The scream filling the air shook me to my core, bones reverberating in sync with the discordant tone. Howls of agony I knew intimately, how pain wracked the body while I watched, my daily communion and affirmation. A reminder of my place over the cattle, that with one nick of my knives, their skin would wither and they would writhe, screaming.

The Simurgh’s scream unnerved me.

The leather grips of my knives squelched in my palms, slick with sweat as I swept from street to street, sprinting. My Teeth—My Teeth, mine!—had scattered when she screamed. Springfield was unfamiliar to me, a temporary haven while we waited out the heat from that snot-nosed Ward getting what was coming to him. But I still had eyes, and the sun still hung in Springfield’s sky as surely as the Simurgh. “South to Hartford,” I had roared while my men proved their cowardice. If the fuckers didn’t regroup—if they ran…

“God. Fucking! Dammit!!” [Belial: I told you before, Rotlimb. If you rule by fear, you rule only until something scarier comes along.] [DZ: Shit shit shit, would you fucking run?!]

A howl tore its way out of my throat, and it was nothing before the seraphim suspended in the sky.

If I ever found those yellow-bellied shitstains who dared to call themselves Teeth, I would cut out their eyes and laugh as they screamed and screamed as the rot seeped deeper and deeper, spreading from their eye sockets into the mush they called brains. Butcher’s power swelled, giving me even more strength than I already had from the unabating fire of the kid’s power. I checked the sun’s position—the Simurgh still right there and screaming screaming screaming—and moved, resuming my southerly sprint.

Or I tried to. Less than a minute later a roar above me broke through the monotony of the Simurgh’s unending scream. My head snapped in that direction, and I caught the tail end of the old bank I had been passing by exploding, tearing a huge chunk out of the wall and roof. More importantly an absolutely massive, somehow still intact stone gargoyle that had been presumably poised on the roof was about to crush me as it fell to the street.

I didn’t know what was worse. That a deft leap to the side should have been enough to get me out of the way, that I somehow tripped over fucking nothing, that my nerves didn’t scream in warning until after I tripped and fell into the exact spot the gargoyle was actually falling towards…

… or that I didn’t have time to decide until after I was looking through someone else’s eyes at the pulped remnants of my head, my innards splattered everywhere like a crushed watermelon.

[Rotlimb: God. Fucking! Dammit!]