Jonathan scoured the room for the blond point of Andrew’s hair, but he could only see the masses of demons surging toward the bar. They climbed over one another as they tried to get to the slayer. Someone honored the Chosen One’s request—Drusilla and the Dollies music pumped out of the speakers again. Jonathan couldn’t make out many of the lyrics over the noise in the club, but he was pretty sure that the chorus included Drusilla screaming the word anachronism.

On top of the bar, the slayer used the Dowsing Rod of Vem to beat back a crush of yellow-and-orange-striped demons. The loose-skinned bartender took a paring knife to the shoulder. A terrifying mass of wailing tentacles burst out from beneath the flaps on his face. The slayer banged the tentacles away with the metal lid of the bar’s ice bin until the demon fell back. A citrus zester plunged into the eye of an encroaching chaos demon. As he fell, his antlers cut down most of the demons in a three-foot radius of him. The slayer laughed and portaled away again.

A scuffle on the balcony made Jonathan look up. The green glow reflected on the ceiling told him exactly what was up there. The staircase became a deluge of bodies—those charging toward the slayer and those already in retreat.

As demons began raining down from the balcony, Jonathan hurried to wind as much of the shrink ray’s extension cord around his arm as he could. Mentally, he cursed Warren for talking him out of making a wearable battery for the shrink ray. If he lived through the day, he was definitely going to go back to work on a backpack battery. It would have been way easier to lug around than this giant orange cord.

A shadow fell over Jonathan’s face. He heard a shout increasing in volume before he clocked the vampire body about to drop on his head.

A hand pulled him out of the way. The vampire smashed to the floor exactly where Jonathan had been standing. Looking back at his rescuer, he was shocked to see the salt-and-pepper hair of the now-sole proprietor of the Metaphysical Boutique.

“Mister Ripper!” he cried.

“For God’s sake, kid,” the warlock said with a grimace. “It’s Ripper. Just Ripper. You make me sound like a senior citizen with all that Mister bollocks. I’m only in my forties, you know.”

So were Jonathan’s parents, but that didn’t seem like welcome information. Instead, he heaved the last of the extension cord’s slack over his shoulder, one eye on the ceiling in case of additional falling bodies.

“What are you doing here?” he asked Ripper. “I thought you hated us. Not all of us. Angelus, for sure. And Spike, probably. Maybe Anya too. I guess—no, yeah, I do mean all of us.”