Sam woke up staring at a dead guy. The body in front of her was Phineas Trimus, the man she had first met when she visited the Rosicrucian Order. He was freshly dead. It looked like he'd been tossed out with the trash. They had cut his throat. The pain in her throat told her they did the same to her. They must have tried to make sure she was extra dead by cutting her throat after they stabbed her.

  She was trapped in a trash room. The door was locked. The room was unlit. A little light seeped through from the doorframe. She could make out poor Phineas's body laying there. The floor was mostly bare, aside from a few bags of trash. This was a place to store bodies until they could be disposed of permanently.

  The Elixir of Life had done its job. Dried blood crusted her shirt at the chest and neck. She could see the dark outline of the hole the knife had made. This time, the Elixir had saved her life blatantly and plainly. She had felt the dagger pierce her heart, and she knew she would die.

  Sam had always wondered what she'd think of in her final moments. Now she knew it was stubborn defiance and anger. They were the recurring theme of her life.

  She checked to see what she had on her person. She was surprised to discover they had left her daggers. She supposed from their perspective she was dead and they didn't have any reason to rob her. Everything in her pockets was still there. She was grateful as she had come well-prepared for a long stakeout. Some of her possessions were irreplaceable. If they had they dug around in her eye socket and taken the Liar's Eye, she’d have had trouble getting it back. They wouldn't know how to work with it, but a few well-placed questions to a diviner or a friendly demon and they'd be able to learn its abilities.

  Sam's anger bubbled up again. These people had tried to take her life twice and succeeded once. She'd be dead on the floor forever, like Phineas beside her, if it weren't for the power of the Elixir.

  Rage clouded her thoughts so she sat down against the wall to collect herself. She tried to figure a way out of the trash room. The rusted metal door was locked. She did have her lock picks with her, but there was no keyhole on this side of the door so they were useless. The door was flimsy enough that it could be kicked open but she had no idea how many people were waiting beyond it. She knew at least one of them was particularly deadly.

  She thought of Furcas. If she could get his blessing, none of these slithery bastards would be a match for her. But the thought of begging for somebody else's power turned her stomach. She wondered if every sorcerer felt this way. Maybe they just accepted the fact that you had to bow and scrape to demons in order to become less pathetic to humans.

  But she was stuck without help. Emil called him Furcas the Cruel. Furcas the Warmaker. The demon offered instruction in battle and strength and told her to return when she was stronger. She thought about how she had been able to contact him in the first place. She used weapons she had stolen from someone who tried to kill her. Did Furcas know she wasn't actually the one that killed the man? Weapons won in battle? She'd stolen weapons from someone who tried to kill her. She used those weapons to draw her own blood to contact the demon. The fact that he responded meant it was good enough.

  A dirty idea formed in Sam’s mind. She was angry at her weakness and wanted to kill everybody in the building. She knew the Elixir was going to heal her and maybe keep her from dying again. She didn't know if the Elixir would run out and she didn't care anymore. So she used a dagger to cut open her palm. She used the blood to paint the binding of Furcas on the ground.

  When the sigil was done, she set about seeing if the door could be brought off its hinges or if she could jimmy the latch. The latter proved to be a good idea, as the old door wasn't tightly shut. After all, they didn't expect anybody to be coming out that way.

  She took one of her lock picks and used it as a simple shim between the door latch and frame. Carefully, she opened the door and looked out into the hallway. No one was there but she heard muffled conversation nearby. She closed the door and intoned her invocation.

  Sam pushed open the door with both daggers in her hands. She walked down the hallway. It was well lit with electric light. The walls were clean cement block painted over with white, and neglected. Paint chipped in big chunks that made piles on the concrete floor. Electric lights hung from loose wire from the ceiling. There was no decoration on the walls. This wasn't a place you would bring guests. This was a place you would take out trash.

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  She called out, taunting whoever was in the next room.

  "Hey, y'all fuckers. You should have made sure I was all the way dead."

  The sound of a chair scraping the floor came from the room beyond. After a moment the door opened. The man's serpentine eyes widened at Sam standing in the hallway.

  They had expected her to lay there like a good little corpse just like poor Phineas. She was glad to see the look of shock on his face.

