breaks sharkface despair

“Kill it,” Mac repeated, his voice harder. “It’s only the first.”
“Yes,” Sharkface said, tilting its head almost to the perpendicular. “Kill it. And more will come. Destroy me and they will know. Leave me and they will know. Your breaths are numbered, wizard.”
As it spoke, I could feel a horrible, hopeless weight settling across my heart. Dammit, hadn’t I been through enough? More than enough? Hadn’t my life handed me enough misery and grief and pain and loneliness already? And now I was going to be up against something else, something new and scary, something that came galumphing at me by the legion, no less. What was the point? No matter what I did, no matter how much stronger or smarter or better connected I got, the bad guys just kept getting bigger and stronger and more numerous.
Behind me, I heard Mac let out a low groan. The shotgun must have fallen from his fingers, because it clattered on the floor. On my left, I saw Thomas’s shoulders slump, and he turned his face away, his eyes closed as if in pain.
The people who stayed near me got hurt or killed. As often as not, the bad guys got away to come embadden my life another day. Why deal with a life like that?
Why did I keep on doing this to myself?
“Because,” I growled under my breath. “You’re Charlie Brown, stupid. You’ve got to try for the damned football because that’s who you are.”
And just like that, the psychic assault of despair that Sharkface had sent into my head evaporated, and I could think clearly again. I hadn’t felt the cloying, somehow oily power slithering up to me—but I could sure as hell feel it now as it recoiled and pulled away. I’d felt it before—and I suddenly knew what I was dealing with.
Sharkface jerked its head toward me, and its mouth opened in shock. For a frozen instant, we stared at each other across maybe fifteen feet of cluttered pub. It seemed to last for hours. Thomas and Mac were both motionless, reaching out for physical supports as though drunk or bearing a heavy burden. They wouldn’t be able to get themselves out of the building in their current condition—but I didn’t have any choice.
Sharkface and its sackcloth cloak flung half a ton of furniture at me about a quarter of a second after I raised my right hand and snarled, “Fuego!”


Cold Days Chapter 22, Page 222-223