During seven years of sorrow, ever since the argument and the Escalade, all that Michelle wanted was to have her husband and her daughter back, her family as it had been, and her music even if she never played it for anyone but Jeffy, Amity, and friends. That wish, that miracle, had been granted to her, and she could not bear to see this psychopath Falkirk take it all away.

When Amity was thrown like a rag doll, like a bag of trash, and slid across the table in front of her mother, crashing into and over the chair, two things of importance happened to Michelle. First, she found within herself the power to cast off the lingering effects of the sedative gas. Second, into her lap fell a knife with which she had earlier cut up her breakfast sausage.

Amity scrambled to her feet, and the Falkirk thing came at her with the pistol in a two-handed grip, so that she wasn’t able to get close to him, couldn’t use the nutcracker trick again. Nothing near at hand except the bags of beans at her feet. If she threw those, he’d shoot her, shoot not to kill but to wound, because he wanted to make this as painful for her as he could. His face was twisted with madness but also with savage glee, and all the parts of it were mismatched and wooden, somehow artificial, as though they had been carved for a dozen different marionettes and then hinged together in this one strange countenance. He moved quickly but jerkily, like a figure controlled by the strings of a raging puppeteer. He bared his teeth in a threat that reminded her of Good Boy’s killing bite. One of his gray eyes was bloodshot from a burst capillary, as red as a wound, and the other looked as depthless as a painted eye.

She had nowhere to run. She wouldn’t drop to her knees and beg for her life, she just wouldn’t, and even if she did, he would never treat her with mercy. Every evil person dies many deaths in numerous timelines, but even the good die often. This was a life in which she would die young. She knew it, and he knew that she knew it, and she could see that her terror excited him. When he was an arm’s length from her, he thrust the pistol at her, thrust the muzzle against her left eye, so that she could look into the dark barrel and know there was no future for her but the bullet in the breech.

Looming suddenly behind the monster, Michelle raised her right hand high. She held a knife. Face so pale and slick with sweat. She swayed from side to side, still not fully recovered from having been gassed. She fixed her gaze on Amity’s right eye. And in that moment, they seemed to be granted telepathy. Amity knew what Michelle—Mother, Mom—was thinking. If she stabbed Falkirk in the back, he might reflexively pull the trigger.

When Amity winked her right eye, her mother returned the wink. They knew what they had to do, take the biggest risk the situation allowed, dare to cheat Death in this world, at least for one day, one hour, one minute.

Falkirk snarled, “You stole my inheritance, little sister, you and your brother and your deceiving whore of a mother. But what’s all that money worth to you now, you little shit?”

He was crazy, really and truly, and Amity expected she’d be dead without ever knowing he pulled the trigger—it would be that fast—but she did what she had to do, anyway. With her right hand, she slapped at the pistol, which surprised him, and the front sight of the weapon nicked the skin at the corner of her eye socket, but the muzzle swung wide of her head. Her mother drove the knife down with all the force she could muster, stabbed it deep into Falkirk’s back. He squeezed off a shot that went past Amity’s left ear, and for an instant that misassembled marionette face looked as if it would come apart altogether—but then everything went wrong.

Michelle was weak and dizzy and nauseous from the lingering effect of the sedative gas. When she drove the blade into Falkirk’s back, into the flesh of another human being, her nausea swelled and she thought her trembling legs would fail her. She should have torn the knife out of him and stabbed again, again. But either madness or drugs—he seemed drugged—or the devil himself gave the sonofabitch uncanny resilience. With the knife sticking out of him like some kind of switch handle, he pivoted and struck her with his forearm hard enough to knock her down.

Amity turned to run. Falkirk pivoted again, kicking her legs out from under her. She fell before him, on her back, as defenseless as a sacrifice on an Aztec altar. He pressed a foot to her throat, immobilizing her, while simultaneously warning off Michelle with the threat of crushing the girl’s airway merely by bearing down with all his weight.

With his left hand, he reached back to his right shoulder and extracted the dripping blade and tossed it through the open door of the pantry. He pointed the pistol at the girl’s abdomen, giving himself two ways to kill her.

To Michelle, as she lay helpless, afraid even to get to her feet lest Falkirk might deal death as he promised, he seemed to have risen out of Hell. He was one of the legions of the damned, unable to be killed because he was already dead.

When Jeffy came through the door from the hallway, armed with a pistol that he dared not use, he seemed to assess the situation in an instant. He held his fire.

More like a malevolent spirit than like a man, as if to tempt Jeffy’s soul into despair, Falkirk said, “What kind of father are you that you run out on her and now let her be under my heel? You’re even worse than the dirty pig who was my old man. He fucked away my inheritance, but at least he didn’t stand watching while I died.”

Michelle half wished that the sedative gas had been a poison, that she had not survived to bear witness to Amity being murdered, no matter how many other Amitys might still live elsewhere.

Then she realized that this Jeffy before her had in some way changed since she’d met him only hours earlier. If he was afraid, his fear was not evident in his posture or face. Like the Jeffy she had loved in her timeline, he had been sweet, sentimental; but at the moment, he appeared to be cold and hard. Anger narrowed his eyes, pinched his mouth, but there was somehow a clean quality to it, more wrath than rage.

Instead of responding to Falkirk, he said to Amity, “A Dragon in New York.”

Amity stared at him but said nothing, and Michelle sensed that some understanding passed between them.

Jeffy lowered his pistol and put it on the floor. He said to Falkirk, “You win. What do you want us to do?”

A calm like none she had ever known settled over Amity. It was the peace that came with an absolute trust in someone, that kind of trust called faith.

A Dragon in New York was a fabulous fantasy novel set in the present day. Amity enjoyed contemporary fantasies in real-world settings as much as she liked those crammed full of swordplay and set in mythical kingdoms many centuries earlier. There were life lessons to be learned from both kinds of stories.

What her father proposed was dangerous, but without risk there was no reward worth having, because rewards without risk were just strokes of luck. If you relied entirely on luck, you had better be prepared that as often as it was good, it would be bad.

He put his gun down on the floor and said, “You win. What do you want us to do?”

Falkirk was a murderous sociopath, an apostle of evil. There were two ways such a servant of evil might have reacted to surrender in a case like this, and neither would have been with a respect for life. He might have shot the girl on whose throat he had his foot, and then her father, or the father and then the girl. Of all the things an agent of evil hates, he most hates innocence. Although he wants to destroy the innocent, he prefers first to have the pleasure of corrupting them and tormenting them until they despair. With Amity’s father dead, Falkirk could then kill her mother, kill Duke Pellafino while he slept, order his men to stay out of the house, and have some quality time alone with Amity. That was how a man as sick as Falkirk, in A Dragon in New York, had hoped to take full advantage of such a surrender as this, though the girl under his foot was a virgin princess of twenty-six, who was guardian to the dragon, and the man who surrendered was a secret prince, not her father. Now, looking up at this would-be killer, Amity saw that he wasn’t the mystery that he had seemed to be, but as common as any villain; not clever, but dull; powerful only until his hatred and obsession caused him to make a decision that exposed his true weakness. He had become so transparent to her that she saw the moment when he made that fateful decision.