Tom did smell smoke. He saw it, too, rolling across the ceiling from the basement door.

The house was on fire.

Grampa built the place back in the seventies, before the sprawl of Chicago suburbs engulfed it, and like so many other old houses, it was built entirely out of highly flammable carcinogens.

Shit, maybe I can put it out or something.

Tom ran up the stairs and lunged for the door handle a moment before Jacob tugged him backwards by the shirt collar, lightly ripping the fabric and nearly causing him to topple down the unpainted stairs.

“Why!?” Tom demanded.

In lieu of response, the skinny freight stocker slipped around him and spat on the door handle.

The spit bubbled and hissed, burning off in seconds, leaving nothing but a smudge.

“Yeah, you don’t wanna open that,” Jacob said, sliding past him in the narrow staircase.

“How do you know to do that!?” Tom demanded.

“You act like you’ve never been in a burning building before,” Jacob said, cocking his eyebrow while he studied the garage window tucked behind the safe, the in-case-of-emergency window meant to allow people to escape in a fire.

“No, I’ve never been in a burning building before. That’s generally a good thing,” Tom said, preparing to slide the safe out of the way.

“Stop,” Jacob said, pinching his ribs.

“Ow! Why!?”

“Because that’s the only way out,” Jacob said, nodding at the window. “So you can bet your ass there’s a gun pointing at it.”

Tom’s mind caught up quick. House was fifty years old, and decided to catch fire now? Not likely. Odds were, the cop set fire to the house, then settled into a nice, relaxed firing stance, aiming at the emergency exit. When Tom put his mug right in the window, he’d get it shot off.

“Son of a bitch,” Tom muttered. It was really smart, in a brutal, stupidly-simple kind of way.

“What? You’ve never been pinned down in a burning building before?” Jacob asked.

“And you have?”

“Nah, just those two things separately. I did read The Art of War, though. He’s controlling our options.”

Tom frowned as he spotted the hole in Jacob’s logic. “You read?”

Jacob scoffed. “We’ve got about five minutes before it becomes uninhabitable in here.” He nodded to the magic supplies strewn about the ground. “You might wanna pack up.”

“Fuck!” Tom knelt down and grabbed a plastic tote and began haphazardly shoving his soulmonger supplies into it. Can’t forget the stacks of money and gold coins from the safe, too.

“So Mr. Fluffybottom, are you bulletproof?” Jacob asked, glancing down at the mountain lion.

“I doubt it,” Tom said as he worked. “Carol wasn’t. And don’t name my demon cougar.”

“Well, I’m not sticking my head out there first.” Jacob shrugged. “I’m not that fucked up. You know, in retrospect, it was probably a bad idea to let a cold-blooded killer know you were onto them.”

“Yes, well, I was pissed off,” Tom muttered, already internalizing the guilt over his stupid, impulsive decision-making.

While Tom was packing, Jacob pulled a canister of bear spray out of his coat pocket.

“Is that gonna be a thing with you?”

“Bitch, bear spray will save your fuckin’ life. Always keep some handy,” Jacob muttered, folding a rag around the cap and spraying it for a fraction of a second.

“Mr. Fluffybottom, does this sting?” He rubbed a bit of the stain on the rag against the creature’s gums.

The man-sized cat shook its head.

“So you don’t feel pain?”

It shook its head again.

“Reeeaally?”

***Kenneth Peterson***

The fire was starting to become really obvious now, which meant sometime in the next minute or two, the two supervillains inside were going to have to make a run for it or get smothered/burned to a crisp.

It also meant he was going to have to bail before the fire trucks arrived.

Everything would be decided in the next couple minutes.

The safe slid out of the way, giving Ken an uninterrupted view of the basement. Unfortunately, they seemed to be onto him, since they went out of their way to avoid putting their faces in the window. All he could see were shelves against the back of the room.

Still, they have to come out at some point.

A hammer swung up and broke the glass, shattering out all the shards along the windowsill.

Ken gently put his finger in the firing position.

A black, man-sized lump flew out the window to the right, and Ken tracked it for an instant before he realized it was a trash bag.

A tan shape was already lunging out the other direction, and Ken snapped the rifle to the left, pulling off a couple snap shots before his brain IDed the…

Is that a cougar!?

And I missed!

The cougar moved like a goddamn…cougar, zigzagging while approaching like a fucking speeding car, with something clutched between its teeth.

Ken got another miss and a graze before the lightning-fast animal was on his ass.

Is that a canister of bear spra—

POW! The cay exploded the canister in its mouth like a fucking suicide bomber, even as it aimed to maul him with its inch-long claws.

Ken gave a strangled cry and focused on his superpower, turning intangible, allowing the animal to slip through him, landing on the ground behind him.

He whipped around and oriented on the confused animal behind him, lining up a shot on the back of its skull.

Then his eyes were on fire.

“Fuck!” Ken turned intangible a fraction of a second before the cougar swept around and tried to bite his throat out, dropping the punctured bear spray on the ground.

