You made any quick vertical moves and you lost your fucking head.
Bullets whistled by, taking out lamps, turning oil paintings to sieves, blowing up porcelain bowls and gold-speckled plates. Grabbing John by the shoulder, he rolled the two of them out of the way, taking cover behind a sofa the color of a buttercup.
Jesus, it was like Die Hard only shot in a museum instead of a high-rise. And what the fuck were those shadow things?
Murhder took aim at the nearest one, which was lashing out at Rhage, and as he pulled the trigger on a gun for the first time in twenty years, his aim was really fucking bad. He ended up drilling a crystal sconce to the left of the fireplace, the lightbulbs exploding into sparks as they vaporized.
He didn’t make that mistake twice.
Finding a groove, he squeezed off multiple rounds, and thus gave Rhage the chance to rescue two females who were holding each other and cowering behind a silk armchair. With the brother as protection, they ran off, high heels twisting ankles, their gowns held up to their waists, their once-neat chignons now birds’ nests full of tangles.
John swung his own muzzle around, and doubled down on the shadow that Murhder was working on, discharging his own bullets—
There was an unholy squeal, a sound higher than a piccolo’s best note and louder than a jet engine. And then the entity blew apart like the first one had, oily mud flying out and hitting the mantelpiece as well as what was left of the window Murhder had broken with his own body.
It was like someone slinging fresh cow flops around.
Two more to go.
Except …
The remaining shadows weren’t attacking anything. The entities were side by side and stationary in the archway of the darkened study beyond, like smog balloons tethered to a fixed point in the floor.
He and John leveled muzzles on their direction.
Nobody moved: Not them. Not their targets.
That was not true elsewhere in the house. The other brothers and fighters were rushing to get the guests to secured locations, all kinds of shuffling feet, hushed voices full of fear, and barked orders radiating into the parlor from a distance.
“We need to kill them now,” Murhder said softly. “It’s the only—”
Poof! Poof!
The entities disappeared, one after another.
As a scream lit off somewhere on the second floor.
Throe tried for the doorknob again, but it burned through the tuxedo jacket—and then getting out of the bedroom suite was no longer an option. What started out as a breeze morphed into a vacuum, the pull dragging him away from the door—
He dropped to his knees. Grabbed onto anything that he went by: A spindly chair. The edge of a side table. The bureau. He fought and clawed, churned his legs, locked eyes on the door into the bathroom as if that would give him a redirection.
He did not want to look again. But once more, his head turned as if controlled by someone else.
The Book had opened itself on the writing desk, and the perfectly cylindrical black void had reappeared, that which Throe had witnessed previously happening anew, that which should have been no deeper than the three-foot drop to the bedroom floor under the blotter funneling into an unfathomable depth—
Something stung his hand. And then his other one.
He swung his head back around. Two of his shadows were before him, and they were lashing out, punishing his grips as he tried to keep himself in the realm of reality.
Throe screamed one last time as he lost all purchase against the powerful draw.
And then his body was sucked feet-first into the void.
Falling. He was falling, the cold damp air becoming more and more frigid. Colder, faster, colder … faster. Ice forming on his upraised hands, his eyelashes, his cheeks.
As his velocity continued to increase, his tuxedo frayed off his body, the fibers brittle from the indescribable freeze, the speed of the fall, the pressure that began to bear down on him. Naked … he was naked now, his skin frosting over, turning black.
And then fraying as his clothes had.
His flesh was next. That which had contained his insides stripped off his bones, and though his eyes disintegrated, he could somehow still see the white of his skeleton—until that turned black as well.
All of his corporeal form was torn away, nothing but his spirit remaining.
And that was when he landed at some kind of bottom, sure as if he still had a physical body, pain lancing through him as if vital