And then I was up and reaching into the thing’s stomach, desperately feeling around, praying that the stuff that felt like macaroni and cheese wasn’t the knifeman’s brains—and yet knowing it was—finding the golden whistle suddenly and unexpectedly and placing it in my mouth.
Where I blew on it as hard as I could, sending a frequency only Puck could hear pulsating through the air.
After which, like gray ghosts, the Nano-Ts began to emerge—slowly, cautiously, not pouncing suddenly as I’d expected, but surrounding us in a loose but ever-tightening circle. Corralling us.
“I’m sorry,” I said, as the Alpha bull approached the corpses one at a time and sniffed them carefully, thoroughly. “You should have gone to Ocean City.”
She looked at me in the dark, the fire having long gone out. “And li
