“Backup for what, Frank?” the first officer said. “We’ve got nothing here.”

“Maybe he ran into the club,” Frank suggested.

“You want to check it out?” I didn’t like where this was going. Put a couple of guns into a bacchanalian setting and eventually those guns are going to be used.

“Yeah,” Frank said, “let’s go. That guy looked pretty dangerous.”

I looked pretty dangerous? There was something dangerous in the club, all right, but it wasn’t me. I had to do something quickly, so I decided to go the Three Stooges route, since the two cops had moved next to each other before tackling a club full of horny twenty-somethings. A Druid’s ability to see the connections between all natural things and bind them together encourages mischief at times, and while I usually did this sort of thing for an immature laugh, now I would be saving their lives. I muttered a binding between two sets of skin cells so that they couldn’t bear to be parted a second longer—specifically, the skin cells on the first officer’s right palm and the cells on Frank’s left cheek. I broke the binding as soon as it was consummated, and the effect was that the first officer gave Frank a beauty of a bitch slap.

Frank reacted as any American might to being slapped unexpectedly in the face by his partner. “Ow! You dick, Eric! What the f**k?” Now I knew both their names. Frank lashed out and laid one on Eric before Eric could explain it had been an involuntary muscle spasm, and then it was on. Watching two cops have a slap fight was a pretty amusing way to pass an idle moment or two. I’ve rarely been so entertained while waiting for someone.

Eric had the advantage in terms of reach, but Frank was much faster. Frank was landing two or three slaps to every one of Eric’s, and after a half minute of that, Eric had damn well had enough. He turned his openhanded slap into a fist, crunching it into Frank’s nose. Frank yelped and staggered backward, raising his hand to his face. It came away drenched in his own blood.

“Oh, shit, I’m sorry, Frank,” Eric said, holding his hands up.

“Sorry isn’t going to make it better,” Frank growled, and he bull-rushed his partner and wrapped him up in a textbook tackle. Eric managed to twist as he fell so that he landed on his shoulder, keeping his head from hitting the pavement. They rolled around a little bit, back and forth, neither getting the advantage over the other, but eventually Frank came up on top, rage driving him to dominate his larger opponent. He landed a couple of solid punches on Eric’s face, and then they were both bleeding. Eric boxed Frank’s ears and threw him off to the side but didn’t pursue him. They were both dealing with more pain than they were used to, so they were content to lie there bleeding, sling various anatomical epithets at each other, and accuse their mothers of sexual adventures with farm animals. Good times.

Laksha still hadn’t returned, and no one had exited the club in all this time. The music continued to thump through the walls into the night, and I wondered if I should start worrying.

The police officers hauled themselves slowly to their feet and plotted to blame their injuries on me. Their story would be that I had hit them with my baseball bats, broken both their noses, and escaped. They’d get worker’s comp for fighting, and I’d get an APB for assaulting an officer. Great.

As they returned to their patrol car to radio their lies to the station, I heard what sounded like faint screams coming from the club, a high-pitched top note to the techno pulse. Laksha emerged with a wicked grin on her face, and then more people came spilling out behind her, some of them in nothing but underwear, clearly panicked and fleeing for their lives.

Laksha’s grin faded as she saw the lights of the police car but didn’t see me. She kept coming straight ahead to clear the press of the stampeding mob, and I hissed at her to get her attention.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“Use your other senses. I’m in camouflage.”

Laksha’s eyes rolled up and then she spied me standing off to her left. “Ah, excellent.”

“What happened?” I gestured at the club.

“I killed twelve Bacchants, as we agreed,” she said pleasantly.

“Is that why these people are panicking?”

“Partially. But mostly it’s because there are three more in there and they’re tearing people in half.”

Since I’m an Irish lad, I’m already fairly pale, but that intelligence turned me from eggshell white to bone. Either Malina’s divination had been incorrect or a few bonus Bacchants had arrived late in the game. “Well, why didn’t you kill them too?” I asked.

“Because we agreed on twelve.”

