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anything to go wrong. She would have to draw on every resource she had. Permit no interruptions. No mistakes.
    She walked back into the area of the house where she spent most of her time. For a moment, Elizabeth saw it as a human would have seen it, were they free of her glamours: a derelict place, furnished with only a few threadbare chairs and a sofa that had not been sat in for decades and probably would no longer bear weight. Faded walls. Water bottles left over from the terrible thirst that had so long racked her but had now departed along with her immortality. (Elizabeth found that she still drank from them often, but it was now merely a matter of habit.) Her old stove, the same one that had once burned wood in the nineteenth century, which now glowed with a very different kind of flame. Broken glass strewn along her blue floor, the shards so familiar to her that she stepped through them easily, without hesitation.
    Nadia would have had to wind her way through all this to reach the back room.
    Elizabeth sat cross-legged in the middle of her floor, book in front of her, then unbuttoned her dress far enough to allow the shoulders to slip down her arms. The burned flesh there stuck to the fabric, and she had to tug it away; the pain was as meaningless as the stray spider at the hem of her skirt.
    Without her having to speak, or even consciously think of what she wanted, the Book of Shadows fell open to a symbol she had drawn there long ago. The One Beneath had showed her this more than a century past, pooling a victim’s blood into the precise markings He needed. She had pressed this page against the symbol, and the maroon stains still held every line perfectly.
    She held two fingers to the symbol, checking the sweep of those two lines—then lifted her hand to her upper arm. Yes, the arc and angle were correct. Although Elizabeth knew this by heart, when it came to this, she wanted to make utterly, completely certain.
    The front door opened.
    Elizabeth was only startled that so much time had passed without her realizing it, but communing with her Book of Shadows could have that effect. “Enter, beast.”
    “You know, if Asa doesn’t work for you, you could just call me Jeremy.” The demon sauntered in as if she were to do his bidding, instead of the reverse. “ Beast is rude.”
    She flicked her hand toward him, calling up spell ingredients without even having to ask, the malachite ring around her finger automatically providing the grounding. Asa staggered backward, gripped by pain of some nature she didn’t bother to recall. As he slumped against the wall, she said, “You let your human guise deceive you. Don’t believe that you have their freedoms. Their souls. It will hinder me and hurt you, when once again you face the truth of what you are.”
    “How kind—of you—to remind me,” he gasped. But already he was straightening; the pain had been vicious but had not lasted long. She had gauged it well. “Name your task.”
    “For now I only want you to stay close to Nadia Caldani and her friends.”
    “Difficult, seeing as how Mateo remembers Jeremy Prasad’s death. And Nadia’s more than far enough along in her training to know a demon when she sees one.” Asa lifted his chin, attempting to display a bit of his earlier nonchalance; it would have been more convincing if his skin weren’t still shiny with the cold sweat of pain.
    “Do what you can,” she said. “I still don’t understand how Nadia made him her Steadfast. No man should be able to hold that power. They’re trying to learn more about the fate of the Laughtons, which is meaningless on its own, but could lead them too close to things they cannot discover.”
    Asa’s eyes darted over to the stove, to the unearthly glow that flickered through the narrow slits of its door. He understood. Good.
    “Eventually they’ll think they can use you to get to me.” Elizabeth slid her dress back on her shoulders, once again felt the distant sting