For us. Not it. It was fine and dandy. Turned out that when it approached, its wings lifted it high enough to expose a fat, savage stinger on the end of that abdomen—the sawlike mouth shot a high-pressure squirt of transparent liquid directly into our eyes, which I narrowly dodged by swinging your blood-sodden arm across your face—fun times, because the liquid turned out to be insane monster acid. I heard the robe sizzling away on contact, then I heard your skin sizzle too—felt the strips fall away from your arm, first of cloth and then of actual dermal layer—and I took a couple of steps back and I bit about three holes through your tongue, but our pain receptors were still all fucked up. I’m not saying it didn’t hurt like a top-notch bitch, because it did, but when I shook the worst of the unholy insect spit off our mess of an arm I found your skin growing back as I watched. Hell of a party trick, Nonagesimus, I mean, damn.

I parried a smashing overhead blow from the stinger, which was beading more clear fluid from a tip that could’ve jerked our heart out, and my borrowed arm clanged my borrowed sword into the saw mouth. I kicked the stinger with your booted foot, which was like hitting a wall with a feather duster, ducked under another stream of acid, and then, sorry, turned and ran for your goddamn life.

I burst into the nearest room. The bedroom. I kind of knew the layout, but I’d never really been able to use your eyes. Living inside you—if I start I’ll never stop, so we have to move on—was like living in a well, and every time I bobbed to the surface I kind of got clotheslined back down to the bottom. I’m not complaining, I just want you to know. Even so, I knew enough to bust through your foyer and to the remnants of that ash barricade you were an idiot to make, heading for the thing I knew I would find right where you left it, with its thick white scabbard cracked into pieces all around.

The creature squirmed through after me, made that shitty bleating half-curdled chirrup, and spat another stream of evil saliva at us. I hit the floor, ditched the rapier, and grasped the hilt of my two-handed sword.

Which was, by the way, in fucking abominable condition. There is so much I should have told you. I just didn’t have time. I didn’t know. I didn’t know I’d have to say: A sword doesn’t hold an edge on its own, you sack of Ninth House garbage. I didn’t know I’d have to say, If you dip a sword into melty bone, the metal gets more pitted than an iron mine, you cross-patched necromantic shit.