The pleasant officer who dropped me off at my house flew off almost as soon as I stepped out of the vehicle. The backwash of the jet stream made me gently sway as I watched the police cruiser takeoff at a 45-degree angle and almost sideswipe a traffic control buoy. I frowned to myself. That couldn't be legal, could it? I guess this case was really spooking the police involved. It seemed they really weren't ready for the dark creepy things to crawl out into the light where they could see them.

Shrugging, I turned and went into my home. Once inside, I could feel the tension from being around others for so long slowly unravel inside me. I plopped down in my comfy chair, and my hand absently lifted to caress the fine mahogany wood bookcase that was strategically in reach. A relaxed sigh escaped me. Home. Maybe later in the day I would go to the cellar and lift the two-ton duracrete plate in the ground, under which I kept my more expensive treasures. Touching our possessions and valuable objects is like therapy for those of our kind. It's hard to explain, but trust me, it beats a massage.

I sat like that for about a half-hour, just unwinding. It may have still been morning, but except for a few hours of sleep, I had been up for a while. I would likely be up for hours yet, perhaps days, since my biorhythm is not in sync with local phenomena such as the sun or moon.

Once I was sufficiently relaxed, I got down to work again. Concentrating a little, I put myself in the light trance favored for forcing the brain to operate at increased speed, comprehension, and retention and dug into the remains of a pile of books on the floor. There is a certain rhythm involved in such a study that defies description. I realize that most of these books were written by quacks and cover silly things such as tooth fairies and the aliens that built the pyramids; however, with the right state of mind, the brain acts as a sieve, shifting out the nonsense and capturing the few nuggets of truth buried in these stories. It helps to be psychic in these situations; not only do you go through these books quickly, but my heightened intuition worked well with my intuitive understanding of magic to make this kind of study possible.

Two hours later, I was done with the latest stack of books. A few kernels of new truths nestled in my mind, and I was ready for a snack. I laid the last book aside and lazily stood up and stretched, hearing the little pops and pings of joints just a little too relaxed. I moved over to the fridge and grabbed the rest of the cooked pig.

I willed my nails to sharpen a bit. I couldn't form talons anymore, but my nails were still as strong as the rest of me, and with a bit of effort, they worked almost as well. Stripping the meat from the bone, I gulped it down within a few seconds, paused to look at the big bare bone that was all that was left, and shrugged. I brought the bone to my mouth and, with minimal effort, reduced it to mulch and swallowed it. Good to the last drop. Ever since I arrived here, I had been almost constantly hungry with only varying degrees. The ambient energy was low, and apparently, I needed to function with a less efficient energy source. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed eating, but I never had to spend so much time doing it. Sometimes I even got an urge to raid a farm for sheep for a late-night snack. I would prefer not to get so close to my roots.

Washing my hands, I levitated my coat over to me and slipped my arms in. Now that I was relaxed and recharged, it was time to completely tense up again and follow up on the lead Jeremy had left for me. I paused as I left my house, looking fondly back at the somewhat humble estate behind me. I still doubted the missiles were a coincidence; it may be time to institute more thorough protections for my home. I had some minor protection circles that I had gleaned from my studies since I had started applying myself. Nothing like what I was looking for, but enough to make supernatural creatures uncomfortable if they came by. Like a mystic hotfoot. Such measures would be useless against humans.

For the more mundane hazards, I did have some contractors build in some large durasteel beams inside the door and walls that would keep mortals out unless they were willing to use explosives. Which they just might. Damn. Now I didn't want to leave my home where I had all my cool sparkly stuff. After standing on my doorstep in indecisive idiocy for a good five minutes, I sighed. I couldn't guard my lair twenty-four hours a day. Only senile ancient lizards did that. It was a sign that they were due for the big sleep.

Disgruntled, I let the energies rush through my brain and with a mental twist impossible to explain to those that can't do it, moved and locked the sturdy metal beams in place in the walls across the doors and windows.

With a final glance over my shoulder, I started sauntering out of the residential area toward the commercially zoned area. As I progressed, I passed that invisible line that only the government knows of. The one that divided homes and businesses. Slowing my walk, I dawdled to enjoy the shopping center’s tiny businesses that nestled around the perimeter of the residences. Around my neighborhood, there weren't any skyscrapers, but you could almost see a linear progression as the buildings rose in height the further away they were.

