In the pantry, standing with a can of pears ready in each hand, Amity heard maybe three or four men enter the kitchen and express their reaction to the scene with an unnecessary number of casually spoken obscenities. Even though she now occasionally used the word shit, and though Duke Pellafino, who was definitely a good guy, now and then used even worse language, it was an article of faith to her that any bad guy’s degree of evil could be determined by how foul his mouth was. If that was true, then these bozos were demonic.

She assumed that somehow the gas had dispersed, because none of the intruders sounded like he was wearing a mask. One of them told the others to search the rest of the house, and Amity felt pretty sure that the voice belonged to Falkirk. She tensed and raised the cans of pears, but the searchers trooped out of the kitchen without taking a look in the pantry, their footsteps receding into farther rooms.

Falkirk, if it was Falkirk, stayed behind. Amity listened to him moving around the kitchen, making small noises that she could not interpret. He muttered to himself, but too low for her to make sense of what he said. He sounded like a grumbling troll.

The moment that thought occurred to her, she wished it hadn’t. She was reminded of something she read years ago, when she’d been an impressionable child, a story about a troll who stole children while they slept and baked them into pies. It was a stupid story, really and truly, but she’d had nightmares in which she believed she was lying drowsily in bed as Daddy tucked a nice warm blanket around her, only to suddenly realize that the blanket was in fact the top crust of a pie and that she was not in a bed but in a pan, and that Daddy wasn’t Daddy.

Maybe it was nervous tension or the faint lingering scent of the gas, or one of the other many smells in the pantry to which she might be allergic, or maybe it was evidence that the devil was real and busily at work in the world, but for whatever reason, she was suddenly overcome by an urge to sneeze. She put down one of the cans and pinched her nose hard with her right hand. The urge didn’t go away. The tingling in her nasal passages grew and grew. She put down the second can and covered her mouth because, when you thought about it, the ahchoo part came from your mouth rather than your nose. Her effort to repress the sneeze brought tears to her eyes. Gradually the urge subsided. When she could no longer hold her breath, she removed her hand from her lips and breathed quietly through her mouth. Only when she was as sure as sure could be that the tingling was gone and wouldn’t come back, really and truly wouldn’t, Amity stopped pinching her nose.

The threat of being undone by a sneeze and winding up in the clutches of Falkirk, the troll, so scared her that she was shaking all over. Through everything that this crazy story had thrown at her, she’d remained pretty darn confident and optimistic. Now she understood that confidence and bravery and fortitude weren’t always enough, that you needed a little luck as well, or you could be undone by a sneeze, a cough, a fart. Without the pears, she felt more vulnerable than ever. But when she picked up one of those pathetic weapons, her hand was shaking so badly that the can slipped out of her grasp and fell to the pantry floor.

89

Ed Harkenbach’s sport coat seemed to offer more compartments than a magician’s wearable portmanteau, as he frantically searched his pockets and patted himself and worried aloud about having left the key to everything in another room.

Pounding footsteps on the stairs revealed that the policemen were boldly pursuing even as the siren of a backup cruiser rose in the distance, a different ululation from the bleat of the burglar alarm.

Jeffy considered dragging a highboy in front of the bedroom door, but a barricade was useless if Ed’s key was on the study desk near the gun cabinet. His key was on the table in the kitchen of this house in another world. He’d kept it within reach while he’d eaten breakfast, so that he wouldn’t need to fumble it out of a pocket in an emergency, but he hadn’t counted on being gassed. He also hadn’t counted on Ed being one of those forgetful guys who misplaced his keys.

One of the cops in the upstairs hall shouted, “Put down your weapons! Open the door and lie facedown in plain sight, your arms straight out from your sides!”

That seemed to be a wordy and impractical order, and it made Jeffy think they were dealing with a couple of cowboys who might take risks that made no sense.

He didn’t want to die here, but he also didn’t want to go to jail here for years and years, worlds away from Amity and Michelle, leaving them to fend for themselves, leaving them to die. Never ever would he shoot a cop, not a good and honest officer of the law. But he stepped to one side of the door, took a deep breath, imagined himself as Al Pacino in a gangster movie, and shouted above the shrilling alarm, “I’ll fucking kill any shithead who comes in here. I’ll blow your fucking brains out!”

Just then Ed said, “Ah, here it is. Why did I tuck it in a hip pocket? I never carry it in a hip pocket.”

Jeffy went to him and clutched his arm. “For God’s sake, Ed, let’s go! They think I’m Dillinger.”

“Get my shotgun.”

Jeffy snatched it from the bed.

The physicist pressed a forefinger to the home circle on the key. Instead of subjecting them to a four-second wait, the device brightened at once. And there was no period of gray light. The three buttons appeared immediately: blue, red, green; HOME, SELECT, RETURN.

Jeffy said, “Why doesn’t mine work this well?”

“Because it was designed by the Ed of your world, and I’m a smarter Ed than he is.”

The smarter Ed pressed RETURN.

90

Certain of his immortality, Falkirk stood to the right of the pantry and turned the knob and threw the door open. Bags of beans lined the threshold. Pistol in a two-handed grip, he stepped away from the jamb and saw the snarky girl alone, a can of pears at her feet.

This most perfect day of his life became even better.

“Come out of there,” he commanded.

“No.”

He trained the gun on her face. “No isn’t an option.”

The little bitch defied him and sat down on the floor of the pantry.

He was going to kill her. He had no compunctions about killing children. He’d done it before, if only a couple times. He wasn’t concerned about what his crew would say, because they wouldn’t care that he offed the little bitch. They wouldn’t report him to anyone. Doing so would only get them executed by even more ruthless agents of the shadow state. They all knew what the stakes were here, knew what was required of them, and if Falkirk killed her, that was just one less task for them.

However, he didn’t want to kill her in the pantry. He needed to get her out of there, secure her to a chair at the breakfast table, where she would wait for her mother and Pellafino to wake. He wanted the girl to watch while he killed Michelle and Duke, wanted her to understand that she had snarked the wrong man. He was a killer of demigods, a man with infinite worlds at his disposal, who could be shot but not stopped, who felt no pain anymore. He had lived a life of pain from an early age, emotional pain. He’d been shit on by everyone: his mother dying on him, his lust-crazed father selling him out for a sexpot second wife, leaving him with no inheritance. To claw his way up in the shadow state and the halls of the überwealthy, he had licked boots and kissed asses and humiliated himself in ten thousand ways, but now those days were done. He had the key now, the only remaining key in this timeline, and it made him free, made him the master of his fate and hers.

He holstered the gun and went into the pantry and shouted at her to get to her feet. She tried to curl up like a pill bug, so he cuffed her hard alongside the head, cuffed her again. He grabbed her by the hair and dragged her, screaming, out of the closet, into the kitchen. She flailed at him vigorously, without effect. He twisted the fistful of hair as though to tear it out by the roots, until her scream became as thin as an electronic squeal. She so infuriated him that he wanted to forget about securing her in a chair to witness her mother’s murder, wanted to deal with her now, put a foot in her face, stomp that smart mouth so she’d never be able to smirk again.

91