They did not rush the last door.
Lily used what little light she dared on Marcus's torn arm and the cut across Dex's ribs. Gold moved under their skin, thinner now than before, more ember than flame. Marcus flexed his hand when she finished and nodded once. Dex checked the cylinder of his revolver, then the charges clipped to his jacket, then checked them all again because his hands needed a job.
Jack stood apart for a moment with the Duke's sword angled toward the concrete. The blade's pale aura did not flare. It waited. So did the thing inside him that had once been another self. It no longer felt like a second voice crowding his skull. It felt like an old scar that had finally become part of the limb again.
Lily came to stand beside him. "You okay?"
"No." He looked at her and said, "I will be when we get her back."
Her mouth tightened, because they were too far gone for lies. Still, she nodded.
Marcus rose with a low grunt. "Then let's not keep your mother waiting."
Jack put his hand on the handle.
The pressure beyond it was vast.
Not the disciplined mountain-weight of the Duke. This was crooked, hungry, amused. Gravity twisted wrong on the other side, pulling in six directions at once. He could feel space itself puckering and stretching as though the roof beyond the door no longer sat cleanly in one world.
He opened it.
Wind slammed into them.
The roof of Hargrove Tower should have been a flat slab of tar, vents, gravel, and a waist-high ledge. Instead it looked like the top of a building balanced over the end of reality. Half the roof was still there. The other half seemed to hang over black depth and torn sky, where strips of different worlds flickered in and out like reflections on broken water. Jack saw the dead city from the dream world beneath one rip in the air. Under another he saw the shape of Maple Crescent under a darkening evening sky, as if home were directly below and impossibly far away at the same time.
At the far edge of the roof stood the Zombie King.
He held Elena over the side by one wrist.
For one stupid second Jack saw only that she was alive. Her hair whipped across her face in the wind. One side of her cheek was bruised dark. Her shoes scraped uselessly against the ledge as she fought for balance. She looked smaller than he remembered from yesterday, smaller than a mother ought to be when her children had crossed an eighteen-floor nightmare to reach her.
"Mom!" Lily screamed.
Jack had already taken three steps forward. "Give her back."
The King's face turned toward him. It was still his face: older around the eyes, skin dead-pale over ruin, death burning where life should have been. A healed bite mark lay on his neck like a signature carved into meat.
"You climbed," he said.
His voice carried easily through the wind. It did not need volume. The roof listened to him.
Elena twisted in his grip, found Jack and Lily, and whatever else she had been about to say vanished when she saw them. Terror hit her face first. Then something fiercer shoved it aside.
"Run," she shouted. "Both of you, run now!"
"We're taking you home," Jack said.
The King's mouth bent, not quite smiling. "Home."
Then all four of them moved.
Jack went first, folding gravity beneath his feet so the roof hurled him forward. Lily cast three lances of gold that left burning lines in the air. Dex flung a chain of nested charges low and fast, each one tucked behind the other so the blast would stack on impact. Marcus came in at an angle with his weapon lifted in both hands, golden strength pouring through his shoulders.
It should have looked like a coordinated strike.
It looked childish.
The King lifted his free hand.
The world kinked.
Jack felt the roof become a wall. Then the sky was below him. Then there was no up at all, only a crushing pull from every direction. His charge collapsed. Lily's lances bent into bright crescents and flew harmlessly into a tear in the air. Dex's explosions winked out as if swallowed by invisible mouths. Marcus actually reached the King, boot skidding against tar within arm's length, and then a slab of force hit him from the side and threw him thirty feet across the roof.
Jack crashed shoulder-first and rolled. He tried to rise and found his own weight multiplied so brutally that his elbows buckled. The King's power pressed on him like a hand on the back of his neck.
Still holding Elena over the drop, the King glanced at the scrape on his sleeve where Jack's blade had almost come through. "Better," he said.
Lily was on her knees, shaking, gold light flaring as she tried to push against the pressure. "Let her go!"
"No," Elena gasped. Blood had dried at the corner of her mouth. "Lily, listen to me. Listen. If you can run, run."
Jack drove his sword into the roof and used it to lever himself upright. Every muscle in his back screamed. He took one step.
The King watched him with red eyes that held not rage but bleak curiosity.
Then, still looking at Jack, he lowered his head and bit Elena in the neck.
The place he bit was the place where his own scar sat.
Elena made a raw, shocked sound. Lily's scream tore across the roof. Jack lurched forward so hard his vision blackened at the edges.
The King held on long enough to make it obscene. Long enough for blood to sheet over his hand and down Elena's shirt. Long enough for Jack to understand that this, this exact moment, had been sitting in the creature's mind since the gun shop.
When he let go, Elena did not fall. Gravity caught her and held her upright on her feet beside him.
Her head sagged. Black veins moved under the skin of her throat. Her fingers twitched once. Twice. Then she lifted her face.
Her eyes had glossed over.
Jack stopped moving.
Everything they had done since the first night narrowed to that impossible sight. The barricaded house. The supply runs. The tower. The eighteen floors. The Duke's last breath. Dex's father nearly dying. Lily bleeding light for all of them. Every step had pointed here.
And here was his mother, dead on her feet.
The King turned her with one lazy gesture and made her sit on the edge of the roof. Her legs dangled over open air. She swayed there, blood dripping from her neck onto the side of the building.
"Would you like her to walk off?" he asked.
The part of Jack that came from this world moved before thought did.
Fury ripped through the one road he had finally forged. Gravity, blade, and divine force snapped together in a single killing line. He crossed the roof in a black-gold-white arc that split tar, vent, and wind. The slash reached the King before the sound of it did.
