stylized dragon heads at either end—and don’t ask me how we know they’re dragon heads, we just do—it has been used for one thing.

Bloodshed. Destruction. The secret to handling it has been passed down from hunter to hunter in an unbroken line since its creation—or so Mikhail told me.

I had no reason to disbelieve him. Once, and only once, I think I saw what the world had looked like when the staff was created. The fact that I wasn’t howlingly insane meant I had passed the test and was ready to descend into Hell—and come back, a full hunter.

My muscles spasmed. The terrible battle began, me trying to wrench my fingers free of the iron, the staff screaming to be set free, to whistle through the air again, to cleave flesh and anything harder, anything at all, to maim and rip and tear. Blood trickled hot down my side, down my leg, down my arm from my left shoulder, turned into hamburger by the thing’s claws.

But Saul’s eyes were dark, and he didn’t look away. He didn’t move. The electric current between us—the thing in him that saw past every wall I’ve ever built to defend myself, the thing in me that recognized him—went deeper than all the bloody raw places in my head, deeper than my breath and bones and blood, and deeper still.

He knew me, even now.

It seemed to take forever but was in reality only a few seconds before I could make my fingers unloose. The staff slid toward the floor, I spun it, turning with a scream of agonized muscles and a cry that shattered each iota of broken glass into smaller shards and tore the scrim of ice into steaming fragments. The staff tore free, taking the skin on my palms with it, and smashed into the wall. Stuck there, sunk six inches into the concrete, quivering.

I let out a low harsh sound. Swayed, the small spattering sound of blood hitting the floor very loud in the stillness. I suddenly became aware that I had been moving in ways a human body hadn’t been designed to move, even one with the help of a chunk of meteoric, pre-Atlantean steel and a hellbreed scar on one wrist. Everything hurt, a scalding fiery pain.

But my heart still beat, so fast the pounding in my wrists and throat was a hummingbird’s wings. I was still taking in great ragged breaths, panting, my ribs flickering as they heaved, fiery oil spreading up my left side. My shoulders felt dipped in molten lead and my legs felt like wet noodles and my head, my God, my head felt like it was going to crack down the middle, like some demented dwarf was driving glass pins through my brain.

I swayed again, sour taste of adrenaline in my mouth. Heard someone else moving and knew it wasn’t Saul approaching me, knew it wasn’t him, and moved without thought.

My fingers had turned into claws, and I screamed as my nails tore through Perry’s face, the scar on my wrist giving an agonized flare of pleasure. Then Saul had me in his arms, was talking to me as I struggled, he had me caught in a bear hug and took my legs out from under me, we hit the ground among debris and melting ice and I struggled, getting wood dust, glass, plaster, water, all sorts of crap in my hair before Saul snarled at me, burying his face in my throat, and I went utterly still. The sharp edges of his teeth could open my carotid in a moment.

I made a low sobbing noise, gongs clanging inside my head. “Si-si-si-si—”

I was trying to tell him there was a civilian in the house, someone I had been protecting, when I passed out.

Chapter Eighteen

I woke up with one hell of a hangover.

Using the staff does that. It’s not something to be done lightly, as Mikhail had reminded me until he was blue in the face. But really, I was just happy it had worked.

I opened my eyes, saw something hazy that qualified (maybe) as light, and let out a low moan. Immediately, someone slid an arm under my head and held the foulest concoction in the whole wide goddamn world to my lips.

The best cure for a bad case of overstrain goes like this: nuke room-temperature Coke until you get the fizzies out, about ten seconds in the microwave on defrost will do it. Then mix it half and half with Gatorade. You dump about a quarter of it and fill up the huge old mug with very strong valerian tea. Mikhail always used to spike it with a little vodka, but he was crazy.

It tastes unspeakably foul, especially when your stomach is trying to crawl out through your throat without so much as pausing to say goodbye. But it works. The Gatorade settles your electrolytes; the caffeine and sugar in the Coke bring your blood levels back up and the nixed carbonation settles the stomach, and the valerian if strong enough is almost as good as Valium to calm down a hunter who’s just gone through the wringer.

The vodka, of course, was because nothing medicinal could be without a touch of that finest of elixirs. I heard Anja’s brews involved imported absinthe, but I’ve never had the dubious pleasure of having her mix up a concoction. God willing, I never will.

I took down four mugs of it before swearing at Saul and thrashing, trying to get up out of bed. “Calm down,” he told me, in a tone that brooked no argument. “Or I’ll strap you down, goddammit. You stupid bitch.”