"Silence!" At some point the Shadowlord had retrieved his club, and he was stroking it as he loomed over them.

"You know if you think that looks threatening . . ." Diana nodded toward the club. ". . . you're so wrong. It's screaming, 'hey, girls, look at my big subst.i.tute.'"

She'd been a little worried she might provoke him into actually using the club, but, fortunately, he went with the personal touch. The backhand lifted her off her knees and threw her back over the steps of the dais. Moving around to face Kris had placed her at exactly the right angle, no brainer to figure he'd lash out, and she grabbed the wand as she sprawled over it, stuffing it down into the front of her pants.

Diana'd seen the same stunt on a television show once. On a seventeen-inch screen it hadn't looked as painful as it really was. Bells and whistles were still going off inside her skull as a pair of meat-minds hauled her onto her feet and dragged her back before the Shadowlord.

"Foolish little girl. I should kill you where you stand."

"Not actually standing here ... Ow!" The dangling she could cope with, but the shaking was a bit over the top. "Besides, you can't kill me or you'd have already done it. And do you know why you can't kill me?" For the same reason she hadn't used the wand the moment her fingers closed around it. "Because you're not the Big Bad." She was not wasting their one chance on a flunky. "Killing me would release all sorts of energy down here. Energy you can't control. That's why you didn't kill me . . . us," she corrected, glancing over at Kris. ". . . before. That's why you can't kill me now."

"I can't, but that from where I came, can." Diana blinked. Even her eyelashes hurt. "What?"

"I speak of the Pit. The Darkness. The . . ."

"Yeah. Okay. I get it. You can't. h.e.l.l can. It may have split you off, and given you a personality, of sorts, but it still keeps you under its thumb."

"That's not . . ."

"Hey, denial; not just a river in Egypt. Face it, h.e.l.l's just using you. In fact, there really isn't a you at all. You don't have a name, you don't have an ident.i.ty; you're just an itty-bitty part of a greater whole. h.e.l.l doesn't trust you with any real power." As the last words left her mouth, Diana knew she'd made a mistake. The Shadowlord had been frowning as he listened to her, clearly not liking what she had to say, possibly not liking it enough to challenge h.e.l.l and cause a distraction, allowing her to seal the hole and shut down the segue thus saving the world, but at trust, he smiled.

"Of course, h.e.l.l doesn't trust me," he said calmly. "h.e.l.l is me. And I am h.e.l.l."

"A little-bitty part . . ."

"Enough. Your blatant attempt to drive a wedge between me and my origin might have worked were we in the sort of fairy tale where the good guys always win, but we're . . ."

"In the subbas.e.m.e.nt of an imaginary shopping mall," Diana finished as dryly as her current position allowed. Oh, great, I'm starting to sound like Claire.

He stepped forward and pressed the end of his club under Diana's chin, forcing her head back. "What part of 'enough' are you having difficulty understanding?"

"Well, duh; the part where I do anything you say."

"Then perhaps you should consider this . . ." Had he been breathing, his breath would have caressed her cheek. As it was, she felt a faint frisson of fear spread out from the closest point between them, as though his proximity caused an involuntary physical reaction. "... I can't kill you, but I can bludgeon you senseless."

"Right. Enough; adverb. To put an end to an action." Clearly she'd been paying more attention in English than biology, and she really, really wished he'd back away. "As in enough taunting the Shadowlord. I should stop it. I can do that."

"Good."

"Is there any particular reason you asked the three-thousand-year-old, reanimated Egyptian mummy that's been sucking out your life force if there was anything we could get her while we're at the mall?"

"I was just being polite," Dean protested as he turned off Sir John A. MacDonald Boulevard and onto Highway 33.

"She's sucking out your life force," Austin repeated, enunciating each word with caustic clarity.

"And that's a reason to be rude, then?"

"Some people might think so."

"Some people might be after jumping in the harbor; that doesn't mean I'm going to do it."

"So, just out of curiosity . . ." He hooked his claws in the seat as the truck maneuvered around another corner. ". . . what would be grounds for rudeness in your book?"

Dean's brow creased above the upper edge of his gla.s.ses as he thought about it.

After a few moments, Austin sighed. "Never mind."

There'd been discussion about Austin remaining at the guest house to keep an eye on things, but in the end they'd decided it was too great a risk. Without Dean there to snack on, there was always the chance that Meryat would turn to the cat and the cat didn't have life force to spare.

"Although it's entirely possible she can't feed from me."

"Why?" Before Austin could answer, Dean had raised a hand, cutting him off. "Because you're a cat."

"Does there need to be another reason?"

"Is there ever another reason?"

The guest house had proven it could take care of itself.

The mall parking lot was about half full. Fully three quarters of the parked vehicles were minivans, which was disturbing mostly because Dean didn't know how disturbed he should be. Or why. Just to be on the safe side, he parked next to a white sedan with Ohio plates.

"I'd feel better about this if I could go in there with you," Austin muttered as Dean pulled an empty hockey bag out from behind the seats. "Do you remember the plan?"

"Find a spot by the food court, place the bag on its side with the zipper open, place the dish of cold Red River cereal in the bag, close the bag while the basilisk is eating, only look at it with this piece of mirror." Dean held up the sideview mirror that had broken off the truck on his first drive to Ontario a year and a half ago. The support had snapped, but the gla.s.s was fine, so he'd hung on to it. "You're sure it'll come to the cereal, then?"

"It's got to be hungry, and that stuff's close enough to chicken feed it'll never know the difference."

"I can't believe we're ..."

". . . utilizing local resources to disable a metaphysical threat."

Dean stared at the cat.

Austin stared back.

"Well, when you put it like that," Dean said at last. He opened the door and stepped down onto the asphalt. "Try to stay out of sight. The windows are open and you've got lots of water, but I don't want some good Samaritan calling the cops on me because they think you're suffering."

"n.o.body understands my pain."

"You can say that again," Dean sighed as he closed the door.

The parking lot felt soft underfoot. It wasn't the heat, even though it was hot enough to paint his T-shirt to his body, and bright enough to light it up like Signal Hill; it was as if the asphalt itself was rising around each boot and trying to drag him down. Not exactly what had happened to Claire and Diana the morning he'd dropped them off since they'd left visible footprints in the tar and he had no actual evidence that this was going on anywhere but in his head. No footprints. No smell of melted tar.

Just a feeling. Accompanied by the certainty that things on the Otherside had gotten worse instead of better.

Things always get worse before they get better, he told himself and didn't find it very rea.s.suring. He wanted to help. He couldn't help. All he could do was make sure that when Claire came home, she wouldn't be facing a life-sucking reanimated mummy. Given the condition of the parking lot, it didn't seem like enough.

He found himself walking with an exaggerated, high-stepping gait. And he wasn't the only one. Across the lot, two kids, one around three, the other no more than five, were walking the exact same way. The funny thing was, their mother, Dean a.s.sumed it was their mother although she could have been a babysitter, didn't seem to notice. Her feet were dragging with the unmistakable exhaustion of someone who'd just spent the morning with two preschoolers in a shopping mall.