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here, even if they don’t realize it.” Todd rose to his feet. “Do you know anything about the bones in north campus?”
    “No, no, nothing.” Amon tore a strip of skin loose and lifted its beaked head, sharp teeth grinding the strip to shreds. The kitchen light blazed in its mirrored eyes. “They were neither sacrificed to hell nor sanctified to heaven. But I see them, I see them for all that.”
    “Do you?” Todd looked at his own reflection in the demon’s eyes, a man-shaped hole in space that held a jigsaw array of tunnels, corridors, stairways, and doors. “And what do they look like?”
    “They curve and writhe and bend and scream, but they do not belong to the mal'akhim, and they make me uneasy.”
    Todd frowned as he paced through the apartment. It was an architectural mirror-image of his own place, although Markham’s decor ran to cheap furniture and shelves full of books.  His eyes were caught by a faded but framed ’70s concert poster in the study. Wolfhowl , it declared across a photo of four young musicians.
    He recognized both Andy Markham and Jack Langthorn. He didn’t recognize the other two band members or the name of the club they were playing. A place in Anchorage, Alaska. Not a successful band, then.
    “Bender....” Amon padded across the carpet, its claws making ripping sounds as they caught in the cheap weave and tore free again. The demon pressed against his leg. “We should kill them.”
    “Let them be, beloved. They were brought here just as I was.  The patterns suggest something important is at hand.”
    “The bones make a noise that will awaken the armies of the mal'akhim,” Amon said in its creaking voice. “We will have war.”
    “All the more reason to let them expose themselves while I stay in the shadows.” Todd walked back to the kitchen. “Do you like shrimp Creole?”
    Amon hissed impatiently, its sides rasping and ripping along the edge of a bookshelf as it passed. Todd considered cleaning up after the demon, then dismissed the thought. If Andrew Markham and Jack Langthorn recognized the smudges and skin, they’d realize they weren’t as safe as they thought, surrounded by their spells and sigils. Their wards were sufficient to turn aside a hex or dissuade a black magickian, but they were no good against the mal'akhim.
    Or him.
    Todd took another mouthful, enjoying the faint burn of hot pepper as he chewed. The dish must have been eyewatering for humans.
    Todd had traveled the dimensional pathways long enough to no longer consider himself human. He was perceptible to the mal'akhim as the active emptiness he’d taken as his own, the absence he used to tread the pathways of heaven and hell. As far as he knew, he was the only being to have escaped both the b'nei elohim and the nephilim yet remain clearly perceived by both.
    But if Amon were right about the bones, there was something else out there, something powerful and dangerous enough to draw the attention of both sides of the Host while remaining outside of their eternal conflict.
    Something like him, perhaps.
    He scraped his plate clean and washed down the last bite with the flavorless soda his hosts had served instead of the beer he’d expected.
    “Let’s go,” he said. Amon looked up from tearing at its genitals and scattered the detritus of its work over the floor. “I want to see those bones myself.”
    The demon shifted and washed its face with jerky, insectile motions.
    “They are loud,” it complained.
    “And I want to hear them.” Todd looked for the possibility that ran from the kitchen to the north campus and unlocked it, opening a bloody, tooth-lined hole. The backs of nail-skewered birds formed a walkway through spacetime. “Are you coming?”
    Amon rose to all eights and scuttled after him as Todd stepped into the other place.
    Behind them, the wound in reality sealed with a low groan.

V

     
    Two black and white cars were parked in front of the small Gudrun Ranch House, their strobing