Moving around the parking lot and keeping a wary eye on the traffic peppering the air above me, I headed towards the line of taxis as they rested like boxy-shaped birds of prey. As one scooped up the man in line before me I handed the dispatcher my address and credit tag. He in turn gave me an incredulous look for me being gauche enough to use such an ancient method of payment.

I really should learn to use a floater myself. It’s not like I couldn't afford one but... well, I just don't like machines that much; the newer technology tended to do odd things around me. The suburban area was the closest you could come to the wilderness in a city this size, outside the admittedly generously partitioned state-owned parks. It's hard to get a reputation as a respectable occult book researcher if your address is in the park. It’s a cruel world, but that’s just how it is. Besides, I have gotten very attached to my new home as time passes.

I watched the world go by as we flew to our destination on the fancier side of the city. A familiar feeling of nostalgia rolled through me. It was just as well the trip was short, so I didn't have much time to be maudlin. I was almost grateful for the landing, as uneventful as it was.

Here in the heart of the city, the buildings rose around me like canyons, and the wind whipped at my coat. I didn't feel the cold, but there were homeless people huddled on the sidewalk wrapped in blankets sitting on top of veritable geysers of hot air coming up from the sewer grates. I looked at them in puzzlement; I could have sworn the police would have moved them on to the poorer side of town or shuffled them into the Blight. Maybe they just hadn't gotten around to it yet.

The taxi had dropped me off in front of the Hotel Riviera, where Mei Ling was supposed to be staying. I casually strolled through the revolving door and walked up to the front desk.

“Excuse me, I am a friend of Mei Ling,” I offered to the fellow at the console. A little mental push reinforced that statement to ensure that he knew I was Mei Ling's friend. The man looked me in the eye with a hint of vagueness that informed me my suggestion had been accepted. Either that, or he had to go to the bathroom, and his mind wasn't on his job. Sometimes the subtler abilities are a bit of a crapshoot. “Could you give me her room number?”

“Room 2845, here's her room key,” he said, handing me a small card. I looked at the card and the man, and I can't swear that my mouth didn't open in shock. I had used this trick before, and no one had ever actually given me the key without me asking. The security here was either appalling, or something fishy was going on.

“Um, thanks.” Gathering my wits, I stuck the card in my pocket and backed away before he changed his mind. I headed to the stairs and started climbing. It was only 28 floors, so it’s not like it would take long, and I needed time to think.

Trudging up the stairs didn't take much energy. I had supernatural endurance; if I wanted to, I could sprint up there and hardly take a deep breath. My mind, however, ran in circles. No one just handed the key card to a woman's room without a little more resistance than that. Even I expected to have to plant a few more suggestions before I got that far. So either this was a strange case of mistaken identity, or it was a trap. I perked up at that. Problem solved.

A few minutes later I came to the correct floor and stepped out, walked around the corner past some big hulking guys waiting for the elevator, and continued on around the corner to the hallway where room 2845 was. I knocked at the door and waited. Why did I knock? Well, aside from this perhaps being a trap, I wanted to get Mei Ling's help, and she was more likely to give it if I didn't break into her room.

I knocked once more, and then I waited for a minute. Satisfied no one was going to open the door, I unlocked it with my key card and walked in. I am not sure what I expected, but four very large guys in suits weren't on the top of my list.

“Excuse me, but does Mrs. Ling know that you’re here lying in wait for her when she comes back?” I asked politely while examining their auras. Hmm, supernatural... probably shifters of some kind. Maybe from that wizard the girl was hunting. The female sounded more of a loner, though Jeremy didn't say much, so I could be wrong. Besides, bounty hunters hanging around with men in suits? Very unlikely.

“Who are you? What are you to the woman?” the man in the middle spat out. He was perhaps the best dressed, though I am not really a fashion expert.

“The woman. Not on a first-name basis, eh,” I said with a smile. Meanwhile, the four spread out around me. “I am George Carson, and I am your doom,” I shouted with a theatric growl and eyebrow wiggle. That wasn't really my name; I didn't want these people following me home. They didn’t look like cute puppies.

They must have been on edge because they immediately jumped me. I had kinda expected that. Shifters of any kind have a fight-or-flight reflex that is a bit on a hair-trigger in high-stress situations. The only thing that seems to short-circuit them is when another shifter or someone in authority plays dominance games. Then different set reflexes get triggered.

