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Valentine's vision cleared and he saw, and worse, felt, the Reaper straddling him. The goad was gone, his pistol was gone. He put up a hand against the tongue already licking out of the Reaper's mouth. It pulled his shirt open.
Valentine groped at his belt. He had another cargo hook. . . .
Gail struck the Reaper across the back of its neck with her hands interlocked, but it ignored her the way it would a butterfly alighting.
Valentine brought up the cargo hook-feeling the pointed tongue probe at his collarbone-and buried the hook into the Reaper's jaw, returning pain for pain. He pulled, desperate, and the black-fanged mouth closed on its own tongue.
The Reaper's eyes widened in surprise and the tongue was severed. The cut-off end twitched on Valentine's bare chest. Valentine slid and gripped the Reaper by its waist with his legs. It brought up its bad arm to try to pull the hook out, fumbling with the chain.
Valentine pulled, hard, putting his back muscles into the effort, straining-God, how his jaw hurt as he gritted his teeth-the Reaper looking oddly like a hooked bass with eyes glazed and confused-hurt it bad enough and the Kurian shuts down the connection?-and the Reaper's jaw came free in a splatter of blood. The Reaper swung at his eyes but Valentine got a shoulder up. He punched, hard, into the open wound at the bottom of its head and groped with his hand wrist-deep in slimy flesh. He dug with fingers up the soft palate.
The Reaper's eyes rolled back into its skull as he squeezed the base of its brain like a sponge.
Gail whacked it again and it toppled off the back of the legworm. Valentine sucked in air and pain with each breath.
"You look funny," Gail said.
"I bet I do," Valentine said, though it hit his ears as "I et I oo." Valentine examined his chest. The tiny wound from the Reaper's tongue had a splattering of Reaper blood all around it. It itched. He tore up some of the fiberglass-like legworm skin and blotted the tarry substance away.
The legworm they rode waved its snout in the air as it hurried around the perimeter of the pushed-up earth. When it slowed to re-descend into the pit, Valentine removed his first cargo hook, used it to lower Gail, and dropped off himself. He retrieved his goad and the other cargo hook.
This time she clung to him as he carried her, running for the telephone poles.
* * * *
Valentine heard voices, and turned toward the sound.
"I can't believe you used me as bait," Thatcher said.
"I got it, didn't I?" Duvalier chided.
"A second later and it would have popped my head off."
"Uh-uh. I never leave less than a second and a half to chance, sweetie. Wait--"
The last was at the sound of Valentine setting Gail on her feet again.
"It's us," Valentine said, holding his jaw. He came into what might pass for a clearing-thick grasses rather than trees-around an old barn. The telephone poles lined a road like the Roman crucifixes on the Via Appia.
Duvalier knelt down, working.
Valentine stepped up and found what he expected, a headless Reaper.
"Hell, Val," Duvalier said.
"Uf igh," Valentine tried. "Rluff nigh."
Thatcher seemed lost in his own thoughts as he stared at the Reaper corpse. "You should have seen it-the Reaper was coming for me. I tried to fire but my gun was on safety, and before I could even flick off it reached, and there she was behind it."
"Big tactic," Duvalier said, examining the robe she had stripped off the Reaper for black-and poisonous-subcutaneous fluid. "Lying in the grass like a snake."
"You're one of those . . . one of those Hunter-things," Thatcher said.
"You have a problem with that?" Duvalier asked.
"Offerz," Valentine garbled. "Oturs."
"The others?" Duvalier said. "I dunno. I didn't hear any screams."
