The thing waved one gnarled hand in the air. Blue sparks crackled between its fingers. Roger gulped and tried to think of a banishing spell. Sometimes being exact had its drawbacks. He was not very good at improvising.

A minute passed. Roger stood motionless, his thoughts racing through all the mystic lore he had studied in the past few years, trying to come up with a way out of this fix. Meanwhile, the crouching man paced back and forth in the pentagram, softly muttering threats that Roger tried to ignore. It was a stalemate of sorts. Roger couldn’t send the demigod back to the outermost dark, but neither could the being escape from the prison in which it was trapped.

Being eminently practical and depressingly materialistic, Roger finally settled on the only possible course of action. He would leave the room and then seal it closed forever. Maybe even fill the outer chamber with concrete for additional security. The creature he summoned would remain trapped inside the pentagram for the foreseeable future, unable to cause any harm. Roger could continue his work elsewhere, exercising a good deal more caution in his selection of demons.

He was turning to leave when the earthquake struck.

It wasn’t much of a quake, barely registering on the Richter scale. Dishes rattled, dogs howled, and a few VCRs clicked on for no reason. Other than that, most people looked up from whatever they were doing, hesitated for an instant waiting for worse, then settled back to their normal activities.

In Roger Quinn’s subbasement, a little more than a mile from the center of the quake, the concrete floor growled and shifted. It moved less than a hundredth of an inch. Barely enough to send a hairline crack running directly through the center of the magic circle.

Roger blinked in astonishment. The threatening presence no longer stood in the pentagram. Rather, it crouched at Roger’s side. Fingers cold as ice clenched him by the elbow.