Werth hides. In a coat closet, of all places. He pulls out his phone. Texts Haversham: HAVE THAT GUN READY. Upstairs, the ground shudders. Banging. Crashing. Gunfire. The walls of the house actually shake.
Werth thinks, I have to go. Now’s the time. Run away. Get out of the city.
But Mookie. Mookie saved his ass. And he didn’t do shit for him.
Loyalty, Werth thinks. Do I even know what the fuck that is anymore?
He decides, suddenly: yeah, yeah he does.
The old goat man creeps out of the coat closet. Another gunshot upstairs. Something – not someone – screams. Werth darts back into the foyer, then to the bottom of the staircase: there, at the bottom, is the body that rolled there. The Snakeface that was pretending to be Lutkevich and now is just a dead Snakeface, skin like gunmetal scales hanging on black leather. At his feet is a gun. Werth picks it up–
Just as Candlefly comes in from the kitchen. A phone pressed against his ear. Ernesto is looking up toward the ceiling as the house shakes. Werth catches snippets of him yelling over the din: “–still don’t have the Ochre, and now this–”
But then he sees Werth.
And Werth has the gun pointed.
Werth makes a gesture: Put the phone down.
Candlefly scowls, rolls his eyes, and sets the phone on the floor.
“You’re making a big mistake,” Candlefly says, then adds: “Etc., and so on.”
“You’re a bad man.”
“Who said I was a man?”
“Then what are you?”
Candlefly’s smile spreads – like jam on toast. “A daemon.”
Werth pulls the trigger. The bang is loud: too loud, impossibly loud, and the kickback on the pistol is worse than he figured, so bad that he can feel it vibrating in his arm, in his chest, like a fist punching him in the heart–
He suddenly can’t get a good breath.
Candlefly looks behind him at the bullet hole in the wall.
Then says, “Thank you, Haversham.”
Haversham? Werth turns. Sees the company man behind him. With a small Walther. Little smoke signals drifting from the barrel, carrying one message: I’ve made my choice.
“Haversham,” Werth blast. “You shit.”
Haversham pulls the trigger again, and it’s lights out for James Werth, the old goat.
It’s not pain so much as pressure. The arm goes the wrong direction, and Mookie can feel the unnatural way it bends. The Boss-thing wraps its elongated body around it, tightening and twisting, making the break worse.
And now Sorago, the Snakeface he dragged through the floor and left for dead, is coming up the steps.
With two of the black shadows.
Panic. Anger. Two warring feelings. Part of him wants to stay here, stand his ground. Keep fighting. Fight till they whittle him down. Fight till he dies on his feet. He could do it. Burn up like an asteroid tossed into the sun. Go nuclear. Take someone with him.
But Nora’s face floats before him, again pushing the wall of fire back. The panic tells him it’s time to go. Panic is a rat on fire; a bear hounded in bees. It wants to run. It wants to escape the pain. Most of all, it wants to live.
Mookie, though, doesn’t give a shit about living.
He cares a hell of a lot about Nora living, however.
Which means it’s time to figure out a way out of here. The window, he thinks. Maybe the window. Nora’s in the study. There’s a window in there.
Panic wins. But not before anger takes one last bite. With his good arm Mookie grabs Zoladski by the head, rips him off his broken arm – an act that only makes the break worse, compounding the fracture as bone bites through skin – and pulls the Boss-thing’s undulating body upward, its leech-mouth gnashing–
Then he smashes his head forward as he pulls his hand toward him.
His big bald dome crashes into the creature’s mouth. Teeth shatter against his skull. Embed in the meat of his forehead. The thing screams.
It’s distracted.
He wings it toward Sorago – who now stalks the hall toward him.
Snakefaces are fast, lithe, a bundle of snakes in humanoid form – but right now Sorago’s slow, probably from getting dragged down through marble and wood and metal pipes.
It knocks him down. The shadows duck it by disappearing through the floor.
It affords Mookie an opening. A short one.
He seizes the moment. Runs like a Mack truck toward the study door.
Mookie dives through it. Slams it shut behind him. His panic is a gleaming beacon, a lighthouse beam swooping over his very few options.