Sarah looked around the penthouse living area for something to accompany her sword—specifically something that could block bullets. I’ve got a sword that’s not a sword, she thought, so why not a shield that’s not a shield? But she found nothing that 1) she could hold in one hand, and 2) that could stop a bullet.

  “Our only advantage is that they don’t know we’re ready for them,” Henry said.

  “We are far from ready for them!” Sarah said, hurrying to the hallway but stopping short of joining Henry right in front of the doors.

  “They’ll never see it coming,” Henry said.

  “How do you know that?” Sarah was breathing hard, chest heaving like she’d been running. It wasn’t an uncommon experience. She’d felt it before every wrestling match, and she knew what it was: adrenaline, preparing her mind and body for the battle ahead.

  Henry grinned, poised to sprint at the doors, just a few feet away. “No one ever sees me coming.” Then he smiled. “Alexa, volume ten. Play Apashe by Dies Irae featuring Black Prez.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Trust me.”

  “Here’s Apashe by Dies Irae featuring Black Prez. Starting now, on Amazon Music.”

  A melodic mix of violins rose, mixing with some kind of choir, before building to a bass drop and a digital drumbeat. The music was…epic. Sarah’s nervous energy transformed into strength.

  Henry met her eyes, looking mischievous and quoting the song’s lyrics. “I’m a beast.”

  She smiled—What’s happening to me?—all her misgivings somehow fading into the ether. She braced herself for a fight. “We both are.”

  The elevator chimed. As the doors slid open, Henry charged. When there was just enough room to fit through, he dove into the elevator full of killers.

  24

  Henry swung the kopis like an axe, putting everything he had behind it. He wanted to swing in an arc. In his mind, he saw himself cutting down the whole front row. But then he remembered Jerry the doorman. Jerry didn’t deserve to die, and Helen seemed fond of the man. So he swung high—

  —and connected.

  There was a sharp ping of metal on bone, the sound of it dulled by the ski mask. A vibration shook through Henry’s arm. He nearly dropped his newly acquired and already beloved weapon.

  The man with a cleaved skull twitched and gurgled.

  For a moment, the elevator stood silent with shocked killers.

  Henry smiled at them. “You totally didn’t see that coming, right?” He turned to look back at Sarah. “I got one!”

  Henry didn’t see the attack coming because he wasn’t worried about it. A foot caught him hard in the gut. He spilled back out of the elevator, landing hard on the floor. He slid across the smooth marble, hitting his head on the equally hard wall.

  He pushed himself up, kopis in hand. “Who’s ne—”

  Some kind of human freight train barreled into Henry from the side. He was lifted off the ground and body slammed farther down the hall. The wall and the floor where he’d been standing turned to powder under a barrage of gunfire.

  The sound of it was painful, each shot echoing off the penthouse’s solid floor and walls.

  Sarah rolled off him. She’d save his life.

  “Thanks,” he said. The word felt strange in his mouth, like the Tide Challenge, which, yeah, he did. Twice. He would have done it a hundred more times without flinching, but the social rewards for doing something stupid reversed quickly with that particular challenge.

  “You’re welcome,” she said, and then she shoved him hard. He spilled out of the hallway entrance, rolling over the chair that had held his clothing. Bullets zinged through the air where they’d been standing.

  The elevator was vomiting its deadly payload.

  The first killer ran into the room without backup—without thinking. The petite woman was dressed in a gray power pantsuit, heels discarded for bare feet. Gun raised, aimed toward Henry, she didn’t see Sarah’s forearm swing toward her neck. The blow struck, perfectly timed with a bass drop in the music, and it flipped the woman, head over heels backward, while her body continued forward. She slammed into the large glass window upside down, before crashing to the floor, unmoving and unarmed. Her gun slid into the room’s corner, but there was no time to retrieve it. Her partners had arrived.

  Henry dove into the fray again, and as usual, no one was prepared for the scrawny whirlwind of violence. Even the most crazed person—willing to give their life or not—flinches from the sudden threat of pain. It’s impossible not to…for most people.