“I’ll be sure not to fetch you any extra apples, then. Where are they?”

“I’m sure they’ll be coming out after me soon enough. They’ll be the ones dressed in white sheaths stained with wine and carrying staves. Bloodthirsty look in their eyes, chunks of meat in their teeth—you can’t miss them.”

She wasn’t kidding. A particularly piercing scream drew my gaze to the entrance, where a diminutive brunette in a white nightie had seized a much taller woman by the hair and a fistful of fabric at the small of her back. As I watched, this tiny woman—who could not have weighed more than 110 pounds—heaved the larger one off her feet, spun her around like a discus thrower, and slung her in a high, shrieking arc across the parking lot, over our heads, to land ruinously on top of Frank and Eric’s patrol car.

I almost wished Granuaile could have seen it; she wouldn’t have thought the Bacchants were victims anymore. Laksha laughed, somehow thinking the poor woman’s death was funny. We had different senses of humor, I guess.

I couldn’t stay back any longer. Not only was it clear that Laksha had done all she was going to do, but now the police would be getting involved. I had to eliminate the threat before bullets started flying and ricocheting off the Bacchants’ magic hides. There was no danger of being lured into their orgy now; the happy time was over and the madness had begun.

Still in camouflage, I charged the wee Bacchant as she tore after another panicked clubber. A second Bacchant emerged from the club, bloodstained and wrathful, eyes bulging as she grabbed a full-grown man and broke his back over her knee in one of those wrestling maneuvers that simply wasn’t for show. Too late to save him, but not too late for the fellow the tiny Bacchant was after. As she seized him by the collar of his Dolce & Gabbana shirt, I came in low with the bat in my left hand and swept her legs out from under her so that she fell ungracefully on her backside. She made the sound a cat makes when you step on its tail, and now that I was closer I was surprised at how young she was. She had probably been pretty once, with a name like Brooke or Brittney or maybe Stacy. She might have been captain of the cheer squad and a homecoming queen, driving to school in a pink Cabriolet her daddy had bought for her. Now, however, her nails were more like claws, and her teeth were filed to points, and she had blood dribbling from her mouth—and it wasn’t hers. I brought the bat in my right hand down hard on her face before she had time to leap back up. I even hit her again to make sure she was through, regretting the necessity and thinking that one never quite gets used to crushing skulls. Then I looked up to track where the other Bacchant went.

She was coming for me. She couldn’t see me, but she knew something had just taken down her sister and it was still nearby. This one had never been pretty. Her hair was the frizzy, curly kind that looks like a halo of shag carpeting, and it was matted with blood and pieces of recent victims. She had a beaklike nose, a single eyebrow above it like a malevolent, hairy caterpillar, and the same pointed teeth that the smaller Bacchant had. Her arms looked like flabby shanks of lamb, but there was a preternatural strength inside them. I know because, when I took a swing at her with the bat in my right hand, thinking I’d clock her upside the head, she felt it coming somehow and broke it in two just by doing one of those wax-off moves from The Karate Kid. Now holding half a bat with some sharp splinters at the end as I followed through, I had to think quickly as she kept rushing forward, reaching for me with a clawed right hand, and bringing her left one back around. If those got hold of me, I wouldn’t stay in one piece for very long. I shifted my grip on the bat handle so that my thumb was on the bottom instead of the top, and as her nails dug painfully into my left shoulder, I stabbed down with the sharpened splinters of the bat into the side of her neck where it met her collarbone. That set her back some, and she yowled as she released me to deal with it. I dissolved the camouflage on it so that she could appreciate what was causing the pain. She jerked it out as I backpedaled and shifted the bat in my left hand to my right, and though a fountain of blood spurted forth, she didn’t appear to feel faint: She actually accessed a whole new level of pissed when I already thought I’d never seen anyone madder.

I stepped to my right as quietly as I could and watched her scream away what little mind she had left. Regardless of her incredible strength, that was a mortal wound, and she couldn’t last much longer while losing that much blood. Bacchants aren’t great healers, and she couldn’t see through my camouflage, so I thought all I’d need to do now was wait a couple of minutes and make sure she didn’t hurt anyone else. But the damn thing took a deep breath to scream some more and smelled me.

