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He’s swaying like a tall tree in a hurricane.

And we’ve still got to get out of here. I told them to do it in the middle, and that’s a whole line of shelves away. Not to mention the fact that we might have to do some serious climbing. I’m imagining a rope, and right now I have no idea how we’re going to deal with that.

He staggers instead of walking.

And I can hear sounds from some distant corner of the library.

“Come on, it’s okay,” I tell him. “It’s okay.” But it isn’t, because the sounds are getting louder. There’s a crash and I almost collapse, heart now racing, everything in me focused on getting him out of there.

I’ve never been so happy to see a hole in a ceiling.

Or the frantic but smiling faces of my friends through it.

“We did it!” Nancy screams like an absolute maniac. Then even better, even sweeter, they all scramble to shove a ladder down to us. An honest-to-god rickety, fixing-the-roof kind of ladder. And it reaches, too. It touches down by my feet, Jack holding it steady at the top, all of them yelling, “Hurry, hurry, hurry!”

The only bad thing is that hurrying is somewhat out of the question.

It’s hard to get up a ladder with only one arm. Plus, getting him to go first is like trying to push a mountain into outer space. He point-blank refuses, and tries to force me up there instead. And all the while the clock is ticking.

“I am going to tear you both apart with my teeth,” I hear Hannigan say from some place that doesn’t seem that far away now. Thirty seconds, I think, and just get ahold of him and shove. I actually get him onto the ladder. But he doesn’t let me go when I do. He grabs me around the waist.

And the thing is, he’s still strong.

He’s still incredibly, impossibly strong.

Once he has me, it takes him almost nothing to simply pull back his one good arm and throw. And I swear I shoot through that fucking hole like a bullet out of a gun. My friends have to fumble back and away; I flail in the air briefly, above the library roof, high enough up that I can see over the edges of it to Main Street below.

Then I drop back down, fast enough that Jack lunges forward.

He catches me, like a baseball player going to catch the ball before someone hits home plate. It’s quite something to see and experience—but I can’t focus on that. Sten is still down there. He’s still down there. Cassie and Seth are doing their best to grab him, and they’re just getting nowhere. Seth in fact is almost in the hole now, and still it doesn’t seem to matter.

You’re gonna get yourselves killed, too, I think, and despite how much the idea of them doing that for me fills my heart with endless wonder, I have to intervene. I scrabble across to them, fast and fierce enough that Jack’s attempts at holding me back fail. Then I shove Seth out of the way. I get my hand down there myself.

It’s the best thing I’ve ever felt in my life when Sten grabs it, despite how rough I know this is going to be. Half of me is glowing with magic, filled with supernatural strength and heaving like there’s no tomorrow. But the other half—the one actually in the library—is as empty of it as any ordinary human could ever be.

It’s like being split in two. Like being two people at once.

But I think the magic side is winning.

In fact I know it is. The more I pull, the more it spreads through me. I can see it running down my hands in ribbons, each one reaching for him. Each one kissing that barrier between magic and not, and burning for more. And just when it doesn’t seem like it’ll be enough, just when I think I’m a little short, I feel Nancy’s and Cassie’s hands on me.

Their magic meets mine, and we pull.

We pull so hard that he almost flies into the air like I did.

Just as Hannigan gets to the bottom of the ladder.

“Pull it up, pull it up,” Nancy shrieks. But there’s no time for that. I stare down into the hateful, horrible face, almost bashed in on one side by Sten tossing him, but still seething and single-minded. He bares his tombstone teeth, one terrible hand reaching for us.

And I reach out my own, and seal the hole over.

Slowly, with the sort of magic that lets him understand exactly what’s coming.

All it takes is Sten taking the brew Cassie hands to him—the one that isn’t magic but will do the job we want it to all the same. It’s so toxic that it actually burns his hand as he holds it over the almost-sealed hole. No doubt it will kill him in seconds—though, honestly, I’m sort of hoping it will be slow.

“Farewell, my immortal enemy,” I say.

And then we drop it, and watch him dissolve.