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With the laptop gone, we had no way to tell the review bot that we were repentant. We had to accept the consequences. That was the whole point of this experience, according to how the chat had ended.

Zee had to face his fear or it would never end. The frogs would keep on coming. We’d have to close the hotel. It would be a health and safety nightmare. Zee had to fix this.

But he was stuck to the ceiling, hissing like a cornered wildcat.

I dropped behind the bar, receiving Tom’s raised eyebrow. There were no frogs back here. Tom was right, in that his side of the bar had nothing to do with this.

“We need to get Zee back down here,” I told Victor.

Victor dropped behind the bar too and lifted his gaze to our demon ablaze with purple flame. “That is going to be difficult.”

“Not really,” Tom said, then produced the frog he’d stashed away earlier, and threw it overarm, at Zee.

The frog hit Zee in the forehead, bounced off, and dropped into its pool of writhing buddies.

Zee froze. His eyes got all big. He was either about to go feral or cry.

“Hey, Zee! Get down here.” I waved at him. “There are no frogs behind here. Look!”

He blinked. Once. Very slowly.

“He’s disassociated,” Victor said, then turned to face me. “He’s barely with us right now.”

“You people are so dramatic,” Tom Collins said, then lobbed a bottle of something at Zee. It plonked between his horns, didn’t break, then that too toppled into the pool of frogs beneath him.

“Tom, I don’t think throwing things at Zee⁠—”

Zee poofed from the ceiling and appeared behind the bar in a blast of sparks. He staggered, breathing again, and grabbed Victor, shaking him. “I’m done for. I die here, I know it! This is my fate. Tell my mother I’m sorry about the souffle.”

“You don’t have a mother,” Victor said, between rattles.

“Tell my brother I didn’t mean to eat his balloons.”

Zee had a brother? No, probably not.

“Your demon is broken,” Tom Collins said. He grabbed another bottle and swung it full force at Zee’s head.

Zee’s hand came up without looking. He grabbed Tom’s wrist, stopping the swing. His lips rippled in a snarl and slowly, he turned his head toward Tom. “Hit me one more time and I will zap all your fucking electronics and fry your AI brain with sparkly fabulousness.”

“No need.” Tom smiled. “There he is.” He yanked his arm free and lowered the bottle.

“Now that we’re all calm . . . Zodiac,” Victor said, calmly, as though his being calm could make the rest of us calm. “Please unhand my shoulders.”

Zee gave Victor one final shake, then let him go, looked out at the sea of frogs bathed in the jukebox’s neon light, and gulped. “This is my nightmare.”

“Zee . . . uhm . . .” I took a deep breath and said over the croaking, “You’re going to need to walk through them to get to the door. That’s the only way this ends.”

“Uh, no.” He folded his arms. “Nope. Never happening. Also, I can poof away, so there’s that . . . I’m not touching any of . . . that. Frogs will eat your faces, all your faces. You wanna go out there, go ahead. I’ll wait while they eat your faces.”

“Frogs do not eat faces,” Victor corrected.

“Yes they do.”

“They eat flies.”

“No, they eat faces.” Zee spread his hand up close in front of Victor’s face. “I read it in a book once.”

“You read a book?”