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blasting electricity at the nasty thing. As with Nathaniel, my spell caught only a little of the demon. The electricity also didn’t slow it down a bit, even though I could smell barbecued demon in the air.
    I ran down the hall after the demon, which was wickedly quick. The doctor reached out and grabbed my ankle as I went by.
    The sudden halt in my momentum made me stumble, and my second blast went wild, spraying electricity into the wall. Smoke rose in the air, setting off the hallway sprinklers. The pix disappeared at the other end of the hall.
    “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I said, stomping down on the doctor’s fingers with my other boot. The doc howled and released my ankle, and I took off down the hall after the pix, Nathaniel close behind me.
    “I thought we were not harming innocents?” he murmured.
    “Just stay focused on the task at hand,” I snapped.
    Nathaniel chuckled quietly.
    The demon, of course, was gone when we reached the end of the hallway. The sprinklers had obliterated any trail of goo that the pix might have left behind.
    I stopped in front of a bank of elevators, staring at Nathaniel with a mixture of annoyance and hopelessness, water pouring over us.
    “This is so freaking irritating,” I said. “Why can I take down a Grigori, a shapeshifter, and a nephilim on my own, but you and I together can’t defeat one scavenger demon?”
    “The difference is that the others wanted to defeat you, so they stood and fought. The pix wants to survive, so it is not foolish enough to face two creatures that it knows very well are more powerful than it is.”
    “Don’t try to be logical,” I said. “I’m ready to say to hell with it and go home.”
    “You are?” Nathaniel asked, tilting his head curiously.
    “Well, no,” I admitted. “At this point I just want to kill the stupid thing out of spite.”
    Then we heard a sound like a muffled explosion, and the building trembled beneath our feet.
    “What was that?” I asked, my eyes wide.
    We ran to the windows, but what we could see of the streets below did not appear any different than it had been when we arrived earlier.
    “Perhaps there is a television we can check,” Nathaniel said.
    “There will definitely be one in a patient’s room,” I said.
    We peeked into a room and found it empty. I wondered why more patients hadn’t come rushing to their doors when they heard the ruckus in the hallway. I supposed it meant that most of them were unable to get out of bed without assistance, and that probably meant almost everyone on the floor was elderly, terminally ill, or both. The thought made me very grim. If the vampires got into the building, these people had no chance at all.
    It was also more than a little strange that the hospital staff hadn’t rushed to the floor. Strange, and probably ominous. It meant there was something going on that was more pressing than a smoke alarm on a patient floor.
    Nathaniel found a remote and turned the television on. A daytime talk show was running, the host interviewing the starlet of the moment. He flipped through the channels—cartoons, reality TV, sports highlights.
    It seemed wrong that the rest of the world would go on as normal when it felt like we were in the middle of an apocalypse. But most programming was broadcast out of New York, and the stations wouldn’t interrupt their regular schedule even if the world was coming to an end.
    “Find a twenty-four-hour news network,” I said. “Or a local channel. They probably can’t get enough of this story.”
    The twenty-four-hour networks would be making hay out of this for weeks. There’s nothing a news channel likesbetter than a major tragedy and a big pile of bodies to go with it.
    Nathaniel continued cycling through the channels. “Why do humans need so many useless programs?”
    “That’s a question I’ve been asking for years,” I said. “You should ask Beezle. This is his favorite time of day, programming-wise.”
    “Yes, I am familiar