Ket sweeps her hands out in another fluid motion, and the rest of the coven is unveiled around me—Sulis, Brixia, and Marcus Cheng, all standing over chalk symbols reflecting their elements. They’ve been here all along, waiting for this moment, hidden by the camouflage of Ket’s magic: disapparition and the control of unseen matter. Hope needed to be close to the picnic grounds, the coven needed space to perform their ritual, and the glassworks factory met all the requirements. In a brief phone call with Ximena on Wednesday morning, I’d formally accepted the witches’ offer to exorcise Azazel, and this was the location we’d settled on to see things through. They wouldn’t help me with my half-cocked rescue, or with the deadfall I was arranging for my enemies in Colgate Woods … but they’d at least agreed not to get in my way.

Rasputin scrambles to his feet just as Sulis launches a ball of swirling fire his way. He blinks out of its path, reappearing several feet over, but the sorceress seems to have anticipated the move. Like a boomerang, the miniature comet suddenly redirects, unfurling into a rope of flame—catching the edge of Rasputin’s robes just as he resolidifies. The magical blaze spreads fast, leaping hungrily up his sleeve, and the undead cleric frantically tears the garment from his body.

“Forget him, sister,” Brixia interjects calmly. “He’s about to become quite too busy to bother us.”

As she speaks, a small shadow darts silently into the moonlit reaches of the upper story, and then dives—dropping like a stone at Rasputin’s head. Only when its wings snap wide to catch the air, two feet from its mark, do I realize it’s a familiar owl. Bursting into an expanding plume of smoke, it catches the cleric’s attention at last, and he whirls just as Viviane Duclos leaps from the twisting cloud, already lunging into an attack. Immediately, he reverts to his trusty disappear-reappear trick, but she’s done pretending to be fooled.

Viviane’s body moves in a way I can’t comprehend, faster than should be possible. Her hips rotate, her spine bends, and her foot catches Rasputin in the chest before her hands have even cleared the space where he was standing a moment earlier. The cleric’s body launches back as if blown from a cannon, smashing into an outside wall hard enough to break through. Bricks fly apart as he ejects from the warehouse, exposing a slice of night sky, demolished mortar dusting the air.