Back in college, Nell had dated a horror hound who dragged her to every new flick. When it came to slasher movies, one trope always infuriated her. It was the obligatory scene where the heroine knocks the killer down, holds the upper hand, and then runs away or turns her back instead of finishing him off. And he always sprang back to life for one last scare. Always.
She picked the chair up again.
“On one hand,” she said, “this is escalating from justifiable self-defense to criminal manslaughter.”
The chair came whistling down. It broke against his skull, tearing his stolen face and baring the wet-meat muscle and stained jawbone beneath. Rime’s shoulders gave a spasmodic jerk, then fell still.
“On the other hand, I am way past the point of giving a fuck.”
She hit him two more times. Spent, glistening with sweat, she let the chair tumble from her hands and clatter to the blood-smeared floorboards. Now she could turn her back on him. She scooped up the fallen binder and opened it, checking on the treasures inside. The letters had a blade-sized hole in their heart, but they could still change the world.
A groan, squeezing its way from a crushed windpipe, turned her head.
Rime was getting up again.
As he pulled himself to his feet, his body mended itself. A chunk of spongy skull slid back into place, coated in a film of white milky fluid that wormed its way between the cracks. Torn muscle knitted together, tendons twisting, going taut with a rubber-band snap. The only part that didn’t heal wasn’t truly his: the professor’s stolen face drooped like a sagging Halloween mask, one ripped cheek dangling in red ribbons.
“Hades is no country for a soldier of fortune,” he said. “Even if I wished to die, I would be quite incapable of the deed. And I do not wish to die.”
She rushed for the door, breaking left around the glass table. He moved like a cat, liquid fast, blocking her path. He showed his blood-flecked teeth.
“That’s two perfectly good faces you’ve ruined, Ms. Bluth. Such a spiteful little thing you are. No wonder you can’t find a husband.”
She bolted right, circling the table again. He was there to meet her, his open hands flexing at his sides, inviting her to take a swing. Playing with her. The apartment door was six feet away; it could have been six miles for all her hopes of reaching it.
Bad idea. She needed another way out. The layout of the apartment flickered through her mind as the teakettle started to scream. Kitchen dead-ended at a window, no chance she’d get it open fast enough. Kitchen was where all the knives were.
Window. Bathroom.
She snatched a hardcover book from the teetering mountain on the table and threw it at him. His hands rose, reflexive, batting it away, and she was already turning on her heel and sprinting in the other direction. She hurtled across the bathroom threshold, slammed the door behind her, and twisted the flimsy lock.
The bathroom window was built like the room itself: tall and narrow, a rectangle of dirty glass at the end of a cramped aisle between the sink and the tub. Nell lunged for it, hands scrabbling at the twin latches above the windowpane, yanking them back. One fought her, the old metal warped and frozen fast. Her fingers slipped and the steel nub caught under her thumbnail, almost ripping it loose. She gritted her teeth against the pain and tried again, wriggling the latch back and forth until it started to give.
A fist slammed into the bathroom door. The old wood rattled against the hinges.
The second latch tugged open. Nell grabbed the handles at the base of the window and heaved. Tiny flecks of dirt-brown paint shook loose as it jolted a quarter inch upward. Then another, the frame squealing like nails on a blackboard.
Another punch shook the door at her back. The wood cracked and started to buckle.
“Come on, come on—” Nell hissed through clenched teeth. Her arms burned as she hauled on the handles. One wriggled under her fingertips, a mounting screw peeling loose from its socket. The window moved another quarter inch. Just enough.
Nell let go of the handles and curled her fingers through the gap under the window. She turned her shoulder into it, trying to get leverage as she wrenched it upward. The tortured frame shrieked with every heave. She could see the other side now, the neighboring apartment building across the alley, the long