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"Flower?"
"Picture your favorite flower".
"Daisy", she said.
"Great, a daisy. There's just a daisy, nothing else, blackness and a daisy. It's a big one. You're keeping your eyes on the yellow center".
"Yes", she said, sounding a little better.
"Now it starts to spin slowly, like a windmill. Oh so slowly".
"Yes", she said.
Screams and a crash from the center of the building.
"Never mind that". Valentine lowered his own lifesign and tried to open the window. It had been painted recently and was sticky.
"Speed the daisy up. It's spinning faster now".
She didn't respond.
"Slow it down now. Slower and slower and slower". He lowered his voice. "Slower than that windmill, slower than a second hand on a watch, slow it so it's moving like a minute hand. You can barely see it, it's moving so slowly". More screams, this time female. The deep blast of a shotgun and running feet in the hall.
He unwrapped a souvenir from his time with the Kentucky worm riders. It was a short, stout hand ax, blade tapering into a legworm hook. He pulled on his pants and laced his boots.
For Valentine, lowering lifesign meant taking a big, bright blue ball that represented his consciousness and slowly shrinking it to a point like a star, which he watched with all the concentration of an astronomer at a telescope eyepiece.
"Keep watching the petals turn", he whispered. He reached up and gripped a chamois-wrapped handle from beneath his pillow and drew it close beside.
A heavy tread in the hall and she groped for his hand.
"Turning", he whispered.
A door torn open with a sharp metallic cry. Another scream.
"Turning", he repeated. He tried a fearful whining sound in his throat, trying to imitate a whimpering dog.
Something jiggled the doorknob.
More shots from the hall, and heavy, pounding footsteps as the Reaper ran toward the door ...
"Turning", Valentine whispered.
Five minutes later the noises faded into a last distant scream.
"Safe?" Jules asked.
"We are. They're not..".
* * *
The old Cat Everready got to be an old Cat by hunting Reapers only in the daylight, when their connection to their master was weakest, or after they fed, when they, or more accurately the master Kurian animating them, got dopey from the aura feed.
The Valentingle weakened and diffused, throbbing on and off in his head like a bulb on fading current.
He stepped into the hall.
Carnage was the only word for it. Bodies, some still dripping and twitching, lay in the hallway, or had been flung across gurneys. Crushed necks and heads mostly. Some bore wet blossoms on their shirts from punches that had caved in rib cages.
