And then off to the right is the third.

The one Candlefly calls “old friend”.

All of them, fangs out. Tentacles searching the air silently.

It’s then she realizes: they’re going to kill my father.

That’s when it all melts away. The anger. The hate. Like ice in the Devil’s mouth.

She doesn’t expect the word to come out of her, but there it is, screamed aloud, betraying everything she wanted, everything that she believes herself to be:

“Run!”

He didn’t see that coming.

The first thought that pops into Werth’s head as chaos takes hold is an oddly calm and quiet one: The little sociopathic bitch has a heart after all. Buried somewhere under that glacier she calls a soul.

Then the thought is gone as it all goes to epic shit.

Nora screams for her father to run.

But Mookie does no such thing. He lurches to his feet. Puts his daughter at his back in a protective stance and stands tall as the first two Snakefaces close in.

The one that looks like Spall leaps – and meets Mookie’s thundercrack fist, head snapping back and shattering a bottle. Red wine spills like blood.

The other – Not-Lutkevich – tries to tackle Mookie from the side, but it’s like a dog hitting the side of a school bus: he thuds dully into the slab of meat that is Mookie Pearl, and Mookie picks him up and slams him down on his knee. Like a child breaking a twig over his leg. Lutkevich rolls to the ground, doubled over.

But Sorago–

Sorago’s fast.

He twists out of the way of a backhanded hammer-fist, comes up around and behind Mookie as if the laws of physics are no longer in service – fangs thrust forward, glistening.

They plunge into the back of Mookie’s neck.

Werth thinks, This is it, goddamn, Mookie’s down for the count, and he looks to Haversham, but Haversham is just staring, a bug-eyed fly-catcher who’s never been in the shit, who’s never been in the fray with bullets knocking splinters out of the doorframe inches from his head, who lives a life of spreadsheets and appointment books.

But Mookie isn’t done for. Not by a long shot.

The big sonofabitch spins. Sorago barely holds on with squirming tentacle-fingers, fangs still embedded in Mookie’s neck. The other two – Sirin and Sarnosh, Werth thinks their names are – lurch up, hissing, arcs of spat venom just missing Mookie’s face.

Mookie drives his hulking body backward. A rack topples. Glass shatters. Sorago drops, flailing.

Candlefly sees an opening.

Werth watches, horror-struck.

The man reaches into his suit.

Draws a small pistol. A Walther. Points it not at Mookie–

But at Nora. She rushes to meet him, a sudden glimpse of the father within the daughter, a feral tiger sprung free from its cage–