I hurled the pencils into the web. For a second, the small package stuck to the slime, and then the web around it shivered and wrapped over it, twisting and winding, over and over, until the pencils disappeared from view and only a thick cocoon of slime remained. The rest of the pearly curtain flowed, replacing the web that had been used up by the cocoon.

If I tried to bust my way through the walls or run through the slime, I’d be wrapped up like a mummy ready for burial faster than I could blink.

New plan. I pulled out my knife and worked a square of the parquet floor aside. Concrete. Great. Just great. That’s the second time I had gotten trapped after breaking and entering. Maybe God was trying to tell me that I should give up my life of crime.

I dug in my duffel bag and pulled out the small flask of alcohol. The chair yielded a leg, the medkit gave me the gauze, and once I soaked it in alcohol, I had myself a torch. I set it on fire and carried the torch up to the wall. The flame licked the slime. The web bit at the torch, jerking it, and I let go a fraction of a second before the slime touched my fingers.

The torch stuck to the wall, cocooned in webbing. Fire didn’t work. Fire pretty much always worked.

I looked around. Throwing something heavy at it wouldn’t do either—there was too much web and the walls were solid enough that I’d have trouble breaking through.

Think, think, think…

My gaze snagged on the staff.

I walked up to the desk and grabbed the phone. Phones were strange. Sometimes they worked during magic and sometimes they didn’t. The phone clicked, once, twice, and I got a dial tone. I fished a card out of my wallet and dialed the number.

“Ullo,” a familiar Russian voice said, dripping fatigue. “Yesli ehto ne catastropha…”

Well, it looked like a catastrophe from my end. “Hi,” I said. “This is Andrea.”

“Oh, hello.” A new life came into the voice. “How are you?”

“I’m great. Never better. Hey, listen, I have a staff here I thought you might be interested in. It’s about six and a half feet tall, part wood and part bone. There is writing on the shaft and a face with a mustache. Interested?”

Roman fell silent for a second. When he came back on the line his voice was calm. “Can you read the writing?”

“Some of it looks like runes and some of it is Cyrillic. Let’s see, the top one under the face looks like backward number four, then e, then p, then something that looks like capital H except it’s lower case…”

“Are you holding the staff now?” Roman’s voice was still very calm.

“No, it’s in a case.”

“Do not touch the staff. It’s a very bad staff.”

“Noted.”

“Where are you?”