ONE
Flaherty stood at the New York/Fedic door, which had been scarred by several gunshots but otherwise stood whole against them, an impassable barrier which the shitting kid had somehow passed. Lamia stood silent beside him, waiting for Flaherty's rage to exhaust itself. The others also waited, maintaining the same prudent silence.
Finally the blows Flaherty had been raining on the door began to slow. He administered one final overhand smash, and Lamia winced as blood flew from the hume's knuckles.
"What?" Flaherty asked, catching his grimace. "What? Do you have something to say?"
Lamia cared not at all for the white circles around Flaherty's eyes and the hard red roses in Flaherty's cheeks. Least of all for the way Flaherty's hand had risen to the butt of the Glock automatic hanging beneath his armpit. "No," he said.
"No, sai."
"Go on, say what's on your mind, do it please ya," Flaherty persisted. He tried to smile and produced a gruesome grin instead-the leer of a madman. Quietly, with barely a rustle, the rest pulled back. "Others will have plenty to say; why shouldn't you start, my cully? I lost him! Be the first to carp, you ugly motherfucker!"
I'm dead, Lamia thought. After a life of service to the King, one unguarded expression in the presence of a man who needs a scapegoat, and I'm dead.
He looked around, verifying that none of the others would step in for him, and then said: "Flaherty, if I've offended you in some way I'm sor-"
"Oh, you've offended me, sure enough!" Flaherty shrieked, his Boston accent growing thicker as his rage escalated. "I'm sure I'll pay for tonight's work, aye, but I think you'll pay fir-"
There was a kind of gasp in the air around them, as if the corridor itself had inhaled sharply. Flaherty's hair and Lamia's fur rippled. Flaherty's posse of low men and vampires began to turn. Suddenly one of them, a vamp named Albrecht, shrieked and bolted forward, allowing Flaherty a view of two newcomers, men with raindrops still fresh and dark on their jeans and boots and shirts. There was trail-dusty gunna-gar at their feet and revolvers hung at their hips. Flaherty saw the sandalwood grips in the instant before the younger one drew, faster than blue blazes, and understood at once why Albrecht had run. Only one sort of man carried guns that looked like that.
The young one fired a single shot. Albrecht's blond hair jumped as if flicked by an invisible hand and then he collapsed forward, fading within his clothes as he did so.
"Hile, you bondsmen of the Ring," the older one said. He spoke in a purely conversational tone. Flaherty-his hands still bleeding from his extravagant drumming on the door through which the snot-babby had disappeared-could not seem to get the sense of him. It was the one of whom they had been warned, surely it was Roland of Gilead, but how had he gotten here, and on their blindside? Howl Roland's cold blue eyes surveyed them. "Which of this sorry herd calls himself dinh? Will that one honor us by stepping forward or not? Not?" His eyes surveyed them; his left hand departed the vicinity of his gun and journeyed to the corner of his mouth, where a small sarcastic smile had bloomed. "Not?
Too bad. Th'art cowards after all, I'm sorry to see. Thee'd kill a priest and chase a lad but not stand and claim thy day's work.
Th'art cowards and the sons of cow-"
Flaherty stepped forward with his bleeding right hand clasped loosely around the butt of the gun that hung below his left armpit in a docker's clutch. "That would be me, Roland-of-
Steven."
"You know my name, do you?"
"Aye! I know your name by your face, and your face by your mouth. T'is the same as the mouth of your mother, who did suck John Farson with such glee until he spewed 'is-"
Flaherty drew as he spoke, a bushwhacker's trick he'd no doubt practiced and used before to advantage. And although he was fast and the forefinger of Roland's left hand still touched the side of his mouth when Flaherty's draw began, the gunslinger beat him easily. His first bullet passed between the lips of Jake's chief harrier, exploding the teeth at the front of his upper jaw to bone fragments which Flaherty drew down his throat with his dying breath. His second pierced Flaherty's forehead between the eyebrows and he was flung back against the New York/Fedic door with the unfired Glock spilling from his hand to discharge a final time on the hallway floor.
TWO
Most of the others drew a split-second later. Eddie killed the six in front, having taken time to reload the chamber he'd fired at Albrecht. When the revolver was empty, he rolled behind his dinh to reload, as he had been taught. Roland picked off the next five, then rolled smoothly behind Eddie, who took out the rest save one.
Lamia had been too cunning to try and so was the last standing. He raised his empty hands, the fingers furry and the palms smooth. "Will ye grant me parole, gunslinger, if I promise ye peace?"