I don’t know what I expected to see. Certainly not the “monster” she considered herself to be. She was beautiful, but not in the way that Circe is. Not curvy and elegant; she had none of the fineness of features that belonged on the covers of fashion magazines. Her features were sharper, more foxlike than feline, with intelligent eyes, sharply defined cheekbones, thin lips that were curled into a wicked combat smile, and a body like a dancer’s. Small breasts, long limbs, superb tone. She wore black formfitting clothes with lots of pockets and cross belts for weapons. On a strap slung across her body was a compact Micro Tavor-21 Israeli bullpup assault rifle with an extended thirty-two-round magazine. Very sexy. She reminded me of Grace. Not in looks, but in her air of competence and lethal potential. It took a single microsecond to take all of this in.

“How many?” I yelled.

“Too many,” she said. “Two full teams. Twenty at least.”

“Christ.”

“Maybe more in front.”

We looked at each other in the way soldiers will on a battlefield, gauging each other’s competence and skills. It was a lightning-fast conversation that would have been slowed down by words. She nodded to me and I nodded back.

The hail of bullets slowed and I heard men yelling orders. They were coming.

“Call it,” I said.

“Front,” said Violin.

“Back,” I agreed.

She spun around and ran in a fast crouch toward the store; I pulled a grenade out of my pocket. Not a flash-bang this time. As shadows filled the destroyed doorway I pulled the pin and threw it.

“Ghost—frag out!”

Ghost flattened behind the corpse.

The grenade hit the floor right inside the door and took a short bounce just as the second wave of Sabbatarians rounded the corner. The frag exploded at waist height, blowing the men apart. There were terrible screams from the attackers who hadn’t been in the direct blast radius. Men and women. Then gunfire.

I dove forward and slid chest-first to the doorway, my pistol out in front, and even before I stopped sliding I began firing. I emptied the second magazine into the mass of them, shooting for the center of any man-shaped shadow, firing the magazine dry as bullets tore through the air three feet above me. They couldn’t see me through the smoke, and the confusion was too great for them to grasp that I was shooting from a prone position.

Ghost barked, wanting to be in the middle of this, but this was a gunfight; there was no place for him.

Behind me the front door was blasted to splinters by heavy-caliber gunfire. A second later I heard the distinctive pop-pop-pop of the compact MTAR-21. And more screams.