“Bah,” I said. “And touchй.”

She smiled faintly. “It sucks, but that’s what we’ve got. You done whining?”

“Hell with it,” I said. “Let’s work.”

Murphy jerked her head at the rubble-choked alley between the damaged building and its neighbor, and we started down it, climbing over fallen brick and timber where necessary.

We’d gone about three feet before the stench of sulfur and acrid brimstone seared my nostrils, sharp even through the smell of the gutted apartment building. There’s only one thing that smells like that.

“Crap,” I muttered.

“I thought it smelled familiar,” Murphy said. “Like back at the fortress.” She glanced at me. “And…the other times I’ve smelled it.”

I pretended not to notice her glance. “Yeah. It’s Hellfire,” I said.

“There’s more,” Murphy said quietly. “Come on.”

We pressed on down the alley until we passed the edge of the wrecked portion of the gutted building. One step, there was nothing but wreckage. The next, the brick wall of the building reasserted itself. The demarcation between structure and havoc was a rough, jagged line stretching up into the dust and the snow and the smoke-all except for a portion of wall perhaps five feet off the ground.

There, instead of a broken line of shattered brick and twisted rebar, a perfectly smooth semicircle bit into the wall.

I leaned closer, frowning. The scent of Hellfire grew stronger, and I realized that something had melted its way through the brick wall-a shaft of energy like a giant drill bit. It had to have been almost unimaginably hot to vaporize brick and concrete and steel, leaving the rim of the area it had touched melted to smooth glass, though half of the basketball-sized circle was missing, carried away by the collapsing wall.

Any natural source of heat like that would have sent out a thermal bloom that would have scoured the alley I was standing in, leaving it blackened and sere. But the alley was littered with the usual city detritus, where it wasn’t choked with rubble, and several hours’ worth of snow had piled up there as well.