He came to my side, Sword in hand. I turned to the Way, tired to my bones, lifted my staff and muttered, “Disperd—”
And a black shadow hurtled through the Way, hitting me like a truck.
I was watching for trouble and ready. Michael was ready. Either we were both wearier than we realized, or the shadow moved with such speed that neither of us had a chance to react. Or both.
The impact spun me around in a circle and dumped me on the ground with my everything hurting and my elbows tangled with my scapulae.
I jerked my head up blearily, raising my arms in a defensive gesture, to see that the streak of shadow had whooshed to the far end of Marcone’s vault, to its main door.
Nicodemus rose up out of the swirl of shadow. He looked pale and awful, his eyes sunken with pain, but he held himself straight. His sword was sheathed again, and he still carried the Holy Grail negligently in one hand. Moving with obvious stiffness and pain, he twisted a handle that opened the main door of the vault from the inside. The door swung open when he pushed.
Then he looked directly at me and quite calmly snapped the handle off at its base.
“Dresden,” Nicodemus said. There was something furious and horrible in his eyes—I could see it, even from there. “From one father to another,” he called. “Well played.”
I felt my eyes widen. “Stop him!” I blurted and flung myself to my feet.
Michael started running. Grey blurred toward the far end of the vault, moving at speeds one normally associates with low-flying aircraft.
None of us got there in time to stop Nicodemus from letting out a harsh, bitter laugh, and slamming the huge door closed.
I ran to the other end of the vault anyway, or mostly ran, breathing hard. Anna Valmont stayed beside me, still carrying her tool roll.
“God!” I said. I tried what was left of the handle, but couldn’t get a grip on it. The vault door had locked, shutting us in. I slammed a shoulder against the door, but it wasn’t moving, and I wasn’t sure I could have blasted it open even if I’d been fresh. “Michael, did you hear what he said?”
“I heard,” Michael said grimly.
“How could he know?”
“You told him,” Michael replied quietly. “When you taunted him about Deirdre. You said things only another father would know to say.”
I let out a groan, because Michael was right. Once Nicodemus had realized that I was a father, it was not too much of a stretch to identify the dark-haired, dark-eyed little girl who had suddenly appeared at Michael’s house, a place that I knew damned well Nicodemus would surveil, even if he couldn’t use his pet shadow to do it. And she had appeared there immediately after my insane assault on the Red Court and my apparent death, to boot. It wasn’t hard to figure.
Nicodemus might not be able to walk onto Michael’s property—but he had an entire dysfunctional posse of squires with assault rifles and shotguns who could, and he was filled with the pain of losing his daughter.
Maggie was there. So were Michael’s children. So was a defenseless archangel.
“He’s going to your house,” I breathed. “He’s going after our families.”
Forty-eight
“Get back,” Anna Valmont said sharply, and knelt to flick her tool roll open on the ground in front of the broken handle. “Dresden, get out of my way.”
I moved aside and said, “Hurry, hurry, hurry.”
She started jerking tools out of the roll. “I know.”
“Hurry.”
“I know.”
“Can’t you just cut it open?”
“It’s a vault door, Dresden, not a bicycle chain,” Valmont snapped. She gave Michael an exasperated look and jerked her head toward me.
Michael looked like he wanted to tell her to hurry, too, but he said, “Let her work, Harry.”
“Won’t be long,” she promised.
“Dammit,” I said, dancing from one foot to the next.
“Dresden?” Grey asked.
“What?”
A chorus of moaning wails echoed through the vault as if from a great distance.
Grey pursed his lips. “Should that Way be standing open like that?”
I whipped my head around and stared at the Way. The only light on the other side came from the Way itself, but that was just enough to show me a huge figure step to the Way. Its hairy kneecap was level with my sternum. Then it knelt down, and a huge, ugly humanoid face with a monobrow and one enormous eye in the center of its forehead peered hungrily at me.
I gripped my staff and drew together my will. “Just once I want something go according to plan,” I snarled. “Disperdorius.”
Energy left me in a dizzying wave, and the outline of the Way folded in on itself and vanished, taking the cyclops with it. I turned from the collapsing Way back to the vault door, even before the light show had finished playing out.
There was a little phunt sound, followed by a hissing, and I turned to find Valmont holding a miniature welding torch of some kind, hooked to a pair of little tanks by rubber hoses. She passed a steel-shafted screwdriver to Grey and said, “I need an L-shape.”
Grey grunted, took the thing in both hands, and narrowed his eyes. Then, with an abrupt movement and a blur in the shape of his forearms, he bent the screwdriver’s shaft to a right angle.
“Slide it inside the socket where he broke it off, here, and hold it,” she said.
Grey did. Valmont slid a strip of metal of some kind into the hole, held a little square of dark plastic up to protect her vision from the brilliant light of the torch, and sparks started to fly up from the door. She worked on it for about five hundred years that probably fit inside a couple of minutes, and then the torch started running out of fuel and faltered.
“Hold it still,” she said. “Okay, let go.”
Grey released the screwdriver’s handle, which now stuck out of the original fitting in approximately the same attitude as the original handle.
“Do it. Let’s go,” I said.
“No,” Valmont snapped. “These materials aren’t proper and I’m none too sanguine about that braze. We’ve got to let it cool or you’ll only break it off and I haven’t the fuel for a second try. Sixty seconds.”
“Dammit,” I said, pacing back and forth. “Okay, when we get out, I’m heading for the house as fast as I can get there. Michael, I want you to get to a phone and—”
“I’m going with you,” Michael said.
I turned to face him and said in a brutally flat, practical tone, “Your leg is hurt. You’ll slow me down.”
His jaw clenched. A muscle twitched. But he nodded.
“And you’ll need to help the others get clear of the bank. Hopefully without getting shot to pieces on the way. Get clear, find a phone and warn Charity. Maybe she’ll have time to get them to the panic room.”
“He’ll burn the house down around them,” Michael said quietly.
“Like hell he will,” I said. “Follow along as quick as you can.”
He nodded. Then, silently, he offered me the hilt of Amoracchius.
“Can’t take that from you,” I said.
“It’s not mine, Harry,” he said. “I just kept it for a while.”
I put my fingers on the hilt, and then shook my head and pushed it back toward him. The Sword had tremendous power—but it had to be used with equally tremendous care, and I had neither the background nor the disposition for it. “Murphy knew she shouldn’t have been using Fidelacchius, but last night she drew it anyway and now it’s gone. I’m no genius. But I learn eventually.”
Michael smiled at me a little. “You’re a good man, Harry. But you’re making the same mistake Nicodemus always has—and the same one Karrin did.”
“What mistake?”