41

SHOOTING HIMSELF IN THE FOOTNOTE

Unlike the cunning man who represented John Dee, Evan Gilbert was not living in Rockwall Tower West, toiling away on the School of Night’s copy of the Book of Am. Perhaps that would have been a little too much like the real Walter Raleigh, who had spent several years confined in the Tower of London. Or perhaps Evan was just a sociopath and understood that self-sacrifice was for weaker people and fools.

No, Evan and his wife were in one of the remaining mansions in Detroit, eating filet mignon and ostrich eggs and crepes for breakfast in their bedroom. Evan was still in his pajamas when he heard the strange plants in his garden being burned with flamethrower units and salted with blessed salt. While a poison gas made with cyanide extracted from elderberry seeds began dropping his bodyguards downstairs, Evan took the time to cut his wife’s throat with a letter opener, then took a handgun out of his nightstand and made his way to an honest-to-God secret passage that connected to the back of his closet. The mansion, like a lot of mansions in Detroit, had been built during Prohibition because of Prohibition, and the original occupant had wanted a secret means to a secret cellar.

The School of Night had taken that secret cellar and expanded on it, making an escape tunnel that led to one of the nearby abandoned manors in Brush Park.

Once inside the secret passage, Evan continued to indulge in clichés. There was a bomb with a nonelectrical timer that was powerful enough to destroy the entire manor directly beyond the door, and Evan set it to detonate in ten minutes before making his way inside the walls of his house, abandoning his two children.

Unfortunately for Evan, one of his supernatural bodyguards, a golem made of stone, did not need to breathe. Golems are nasty customers. Animated statues with no vital organs, the only way to kill golems is to destroy the animating word that is somewhere inside their body, either inscribed in their unliving flesh or written on a small parchment.

Lacking any feasible alternatives, the invading knights opened fire on the golem with armor-piercing rounds, chipping away at him, so to speak, and the golem happened to be in front of the wall that Evan was walking behind. Modern safe rooms and passageways are designed to be bulletproof, but there weren’t a whole lot of modern mansions being built in Detroit when Evan had taken residency. Call it dumb luck or poetic justice, but Evan was shot several times, and even though none of the wounds were immediately fatal, he wasn’t going anywhere fast, either. Several knights noticed the passageway peeking at them through torn sections of wall, and when they stepped around the rubble they’d made of Evan’s golem and began knocking larger openings in the wall, Evan Gilbert took the handgun he’d brought along and ended his own life.

The knights found the bomb with three minutes to spare.