Force hammered into the door, and turned maybe fifty pounds of leaded glass into a cloud of razor-sharp shards. The stairwell down to Mac's place was sunken-there was no way any of the shrapnel could fly out at street level.

An instant later, the bottom half of the door exploded into flying daggers of wood. My shield stopped anything heading toward Mac, but I couldn't catch them all. One of them clipped my left cheekbone broadside-if it had tumbled for another fraction of a second, the sharp end would have driven right into my brain. As it was, it hit me like a baseball bat, stunning me and knocking me down.

The world did that slow-motion echo-chamber thing that happens sometimes with a head blow, and I saw our attacker come in.

At first, I couldn't translate what I was seeing into something that made sense: It looked something like those giant spinning, whirling tubes covered in strips of soft cloth at an automated car wash, the ones that actually shampoo your car. Except it wasn't a tube; it was a sphere, and it wasn't at a car wash; it was rolling in through Mac's doorway.

Mac's shotgun went off, the sound of it slapping me in the back. Those things are loud in an enclosed space. Dust and bits of scrap cloth flew out of the attacker, but it didn't slow down. The giant rag ball hurtled toward me, until Thomas dashed in from the side and smashed it with a roundhouse swing of one of Mac's heavy oak tables.

Quick bar fighting tip for you-in real life, when you hit a guy with furniture, it doesn't break into pieces the way it does in the movies. It breaks whoever you hit with it. There was a meaty sound of impact and the rolling shape's forward momentum was instantly converted into a perpendicular line drive. It streaked across the room, trailing streamers of grey-brown cloth like a ragged comet, the cloth flapping and snapping with unnatural volume until it hit the wall with a solid thwack.

Another fighting tip for you: Don't stay on the ground. If you don't know exactly what you're up against, if you aren't sure that the guy you're fighting doesn't have a buddy coming along who might help, you can't afford to be down and relatively motionless. My body was already moving, though I wasn't sure how it was doing that, pushing me back to my feet.

Mac put a hand on the bar and vaulted up onto it like he did it all the time. The attacker bounced off the wall, rolled across a tabletop, and fell to the floor in a heap. Mac took a pair of quick steps to get a better line of fire, and boom went the shotgun again. Another cloud of scrap cloth and dust flew up from the attacker.

The room lurched back into normal speed. Dozens of strips of the dark sackcloth came flying off of the thing, twining in an instant around chairs and tables. A chair flew at Thomas, knocking the table out of his hands, and he was forced to dodge to one side instead of closing in. Mac's shotgun bellowed three more times, and I hurled another lance of force at the thing. Mac's shells didnothing but create puffs of debris, and my own arcane strike split and flowed around the thing, shattering a chair and smashing in a portion of the wall behind it.

And it laughed.

Furniture exploded out from it, flung with superhuman force. My shield barely caught the narrow edge of a table that had been flung like a Frisbee. Thomas's legs were scythed out from under him by a flying bar stool, and he hit the floor with a huff of expelled breath. Mac had already thrown himself down behind the bar-but when another table hit it, there was an enormous cracking sound, and several pieces of wood broke under the impact.

A shape stirred in the writhing mass of ash-colored sackcloth and rose, its outline veiled but not entirely obscured by the cloth. It was lanky-tall, and had to stand hunched over to avoid the lazily spinning blades of the ceiling fans. It was more or less human-shaped, and I was suddenly struck by the realization that I was looking at a humanoid who was wearing some kind of enormous, ungainly garment made of all those restless, rustling strips.

It lifted its head slowly and focused on me.

It didn't look at me-it didn't have any eyes, just smooth skin laced with scars where they had once been. Its skin was pearly grey lined with darker stripes that made me think of a shark. Its mouth was gaping open in a wide grin that reinforced the impression. It didn't have teeth-just a single smooth ridge of bone where teeth would have been on a human. Its lips were black, and its mouth smudged with more of it. Twin trails of saliva drooled from the corners of its mouth, leaving black streaks to down past its chin. There wasn't a hair to be seen on its head.

"Wizard," it said, and its voice was the same as had come through the glossy stone. "Your life need not end this day. Surrender and I will spare your companions."

I could hear Mac reloading behind me. Thomas had his gun in his hand, behind his back, and was prowling silently around the room to force Sharkface to turn to keep an eye on him.

Except it didn't have eyes. Whatever this thing was using to keep track of us, I had a feeling that just standing in an inconvenient spot wasn't going to net us much of an advantage.

"Surrender," I said, as though trying to place where I'd heard the word before. "Yeah, um. I'm not so sure I want any surrenders today. There was a sale on surrenders last week, and I missed it, but I don't want to rush out and buy another one at the regular price right away. I'm afraid the sale might come back a week later, and then, I mean, come on. How stupid would I feel then?"

"Levity will not change the course of this day," Sharkface said. Its buzzing, twisting voice was distinctly unpleasant in my ears, the aural equivalent of the stench of rotting meat. Which was appropriate, because the rest of him did smell like rotting meat. "You will come with me."