“Time is of the essence,” Malina explained as their cars’ security systems chirped at them. “I think we’ve shielded ourselves from divination, but if they somehow penetrate it and know we’re unprotected now, they may have time to repeat the hex that killed Waclawa and wipe us out all at once. I’m sure they have demons ready and waiting to aid them.”

“The clock is ticking, eh? How long do we have?” I wasn’t worried about being found through divination; no one but the Morrigan could find me that way, thanks to my amulet. And Leif had nothing to worry about either, because it’s tough to divine dead guys, and they’d have to know he was involved ahead of time before trying.

“Once they begin the ritual, perhaps as little as twenty minutes. Follow us and we’ll talk on the phone.”

Leif became a little bit envious as he watched the witches pull out in front of him. “Those are very nice toys. What do they do for a living?”

“Consulting.”

“Really? What sort of consulting?”

“Magical, I guess, in the sense that they magically draw a salary without truly consulting anyone.”

“How very clever of them. Though I suppose it is not all that different from real consultants.”

“Malina made the same observation,” I said as we turned left onto Rio Salado and headed for Rural Road to catch the 202 east. My cell phone began to play “Witchy Woman,” and I said, “Speaking of whom, she probably wants to consult with me on our plan of attack.” I flipped open my phone and cooed, “Hel-loooo,” with my voice gliding up into an interrogative tone at the end.

“You’re sounding remarkably cavalier about this confrontation,” Malina said, her Polish accent pronounced. She was already getting herself into a snit.

“I’m simply living in the moment and enjoying it. The near future holds a kill-or-be-killed situation, so I am sucking all the marrow out of life while I can. Leif has a crush on your car, by the way.”

Malina ignored all this and said, “We are traveling to Gilbert and Pecos, so we’ll be heading south on the 101 right after we get on the 202. They’re on the top floor of a vacant three-story building. Something’s waiting for us on the bottom two floors, but we couldn’t see what it is.”

“So you and your sisters are going in while Leif and I wait outside?”

A cold silence greeted me for a few beats, then Malina said, “No, it’s going to be the other way around.” I could almost picture her grinding her teeth as she said it.

“Oh, that’s too bad, because we were going to stop off at Starbucks and get a couple of lattes while you took care of this.”

“That’s the famous vampire Helgarson you’re riding with, isn’t it? Is he fond of lattes?”

“I don’t know.” I looked over at Leif, who was grinning—he was hearing both sides of the conversation, of course—and said, “Malina wants to know if you like lattes, and I want to know if you’re famous.”

“No to both,” he said, as we screamed onto the 202 on-ramp.

“Sorry, Malina,” I said to the phone. “He’s not famous.”

“Perhaps it would be better to call him infamous. It is irrelevant at this point. What is relevant is that my sisters and I are not great warriors. Were the odds even and they did not cheat with modern weapons, I would say, yes, we could walk in and win a magical battle against most opponents. But we are outnumbered more than three to one.”

“How many are there?”

“Twenty-two. Some of them have firearms, but they are not great warriors either. And while they may be expecting you, Mr. O’Sullivan, they will not be expecting Mr. Helgarson to get involved. I imagine the two of you together will be quite formidable.”

“She’s complimenting our martial prowess, Leif,” I said to him.

“I feel more manly already,” he said. The short distance on the 202 was already covered and we were merging onto the southbound 101.

“Hey, Malina, tell me how much you want to see us play with our swords.”

Leif threw back his head and laughed. Malina’s accent thickened to the point that her English was nearly indecipherable. “Mr. O’Sullivan! You will stop this unseemly innuendo immediately! How someone so old can be so immature and inappropriate is beyond me. Try to refocus your attention on our goal, please.”

“Oh, right, right. My apologies.” I grinned, completely unrepentant. One day I’d get her so mad she’d give up on English entirely and just cuss me out in Polish. “I suppose you were going to explain what you and your sisters will be doing once we arrive.”

