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Harrison wasn't quite sure what else to do, so he followed her last instruction. Mitchell was still asleep, curled up on the couch with a blanket draped over him. Harrison wondered if he had done that himself, or if Glimmer had somehow covered him as he slept. While he waited for her to do whatever she needed to do just then, he paced and tried to reorganize his thoughts.

In a little over an hour, he and Mitchell would be raspberry jam, and Glimmer would be inconsolably pissed. Five minutes later, she came flitting back into the car. "Well," she said, "I was wrong about one thing. If we hit that door, I'm dead as a dishrag." Harrison was not sure what the appropriate response to that might be.

Where were you?" he tried. "Milwaukee," she said. "We have a problem." Harrison was stunned. "What? How fast can you fly?" "Pretty fast," she said. "Listen, if we can't get this worm thingy stopped, we are seriously screwed." Harrison felt a moment of head-rush vertigo. He raised his hands slightly to balance himself.

"Wait," he said. "Are you telling me that you could have flown to Chicago any time—"She snapped her fingers in his face. It sounded like a rifle shot. "FOCUS! The tunnel is magicked up! This is a major problem!"

Harrison felt sweat building on his forehead. He imagined he was probably getting pale. "Magicked up? What the hell does that mean?" "I mean there's a spell in the tunnel, right in front of the door. You can see it shimmering. I'm pretty sure it's some variation on a shield curse, which pretty much means that if we make contact with it, we're toast.

The worst part is, we won't even have to hit it all that hard." She was talking quickly, though with relative calm. "So the bottom line is we either need to find a way off this beast or find a way to stop it."