A beam lanced out, striking the lead demon. It roared in pain as its black flesh sloughed off into vanishing dust. The golden light disintegrated its ...orepaw. It crashed in a heap, its three reaming legs kicking as it struggled to rise."You do not belong in this world! Go back to the abyss!"The second lion leaped at me. My beam caught it right in its roaring mouth. The demon's body disintegrated from the inside, the lance punching out through its back. It crashed into a bony heap at my feet, a. .. Penny ... Penscott...” the man mumbles.“Penelope,” the witch corrects.“Yes, Penelope,” he agrees.“Why is he holding you by the neck?” she asks, referring to the other man she doesn’t recognize, hovering over Ned.“This here is Ichabod,” Ned says gruffly. “He’s a vampire.”“Oohh, so they do exist.”Obviously, you dummy. Now let’s scram before he gets any ideas of draining us dry.“Yes, they,” the man agrees.“Why aren’t you really hard like before?”Do you not understand danger? Stop worrying about. Aah, Star's new Aviation Museum, I thought.Just then, Bill Masterton poked his head round the door to ask when we were coming over to see him.Oleg clearly wanted to study Jennie's new recommendations, but he came with us.As we crossed to Bill's office, a helicopter landed nearby and Joe O'Connor climbed out."Can I join you?" He asked, "There's a lot to discuss."Oleg almost immediately waved his printouts in Joe's face as he told him and Bill about what Jennie had proposed. She looked smug, then. I never knew why. It may have been that I did some damage to Mom's plumbing when I was born, or maybe I was such a little brat that they decided not to try again. In any event, I had no big sister to spy on, to try to peek at when she got undressed in her room or when she took a shower. And I had no big brother, either, to buy me those magazines or to give me tips about girls. So I had to rely on Dad and his sloppy safekeeping for the hot picture books.My basic problem was simply to restrain my.