When I’d gotten home, everyone had swarmed me. I’d kept the explanation short, omitting anything to do with the Osiris serum. I’d told them that Cristal was doing illegal research to make super assassins for Diatheke. They’d bought it, probably because it was mostly true. I told them about Benedict. We made plans for tonight with Heart. We had to get the location of that lab no matter the cost. Every minute we delayed, Halle was in danger.

Alessandro hadn’t responded to my text messages. I asked Bug to track him down, but he couldn’t find him. I scoured Cristal’s background and her family, looking for any scrap of information about the location of the lab until the words on the screen blurred. Finally, I went up to my room and collapsed. That was two hours ago.

Shadow looked at the window. Woof.

Woof.

An intruder was coming.

I sat up, scooped Shadow into my arms, and carried her to the bathroom. I set her on the floor and shut the door. I didn’t want her to get hurt.

A long-clawed hand hooked my window and slid it up.

I leaned against the wall in the corner.

A dark figure slipped through the open window and into my room. Tall and gangly, he wore a black bodysuit painted with swirls of grey. It clung to him like second skin, highlighting every imperfection of his odd, disjointed body. His shoulders and thighs were too short, while his forearms and shins ran disproportionately long, ending in huge clawed hands and feet. His neck, long and flexible, supported a round head, and as he crawled through my window, he swiveled it like an owl to glance back at the street.

He stepped on the floor and straightened, a bogeyman born from childhood nightmares.

I held very still.

He turned, scanning the room, and the moonlight caught his eyes, big and white, reflecting the light with an eerie green glow.

In the bathroom, Shadow broke down into a cacophony of barks and snarls, digging at the door.

He pivoted to the bathroom door. Step. Another step.

Another.

Far enough. I stepped into the soap circle on the floor and sank my magic into it. The arcane lines ignited with sapphire flames in a complex, dazzling array. The assassin froze, startled, his face clear in the glow of the glyphs. Bald, with thick glossy skin mottled with a patina of green, brown, and orange, like the carapace of some strange beetle, he didn’t look even remotely human. The typical contours of a man’s face, the cheekbones, the nose ridge, the brow, were thickened, as if someone had injected fat under his skin in all the wrong places. The nose had no tip, reduced to a broad, flattened bulge. His chin receded, almost delicate by comparison. The eyes, unnaturally large, stretched toward his ears. Only the mouth was somewhat normal.

Revulsion slithered through me. The urge to flee was so strong, I almost took a step back. I couldn’t even tell if it was his magic or just intense xenophobia, triggered by encountering a thing humanlike but not human enough.

Benedict had sent his butcher. He must’ve given up on taking me alive.

The lines around the assassin pulsed with yellow. The feedback jolted me. He’d struck at me and the circle dispersed it. A wave of emotion washed over me, disgust, hate, and anger, and underneath it all, a sucking vortex of bloodlust. The circle had lobbed his feelings at me. There was no way around this feedback.

The assassin leaped to the side. The circle pulsed in response, and he landed back where he started.

I had designed the circle by modifying an Acubens Exemplar spell to incapacitate an intruder, no matter what brand of magic he or she wielded. It was an all-purpose trap created to contain and interrogate. From above it looked like a large circle filled with a maze of lines and glyphs, with a double circle inside it at one end. Five smaller circles, each filled with progressively smaller rings, touched the outer rim of the main circle.

I stood within the smaller double circle, while the assassin was trapped in the larger ring. The complex pattern around the butcher imprisoned him. He couldn’t attack me. He couldn’t leave the circle either. His own magic interacting with the boundary held him back. However, he could still attempt to strike at the circle itself, and when he did, his magic would surge through the lines and run off into the five smaller magic sinks.

The assassin crouched on all fours, looking around. The circle fluoresced brighter under his feet. His big, misshapen eyes found me. “Die.”

A bright yellow flash exploded from him and ran through the lines of the circle. The five magic sinks spun, absorbing it and became still.

“Die. Die, die, die.”

