Villain (Gone 8)

Gold-filmed glass windows blew out, showering shards like a hailstorm.

BAM! BAM! BAM!

Round after round blew away pieces of the hotel. It was deliberate, professional destruction. They were piece by piece, floor by floor, destroying the gold tower.

Dekka yelled, “Malik and Francis!”

A buzz came from Shade, and she was gone on a hurricane wind.

Dekka ran down the army column, hands before her like a faith healer in feline cosplay. She aimed at the long barrels spitting fire. It wasn’t hard, it didn’t take long, to shred just enough of a barrel to stop it firing.

She ran and shredded, screaming, “Stop it! Stop it! You’re killing people!”

Machine gunners swiveled to chase her with .50-caliber rounds, but she stayed close to the tanks, making it hard to target her.

Tank after tank, a few seconds each, but all the while the army column stabbed at the Triunfo, and the hotel erupted again and again.

Shade ran up the stairs. No way she was trusting an elevator, and anyway, it was far quicker to run sixty-four floors than to wait on an elevator.

Floor by floor, turning, leaping when she could, snatching at handrails to hurl herself upward as the cement-block walls of the stairwell cracked and buckled under the army’s brutal assault.

She was at the door of Dillon’s suite in seconds. She stopped to listen and heard an eerie, mewling howl within.

Shade stepped inside.

Francis crouched under a desk, covering her ears against the cacophony. Malik sat calmly in a chair.

And Dillon Poe, the Charmer, writhed in agony on the floor, yelling, “Kill me! Oh, God, please! Kill me!”

Ka-BOOM!

A near miss hit the floor below, shattering the windows, making the walls and floor jump. Francis cried out in terror, her eyes streaming tears.

Malik, still eerily calm, nodded at the suddenly absent glass and said, “Well, Dillon, it looks like someone opened the window for you.”

“Aaaaarrrggh!” Dillon shrieked. “Make it stop! Make it stop!”

“Malik,” Shade said, slowing her voice.

It was mesmerizing watching Dillon’s face. He was like a sinner in a medieval painting of hell, his face almost immobile in a grimace of bared teeth, strained tendons, and muscles clenched so hard his arms and shoulders and neck looked like they might crack like dry twigs.

Malik’s expression, slowly turned on her, was unlike anything Shade would have thought possible from Malik Tenerife. His eyes were hot and pitiless.

“He burned those people,” Malik said. “He burned them alive.”

Shade wanted to tell him to stop. She could see the detail as Dillon’s fingernails tore at his face, drawing bloody lines on his flesh.

Malik had a pocketknife in his hand. Not his, Shade was pretty sure; it must have belonged to Francis. Malik slowly opened the largest blade.

He went and knelt in front of Dillon.

“We’re sixty-four floors up. You can jump. Or you can make sure your voice is never a problem again.”

Could Dillon even understand? He was in a living hell of pain.

I have to stop this! Shade thought. I have to . . .

It was not pity for the Charmer. It was fear of what this act would do to Malik. But her words did not come. Something both terribly just and terribly wrong was taking place. Something morally indefensible but cosmically right. In the back of her head, the Dark Watchers seemed to lean forward.