Two grabbed me by arms and the third slugged me in the face. It was a pretty good one too, I actually felt it. I immediately retaliated by slugging him back with a slight boost of psionic energy. Of course, I still had nimrod number one holding my right arm, so he went flying across the room when my right cross landed. The guy I landed my punch on, well it wasn't pretty. It looked like half his face was caved in and I don't think a man's head is supposed to jerk on top of his neck that way. It wasn't my fault, no one told me shifters were that fragile. You always hear 'invulnerable except to silver and magic', and you built up this image of a juggernaut.

I am not entirely invulnerable to everything, but I am made of very sturdy stuff; my entire race is. While I was coming to terms with the unexpected frailty of shifters when other supernatural entities were involved, the guy holding my left arm was trying to kick me in the back of the leg while twisting my arm behind my back. I brought my arm in front of me, which in turn brought the guy wrestling with it for the ride and smacked him hard on the back of his head. I did not add any psychic energy to multiply the kinetic force this time. He went limp, but I didn't see any embarrassing displacement of brain matter.

By this time, the man I had incidentally thrown across the room had gotten back up and looked ready to charge me. What concerned me a bit more was the apparent leader, who had stood outside of easy reach and pulled a gun. It may have been a laser gun; I can't really tell about these things. I hate guns. I am not immune to them and they tend to sting.

He started to fire at me which immediately confirmed the stinging thing. I can't really measure it on a scale, but I would imagine it hurt me about as much as a hornet would hurt a human. I retaliated by encasing him in a bubble of psychic energy and watched him twitch as his own bullets bounced around inside the sphere and riddled him with holes. I suppose they must have been silver bullets or he would have just ignored them. As it was he fell down in a big puddle of blood that pooled in on the bottom of the bubble.

The fourth man had just leaped at me, apparently not registering that his boss was shooting me with silver bullets. He did notice that his boss seemed to mysteriously collapse in a pile from spontaneous holes. I think I mentioned that werewolves have a fight-or-flight reflex? This was enough to toggle him from kill mode to run mode because he swerved to avoid me as he headed out the door. I made a grab at him and came away with the torn rear half of his suit jacket.

Rushing out to the hallway, I saw the man turning the corner, and tried to telekinetically stomp down on the part of his brain controlling his motor skills. I spat in annoyance as I felt my aim to be off. I think that the attempt may have made his toe twitch a bit, but no cigar on the paralysis. Sometimes this stuff is hit or miss.

I almost ran after the guy but stopped myself. It wasn't like he was going to call the police. If I went running after him I may get him, but chances were the residents here would call security on me. Looking down at myself, I saw that my right hand was covered in blood and I had several holes in my clothes where the bullets bounced off me. The tender bruises from the slugs were already fading, but I didn't look very respectable.

Going back inside the apartment, I looked around. The boss in the bubble was pretty obviously dead. His aura was rapidly fading and would be indistinguishable from the background in about an hour. The same was true for the poor fellow I had hit in the face. It looked even worse without adrenaline surging through me. I grabbed an extra sheet from the closet, threw it over the corpse, and instantly felt better.

The still-living shifter was groaning. Apparently, that shifter healing was finally kicking in. Since he was sitting still, I took the opportunity to give his brain a telekinetic poke to freeze his legs and arms. It was actually very difficult to do this, especially to a supernatural and not paralyze his speech centers, but I managed it.

“Hrgph you!” He muttered while sprawled on the floor. Maybe I did tag his verbal control center a tiny bit. Trust me, it's more complicated than it sounds to get some and not others.

I leaned over the man and glowered evilly, cranking up my aura. I winced as the fridge in the kitchen sparked and shuddered to a halt. “I am your worst nightmare.”

“Are you with that bitch?” he glowered angrily back. Apparently, he slept like a baby at night. Okay, time to play domination tactics. If I could project submissiveness into his emotion centers, I might be able to trigger his submission instinct. The trick is it's hard to project an emotion you don't feel. I can do happy, sad, anger, and normal ones, but our species doesn't do submissive very well. We even die angry. Hmm, let's try peace and see if it's close enough.

“Who sent you?” I spat out, trying to appear dominant and intimidating.

“You can bite me, you little shit,” he sneered back.

So peaceful vibes weren't working. How about some suggestions with oomph? Bearing down on his mind, I pushed as hard as I could without damaging him.