  Three killers—two men and a woman—fell with screams of pain, clutching various spots on their bodies that Henry had stabbed or hacked. None of his strikes were particularly deadly, but they caused pain and sowed chaos.

  People fell to the floor around him. Those rushing in behind them, tripped and toppled.

  Some hit hard and fell unconscious. Some got tangled with others. The rest were clutching wounds, faced with the sudden realization that this fight might not go their way. Nothing like a little blood and pain to test allegiance to a cause.

  Henry couldn’t even remember what he’d done or how he’d done it, but the end result was seven people on the floor. Two of them were getting back to their feet, but the rest would be slower to rejoin the fight. And the lady Sarah clubbed… She might never get up. That left…Henry did the math.

  Nine left in the fight.

  Wait, that’s wrong.

  The dead man with a hacked skull laid half inside, half outside the elevator. The doors closed, squished against his lifeless body—pushing blood from the wound—and then opened to repeat the process again. Behind him, seated on the elevator floor, arms wrapped around knees, was Jerry the Doorman. His eyes were stuck wide-open, locked on to the dead man. He wasn’t a threat to anyone.

  Eight left.

  Not too shabby.

  Henry swung low, hoping to strike someone’s leg. But the only person he struck was an already unconscious man’s thigh. The man jolted awake, sitting up and screaming in pain. Henry slapped the flat side of the blade into the man’s forehead, knocking him out a second time.

  “Henry,” Sarah said. “Get up.”

  The eight fully functioning killers entered the room, fanning out around them, each of them armed with a variety of bladed weapons. One man carried a replica of Connor MacLeod’s Katana from Highlander. There were two machetes, a crowbar, a Negan bat and—what the hell?—a woman wearing a hippy dippy skirt with paisleys, carrying a butcher knife and… “Is that a potato peeler?”

  The woman sneered at him.

  Who the hell does she think she’s intimidating?

  “Bring it on, Martha Stewart!”

  The woman charged, but looked surprised when Henry did the same. She swung the butcher knife like a bona fide serial killer, looking to stab it straight into Henry’s chest. But he was faster, and the kopis was a bigger blade.

  Before the butcher’s knife could strike his chest, it spiraled away, still clutched in the now-severed hand that held it. The woman shrieked, but didn’t stop. She swiped the peeler at Henry’s face, striking his chin and coming away with a curled strip of skin a few layers deep.

  Henry winced. “You peeled me?” He ran the kopis through her chest. It might have been meant to hack, but its curved, pointed tip made short work of the human body.

  “Behind you!” Sarah shouted.

  Henry spun around, yanked the kopis out of the woman as she fell, and swung out blindly. Three men leaped back out of range.

  He glanced at Sarah, who was backstepping away from the Highlander and Negan wannabes. Her confidence was wavering.

  They made eye contact. Henry held her gaze. It was dangerous, but he wanted her to feel it—what he did all the damn time. Not just the fearlessness, but the rhythm. The beat. The drums of war. The music brought it out of him, to the surface, his head bobbing in time.

  When she smiled, he knew she felt it, too.

  Then the three men charged him.

  Two of them had skill, holding machetes like they’d used them before. The third was bigger. A brawler. Dressed in a wifebeater and holding a crowbar. He came in first, swinging hard and missing without Henry needing to dodge. The man was overeager.

  And he was woefully unprepared for Henry’s response.

  “Blessed be!” Henry shouted in a high-pitched squeal. Pilfering the cult’s tagline staggered the man, but then Henry leapt into the air, like he’d been shocked, waving his arms wildly. The mask covered most of the man’s face, but Henry could see a pair of bewildered eyes watching him. “Blessed be!”

  The man didn’t have time to register Henry’s flailing switch into a chop. The kopis carved a trough in the man’s meaty shoulder, stopping when it hit bone. The man wailed. Dropped the crowbar.

