“Ow,” I panted, very aware that something at the end of the hall was standing up. But at least now it wasn’t in my head. My heart beat, and that hurt, too. Oh God, I’d never held this much power before. And I stank. I reeked of burnt amber. What the Turn was going on?

With a pained determination, I squeezed the protection circle in my mind until the energy slipped back through my chi and into the ley line. It hurt almost as much as taking it in. But when I unspindled the ever-after from my thoughts to leave only that which my chi could hold, I looked up past the snarls of my hair, panting.

Oh, God. It was Newt.

“What are you doing here?” I said, feeling coated in ever-after slime.

The powerful demon looked confused, but I was still too out of things to appreciate its shocked expression: either a smooth-faced adolescent boy or a strong-featured female. Slender of build, it stood barefoot in my hallway between the kitchen and the living room. Squinting, I looked again—yeah, the demon was standing this time, not floating, its long, bony feet definitely pressing the floorboards—and I wondered how Newt had managed to attack me when I was on hallowed ground. The addition to the church, where it stood now, wasn’t sanctified, though, and it looked bewildered, wearing a dark red robe that looked somewhere between a kimono and what Lawrence of Arabia might wear on his day off.

There was a soft blurring of black ley line energy, and a slender obsidian staff as tall as I was melted into existence in Newt’s grasp, completing the vision I remembered from the time I had been trapped in the ever-after and had had to buy a trip home from Newt. The demon’s eyes were entirely black—even what should be the whites—but they were more alive than any I’d ever seen as they stared at me unblinking down the twenty feet that separated us—twenty tiny feet and a swath of hallowed ground. At least I hoped it was still hallowed ground.

“How did you learn how to do that?” it said, and I stiffened at the odd accent, the vowels that seemed to insert themselves into the folds of my brain.

“Al,” I whispered, and the demon’s almost-nonexistent eyebrows rose. Shoulder against the wall, I never took my eyes from it as I slid upward to stand. This was not the way I wanted to start my day. God help me, I’d only been asleep for an hour by the looks of the light.