Each burst sent a fresh spike of fury and hate through me. I waited until the sinks stopped spinning. I had all the time in the world.

The assassin stared at me. “Release me.”

“Tell me your name.”

“Release me or I’ll eat your family.”

That’s what I liked about warped assassins. They were reasonable, pleasant people. Such deep thinkers.

“Tell me your name.”

“I’ll kill you and eat your guts while you scream.”

“Not in that order, you won’t.”

He charged my circle, clawing at it, his mouth gaping, his small, sharp teeth trying to scrape at the wall of magic. We were barely six inches apart, yet we might as well have been on different continents.

Outside, the emergency streetlamps came on.

The assassin had worn himself out and crouched on the floor again.

“You’re here because I let you come here,” I told him. “I told the soldiers outside to stay out of your way. I knew Benedict would send you or someone like you. I hoped he would come himself, but he doesn’t like to get his hands dirty, does he?”

The assassin bared his teeth. “Whore.”

“Answer my questions and it will hurt less.”

The assassin grinned. “You sound like him.”

“But I’m not him. I didn’t look for you. I didn’t force you into the circle. You came here to kill me, my friends, and my family. You are a murderer.”

“Self-righteous bitch.”

He had retained more IQ points than Lawrence. He had a good vocabulary, and his reasoning ran deeper than the summoner’s “Kill that bitch because my bugs are hungry.” Explained why this one didn’t have a handler.

I raised my arms and concentrated. The circle around me began to spin, sending hair-thin chalk lines spiraling through the larger ring. The lines collided with the pattern around the warped, forming a new design in the circle’s matrix.

The assassin swiveled his head side to side, trying to keep track.

I sank a burst of power into the circle. The magic shot through the new lines like a spark running down a detonation cord. The assassin’s mind flared before me, a bright hot target. I zeroed in on it and struck.

With the right circle, even a weak mental mage could put pressure onto the target’s mind, and I was not weak.

The assassin shrieked. I gripped his consciousness with my power and squeezed.

To be beguiled, a person had to be capable of love, and no matter how deep that spark was buried, my magic would coax it into a bonfire. This inhuman creature was knitted from deep-seated hatred, and rage, and contempt for humans. For all of his regression, Lawrence had loved his swarm. The butcher loved nothing. Guilt, fear, or doubt never troubled him, and regret wasn’t a concept he understood. I couldn’t wrench him open by pulling one of the usual levers present in a human mind. He had none. His will was an impenetrable shell and his inhumanity gave him an extra layer of protection.

I wasn’t at my strongest. I was tired, but I didn’t need to beguile him. I just had to squeeze his mind open. The circle would do most of the work and it didn’t ask for anything complicated. It required raw power, so I reached deep inside myself and found some.

In the ring, the killer raged. Yellow radiance drenched the lines, saturating them. The magic sinks spun, siphoning it off. He had an insane reservoir of magic. His loathing battered me, wave after wave, relentless, his mind churning with rage. Wading through it was like trying to swim through waves carrying razor-sharp rocks. My emotional defenses shook. I gritted my teeth and squeezed him harder.

The two sinks closest to the butcher turned yellow, then orange, saturated to the brink. A normal mage would have stopped out of sheer self-preservation. Spending too much magic too quickly taxed the body, and if a mage exhausted all of their reserves, they lost consciousness. Some never woke up. But he had no capacity for self-preservation. He pounded and pounded against the circle, trying to shatter it, driven by pure rage.

The tide of psychic hatred drowned me. I could no longer keep my head above the water. His emotions coursed through me, threatening to tear me apart. My own reserves were running dry.

A faint crack appeared in the assassin’s will. Fear of being trapped and helpless. Finally.

Another magic sink turned orange and stopped spinning.

I gripped at the edges of the crack with my will and pushed.

The fourth sink froze. We were down to one.

He howled, throwing all of his power against the circle in a frenzied barrage.

The final magic sink stopped, saturated. The tide of his emotions swallowed me whole and I hung suspended, no longer sure where I ended and his fury began.