“We will be setting up an illusion around the perimeter of the building so that it will appear to ordinary citizens that nothing unusual is happening, even if there are gunshots and explosions and hexen being tossed out the windows. We will also prevent any of them from escaping, should they take it into their heads to flee your … giant, mighty swords.”

Leif and I both had a good laugh at that, and I could almost see Malina rolling her eyes as she sighed noisily into the phone, signaling that she hoped we would get the silliness out of our systems soon, now that she’d thrown us a bone.

“We will also take care of the blond one when we get there,” Malina added, when she felt we’d wound down sufficiently to understand her.

“Oh? Why didn’t you do it already?”

“Because then they’d know you gave her hair to us. It is better they not know for sure we are working in concert until it’s too late for them to plan around it.”

“All right. Then we’ll be responsible for twenty-one witches. Plus whatever demons they have hanging around.”

“Correct. All of whom you must kill quickly. They will almost certainly begin Die Einberufung der verzehrenden Flammen as soon as they know we are below, counting on their defenses on the bottom floors to hold until they’re finished.”

“You’re talking about the infernal hex that killed Waclawa. They call it, what—The Summoning of Consuming Flames?”

“Yes.”

“Could they target Leif with this ritual?”

“Absolutely. The demon involved in the ceremony provides the targeting. They don’t need hair or blood or anything else to find someone. It’s why I’m a bit uncertain about our shielding from divination.”

I looked soberly over at Leif. “That trinket I gave you won’t save you from that,” I said. “It’s only good for hellfire attacks thrown at you using line of sight. So the bell tolls for thee, my friend, if we let it toll at all. You’ll go up like a Roman candle.”

“Then our best defense lies in the speed with which we dispatch them?” Leif asked.

“That’s right.”

“Is the Roman-candle expression accurate? What happens if they are successful?”

I relayed the question to Malina, begging her pardon for asking her details of Waclawa’s death.

“I cannot help you there,” she replied. “We didn’t see it happen—I’ve never seen it happen. We see only the aftermath. In this case, we got the report from Detective Geffert.”

“Geffert!” I exclaimed. “I knew I’d heard his name somewhere before! He visited you in your condo, didn’t he?”

“Yes. You know him?”

“He’s the one who’s been pestering me recently. You have his hair in a jar, don’t you?”

“Yes,” Malina confirmed.

“Very interesting. That might come in handy later. But look, for now, we’ll move fast once we get there. We’ll put a couple of grenades through their windows and maybe take out a few if we’re lucky, then we’ll move in downstairs.”

“Did you say grenades?”

“Yeah, we have a couple of RPGs, so we’ll be starting out with a bang. Hope your illusion can contain explosions.”

“Where on earth did you get RPGs?”

“Garage sale across the street,” I said. We rang off so that Malina could share the news with her sisters. Leif put in a call to Antoine, the leader of the local flesh-eating ghouls, as we exited onto the Santan Freeway and headed east to Gilbert Road.

“Antoine. I have an all-you can-eat buffet coming up real soon. Load the boys into the truck. It is a three-story building on Gilbert and Pecos. Twenty-two witches on the menu, some of them carrying demon spawn.”

I didn’t have the same quality hearing that Leif did to pick out the individual words, but by his tone Antoine sounded pleased.

After exiting the freeway, the building soon towered above us on the south side of Pecos, as much as any building in Gilbert could be said to tower over anything. The Phoenix metro area tended to sprawl instead of build up, and three-story buildings in these suburbs meant a fairly ritzy office address. This building had been meant to house multiple businesses, but once the recession hit, it never scored a single tenant. Architecturally, it sported large glass walls with periodic steel-reinforced columns of cement blocks; some attached wedgelike structures of painted, textured Sheetrock provided just a wee bit of rakish modernity and broke up its boxlike sterility. Streetlights revealed that it was painted largely in beige, gray, and sage green along its solid parts, while the wedges were the color of sun-dried tomatoes.

