“I’ll bet you say that to all the guys who glue your stomach back together.”

“Call the Council,” Gard said. “Lodge the challenge.”

“I’ve got a better idea,” I said. “Tell me where Marcone is, I’ll go get him and bring him home, and this will all be over.”

She started pushing the next bit back in, while I waited with the glue. “It isn’t that simple. I don’t know where he is.”

I caught on. “But you do know who took him.”

“Yes. Another signatory of the Accords, just as Marcone is now. I have no authority to challenge their actions. But you do. You may be able to force them into the light, bring the pressure of all the members of the Accords against them.”

“Oh, sure,” I said, laying out more glue. “The Council just loves it when one of their youngest members drags the entire organization into a fight that isn’t their own.”

“You would know, wouldn’t you?” Gard rasped. “It’s not as though it would be the first time.”

I held the wound together, waiting on the glue. “I can’t,” I said quietly.

She was breathing too quickly, too hard. I could barely keep the wound closed. “Whatever you…nggh…say. After all…it’s your ass on the line.”

I grimaced and withdrew my fingers slowly, making sure the wound stayed closed. We’d gotten the last few inches, and the opening no longer gaped. “Can’t deny that,” I said. Then I squinted at her. “Who is it?” I asked. “Which signatory of the Accords swiped Marcone?”

“You’ve met them once already,” Gard said.

From downstairs Thomas suddenly shouted, “Harry!”

I whirled toward the door in time for the window, behind me, to explode in a shower of glass. It jounced off my spell-layered leather duster, but I felt a pair of hot stings as bits of glass cut my neck and my ear. I tried to turn and had the impression of something coming at my face. I slapped it aside with my left hand even as I ducked, then hopped awkwardly back from the intruder.

It landed in a crouch upon the bed, digging one foot into the helpless Gard’s wounded belly, a creature barely more than the size of a child. It was red and black, vaguely humanoid in shape, but covered in an insect’s chitin. Its eyes were too large for its head, multifaceted, and its arms ended in the serrated clamps of a preying mantis. Membranous wings fluttered at its back, a low and maddening buzzing.

And that wasn’t the scary part.

Its eyes gleamed with an inner fire, an orange-red glow—and immediately above the first set of eyes another set, this one blazing with sickly green luminescence, blinked and focused independently of the first pair. A sigil of angelic script burned against the chitin of the insect-thing’s forehead.

I suddenly wished, very much, that my staff weren’t twenty feet away and down a flight of stairs. It might as well have been on the moon, for all the good it was going to do me.