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trickle of blood on her forehead and her eyes closed. What Rafi was destroying was the meds trolley. Pills in a hundred party colors were strewn all over the floor and they crunched underfoot as I shifted my ground.
    Out of the corner of my eye, I saw that Pen was kneeling down to check the nurse’s pulse. I took my tin whistle out of my pocket and put it to my lips, but before I could play a note Rafi threw back his head and howled in what sounded like agony. He threw up his hands and pressed both clenched fists to his forehead, jerking spasmodically from side to side. Then with a deep-throated groan he drew his hands down his face from hairline to chin, digging his nails in deep so that he drew blood from eight parallel gashes.
    I was going to have to put a wrench in this. I felt for the stops and blew an opening chord, as low as I could. Since he’d been completely ignoring me up to then, I was hoping to get a certain momentum going before he realized I was there; but at the first sound of the whistle, he spun to face me. I hiccupped into unintended silence. Rafi’s pale, ascetically handsome face was strained, his thick black hair hanging in sweat-soaked ringlets, his eyes—pupils, whites, and all—were a black so intense they seemed to suck all the light out of the room. I’d seen the effect before, but somehow this was worse than all the other times. It was as though the blackness were brimming there, behind Rafi’s eyes, ready to spill out and drown me.
    “Castor!”
he boomed, in a voice that was louder and harsher than a human throat should have been able to make: a voice like the shrieking intake of a jet engine. For a moment another face moved under his, almost surfacing through skull and muscle and red, stretched skin.
“Too sweet! Too fucking sweet!”
    If he hadn’t tensed before he jumped, that might have been the last sound I ever heard. As it was, I just about had time to drop down and to the side, out of the reach of his clutching fingers. At the same time I blew a screaming, modulated discord that I’d used before on Rafi, to good and usually immediate effect.
    This time I might as well have been playing “God Save the Queen” with my armpit. He turned in the air like a cat and caught me a glancing blow on the side of the head with his closed fist. There was a split second where my visual field shifted into juddering black-and-white: the whistle flew out of my hand, clattered to the floor a long way away. Then Rafi had his feet back under him and he was advancing on me at a brisk walk, grinning a Cheshire cat grin. Pen pressed herself against the wall, out of sight and out of mind, but she was watching everything that happened, looking for a chance to get that nurse out of the line of fire. Great plan: better than mine, anyway. Without my whistle, I was going to have my work cut out even staying alive here.
    I threw a punch, which Rafi swatted aside without breaking stride. His response was devastating—his open hands, fingers as rigid as knitting needles, striking out so fast I heard the whiff of displaced air before I felt the agonizing impact. I staggered backward, trying to keep up some kind of a guard, but it was like being in front of a horizontal avalanche. I went sprawling back out into the corridor with Rafi on top of me, his hands now locking around my throat.
    I was staring directly into those liquid black eyes, and I saw no mercy there. I broke his grip by punching outward against his wrists, but that didn’t make as much difference as I was hoping for. Rafi strobed, his limbs seeming to be in too many places at once, and even though I’d knocked his hands away to left and right, his grip on my throat didn’t slacken. I fought to suck in a breath: if I could breathe I could whistle, even without mechanical aids, but there was nothing doing. He squeezed tighter, and darkness bubbled up inside my head to match the two dark wells I was staring into.
    Over Rafi’s shoulder I saw Pen