And yet he wouldn’t die. Couldn’t die, maybe. As Winter watched, he turned, torn muscles moving visibly in one leg where they’d been laid bare. One of his eyes was gone, the socket leaking vile, gory fluid, but the other stared down at her with a bright, mad glare. His remaining hand scrabbled weakly on the floor for something he could swing.

Winter’s ears were still ringing, and the world tilted wildly around her, but she stepped forward and put her hand against the giant’s chest. She felt the demon inside her surge at the proximity to one of its fellows, felt its boundless hunger, and she willed it down through her arm and into the Penitent Damned. One more time. The two demons met, and tangled about each other, but again the contest was a brief one. Infernivore, the demon that consumed its own kind, spread through the other demon like a drop of blood spreading into clear water, rapidly converting the other’s substance into more of itself. When there was nothing left of the giant’s demon, Infernivore surged back through the huge man’s body and into Winter’s hand, diving once more into the darkest recesses of her soul. The huge priest blinked once, and then his eye rolled back into his head and his massive form sprawled in the wreckage of the table and lay still.

What followed was not silence, since the firefight at the other end of the hall continued, but it was relative stillness. Winter’s ears still rang with the force of the blast, and tiny nicks and scrapes she hadn’t been aware of were starting to make themselves known all over her body. Andy raised her head from where she’d crouched against the wall, and Bobby, her broken arm already working again, pressed herself up from the scorched floor. Joanna had been closest to the blast, and the back of her uniform was torn and bleeding from shrapnel, but she managed to get shakily to her feet.

“Everyone . . .” Winter paused. “Okay” seemed like a stretch, considering. “Still alive?”

Joanna pointed urgently to Barley, who was still lying against the wall. Winter hurried over, then noticed the old man, lying nearby where Joanna had laid him out, was still breathing.

“Bobby!” Winter pointed. “Skewer him if he moves.”

Bobby nodded, retrieving a musket and leveling it at the Penitent. While Winter knelt beside Barley, Andy went to Joanna, whose arm was still dripping a steady patter of crimson onto the floor.

“I’ll get this door open,” Sothe said, bending to examine the lock.

Blood trickled from a cut on Barley’s scalp, and Winter probed it delicately with her fingers. The wound was gory, but not deep, and the skull beneath seemed intact.