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“Did you miss my math there? She’s dead. Or she will be very soon. So take the deal and walk away.”

Henry eyes him. “You’re offering to let me walk away if I don’t go after her, despite assuring me there’s no point. You just want me to turn my back on her. To prove … what? That everyone has a price? That altruism and empathy only extend so far?”

“Don’t try to think, Henry. It’s painful, and you aren’t very good at it.”

Henry strides for the next window.

“She is dead,” the bartender snaps. “Don’t you get that?”

“Nope, I’m too stupid, apparently.”

Henry grabs the nearest chair to smash the window, and his feet fly out from under him and he lands on his ass so hard he blacks out for a moment. When he comes to, shaking his head, he rises and reaches for the chair—

The window is gone. He turns slowly, knowing what he’ll see. The door is gone. All the windows are gone. Every exit from the bar has vanished.

“There,” the bartender says. “Happy? You can’t get out. So you don’t have a choice. Just sit your ass down and wait. Unless you’d rather watch her die. I can arrange that. Ask Maggie over there. She’s watching it.”

Henry glances at the woman, who sits there, immobile, staring into that glass as she’s been doing since they first arrived. He thinks the bartender is joking, but when he backs up a step, he sees the anguish in the reaper’s expression.

Ellie is still alive, but not for long. The bartender threw her to the wolves and every other monster out there, all of them converging on the lone victim. He thinks of that, of Ellie, who’s never done a damn thing to deserve it, who’s spent most of her life fighting against being forgettable because some power decreed she wasn’t important. That she was disposable.

It decreed those kids—Caleb and Noemi—were disposable. That the old man—Edgar—was disposable. Even that bastard Raymond had done some truly shitty things in his life, but he hadn’t been disposable. There were people in the world who cared about him, loved him, maybe even people he loved back.

And what about Henry himself? Forget the lives he’s saved as a paramedic. How many lives has he touched? Ask him the question and he’d duck and dodge, but he knows he has been important to people. To his parents. To his siblings. To his friends. To Jenn and Raine and Ivy.

Isn’t this just how it’s always been? That some people “count” more than others? Kings sit on their thrones while soldiers die. Lords throw lavish banquets while peasants starve. CEOs crisscross the globe on private jets while their employees struggle to earn just enough to survive. Ordinary people who aren’t dreaming of yachts and mansions. They’re dreaming of roofs over their heads and food on the table and medicine when they need it, and how many times, how goddamn many times, has the person he saved been sent home with a fucking bandage when they needed surgery. Sent home because they don’t have insurance. Because they are disposable.

Rage rips through him. A lifetime of rage, of listening to the elders fight for clean water, of watching his mother counting pennies for healthy food, of helping Jenn scrounge to get funding for her education, of both of them taking substandard jobs because they offered essential benefits, of the girls fighting for places in their suburban school. All the things that people with money and access took for granted, and he’d had to fight for, his friends and family had to fight for, all because they were “not important.”

And now this asshole is telling him he was supposed to die because he didn’t matter? That Ellie is dying horribly for the crime of being not important enough?

Henry turns away to hide his expression. Rage is what this demon wants. Rage or despair or guilt or anything that feeds the dark hunger inside him.

He walks to the wall near the bar and leans against it. Then he slumps to the floor, his hands over his face, and he shakes. He shakes with forty years of suppressed anger, but he knows what it’ll look like to the bartender. Like anguish. Like tears.

The bartender can’t see him from where he stands, and Henry listens to the footsteps draw closer. He even allows a noise to come out, his jaw clenched so tight that the howl is a whimper. That draws the bartender closer, and Henry swears he can feel the demon gloating.

Henry drops his face to his bent knees. He wraps his arms around his head. Hiding, like a little boy caught crying.

Closer the bartender comes. Pulled in, needing to see more, needing to drink Henry’s pain like the finest wine.

Henry scrunches into himself. He remembers a friend whose father would beat him if he cried, how that friend would make himself and his pain so small, even when his dad wasn’t there, how Henry would stare in confusion because he didn’t understand, not having a single relative who would judge him for crying, much less hit him.

Because Henry had watched, he can emulate that friend now, how he pulled everything in, as if he could disappear.

The bartender chortles and crouches.

“Aww,” he says. “Poor Henry. You don’t know what to do if you can’t play the hero. You just break down and—”

Henry grabs him by the hair and, in one motion, twists as he springs to his feet. Again, the bartender doesn’t have time to teleport away. He lets out an oof of surprise but no alarm. Henry doesn’t have a weapon. But he does have two very big hands and a mountain of muscle and decades of pent-up rage, and he pours it all into that twist. Even when there’s an audible snap, he keeps twisting, as if he can pull the demon’s head clear off.

Pull it off and pitch it across the room. Splat it into the wall like an overripe melon.

“Enough,” the woman says, not looking over.

Henry pauses, but he knows she isn’t trying to stop him. She means he’s done enough. Around them, the bar is already cracking and crumbling, and he doesn’t have a second to spare.

Five minutes.