However much speed demon-ness granted the Ascendent, it wasn’t enough to beat a bullet. My shot hit Djera Maha square in the thigh, and she doubled over with a grunt.

I didn’t wait to see if I’d hit an artery or anything so lucky. Keeping the gun leveled at her, I scanned the room for Faith’s sword. Where would you hide a sword in a Church of Ecstasy reading room so that your target wouldn’t notice it, but your ally would?

Djera Maha was already straightening, face contorted with hate. I danced a couple steps to the right, tracking her out of the corner of my eye.

There.

In the back, under a pile of cushions, metal glinted.

Dodging around the cowering priest – who was obviously more a lover than a fighter, not that I was complaining – I snatched the hilt, whipped the sword out of the scabbard, and swung the blade up just in time to block Djera Maha’s first blow. Even hampered by the wound, she was still terrifyingly, inhumanely fast. Totally calm, as if she knew that she was in control of the situation, she struck again.

Knocking aside her bare fist – which didn’t faze her one bit – I started bellowing out Ash’s rant: “How could you defy the Emperor and the Church? How could you expect to get away with it?”

She didn’t bother to answer – although maybe by that point she’d sunk too far into her demonic side for human speech.

Deflecting another punch, I roared, “You gave me no choice!” (Well, okay, it might have come out as more of a shriek.)

I flashed forward, trying to break through her guard, but she simply brushed the blade aside, grabbed me around the waist, and bashed me into the wall.

All the breath whooshed out of me. My ribs screamed. My armor absorbed the impact, and I somehow managed to cling to the hilt, but for a brief, crucial second, I hung limply in her grasp.

She didn’t do anything so human as gloat or even smile. In her dark eyes, I read only her intent to finish me off as quickly and efficiently as possible.

All of a sudden, the air behind her flickered. Ash dove straight out of the ghost field and plunged a dagger into her unprotected back. Her eyes widened, as if a mosquito had bitten her in an inconvenient spot, and her grip loosened just a bit.

Seizing the chance, I wrenched free and sank into a guard position, while Ash danced around her with his bloody dagger. Djera Maha shook her head, irked at having to split her attention between two minor irritants.

The door flew open with a bang and in rushed Faith, acolyte in tow. “I think there’s some horrible Hive thing going on!” Faith cried. “That poor priest needs our help!” She grabbed the acolyte’s shoulders and pointed the girl at the hysterical priest. “Let’s get him out!”

Assisted by a push, the acolyte stumbled forward and tugged urgently on the priest’s arm. “We have to go we have to go we have to go,” she babbled.

Quivering from head to toe, he let her pull him to his feet.

A faintly dreamy smile crossed Faith’s face as she contemplated Djera Maha, Ash, and me. Attuning to the ghost field, she tried to identify Djera Maha’s demon’s elemental affinity.

(“The Church isn’t picky about which demon it uses,” she explained later. “It just grabs the most powerful one that it thinks someone’s soul can hold. I thought that knowing what sort of demon it was might help you, Isha – in case you wanted to befriend it! They’re generally more like Setarra than Cuddles, though. But you liked Cuddles, right? You thought he was cute?”

Yeah, sure.)

But the demon kept slapping her away and refusing to hold still.

Since that attunement had failed miserably, Faith reached behind the door, produced her lightning hook, flipped a switch – and drew a long arc of electroplasmic energy straight out of Djera Maha’s blood. Bluish-white light streamed out of the Ascendent’s wounds and steamed off her skin, charging the lightning hook to capacity.

Djera Maha screamed in pain and convulsed.

With a flick of Faith’s wrist, the arc of lightning bent around and leaped into my sword, which started crackling all the way down the length of the blade. The metal buzzed and bucked, as if I were using it to pry apart the lightning barrier, and I clutched the hilt with both hands, hoping the blade wouldn’t tear itself free. For a split second, I was glad that this wasn’t Grandfather, because I had absolutely no idea what an infusion of another demon’s energy would do to it.

Gods, I must be going crazy! Why was I worrying about Grandfather?

Swinging the sword with all my strength, I lopped off Djera Maha’s head. Her body collapsed like a broken puppet. I swayed in place, panting and stunned, while blood gushed from her neck.

