Sleep, he whispered into my right ear and my body grew heavy, as if I were in the clutches of a centrifuge and gravity had begun to multiply.

Sleep! His whisper was a barbed hook traveling into my brain.

Cold, disassociated, panicked, I screamed down the red light and it filled me with the power to raise Milo’s full-grown bull overhead. As the lamps flared to life again, I punched Mandibole’s jaw, exerting force enough to knock a hole in a sandbag, to snap a man’s neck. He flinched. I grasped his head in both rock-crusher mitts and tried, with all my might and main, to wrench his spine out of his body. If I could’ve uprooted a tree, I could’ve budged him. He slammed the heel of his hand into my nose and my nose squished. Made my heart skip a beat. I traveled some weightless distance, winking out of reality, then in, as I pinballed through furniture. My splinter-torn face pressed to the wooden floor; a galaxy wheeled beneath me, hell-bright, eating the boards, foundation, musty, wormy earth. Nebulae hummed a frozen, ethereal tune, calling to me as the Sirens once sang sweet murder to Odysseus while his oarsmen rowed for their lives. I yearned to dissolve into stardust and join the cosmic tide. It was pleasing to recognize every millimeter of my minuteness. Death was nothing to fear. Peaceful.

Mandibole crossed the room in a single stride. He lifted me by my right arm and a fistful of my coat until we were eye to eye. No one had done that to me since my angry, drunken father when I was a child. He probably meant to send me into the afterlife with a quip. Hanging limp at his mercy, knees bent, arm pinned, I couldn’t reach my jawbone knife on the opposite hip. And let me assure you, I wanted that knife in the worst way. My left hand went into my pocket and closed on something—the sharpened bone the Magician had fashioned into a recorder months ago and that I’d discarded with revulsion at the Hotel Roan. A mysteriously appearing recorder with a razor-sharp pointy end.

For when it’s time to face the music.

I gripped it like an ice pick and stabbed three-quarters of it through his breastbone. Mandibole released me, momentarily befuddled. He screamed. His mouth dropped open, wider than you’d expect. It had a linear, trapdoor quality, like you’d catch in a ventriloquist’s dummy if you did a freeze-frame. Blew my hair back with a ripe scent of green-black jungle and something dead and mummified and cuddled in webbing. I couldn’t see his teeth or his tongue. But it was dark in there and black spots floated before me. World-eaters. The screaming stopped, mid-breath. Blood squirted from the hollowed bone like a spigot. He sealed the aperture with his palm. Blood seeped and dripped, but it was better.

“Boy, I loathe that guy.”

I assume he referred to the Magician.

He turned smartly and walked away. Staggering, I followed him outside. There was an interesting tableau in the yard. Lionel had arrived. He stood near the van pointing his rifle at Veronica and Betty. The ladies dismissed him and continued stuffing Buckhalter’s remains in the trunk of the Bentley. He immediately skirted around and joined me on the porch.