The building sat right on the edge of the street, with a large empty lot to the south. We parked there, and they surely saw us if they had the most rudimentary watch set. The single entrance faced the parking lot, to the left of center. Leif and I mounted the RPGs to our shoulders and cautioned the Polish ladies to stand away from the breeches in the rear. Malina said not to worry; they were going to spread out and surround the building as best they could right now. We should just aim high so they wouldn’t be in the line of fire. I chose the top left corner of the building, where a lookout was most likely to be watching us, and Leif chose a wall of glass on the third floor to the right of center. We carefully aimed through the optical sights, then pulled the triggers on the count of three. The rocket trails hissed above the witches’ heads and hit at first with a dull thunk, followed shortly by the sound of shattered glass and the concussive shock wave. That would get their attention.

“Clock is running now. They’re going to come after us with that hex for sure.”

I groped for the two swords in the trunk and figured out by touch which one was Fragarach. I slung it across my back and handed Moralltach to Leif.

“Let’s keep them camouflaged for a surprise. Once they’re covered in blood they’ll be visible, but the first couple of critters we run through will wonder where the swords came from.”

Leif chuckled, slipped his arm through the strap, and said, “Oo-rah.” We had about a sixty-yard dash to make it to the building, since we had parked some distance away. We both drew our swords and advanced, and I took a grenade out of my pocket too. I could feel the battle madness coming on as I ran, a cocktail of adrenaline and testosterone and a heightening of my senses. In the old days, Celts used to charge into battle na**d, wearing nothing but a torc around their necks. I’d fought my share of battles like that—very recently, in fact—but I’d long since found I could run faster when my goodies weren’t flapping around between my legs. Now I even wore shoes, because there was no way I’d be able to connect to the earth here anyway. The sum of my magical power was stored in my bear charm, and I hoped I’d have little occasion to draw on it. Fragarach would have to do my work for me.

When we arrived at the entrance—two very large glass doors with brushed-metal handles—we saw nothing but an empty lobby faced in dark granite and two hallways near the back, one of which presumably led to the stairwell and the other to the elevators. Leif was going to drive his fist through the glass, a dramatic announcement of our arrival, no doubt, but I asked him to wait. With a little concentration and a little expenditure of magic, I was able to unlock the door by binding the bolt to the open position. I then tore out the pin of the grenade with my teeth, opened the door silently, and tossed the grenade to the back hallway on the right-hand side, where I assumed the elevators were, along with anyone (or anything) waiting in ambush. It rebounded off the back wall and, thanks to the angle, disappeared down the hall so that we would be safe from shrapnel when it went off.

It exploded satisfactorily, but we heard no screams of dismay. We entered and shuffled forward, swords raised defensively, and I asked Leif, “You smell anyone?”

The vampire shook his head and said, “Not on this floor. Only dust.”

That relaxed me somewhat, and I almost got squashed to Druid marmalade because of it. A huge column of basalt fell from above as I squared with the dust-clouded hallway, and only my peripheral vision and reflexes allowed me to roll out of the way in time. It crashed loudly onto the floor of the lobby, shattering the tile and sending aloft a small spray of ceramic shrapnel. But then the column of basalt didn’t lie still, the way stone should. It moved, back and up, until I saw that it was attached to something much larger looming in the cloud of hallway debris—namely, the torso of a very large basalt golem, with eyes like pilot lights set deep in a boulder it used for a head.

“Another behind you!” Leif shouted, and I rolled again as a second massive arm smashed the tile where I’d been lying into ceramic tortilla chips. This one had been waiting in the opposite hallway, guarding the entrance to the stairwell. I was back up against another glass wall with a single door in it. Beyond was a large, undeveloped office space, with a bare concrete foundation, no dividing walls, open ductwork in the ceiling, and plenty of room to dodge a couple of golems.