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he could plunge the blades into my flesh, there was a blur of motion behind him, followed by a sickening thud. Quietus’ head snapped to the side, he staggered, and then collapsed to the ground. Behind him stood Jinx, holding a new sledgehammer and grinning.
    “Say hello to Cuthbert Junior.”

TWO
    Jinx found a Door in the middle of an alley. It didn’t look like a passageway between dimensions: featureless wood surface, peeling white paint, tarnished metal knob… If I – or any human – tried to open it, I’d find it locked, and if I returned tomorrow night, I’d discover the Door gone, only brick in its place.
    Hell, without Jinx along, there was a good chance I wouldn’t be able to even see the Door. Doors aren’t invisible to human eyes exactly, but there’s an intrinsic wrongness to them, one that humans sense on a subconscious level. I was a trained officer of the Shadow Watch, and I’d been through Doors dozens of times, and I still felt a compulsion to turn and walk away whenever I looked at one.
    We had Quietus in custody, a negator around his neck to nullify his Incubus powers, and another wrapped tight around his wrists to keep him from attacking us by more mundane means. Negators might prevent Incubi from using their special abilities, but they don’t remove their training and experience. Superpowered or not, Quietus was still a master assassin, and we weren’t taking any chances.
    Well, I wasn’t. Given Jinx’s penchant for random acts of chaos and mayhem, I had to watch him almost as closely as I did Quietus. I knew my partner would love for Quietus to make a break for it, just so he could fight some more. I wouldn’t put it past Jinx to “accidentally” allow Quietus to escape, so he could have a little more fun.
    I’d searched Quietus while he’d been unconscious to see if he carried any other weapons on him. I’d never touched Quietus before, and I was surprised to find his substance – I can’t bring myself to refer to it as flesh – was cool and spongy to the touch. As near as I could tell, he wasn’t wearing any kind of outfit. I could find no zippers, buttons, or seams.
    Quietus appeared to be a creature molded entirely from living shadow. He had no pockets, but then, why would he? He didn’t need to carry anything because he could create weapons from his own darkness. He had no wisper on him, which was too bad. The M-gineers could’ve hacked into its system to search for the identity of his employers. Which was, of course, why Quietus didn’t have one.
    We walked toward the Door, Quietus between us, each of us holding onto one of his arms. Since my trancer needed recharging – something I couldn’t do on this side of a Door – I held a blade to the assassin’s ribs. M-blades are made from concentrated Maelstrom energy, and while they can kill Incubi if used right, stabbing an Incubi with one interferes with the Maelstrom energy that forms their bodies, causing a kind of short circuit. This results in agony so intense that all an Incubus can do is fall to the ground, drooling and twitching. It’s a wonderful sight to behold, and I was almost sorry that Quietus hadn’t given us any trouble. Audra , I thought to myself, you’re starting to get as bad as Jinx.
    Jinx had been in merry mood when we’d captured Quietus, but as time passed without the advent of additional ultraviolence, he’d turned grumpy and taciturn. Normally, anything that got Jinx to shut his nonstop mouth for a while was a good thing in my book, but the grumpier he became – or First Dreamer help me, the more bored he became – the more likely he was to do something impulsive and potentially fatal to anyone in the vicinity, including me. The sooner we opened the Door and stepped through and into Nod, the better.
    But just as we reached the Door and Jinx stretched his ivory-colored fingers toward the knob, the Door opened from the other side.
    Jinx and I assumed battle-ready positions without