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light blazed in his face, sudden pain behind his eyes. He struck at it without thinking. His cane rang on metal and sent the light spinning, sparking, into darkness. Another swing, shaft thudding on flesh-padded bone, crook of cane grabbing, pulling, a thrust into body and grunt of breath; upward jab and switched grip and clunk of shaft on skull; rustle of falling cloth, silence.
    He spun away, staggering toward the faint light of the door, heard movement and muttered oaths behind him. Light flared again, searching, stabbing, light that missed him as he dodged. Light that found him, followed him.
    “Halt! Police!”
    A snarling voice, female but no way feminine.
    He ducked and turned a corner. Bullets whined off brick and stone, followed by echoing booming gunshots.
    Running now, panting, he grabbed at another corner, winding deeper into the labyrinth of alleys and courtyards, hoping against dead ends. Each turn blocked sightlines, trajectories from that gun . . .
    He’d just attacked a policeman, maybe killed him. At least one cop still lived back there, a cop who had seen Albert’s face. Up close and well-lit. Defy a demon and follow up with that?
    Albert had had better days.

III
    The way the rest of the night worked out, maybe he should have just trotted straight back to that bottle club where he’d heard Lula’s sax. Sure, Legion might have killed him. He’d have died a happy man. Instead, he stumbled into night-hidden alley potholes and around stinking garbage bins, past lunging snarling shadowy dogs maybe chained or behind fences, maybe not. He stopped, listened, waited, darted through pools of light, sorting through memories twenty years, fifty years old for the alleys and mews and stairs up hillsides too steep for streets and other back ways of a person on foot and hunted.
    All this while twitching at the echo of every footstep within three blocks, every whiff of fresh human sweat. All this while his shoulder blades cringed away from that bullet without warning—“hot pursuit” and legal. He couldn’t shake the fear, even though he didn’t hear or see anyone following him through all the twists and turns and doubling back. That included crossing the river twice, long open stretches of bridge where he had clear views ahead and behind under the streetlights.
    Some people have always been the sort who cops call “sir,” but those people never have been hunted. Albert had been down a lot more than he’d been up and knew cops from the underside. Most cops were okay, no worse than the average human. But attack, maybe kill, one of their own, and they turned mean. Suspects had a way of getting killed while resisting arrest or attempting to escape.
    And he was carrying a cane with stuff smeared on it, blood and hair and skin cells for sure, maybe a dab of brain tissue, maybe not. He almost threw it in the river, both times crossing, except he couldn’t count on it staying there. A simple magnetic drag would probably catch it—a finding spell certainly would. Wiping it down wouldn’t help—even a bleach bath. Physical evidence might be erased, but the cane’s aura would still match the dent he’d left in that shadow’s skull. They also knew each other—easy enough to detect.
    He didn’t want to throw away that blade, either. It carried part of his soul, from the forging.
    He made it home un-challenged and un-shot. After a long twitchy wait in the shadows, watching for trackers while sweat chilled on his back, he unlocked a cellar door off the back alley and made damn sure he locked it behind him, setting a bar across it before climbing down through gloom into dark stone-smell and into darker shadows, placing another bar across the second door at the bottom of the cellar stairs.
    He kept his forge in the cellar. Less noise to disturb the neighbors that way, no windows for snoops to look in on his work, and besides, he’d like to watch some random stranger drag a two-hundredweight anvil up three long