  “Heads up!” Sarah shouted.

  “Let’s do this!” Henry said, spinning around, extracting the kopis from the shoulder, sweeping it around, and striking another man’s neck full on. Henry didn’t put any thought into the strike. Had no idea what to expect. But even he was surprised when the blade passed through meat and bone, cleanly severing the man’s head with enough force to send it toppling through the air. A spiral of blood flung from the head, while a fountain gushed from the still standing body. The floor, turned blood-red, Jackson Pollock painting, was smeared when the man’s body crumpled.

  But no one was watching his body. All eyes were on the spinning head, eyes frozen in surprise. It wasn’t just the head, it was the Negan fan careening through the air—somehow flung by Sarah—hands raised, shouting a long, drawn out, “Nooooo.”

  And then, whack. Negan fan and decapitated head collided in mid-air, both of them hitting the far wall.

  They fell to the floor together.

  The head rolled in a lazy circle and then stopped so it appeared the man’s frozen eyes were staring at his still standing compatriots. Everyone was frozen in shock for a moment.

  Then Henry burst out laughing. “Heads up! Yes!”

  “That’s not what I meant!” Sarah said.

  The man with the Highlander sword took a step back. “This isn’t how it was supposed to be.”

  “Stand your ground, Rick,” one of the men facing Henry growled.

  “Yeah, Rick,” Henry said. “Blessed be!”

  “Kid’s a fucking psycho. We don’t even know who they are.” Rick took another step back, leaving Sarah free to act.

  She reached back and grasped the long bench lining the long window. She tugged. The bench wiggled. Heavier than she thought.

  Whatevs, Henry thought, and he started swinging his kopis wildly, engaging both men. They blocked his strikes, filling the air with the sound of clanging metal. They knew what they were doing, but Henry’s attack was so erratic, that they were off balance, incapable of counterattack, as the kopis whooshed toward heads, feet, and crotches.

  In the back of his mind, Henry heard Sarah shout, but not in pain. It was exertion. Then he was kicked in the gut, and he staggered back, sucking for air. He was wide open to attack and completely vulnerable, not just because he had the wind knocked out of him, but because he wasn’t worried about attack—or anything else.

  In his mind, a lack of fear making him slow to react to danger was his only weakness. He was aware of it, but he could do nothing about it.

  But someone else could.

  “Down!” Sarah shouted.

  Henry obeyed, ducking to the floor. He felt a breeze brush past his neck and then looked up. The room-length bench swung over his head, and careened into the two machete holders and everyone else still standing. Sarah stepped past, muscles quivering as she plowed into the cult and slammed them against the far wall. Bones cracked. People shouted in pain.

  Sarah pressed harder. Held it.

  Men gasped.

  Beyond the struggle, out in the hall, the Highlander fan dragged the dead man out of the elevator. He slipped inside without looking back, or acknowledging Jerry, who was still frozen in fear, seated on the elevator floor. The doors closed behind him.

  Sarah pushed harder. Holding… Holding…

  The cult members passed out, one by one.

  Henry kicked one of the people on the ground, knocking him unconscious. When another reached for a gun, Henry stabbed him through the forearm and stomped on his head.

  Sarah released the bench, dropping it, and the rest of the killer crew, to the floor just as the song ended.

  They stood there together, surrounded by carnage, out of breath.

  After looking at the mess, they turned to each other, and said in unison, “How did you—”

  A loud crackling sound interrupted—from outside. They spun toward the window and found eight men in tactical gear swinging down from a pair of helicopters. They shot the windows out with automatic weapons and then crashed through, rolling across the floor and the dead without missing a beat.

  25

  Sarah’s revolt over what she’d done and seen done in the past minute took a back seat to what she could only describe as bloodlust. Henry had gone too far with the severed head thing, but these people were trying to kill them for no good reason. Tit for tat, and all that. They had it coming. And holy hell, she was capable of so much more than she believed possible.

