She tried to focus on extricating the safe. But all she could see was the baby, its head impaled on an iron fence post, passersby tearing viciously at each other in the scramble to consume the twitching infant … Why WHY WHY the fuck would people do that? What the hell had happened out there? It made her so goddamned angry she boiled over with an empowering rage that made her invincible. It was sick and wrong and she needed to make those motherfuckers understand … Maybe she’d smash their faces against metal spikes and see how they liked it … They’d cry for mercy and repent when it was her teeth in their throats, her fingers gouging their eyes …

The cutting tool died out. So did the lights. It was as though the creeping blackout on the street had oozed into the casino to play havoc with the power here, too.

Distracted by her own swelling sense of rage, and the nightmare vision playing on endless loop inside her mind’s eye, and half deaf from the residual whine of the hydraulics, she didn’t hear the footsteps. She didn’t realize she wasn’t alone until a double loop of hydraulic lines and electrical cables snapped tight against her throat. She dropped the cutter, fingers scrabbling at the bands of plastic and rubber pinching off her windpipe.

“Cunt! You fucking cunt!”

Spittle misted the side of her face as Brent screamed in her ear. He hauled on the cables hard enough to physically yank her off her feet. Flecks of more spittle pattered against her neck while he screamed at her, while her fingers clawed ineffectually at the cables around her throat, while her lungs burned, while her dangling feet kicked wildly for purchase.

A red veil fell over the contracting world. Baba Yaga’s bedroom and all of her furniture—her enemies, her victims—retreated to the end of a narrow tunnel. Mollie flailed, squirmed, kicked, but Brent was too big, too strong, too enraged. The cables cut into her neck. Just before the lights went out, a voice whispered to her from the past, from vastly better days: Be smart.

Mollie created a doorway to Idaho under Brent’s feet. Together they fell from Talas to the family barn. The impact jarred him hard enough to loosen his grip. She rolled away through dirt and straw, unwrapping the cables around her throat. Mollie sucked down air with explosive gasps. The red veil over the world receded, leaving a pounding headache and incandescent rage in its wake.