I was cheering, by the way, for the Jabberwock. It was just a nasty beast and need not have been homing in on me in particular when it was distracted by the arrival of its exotic nemesis. The Fire Angel had been playing an entirely different game. There was no reason for a Fire Angel to be stalking about this far from Chaos unless it had been sent. They’re devilish hard to capture, harder to train, and dangerous to handle. So they represent a considerable expense and hazard. One does not invest in a Fire Angel lightly. Their main purpose in life is killing, and to my knowledge no one outside the Courts of Chaos has ever employed one. They’ve a vast array of senses some of them, apparently, paranormal — and they can be used as Shadow bloodhounds. They don’t wander through Shadow on their own, that I know of. But a Shadowwalker can be tracked, and Fire Angels seem to be able to follow a very cold trail once they’ve been imprinted with the victim’s identity. Now, I had been trumped to that crazy bar, and I didn’t know they could follow a Trump jump, but several other possibilities occurred to me — including someone’s locating me, transporting the thing to my vicinity, and turning it loose to do its business. Whatever the means, though, the attempt had the mark of the Courts upon it. Hence, my quick conversion to Jabberwock fandom.

“What’s going on?” Luke asked me suddenly, and the walls of the cave faded for a moment and I heard a faint strain of music.

“It’s tricky,” I said. “Listen, it’s time for your medicine.”