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shadowed with horror. “I know,” she whispered. “What he did, what he did to me, I know—”
    “Who?” I had to keep her focused. This was the hardest moment of all, harder even than the pain of her death. “Who was it, Portia?”
    “You know,” she said. “It was the man in the boots.” She shuddered, and her eyes rolled up until the whites showed. “He isn’t a man.”
    “No,” Andy agreed. “He’s a demon. Portia, you have the gift, and we need you to tell us. You know what we need to know.”
    It was shocking, how suddenly her eyes rolled down to focus on his face again. “Yes.” The dark pupils expanded, consuming the brown around them until her irises were completely eclipsed. “There’s an abandoned train station next to the Amtrak station. That’s where he’ll be. But you have to get there fast.”
    “Does he know we’ll be coming?”
    “He made me tell him where you’d come to kill him,” she said. “Before I died. But I lied. I told him you’d kill him at your house.”
    That made me cold, because she’d warned him we’d kill him
in our house
, and his response? Go to our house. Spit in the face of destiny.
    That was just how confident our serpent was of his ultimate survival.
    “Thank you,” I said, and I pressed a kiss to her forehead. “You’ve been very brave, Portia. You’re a hero.”
    She smiled, just a little. “I just got murdered, that’s all. But you’ll get him for me, Holly.” The smile faded, and the darkness in her eyes grew to terrifying proportions. “Beware the dog.”
    I couldn’t hold her, and I knew it. Some resurrections are like that—minutes, at best. I’d been able to manage more than a day only a handful of times—and one of them had been Andy Toland, resurrected from his Old West slumber, more than once.
    But Andy, the most powerful resurrection witch who’d ever existed, had simply refused to leave that last time. And still he stayed, because of me.
    Portia couldn’t. She said nothing more, but she silently begged me to let her go, and I did. It was as simple, in the end, as letting go of her hands. The bond severed itself in our minds at nearly the same moment, snapping like a thin silk thread, and her body sighed and sagged and Andy and I eased it back to the steel table. Empty once more, and still.
    “I’ll see to her later,” Andy said. That, too, was something done by his brand of magic, not mine; he could unmake a dead body back to the tiny fragments of skin that had created the shell. In the hands of some witches that was a clinical, cold process, but not when Andy did it; he would see her put to rest gently and with respect. “We ain’t got much time now.”
    “I’ll get the case,” I said. My potions case—a square leather bag with holders for vials, each one filled and labeled—contained all the secrets the two of us knew, and that was considerable. Was it enough? It was hard to tell.
    First, though, we had to get out of the house.
    Lyons had dispatched new emissaries—a different group, larger this time, simmering with ugly energy. They crowded the sidewalk and overflowed onto our lawn. Andy, without being asked, loaded the shotgun and extra shells, and strapped on his gunfighter’s rig, with two six-guns. He also put on his leather duster, and a cowboy hat he particularly liked.
    Loaded for war.
    I just settled for a good pair of sturdy lace-up boots, a leather jacket, and a bad attitude.
    “Ready?” he asked me. I nodded, and hit the garage door opener. It rattled up, and I already had the car in gear, moving slowly but with purpose. I managed to get the garage closed again before anybody thought to rush the opening, at least, but that left us pinned, with the protesters swarming around us like angry wasps as we crept slowly down the slanted driveway.
    They were climbing onto the windshield, the hood, the roof. Clawing at the doors and hammering on the glass. Something metal hit the windshield and left a