“They’ll shoot you down before you get within fifty feet of him.”

“That would suit me fine.”

“Do nothing. For a day or two. Go back to the pet shop. Eat. Sleep. Rest. I’ll fix it.”

“Gilda, damn you—I thought I was supposed to be the childish one. The world is ruined. The Westside is broken, and nothing will fix that. Nothing will ever be good again.”

I wanted something clever to say, something to make him smile in spite of himself. Nothing came to mind. We stepped off the sidewalk into the mossy street, and the quiet was broken by screams, faint and piercing. They came from the far side of the park, and they came in Swedish.

I ran, and Cherub stumbled after me. The night’s horrors were not through with us yet.

The top floor of the house had blown away like smoke. Below, where the vines were thickest, my home was putting up a fight it could not win. Hairline cracks shot from the foundation up through the brick. The stone shattered, but the windows could not be broken. I knew that immediately, because Hellida was on the first floor, banging on the glass with my father’s favorite reading chair, and no one in New York was stronger than Hellida when she was angry.

The gate was latched and would not open for me. I hopped over it, and Cherub called after me, but the breeze had turned into a tornado, and I couldn’t make out the words.

I tried to jerk open my front door. The knob, white hot, burned my hands.

“Where’s your goddamned sword?” I screamed at Cherub, my words lost in the wind.

Something thudded against the window—Hellida’s crepe pan. She retrieved it, ran deep into the parlor, spun, and let it go, hard enough that it should have shattered the glass and sailed all the way across the park. But the window would not yield.

The second floor followed the third into the shadows. All that remained was the dust-covered wood. The vines flopped across the second story—my father’s office, and the room where my mother left this world—and squeezed. The cracks in the brownstone opened wider, and from them poured inky black light.

The thudding stopped, and above the wind I heard Hellida scream my name.

She ran her finger across the window. The house began to split. As the room melted around her, she did not wince and did not cry. She simply disappeared.

A final gust blew me down the steps, which were gone by the time I opened my eyes. Cherub and I stood in an empty lot, overgrown with a decade’s moss and vines, just glowing pink in the light of dawn.