Seize the Night

Bobby or at me, but at the glass panels in the four doors of a display cabinet, bashing each pane with the baton, and then he tore open one of the doors and, with the stick, swept out the Royal Worcester china, the Evesham set of which my mother had been so fond.
    Saucers, cups, bread plates, salad plates, a gravy boat, a butter dish, a sugar-and-cream set crashed onto the countertop and from there to the floor, porcelain shrapnel pinging off the dishwasher, singing off chair legs and cabinetry. The microwave oven was next to the display cabinet, and he hammered the club into it, once, twice, three times, four times, but the view window was evidently made of Plexiglas or something, because it didn't shatter, though the club switched on the oven and programmed the timer, and if we'd had the foresight to put a bag of Orville Redenbacher's finest in the microwave earlier, we could have enjoyed popcorn by the time Manuel had worked off his rage. He plucked a steel teapot off the stove and pitched it across the room, grabbed the toaster and threw it to the floor even as the teapot was still bouncing around— tonk, tonk, tonk —with the manic energy of a battered icon in a video game. He kicked the toaster, and it tumbled across the floor, squeaking as though it were a terrified little dog, trailing its cord like a tail, and then he was done.
    He stood in the center of the kitchen, shoulders slumped, head thrust forward, eyelids as heavy as if he had just woken from a deep sleep, mouth slack, breathing heavily. He looked around as though slightly confused, as though he were a bull wondering where the hell that infuriating red cape had gone.
    Throughout Manuel's destructive frenzy, I expected to see the demonic yellow light shimmer through his eyes, but I never caught a glimpse of it. Now there was smoldering anger in his gaze, and confusion, and a wrenching sadness, but if he was becoming something less than human, he wasn't far enough devolved to exhibit eye shine.
    The nameless deputy watched cautiously through eyes as dark as the windows in an abandoned house, but Frank Feeney's eyes were brighter than those of Halloween pumpkins, full of fiery menace. Although this uncanny glimmer was not constant, coming and going and coming again, the savagery that it betokened burned as steady as a watch fire.
    Feeney was backlit by the dining-room chandelier, and with his face in shadows, his eyes at times glowed as if the light from the next room were passing straight through his skull and radiating from his sockets.
    I had been afraid that Manuel's violence would trigger outbursts in the deputies, that all three men were becoming, and that a rapidly accelerating dementia would seize them, whereupon Bobby and I would be surrounded by the high-biotech equivalent of a pack of werewolves in the grip of bloodlust. Because we had foolishly neglected to acquire necklaces of wolfsbane or silver bullets, we would be forced to defend ourselves with my mother's tarnished sterling tea service, which would have to be unpacked from a box in the pantry and perhaps even polished with Wright's silver cream and a soft cloth to be sufficiently lethal.
    Now it appeared that Feeney was the only threat, but a werewolf with a loaded revolver is a lycanthrope of a different caliber, and one like him could be as deadly as an entire pack. He was shaking, glistening with sweat, inhaling with a coarse rasp, exhaling with a thin and eager whine of need. In his excitement, he had bitten his lip, and his teeth and chin were red with his own blood. He held the gun with both hands, aiming it at the floor, while his mad eyes seemed to be looking for a target, his attention flicking from Manuel to me, to the second deputy, to Bobby, to me, to Manuel again, and if Feeney decided that we were all targets, he might be able to kill the four of us even as he was cut down by his fellow officers' return fire.
    I realized that Manuel was talking to Feeney and to the other deputy.
    The pounding of my heart had temporarily deafened me. His voiced faded in,“… we're done here, we're finished, finished with these bastards, come on, Frank, Harry, come on, that's it, come on, these scumbags aren't worth it, let's go, back to work, out of here, come on.”
    Manuel's voice seemed to soothe Feeney, like the rhythmic lines of a prayer, a litany in which his responses were recited silently rather than spoken. The bale fire continued to pass in and out of his eyes, though it was