By the light of the moon

Between them and the
south wall, a reassuring bulk of furniture absorbed or deflected
the lower incoming rounds, while the rest passed over them.
    Bullets whistled overhead, the sound of fate sucking air through
its teeth, but Dylan didn't yet hear any shrieking shards of
whirling shrapnel, neither cyanide nor any other flavor.
    A thin haze of plaster dust cast a dream pall over the room, and
pillow feathers floated in the air, as thick as in a henhouse
roiled by a fox.
    Shep snaked into the hallway and might have kept going into the
study if Jilly had not been lying prone at the foot of the stairs.
She wriggled backward, blocked him, grabbed him by the loose seat
of his jeans, and redirected him to the steps.
    When not stopped by furniture or otherwise deflected, bullets
penetrated the front hall through the open door to the living room.
They also slammed into the south wall of the hallway, which was
also the north wall of the living room. Impact with this second
mass of wood and plaster stopped some rounds, but others punched
through with plenty of killing force left.
    Wheezing with fear more than with exertion, grimacing at the
alkaline taste of plaster dust, gazing up from the floor, Dylan saw
scores of holes in that wall. Some were no larger than a quarter,
but a few were as big as his fist.
    Bullets had hacked chips and chunks out of the handrail. They
hacked another and another as he watched.
    Several balusters had been notched. Two were shattered.
    Those rounds that made it through the wall and past the stair
railing were finally stopped by the north wall of hallway, which
became the stairwell wall. Therein, the powerful rounds had spent
the last of their energy, leaving the plaster as pocked and drilled
as the backstop to a firing squad.
    Even if Jilly and the brothers O'Conner, like a family of
snake-imitating sideshow freaks, ascended the steps with a profile
as low as that of a descending Slinky toy, they weren't going to be
able to reach the first landing unscathed. Maybe one of them would
make it alive and whole. Maybe even two, which would be irrefutable
proof of guardian angels. If miracles came in threes, however, they
wouldn't be miracles anymore; they would be common experience.
Jilly or Shep, or Dylan himself, would be killed or gravely wounded
in the attempt. They were trapped here, flat on the floor, inhaling
plaster dust with a gasp, exhaling it with a wheeze, without
options, without hope.
    Then the gunfire abated and, within just three or four seconds,
stopped altogether.
    With the first phase of the assault completed in no more than
two minutes, the assassins to the east and south of the house were
falling back. Taking cover to avoid being wounded by crossfire.
    Simultaneously, to the west and north of the house, other gunmen
would be approaching at a run. Phase two.
    The front door, in the west wall of the house, lay immediately
behind Dylan, flanked by stained-glass sidelights. The study was to
their left as they faced the first landing, just beyond the
stairwell wall, and the study had three windows.
    In phase two, the hallway would be riddled with such a storm of
bullets that everything heretofore would seem, by comparison, like
a mere tantrum thrown by belligerent children.
    Taunting Death had granted them a mere handful of seconds in
which to save themselves, and his skeletal fingers were spread wide
to facilitate the sifting of time.
    These same lightning calculations must have flashed through
Jilly's mind, for even as the echo of the last barrage still boomed
through the house, she bolted to her feet in concert with Dylan.
Without pause for even one word of strategic planning, they both
reached down, grabbed Shep by his belt, and hauled him to his feet
between them.
    With the superhuman strength of adrenaline-flushed mothers
lifting overturned automobiles off their trapped babies, they
pulled Shep onto tiptoe and muscled him up the steps, against which
his feet rapped, tapped, scraped, and occasionally even landed on a
tread in such a way as to modestly advance the cause and assist
them with a little upward thrust.
    'Where's all the ice?' Shep asked.
    'Upstairs,' Jilly gasped.
    'Where's all the ice?'
    'Damn it, buddy!'
    'We're almost there,' Jilly encouraged them.
    'Where's all the ice?'
    The first landing loomed.
    Shep hooked the toe of one foot under a tread.
    They maneuvered him over it, onward, up.
    'Where's all the ice?'
    The stained-glass sidelights dissolved in a roar of