Faith’s smug smile said, Well, that’s convenient.

During all of that, the acolyte and the priest had held stock-still in sheer terror. Now they broke out of their trance and bolted for the door.

I seemed to have lost control of all my muscles and was shaking almost as hard as the priest, but with the last of my strength, I pointed the sword tip at them and croaked, “Don’t you dare go anywhere.”

They froze in the doorway, too petrified to scream.

All of a sudden, the sword weighed as much as a railcar. The hilt ripped out of my fingers. From far, far away, I watched the blade clatter to the floor. And then I was joining it on the cold tiles next to an ever-growing pool of blood, blinking up at my crewmates as they bustled around me.

From a pocket, Faith was producing a bottle and vacuum device and sucking up the blood. “Arilyn, help me collect this,” she called. “The Church would be upset if it went to waste.”

As dazed as I, the acolyte obeyed, while Ash scooped up a sample for his own experiments. Among the three of them, they managed to collect all of Djera Maha’s blood, minus the amount staining the acolyte’s robes.

Looking her up and down, Faith tsked, “Just think how suspicious it would look if you ran off now, all covered in blood, to report this murder.” Lips pursed, she scrutinized the priest next, then suggested, “Perhaps it would be better if you waited here, as if you were also a victim and fainted during the entire process.”

Both the acolyte and the priest promptly flopped to the floor and played dead.

Satisfied, Faith smiled down at her handiwork – then frowned when she realized that Dunvil would seek a scapegoat. Hauling the acolyte back to her feet, she hustled the girl out of the reading room, her words drifting back to us: “You’ve started to get a glimpse of all the horrible things the Church is doing. Now, let’s go change and slip out for an evening on the town, because we totally weren’t here at all.”

I stared after them blankly, wondering what acolytes of the Church of Ecstasy did on a night on the town.

A gloved hand tugged me to my feet. Ash inspected me for bloodstains, then put a gentle hand on my elbow and steered me back towards the nave. “I sent the children to establish an escape route for us,” he said, in the soothing tone you might use on an injured dog. “I told them to create a distraction. I left it to their discretion, but…fires are just so efficient. Especially ones near precious artwork.”

I wanted to protest but couldn’t find the words.

Back in the nave, the orgy was winding down, and if I stumbled and tripped from time to time, I fit right in with everyone else. Ash and I were halfway to the main entrance when the first alarms were raised: “Fire! Fire near the sacristy!”

Chaos erupted as the congregation fled for the exits and the acolytes ran to save the art. Making sure to keep a firm hold on me, Ash let the crowd sweep us out of the Sanctorium and into Unity Park. In the distance, fire engines clanged and goat hooves clattered.

“Note to self,” Ash groused, “murder the fire brigade.”

I roused myself enough to object, “But then the city would burn down.”

He looked as if that prospect weren’t precisely unappealing.

Through a miracle on par with the shattering of the Gates of Death, all of us got away clean. Unsurprisingly, our crew now found ourselves at war with both the Church and the Hive, which meant that we really should lie low for a while (not that I actually believed we would).

Overall, the Lampblacks and Red Sashes applauded our efforts – although not the twelve-coin fee that they had to shell out to their overpriced assassins. Happiest of all was Irimina, who now possessed concrete proof that the Hive had murdered her parents (which she’d suspected all along); the identity of the murderer; and the final, irrevocable death of said murderer – plus her lieutenant to interrogate for all kinds of information that might be useful to a smugglers crew.

Or, as Faith put it when she delivered a pink-ribbon-wrapped Marne to the Kinclaith mansion, “We accidentally came into possession of this poor person who seems very knowledgeable about the Hive’s sins. There was a terrible catastrophe in which she accidentally murdered her superior officer, and now the Hive wants her blood! So she is so desperate that she will reach out to the Hive’s enemies themselves – in a very suspicious act – to attempt to flee the city and the circumstances that she has brought upon herself! And her destination is unknown, but were it to happen to be in the middle of the deathlands, I’m sure she would be the only one to object.”

Irimina simply smiled and sipped her tea, enjoying the theatrics.

