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I say, “Hey, Kenny. What’s that circle made of? Sea salt?”

He smirks at me like he was expecting the question.

“Of course it’s salt,” he says, “but I souped it up. The book says that silver is also a powerful spirit binder. So, for extra protection I added silver.”

He looks so pleased with himself. A kid who just went around the block on his first two-wheeler. Too bad he’s going to die.

Rudy finally pulls away from Dan and Juliette and plunges into the back of the crowd. Kenny steps up to take his place at the circle.

“Pure silver?” I say.

“Of course.”

“You know that mixing too much silver with salt cancels the effects of both, right?”

He looks puzzled. “I’ve never heard that. You just made that up.”

I grab Janet and try to pull them to the stairs, but it’s too late.

Smoke squid manages to move enough of the circle out of the way that a tentacle blows through it and grabs Kenny around the neck. It pulls him into the air and shakes him like a terrier with a rat. His neck snaps and he’s dead a second later.

I drag Janet back from the stairs to the vault room where I fought the vampire. I stay outside, but yell to the others as I go.

“In here, assholes.”

Having honed their survival instincts through years of extreme craziness, Dan and Juliette are the first ones into the room before the rest of the Lodge shoves and claws its way inside. The smoke squid is out of the circle now, banging off the walls and shaking the whole building as it looks for a way out.

As the last few people make it inside the vault, Manimal Mike shoves Maria in ahead of him. Then some nervous creep pulls the door shut before Mike can get in.

The smoke squid grabs his arm and tosses him across the room like a dead flounder. Mike doesn’t move after that, so the squid loses interest in him. To make sure, I shout some hoodoo at the thing and blast it into the wall a lot fucking harder than it tossed Mike.

The squid spins and comes after me, but I’m able keep it away with a stream of Hellion curses.

Whatever the thing is, it isn’t dumb. When it realizes that it can’t kill me, it shoots out its tentacles and probes the walls and ceiling for a way out. I pull the Colt and take aim at it with a Spiritus Dei–coated bullet. But as I’m squeezing the trigger, the smoke squid rips a set of heavy bookshelves off the wall and tosses them at me. I have to dodge it to keep from being crushed and by the time I

have the Colt back up the squid is gone.

It turns out that the bookshelves were a con job. They were there to cover a passage cut into the rock wall. I want to ask the doom twins where the tunnel leads, but there’s no time. All I can do is go after the squid and hope it’s not hiding around the first turn to rip my head off. That would be embarrassing.

I hate chasing things that float or fly. I’m stuck on two legs, panting and sweating, while they glide around like Rocky the Flying Squirrel. I swear that I chase the smoke squid for at least twenty minutes before I get near it. We move down through a series of passages that open up into a huge cavern, which soon narrows into a wide tunnel.

I eventually catch sight of the squid. There are stalactites hanging from the roof of the tunnel. I shout some hexes, and one by one, they begin to fall. The third one comes down dead center on the squid, blasting its smoky body into a thin mist. I take a couple of shots at it with the Colt, but there isn’t enough of the squid in any one place to hurt it badly. When it does coalesce again, it shoots out two long tentacles and latches on to one of my legs.

It drags me along the floor of the tunnel toward a black maw the size of a cement truck. When I try to shoot again, another tentacle knocks the Colt out of my hand. I have to wait until the last minute, when Smokey the squid thinks it’s about to get lunch. Just before it tosses me like a peanut into its guts, I shout one of my old favorite bits of arena hoodoo—a massive pressure blast that hits like a cement truck.

The problem is, this close to the smoke squid, the blast could take me out too. There’s a split second when the pressure hits and the squid lets go of me to dive into a shadow. Only I’m just a little bit off and the force of the tunnel blast rockets me through the shadow and into the Room of Thirteen Doors at the speed of a cruise missile. I hit the far wall and come to on the cool stone floor.

Once I’m sure all of my limbs are there and still working, I stumble out of the Room and back into the tunnel.

The doom twins and the other Lodge suckers are staring down at the two tons of goo that used to be the smoke squid. I come up behind Dan and Juliette as quietly as possible so I can rip out their spines in front of everybody.

Before I can get hold of them Janet screams my name and practically tackles me, holding me in a rib-crushing hug that goes on for a long time.

“I thought that thing ate you,” they say.

“Nah. Turns out it was vegan.”

Janet kisses me and when we pull away, I finally get a good look around at the tunnel.