“Nevada?”

“I’m okay.”

Rogan snarled like an animal and yanked his seat belt off, his face inhuman, aggression rolling off him like heat.

I had to get out of the car. I clicked my seat belt, jerked the door open, and stepped onto the grass. White chalk lines burst into cold flame around us. We were inside an arcane circle, so huge it had to be thirty yards across. The symbols pulsed once, the fire surged, and then something reached down my throat with slimy cold hands, grasped my insides, and tried to rip them out of my mouth.

The ground vanished. I flailed in midair, suspended in some primordial darkness, agony twisting and breaking me, wringing my bones, and then the blackness tore and I collapsed on an ice-cold floor, the pain a fading echo in my joints. My breasts hit a rough cold surface. I was naked. Rogan fell next to me and rolled to his feet, naked.

I blinked, trying to clear away tears.

The street was gone. Houston was gone. Instead a football-field-sized stone cavern surrounded us. All around, slender concrete columns stretched in neat rows to support a stone ceiling three stories above us. Round electric lights illuminated the space, glowing with yellow radiance at the top of the columns.

Arcane lines burned with turquoise around us. We were inside a circle—the most layered and complex circle I had ever seen—drawn on the concrete floor. Inside the circle, that floor was bare, but outside of the lines it was white with frost. A narrow foot-wide channel of power made of perfectly straight lines fed the circle. I raised my head. Ten feet away the channel of power widened into a second, smaller circle. In the middle of it, naked and covered with blue glyphs, sat David Howling.

“Hello,” he said and smiled.

It was cold. It was so unbearably cold. I got off the floor and hugged myself, trying to hoard what little heat my body had. Next to me Rogan stood, his shoulders squared, his feet apart, the muscles of his thighs tight as if he were ready to leap forward. Looking at his face, I could hear David’s bones breaking. Unfortunately, he was all the way over there, and we were here, trapped inside the circle.

It was a hell of a circle too, complex and twisted. The base of it had to come from Pùbù, a higher-level circle named after the Mandarin word for waterfall. Pùbù started as two circles, one large, one small, connected by a narrow channel of power about eighteen inches wide. The smaller circle fed the larger one, the channel focusing and magnifying the mage’s power, like a lens. David had modified it, adding another row of glyphs, a second border, and odd constellations of smaller circles branching out from the outer boundary.

“Here we are,” David said.

Rogan’s magic stirred, building slowly, like a hurricane about to be unleashed. I forced myself to stand still. He was about to let himself go and do the thing that had earned him his terrifying nicknames.

“I wouldn’t advise that,” David said, his voice casual. “Look around you, Rogan. This place should look familiar. Let me jog your memory. You’re a Crownover Raven, like me. History of Houston Houses, a required course for high school graduation in the Crownover Academy? The obligatory cistern-viewing trip, spiced by the lecture on John Pike and Melissa Crownover’s duel? Any of it ring a bell?”

Rogan looked around. His magic died as if snuffed out.

I looked at him.

He shook his head, his face grim.

“For the lovely lady’s benefit,” David said, “this cistern is one of many underground water reservoirs the Houses of Houston built after 1878. This particular cistern belonged to House Pike. It’s located only a proverbial stone’s throw from Buffalo Bayou, and is sitting under what is now Pike University, approximate capacity at this hour about three thousand students. Give or take.”

Memories of a crumbling downtown floated before me, the buildings around us shattering as pulses of Rogan’s power fractured them while he floated within the circle, his face otherworldly and serene. When Rogan used the magic that made him the Butcher of Merida, it didn’t just generate a null field. It punched a hole in reality. Nothing could touch him within that circle, but his power would pierce straight through the rock and the campus above us. The first pulse of his magic would crumble the ground above us, and the next would trigger a collapse. Even if I managed to stop Rogan again, as I had done before, by the time we were done, the campus would be in ruins, partially buried, and the waters of Buffalo Bayou rushing into the depression would drown the survivors. We would survive. Nobody else would make it.

The temperature dropped. I shivered. So cold.

Rogan stepped close to me, wrapping his big body about mine. The warmth of him felt so good, and I locked my arms around him. I didn’t want him to die.

“This wasn’t my idea,” David said. “I prefer quick, precise kills, but apparently there are some specific plans for your corpses. I’m instructed to kill you without any obvious wounds or damage to extremities and your faces, which eliminates my usual range of weapons and leaves us with hypothermia. Unfortunately, teleportation transports only living things. Thus we find ourselves here, naked, with no shreds of dignity left. I don’t like confrontations, and quite frankly, this entire situation is rather distasteful. This space is quite large, so I’ll need another twenty to thirty minutes. As deaths go, this one is long, but the pain lessens the closer you are to expiring. It will be easier once confusion sets in. At some point you might even feel warm. I’ve had people dance in delirium before. They went into the Great Beyond never knowing they were leaving. Try to relax.”

If only I could get my hands on him, I’d wipe that smug smile right off his damn face.

Rogan stroked my back. The harsh expression on his face told me everything I needed to know. We were trapped. The inner boundary of our circle cut us off from the rest of the world and from David. Nobody knew where we were. No help was coming. We would die here, naked, while David Howling looked on and smiled.

The cold was unbearable now. My teeth chattered. My knees wanted to knock together.

I shifted from foot to foot and stepped on something hard. Pulling away from Rogan and the warmth physically hurt. I crouched down, hugging my knees, as if trying to keep warm, keeping my body between David and whatever I’d stepped on. I felt around with my hand and found the familiar shape. The piece of chalk I had clutched in my hand as I had gotten out of the car. I almost cried. Instead I stood up and wrapped my arms around Rogan again.

“Inconsiderate of you,” Rogan said, looking at David. His voice was calm.

“I did the best I could. Teleportation is tricky business,” David said. “Nobody wanted you to end up as a human version of the Wisconsin cannibal sandwich. If it came to it, they would accept such a death, but it certainly wasn’t ideal. Teleportation required a place that was relatively close and large enough to absorb the teleportation echo, while I required an isolated, enclosed area with high moisture located somewhere where your penchant for urban destruction wouldn’t be an issue.”

“Still, the risk was too high. Over fifty percent of teleportations fail.”

David shook his head. “Neither of you had any major surgeries requiring inorganic components. I did take a chance on Ms. Baylor not having breast implants. Fortunately for all of us I was right, otherwise things would’ve gotten quite messy. The only wild factor was whether or not you would drive over the children, but after the incident at Antonio de Trevino’s house, I was reasonably certain you would do everything in your power to avoid it. Principles make us predictable. We all have the lines we don’t cross. Yours simply happened to be one of the more obvious ones.”

“Compounds of organic origin,” I said. My voice sounded hoarse.

“I’m sorry, what?” David asked.

“Teleportation doesn’t affect living things. It affects compounds of organic origin.”

“Yes, but I fail to see your point. Even if one of you wore something made of pure cotton or silk, it would only prolong your death by a couple of minutes.”

I fixed him with my stare and offered Rogan the chalk. His eyes shone. He kissed me, hard, gripping me to him. It wasn’t a kiss, it was a declaration of war and I reveled in it. He let go of me.

“How do we get out of this circle?” I asked him.