The bloody broken bat suddenly became a wooden stave thrown at my heart, as she turned and chucked it uncannily in my direction. I had to drop to the ground to avoid it, and before I could roll away, she was on me. Quickly, I thrust the second bat up crosswise toward her throat, dismissing its camouflage too, hoping she’d take hold of it rather than groping for my neck. If she got hold of my head, she could tear it clean off. She took the bait, grasping the bat at either end and trying to wrench it free from my grasp. I held on for the first spastic attempt, but just barely. Her blood was dripping steadily down on me, ruining my camouflage and supposedly sapping her strength, but I could tell she was still a couple of oxen ahead of me in the muscle department. She gathered herself for a truly mighty yank, and as she did I knew I had to end this before she could use it against me. So when she yanked a second time, I didn’t even try to hold on but rather let go, which caused her to throw her hands up over her head as she unexpectedly met no resistance. That left her completely unguarded, as I intended, so I drained the last of the power stored in my bear charm and channeled it all into my left shoulder and arm. I rose in a stomach crunch and plowed my fist hard into her chin. The impact broke the first joints of my index and middle fingers, but it also snapped her neck.

That solved my immediate crisis but left me with several others. Completely drained of magical energy, I couldn’t begin to heal or shut down the pain. And all the weariness of my earlier casting of Cold Fire came back to settle heavily on my frame, even as the shag-haired Bacchant settled heavily astride my hips. There were still panicked clubgoers streaming out of Satyrn, and Frank and Eric, the broken-nosed cops, were heading my way with guns drawn. To top it off, I was so drained that I couldn’t maintain the camouflage spell any longer, and I became clearly visible to them. This just wasn’t the right time or place to have this fight, and that’s why I lost it.

Oh, were they happy to see me again. Not only was I visible, but so was my sword that had disappeared earlier, and a woman with a giant bloody wound was lying on top of me. Never mind that the sword was still in its scabbard and I was lying on top of it; never mind that a cursory forensics inspection would reveal that the wound wasn’t a sword wound; in their minds I had just about decapitated the poor woman with a bad hairdo.

So it was hands up, roll over facedown away from that woman, spread your legs, take off that weapon, and then a pair of cuffs around my wrists as half-naked people continued to run away, not from me, but from whatever horror awaited inside. Once I was subdued, it gradually dawned on them that I wasn’t much of a threat to the public: The public was freaking out about something else. Frank thought he should maybe take a peek inside.

“Don’t do it, Frank. One of them is still in there.”

“You shut up,” Eric said, poking me in the ribs with his gun. Authority established, he asked, “One of what?”

“These ladies in white that have been killing people. If you have to go, use your baton, not your gun.”

“Right,” Frank said sarcastically. “Ladies in white killing people. Like this very dead lady in white right here. We’ll be sure to follow your advice.”

Frank went into the club gun first, while Eric tried to take Fragarach away from me, which was resting by my side on the asphalt. It was bound so that it couldn’t be moved more than five feet away from my body, and, unlike camouflage, it wasn’t a spell that depended on my current power level to be maintained. It would stay bound to me until I dispelled the binding, so Eric was about to lose a fight with an inanimate object. He was so surprised by it pulling away from him the first time that he dropped it. He tried again, and dropped it again.

“What the hell is going on? Are you doing that?” he asked.

“Doing what, Officer? I’m facedown in the parking lot with my hands cuffed behind my back. What kind of bullets do you use?”

“Shut up. Full metal jacket.”

“Please tell me they’re copper jackets.”

“I said shut up. They’re steel.”

“I was afraid of that.”

“Shut up.”

Eric was about to pick up my sword again, but he was distracted by the sound of shots being fired in the club. Nine of them, out of those modern guns the police carry, at a Bacchant with immunity to iron. And then we heard a man screaming horribly over the techno thrum.