A little hand grabbed me by the wrist and pulled me into the crowd. It was Roach, still clutching the standard of the One-Eyed Cats. At the edge of the massacre, we found Cherub Stevens, waving his saber, trying to rally his men.

“One-Eyed Cats!” he shouted, his voice broken, his ankle twisted, a horrible bloody gash running down his chest. “To me!”

“I found her,” said Roach, and Cherub smiled that marvelous smile, and the shadows swallowed us whole. The icy black knocked the wind from my chest and forced my eyes shut, and for a long moment there was nothing I could do but try to catch my breath. When I opened my eyes, light was dark, dark was light, and the battle had gone silent.

Cherub’s mouth hung open. He might have been screaming, or he might simply have been in shock at the impossible scene. Behind him, stretching down the white pavement of Fourteenth Street, an army marched beneath the bone-gray sky. Clothes tattered, skin liquid smoke, eyes flickering white fire. There were hundreds of them, those ghouls, those creatures of the shadows: newsies and cops, priests and streetwalkers, gangsters and debutantes and every other specimen of humanity the city had to offer. They held their arms open to embrace the routed soldiers. They swallowed them in white smoke and turned the boys to their side. Inch by inch, they grew closer. I would not let them have us.

I seized Cherub by the wrist, held tight to Roach’s hand, and dragged them away from the dark. Shoving through the retreating mob was like swimming against the Hudson current. It took all the strength I had to keep from being picked up and carried along by the wave. I fought to take one step, then another, and another, but no matter how hard I worked, it seemed we had not gotten anywhere, and death was closing in.

If there had only been some noise, I thought. If I could have heard them at my back, instead of just knowing they were there. If I just could have screamed, to release the pressure that had been building on my chest for the last minute, day, week, then I might have been light enough to flee.