“Oh, hey, Anya, could you refill the bat-blood Cambro? We’re getting low after the lunch rush,” Human-Mike said, slopping his wet mop over the footprints in the entryway. The sudsy water turned pink as he wrung out the mop into the yellow bucket.

“Not now, Mike!” Anya said, her voice deepened to its most threatening demonic rumble. She blew out an annoyed sigh and tilted her head apologetically at Andrew and Jonathan. “Dang it. Now we have to start over. Would you guys mind wishing again?”

The two boys obliged, albeit with slightly less oomph than the first time.

“Wish granted,” Anya intoned with all the gravitas she could muster while wearing an indoor visor. She thought about taking it off but didn’t want to get yet another lecture from Human-Mike on maintaining a professional appearance behind the counter.

She waited for her amulet to glow, imbuing her with the full might of Arashmaharr. But it didn’t happen. Searching inside herself for the feeling of power and connectedness that she usually felt in her demon form, Anya found nothing.

She still felt human. Just wrinkly and human. The worst of both worlds.

Her face heating up with an embarrassed flush, she cleared her throat and tried again. “Wish granted!”

And again, she felt nothing. No wellspring of unlimited creation. Not even a hiccup of power. Complex Wishes like bringing someone back from the dead meant creating a pocket dimension where the killing blow had never happened. Normally when Anya set out to create a new Wishverse, her magic became linked to the ever-expanding infinite schema of timelines and universes. She should have been able to sense all the other worlds created by vengeance demons. Worlds where losers were heroes, the dead lived, where only famous people worked in coffee shops and constantly fell in love with their customers.

She couldn’t even sense the world without shrimp.

Something was definitely wrong.

Andrew shifted his weight uneasily from foot to foot while Jonathan skittered out of the way of Human-Mike’s passive-aggressive mopping.

Anya gripped her amulet between her thumb and forefinger. It was cold to the touch and refused to glow, no matter how much she mentally begged it to connect her to its Creation magic.

“This almost never happens,” she said, flinching a sheepish smile at the boys. “Unless the Powers That Be have a particular reason for not wanting someone to stay dead. Your friend wasn’t politically important, was he?”

“He was an intern at City Hall,” Andrew said.

“So, no,” Jonathan said.

“He was really good at building robots,” Andrew said. “Do you think that they want him to stay dead so he won’t accidentally create Skynet?”

“I knew we shouldn’t have called the party-bots T-800s!” Jonathan said, stamping his foot. Blood splattered out of his canvas sneakers. “Even as a joke, I knew we were tempting fate!”

“Oh, this is your friend who makes the femme-bots?” Anya said. She had a vague recollection of Andrew talking ad nauseam about the genius of his friend turning some old toy parts into automaton girlfriends. Anya had been fairly disgusted by the idea of women created only to “party” with Andrew’s little gang and had stopped listening in favor of wondering if she could honor the vengeance Wish of a robot against its creator. She supposed if Warren stayed dead, she’d never get to find out. Heaving a sigh, she said, “This glitch is probably just a paperwork thing. I haven’t been into the office since I moved to earth. Let me call my supervisor real quick.”