He just didn’t rotate it quickly enough.

*****

Harried voices barked commands with life and death urgency through the cold night air. The tinny bursts of police radios punctuated the sounds coming from the scene above, all mixed with the frenzied pace of the music. The activity sounded rushed but methodical.

Intense.

And all focused on the rescue of the warlock, Rowan Gant.

A strong voice filled with authority but edged with what sounded almost like fear, parted all other sounds to make room for itself. “Goddammit, somebody shut that fuckin’ music off!”

After a moment, the frenetic instruments fell quiet, in comparison bringing what almost seemed to be silence to the landscape even though the voices and activity continued on unimpeded.

Fog was still clinging in a moist, grey shroud to anything and everything in its path, and most especially, to anyone. Eldon felt its clammy insistence as it pervaded his clothing, sending tendrils of cold dampness inward to chill him all the way past the bone and directly to the soul. Through his mist-soaked clothes, the cold metal of the girders pressed against him, mercilessly leeching the warmth from his body.

The sharp sting in his scalp, which had earlier occupied the foremost position in his list of unwanted sensations, had now taken a back seat to the fiery burn in his left arm. The bullet, which had been expelled at high velocity and point blank range, had ripped into the soft flesh of his wrist and fragmented in a diagonal trajectory along several inches of his forearm. He wasn’t entirely sure, but judging from the amount of movement still left in the appendage, the wound involved only muscle and no bone.

Even so, it hurt like hell.

But he knew the fact that he was here, now, feeling the pain, was yet another of those hidden blessings, because it could have been far worse. In fact, it almost had been…