I got it back together in a few seconds, for two reasons. One, Harry-the-wizard was giving me a really epic stinkeye, and two, we kinda needed to see where the demon went. I wasn't wild about having a guy at my back who was from the weird side of the tracks, but he'd had plenty of chances to make a play for me if he wanted to and hadn't done it yet, so I decided to just put that whole discussion on hold.

"Does it have a tunnel or something under there?" I said. The curtain the demon had gone under was hung from a rod; I got there in a few steps and pushed it back.

Underneath, there was a…glowing…thing. It looked like the cell doors on Star Trek that you could only see when someone was touching them, except not going away. It was about as wide as a door, but only a little taller than me.

"What the hell is that?" I asked. Harry came up to stand beside me. "Got me," he said. "Thomas and I touched it, but it didn't seem to do anything."

"You touched that on purpose? Because that doesn't look like a disintegrator field or anything."

"We heard Liz screaming," Harry said. He looked a little embarrassed. It was weird having to crane my neck even more than when I look at Sam.

"Yeah, why did that make you touch the glowing thing?" I asked. Harry had a look on his face that I recognized from seeing it on Sam. He trying to put together the pieces of something, but they weren't fitting yet. I was drawing breath to ask another question when my cell phone rang.

"Yeah, Sam."

"Little problem here," my brother said. "Thomas says he can't find his car or Harry's, and his cell isn't working. He can turn it on but it won't pick up coverage."

"Well, demon-boy showed up, but Harry and I made him dump his meatsuit and retreat," I said. "Not much way to track him right now. We'll meet you at the Impala, okay? It'll be a minute, I need to finish drawing a trap here in case he comes back. And Sam, keep an eye out." To Harry and Thomas, it'd sound like a generic warning about the demon. Sam would know what I meant, though: Be careful, these guys might not be on the up-and-up.

Harry could produce fire out of thin air. I'd seen Thomas go around the devil's trap. I was inclined to trust them because of the way they'd been dealing with Liz before they knew we were there, but there was no reason to be stupid about it.

"Gotcha," Sam said. "Hurry it up, though. I want to get Liz out of the street."

"Sit her in the car with Chris till we get there," I said, and hung up as Sam acknowledged me.

I went back over to the landing, talking as I went. "Sam says your buddy can't find your cars and he's having trouble with his phone." The paint stick was where I'd dropped it, at least. I grabbed it and prepared to start painting again, and then Harry said, "Oh," in a way that meant I am an idiot for not having figured this out before. I turned to look at him, just in time to see it as he stepped into the glowing thing and vanished.

A second or two later, he reappeared.

"It's a door," he said. I knew I was staring at him like the biggest dork in creation but I couldn't stop. "It's not like a portal into the Nevernever—" I added 'What's a Nevernever' to my rapidly growing list of what the fuck "—but it's a door. On the other side of it, there's a basement that looks just like this, except stuff's not arranged quite the same and you aren't there." He looked confused for a second, and I was really glad I wasn't the only one. "That's…wow, really hard to think about."

"Dude, look," I said. "I'm gonna need you to give this to me in words of one frickin' syllable, OK? Because it sounds like you're telling me that's, like, a portal to another universe."

Harry looked at me, surprised and trying to hide it, and said a little slow, "That's...exactly what I'm telling you. You got that from what I said?" I tried not to feel insulted. I mean, I get that Sam's the giant brain of the family, but that doesn't mean I'm stupid.

And you know, I watch TV.

"Yeah," I said, turning back to the half-drawn trap on the landing. "I mean I guess it's not a full-on 'Mirror, Mirror' thing, because then you and Tom would be us, only with goatees. But it makes sense." I was still planning on having a serious freak-out later, as soon as I had the time.

Harry made a sound that I thought was supposed to be a laugh. I felt for him. This was weird, even by me and Sammy's standards. "How does it make sense?"

I painted as fast as I could. "Look, I've never even heard of anyone who can do that thing you did with your..." Crap, there really wasn't any other good word for it, was there? I gritted my teeth and finished, "wand. That was freaking fire out of the air, dude. Even demons don't pull that shit. And 'wizard'? Witches, sure, with their nasty-ass bodily fluid all over the place thing, but wizards? You're down with vampires and shapeshifters, but you've never even seen a devil's trap and you don't know about salt and plus? You just walked into the wall and back out. So yeah, it makes sense." I stopped talking. Looked like the stress was building up ever-so-slightly more than I realized. I finished the next-to-last symbol (I think of it as "funny looks-left guy") and turned to glance at Harry, who was staring at me.

