The sticks were everywhere now, all over the compound. Richards could hear the screams and the gunfire. He took extra clips from his desk and ran upstairs to Sykes’s office.

The room was empty. Where was Sykes?

They had to establish a perimeter. Push the sticks back inside the Chalet and throw the switch. Richards stepped from Sykes’s office, his gun raised.

Something was moving down the hall.

It was Sykes. By the time Richards got to him, he had slumped to the floor, his back propped against the wall. His chest was heaving like a sprinter’s, his face sheened with sweat. He was holding a wide tear on his lower arm, just above the wrist, from which blood was running freely. His gun, a .45, lay on the floor near his upturned palm.

“They’re all over the place,” Sykes said, and swallowed. “Why didn’t he kill me? The son of a bitch looked right at me.”

“Which one was it?”

“What the fuck does that matter?” Sykes shrugged. “Your pal. Babcock. What is it with you two?” A deep tremor moved through him. “I don’t feel so good,” he said, and then he vomited.

Richards jumped away, but too late. The air tanged with the stench of bile, and something else, elemental and metallic, like turned earth. Richards felt the wetness through his pants, his socks. He knew without looking that Sykes’s vomitus was full of blood.

“Fuck!”

He raised his weapon at Sykes.

“Please,” Sykes said, meaning no, or maybe yes, but either way, Richards figured he was doing Sykes a favor when he pointed the barrel at the center of his chest, the sweet spot, and then he squeezed the trigger.

Lacey saw the first one come out an upper window. So quick! Like light itself! How a man would move if he were made of light! It was up and over in an instant, vaulting off the roof into space, sailing through the air above the compound, alighting in a stand of trees a hundred yards away. A man-sized flash of throbbing luminescence, like a shooting star.

She’d heard the alarm as the truck pulled into the compound. The two men in the cab had argued for a minute—should they just drive away?—and Lacey had used this moment to climb out the back and scurry into the woods. That was when she’d seen the demon flying from the window. The treetops where he landed absorbed his weight with a shudder.

Lacey saw what was about to happen.

The driver of the truck was opening the truck’s rear gate. Ordnance, the sentry had said—guns? The truck was full of guns.

The treetops moved again. A streak of green fell toward him.

Oh! Lacey thought. Oh! Oh!