Isaac let out a shout and fired his weapon, but that was like shooting a rubber band at a charging bull: The bull didn’t notice and you just lost what had held your newspaper together in a tidy roll.

Jim shoved the soldier out of the way and attacked in a lunge, his body tackling the zombie into the wall. The moment impact was made, the image of Devina’s face overlaid the decimated features of the man whose body she’d taken control of, the morphing reconfigurement smiling in satisfaction at him.

Like she’d won already.

Jim went for the stab in a quick, powerful jab, the crystal knife penetrating between the set of eyes that were corporeal as well as the pair that were metaphysical.

A screeching sound exploded from the zombie and a shaft of black smoke shot up in a vile stench, the dark fog coalescing, and then making a beeline for the front door. At the last second, it flashed under the wooden panels, sure as if it had been sucked out from the other side—and in its absence, the body of Matthias’s second in command crashed to the floor like the bag of bones it was, the source of its animation no longer held within the bounds of its flesh.

“Now it’s fucking dead,” Jim said as he breathed heavily.

In the shocked silence that followed, he looked over his shoulder at Isaac. The guy’s eyes could have given truck tires a run for the money in the diameter department, and water was dripping off of him, Adrian and Eddie having emptied the barrels of their crystal guns over his head to protect him.

Good move. Except . . . the evil hadn’t even tried to go for the soldier. It had taken off in the opposite direction.

Jim’s mental circuits went Las Vegas on him, his instincts screaming that this was wrong. All wrong. Second chance at getting to Isaac . . . and Devina had passed. Again.

Why had—

Like a curtain being wrenched back from a window, the landscape of the game suddenly became clear to him and what he saw rocked him to the core. Holy fucking shit . . .

Abruptly unsteady, he threw his hand out and caught himself on the wall.

“You are not the one,” he said bleakly to Rothe. “Oh, God save us all, you’re not the one.”

As Grier Childe burst into the archway in from the kitchen, Isaac spoke up. “We’re okay. Everyone’s okay.”

Which was only accurate to a point. Sure, Devina had apparently pulled an Elvis and left the building. And yeah, no one in the group glowed with an unholy shadow and Jim’s neck was no longer doing the OMGs. But they were far from hunky-dory.

The urgent question now became . . . who was that demon after? Which soul were they fighting over?

The cell phone, Jim thought.