An amused Patrick grins back. "Don't worry about it, kid. These guys have never needed help when it comes to killing people." The last is said with a little less amusement. Sometimes their 'talents' had been a good thing, sometimes a very bad thing indeed. And the bad memories were still very bad ones. He's serious when he adds. "They just took us by surprise this time, that's all."

After years of thinking it was all over, they'd relaxed their guard. And the cult had sent an assassin, a human woman with a gun, while the puppets had been away and unable to protect their master. None of the puppets are ever going to let that happen again.

Rick just sighs. Even before then, in all the time he'd had the puppets... they hadn't directly caused any human deaths. Ok, there'd been Jennings, but he'd fallen down an elevator shaft backing away from them.

Even the mummified undead cultists and whatever sort of golem-ish things the Totems were had quit coming around after the first few years. And while he knows the puppets have killed people before, to the point of having been given a rundown of their history via typed messages in the first year he'd had them... If things are about to get bloody again, he's not sure he's up to it. He's never had to kill a living person before, and it's easier to justify mummies or not-quite-knee-high razor-clawed life-sucking monsters. It's not that he's sorry the woman who attacked them is dead, either. Not after she shot Susie twice and shot him four times. But the months spent in physical therapy so far haven't made him have less of a feeling of impending dread about just what's going to go down if they go back.

Starting with that probably-still-fresh-due-to-timeline-weirdness corpse back at the hotel. Crap. Hopefully the police haven't gotten involved yet.