“Where flees the adulteress?” His voice was all that I remembered it being—disgusting and spine-chilling for a reason I couldn’t put my finger on. “Where goes the wicked one?”
“That was Mandy,” Goodfellow said as he unsheathed his sword from his own long coat that hung over his suit Nik had traumatized him by creasing. “She is married, but her husband is in the business, and is it adultery if it involves your occupation and the party of the first and the party of the second both consent to said parameters of the relationship?”
“Be grateful he doesn’t know Shakespeare,” Niko grunted, his own katana already in hand. “‘First kill all the lawyers.’”
“Every trickster, pucks or others, has a law degree. It’s the perfect con.” Robin was trying for cheerful, but seeing Jack for the first time and having heard our story of failure of all our weapons against him, the cheer was strained.
Jack filled the back of the hall entirely. The destroyed lights and his own inherent darkness made him the same form impossible to pin down. Mist, fog, shadows, sparks that circled like a whirlwind within him and two oval-shaped eyes that were the last color you’d see if you were an unlucky bastard standing outside when a bolt of lightning struck you from an overcast sky. He was everything and he was nothing, all in one, and that was a problem. You can’t fight everything and you can’t fight nothing.
“What the fuck.” I just shot him seven times. Shooting him hadn’t worked when he’d attacked me in my room, but I liked to think two of my best qualities were persistence and the ability to hold on to resentment to my dying day. And I did resent Jack for showing up at one of the least convenient times in my life—especially when I’d been ready to give him a pass and ignore his existence.
The bullets disappeared into the tempest and Jack didn’t react, same as before. Niko was on him then, katana moving in an arc of sheer quicksilver beauty. It struck Jack and the force of whatever it hit threw Nik back several feet. He managed to land on his feet, growled, and attacked again.
“This is not your time. This is not your turn,” Jack said thickly . . . so thickly it sounded as if he had a mouthful of shit, blood . . . or the skin he was so fond of taking. That’s what bothered me. A storm spirit should sound like the wind or the rushing train of an incoming tornado, not as if he had a mouthful of fresh, blood-soaked flesh.
“I am coming for you, but now the wickedness of the adulteress.” The rest of the lights exploded but there was enough drifting in from the entrance of the hall to see that Jack hadn’t gone. His electric-chair eyes were bright and hovering in the blackness.
“You were right. He is quite annoying.” Goodfellow was at Niko’s side now, both swinging blades at Jack.
“Go right and get down,” I shouted. Over the strike of metal against God knew what and the rising sound of wind and the sizzle of electricity, it was getting loud. We wouldn’t be alone here much longer. As Niko and Robin went flat on the floor, I raised my other gun. I had the explosive rounds custom-made by naughty people for the Desert Eagle. Time to see if they worked any better on Jack than normal rounds did. I fired high and to the left. I waited for the explosion—when it came to explosive rounds you didn’t worry about a silencer. You shot and you ran like hell before the cops showed up.
I knew the round had hit Jack and I waited, but I heard nothing. Not a muffled thud, positively no explosion. I fired again, and again nothing. I’d have heard more if I’d chugged a marshmallow at him.
Then it was Jack’s turn. He turned the hall into . . . hell. I was struck by something. I didn’t know if it was Jack himself or the force of a hurricane, but I was slammed from wall to wall, up to the ceiling, then back down to the floor. It hurt, distantly, because what I was thinking over all that was that I couldn’t breathe. All of the oxygen, all of the air itself was sucked out of the hall and my lungs did more than burn. I felt them almost collapse from the negative pressure. It couldn’t have been a complete negative pressure or they would have, but it was close enough to leave me sprawled on the floor, half believing I was dying and wholeheartedly wishing I would. It would be less painful.
After moments or minutes, I couldn’t tell, my lungs were slowly beginning to cooperate again. Bit by bit. It was a long time before I was breathing anything close to normal and it would’ve been longer before I remotely thought about trying to get up, but Goodfellow was slapping my face hard and yanking at my arm. “Humans,” he muttered. “You depend far too much on breathing as often as you do. Cal, up. We need to go before Mandy brings back every man, woman, and security guard who swings a mean dildo.”