"More than most."

Martin nodded. "Do you have a safe house?"

"My place. I've got some emergency wards I can set off. They could keep out a mail-order record club." I bobbed my eyebrows at Susan. "For a while, anyway."

Martin juked the car around another corner. "It isn't far. You can jump out. We'll draw them off."

"He can't," Susan objected. "He can barely move. He's been hurt, and he could go into shock. He isn't like us, Martin."

Martin frowned. "What did you have in mind?"

"I'll go with him."

He stared up at the rearview mirror for a moment, at Susan. "It's a bad idea."

"I know."

"It's dangerous."

"I know," she said, voice tight. "There's no choice, and no time to argue."

Martin turned his eyes back to the road and said, "Are you sure?"

"Yeah."

"God be with you both, then. Sixty seconds."

"Wait a minute," I said. "What are you both-"

Martin screeched around another corner and roared ahead at top speed. I bounced off the door on my side and flattened my cheek against the window. I recognized my neighborhood as I did. I glanced at the speedometer of the car and wished I hadn't.

Susan reached across me to open the door and said, "We get out here."

I stared at her and then motioned vaguely at the door.

She met my eyes and that same hard, delighted smile spread over her lips. "Trust me. This is kid stuff."

"Cartoons are kid stuff. Petting zoos are kid stuff. Jumping out of a car is insane."

"You did it before," she accused me. "The lycanthropes."

"That was different."

"Yes. You left me in the car." Susan crawled across my lap, which appreciated her. Especially in the tight leather pants. My eyes agreed with my lap wholeheartedly. Especially about the tight leather pants. Susan then crouched, one foot on the floorboards, one hand on the door, and offered her other hand to me. "Come on."

Susan had changed in the last year. Or maybe she hadn't. She had always been good at what she did. She'd just altered her focus to something other than reporting. She could take on demonic murderers in hand-to-hand combat now, rip home appliances from the wall and throw them with one hand, and use grenades in the dark. If she said she could jump out of a speeding car and keep us both from dying, I believed her. What the hell, I thought. It wasn't like I hadn't done this before-albeit at a fifth the speed.

But there was something deeper than that, something darker that Susan's vulpine smile had stirred inside of me. Some wild, reckless, primal piece of me had always loved the danger, the adrenaline, had always loved testing myself against the various and sundry would-be lethalities that crossed my paths. There was an ecstasy in the knife edge of the struggle, a vital energy that couldn't be found anywhere else, and part of me (a stupid, insane, but undeniably powerful part) missed it when it was gone.

That wildness rose up in me, and gave me a smile that matched Susan's.

I took her hand, and a second later we leapt from the car. I heard myself laughing like a madman as we did.

Chapter Twenty-four

As we went out the door, Susan pulled me hard against her. On general policy, I approved. She got one arm around the back of my head, shielding the base of my skull and the top of my neck. We hit the ground with Susan on the bottom, bounced up a bit, rolling, and hit the ground again. The impacts were jolting, but I was on the bottom only once. The rest of the time, the impact was something I felt only through my contact with Susan.

We wound up on the tiny patch of grass two doors down from my boardinghouse, in front of some cheap converted apartments. Several seconds later, the two pursuing cars went roaring by after Martin and his rented sedan. I kept my head down until they had passed, and then looked at Susan.

I was on top. Susan panted quietly beneath me. One of her legs was bent at the knee, half holding my thigh between hers. Her dark eyes glittered, and I felt her hips twitch in the kind of motion that brought a number of evenings (and mornings, and afternoons, and late nights) to mind.

I wanted to kiss her. A lot. I held off. "You all right?" I asked.

"You never complained," she answered. Her voice was a little breathless. "Nothing too bad. You? Anything hurt?"

"My ego," I said. "You're embarrassing me with the superstrength and whatnot." I rose, took her hand, and drew her to her feet. "How's a guy supposed to assert his masculinity?"

"You're a big boy. You'll think of something."

I looked around and nodded. "I think we'd better get off the street, pronto."

"Is running and hiding assertively masculine?" We started for my apartment.

"The part where we don't die is."

She nodded. "That's practical, but I'm not sure it's masculine."

"Shut up."

"There you go," Susan said.

We went only a couple of steps before I felt the spell coming. It started as a low shiver on the back of my neck, and my eyes twitched almost of their own accord up to the roof of the apartment house we were walking by. I saw a couple of bricks from one of the chimneys fall free of their mortar. I grabbed Susan's collar and sidestepped, pulling her with me. The bricks shattered into shards and red powder on the sidewalk a step from Susan's feet.

Susan tensed and looked up. "What was that?"

"An entropy curse," I muttered.

"A what?"

I looked around, struggling to sense where the next surge of magic might come from. "Sort of a bad-luck spell. A really, really bad-luck spell. Preferred magic for getting rid of someone who annoys you."

"Who is doing it?"

"My guess? Snakeboy. He seems to have some talent, and he could have gotten some of my blood to target me with." I felt another gathering surge of energy to my right, and my eyes went to the power lines running overhead. "Oh, hell. Run."

Susan and I broke into a sprint. As we did, I heard one of the power lines snap, cables squealing. The longer end of loose cable flew toward us, trailing a cloud of blue and white sparks. It hit the ground somewhere behind us.

My clothes hadn't yet dried out from Nicodemus's guest accommodations. If it had been raining, the downed power line might have killed me. As it was, I felt a vibrating, clenching tingle wash over my legs. I almost fell, but managed to get a few more paces away from the sputtering line and regained control of my legs.

I felt another magical strike building, bringing a gust of wind with it, but before I could zero in on it Susan shouldered me to one side. I fell to the ground just as I heard a loud cracking sound. A branch as thick as my thigh slammed to the ground. I looked up to see a strip of bare white bark showing along the trunk of the old tree behind my boardinghouse.

Susan helped drag me to my feet and we ran the rest of the way to my apartment door. Even as we did, I felt another strike building, stronger than the last. I fumbled open the lock while thunder rumbled through the predawn grey, and we got inside.

I could still feel the curse growing and reaching for me. It was a strong one, and I wasn't sure that either my apartment's threshold or my standard wards would be able to keep it out. I slammed the door closed behind me, locked it. The room fell into darkness as I reached for the basket beside the door. There was a waxy lump the size of my fist in it, and I lifted it and slammed it hard against the door, across the crack between the door and the jamb. I found the wick standing out from the wax, focused on it, and drew in my will. I murmured, "Flickum bicus," and released the magic, and the wick suddenly glowed with a pure white flame.

Around the room at precisely the same moment, two dozen other candles of white and butter-colored wax also lit with a gentle flicker of white fire. As they did, I felt a sudden thrum of my own magic, prepared months before, raise into a rampart around my home. The curse pulsed again, somewhere outside, and hammered against the barrier, but my protection held. The malevolent energy shattered against it.