  How much did that bench weigh? She couldn’t tell, but it had to be more than she’d ever lifted before, not to mention carried and used to crush several people.

  Everything felt unreal. Like a dream, except instead of moving in slow motion, or being limited, she was powerful.

  But not bulletproof.

  Without warning or asking permission, she grabbed Henry around his waist, hoisted him up, and ran for the hallway. As she leaped over bodies and the long bench, glass shattered behind them.

  She heard the men thump to the hard floor. Could see them in her mind’s eye, rolling back to their feet as shards of glass twinkled like fire in the setting sun. She could feel their rifles rising toward her back. As they passed through the hallway, into the living space, she tossed Henry to the right—into the kitchen, and she dove left into the living room.

  Bullets buzzed through the air between them as they separated.

  “Hey!” Henry shouted, pushing himself to his feet. “You can’t just pick me up!”

  “Actually, it was pretty easy,” Sarah said, looking around for something to use as a weapon, or a shield. She’d brought a kopis to a gun fight. But the couch, chairs, and coffee table weren’t going to do much good against a killer SWAT team in body armor.

  Henry stood in the kitchen, doing the same. Aside from knives smaller than his blade, and a few pots and pans that wouldn’t stop a bullet, he was out of luck, too. He laughed, “Well, yeah, but don’t.”

  “Pretty sure I saved your life,” she said, and then she thought, Where the hell are they?

  Unlike the mob who poured out of the elevator, these guys were well trained professionals rather than crazed zealots. Were they part of the cult, or hired mercenaries? Or worse, were they actual SWAT?

  She slipped up to the hallway entrance, and quickly peeked. Two lines of men snapped their weapons toward her, but held their fire as she ducked away. They were approaching slow and careful. The men in front held riot shields.

  “Are they cops?” Sarah shouted to Henry.

  He rummaged in the cabinet beneath the sink. “They have to say it if they are.”

  “Are you cops?” Sarah shouted.

  No reply. Just the steady march of boots. They would arrive in the next ten seconds, armed men poised to kill, protected by a moving wall.

  Henry stood holding a spray can. Glanced back at the hallway. Put the can in the microwave and started a five-minute cycle. Then he opened the fridge, and emerged with a beer and a dozen eggs.

  He whacked the beer bottle’s cap on the countertop’s edge, dislodging the cap. Then he took a long drag, tossed the bottle over his shoulder, and then started a count down from five on his fingers.

  What the hell is he counting down to?! Sarah asked herself with a befuddled expression.

  He waved her over and then resumed the countdown.

  At three, he opened the egg carton, and somehow managed to pick up four eggs in his long fingers.

  Two…

  He cocked back the handful of eggs.

  She understood the plan. It was simple. He’d throw the eggs, the SWAT dudes would duck behind the shields for a moment, and she would dive into the kitchen.

  But she didn’t like it. Eggs against armored soldiers. Only Henry would conceive of such a thing.

  Why not? They’d already done and survived crazier things…including death, apparently.

  She glanced up at the River Styx painting, flashing back to the dream. The glowing letters. The stench of it. The strange underground warmth of the place. The haunting howls. It had felt so real.

  A surge of confidence focused her. She nodded.

  Henry lowered his last finger and lobbed the eggs toward the hallway. They started in a tight formation, arcing through the air like an ovoid fighter squadron. Then gravity, mass, air resistance, yolk size, and a dozen other minute factors—including the fact that Henry threw with the skill of a Chimpanzee chucking its own feces—conspired to separate the eggs.

  Sarah attempted to track the projectiles through the air, but suddenly she had to focus on the one headed toward her face.

  She ducked and dove, the egg splattering behind her.

  A second egg struck Charon on the river’s edge. And the other two entered the hallway, one high, one low. As she slid across the smooth floor, Sarah saw one egg strike a man’s head, and the other burst against a shield. The six men ducked down behind the shields. The two in front opened their eyes a little wider when she slid to a stop in front of them, arms extended like Superman.

  The men tensed.