Boxes in the basement started to rattle.

Finally, a pinch of the excitement Darling had been waiting for.

She may not have had emotions, but she certainly had enough intellect to recognize the concept of boredom. More importantly, she had expectations, and she’d known some commotion would happen in this basement for quite a while now.

For the purposes of guarding the gloomy damp basement, Darling had been reassembled and ordered to patrol like a royal guard. Thus, for weeks now, she’d been walking nonstop in a jittery U, its shape dictated by the forms of the clutter.

That clutter was now tumbling apart. Across the walls of the basement splattered shafts of light—of spangled, impossible blue light.

Darling snapped to attention. Her heels clicked together, and her six arms assumed her best approximation of a martial-arts stance.

Seconds passed. The shaking didn’t intensify, but it didn’t stop either.

She slinked closer.

Was it coming from some clandestine enemies of Nightfall Castle who’d snuck in, yet been detected by Darling already? Nah, it was just the incredibly large cage with very tight bars with the regenerating ogre in it. Y’know, that incident with the assassins. Why Nyx had brought this hostile hostage’s soul gem down here—and who the hostage was—was not for Darling to judge.

What once was a gem was erupting into the smoke and aquamarine fire that signaled a water-aligned demon’s rebirth. Darling knew to stay calm and poised while the body of Rikvis the ogre took on its old form. If your eyes could pierce the smoke, you’d notice that blue fire shaping and building upon itself like an evolving clay fetus, becoming an adult within thirty minutes.

Then Rikvis was reborn, turning what once had been an overly large cage into a suitably sized one. She groaned and rose onto her palms as if she’d just come into a hangover.

“Welcome,” said Darling at the first sign of consciousness. “You must be quite disoriented. That is too bad, since I have not been ordered to give you any information or peace. Instead, I will guard this cage until my lord’s return.”

“My bazooka,” wailed Rikvis.

“I can offer no condolences,” said Darling.

Suddenly and all at once, Agi, Dodd, and Felicity leaped out of the shadows and onto Rikvis’ back while stabbing vigorously: Agi with talons focused into points, Felicity with wooden blades, Dodd with a dented chakram that was about as effective as the top of a tin can. Rikvis yelped in surprise, then in pain as the gang forced her to collapse and die afresh. The cage filled with hellsmoke. Agi and the imps only smiled.

Darling tried to summon a question, but only managed to say, “Wh—?!”

“A conduit!” cried Agi. He came phasing out of the cage and its billowing plumes. Then he thought better of that, phased back in, phased out again, and set Felicity and Dodd on the ground. “That ogre is an obvious conduit for invasion.”

“I do not follow.”

Ah, right, she had so little demonic life experience. Agi explained, gesticulating with a hand that dripped with guts, “You know, when you try to reach a certain place or demon that you’ve never met or been to, so you need to use a third party? Say I had it on good authority that Lord Nyx had a custom-built machine, and I knew there were only three thousand tech artificers who could have built it...if I were to simply ask those three thousand tech artificers and their gremlin workforces about the matter, and if they have records of such, they could point me in the right direction.”

It went without saying that a hired assassin who had quite publicly fought Nyx could also be a good flag. Not in the “informant” sense, but in the sense of “because travel is weird in the hells, I will move with the intention of moving toward Rikvis and end up at Nyx’s place.”

“Oh. I suppose that sounds sensible,” said Darling. “What now?”

Felicity shook her hands out and shapeshifted them back into claws. “Let’s patrol the halls,” she said.

“They may be here any moment now,” said Dodd, a worried hand at her face. “It could be one infiltrator, or it could be...a bunch.”

Little did they know that the invasion was thoroughly in progress—so thoroughly, in fact, that the castle’s second floor was being torn limb from limb.

An army’s worth of demijellyfish had been condensing and contorting themselves to bore and crawl through walls. They burst through at will, following two commands: find the tags Nyx had stolen from the auction, and cause general destructive mayhem.

Crystal-colored tentacles, coiling and launching like springs, obliterated the walls of Nyx’s room. It opened the way for a flood of smaller jellies to slither in, probing with eyes that sparkled from under huge mushroom caps. Their tentacles lashed, their acid trails ate away, and electric currents bolted straight from their nerves. Well past time for the servants to defend their home.