Bringing her voice down from its shrill register, Faith winked and teased, “Just as long as it is very obvious that she is very suspiciously fleeing the city.” Then, as if the thought had just occurred to her, she sighed, “Such a tragic tale. The horrible things that have happened to her, the horrible things that she knows about the Hive’s connection to your family…. I mean, as a smugglers crew, you must have ways of torturing information from people yourselves, right?”

Irimina smiled again, a very different kind of smile this time. “Oh, yes.”

“Oh, sorry!” Faith gasped in fake contrition. A hand fluttered up to her lips. “I need to resist asking for details. I’m sure you have your secrets. Although…I really want to learn your ways.” Before Irimina had a chance to answer, Faith blinked coquettishly and went on, “But in the meantime, isn’t she pretty? Did you see how I wrapped her up in this giant pink ribbon?”

This time, Irimina’s smile showed genuine amusement. “I did.”

Shortly thereafter, rumors circulated through the criminal underworld that Marne Booker had been seen at Gaddoc Rail Station, catching a train out of town.

She was never seen again.

Around the same time, a letter worked its way up through the Church bureaucracy and finally landed on the desk of Preceptor Dunvil. In a long, rambling confession, “Marne” wrote that she had discovered a conspiracy within the Hive to betray the Church – and that it had centered on Djera Maha. “She paid dearly to have the Church ritual defiled,” “Marne” revealed, hinting that Djera Maha had sabotaged her own second-in-command’s Ascension, “and I bear guilt every day for assisting her in this atrocity. But I can endure this no longer, so I am taking justice into my own hands.” For verisimilitude, Ash included specifics of Hive politics that he and Faith had extracted from Marne, as well as select details about the Ascension ritual sabotage. The letter concluded with an anguished, “I know that my zealotry will cause turmoil that you will have to suffer, but I also know that after this parasite is excised, the Church will emerge stronger than ever under your leadership. Yours, in faith eternal, Marne Booker.”

“I wanted to make Marne sign it herself,” Ash sighed, “but her signature would have been too shaky.”

With no small amount of regret, he had forged it.

No one in the Church noticed.

Not long after that rumor set the underworld abuzz, my crewmates and I were breakfasting in the railcar when there was a knock on the door. Ash opened it to find Nyryx and an unfamiliar woman. Both of them were heavy cloaked.

Looking first at Ash, then past him at Faith and me, Nyryx said, “We need to talk to you, urgently.”

From her seat at the table, Faith sang out, “In our line of work, we understand that people need to talk to us urgently. But the rules are always the same: No assassinations if the target is really, really cute.” Then she hopped up and offered Nyryx a chair.

Without taking it, Nyryx informed her, “I don’t think that will be an issue.” To Ash and me, she said, “I don’t believe you’ve met Salia. She is one of the leaders of the Reconciled.”

The mysterious Salia, whose name had popped up so many times, lowered her hood to reveal a woman of indeterminate ancestry with nondescript hair color, eye color, and facial features. She shook our hands with a firm, confident grip. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.” Sitting in the chair that Faith had offered Nyryx, the Reconciled leader looked around at all of us and observed, “So: I see that you’ve gone and upset the apple cart. Killing one of the Ascendent is a very bold move – ” her neutral tone didn’t exactly make it sound like a compliment – “but one that will speed up everyone’s timetables a great deal. Therefore, I think it will be in all of our interests if we deal with the rest of the problem as quickly as possible.”

Perhaps, but Faith couldn’t possibly let anyone else, even her friend’s superior, speak for so long without interruption. “I agree,” she sighed, sinking back in her chair and trailing her limp hands over the armrests. “Contagion should be wiped out so it can’t spread any further. As quickly and ruthlessly as possible.”

Ash seconded her at once. “I couldn’t agree more.”

Although I had no idea what any of them were talking about, I nodded sagely.

In the matter-of-fact tone that always presaged a long bargaining session, Ash asked, “How deep do you envision taking this? Because there are an awful lot of them.”

Salia’s eyebrows lifted. “Of Ascendent? No.” With a hint of reproof, she corrected him, “There are three that I care about. And I need you to kill them.”