It’s not pain so much as pressure. The arm goes the wrong direction, and Mookie can feel the unnatural way it bends. The Boss-thing wraps its elongated body around it, tightening and twisting, making the break worse.

And now Sorago, the Snakeface he dragged through the floor and left for dead, is coming up the steps.

With two of the black shadows.

Panic. Anger. Two warring feelings. Part of him wants to stay here, stand his ground. Keep fighting. Fight till they whittle him down. Fight till he dies on his feet. He could do it. Burn up like an asteroid tossed into the sun. Go nuclear. Take someone with him.

But Nora’s face floats before him, again pushing the wall of fire back. The panic tells him it’s time to go. Panic is a rat on fire; a bear hounded in bees. It wants to run. It wants to escape the pain. Most of all, it wants to live.

Mookie, though, doesn’t give a shit about living.

He cares a hell of a lot about Nora living, however.

Which means it’s time to figure out a way out of here. The window, he thinks. Maybe the window. Nora’s in the study. There’s a window in there.

Panic wins. But not before anger takes one last bite. With his good arm Mookie grabs Zoladski by the head, rips him off his broken arm – an act that only makes the break worse, compounding the fracture as bone bites through skin – and pulls the Boss-thing’s undulating body upward, its leech-mouth gnashing–

Then he smashes his head forward as he pulls his hand toward him.

His big bald dome crashes into the creature’s mouth. Teeth shatter against his skull. Embed in the meat of his forehead. The thing screams.

It’s distracted.

He wings it toward Sorago – who now stalks the hall toward him.

Snakefaces are fast, lithe, a bundle of snakes in humanoid form – but right now Sorago’s slow, probably from getting dragged down through marble and wood and metal pipes.

It knocks him down. The shadows duck it by disappearing through the floor.

It affords Mookie an opening. A short one.

He seizes the moment. Runs like a Mack truck toward the study door.

Mookie dives through it. Slams it shut behind him. His panic is a gleaming beacon, a lighthouse beam swooping over his very few options. They’ll be through the door in two seconds. Move, move, move. He reaches out with a big arm, grabs one of the bookshelves, yanks it out of its mooring. It brings hunks of plaster wall with it as it tears out anchors.

He smashes it up against the door. Then grabs another bookshelf, rips it off the wall, and adds it to the pile. Then he presses his back against it just as something hits the door like a shark smashing its nose into a diver’s cage.