"Harry," she said. "I'm not thirsty." Her eyes smoldered. "I'm hungry."

I hit upon an idea. "Once we drink this, I'll be ready, and we can go to bed."

She looked up at me hazily and smiled, wicked and delighted. "Oh, Harry. Bottoms up." Her hands made a sort of silent commentary on her words, and I jumped, almost dropping the bottle. More shampoo from my hair trailed down my already burning eyes, and I squeezed them closed.

I slugged away about half the potion, trying to ignore the flat-cola taste, and quickly passed the rest to Susan. She smiled lazily and drank it down, licking her lips.

It started in my guts—a sort of fluttery, wobbly feeling that moved out, up through my lungs and out along my shoulders, down my arms. It also went down, over my hips and into my legs. I began to shake and quiver uncontrollably.

And then I just flew apart into a cloud of a million billion tiny pieces of Harry, each one with its own perspective and view. The room wasn't just a square, cluttered basement to me, but a pattern of energies, grouped into specific shapes and uses. Even the demon was only a cloud of particles, slow and dense. I flowed around that cloud, up through the opening in the ceiling pattern, and outside of the apartment and into the raging nonpattern of the storm.

It took maybe five seconds, and then the power of the potion faded. I felt all the little pieces of me abruptly rush back together and slam into one another at unthinkable speed. It hurt, and made me nauseous, a sort of heavy-duty thump of impact that didn't come from any one direction, but from every direction at once. I staggered, planted my staff on the ground, and felt the rain wash down over me.

Susan appeared next to me a heartbeat later, and promptly sat down on her butt on the ground, in the rain. "Oh, God. I feel terrible."

Inside the apartment, the demon screamed, a raging, voiceless hiss. I could hear it madly rampaging around inside. "Come on," I told her. "We've got to get out of here before it gets smart and starts looking outside for us."

"I'm sick," she said. "I'm not sure I can walk."

"The mixed potions," I said. "They can do that to you. But we have to go now. Come on, Susan. Up and at 'em." I bent down and got her up on her feet and moving away from my apartment.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"Do you have your car keys?"

She patted the dress, as if looking for pockets, and then shook her head dazedly. "They were in my coat pocket."

"We walk, then."

"Walk where?"

"Over to Reading Road. It always floods when there's this much rain. It'll be enough water to ground that thing if it tries to follow us." It was only a couple of blocks away. The cold rain came down in buckets. I was shaking, shivering, and naked, and more soap was getting into my eyes. But hey. At least I was clean.

"Wha?" she mumbled. "What will the rain do to it?"

"Not rain. Running water. It kills him if he tries to go over it after us," I explained to her, patiently. I hoped the potions mixing together in her stomach hadn't done anything irreversible. There had been accidents before. We were moving at good speed, all things considered, and had covered maybe forty yards in the pouring rain. Not much farther to go.

"Oh. Oh, that's good," she said. And then she convulsed and pitched to the ground. I tried to hold her, but I was just too tired, my arms too weak. I nearly went down with her. She rolled to her side and lay that way, retching horribly, vomiting herself empty.

Thunder and lightning raged around us again, and I heard the sharp crack of the storm's power touching a tree nearby. I saw a bright flash of contact and then the subdued glow of burning branches. I looked in the direction we had been heading. The flooding Reading Road, safety from the demon, was still thirty yards away.

"I didn't think you'd last this long," someone said.

I almost jumped out of my skin. I picked my staff up in both hands and turned in a slow circle, searching for the source of the voice. "Who's there?" There, to one side, a spot of cold—not physical cold, but something deeper and darker that my other senses detected. A pooling of shadows, an illusion in the darkness between lights, gone when lightning flashed and back again when it had passed.

"Do you expect me to give you my name?" the shadows scorned. "Suffice to say that I am the one who has killed you."

"You're an underachiever," I shot back, still turning, eyes searching. "The job's not done."

In the darkness underneath a broken streetlight, then, maybe twenty feet away, I could make out the shape of a person. Man or woman, I couldn't tell, nor could I distinguish from the voice. "Soon," the shape said. "You can't last much longer. My demon will finish you before another ten minutes have passed." The voice was supremely confident.

"You called that demon here?"

"Indeed," the shadowy shape confirmed.

"Are you crazy?" I demanded, stunned. "Don't you know what could happen to you if that thing gets loose?"

"It won't," the shape assured me. "It is mine to control."

I extended my senses toward the shape, and found that what I had suspected was true. It wasn't a real person, or an illusion masking a real person. It was only the seeming of one, a phantasm of shape and sound, a hologram that could see and hear and speak for its creator, wherever he or she was.

"What are you doing?" it demanded. It must have sensed me feeling it out.

"Checking your credentials," I said, and sent some of my remaining will toward it, the sorcerous equivalent of a slap in the face.

The image cried out in surprise and reeled back. "How did you do that?" it snarled.

"I went to school."

The hologram growled, then raised up its voice, calling out in rolling syllables. I tried to hear what had been said, but another peal of thunder blocked out the middle half of what was undoubtedly the demon's name.

From within my apartment, the distant, faint sound of the demon's smashing ruckus came to an abrupt halt.

"Now," the image said, a sneer to its voice. "Now you will pay."

"Why are you doing this?" I demanded.

"You're in my way."

"Let the woman go."

"Sorry," the image said. "She's seen too much. She's in the way, too, now. My demon will kill you both."

"You bastard," I snarled.

It laughed at me.

I looked over my shoulder, back toward the apartment. Through the rain I heard a dry and raspy hiss, underlaid with a sort of clicking growl. Blue frog-eyes, reflecting the storm's lightning, came up the stairs from my basement apartment. It focused on me immediately and started forward. The back fender of Susan's car, which she had parked outside my apartment, got in its way, and with the pad-tipped fingers of one skinny, soft-looking hand, it picked up the back end of the car and tossed it to one side, where it landed with a heavy crunch.

I tried not to think about those fingers around my throat.

"You see?" the image said. "Mine to call. Time for you to die, Mr. Dresden."

Another flash of lightning showed the demon falling to all fours and scrambling toward me like an overweight lizard scuttling across hot sand to shade, in an exaggerated wagging motion that looked ridiculous but brought it closer and closer at deceptive speed.

"Deposit another quarter to continue your call, asshole," I said. I thrust my staff toward the shadowy image, this time, focusing my will into a full-fledged attack. "Stregallum finitas."

Scarlet light abruptly flooded over it, devouring its edges and moving inward.

The image snarled, then gasped in pain. "Dresden! My demon will roll in your bones!" And then it broke off into a scream of anguish as my counterspell began to tear the image-sending apart. I was better than whoever had made the image, and they couldn't hold the spell in the face of my counter. The image and the scream alike faded slowly into the distance until both were gone. I allowed myself the smallest touch of satisfaction, and then turned to the woman on the ground.