Ethel hobbled from the room rather swiftly to obey her nightmarish master.

The demon continued to sniff at the air and shudder, as though in pleasure. It was disconcerting and worrisome, to put it lightly. I tried not to shake with fear. “A feast,” it’s dark voice rasped. “You are a feast to all of my senses.”

It approached me very slowly, claws and jaws snapping with every step. Ethel burst back through the door, a middle-aged, terrified looking man on her heels, long graying brown hair covering nearly his entire face as he bowed low. He was shorter than the hag, and skeletal thin.

“Here he is, master. Yours to command, master,” Ethel screeched, sounding terrified herself.

The demon turned it’s terrible regard to the man, and he instantly fell to his knees before it. I saw that the cypher also had a prosthetic leg from the thigh down. It was no coincidence that they were both missing limbs, I now knew. I wondered if there was any way that the man’s leg had been a voluntary sacrifice.

“Tell me what she is, slave,” the demon said, in that insidiously terrifying voice.

The cypher stumbled to me, awkward with fear. I blinked as he came closer and I got a good look at his face. His nose was missing, along with all of his teeth. His face was a gruesome sight. He pushed his hair out of his face, an instinctive gesture, as though to hook it back behind his ears, but those were missing as well.

Looking into his panic-stricken eyes, I didn’t think that any of those offerings had been willing, as the hag’s must have been. He must have been her prisoner for quite some time, since the wounds over all of his missing parts were healed over. The pitiful man placed a quivering hand over my heart, closing his eyes. I watched his hand warily. Even his nails were missing. He placed a second hand on my chest, right over my heart, avoiding my br**sts as much as possible. He wasn’t trying to cop a feel, which was something, I supposed.

He took a few deep breaths before gasping and falling back with a low, pitiful moan. “She’s fire.”

Ethel screeched at him. “Master needs a real answer. What does that mean, she’s fire?”

The cypher just began to shake his head, over and over. “I don’t know. I’ve never seen anything like her. She burns, deep inside, like fire incarnate.”

That statement seemed to finally snap me out of my stupor. I studied the yellow-stained wall and channeled my rage. Yes, I did burn. I touched a fingertip to the table below me. It was all I could reach, but it would be enough. Burn, baby, burn.

“Stop that!” Ethel screamed at me. I couldn’t imagine how she thought that would actually make me stop.

“Blood. If I touched her blood, it might help me know what she is,” the cypher gasped, seemingly oblivious to the blue fire that was swiftly engulfing the table I lay on.

“Blood, yes, her blood,” the demon snarled, bringing his snapping teeth down to my neck. I screamed, finally unable to hold it back.

The door burst open and the strange girl from the lobby stood there, holding a ridiculously huge gun in each hand. She didn’t hesitate, leveling the one in her right hand straight at the cypher, and taking his head off clean with one quick shot. It exploded, splattering the room, breaking my concentration for a long moment while I stared at the strange girl.

Ethel screamed and screamed, but the girl’s rough bark of a voice somehow drowned her out. “Banish the demon, or your head is next, hag.”

Something about the girl’s voice and the words she used triggered some kind of recognition, and I studied her, shocked and stunned.

The demon roared, scuttling towards the girl with it’s nightmarish gait. “Now or never, hag,” the girl barked, and the hag began to chant, her voice breaking in panic.

It was suddenly easier to breath in the room, and I let my flames abate as I realized that the demon had just disappeared.

Ethel chanted for a few more beats and then just stopped, raising her hands in a sign of peace to the girl. “He’s gone. Caged away. He’ll make me pay for that.”

The girl nodded, her face expressionless. It was then that I was positive of her identity. Her next move proved it. She raised her gun and shot the hag in the head, taking it clean off.

I shut my eyes in relief.

“The walls are still burning,” Caleb told me, in that strange girl’s voice.

I nodded. “This place is going to burn down. I got the fire too deep into the walls to stop it.”

I began to sit up, but Caleb was there, in that strange body, picking me up. “You’re seriously off of your game today, Jillian. That hag shouldn’t have been able to hold you so easily.”

I couldn’t argue. He was right. My injured body combined with my absent healing regeneration had seriously crippled me in there. It was embarrassing, especially in front of badass Caleb. “The fact that I attempted something like that at all should tell you just how off of my game I am at the moment.”

“Yes, that was amazingly idiotic. You need to bite the bullet and go see Dom.” He carried me out of the building in that tiny body amazingly fast, not even breathing heavy under my weight.

“I can walk,” I told him. He set me down, taking me at my word. I sighed, knowing I owed him now. “Thank you, Caleb. You know I owe you.”

He smiled, a cold little smile, just as creepy in that girl’s face. “Yes. Never a dull moment with the sisters. So what’s your plan now? Hopefully it’s something better than this fiasco.”

I sighed again, tired and unhappy with the way things had turned out. All of that, and I still had this f**king geas on my wrist. At least I had tried. “First, I need to stop by our house and grab some clothes. Then, possibly a quick trip to the spa.”