"Sssssend him to usssss."

That wasn't creepy or anything. "My schedule is kind of full today," I called. "How's next Tuesday for you?"

"Thrice we asssssk and done," hissed the voice. "Sssssend him to usssss. Now!"

I took slow, steady breaths to keep the fear at bay and think. I was pretty sure that whatever was out there, it wasn't interested in talking. I was also pretty sure that I didn't want to toddle out onto that narrow, mist-clouded stairway to start a fight. But I wasn't the only one in the room. I looked back at Mac.

"I don't want to bring any trouble into your place, Mac," I said. "You're my host here. I'll take it outside if you want me to."

In answer, Mac made a growling sound and worked the action on the shotgun, pumping a shell into the chamber. Then he reached under the counter, produced a heavy-caliber automatic pistol, and put it on the bar within easy reach.

Thomas showed his teeth in a predatory grin. "I'm leaving bigger tips from now on."

"Right," I muttered. I gestured at Thomas to move a few steps back, and made sure that neither of us was standing in Mac's line of fire to the door. I focused on the black stone. It would start there. "Hey, creep!" I called, lifting my left hand. "You heard the man. Kisssss my asssssss!"

"Ssssso be it," hissed the voice from the stone.

And the black stone exploded.

I was ready for it, though. I'd already prepared the defensive spell, and I poured my will into a thick wall in the air in front of me as fragments of glossy black stone flew around the room. They bounced off my shield and went zinging, shattering one of my empty beer bottles on the table, slamming into the wooden columns, and gouging wood out of the walls. None of them got to Thomas, Mac, or me. I'd put the shield between us and the black stone while our attackers wasted time in negotiation. It wasn't as good as the shield I could have thrown up if I had managed to replace my old shield bracelet, and I couldn't hold it up anywhere near as long, but I didn't need to.

Once the explosion had passed, I dropped the shield, already focusing my will upon my other hand, gathering a cannonball of raw force, and at the first flicker of motion outside the door's glass, I snarled, "Forzare!" and sent it hurtling forth.

Force hammered into the door, and turned maybe fifty pounds of leaded glass into a cloud of razor-sharp shards. The stairwell down to Mac's place was sunken-there was no way any of the shrapnel could fly out at street level.

An instant later, the bottom half of the door exploded into flying daggers of wood. My shield stopped anything heading toward Mac, but I couldn't catch them all. One of them clipped my left cheekbone broadside-if it had tumbled for another fraction of a second, the sharp end would have driven right into my brain. As it was, it hit me like a baseball bat, stunning me and knocking me down.

The world did that slow-motion echo-chamber thing that happens sometimes with a head blow, and I saw our attacker come in.

At first, I couldn't translate what I was seeing into something that made sense: It looked something like those giant spinning, whirling tubes covered in strips of soft cloth at an automated car wash, the ones that actually shampoo your car. Except it wasn't a tube; it was a sphere, and it wasn't at a car wash; it was rolling in through Mac's doorway.

Mac's shotgun went off, the sound of it slapping me in the back. Those things are loud in an enclosed space. Dust and bits of scrap cloth flew out of the attacker, but it didn't slow down. The giant rag ball hurtled toward me, until Thomas dashed in from the side and smashed it with a roundhouse swing of one of Mac's heavy oak tables.

Quick bar fighting tip for you-in real life, when you hit a guy with furniture, it doesn't break into pieces the way it does in the movies. It breaks whoever you hit with it. There was a meaty sound of impact and the rolling shape's forward momentum was instantly converted into a perpendicular line drive. It streaked across the room, trailing streamers of grey-brown cloth like a ragged comet, the cloth flapping and snapping with unnatural volume until it hit the wall with a solid thwack.

Another fighting tip for you: Don't stay on the ground. If you don't know exactly what you're up against, if you aren't sure that the guy you're fighting doesn't have a buddy coming along who might help, you can't afford to be down and relatively motionless. My body was already moving, though I wasn't sure how it was doing that, pushing me back to my feet.

Mac put a hand on the bar and vaulted up onto it like he did it all the time. The attacker bounced off the wall, rolled across a tabletop, and fell to the floor in a heap. Mac took a pair of quick steps to get a better line of fire, and boom went the shotgun again. Another cloud of scrap cloth and dust flew up from the attacker.

The room lurched back into normal speed. Dozens of strips of the dark sackcloth came flying off of the thing, twining in an instant around chairs and tables. A chair flew at Thomas, knocking the table out of his hands, and he was forced to dodge to one side instead of closing in. Mac's shotgun bellowed three more times, and I hurled another lance of force at the thing. Mac's shells did nothing but create puffs of debris, and my own arcane strike split and flowed around the thing, shattering a chair and smashing in a portion of the wall behind it.

And it laughed.

Furniture exploded out from it, flung with superhuman force. My shield barely caught the narrow edge of a table that had been flung like a Frisbee. Thomas's legs were scythed out from under him by a flying bar stool, and he hit the floor with a huff of expelled breath. Mac had already thrown himself down behind the bar-but when another table hit it, there was an enormous cracking sound, and several pieces of wood broke under the impact.

A shape stirred in the writhing mass of ash-colored sackcloth and rose, its outline veiled but not entirely obscured by the cloth. It was lanky-tall, and had to stand hunched over to avoid the lazily spinning blades of the ceiling fans. It was more or less human-shaped, and I was suddenly struck by the realization that I was looking at a humanoid who was wearing some kind of enormous, ungainly garment made of all those restless, rustling strips.

It lifted its head slowly and focused on me.

It didn't look at me-it didn't have any eyes, just smooth skin laced with scars where they had once been. Its skin was pearly grey lined with darker stripes that made me think of a shark. Its mouth was gaping open in a wide grin that reinforced the impression. It didn't have teeth-just a single smooth ridge of bone where teeth would have been on a human. Its lips were black, and its mouth smudged with more of it. Twin trails of saliva drooled from the corners of its mouth, leaving black streaks to down past its chin. There wasn't a hair to be seen on its head.