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“a slow process.” There was “a dearth of suitable candidates” but one would be selected as soon as “humanly possible.” Ileana suspected the truth was that the Legion was losing interest in the hunt. It was prohibitively expensive, for one thing, not to mention risky—and not just for the hunters, as the circumstances of Alec’s death testified.
    She drew a circle in her mind now, of the kind witches were said to use to contain demons when they summoned them. A thick ring of powdered gypsum made iridescent by a tincture of silver dust (not plain blackboard chalk, as so many movies depicted it). Within its protective boundary she allowed certain memories to take shape. Memories of that terrible day in 1992, of the incomprehensible feeling of being a stranger—a prisoner—in her own flesh, a helpless observer of the depraved, degrading acts her flesh performed. The things her hands reached for, the objects she put in her mouth. On the worst days, the days when her own continued existence seemed too oppressive to contemplate, she forced herself to think of all the reasons she had to go on living. In the years before Alec died she’dalways managed to come up with three or four, sometimes even half a dozen, but since he’d been killed she found herself falling back on just one: revenge. But now, as she checked her pulse against the second hand of the watch he’d given her, she put aside ideas like hand , like mouth , let go of words like revenge and reason . She forced herself to reach past the limits of bone and blood, of muscle, tendon and ligament. Any athlete could train those parts of the body. The real key was endocrinology. The glands, the hormones they secreted. Before Francois Dumas had poured himself another shot of Cocker Spaniard, Ileana’s liver and kidneys had neutralized the alcohol she’d consumed, even as her pineal and pituitary and thyroid glands replaced it with a finely calibrated chemical cocktail no mixologist could’ve dreamed of, let alone concocted. Epinephrine to boost her heart rate and insulin to stimulate the metabolism of glucose, endorphins to increase her resistance to pain and serotonin to keep her focused.
    If you could somehow distill the microliters of fluid she produced in the few seconds before she entered the hotel lobby, they wouldn’t have filled a teaspoon. Yet by the time she entered the room Ileana had become as taut as a wire, knew she could outrun an Olympic sprinter, outbox a heavyweight. For the next several minutes at least, she was a match for any human being in the world, save perhaps Antonio Soma. Her only real advantage was that the Mogran didn’t know that.
    Mogran was another word she tried to avoid, at least while she was hunting. She thought of him only as a demon—a demon whose circle of protection just happened to be a human being named Antonio Soma.
     
    When she emerged into the lobby, however, her quarry was already gone. Damn it, she cursed. She swung by the desk and shot a glance into Soma’s cubbyhole. The note was still there. That, at least, was good news.
    She went up to her room and took a moment to collect herself. Itwas every bit as important to power down, as it were, as to prepare for a fight. To neutralize the chemicals that had been released lest they leave her nervous system so highly strung that it crashed. There was a liter bottle of water on the dresser—a local brand, Source of the Nile—and she opened it, drained half at a gulp. Sinking on the bed, she closed her eyes and reviewed what she knew about this particular demon.
    It had first surfaced in Singapore. It was a hard place for a white face like Ileana’s to disappear, but the demon had been in the grip of the frenzy, and she knew it wouldn’t be paying much attention to the local scenery, archaeological or human. But it had been difficult to pin down for precisely the same reason. It must’ve jumped twenty times in half as many days, leaving behind a trail of