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that gave me hope that I could get past the lesser devil without anyone noticing.
    I smiled at him and began nodding my head. Like chicken hypnotism, the tactic works pretty well on the lowest class of devil, because they have such limited intelligence that they are often reduced to mimicry. After a moment, the devil’s wide mouth opened in a wet, fangy grin and his broad head began nodding back at me as I sidestepped his wide body and started to pull my arm gently from his iron grasp.
    The tactic seemed to be working for a moment, but then an explosion from the front of the room and a burst of louder chanting pulled his limited attention away from me and the trance snapped.
    His grip on my arm tightened.
    I braced myself on both legs and leapt off the ground, swinging my right leg into his groin. He snarled in pain and let go of my arm to grab the breached area. I used the momentum of my kick to launch myself over his head and onto my hands behind him. As he turned to come after me, I sprang away from the floor and landed in front of the door on my feet again.
    He followed me through the door. I was waiting for him just to one side as he lumbered through with a spit-filled snarl. My hand whipped through the air and the belt of crosses swung around his thick, scaly red neck. It began burning him as I reached to grab the ends that were crossed behind his neck and pulled as hard as I could. He howled in terror and pain, while the hundreds of tiny, platinum crosses seared through his leathery skin and embedded themselves into the flesh beneath. “To Hades with you, fool. For God hath tired of you.”
    One final cry sounded on the quiet air and I quickly pulled the belt away from his neck and ran for the Viper. I felt the first tendrils of cold as I lowered myself into the Viper and screamed, “Secure and climb.”
    Although I hadn’t logged any directional information into the Viper’s information unit, it lifted straight into the air, through the open door in the ceiling of the warehouse and kept climbing as I began to pray. The hair on my arms stood up as my fear-thickened fingers jabbed instructions into the directional panel.
    ~SC~
    Mx. Deaver was probably waiting for me in that empty church somewhere in the city. But Hades if I knew where. The Viper had continued to climb until my stiff fingers managed to pound the address of the Church of the Twined Hands into the directional information unit but I wasn’t sure it would even find the church since we didn’t know where the hell we were.
    Fortunately for me, the Viper was equipped with a directional system that didn’t need visual information to function. I felt it turn sharply and smoothly to my left, which I judged to be south of where we were and take off on silent wings of air. The screens came up after about ten minutes and I could see the lighted skyline of Angel City in the distance.
    I sighed my relief. Apparently the thing in the warehouse hadn’t been told to come after me, though it had obviously been waiting for my return. I had felt the cold, electric presence as I’d jumped into the Viper. I glanced at my watch and smiled. It was a few minutes before nine. I wouldn’t even be very late.
    The Church of the Twined Hands was in an upscale part of town that had been an abandoned hellhole until about eighteen months earlier. That was when the city decided to orchestrate a comeback for the beaten down area and the mayor had created encouragement, in the form of tax breaks and low-interest loans, for people to purchase and rehabilitate the battered-down buildings.
    The renovated area now sported the latest in modern architecture. The stainless steel and glass structures that predominated on Bridge Street looked cold and sterile in the bright light of day. At night, with no sunlight to burnish their sterile faces, they were downright dingy looking.
    However, even the street’s older buildings were a magnet for the wealthy, childless, people who seemed drawn