  The snakeman pulled his own dagger and charged at her. She didn't bother with grace or dodging. She just turned and let his dagger sink into her shoulder, grunting at the pain. She used his momentum to push one of her daggers deep into his throat. He made gurgling sounds. He tried to gasp for breath and then fell to the ground. She pulled his dagger from her shoulder. She felt the wound start to knit itself together.

  "Furcas, are you watching?" she said to the demon, hoping that she wasn't too far away from the binding she'd painted.

  She walked towards the door when it opened again. Another man, this time with no mask, came through. Strange marks spread up his cheeks next to his nose. Part of the skin there peeled away. His eyes were also like a snake's.

  "I thought I smelt warmth out here," he said. "I'm gonna cut off your hands and your feet and then I'm gonna find out why you're not dead."

  She responded by raising her daggers, readying herself for his attack. He charged her, the same way the other man had. They had a similar fighting style. They both used the two daggers the same way, one in each hand, with the quick, sinuous movements of a serpent.

  Sam let this man's first swipe slice her chest. This time she didn't wince at the pain. She welcomed it. The angrier she got, the more they seemed to move in slow motion. This time she struck the man in his arm. She cut deep. His arm fell to the side. She must have cut something important because it hung as if he couldn't move it, limp. His other hand was still deadly, and he swung it at her face. She blocked with one of her daggers and used the arm she'd been stabbed in the shoulder with to try and cut at the man's throat. Her arm betrayed her, its strength failed her, and the man was able to jump back away from the attack. He now eyed her warily and glanced at his own arm, hanging beside him.

  She smiled at him.

  "Hurts, don't it?" she said.

  Sam advanced on him, not wanting to wait to play a game of feinting and dodging. She decided to strike out quickly and try and catch him unaware. The man backed away from the flurry of blows. He wasn't prepared for the dozens of cuts and strikes she followed up with. She realized she had no reason to hold back and wait and try and play an honorable game of strike and riposte. Instead she stabbed him over and over and over until the knives made wet sounds and his eyes closed, never to open again.

  "Furcas!" she shouted.

  She stepped into the room the two men had come from. It looked like a meeting room or a cafeteria. Long tables were set up with chairs. The room looked too boring to hold the crew of snakemen. It was more like a place for planning a pot luck fundraiser than hosting murderers with inhuman eyes.

  The room had a pass-through that looked into a kitchen. Beyond the pass-through, another snake-eyed man stood. He stared.

  "What did you do to them? I'm gonna gut you like a fish!" the snakeman chef snarled.

  Rather than attack, the man turned, and opened double doors behind him.

  "Hey, the woman's not dead. Get in here!" he shouted.

  Footsteps came from beyond the double doors. Four men burst through. Five attackers glared and took her measure. Each man had the strange snake eyes. Each man stared at her. Some wore masks. The ones that didn't had the same deformity around their noses as the man she had seen before, the one she had stabbed in the hallway. She hoped she could leave one of them alive so she could ask what the hell was going on.

  Fury and battle rage filled her. She hadn't felt like this since the war. But back then she had a platoon of soldiers who would take on the enemy with her. This time it was just her, one woman, against five men, all equally armed. The men had greater reach and strength. She was going to end up relying on her ability to be cut to ribbons and then wake up feeling fresh and chipper.

  These men were no fools. They moved to surround her, so she backed up into the hallway, forcing them to come only two abreast. Which they did.

  They didn't give her time to prepare any defense other than her daggers and the hallway. The first two men approached her, snake daggers raised.

  She finished the invocation and lunged at them.

  She tried stabbing at them the way she had against the last man she killed, in a flurry of blows. It almost worked against the first one, but the man next to him simply stepped out of range. He waited for one of her hands to drop and sliced deep into her forearm.

  The second took both of his daggers and drove them into her stomach. She barely felt the pain through the haze of rage. She felt the warm blood gush from her. Once again, she was filled with bitter anger at dying here.

  She heard a voice like gargled razor blades come from somewhere behind her.

  "Thou hast proven thy strength. Thou hast fought and thou hast conquered.

  "Thou art worthy.

  "I grant thee the power of Furcas the Knight."