concrete. Pushing against him, I barely managed to keep his weight from coming down on my chest so that it came down somewhere around my hips instead. He seized my right hand and squeezed.
Pain. Tendons tearing. Bones cracking. He shook his arm once, and my Sig went tumbling away.
I didn’t hesitate. I just doubled up, leaning toward him, and rammed the blazing end of the flare into the open flap of his gills.
He screamed, louder than a human being could have, and both hands flew to his throat to clutch at the flare. I got a leg free and kicked him in the chin, hard, driving down with all the power of my leg behind a crushing heel. I heard something crack, and he screamed, flinching. I freed my other leg and scrambled away from him, clutching awkwardly at my right ankle with my left hand.
Nothing tore the flare out, his pale eyes nearly luminous with rage, and came after me, roaring.
I had never been more frightened in my life. I couldn’t get to the damn holdout gun before he reached me, so I did the only thing I could. I ran, blind, into the dark, and he came after me like a rabid locomotive.
I knew I didn’t have much room left. I knew that I would hit a wall in a few seconds, and that then he’d have me. I could only pray that the shots I’d put in him were more serious than his reaction to them indicated—that he was already bleeding massively, and that the extra few seconds would be enough time to let him die.
But somewhere inside, I knew better.
I was playing out of my league, and I had known that from the beginning.
Beautiful light suddenly fluoresced in front of me—the acid growths on the walls. I slammed to a stop in front of the weird clumps of material and saw little tendrils and orifices on the growths tracking and orienting on me.
I turned to face Nothing.
He came in, insanely huge, insanely strong, and roaring in a terrible fury.
But terrible fury alone doesn’t win fights. In fact, it can be a deadly weakness. In the second it took him to reach me, I touched the center of calm in myself, earned with endless hours of practice and discipline. I judged the distance and the timing. It felt as if I had forever to work out what I would need to do.
And then I did to Nothing exactly what I’d done to Ray.
As he closed, I ducked under his huge hands, spinning to sweep my right leg across his right foot, just as it was about to hit the floor. Preternaturally strong though he may have been, gravity pulled him just as hard as it had Ray, and his joints operated in exactly the same fashion. His right foot was driven to tangle with his left, and he went smashing forward into the wall.
Into the growth.
Into the spurting cloud of acidic spray that erupted from it, aiming at me.
I rolled away to one side, frantically, but I needn’t have worried. Nothing’s vast bulk shielded me from the acid spray. I turned over and backed away awkwardly on my butt and my left hand, staring at Nothing in sheer fascination.
He didn’t scream. I think he was trying. The acid must have torn his throat apart, first thing. He sort of recoiled, staggering, and fell to his knees. I could see his profile dimly in the distant light of the flare and the glow of the acid fungus. It . . . just dissolved; seeing it was like watching time-lapse photography of a statue being worn away by wind and rain. Fluids pooled around his knees. He took several agonized breaths—and then there were sucking sounds, as the acid ate into his chest wall. And then there were no sounds at all.
He tried to get up, twice. Then he settled down onto his side as if going to sleep.
The acid kept chewing at him, even after he was dead.
The stench hit me, and I retched horribly.
I backed farther away and sat for a second with my knees up against my chest, my good arm wrapped around them, and sobbed. I hurt so much.
I hurt so much.
And my arm throbbed dully.
“Dammit, Dresden,” I said into the silence in a choked voice. “Dammit. Here I am doing your job. Dammit, dammit, dammit.”
I got to my feet a moment later. I recovered the second flare. I found my gun. I went to