The stocky man in the long coat paused there to pull the jungle clip from his rifle and flip it to the charged end. He then detached a plastic box from the ejection port and dumped the spent brass into his coat pocket. His eyes never left the escaping target. “Go after it,” Del snapped. “Go after it, for God’s sake!”

The bearded stranger barely granted him a glance. “I’ve already taken care of him,” he said, then whispered over his shoulder, “It wasn’t him, was it?”

Another voice sounded, deeper, huskier, but Del couldn’t tell from where. “Not the Enemy,” it said anxiously. “Hurry, check the house.” The stranger nodded and stepped past Del, and for an instant the boy thought he had left his shadow behind on the tramped down grass. But then a cloud crossed the moon and the shadow was gone.

The man knelt beside Bart and checked his pulse, then inspected the puncture wounds on his neck. “Missed the artery,” he observed, wiping the trickle of blood from the bite. “He’ll be all right.” He motioned for Del to come closer. “Are you okay?”

“I . . . I think so.”

“Have you ever shot a rifle?”

“Just a twenty-two.”

“Good enough.” He worked the bolt and laid the machine gun in the boy’s hands. “If you see anyone but me, put that light in the middle of their face. If they don’t stop, just squeeze the trigger. Okay?” He brushed back his coat and drew two pistols, each a stainless steel semi-auto sporting an extended twenty-shot magazine and a miniature flashlight mounted to the frame. “Stay here,” he warned. “Don’t go near the house.”

Like a gunman from the Old West with duster billowing and six-shooters at the ready, the stranger stalked onto the porch and through the ruined French doors, into the shadowy bowels of Danner House.

Del stood silently in the garden with his brother, cradling a machine gun in his arms and wanting to ask, who was that masked man?

Stiles stood in the cellar before the ruined wall and its exposed cell, pistols at his sides, and he wept. Not for the cell’s prisoner, the thing he’d blown the shit out of in the gardens above. It deserved whatever it got.

Instead, he wept because of the cell. Because it was too small, too shallow. Because there was only enough room for one person inside, only one set of broken shackles. One entity, one evil. And it hadn’t been the Enemy.

Again.