Ricky grabbed the thing. It wasn’t any bigger than a swallow, and his hand engulfed it. The melltithiwyd went wild, pecking but unable to reach him. He squeezed. It started to scream, a scream of rage that turned almost human as it thrashed and pecked, its beak still spattered with my blood. Ricky kept crushing it, his fingers digging into the dark red feathers. The tiny body contorted, and the melltithiwyd snarled, white eyes turning human. Ricky squeezed until gore and black blood ran down his arm. That’s when it stopped snarling, stopped screaming, stopped pecking, stopped struggling.

Ricky whipped the mangled thing at the departing flock. It hit one, and as the creature turned, it struck another, a chain reaction, the last few melltithiwyd pecking and shrieking as the rest of the flock swirled out of sight.

The dead melltithiwyd fell to the floor with a wet thwack, and when the remaining ones heard that, they stopped in mid-peck and looked down at the corpse on the floor.

They swooped as one body, and all I could see was a red-black blur. But I heard more. I heard ripping and snapping and gulping, and when they finally stopped, there was nothing on the floor but a black stain of blood. The lingering melltithiwyd flew upward, bits of their dead brethren still hanging from their beaks as they flew to join the others.

I grabbed the edge of the hole. “Gabriel?”

“I’m fine,” he said. “They only knocked us in. Which was not a pleasant reoccurrence, but we’re unharmed. It was simply a message—telling us that we are not escaping until the sluagh allows it.” He squinted up, holding his cell phone for light. “Is that blood?”

My hand clapped to the spot the melltithiwyd had attacked, and I felt a tiny divot of missing flesh. “I’m fine. Ricky…” I turned quickly. “Are you okay? Your back…” I moved behind him.

“A leather jacket is both symbolic and functional,” he said as I saw the peck marks on the leather. “I’m good.”

I reached to the rear of his neck, where blood dripped from his scalp.

“Yeah, I should have been wearing the helmet, too,” he said. “But it’s just pecks. Like oversized mosquitoes.”

I wiped the blood and checked a couple of the spots, which really did look like bug bites, bloodied pocks like the one on my cheek.

“You do an excellent job of feigning concern,” the sluagh said, her voice sliding around us. “Overreact to his injuries in hopes he won’t notice you asked after Gwynn first.”

“Shut the fuck up,” Ricky said.

“Scraps of attention,” she whispered. “Her dutiful hound—”

“No, really, shut the fuck up. You told Patrick his ploy was poor? Yours is poorer. I just crushed a fucking hell-bird. Obviously, I was fine, and obviously she’s going to check the guy who fell through the damned floor again.”