"And Thus Be It Ever...."
Flaming radiation from the crystal seared a livid path across the room. Duane gasped and tumbled to the floor, hands clawing futilely at his own harness, now stripped of all defensive weapons, rolled and pulled to his knees, trying to close the gap between himself and his attacker before the maddened German could spear him on that lethal ray.
But if Steve was weaponless, another was not. A cry of burning rage burst from the lips of the Lady Loala, and a whirring something whispered a threnody of death across the room as she whipped a small, jeweled dagger from her side, hurled it at von Rath.
Too hastily she threw. The poniard missed its mark. But in ducking away, the one-time Nazi spy caught the whirling impact of the dagger's pommel on his right wrist. His crystalline weapon flew from nerveless fingers, skittered across the floor, rays of death still spuming from its orifice.
Duane needed but that one moment. With a leap and a bound he was upon the man to whom he had promised death should ever again they meet.
Von Rath, scrambling after his fallen weapon on all fours, swiveled in time to see unleashed vengeance crashing toward him. He forgot the crystal then, and with a shrill cry of panic turned to flee.
But he never reached the door. Steve caught him first. And there was inexorable certainty in the settling of his hands about the German's throat.
"This I promised you, von Rath," he roared. "It comes late, but at last it comes!"
And his fingers tightened.
What von Rath screamed in those last moments, Duane did not know nor ever was to learn. Perhaps his last breath cursed the fellow Slumberer whose hands with dreadful certainty crushed the breath of life from his lungs. Perhaps in that last moment the son of pagan Germany voiced futile pleas to a forgotten God. Whatever his words, they found no hearkening ear. Steve's great hands tightened till a darkness thickened the traitor's veins, and his tongue thrust from gasping lips. Tightened until hoarse rawls choked into silence and the body before him became a dead weight beneath his grasp.