It fires the teeth of people who’ve died horrible, agonizing deaths. Their suffering is distilled into the teeth, and it’s released when they hit their target.Few things can withstand a concentrated dose of another being’s pain.

She was glad the fucker was hurting. She’d make him – and the rest of the goddamned Cabal – experience all the pain in the universe if she could.

Rauch, wearing his police uniform, exited the cruiser, seemingly unhurt after ramming his vehicle into the Pest Defense van. Too bad, Lori thought.

The rumble of the motorcycle engine grew louder, and an instant later, Goat-Eyes joined the rest of them. Like the Driver, she wore her Cabal robe, and Lori wondered how she was able to drive her bike without getting the hem’s fabric caught in the back wheel. It seemed to Lori that it would take as much supernatural power as anything else the Cabal did.

Goat-Eyes pulled her motorcycle up to the Driver’s car, parked, and dismounted.

The gang’s all here, Lori thought.

Ignoring the protestations of her knee, she rose to her feet. Whatever was going to happen next, she’d be damned if she’d face it lying down.

She looked around once more for the Gravedigger Special and this time she saw it, gleaming white against the Nightway’s glossy ebon surface, ten feet to her left.

Goat-Eyes had a cord of braided leather wrapped several times around her waist. A handle protruded from the coils, and Goat-Eyes took hold of it and yanked. The cord slipped loose, and when Goat-Eyes flicked her wrist, Lori realized she was holding a whip. It cracked loudly and flames burst to life along its length. Lori had to admit the effect was impressive. Goat-Eyes kept cracking the whip as she approached, and every time she did, the flames burned higher and hotter.

Smiling in triumph, the three Cabal members closed in on Lori and Edgar. Only the Driver was unarmed, but considering what his non-eyes could do, Lori knew he didn’t need any other weapon.

“Come with us willingly, Lori,” the Driver said, hand pressed to his shoulder wound, voice tight as he fought against the agonizing pain caused by the tooth-bullet. “If you do, I promise no harm will come to Edgar. We’ll leave him here without so much as mussing a hair on his head.”

“Of course, there’s no guarantee a predator won’t get him after we depart,” Goat-Eyes said.

“But that’s not our problem,” Rauch said. “Besides, he’s a wily veteran of the Nightway. If anyone can survive its dangers on foot – literally one foot – it’s him.”

“Don’t do it,” Edgar said, wobbling as he continued to try to maintain his balance. “You can’t trust them. They’ll probably kill me as soon as they get you out of here.”

“We wouldn’t do that,” Goat-Eyes protested. “We still have need of you.”

“By need, you mean you want to take him back to the tower and torture him,” Lori said.

Goat-Eyes shrugged. “One person’s torture is another’s bliss. We do what we must to maintain the Balance.”

The trio had continued moving as they spoke, and now they were less than fifteen feet from Lori and Edgar. Lori glanced at the Gravedigger Special again, tried to calculate the odds of her being able to get hold of the gun before the Cabal members could attack. She was no great mathematician, but she figured her chances were piss-poor.

Edgar extended his hands in a warning gesture.

“Stay back! Not all of my bugs are dead. They’ve multiplied since I escaped you, and I still got a fuck-ton inside me. If you so much as take another step closer, I’ll—”

Rauch raised his gun and fired.

Edgar’s head jerked as a bullet pierced his skull and entered his brain. The impact knocked him off balance and he fell to the ground, blood jetting from his wound. He turned to look at Lori one last time, but his eyes were already starting to glaze over, and she didn’t know if he actually saw her. Then he slumped over and fell still, mouth open, no beetles emerging from it.

“You idiot!” the Driver shouted. “He was bluffing – he didn’t have any more beetles inside him!”

“How was I supposed to know?” Rauch said. “He sounded very convincing.”

Goat-Eyes stared at Edgar’s body. The whip fell from her hand, and when it hit the ground, its flames extinguished.

“Do you have any idea what you’ve done?” she said, nearly screaming the words.

Edgar’s sudden death shocked Lori to her core. She hadn’t known the man long or well, but he’d been a friend to her, helping her when she’d most needed it, and without any concern for his own safety. Fury at the Cabal – especially Rauch – overwhelmed her, and while the three mystics argued, she started toward the Gravedigger Special. She tried to run, but her fucking knee wouldn’t allow her to do more than a sort of shuffling hobble. She expected to hear Rauch fire his gun once more, expected to feel a bullet slam into her, but he didn’t. As if from a distance, she heard him arguing with his two companions, and she prayed the three would remain distracted just a few moments more.

Her knee gave out on her before she reached the gun, but as she fell, she stretched out her right arm as far as she could. As she smacked down onto the Nightway’s cold, smooth surface, her hand came down on the Gravedigger Special. She grabbed it, rolled onto her side, aimed at Rauch, and fired.

