“I will pay. I have some money that Ysolde forced Baltic to give me until I can make my own.”

“And it will take longer. Surely you want the dragon curse broken pronto.”

“A few hours will not matter.”

“The longer we hang around here, the more in danger we are of Asmodeus’s demons seeing us,” she argued. “And if I can put up with being chained to a dragon, then you can just suck it up and go through the portal.”

He raised one eyebrow at that. “You can’t really imagine that they don’t know exactly where we are right now, can you?”

“Of course I can.” She frowned. “Why shouldn’t I?”

“We were allowed to escape,” he said simply.

Bee looked like she wanted to protest that idea. “But—you knocked the demons down so that we could get past them and go through the door.”

“Yes, and when is the last time you saw a dragon take down two wrath demons with one blow to each?”

She opened her mouth, closed it, and opened it again a couple more times before answering. “Well… they were… you took them by surprise… you are pretty buff…”

Constantine shook his head. “We were allowed to escape, Bee. Asmodeus is no fool—he clearly understood the importance of you and I both trying to get a talisman from him. He knows that his ring must be in the possession of dragons, and thus he intends to use us to find it. That is why we have nothing to fear from demons while we are in Seville. It would be folly for them to attack us before we’ve led them to the ring.”

“Ugh. That wouldn’t be good.” Bee thought for a few minutes, then tapped him on the wrist when he straightened up after giving Gary a glass of water. “But it does give us even more reason to take a portal. The company won’t transport demons—they never have, and I can’t see why they’d suddenly start now. This is our chance to get away. We can get the jump on them and make it to Paris before they even know we’re out of town.”

“A plane is fast,” Constantine said stubbornly, but he feared he was losing the battle.

“Also, there’s a chance it can break the shackles.”

“How so?” He looked down at the metal around his ankle. “It is forged by a demon lord. It will not be easy to remove.”

“You melted the bars of the cell I was in,” Bee said, looking thoughtfully at the chain. “Do you think you could break this that way?”

“I can try, but I doubt it would work.” He studied the chain for a moment. “The bars were not forged by Asmodeus. The links in this chain have runes on them, which means that a demon lord most likely made it.”

“It’s worth a try, isn’t it?”

Constantine agreed, and bent down until his head was under the short white-and-blue-checked tablecloth, whereupon he blew fire on the chain held between his hands.

“It is as I thought,” he said, sitting up in his chair again.

“Dammit.” Bee bit her lower lip for a few seconds before saying, “The portal is going to be our best bet. No, hear me out: portals displace time and space, so using one might well knock the shackles right off our legs. Plus, there’s the added bonus that most portalling places refuse to cater to demons, and thus anything demonic like the chain formed in Abaddon wouldn’t be transported.”

“Which might also result in our legs being left behind as well,” Constantine pointed out. “Flying poses no such risk.”

“Look, I’m not some brave superhero woman out to save the world. I’m a simple Charmer, one who came into the trade wholly by accident. I do what I can to help people because that’s what my parents raised me to do—although they had no idea I’d end up unmaking curses, and hanging around people who could be found in a medieval bestiary. All that aside, I’m willing to take the chance with the portal,” Bee said, her chin raised in challenge. “So get with the program, and let’s get this done so that I can do the job I’m being paid to do.”

A muscle twitched in his jaw. He liked his legs, dammit. Both of them. He didn’t want to lose one, but on the other hand, he did wish to be rid of the shackles, and if there was no time to find someone locally who had the ability to do so, then he had little choice. He felt that the potential loss of a leg in addition to the trauma of traveling through a portal qualified him for sainthood.

And that is why, less than an hour later, when he leaped through the swirling oval of nothingness that was confined in a back room of the small portal shop deep in the heart of Seville, he resigned himself to feeling as if his atoms had been smashed flat against an anvil, then exploded into a million bits.

“Anvils,” he groaned when he hit the landing mats on the receiving office in Paris. He rolled to his side, his head spinning, and feeling as if he were covered in barbed wire. “Definitely lots of anvils.”

“What on earth are you babbling about?” Bee suddenly loomed over him looking tidy and not the least bit in disarray, whereas he felt as if he’d been turned inside out and back again. She also appeared to have both of her legs, and no shackles.

He tried to raise himself to see if he did as well.

“Hrn,” he told her and fell back when the room spun and dipped perilously.

Just as he got to his knees, a strange keening noise seemed to come from nowhere, then resolved itself into a joyous “Wheeee!” that resulted with the metal birdcage bursting free of the portal, and smacking him in the kidneys.

“Are you all right?” Bee asked, pausing in the act of helping Constantine to his feet. Both of them, he was relieved to note.

Gary rolled around his cage whooping with laughter. “All right? That was a blast! Can we do it again? What a trip! It was like wham, bang, zippee!”

“Did you notice the shackle is gone, Constantine? I’m so relieved we don’t have to fight with that any longer. Now we can go find the ring and get this job done. No, Gary, you can’t go through the portal again.”

Constantine got to his feet at last. He was missing a shoe, his shirt had turned around so that it was on backward, his hair felt like it was standing on end, and his one bare foot was on fire. He cast a look at where Gary lolled around on the back of his head giggling. “I hate you,” he muttered to the head before jerking his arm from Bee’s grasp, and limped with as much dignity as he could manage from the room, trailing fire with every step.