For the first time, the King's expression changed.
He caught the cut in one hand.
It still drove him half a step sideways.
Black blood smoked between his fingers. A thin line opened across his palm and along one cheekbone. Not deep. Not enough. But real.
The King looked at the blood as if he had forgotten what it was.
Then he laughed once, softly.
"Impressive," he said. "I was going to end this quickly."
The roof boomed.
Walls of transparent pressure slammed up out of nothing between the survivors. Jack found himself sealed in a long rectangular space of warped air. Lily appeared in a matching prison ten yards to his left. Marcus and Dex were trapped opposite them, each in his own lane. Jack struck at the barrier immediately. The Duke's sword screamed. The wall shuddered and held.
Beyond them, the King stood in the open center of the roof, with Elena's dead body perched on the ledge behind him like a promise.
"One last chance," he said. "Show me something worth remembering."
Marcus spat blood onto his side of the roof and pushed himself upright. He looked first at Dex, then at Jack and Lily. There was grief in his face already, but no surrender.
"Kids," he said, voice rough. "Eyes up. Whatever happens, eyes up."
"Dad..." Dex started.
The wall in front of Marcus vanished.
He did not hesitate.
He hit the center lane like a charging bull, gold flooding through his limbs so hard it outlined him. His first swing cracked the roof open. The King slipped aside by inches. Marcus fired from the hip with blessed rounds bright as comets.
The King pinched the air.
The shells stopped.
For one instant they hung between them, spinning.
Then they reversed.
Marcus twisted. One round tore through his shoulder. Another ripped his thigh. The third hit him square in the ribs and burst holy fire across his chest. He staggered, smoke pouring off him, and still he came on with a roar that sounded more furious than human.
Jack hammered his barrier with gravity until blood ran warm from his nose. Lily flung radiance against hers, gold spiderwebbing over invisible force. Dex pounded both fists on his prison wall and shouted his father's name.
Marcus reached the King one last time and caught his coat with his free hand.
"You don't," Marcus said, dragging each word through blood, "touch my family."
The King looked almost bored again.
Space tightened around Marcus's arms and legs.
Jack felt it happen before he fully saw it. Gravity pulled in opposite directions at once. Marcus's body jerked violently. Bone cracked loud enough to hear over the wind. The golden light around him burst outward in ragged strips.
Then the King opened his hand.
What hit the roof afterward did not move.
Dex made no sound.
Jack did. He did not recognize it as his own voice until it broke apart in his throat. He hit the barrier again with everything he had, and the wall only rang like struck glass.
The King turned his head toward Dex.
That wall dropped.
Dex walked into the open center slowly, stepping around blood and shattered tar. He was white around the mouth. His eyes never left what was left of his father.
When he finally looked up at the King, the grief on his face had gone still.
"Okay," Dex said.
He unhooked every remaining charge from his jacket and rolled his shoulders once. Orange-white sparks danced over his knuckles, gold inside, packed tight and hot. When he moved, he moved with none of his usual wasted anger. Each gesture was exact.
The first detonation struck behind the King's left shoulder.
The second arrived inside the recoil of the first.
The third bloomed under his feet.
The roof vanished in white fire.
Jack threw an arm over his face. Even through the barrier, heat slammed him backward. Dex kept building the chain, layering blast inside blast until the air itself looked hammered flat. The King disappeared in the center of it. Chunks of roof lifted, turned liquid, and blew away into the black around the building.
"Come on," Lily whispered. She had both hands pressed to the wall, crying openly now. "Come on, Dex."
A figure staggered out of the smoke.
The King's right side was burned open from collar to hip. One eye had been blasted away. Blackened flesh hung from his jaw. For a heartbeat, triumph jolted through Jack so hard it hurt.
Then the wound began to close.
The King touched the ruined side of his face and looked at his own hand again, as if mildly surprised to find it unsteady.
His remaining eye fixed on Dex.
"Enough," he said.
The air behind him dimpled.
A black sphere the size of a marble appeared over his shoulder, perfectly round, perfectly dark. The roof around it bent inward. Dust, embers, and scraps of tar drew toward it and vanished without sound.
Dex's expression did not change. He threw two more charges.
They curved in flight.
Both were swallowed by the black sphere. Their light vanished inside it like sparks into deep water.
A second sphere opened near the King's other hand. Then a third.
Dex kept firing. He had to know it was useless by the end. His sparks grew dimmer. His face shone with sweat. Blood leaked from one nostril. Still he layered every scrap of power he had left into the blasts, forcing them harder, hotter, cleaner.
The spheres ate them all.
When Dex's hand finally fell to his side, empty, the King crossed the distance in a blur of warped space.
Gravity locked Dex in place with his arms half-raised.
Jack slammed both palms into the barrier until he thought his wrists would break. "Dex!"
Dex looked at him.
For the first time since the roof, fear showed through the calm. Not much. Just enough to make him young again.
The King lifted one finger. A new black hole formed at its tip, smaller than the others, dense enough to make the light around it twitch.
He pressed it into Dex's chest.
There was no explosion.
Just a terrible, abrupt collapse. Cloth, bone, blood, heart; gone into a point too small to see.
Dex had gone still.
Then the King let him fall.
The tiny black sphere winked out.
Silence came down over the roof in a hard, final sheet.
Marcus was dead. Dex was dead. Their blood marked the same rooftop where Elena's corpse sat swaying over the edge.
Jack stood behind the unbroken wall, every breath turning sharp in his lungs. Across from him Lily had gone utterly still, her face streaked with tears and roof-grit and gold light.
The King turned between them, deciding.
Above the tower, the sky tore a little wider.
His red gaze settled on Lily.