Mr. Lemmy started to call him something. He got as far as “ass—” before six little girls in gingham dresses pulled him from the fountain. His last thought was, I would have switched to glitter.

Salzman looked back over his shoulder. To his surprise, the boar wasn’t behind him anymore. It was the puffer fish. The boar was running as fast as it could the other way.

“Shoot it!” he yelled and dove to the side of the vampire bar.

The Russians aimed their rifles and Zavulon pulled out a Tokarev pistol the size of a small dog. They all began firing at the same time.

Not that it did them much good.

The Russian thaumaturgic armor was designed to withstand bullets and magic, not a red-hot, one-ton spiked ball smashing into them like an infuriated bulldozer at thirty miles an hour. They were tossed around not so much like bowling pins as like Barbie dolls in a cement mixer. When it was over, Fluffy lay on his side, slowly deflating, his iridescent glow fading. If any of the Russians had been able to glow, their glows would have been fading, too.

A minute later, when he was sure he was safe, Salzman crept from his hiding place, stepped over the Russians’ bodies, and went back to searching for the box.

The boar continued its swift and gallant retreat from Fluffy, running straight past the Caleximus congregation, trying to get back to the elevator. As it neared the Abaddonians, they began to fall back to the escalator. Tommy didn’t fall back. He just ran.

“Uh, Dark High One?” said Adept Six. “Perhaps we should think about, and please don’t take this as a lack of faith, retreating just a bit?”

“Hold fast, everyone,” said the Magister. “Lord Abaddon will protect us.”

He threw out his arms and growled deep in his chest, intoning an eldritch undersea spell that hadn’t been heard on land for thousands of years. It was a bubbling sound mixed with strange harmonic overtones, like bees in a bubble bath. The air around the Magister darkened. A pool of brackish water formed at his feet, smoking and boiling. The adepts and acolytes cheered their Magister—for most of them, it was the only time they’d ever seen him do anything even vaguely mystical (for Adept Six, it was the first time he’d seen the Magister do magic that might actually accomplish something). The Magister reached into the seething pool and drew out a handful of superheated seawater, a boiling ball of white-hot liquid plasma. Noting their master’s seemingly awesome magic, the adepts and acolytes crept back up the escalator, fanning out behind him.

“Behold the wrath of Abaddon,” the Magister yelled. He reared back to throw the plasma, waiting for the boar to get close enough to see its demon eyes.

And his back went out.