The tooth-bullet struck Rauch in the throat, and his head jerked backward. Blood jetted from his neck slits, and when the agony contained within the tooth was released into his system, he screamed. More blood gushed from his mouth, and for an instant he looked like some kind of grisly fountain. Then his body went limp and he fell to the ground.

“Fuck you!” Lori shouted in triumph.

The Driver and Goat-Eyes gaped at their companion’s corpse, and Lori wondered if they’d ever seen one of their own die before – or if they’d even believed any of them could die until this very moment.

By her count, the Gravedigger Special had five rounds left, and she intended to use them all. She aimed at the Driver, but before she could pull the trigger, she felt a tremor shudder through the ground beneath her, far stronger than the mild vibration that constantly hummed in the Nightway’s surface. She’d lived in Ohio all her life and had never experienced an earthquake, but she knew that was exactly what was happening now.

The four vehicles – the overturned van, the Driver’s car, Rauch’s cruiser, and Goat-Eyes’ motorcycle – shook and bounced. The motorcycle fell over with a crash, and both Goat-Eyes and the Driver fell too, unable to maintain their balance.

The tremors intensified, and Lori felt the ground actually ripple beneath her, as if the Nightway momentarily became water. She heard cracking sounds like breaking ice, and she watched as fissures – some small, some large – opened in the road’s obsidian surface. She couldn’t stand, couldn’t move. All she could do was hold tight to the Gravedigger Special so she wouldn’t lose it again and let the tremors do with her what they would. She had no idea how long the quake lasted, but eventually the tremors lessened before finally ceasing altogether.

She lay still for several moments, heart pounding, body bruised and aching. Her knee still hurt like hell, but she had more important things to concern her right now. She pushed herself into a sitting position and saw that the tremors had bounced and rolled Edgar’s body, and now he lay face down, arms splayed at awkward angles. His damaged prosthesis had broken entirely off and lay some distance away, while the other was now bent at a forty-five-degree angle. As she gazed upon her friend’s corpse, she became aware of a tickling sensation on the back of her left hand. She looked down and saw a black beetle – one of Edgar’s, she presumed – crawling on her skin. Ordinarily, the sight of such an insect on her body might’ve freaked her out, but she was emotionally numb after everything that had happened in the last several minutes. So instead of shaking her hand to dislodge the beetle, she raised it to her head and tilted it to encourage the insect to crawl off. She felt it scuttle onto her head, where it nestled into her hair and fell still. Maybe one of Edgar’s friends had escaped being swallowed by the darkness inside the Driver’s head. Or maybe Edgar had had one last beetle inside him after all, and the earthquake had shaken it loose. Either way, a piece of him had survived, and she didn’t intend to leave it behind.

She looked up then, startled to see the Driver standing over her. He still had one hand pressed to his shoulder wound, but he held out his other hand, and without pausing to consider whether it was a good idea, she took it and let him help her to her feet. He winced in pain from the effort but did not cry out. Goat-Eyes walked over to join them. Her face was ashen, as if she was terrified, and the Driver didn’t look much better.

“What the hell was that?” Lori asked.

The Driver spoke first. “Edgar died before he could discover how he upset the Balance and take action to correct his mistake. And now that the Imbalance cannot be rectified by any other means––”

“The Intercessor has decided to step in,” Goat-Eyes finished. Her voice was respectful, almost worshipful, but also suffused with fear.

Lori remembered hearing that word – Intercessor – in the Vermilion Tower.

“Isn’t that your people’s god or something?” she asked.

“The Intercessor is much more than a mere god,” the Driver said. “It is the ultimate keeper of the Balance between worlds. The members of the Cabal act as its agents, but when we are unable to correct an Imbalance ourselves, the Intercessor rouses from its slumber to tend to the task itself.”

“It hasn’t woken for millennia,” Goat-Eyes said. “In all that time, we haven’t failed to fulfill our duties.”

“Until now,” Lori said.

“Yes,” the Driver said.

Lori remembered seeing the Vermilion Tower for the first time, when the Driver had brought her to it. She had been struck by the structure’s spiral, almost organic-looking, shape, and she’d imagined it as the horn of a gigantic beast whose body was almost entirely hidden beneath the ground. She realized then that her imagining had been right. The Vermilion Tower was part of the Intercessor, and the creature was now awake.

“The earthquake….”

“Was the result of the Intercessor pulling itself out of the ground,” Goat-Eyes said.

Lori thought of the Cabal members she’d seen within the tower, hundreds of them. Had any of them managed to escape before the Intercessor had begun to wake? What of those that had been caught inside? Had they been tossed around like pieces of straw in a hurricane as their god began to move? If so, how many of them had survived? Not that she gave a damn what happened to them, considering the way they treated the people they abducted.

“Why would you let it come to this?” Lori asked. “If you just handled Imbalances yourselves instead of goading us into trying to figure everything out, something like this would never happen, and the Intercessor could go on sleeping forever.”