The robot thumped into the table again. The Gandalf staff clattered to the floor and rolled itself toward the west-facing door. Stupid useless prop.

“See what you did?” he scolded the robot. “What if that had been something breakable?”

With an impatient exhale, Jonathan set the video camera on the table next to the ugly clay urn and bent to scoop up the fallen staff. He used the blunt end to tap the robot, very lightly, on the leg.

“Just turn around,” he said. “Please?”

Much like a real girl, the robot ignored him. She continued to walk into the table, every step making the artifacts jump again.

Replacing the staff, Jonathan heaved a sigh and reminded himself that the girl was nothing to be afraid of. She, like all the robots, was mostly made of salvaged Furby parts. She wasn’t human. She wouldn’t scream at him if he touched her with his clammy hands. She didn’t have a withering stare or friends to make fun of him with.

He gingerly took her by the forearm.

A Klaxon sounded, replacing the music. The strobe lights’ flashes changed to burning red.

Heart in his throat, Jonathan jolted away from the robot girl and cursed into his headset. “Not funny, guys!”

He expected to hear Warren and Andrew snickering in his ear, mocking him for being afraid of offending a robot—they were always teaming up against him; he knew it was because he was the shortest—but instead Andrew’s voice came through in a shout.

“Perimeter breach! Perimeter breach! The side door is open!”

Jonathan’s breath caught as he imagined any number of Demondale’s evils crashing their party. Hungry vampires. Lizard monsters. Skyler the demon wanting the Books of Ascension back.

“It’s fine, moron,” Warren barked. Jonathan could see him behind the podium, face sweaty and strained as his new scorpion tail lifted above his head. “We practiced for this, remember?”

Practice had been taking turns aiming the bulky shrink ray at various things back at the house. Empty cereal boxes. Laundry piles. The least-prized of their action figures. There were bets on what would shrink or explode. The prototype was pretty much fifty-fifty on results. But either outcome would keep the party from being interrupted.

Hands over his ears to muffle the relentless drone of the Klaxon, Jonathan moved down the table toward the shrink ray. He struggled to hoist the weapon—which was shaped like a giant hair dryer with a glass bowl on the end—under his armpit. For an item created to make other things smaller, the ray gun itself was fairly heavy and hard to hold. The Trio hadn’t managed to find a compact power source for it yet either. Jonathan had to unwind the long orange extension cord and search the wall for a power outlet. Having his back to the room, even for a moment, made his hands start to shake. It took him three tries to insert the plug into the socket.

The robots, following their party-protocol, continued to dance to the sounding alarm as Jonathan staggered among them, dragging the extension cord. Sweat prickled his forehead as he swished the shrink ray from side to side, searching for the intruder. Every brush of an arm or flick of synthetic hair made him jump, imagining his own death at the hands—or fangs—of something huge and evil. Vampires had to be invited over the threshold of private residences—but could they break into an abandoned warehouse as easily as the Trio had? Jonathan hated the idea of being bitten. Even if a vampire decided to turn you into one of them, the transformation could make you an unrepentant douche canoe. Like Andrew’s older brother, Tucker, who, since becoming a vamp, refused to speak to anyone he’d known in his breathing life.