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This wasn't just a fight anymore, this was a living nightmare; she was being attacked not by a freaking nutcase, but by a thing, a monster in a human disguise, such an alien creature that it wasn't possible to know what it would do to her before it slaughtered her. Kicked in the butt, knocked flat, Amity tried to thrust to her feet, but Falkirk grabbed her by the seat of her jeans and the back of her T-shirt and plucked her off the floor and turned in place, swinging her in a circle, as her father once played airplane with her when she was little, though there was nothing fun about this. This was vicious, hateful. He was going to bash her head against something. There was no way she could strike out at him, nothing she could do to break free. In time to the two-beat slamming of her heart, she thought, Please God, please God, please God ... This man, this diabolic thing, didn't seem to be strong enough to do what he was doing, especially after enduring a nut busting. Rage and insanity gave him something like superhuman strength. As he swung her, he chanted, "Bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch, bitch," every repetition more explosive than the last. He was going to fling her, send her flying. She started screaming again, because if she landed wrong or slammed into a wall, bones were going to break. And he let her go.

Michelle wandered in a labyrinth with an undulant floor and stacked-stone passageways, catacombs poorly illuminated by candles on wall shelves. Reflections of flames licked the stones, and lively shadows slithered like salamanders over every surface.

The dead lay in niches, wrapped in browning bandages, their faces concealed. She roamed ever farther into the maze, deeper into the earth: seeking her mother, who died in childbirth; seeking her father, who was electrocuted in a transformer vault; seeking Jeffy, who died under the wheels of an Escalade, and Amity, who perished in her father's arms.

Sometimes Michelle carried an oil lamp, although at other times it was a flashlight. She peeled wet strips of moldering cloth off face after face. Again and again, she discovered those dead loved ones whom she sought, and she also unmasked multiples of herself, preserved in death.

A quiet desperation overcame her as she realized that there would be no end of searching, that she would never find the final and true version of mother, father, husband, child, or self.

Just then the silence of the catacombs was riddled by a scream and its many echoes, a child's scream, Amity's scream.

Through the lapping light and tongues of licking shadow came the living girl, running for her life, terrified. She streaked past and away, and Michelle set out after her, probing the gloom with the flashlight. As passageways branched off in ever greater numbers, she opened her eyes wider and stared with increasing intensity into each stony corridor—until at last she blinked, blinked, blinked away the labyrinth and saw the kitchen.

Her eyes felt sunken, and tinnitus rang in her ears, and her tongue seemed twice as thick as it ought to be. She remembered the yellow gas gushing from the heating vents high in the walls.

Falkirk raging and capering like a demonic spirit. Amity on the floor, crawling away from him. Falkirk kicking at her and missing, kicking again and connecting with her backside.

Michelle closed her eyes and the labyrinth coiled away to every side, as before. No!

Panicked, she opened her eyes and saw the kitchen and the demon and the innocent girl. He swung the child around as if she were only a rag doll. Her head whipped past the refrigerator, missing the long steel handle by an inch. One of her sneaker-clad feet stuttered across a cabinet door.

Where was Jeffy? Nowhere in sight.

Gasping for breath, Michelle tried to press up from her chair.

She felt heavy and slow. Her legs wouldn't work. The kitchen seemed to expand and contract and expand repeatedly, and darkness throbbed at the edges of her vision.

Falkirk flung the girl away from him.

Amity was thrown onto the breakfast table and slid across it, sweeping plates and coffee mugs and utensils to the floor. Momentum carried her after that cascade of debris. She crashed into a chair, toppling it, tumbling over it, rolling to a stop in the open doorway to the pantry. Her scalp burned from her hair having been pulled so hard, and her right shoulder ached, and so did her left knee. She'd bitten her tongue; there was blood in her mouth. She didn't seem to have broken any bones or sustained any bad cuts, but her heart was knocking so hard that it seemed about to shake her joints apart—and here came Falkirk. He'd drawn his gun again.

The two thugs didn't have weapons in their hands. However, they were armed, and surely with more than pistols. They were big, hard-looking men with stares as cold and merciless as those of robots.

The shotgun roared twice. Jeffy fired the Sig Pro ten times without hesitation or any expectation of remorse, blasting the two men even after they were down, because maybe they were protected by Kevlar and because, crazy as it sounded, there was something almost supernatural about their deadpan faces and their self-assurance when confronted with imminent death, so that maybe even two point-blank head shots weren't enough to stop them.

Amity was screaming downstairs, and if there were a dozen more of these men between here and there, he would do the same to them if he could. The supreme evil kingdom of Mordor wasn't just a place in Tolkien's imagination. It was real. It always had been real. It was here and it was everywhere men sought absolute power over others. He ejected the empty magazine and snapped a fresh one into the pistol.

Harkenbach said, "Are you all right?"

"No."

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 Yorkwas 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.

He swung the pistol away from Amity, toward her father, but in the instant that he acted, so did she. The moment the muzzle of the gun was not in line with her, but before her father was at risk, she seized the ankle of the foot on her throat and shoved hard with both hands. Even as Amity reached for Falkirk's ankle, Daddy stooped to retrieve the pistol he'd put on the floor. Staggering off balance, Falkirk fired one wild shot, and Daddy squeezed off two. Because a girl couldn't hide from the hardness of the world forever, because she had to grow up sometime, and because Amity was going on twelve, she didn't look away, but saw the head shot, the chest shot, and knew that what had happened was as terrible as it was right and good.

At the table, Duke raised his head and blinked and surveyed the trashed room. He looked confused and said, "What did I miss?"

Mother said, "The final climax, but not the denouement."

Amity wanted to ask what that word meant, but she needed a few minutes to get her breath and to become accustomed to still being alive, like the spunky princess in A Dragon in New York.