Except that retreat wasn’t going to last, even with the special ammo he had. To truly eliminate the thing, he was going to have to pump it full of lead, and he had something else he needed to worry about first.
Then again, two birds with one stone.
Two evils with one trigger.
Balz pointed his weapon at the old man—
And blew the bastard’s head clean off.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Everything went into slow motion as the suspect Erika had been looking for, and not able to forget, and feeling really bizarre about, started shooting into the shelves of dusty books. Three discharges popped off, one after the other, at a victim she couldn’t see because he was holding her in place against his bulk.
And then he swung his gun back around at the shopkeeper.
And pulled the trigger.
As Erika shouted, the old man was blown off his feet, his hands breaking free of their grip on the counter, his arms flopping wide open as he stumbled and fell to the floor. For a split second, shock rendered her utterly frozen—but she got over that quick. A heartbeat later, she unholstered her service weapon and jammed her muzzle into the man’s side.
“Drop your weapon!” Her voice was loud as she yelled up at him. “Drop your fucking weapon!”
“Stay behind me,” he hollered back, his free arm flailing around, batting at her. “Stay back!”
“I will shoot you—”
“Do you want to die!”
As he twisted to the side to glare at her, she—
Stopped moving. Stopped breathing.
Across the shop, about twenty feet away… silhouetted against a stack of books… something was rising off the floor. For a split second, she thought it was a man and that what she was seeing was the shadow he was throwing. But then she realized there was no man.
It was just a shadow.
As her blood ran cold, she steadied herself on the suspect’s strong arm. “What… the hell… is that.”
And yet she knew: It was what had been in her dream. A shadow that was so much more, and so very evil.
The suspect squared off at… whatever the hell it was. “Fuck you! Fuck you!”
He opened fire at the thing, emptying a clip’s worth of bullets into what she had been attacked by in her nightmare. With every impact, there was more of that high-pitched, scream-like sound she’d assumed was a person in pain. With every wounding, parts of the entity billowed out in response, the shape shifting like water.
Even as Erika witnessed this with her own eyes, her mind refused to process what she was looking at—except then everything clicked. This had to be another nightmare. She was asleep again, probably at her desk in the Bull Pen, her subconscious coughing out more of this crap—no doubt because she had been to see Keri Cambourg, and they had stood in her husband’s book collection room, and they had talked about the ancient, ugly tome that had disappeared. And then right after Erika had almost had another seizure, just as she’d headed for the triplex’s door, Keri had remembered the name of the bookstore. After which, she had gotten in her car and driven over…
Oh, God, maybe this was actually happening.
Stopping her thoughts, she pointed her own muzzle at the shadow, and as the suspect in front of her took out another gun from somewhere, she started to shoot.
’Cuz if this was just a dream, it wouldn’t matter. And holy hell, if this was actually for real? She needed to defend herself, defend him.
Pop, pop, poppoppop—
Just as she was coming to her sixth discharge, as the suspect began pulling his trigger once again, she heard a female voice in her ear. “That’s my pet you’re fucking with.”
The words were so unexpected, so calm and measured, so out of place in all the high-pitched shrieking from that entity, that Erika yanked her head around to see who was—
It was the brunette. From down by the river.
But instead of her clothes being red and skintight… she was wearing the old man’s cardigan.
“You are really underwhelming in person,” the woman drawled through the noise, in a way that couldn’t be explained. Unless she was implanting her words directly into Erika’s mind. “And you’re coming with me.”
Before Erika could respond—or fight back—a crushing weight bore down on both her chest and her back. It was as if she were pinned between two walls, and her body went limp under the pressure. As her gun dropped to the floor, she strained against suffocation and pain, tried to fight the compression, groaned to get the suspect’s attention.