Fifty
I stepped up to the door with my staff in hand just as the three men hurled the bottles of vodka, pointed the staff, and snarled, “Infriga!”
Icy air screamed. The bottles soared up toward the house and hit the roof with a number of dull thunks, then came rattling back down to fall to the lawn, glass cracking, their contents frozen solid.
A number of things happened, all at once.
Tessa let out a hellish screech. She lifted a hand toward me, gathering power in her palm, but as she released it, Nicodemus seized her arm and directed the blast straight up into the air.
Squires started shooting at me. A bullet smacked into my duster over my left lung and hit me like a fist, spinning me to one side.
Mouse hurtled toward the rear of the house.
And, as I fell, Mab’s earring burst, the two pieces flying out of my ear in different directions and bouncing off the walls of the entry hall, and all the pain in the universe came crashing down on me at the same time.
Dimly, I heard Butters calling my name. Bullets hit the entry hall and the doorway and darted past me in spiteful, hissing whispers to thwack into the stairs behind me. I lay there in a stupor of pain, and another round hit my duster again, and then Butters was hauling me out of the doorway by main force.
I tried to care about other things that were happening, but mostly I was trying to work up enough energy to curl up into a defensive fetal position—and failing.
“Harry!” Butters screamed, propping me up. “Harry, get up! They’re coming back!”
“Burn it!” Tessa shrieked. “Burn them! Burn them all!”
“Harry!” Butters howled. “Do something!”
I didn’t have enough left in me to contort my face.
“Oh, God,” Butters said. “OhGodohGodohGod . . .”
And that was when I saw Waldo Butters choose to be a hero.
He looked up the stairs, toward where the children were hidden. Then he looked out toward the men outside. Then he hardened his jaw.
And with businesslike motions, he stripped me out of my leather duster. He put it on. The sleeves were too long and it was grotesquely oversized, but I had to admit that he got a lot more coverage out of the thing than I ever did.
“Bob,” he said.
Glowing lights surged up out of one of the pouches on his Batman vest, dancing nervously in the slowly growing light of dawn. “Yeah, boss?”
“We’re going in.”
“Uh . . .”
“If anything happens to me,” he said, “I want you to head back to the skull. Tell Andi everything you saw. Tell her I said to get you to someone responsible. And tell her that I said that I loved her. Okay?”
“Boss,” Bob said, his voice subdued. “You sure about this?”
“There’s nobody else here,” Butters said quietly. “Harry’s down. Charity’s been captured. We can’t risk Uriel’s demise. And if we wait for help, they’ll burn the kids to death while we wring our hands.”
“But . . . you aren’t up for this. You can’t possibly beat them.”
“Gotta try,” Butters said.
“You’ll die trying,” Bob said. “And it won’t make any difference.”
“I’ve got to believe that it will,” he said. “Maybe I can slow them down until some real help gets here.”
“Oh,” Bob said, his voice very small.
“You ready?” Butters asked. “Can you access the duster?”
“Sure. I tutored Harry on these spells.”
“Keep the bullets off me for as long as you can,” Butters said.
“Got it,” Bob said. “Let’s give ’em hell, boss.”
“That’s the spirit,” Butters said. He took a deep breath, and then put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t worry, Harry. You’ve done enough. I got this.”
I wanted to scream at Butters not to go, not to throw his life away—to go get the kids and try to run. It would have been just as hopeless, but he might not realize that. And at least they’d die with bullets in them instead of being burned to death. But I couldn’t move, or think or do anything else. The pain was simply too great. It wasn’t a headache now. It was a worldache. I didn’t have a broken arm anymore—I didn’t have a body at all. I just had pain.
But I started crying as Waldo Butters stood up, rolled the sleeves of my duster up until his hands could reach out of them, grabbed a couple of things from his vest, flung something on the floor of the porch and went out the door.
The first globe he’d hurled down released a sudden, brief cloud of opaque smoke that went roiling out in all directions, and guns began firing outside.
No, dammit.
No.
I couldn’t let things end like this. Butters was a friend, and too good a man to let die while I lay on the floor unable to go to his aid.
I fought to rise, but my arms and legs couldn’t hear me through the pain. Again, I struggled, throwing up every mental shield I could against the agony, and this time I managed to shift my weight, and fall heavily onto my side. My cheek lay on the floor and I found myself staring along it, down the hall toward the back of the house, past the dining room where I’d struggled with the squires who invaded . . . and where the remnants of Fidelacchius had been carefully set on the dining room table.
The table had been jarred in the fight. The broken hilt of the Sword of Faith had fallen and rolled toward the front of the house. It was only a few feet away from me.
Could it be?
When the Knights of the Blackened Denarius set out to wreak harm, the Swords were there to oppose them. The Sword of Faith was no more. But that did not mean that the power that guided the Swords could not find another means of expressing itself. I’d seen Charity Carpenter rely upon her faith when Molly was in danger before. How much deeper would it be now, with her home and family in peril?
Maybe Michael was right about the Sword. If he was, there was still a chance.
And I had to believe that. People I loved were going to die. I had to believe that there was hope.
Hope lets you do things you would otherwise never be able to do, gives strength when everything is darkest. In that moment, maybe it helped me—because I forced my nerve endings to respond and dragged myself toward the hilt of the Sword, clenching my teeth in sheer defiance of the agony supplanting my existence. It felt like it took forever before my fingers settled on the wooden grip of the Sword, but by the time I finally reached it, and turned back to the door, Butters had only at that moment reached the front gate. My duster whirled and swirled around him like a living thing, orange light playing along the normally invisible black runes I’d tattooed into the leather, the mantle flaring up wildly like a cobra’s hood.
Half a dozen squires stood stupefied and confused in dissipating clouds of memory mist, and of the others who were moving, only one had a clean shot at Butters. But the little guy’s hand pointed and an orange flicker danced out, a thin line wrapping around the barrel of the gunman’s weapon and holding fast. Butters heaved, shouting, and hauled the rifle out of the man’s hands. The cord released the gun in a glitter of orange light and slithered back up Butters’s sleeve.
And then, before any of the scrambling gunmen could get a clear shot at him, Butters hurdled the Carpenters’ little fence and smashed into Tessa in a tackle that, if not exactly physically impressive, was dynamic as hell.
The impact tore the pint-sized Tessa loose from Charity, and the emaciated Denarian let out a furious squall and went down under Butters’s weight.
Nicodemus drew his sword and thrust it at Butters’s back, but the flying folds of my leather duster slapped the blade aside. Butters wasn’t much of a fighter, but he was game. He screamed and slammed his head down into Tessa’s.
Then she lifted her hand and shouted something, and there was a crash of sound, a flash of light.
Butters flew off of her and landed six feet away, sprawled and dazed on the icy street. I could see blood running from one of his ears. He made a vague, spreading gesture with one hand, and Bob’s trail of campfire sparks emerged from the duster and soared away in the general direction of Butters’s apartment.
“What was that?” Tessa demanded, her tone furious as she came back to her feet.
“A detail,” Nicodemus said, his tone harsh. “Stupid, but brave, little man. Nice try.” He stepped over to Butters and raised his sword. Butters clenched his jaw and raised his hand in a hopeless defensive gesture. He knew what was coming—what had to come. But though his face was ghostly white, his eyes were steady, unflinching.
He’d made his choice, and he would accept the consequences of his actions.
And for that moment, everyone out there was looking at Nicodemus and Butters—and no one was looking at Michael Carpenter’s wife.
Hope gave me a last burst of strength.