"Voulez-vous cesser de me cracker dessuspendant que vous parlez,"I said, my heart pounding wildly.

"There's the spitting-in-my-face saying," Jim said softly to itself.

"Jai une grenouille dans mon bidet!"I growled.

"And the frogs."

"T'as une tete afaire sauter les plaques d'egouts,"I wailed.

"Face like a manhole cover. Canmerde be very far be-hind?"

"Merde!"I bellowed.

"You can say that again," Jim said.

10

"Why does this keep happening to me?" I wailed, wav-ing my hands around wildly. "Why, why, why? What am I, a dead body magnet?"

"You want everyone in the neighborhood to hear you, keep it up," Jim advised, looking over its shoulder toward the house.

"Ack!"I shoved Jim inside the gazebo and closed the door behind us. "Don't touch anything. Oh, my god, he's beenkilled!”

"Looks like the same setup as the other place," Jim said, nosing around the circle. "Smells the same, too."

I wrung my hands, my mind whirling like a hamster chained to a wheel, forced to run around and around and around without stop. "He's dead! The Venediger is dead! Right in front of me, he'sdead!"

"Yeah, I think we've established that. Are you hyster-ical?" Jim asked. "Should I slap you upside the head?"

The threat of being slapped by a demon allowed me to get a grip on myself (although it was a close thing there for a few seconds). I took a few deep breaths to get some much-needed oxygen heading toward my hamster-on-a-wheel brain. "OK. I'm in control. I'm confident."

"But are you a professional?" Jim asked.

I circled the upside-down body of the Venediger, gnawing on my lower lip as 1 examined him. "He's hang-ing by one foot. His hands are bound lo his sides. He has a knife in his heart. Oh,merde, this is the Second Demon Death, isn't it?"

"Yup. All the classic signs, right down to the sum-moning circle beneath him."

I reached across the circle to place two fingers on the Venediger's hand. It was cooling, but not yet cold. He hadn't been dead long, maybe a half an hour. As I took my hand away, an object fell from his grasp. Without thinking, I picked it up. It was about the size of a silver dollar, a flat, round, dull gray-striped stone that was chased in gold, a paper-thin golden dragon limned onto the back. "What the heck is this?"

"You asking me?"

"No," I said slowly. I turned the stone over in my hands, unsure of what I should do with it. It felt heavier than it looked, and made the tips of my fingers tingle. "Power. It has power. Since it was clutched in his hand, more than likely it was the Venediger's, but the dragon is the same style as the one on my aquamanile and the chal-ice I saw in Drake's lair. Didn't Drake mention some-thing about the aquamanile being one of a set of three?"

I gnawed on my lip for another moment, then tucked the stone into my bra for safekeeping. If it turned out to be nothing, I could easily return it. If it was valuable, per-haps I could use it to charm Drake into helping me. "Be-sides, the Venediger's dead, so it's simply a matter of finders keepers."

"Oh, yeah, that sounds ethical," Jim said dryly.

I ignored the demon as I paced around the body again before squatting on my heels to look closely at the circle.

being careful not to touch it. "It looks like it's been drawn with a marking pen."

"Wood floor," Jim pointed out.

"Oh, yeah. At least it's easy to see the demon symbols. Bafamal again."

"Popular guy. Gets around a lot. Likes disco. Favors shiny Italian suits when it dons human form," Jim said helpfully.

"Hmm." I bit back the urge to run away from the dead body, from Paris, fromeverything and instead held my hands close to the circle as I closed my eyes and opened myself up to the power within it. The light in the gazebo as viewed through my inner sight was so brilliant, it made me flinch. Mentally I looked around the room, but there was nothing to see but the body, the blood, and the circle. "The circle is closed, but no demon was summoned. Bafamal was here, though."

"Went to ground." Even with my eyes closed, I could see Jim nosing around a faint black smear on the wooden flooring. "Don't suppose you can feel who drew the cir-cle?"

I dragged my sightless gaze back to the circle and al-lowed myself to really see it. There was something about it that felt. .. familiar. "It's someone I know, someone I've met since I came to Paris, but who it is … I can't see. I just can't see." A finger of ice chilled my back, making me shiver. "I know this: It's someone with a truly evil soul."

Jim looked toward the body of the Venediger and pulled a face. 'That pretty much goes without saying."

"Darn it, I can almost feel who drew the circle. I must not be doing something right. If I can just concentrate enough …" I pictured my magic door, pictured it open-ing as it had when I channeled Drake's heat, when I felt the power of his fire as it burned through my body, giv-ing me strength, giving me energy.

"Uh .. . Aisling . .."

"Shh, I'm concentrating." I embraced the dragon fire, shaping it, molding it, turning it from a force that took life to one that created it.

"Aisling, I think you should see this."

"Just a sec—I'm almost done." Drake's dragon fire was the key to my power, about that I was sure. I took the shaped energy I had drawn from within me and gave it form.

"How do you like your dead man, rare or well done?"

I opened my eyes, once again aware of a vague sense of loss as I was confined to just normal sight.

The gazebo was on fire.

"What the hell?"

"Abaddon, not—"

"Crap on rye!" I interrupted, stared at the flames lick-ing at the back wall of the gazebo. "Didn't I tell you not to touch anything?"

"I didn't do that—you did. The minute you started breathing heavy and doing your Mme. Aisling stuff, the fire started."

"Criminy dutch," I snarled as I got to my feet, cough-ing as the smoke from the fire stung my throat and eyes. "Why does everything happen to me?"

"I don't think now is the time to debate the cata-strophic nature of your life. Now is the time to get out of here before we become barbecue."