The third book in the Dog Days series, 2009

I’d like to thank Don Sipley for all the wonderful covers he’s done for the Dog Days series.

Also, thanks to my copy editor, Emma Stockton, and all the people at Ace Books-art department, production, promotion-everyone there who works so hard to make the books as good as they can be.

A FRESH BREEZE, CARRYING A SALTWATER TANG, pushed inland from across the ocean. The sky had just turned that purplish hue of dusk, and the top of the Golden Gate Bridge was just visible over the tops of the trees. A fine San Francisco evening, perfect for sightseers, dog walkers, and lovers. And hunters.

Somewhere in the undergrowth and tangled brush, the creature waited for us. Victor was over to my left, carrying the sawed-off shotgun. Not much of a weapon if you need to aim, but for close-up work it’s unbeatable. Lou ranged ahead, light on his paws, using only his dog senses for once. His magical talents were useless in tracking this thing, but he still had those sharp ears and an even sharper sense of smell.

He moved his head from side to side, nose twitching, constantly testing the air. Victor watched intently, and when Lou finally stopped and focused on a particular patch of thick brush, he moved up behind him. He motioned for me to hang back-the last thing he wanted was for me to be anywhere near the line of fire. A sawed-off shotgun sprays pellets like a garden hose, and even if you’re not directly in the line of fire, you can be struck anyway. And since each double-ought pellet is roughly the size of a.32 bullet, even one of them can kill you.

I didn’t have a gun. My job was to take care of the magical side of things. The creature wasn’t much affected by any use of magical talent, but situations can still arise where a clever spell might come in handy.

The patch of brush was edged by tall, leafy trees, a pocket of wildness on the edge of the urban landscape. Lou edged closer, but he looked puzzled, as if he’d picked up the scent, then lost it. Maybe the thing had slipped away once again. We’d been hunting it for months, off and on, without success. It was as smart as it was vicious.

Victor moved toward the underbrush, shotgun held easily at hip level, ready to swivel in any direction. He stopped well before he reached the tangle of bushes; shotgun or no, he wasn’t pushing his way into an overgrown space where anything lying in wait would have every advantage.

I don’t know if Victor heard something or if a sixth sense kicked in, but he suddenly glanced up and then dove sideways just as the thing dropped down from an overhead tree branch. It aimed for his shoulders, hoping to get its muzzle close to his throat. That would have been the end of that story. It missed, but even so it raked his arms on the way past and knocked the shotgun flying. It was up and at him again in an instant, a blur of claws and teeth and snarls.

Lou charged forward and tried for a back leg, but Victor and the creature were rolling on the ground, momentarily inseparable. I ran toward the shotgun and scooped it up. The shot pattern wouldn’t spread if I could press the muzzle right into the creature. All I’d need was a moment’s separation between the two.

It saw me coming with the shotgun and broke off the attack, darting into the cover of the bushes. Victor hauled himself up into a sitting position and gasped something I couldn’t catch. He shook his head as I approached him, and reached out his hand.

“Mason. Give me the gun,” he finally got out. “It may come back.”

Clearly he thought he was better able to handle the threat, torn up as he was, than a healthy Mason would be. He might have been right.

“How bad is it?” I asked, squatting down and handing over the shotgun, wincing as I watched blood dripping onto the ground beside him.

“I’ve been better.” He’d managed to protect his vital parts, but his right leg was a mess of blood and torn tissue. The fabric of his black jeans hung in shredded strips. “Hiding in the tree,” he muttered, talking half to me, half to himself. “How could I have been so dumb? Rookie mistake. Look up; always look up.”

It took him ten minutes to be convinced the creature wasn’t returning. Lou sat next to him, keeping guard as well. Victor kept hold of the shotgun the whole time, but he was beginning to have trouble holding it. Blood loss was rapidly weakening him. Finally, he reluctantly handed it to me and tried to climb to his feet. His leg, not surprisingly, gave way and I had to catch him to keep him from falling over.

“Might be time to go home,” he said.

“Yeah, sure. A good night’s sleep is all you need.”

“I’ll survive.”

“Sorry,” I said. “We’ve got to make a quick stop first.” He looked at me suspiciously.

“Where?”

“It’s a special place, one you may have heard of. It’s called a hospital emergency room.”

YOU MIGHT SUPPOSE THAT ALL ERS ARE MUCH the same, but they’re not. San Francisco General is like the ones you see on TV-gunshot victims, knife wounds, heart attack patients staggering in clutching their chests and gasping for air. Luckily, we were over at UCSF on Parnassus, a kinder and gentler place.

Victor wasn’t the kind and gentle sort, however. He never is, but right now he was more pissed than usual since the lower half of his left leg was shredded, almost to the bone in places. His pants leg was now soaked through with blood, which was the only reason he’d finally agreed to an ER visit.

“Pit bull attack,” I explained to the admitting nurse.

If only that had been true. Victor had been savaged by something far worse, and it was my fault, at least in part.

“Did you notify Animal Control?” the admitting nurse asked. He seemed genuinely concerned.

“Not yet,” I said. “It ran off and I was too busy getting my friend over here to even think about that.”

After months spent hunting the creature off and on, this time we had almost got it. We’d started taking an interest in tracking it when odd stories about mutilated pets had begun to surface in the newspapers. We were fairly sure we knew what was responsible for those attacks. But it didn’t become a priority for us until it started attacking Ifrits whenever it could. And now, it had apparently started targeting people as well. That was when we had got serious about it.

But we hadn’t been able to track it down. It was fast and it was smart. Being smart was a given, seeing as it was an Ifrit of sorts. Not a real Ifrit, like Lou, but the product of an incautious incantation by some very peculiar individuals. I had been instrumental in bringing them what they needed to accomplish it, and so I felt it was partly my responsibility. And Victor and I are also enforcers. Our job is to prevent problems like that from happening, not to help create them.

True Ifrits are small-seldom over ten pounds or so, although Lou, my Ifrit, was twelve and would have been twenty if I’d let him eat every time he felt like it. They are companions to practitioners-the lucky ones at least. Not everyone has one, although all practitioners wish they did. The reasons why Ifrits are relatively rare are still not clear, although we’d come up with some interesting theories lately.

Most Ifrits take the form of cats or other small animals; a few, like Lou, are small dogs. Lou looks just like a shrunken-down Doberman with uncropped ears and tail, black with a tan chest patch and muzzle and eyebrow markings. But he’s not a dog, not really.