episode of Mr. Rogers? Grab him!” Heloise adjusted her stance, once again taking careful aim at my chest. Headshots are tricky. Even the best marksman can miss. Chest shots, at close range, are much more likely to do the kind of damage jerks like Heloise prefer. “Grab him, or I’m going to shoot you both.”
Slowly, James turned to face her. His motions were jerky, like he was fighting some force I couldn’t see. I wanted to cheer for him. I kept quiet. The last thing I wanted to do right now was attract more potentially deadly attention to myself.
“You’re my friend, Hel,” he said.
“I know, Jimmy. I know.” Her voice was treacly sweet, a parody of a friend’s concerned tone. It made my skin crawl. The way she batted her eyelashes at him made it worse. “He’s a bad person. You need to stop him.”
James nodded in that same jerky manner. Then he reached up, swiped his thumb through the blood on his cheek, and stuck it in his mouth. His eyes cleared. He lunged for Heloise, who shrieked and stumbled backward on the lawn, aiming her stolen gun directly at his face and pulling the trigger.
Nothing happened. There was a dull click and that was all, and I had to swallow the urge to laugh even as I pulled the cosh out of my pocket with my uninjured hand. In all the chaos and the triumph of getting her hands on the gun, she had forgotten one essential step.
She had forgotten to take the safety off.
If this had been a movie, I would have said something pithy about safe shooting, some stupid little quip that would probably have alerted her to the problem. Thankfully, while we all come from the Spider-Man school of combat—the bad guys can’t hit you if they’re too busy trying to figure out what the hell you’re talking about—my parents had always been very clear that there was a time and a place for helping your enemies improve. The middle of combat was neither of those things.
I rushed for Heloise, swinging my arm around so that the cosh hit her in the shoulder. She yelped with pain. She dropped the gun. James lunged for her again, barely missing as she staggered backward.
And that’s when Sam dropped down on her from above like the two hundred pounds of furious pseudo-simian he was. He landed feet-first on her shoulders, toes gripping hard. For one glorious moment they stood there like cheerleaders getting ready to do a really impressive trick. Then physics kicked in, and Heloise went down hard, Sam on top of her, lips pulled back from his teeth in a genuinely impressive snarl. She screamed. The sound was almost enough to drown out the click of a hammer being pulled back. I looked behind me.
There was Antimony, a scowl on her face and a gun in her hands. This one was bigger than the one on the ground, and the safety was most definitely not on. She looked like she was ready to start shooting people. It was a mood I could absolutely support.
“Hey, cuz,” I said. “You okay?”
“You mean after James hit me in the head with an ice cube the size of a golf ball? Oh, I’m dandy.”
“You don’t sound dandy. You sound like you’re about to kill somebody.”
Annie’s smile was more like a snarl. In that moment, it was easy to see why she was Sam’s perfect girl, even if I would have sooner gotten involved with a live wolverine even if we hadn’t been related. She was way too scary for me. “That’s probably because I’m about to kill somebody. Sam! Get off the fucking cuckoo so I can shoot it!”
“You can’t shoot her,” said Sam, and slammed Heloise’s head into the lawn with a sharp shove of one foot. “No. Stay down. This is the part where you stop fighting so my girlfriend doesn’t kill the living shit out of you.”
James clutched the sides of his head with both hands, bending almost double. “Can you please, please knock her unconscious?” he moaned. “Half of me still wants to save her from you because she’s been my best friend since grade school, and I know that’s not true.”
“Listen to your sister, meaning me,” said Antimony. “She’s not your friend, she’s not your long-lost bestie, and she’s not the secret to bringing Sally home. She’s just a complication we didn’t ask for. Sam?”
“On it,” said Sam, and gripped Heloise by the hair, pulling