The Nachtmar grimaced and slid down the wall, leaving a smear of blood, until he came to a rest, seated, chest full of weeping holes. “It is all for nothing. The human I am bonded with is beyond your reach. You cannot kill him.”

“I know,” I said as I slowly got to my feet. “That’s why I’m going to talk him into doing it himself.”

And then the ancient nightmare creature realized what I intended to do. “No! You—”

This time Lacoco walked over, put his pistol against the copy’s temple, and blew a reasonable facsimile of my brains across the twentieth floor. Lacoco spit on the corpse. “Shut up.” His lips were so mangled and the words were so slurred that they were barely understandable. The big man turned toward me, quivering with fury. One side of his face seemed shrunken without the eye. The other side was battered into split-open pulp. I was amazed he was still standing.

I looked at the pistol dangling in his hand. “That wasn’t me.”

“It was once…” He looked back at the body.

“Neither one of us is the man we were once, and I’m sorry for the man that I was, for what I did to you.”

Lacoco put his pistol back in the holster. “Apology accepted. You can buy me a beer when we get back to Earth.”

“Deal.” I moved my arm around from behind my back, revealing that I’d pulled my own .45, originally to shoot the copy, but had kept it hidden until Lacoco had put his own gun away. “What?” Lacoco shook his head ruefully when he saw that, but he still came up to help me limp along. “I’ve got things to do. I didn’t have time to get shot by you.”

He grunted in acknowledgement as he put my arm over his shoulders and took some of my weight. Then he said, “I gotta say, it felt awfully good to shoot you…the old you.”

I chuckled, then paused to listen for the gargoyles, but I couldn’t hear them. Maybe even here the Nachtmar could only pay attention to so many things at once, and there was an army of demons below. But now that the Nachtmar realized what I was up to, it would be coming for me with everything it had, which was exactly what I wanted. That would distract it from the others. There was a sudden crash and a cry from the other end of the hall. “Ed!”