"'Mirror, Mirror'?" he said.

"Yeah. It was a Star Trek-"

"I've seen it," Harry said. "But what makes you so sure Thomas and I are the ones from the evil universe?" I looked at him again, and he was actually grinning a little.

I grinned back.

*.*

I had enough salt in the duffel for two lines around the portal, though Harry bitched a little about them and the devil's trap, something about how they weren't empowered so they shouldn't keep anything out. We drew traps on the floor inside both doors too, much easier on hardwood and linoleum than carpet. I really, really wanted to keep the black-eyed son of a bitch limited to one version of Chicago if I could possibly make it happen, and though Harry probably wasn't too happy that it was in his world rather than ours he was smart enough to know we needed a planning session more than anything else right now.

Once that was done we booked it back to the Impala. Chris and Liz were inside; Sam and Tom were leaning on the car, trying to look like a couple of guys shooting the breeze. Tom was doing a pretty good job of it, and probably so was Sam if you weren't me. They both relaxed a notch when they spotted us.

It took a few minutes to get us all into the car, because we had two women, two guys and two freaking giants. And my baby, she's a big girl (especially by the standards of the coffins they call cars these days), but she's not infinite. We ended up with Harry in the passenger seat with Chris on his lap and Liz sort of draped over Sam and Tom in the back.

"OK. Where we going?" I asked once we were all situated.

"We found out that Thomas's building doesn't know his name while we were waiting for you guys," Sam said. "We probably still shouldn't go back to Chris and Liz's place, so..."

I sighed. "Motel it is."

We made the trip in mostly silence, on the pretext of letting Liz rest. Harry and I hadn't really conferred much on the whole portal-between-universes thing, but I at least was pretty clear that I didn't want to have to try explaining it to Sam while a couple of civilians were listening.

We made it back with no incident, me following every traffic law to the letter because I couldn't afford to get pulled over with six people crammed into the car. Fortunately one of the rooms next to the one Sam and I already had was open, so we installed Liz in it, with Chris to keep an eye on her; Sam spent a few minutes going over her injuries. None of them were bad enough to need stitches, which I thought was kind of weird until it occurred to me that the demon would want to keep her alive as long as it could-dead people can't feel pain. Once I thought about that, I felt sick.

That son of a bitch needed to die so much, and we were gonna have to settle for just sending it back downstairs unless Sam's little stalker showed up.

While Sam put Neosporin and bandages on things, I salted the door and windows. Liz hadn't been really with it since we'd gotten to her and no one was surprised when she fell asleep; Chris was OK with staying with her, so we decamped back to our original room.

Which Tom was inside, so that meant he'd gone over the salt line. I had no idea what his deal was. He and Harry stopped talking when we opened the door, but I was actually kind of OK with that; they had the right to be wary of us too.

"So," Sam said as soon as he closed the door. "What happened?" Harry was sitting on my bed and Tom in one of the chairs at the tiny table; I took the other chair and Sam decided to hold up the wall, his arms crossed.

"The demon showed before I had a trap drawn, Harry and I fought him off, he decided to ditch the meatsuit and run," I said. "But that's not the interesting part." Sam raised his eyebrows at me. "No, seriously. Harry. He's not gonna believe this if I just tell him."

Harry and Tom traded a look and a shrug that was almost too faint to see, and Harry said, "Do you guys have a candle or cigarettes or something?"

"Candle?" Sam asked, his eyebrows climbing towards his hairline. I nodded at him and he pushed off from the wall, wearing his This had better be good face, and went over to the supply bag. He pulled out one of the cheap paraffin candles and a holder, stuck the former in the latter, and at Harry's nod set it on the table.

"OK," Harry said. And then he gestured at the candle and muttered (no shit) "Flickum bicus." The candle burst into flame.

I was sorta prepared, and it still made me blink. Sam literally gaped. He stood frozen, but his eyes flicked to me. "I think we're OK, Sam," I said, and watched Tom and Harry out of the corners of my eyes. They were tense but not aggressive.

"He just did magic," Sam said, "and you think we're OK." And he had a point; normally I'd be the one pointing guns and demanding answers. But Sam hadn't seen Harry fighting the demon, and I had.

"So the other thing you aren't going to believe," I said. "There was something in that basement you didn't see." I locked eyes with him, to make sure he understood I was not shitting him. "There was a door down there. A door to somewhere else."