There was another flurry of gunfire from inside the station.
I rushed to the front of the truck, but I already knew what had broken the windshield. It was Luke’s head.
Annalise had started her attack.
I couldn’t resist one more look at Luke. Thankfully, his face was not much in view, but it suddenly became indistinct. It was vanishing right before my eyes. Damn. I should have stabbed it with the letter opener.
There were more gunshots from inside the station. Ducking below the windows, I ran toward the stairs. I saw a flare of green light, and Emmett began screaming “No no no!” at the top of his lungs. I burst through the door.
The desks we had walked past on our first visit had been smashed and knocked aside. Just beside the door, a pile of scorched black bones lay on the tile floor.
Annalise stood in the center of the room, her fireman’s jacket wide open, ribbons hanging from her vest. Luke Dubois’s headless corpse lay at her feet.
But his head was starting to appear on his shoulders. His head was coming back.
“This is amazing,” Annalise said to me. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Look at the fat one.”
I looked down at Wiley again. Raw meat was growing on his bones. It was repulsive. “Jesus,” I said. “Everything about these guys makes me sick.”
“No more,” Emmett said. He stepped out of his office, a pistol at his side. The slide was back; he’d already emptied it. “Please, no more. We’ll leave town and never come back. We have money we can pay. Anything. Just let me take my brothers away from here.”
“The spell,” Annalise said. “I want it.”
“Wha… what do you mean?” Emmett said.
“Ray, do that one.” She nodded at Wiley’s corpse.
There was nothing much of him to stab with the letter opener, so I swept the ghost knife through the same place on his shoulder where Sugar had been marked with a sigil. The space where the spell would have been suddenly erupted with a jet of black steam.
Wiley’s body stopped regenerating. The gory mess inside his rib cage sagged and began to spread out across the floor. I hopped away from him.
“Oh my God, Wiley.” Emmett’s voice was small. I felt a twinge of sympathy. Then I remembered the dead woman in the morgue, and all the bodies at the hospital, and my sympathy shriveled into cold hatred. He didn’t have the right to grieve.
“You’re right, Ray,” Annalise said. “These guys are repulsive. Do the rest.”
“No!” Luke yelled. “Don’t do it!” He was alive again.
Annalise put her foot on Luke’s back, holding him down. “I already did it,” she said to him, “and I may do it again if you don’t shut up.”
I crossed the room and slipped the ghost knife through Luke’s shoulder. There was another jet of steam and Luke screamed.
Emmett let his empty pistol fall to the floor. “We did some good here, too.” His voice was feeble and small. “We protected the town, too.”
I didn’t care, and neither did Annalise. I walked toward him, being careful not to get between them. I cut his spell with the ghost knife, and he collapsed to the floor in agony. I didn’t watch this time. I walked over to Sugar.
He was lying on the floor in the middle of a spell circle. Compared with the other circles I’d seen, this one was surprisingly simple. It was not drawn or painted on the floor, it was just a hoop of silver wire. There were no other marks or designs that I could see.
Sugar was in bad shape. His arms and legs were broken, and I could see where his skull had cracked and swollen. He looked like he was in terrible pain. His shirt had been cut open, and there was a new sigil on his chest. He wasn’t healing, though. He didn’t seem to be changing at all.
That seemed important, although I wasn’t sure why.
I cut the silver hoop with the ghost knife. There was no rush of power or bolt of black steam. I moved toward Sugar and bent to cut the sigil.
“Don’t!” Emmett pleaded. “Please. He’ll die without it.”
Annalise snorted in irritation and moved her foot to Luke’s skull. Luke let out a little shriek.
“Boss, wait!” She did. I turned to Emmett. “Give me the spell, and tell me everything you know about it. Where it came from and who gave it to you. All of it.”
Emmett looked nervously toward Annalise. He reached into his jacket pocket and took out an index card inside a plastic sleeve. He held it out to me. His hand trembled.
“Toss it.” He did. I glanced at it. There was a complicated design on one side of it, and a four-line rhyming poem on the other.
“My father gave it to me.” Emmett said. “He got it from the original Cabot Hammer, the man who founded this town, a long time ago. I don’t know much more than that, except that I’m supposed to say the words while the person getting the spell sits in the hoop and looks at the other side of the card. That’s the only copy, too. My father told me to never try to copy it.
“We didn’t kill people every full moon or anything. It didn’t work like that. We-“
Annalise stamped down on Luke’s skull. At the same moment, I slid the ghost knife through the sigil on Sugar’s chest. The magic rushed out of it, and his tortured breathing stopped.
