“What now?” There was a violent crunch. The cement wall on the landing above us was suddenly riddled with cracks. Lacoco and I stopped.

“Gargoyles. You’ve got three gargoyles on the exterior of the stairwell.”

Edward ran back past us, hit the nineteenth floor landing, yanked the door open and looked inside. He nodded quickly. Clear. The concrete on the twentieth floor was raining down in dust and chunks. An enclosed space was a stupid place to take on an animated stone monster. We went after Ed.

His response had been much faster than expected, but I wasn’t done provoking our monster. “Gargoyles? Probably the same ones from Appleton. See, what did I tell you? Now he’s cherry-picking Julie’s memories. He can’t do anything on his own. He’s a chump. He’s got no imagination.” The three of us entered the nineteenth floor. It was pitch-black, but Lacoco and I turned on our flashlights. Ed could see in the dark. This floor was still under construction, and was a mess of half-finished metal frames, dangling wires, scaffolding, and stacked sheetrock. There had to be another interior stairwell in the middle, and we could take that to the roof. “He’s limited to the weapons we provide him, and even the poor deluded human he’s keeping alive isn’t powerful enough to handle the things I’ve got in my head.” I could only hope that the great Old Ones were so sanity-bending and incomprehensible that they couldn’t be copied, otherwise we’d all just get squished.

There was a horrendous crash as the gargoyles broke into the fire stairwell. We kept moving as fast as we could, but I’d seen how quick these things were. It was a straight shot down the middle. Ed found the door for the next set of stairs and jerked it open. Ed looked inside, up, down, then back at us and nodded. Clear.

I got back on the radio. “Screw you, Nachtmar. Your world is nothing. You cobbled together all of this from your host’s subconscious. Your days are numbered. They know your secret back on Earth. They know how to kill him and banish you now. They’re going to find your poor human, waste him, and you’ll go back to being nothing. You might find someone else to bond with, but it’ll never be the same. Your glory days are almost over. You’ll be so weak that you won’t even show up on the PUFF table. You’re a nuisance. The best you’ll be able to do after this is make a five-year-old wet the bed.”