“You want to help me. Only I can get you through this alive.” Plan B, appeal to his survival instinct and extend a helping hand. The next step was to try to read his surface thoughts, but that always gave me a headache.

“Oh geez, you suck at this,” a female voice said from behind me. Whirling around in surprise, I caught a glimpse of a short, slim oriental girl, with very athletic curves and an eye-popping orange streak in her hair, sweep by me. I spun around again with a defensive retort on my tongue and an admonishing finger pointing at her, when she continued past me, completely ignoring me.

“Come on you punk,” she spat out as she moved over to the prone man and lifted him by the neck with one hand, shaking him like a toy rattle. It was odd to see a man handled as if he weighed as much as a pillow by a tiny woman who couldn't have been more half his mass. Her hand reached behind her shoulder and suddenly a katana which radiated huge amounts of magical energy was in her hand and pressing firmly against the captive's throat. “Please give me a reason to remove your stinking head.”

“Mercy,” whimpered the man. Apparently, she was far more intimidating than me because the man just caved. His tense posture collapsed into itself, and if the man hadn't been held up a foot off the ground and pressed up against the wall, I think he may have pissed himself. Never mind. I am just glad it wasn't my apartment.

“So where is he,” she growled while putting her formidable magic armament back over her shoulder, where it promptly vanished once more. It wasn't invisible; I see that kind of thing.

“Um, don't you want to know who sent them first?” I meekly asked. Hey, I admit she even impressed me.

“Shut up,” she told me absently, not even glancing away from the man she was holding. “I know who is behind this. All I want to know is where he is so I can kill him.” I can’t argue with logic like that.

“He... he sent us ahead,” the man shuddered as he talked. He probably thought he was as good as dead. I looked at the petite but vicious Asian cutie holding him above the floor. He may have been right.

“We were going to set up his operation so he could do his summoning when he got here.” That perked up my attention. Summoning magic definitely involved some form of dimensional travel. The wrong direction but very close.

“What does the old freak plan to do this time,” she asked with a shake to enunciate her question.

“Army of demons...” was as far as he got when he screamed in agony, twisting in her grip. I was still exerting some concentration to see auras, and saw a flare-up of magical energy. It was coming from outside the room, and flooding into our captive and, to a lesser extent, the corpses under the sheet and in my bubble. All I saw was smoke coming out of his mouth, ears, and eyes to my mundane vision. I winced; that was a nasty way to go.

“Excuse me, but I think he's about to explode,” I muttered as I moved up next to her and grabbed the expiring man around the neck. It’s a very convenient handhold. She relaxed her grip enough to let me grasp it and I lifted the man over my head and threw him at the window. I turned around to run towards the now smoking corpse under the sheet, so I didn't really see the fiery explosion blossom from the man I had thrown outside. I felt it though. I think the whole building may have shivered and I definitely heard some of the adjacent windows crack. It's more impressive than it sounds when you consider that they started using explosive resistant glass for window material, after terrorism and high yield explosives became a larger scale problem about 20 years ago.

I was more worried about the still-smoldering bodies so I dismissed my bubble and picked them up and chucked them after the first poor SOB. These must have been on a slower fuse because they had time to hit the roof of the building opposite us before they went off. This explosion was relatively small compared to the first. I suppose dead people don't explode as well as live people. I'll have to find a magic book that explains that one; I got nothing.

It wasn't the explosion on the roof across from us that gave me such a surprise; it was the explosion that came from just down the hallway outside the apartment door. Spinning, I faced the door, which had been blown open and now had smoke pouring through it.

I have a pretty high tolerance for surprises; it takes a lot to phase me, but I admit I was looking around with my jaw agape trying to figure out what the hell was happening.

“What the hell blew up?” I shouted as if I was yelling over an explosion. “I mean, other than those bodies we just threw out the window,” I continued in a quieter voice.

“Um, I guess the other three I killed on the way up to here,” the little Asian woman said uncertainly. I looked at her a moment.

“What other three?” I deadpanned.

“There were two waiting for me when I got out of the elevator, and one ran by almost as soon as I had downed the first two,” she said, shrugging.

I looked at the smoke billowing into the apartment. The fire sprinkler system triggered, soaking us both in seconds. “Well, I think I worked up an appetite. Dinner?”

The woman I assumed to be Mei Ling glanced expressionlessly from the door blown off its frame to the hole where the window once was. “Let me get my travel bag. I think it’s time to check out.”