“So come on, Althea. Name your sword."

“Or suffer the consequences," Rachel teased.

Althea appreciated what they were trying to do. How like humans.

They're offering themselves up as bait, forced to walk into the lion's den against an enemy they can't possibly defeat, and they're trying to cheer me up!

“*Love,'" she said at last. "The name of my sword is 'Love.'"

Silence fell over the table. "Well," Josh put in at last. "It's all we need."

“You are such a flower-child, Daddy." Sarah's voice was gently mocking, but also full of affection. "If love is all we need, why do we need a sword? We'd just be able to kill the demon-spawn by throwing puppies at him so he could be licked to death.

“But we can't. Sometimes we need more than Love. We need a killer." Her eyes were sympathetic as she looked at Althea.

“No matter how much that killer hates what she has to do."

Althea nodded, feeling her throat grow tight.

“Anyway, it'll all be over tonight, one way or another."

Tonight, Kincaid gloated, watching the sun slowly sink in the western sky. Tonight, it will finally be over.

The days had seemed to drag. Caught up with the possibility of slaying the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned Rachel Wainwright, her insufferable family, and the succubus who was occupying her mind, he had let his legal practice Lapse, until the voice mail in his office was choked with messages from politely irate clients. Clients who needed his services, but were afraid to offend him. Instead, his mind had dwelt lingeringly on how to draw out their torment. Would he kill Alex,

Rachel's son, quickly, drowning the stage in a welter of bloody gore?

Or should he gut him slowly, until both his and his mother's mind broke under the agony of torture? Who then would he kill next? The husband, no better than a gigolo? The vapid, lazy daughter?

He grinned mirthlessly. All that was certain was that Rachel and the passenger she unwillingly carried in her mind would be the Last. And that he would lay their deaths at the feet of the Dark One himself in exchange for being allowed to leave Earth and to take up residence in the Pit with the rest of his Lord's demons. After nearly fifty years in the mortal realm, surrounded by teeming hordes of stinking humans, he wondered how full-blooded demons managed to keep their sanity.

But is Althea truly helpless? On and off over the past several days, he had been gnawed by that crippling doubt. Rachel and her family had somehow managed to rescue her physical form from the hospital, eluding him in the process. Had Althea's perverse spirit somehow been returned to her body? If it had been, he was looking at a fair fight which he very well might lose.

And there was nothing on earth Mortimer Kincaid despised more than a fair fight.

No, he decided. Rachel's voice on the phone a few nights before had been filled with barely-suppressed hysteria, delicious to his ears. The tree-hugging bitch had been all but incoherent. Even if Althea

Carpenter knew how to get back into her own body, there is no way

Wainwright could keep her mind in one piece Long enough to help her do it.

Kincaid had done his homework. Two days of trawling through the murkier depths of the internet had told him that an unwarded succubus could indeed be torn Loose from her body, though there was no mention at all about how she could be returned. In fact, Legends said that a succubus could actually transfer her consciousness willingly to a receptive partner. But, he was sure, that had not been what had happened to

Althea Carpenter and Rachel Wainwright. His instincts told him that by some bizarre circumstance, Althea had been unwillingly ripped away from her own body and forced to take up residence in Rachel's own.

References had been few and vague to the point of gibberish, but

Kincaid had seen a few dim hints toward the need for arcane rituals.