Tirana shook her head vehemently. Meiman opened his beak and hissed at her. She shrank away from him. Detta Walker had already gotten her fingers into the mask wore and it hung in shreds about her jaw and neck. In the middle of her forehead, a red wound opened and closed like the gill of a dying fish.

Meiman turned to Andrew, released him long enough to point at the shaman, then drew the talon that served him as a hand across his feathered throat in a grimly expressive gesture.

Andrew nodded and brushed away his wife’s pudgy hands when they tried to restrain him. The mask of humanity was good enough to show the low man in the garish tuxedo visibly gathering his courage. Then he leaped forward with a strangled cry, seizing Callahan around the neck not with his hands but his fat forearms. At the same moment his jilly lunged and struck the ivory turtle from the Pere’s hand, screaming as she did so.

The skoldpadda tumbled to the red rug, bounced beneath one of the tables, and there (like a certain paper boat some of you may remember) passes out of this tale forever.

The Grandfathers still held back, as did die Type Three vampires who had been dining in the public room, but the low men and women sensed weakness and moved in, first hesitantly, then with growing confidence. They surrounded Callahan, paused, and then fell on him in all their numbers.

“Let me go in God’s name!” Callahan cried, but of course it did no good. Unlike the vampires, the things with the red wounds in their foreheads did not respond to the name of Callahan’s God. All he could do was hope Jake wouldn’t stop, let alone double back; that he and Oy would go like the wind to Susannah. Save her if they could. Die with her if they could not.

And kill her baby, if chance allowed. God help him, but he had been wrong about that. They should have snuffed out the baby’s life back in the Calla, when they had the chance.