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them. Everyone stared at what had appeared.
    Irenee had expected some sort of crystal or polished rock or metal brooch with a gemstone or even a small dagger, like the pictures of various ancient evil items. She’d studied misshapen objects, semi-melted jewelry, crystal clusters in grotesque shapes, and nausea-inducing carvings.
    Nothing she’d seen or heard of looked like what lay in the bowl.
    An obsidian crystal about three inches long, the item was shaped like one end of a large egg. The rounded portion held many facets, but they absorbed, rather than reflected, the overhead lights. The rest of the egg had been sliced off with a slanted cut or perhaps broken along an oblique fault line, leaving a smooth, sloping side. Even more than the facets, this surface sucked in light like a miniature black hole.
    “This cannot be right,” Glynnis stated, bending over the bowl. “It is not whole. Where’s the rest of it?”
    “Th-that’s all there was,” Irenee said as nausea roiled in her stomach. Oh, God, she’d confiscated the wrong item. Or only part of it. She had failed. She had to clear her throat before she could say, “Nothing else was in the safe except for some envelopes and a black box with flash drives in it.”
    Glynnis patted her arm. “I know it’s all you found, honey. The rest was probably destroyed long ago when the break occurred.”
    Although the comment helped bolster Irenee’s confidence, disappointment still ate at her insides.
    “What is, or was, the whole?” Fergus asked.
    Glynnis hesitated, studied the object for a few minutes with a magnifying glass as she used a pair of tongs to turn it over. She held her hands over the bowl to measure its vibrations. She stood unmoving, eyes closed, for a number of minutes. Finally she opened her eyes and said, “Assuming it did look like an egg, I’d estimate the intact item would have been about seven or eight inches on its long axis. Taking into account the slanting cut, I estimate this is about a third of the intact whole. The vibrations from this remaining piece are incredibly strong. It’s definitely what I felt when Alton Finster used it to cast. Do any of you feel anything?”
    Several Defenders reported a much higher level of dizziness and queasiness than evil items usually caused.
    Irenee pushed her personal feelings of possible failure aside. She wasn’t having her usual reaction to an evil item, either. “My magic center feels like something’s tugging on it—or trying to get in.”
    “That’s the item looking for a victim. Fasten your robe,” Fergus said. “Everybody, even you two at the end of the table, button up.”
    Irenee kicked herself mentally for not remembering to follow one of the basic rules for dealing with nasty items. The robes, with all their heavy-duty protective enchantments, were their first line of defense, able to repel harmful spells on their own. She quickly pulled the sides together, hooked the loops over the buttons, and tied the sash. “It stopped.”
    “With me, too,” Annette Chang reported.
    Glynnis nodded. “As for its identity, I can’t be totally certain without more research, but it’s ancient and extremely powerful, even in its fractured state. The total blackness and the absorption of light have been documented in only a few items, and all except two of them have been found and destroyed. If it’s what I think it is, we may be fortunate to have to deal solely with this portion. It’s a coup for us that we confiscated it. Since the fifteenth century, Defenders have been looking for the Cataclysm Stone.”

CHAPTER THREE
     
    While Glynnis and Fergus moved the Cataclysm Stone to the specially spelled and protected underground chamber where they would destroy it, Irenee ran over to her condo to change into comfortable clothes. There was no telling how long demolition would take with such an ancient artifact, even a somewhat diminished one. It was midnight already. She might be standing for