Screw this, time to go.

Ken maintained his intangibility while he sprinted to his car, half blind. He slipped through the door, the cougar clawing ribbons of the plastic siding off the sedan right behind him.

Coughing violently, eyes watering, Ken unlatched his glove compartment, grabbing the spare nine-millimeter he kept there.

“You wanna taste of me, huh?” he growled, angling the gun toward the snarling cat outside the car. “How about a taste of this?”

BOOM!

The window shattered as a bullet tore through it, but it wasn’t Ken’s.

In the distance, Ken could barely make out two figures silhouetted by the burning house. The tall skinny one in front was marching toward him with an arm extended.

BOOM! Another bullet whizzed past his face.

Who the fuck do you think you’re shooting at!? Ken thought, his teeth bared as he tried to aim the nine-millimeter towards them.

A cougar paw darted through the broken window and sank claws deep into the skin of his left arm.

“FUCK!”

BOOM!

Ken dropped the gun and turned the key, putting the car in gear and driving away at full speed. There was a wrenching flash of hot pain in his arm as the claws were torn out of his skin by sheer force.

BOOM!

The back window shattered, and the rear-view mirror disintegrated. Ken stepped on the gas, ignoring the warm liquid dripping down the side of his arm.

Fucking supervillains, using magic fucking giant cats as jihadists. The cowards can’t just face me fair and square.

And they shot at a cop.

That was unacceptable. It was against the fucking rules.

No, if they’re gonna be like that, I see no reason to play fair either. Ken’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. He patted the doodad in his pocket, feeling the sizzling sensation inside it.

It just occurred to me. There’s a lot more where this came from, and the thingy has plenty of charge now. The plan is back on.

***Tom Graves***

“PUSSY!” Tom shouted after the pussy at the top of his lungs.

Tom glanced at the cougar. “Can you track people?”

It nodded.

“Go kill that fucker. If he’s not dead by morning, come back to me. Probably too much trouble to have you move around during the day.”

The cougar nodded, sprinting away at a speed that boggled the mind.

Tom glanced at Jacob.

“Nice move with the trash bag. Did you learn that from The Art of War?”

Jacob scoffed. “I learned that from Cowboy Bebop.”

“What’s Cowboy Bebop?”

Jacob’s jaw dropped.

“You know what? Not important.” Tom held up a hand, forestalling any recriminations for not watching ‘classic anime’. “Let’s get the fuck out of here and get Suzie to the hospital. If I don’t have sixty soul-pulses in the next thirty days, I’m dead.”

Tom shoved the plastic tote of supplies into the back of the truck, then loaded up Suzie into the passenger seat between him and Jacob. The toad familiar was soft to the touch, with strangely bendy bones, and surprisingly non-slimy skin.

I guess it’s not actually a toad. It just kind of looked like one. Honestly, it was more like a plush stuffed animal. It was very squishy, and Tom was tempted to give the stubby creature a couple squishes, but they were on a harsh, you’re-gonna-die sort of deadline.

Jacob, in the meantime, was dinking around on his phone while he waited, seemingly heedless of the approaching sirens.

“Did you know a cougar can run up to fifty miles per hour?” he asked as Tom climbed into the dusty truck beside him.

“It seemed like it was going faster than that,” Tom said, settling into the seat and buckling in.

“Yes, it did,” Jacob said, putting the truck in gear and rumbling out into the road.

Tom glanced up into the rear-view mirror and caught the sight of his childhood home burning to the ground.

If there was ever a reason not to overplay your hand, that would be a damn good one right there.

He swallowed the lump of emptiness that was threatening to turn him into a sobbing wreck. It wasn’t quite as bad as Lily dying, but it was bad.

“Sup?” Jacob asked as Tom pulled out his phone.

“Gotta tell the grandparents they’re not coming home on Thursday,” Tom muttered, eyes watering.

Jacob sucked in a breath through his teeth, patting Tom on the back as he drove toward the hospital. “Hey, I know this is a bad time, but can we stop by my dealer’s place? She’s on the way to the hospital, and I need to top off.”

Tom glanced over at Jacob, eyes narrowed. He could feel his familiar, sitting on the bench seat between them, give the cokehead a similar look. Suzie narrowed her eyes, and turned slightly to put Jacob in the center of her vision, mirroring Tom’s disapproval.

“I almost forgot about that,” Tom said, maintaining hard eye contact.

“We can skip it,” Jacob offered with an anemic grin. “I can go by myself later.”

“No, let’s do it. I’m sure there’s something in The Art of War about keeping your troops coked up and ready to go.”

“There is, actually,” Jacob said with a grin. “Although it was mostly about morale.”

“See, Suzie? We’re learning already.”

She glanced at him, then radiated a thought.

All imperfect.

“I agree, Suzie. Nobody’s perfect.”

Tom stopped resisting and put Suzie in his lap and squished the toad demon as they drove away from his former home, petting his familiar with one hand while he dialed up Grampa with the other.