“If it pleases you to do so. I am but a servant,” the skull said with another nod. The contempt in its tone held steady, though. “Shall I allow him to pass?”

“And be quick about it,” the Grey Ghost snarled.

“As it pleases you,” the skull replied, speaking noticeably more slowly than a moment before. It vanished into the floor.

I held very, very still. Motion was the hardest thing for a veil to hide, and I suddenly realized that the one-shot, one-kill plan had a serious flaw in it: I had forgotten to account for Evil Bob. The spirit was powerful, intelligent, dangerous—and apparently incapable of anything resembling fear or respect. I suppose that after a few decades of working with Kemmler, the most dangerous necromancer since the fall of the Roman Empire, it was difficult to take a lesser talent seriously.

Not that regular Bob was exactly overflowing with respect and courtesy. Heh. Take that, bad guy.

In any case, I had a chance to find out more about the enemy. You can’t ever get too much dirt on these cloaked lunatics. Frequently, learning more about them exposes some kind of gaping hole in their armor, metaphorical or otherwise. I’ve never had cause to regret knowing more about an enemy before commencing a fight.

Besides. If the Grey Ghost was a part of some kind of partnership, instead of operating alone, I had to know about it. Bad-guy alliances were never good news.

The Grey Ghost stepped away from the pit. In fewer than thirty seconds, the ground rippled again and a man appeared, arising from the ground a bit at a time, as if he were walking up a stairway. The skull came with him, floating along behind, just above the level of his head.

I recognized him at once: the leader of the Fomor servitors who had come after Molly. He was still dressed in the black turtleneck, but had added a weapons belt with a holstered pistol beneath his left hand and a short sword at his right. It was one of those Japanese blades, but shorter than the full katana. Wakazashi, then, or maybe it was a ninja-to. If it was, minus points for carrying it around out in the open like that.

Oh, there was something else odd about him: His eyes had changed color. I remembered them as a clear grey. Now they were a deep, deep purple. I don’t mean purple like the dark violet eyes that lots of Bob’s romance-novel heroines always seem to have. They were purple like a bruised corpse, or like the last colors of a twilit sky.

He faced the Grey Ghost calmly and bowed from the waist, the gesture slow and fluid. “Greetings, Lady Shade, from my master, Cantrev Lord Omogh.”

“Hello. Listen,” the Grey Ghost replied, her tone sour, “what does Omogh want from me now?”

Listen bowed again, purple eyes gleaming. “My master desires to know whether or not your campaign is complete.”