Constantine picked up Sonja’s ax and sprang to his feet. Stephen faced the arena door and reached for a pouch on his components belt. I picked up the scimitar, prepared to smash through the door if I heard another scream.

But none came. The three of us stared at the door, ready to enter regardless of what Nissa had told us. It was one thing to promise to listen, but another when you hear one of your best friends scream in abject agony like that.

The bar on the other side of the door clunked, and then a red-robed gnome pushed the door open. Another gnome silently beckoned us inside. I drove past them into the theater. Sonja still lay on the low table in virtually the same position I’d left her, but the gnomes had tied her hands and feet with leather belts to hooks beneath the table. I took the steps down to the table two at a time, trying not to wonder why the gnomes needed restraints on their altars.

When I got to Sonja, her eyes were still closed, but a healthy bronze color had returned to her face. And her chest rose and fell, though it was shallow and halting.

She’s alive, I thought, joyful tears springing to my eyes. Melony’s alive!

“Where is your healer?” Nissa asked from next to the cabinet. She was wiping her hands with a bloody white cloth. “Her wound is still open and needs to be closed if she is to survive the hour.”

“I’m on it,” Constantine said, shouldering past me and standing above Sonja’s wounded leg. The ragged gash was still there, but it wasn’t pumping out blood like before. Instead, the wound seemed to have a transparent film over it, like a steak wrapped in plastic. Constantine put his hands on the wound and said, “We’ll fix you up, lass. Enhanced Heal Wounds.”

I didn’t see any visible manifestation of Constantine’s divine magic, but I saw the results. The transparent film over the wound dissolved, and the wound went through an extreme fast-forward healing: the muscle fibers inside the wound reconnected, and the skin above it came together like a zipper. The skin re-formed, starting pink and thin, but grew more solid until there was barely a scar over what had once been a mortal wound. Sonja’s breathing grew deeper and more relaxed.

“Her body will recover now,” Nissa said as she approached the table. “But there was a complication.” She gave a shooing motion to the red-robed gnomes, and they silently shuffled out of the theater through the door they entered.

I felt my eyes narrow. “What complication?”

“Not one of my doing,” she said. “It was your fault for not telling me that two spirits were attached to this body.”

“What happened?” Stephen asked, looking at Sonja. “She seems okay. Isn’t she?”

“As I said, she will live,” Nissa replied. “But I don’t know which spirit entered her body during the ritual. One was the Warrior of the Crimson Leaf, for it was strong and willing to fight for its body. The other…well, it was not like any other spirit I’ve known. It did not seem of this world.”

I exchanged worried glances with Stephen and Constantine.

“Which spirit won?” I asked.

Nissa shrugged. “I don’t know. They fought each other at the end, and then her body screamed. That means a spirit returned to the body. But in this case, with two fighting for the same body, well, one of them won and the other…didn’t.”

“What happened to the other?” I asked. Desperation made my voice squeak.

The gnome shrugged again. “My assistants have gone to retrieve tools that might help us find out.”

I looked down at Sonja, who now seemed to be sleeping peacefully. “So we don’t know if Sonja or Melony will wake up,” I whispered, not caring if anyone heard me.

“Melony?” Nissa asked. “You know this other spirit?”

“Aye,” Constantine said, “but it’s complicated.”

“When will she wake up?” Stephen asked Nissa.

“It depends on the strength of her spirit and her body. No matter which spirit won, I have no doubt it will be soon.”

The doors on the other side of the theater flew open, and the red-robed gnomes shuffled in again. But this time, four of them carried a tall, oval mirror above their heads. They silently descended the stairs and placed the mirror at the end of the table near Sonja’s feet.

I couldn’t help but stare at my reflection in the mirror. Seeing Mace in the cabin during my near-death experience was like talking to another person. But the image in the mirror was me. I had long black hair tied back with wisps floating around my chiseled brown face and a scruffy, two-week-old beard. My shoulders looked like I was wearing football pads and my arm muscles bulged from my short-sleeved tunic. I moved my head back and forth to catch every angle. I felt like the school nerd who found the football captain’s varsity jacket and decided to try it on.

Nissa retrieved from her cabinet a set of goggles with lenses that looked as dark and thick as an arc welder’s mask. “I would offer you all goggles, but I doubt any of them would fit your big heads.”

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Find out who lost,” Nissa said. “Now, you all can stay here for this, but you must sit there.”

She pointed to the first row of seats about ten paces away. Constantine, Stephen, and I went reluctantly to the seats, but we just stood next to them.

