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yours left to kill. But before I’m finished with you, you will
know pain beyond skin and screams. This, I promise you.”
Tom’s stolen face twisted into a blistering expression of
hatred that outstripped his host’s ability to articulate. His
coat of graying professor was shredded into gory flaps of
hanging facial flesh, revealing the death mask the antlered
god was far better known for wearing. When the meat of
his face had all but retreated from his cleft, glistening skull,
Tom’s cracked teeth and bloody tongue came together
around the words of his counter proposal “I will forget your
name moments after you fail, little killer.”
Before I could sink Tom’s real face into the steel of the
vehicle’s hood, the ambulance struck a tractor trailer and
flipped, rolling over and crashing through the glass façade of
a rambling hotel, finally coming to rest within the glittering
lobby.
Rising from the conflagration, I glared at the retreating
figure of Tom Hush. I no longer cared about the Shepherd’s
Game or the approaching police sirens at my back. Not even
the terrible memory that burned through my mind like poison
fire gave me pause. All I desired was before me, backpedaling
away in the ruined skin of a folklorist—no doubt wondering
how a mortal could rise from a bloodstained alter, bearing
fire and vengeance against the gods.
A storm broke behind me as a fresh gust of bullets blew
across the already ruined lobby. Before the Darkness, the
police exercised far more discretion as to where they pointed
and fired their weapons. But now, with remainders of the
Darkness seasoning an otherwise dead world, discretion was
not a care they took very seriously.
Luckily, the Red Dream held fast, transforming most
of the deadly injuries I should have suffered into only cuts
and bruises. Yet the police and their gunfire were far from
primary to my thinking—only the fleeing form of Tom Hush
pinned my attention.

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