“You two were here last week, weren’t you?” Rayne asked, narrowing his eyes suspiciously at the human boys. “Looking for some very specific spell ingredients. Kandarian fangs and a jar of infernal sands. Your friend claimed to have the Books of Ascension. Has he reconsidered selling them?”

“Oh, the Books of Ascension,” Andrew said, his shoulders sagging. “They sort of, um—”

“Blew up,” Jonathan finished for him.

“As did their friend,” Anya said.

“Ah, well,” Rayne said, his face relaxing into something like relief. “Demon Ascension is a sensitive business. It can easily overwhelm a magical novice. You’re keeping”—his eyes flickered toward the vampires lurking near the door—“hardier company these days. Feel free to take a look around, my friends. There’s nothing on the premises that could cause you harm.” He reached back, tapping a framed paper with an official-looking golden seal in the shape of a snake spitting fire. “We’ve been certified for vampire safety by the Church of the Eternal Night themselves. Won’t even eat garlic for lunch except on days off.”

“Then you must be delicious,” Drusilla said, floating down the stairs toward a display of tarot cards.

“We need some information on the boys’ magical arsenal,” Spike said flatly.

“Right,” Andrew said. “Warren bought a lot of stuff from here, but we were never sure what all of it did. And now that he’s gone he can’t tell us.” With a gulp, he glanced back at Angelus and cautiously held out his hand. The beefy vampire slapped the crumpled list into his waiting palm. Andrew flattened the page on the top of the glass counter. “We were hoping you could fill us in on the official names and combat stats of these.”

“Quite the list,” Rayne said, examining the contents without deigning to touch the paper. He squinted through his bruised eye. “Ah, you are the owners of the Ram’s Horn horn. Have you found much use for calling forth all the livestock of hell?”

“Not yet,” Andrew said defensively.

“Well,” Rayne said with a flick of his eyebrows. “Tracking down all of these would take quite a bit of time. Sure, the Urn of Fernda is well known for being adamantine—”

“Like Wolverine’s claws?” Jonathan asked, his face scrunched. “But it’s made out of clay, not metal.”

“Adamantine, not Adamantium!” Andrew said, whacking his friend with the back of his hand. “It means unbreakable.”

“So. . .like Wolverine’s claws,” Jonathan said slowly. “But clay?”

Rayne didn’t look up from the list. “These unknown items would be much harder to parse. For instance, who’s to say whether this ‘medieval knight’s gauntlet’ is the Glove of Myhnegon, which shoots lightning, or the Gauntlet of Hellfire or even just a spare bit of armor your friend found on a shelf? I’d need to go through our sales records and cross-reference to our inventory, which, of course, we keep by hand—”

“What needs cross-referencing, Ethan?”

A second British man with short, graying hair ducked out of the back room, holding a steaming mug that Anya could only assume was tea. She hadn’t lived on earth for long, but Anya did find it odd that there were this many English accents in one room in California. Between the warlocks, Spike, and his wild-eyed prophetess Drusilla, you could chart all London by cadence alone.