"Susan!" I shouted. "There's a sports bottle on my table down there. Drink what's in it, and think about being away from here. Okay? Think about being far away."
"I found it," she called up a second later. "It smells bad."
"Dammit, it's a potion. It'll get you out of here. Drink it!"
There was a gagging noise, and then a moment later she said, "Now what?"
I blinked and looked at the stairs going down. "It should have work—" I broke off as the toad thing leaned forward, reached out a clawed foot, and in that stride gained three feet of ground toward me. I was able to stop it again, barely, but I knew that it was going to be coming for my throat in a few more seconds.
"Nothing happened," she said. "Dammit, Harry, we have to do something." And then she came pounding up the ladder, dark eyes flashing, my.38 revolver in her hand.
"No!" I told her. "Don't!" I felt the staff slip more. The demon was getting ready to come through all my defenses.
Susan raised the gun, face pale, her hands shaking, and started shooting. A.38 Chief's Special carries six rounds, and I use a medium-speed load, rather than armor-piercing or explosive bullets or anything fancy like that. Fewer chances that something will go wrong in the presence of a lot of magic.
A gun is a pretty simple machine. A revolver approaches very simple. Wheels, gears, and a simple lever impact to ignite the powder. It's tough for magic to argue with physics, most of the time.
The revolver roared six times.
The first two shots must have gone wide and hit somewhere else. The next two struck the demon's hide and made deep dents in it before springing off and rebounding wildly around the room, as I had feared they would, more of a threat to us than to it. Fortunately, neither of us was injured or killed by the ricochets. The fifth shot went between its long, oddly shaped legs and past it.
The sixth hit the thing square between its lightning-lantern eyes, knocked it off-balance, and sent it tumbling over with a toady hiss of frustration.
I gasped and grabbed at Susan's wrist. "Basement," I wheezed, as she dropped the gun. We both scrambled down the ladder. I didn't bother to shut it behind me. The thing could just tear its way through the floor, if it needed to. This way, I would at least know where it would come down, rather than have it tunnel through the floor and come out on top of my head.
At my will, the tip of the staff I still held burst into light, illuminating the room.
"Harry?" Bob's voice came from the shelf. The skull's eyelights came on, and he swiveled around to face me. "What the hell is going on? Woo woo, who is the babe?"
Susan jumped. "What is that?"
"Ignore him," I said, and followed my own advice. I went to the far end of my lab table and started kicking boxes, bags, notebooks, and old paperbacks off the floor. "Help me clear this floor space. Hurry!"
She did, and I cursed the lack of cleaning skills that had left this end of the lab such a mess. I was struggling to get to the circle I had laid in the floor, a perfect ring of copper, an unbroken loop in the concrete that could be empowered to hold a demon in—or out.
"Harry!" Bob gulped as we worked. "There's, a, um. A seriously badass toad-demon coming down the ladder."
"I know that, Bob." I heaved a bunch of empty cardboard boxes aside as Susan frantically tossed some papers away, exposing the entirety of the copper ring, about three feet across. I took her hand and stepped into the circle, drawing her close to me.
"What's happening?" Susan asked, her expression bewildered and terrified.
"Just stay close," I told her. She clung tightly to me.
"It sees you, Harry," Bob reported. "It's going to spit something at you, I think."
I didn't have time to see if Bob was right. I leaned down, touched the circle with the tip of my staff, and willed power into it, to shut the creature out. The circle sprang up around us, a silent and invisible tension in the air.
Something splattered and hissed against the air a few inches from my face. I looked up to see dark, sputtering acid slithering off the invisible shield the circle's power provided us. Half a second earlier and it would have eaten my face off. Cheery thought.
I tried to catch my breath, stand straight, and not let any part of me extend outside the circle, which would break its circuit and negate its power. My arms were shaking and my legs felt weak. Susan, too, was visibly trembling.
The demon stalked over to us. I could see it clearly in the light of my staff, and I wished that I couldn't. It was horribly ugly, misshapen, foul, heavily muscled, and I compared it to a toad only because I knew of nothing else that even remotely approached a description of it. It glared at us and drove a fist at the circle's shield. It rebounded in a shower of blue sparks, and the thing hissed, a horrible and windy sound.
Outside, the storm continued to rumble and growl, muffled by the thick walls of the subbasement.
Susan was holding close to me, and almost crying. "Why isn't it killing us? Why isn't it getting us?"
"It can't," I said, gently. "It can't get through, and it can't do anything to break the circle. So long as neither of us crosses that line, we'll be safe."
"Oh, God," Susan said. "How long do we have to stand here?"
"Dawn," I said. "Until dawn. When the sun rises, it has to go."
"There's no sun down here," she said.
"Doesn't work that way. It's got a sort of power cord stretching back to whoever summoned it. A fuel line. As soon as the sun comes up, that line gets cut, and he goes away, like a balloon with no air."
"When does the sun come up?" she asked.
"Oh, well. About ten more hours."
"Oh," she said. She laid her head against my bare chest and closed her eyes.
The toad-demon paced in a slow circuit around the circle, searching for a weakness in the shield. It would find none. I closed my eyes and tried to think.
"Uh, Harry," Bob began.
"Not now, Bob."
"But Harry—" Bob tried again.
"Dammit, Bob. I'm trying to think. If you want to be really useful, you could try to figure out why that escape potion you were so confident of didn't work for Susan."
"Harry," Bob protested, "that's what I'm trying to tell you."
Susan murmured, against my chest, "Is it getting warm in here? Or is it just me?"
A terrible suspicion struck me. I looked down at Susan and got a sinking feeling. Surely not. No. It couldn't be.
She looked up at me, her dark eyes smoky. "We're going to die, aren't we Harry? Have you ever thought you'd want to die making love?"
She kissed my chest, almost absently.
It felt nice. Really, really nice. I tried not to notice all the bare, lovely back that was naked underneath my hand.
"I've thought that, many times," she said, against my skin.
"Bob," I began, my voice getting furious.
"I tried to tell you," Bob wailed. "I did! She grabbed the wrong potion and just chugged it down." Bob's skull turned toward me a bit, and the lights brightened. "You've got to admit, though. The love potion works great."
Susan was kissing my chest and rubbing her body up against me in a fashion that was unladylike and extremely pleasant and distracting. "Bob, I swear, I am going to lock you in a wall safe for the next two hundred years."
"It's not my fault!" Bob protested.
The demon watched what was happening in the circle with froggy eyes and kicked a section of floor clear enough of debris for it to squat down on its haunches and stare, restless and ready as a cat waiting for a mouse to stick its head out of its hole. Susan stared up at me with sultry eyes and tried to wrench me to the floor, and consequently out of the circle's protective power. Bob continued to wail his innocence.