A sound: bink, tink, tunk – chain links bending, bowing, snapping. His body swells. Everything cramps. Pain, sweet pain, delicious misery. He feels sharp like a broken tooth, raw like a scalded tongue. He stands. Chain links drop to the floor. The shadow-thing thrashes on the ground behind him like a bug under a magnifying glass. Screech, wail, spasm. Its pain is his pain. Mookie’s breath comes in shallow gasps. Fingernails in palm-flesh. Teeth gritting. He stoops by the thing, and tears off its eyes. It thrashes.

Everything hurts. The hurt is pleasure.

Saliva pools in his mouth. His dick is hard as rebar.

He begins to climb the wine racks.

Upstairs, Werth thinks, it’s time to go. Just make a break for it. There’s the door. Run, you asshole, run. He almost laughs. Like he can run! Best he could do is limp-stagger-stumble toward the door and the moment he tried Sorago would be on him like a fast cat on a sick rabbit.

He feels Candlefly watching him.

“That was curious,” Candlefly says.

“Was it?” Werth tries to play cool.

From upstairs, Haversham wanders down.

“You seem to have a lot of anger toward your old friend.”

“Guess I do.”

“It doesn’t make sense.”

Werth freezes. Sorago tilts a head toward him. Eyeing up the kill. Candlefly steps closer. Werth’s mouth goes dry.

Candlefly says, “I’m beginning to think our trust in you is misplaced.”

Sorago smiles. Hisses. Squirms closer.

That’s when a fist punches up through the marble floor.

It grabs Sorago by the ankle.

It drags him back through the hole, the Snakeface’s writhing body collapsing as it’s sucked down into the cellar.

An eerie silence follows.

Candlefly gapes.

Werth almost laughs. Because he knows that fist – fat knuckles, pink scars, each finger thick like a goddamn bratwurst. And the look on Candlefly’s face, one registering genuine holy-shit surprise, is a prize without value.

Mookie. The Red Rage took. The transformation is a thing of fear and horror, but also victory.

Candlefly gives Werth a look. “You.”

Werth gives him the finger.

The floor suddenly shudders. The marble begins to crack. Another tremor, this one rougher than the last. The ground quakes, then–

Mookie crashes up through the floor. Bloody. Beaten. Covered in marble fragments like shards of eggshell.

He’s huge.

Bigger than normal. Neck thick as a tree trunk. Biceps rippling as though snakes swarmed beneath the skin. His eyes are black dots in red seas. His wrecking ball skull pivots, leers toward Candlefly.

“You.”

Candlefly doesn’t hesitate. He pulls his pistol. Empties the magazine into Mookie’s chest. Werth’s ears ring. Gunpowder haze fills the air.

Mookie’s shirt is torn.

On the skin are stuck flattened mushrooms of lead.

Which drop to the floor, one by one. Plink, plunk, thunk.

Mookie roars, stomping toward Candlefly.

From upstairs comes another scream. Nora.