Nissa returned to her cabinet, took out two suction cups with six-foot-long copper wires protruding from the tops, and returned to Sonja. She placed each suction cup on Sonja’s temples, then wrapped a leather band around her head to keep them in place. She led the wires out so that they lay on the floor of the dais.

As Nissa did all this, one of the red-robed gnomes went behind the cabinet and pulled out two large copper wire coils plugged into something behind the cabinet. The gnome dropped one coil next to Nissa and then led out the second coil to the back of the mirror. He did something back there and then peeked around the corner and nodded to Nissa. Then he went behind the cabinet again, where he stood quietly.

I craned my neck to see what was back there. The red-robed gnome stood next to a large bronze box with many dials and levers on the top. The two copper coils snaked out of a hole at the bottom of the box.

Nissa then took the wires from the suction cups and attached them to the coil at her feet.

I got the uncomfortable feeling that Sonja was about to rise off the table in Bride of Frankenstein fashion.

Nissa pulled her goggles over her eyes and said, “Whatever you do, do not look at the mirror. In fact, it’s best if you close your eyes now and turn your backs unless you want to be blinded. I do not have a cure for that.”

“I do,” Constantine muttered, but he turned his back on the mirror and shut his eyes anyway. Stephen did the same. I gave Sonja one last look—and Nissa a warning frown—and then turned my back and closed my eyes.

Once we did that, Nissa cried, “Light her up!”

Even with my eyes closed and my back turned, a brilliant white light shone through my eyelids like I was staring into the sun. Stephen and Constantine gasped beside me. I covered my eyes with my hands, but I still saw starbursts from the blast of light.

“Dial it up to five,” Nissa said. A faint humming came from behind me, which I assumed came from the bronze control box.

“No good, no good,” Nissa muttered. “Increase to eight!”

The humming grew louder, and then I heard a sizzling sound. I dropped my hands but kept my eyes closed. I was ready to turn and make sure they weren’t cooking Sonja, but the light was even more brilliant than before, and I had to put my hands back over my eyes. Along with the sizzling came the scents of ozone, burning cloth, and cooking meat.

“Gliff, relieve Torab and crank it to eleven!” Nissa yelled, sounding every bit as crazy as Dr. Frankenstein.

I heard some shuffling, and then the humming grew stronger. My bones felt like they were about to vibrate out of my body.

“Ah, there you are….” Nissa said. “Capture it, Fexir!”

A snap like a cracking whip exploded from whatever was happening behind me, and then the humming stopped.

I no longer saw the brilliant light through my eyelids, so I tentatively opened my eyes. Though I still had to blink away the starbursts from the initial brightness, the theater was once again lit only by the relatively dim electric lanterns on the walls.

I turned around. I seriously expected to see a smoking corpse lying on the table, but Sonja looked just as alive as when I last saw her. Nissa removed the suction cups from her temples as the red-robed gnomes recoiled their copper wires. By the bronze control box was a crumpled, smoking heap where the first red-robed gnome had stood.

“Did it work?” I asked Nissa as I went to Sonja’s side.

Nissa came over and stared at the mirror near Sonja’s feet. “You tell me, Paladin.”

When I looked at the mirror, I expected to see Casper Van Dien staring back again. But the image in the mirror was frozen like a painting. Rather than a reflection of Nissa and me standing near Sonja’s head, I saw the static image of someone else. The image was fuzzy, like a photo of someone in motion, but I could make out some details. The person looked human, with a head, four limbs, and clad in red and black clothing. The hands reached toward Sonja’s body as if the spirit was trying to hang onto it. I couldn’t see any features on the head, for it looked strange. It was smooth, a little shiny…

Like a motorcycle helmet.

With that realization, I knew the red and black clothing was Melony’s motorcycle leathers. I could even see black stripes down her red sleeves.

I swallowed once. “That’s Melony.”

Constantine and Stephen arrived just as I began staring at the image.

“Aye, that’s her,” Constantine said, then looked around the space above us. “Is she just…floating around here?”

“She was at the moment we took this image,” Nissa said. “She could still be here, or she might have moved on. It depends on how badly she wants to keep this body.”

I began shaking with frustration and anger. Melony’s spirit could be gone, and there was no way we would know. Did that mean she was dead, or did it mean she was now back in Georgia? Whatever the truth was, she was not the way she was before.

I shifted my eyes back to the gnome. “This does not meet with my satisfaction,” I said through clenched teeth. “Our contract is void.”