status quo until recently. The enchantress who had made them, Warden Luccio, had lost her capacity to create them when Corpsetaker had swapped her into the body of a young woman with very little natural inclination toward magic. As a result, most of the new Wardens, starting with me, didn’t have a groovy sword. Which meant that most of the Wardens didn’t carry swords any longer.
But that impression, apparently, hadn’t trickled down to street level yet.
Things started happening very quickly.
Aristedes produced his knife, a wicked-looking number with a lot of extraneous points on it—an interpretation of a bowie knife, as done by H. R. Giger.
Daniel Carpenter had evidently noticed Fitz’s behavior and deduced its meaning. He dragged both Fitz and Butters behind him with a sweep of his brawny arms and positioned himself between them and the sorcerer, his hands up in a defensive martial arts stance.
Butters let out a yelp as his ass hit the cold concrete floor.
Fitz took the fall and rolled, his eyes wide with terror as he regained his feet and started to run.
“You are all dead men,” Aristedes snarled.
And then he blurred forward, almost too quickly to be seen, the knife gleaming in his hand.
Chapter Thirty-eight
Aristedes was nothing more than a streak in the air as he closed on Daniel, slamming into him, knocking him back. As Daniel fell, that wicked knife gleamed and whipsawed back and forth half a dozen times in the space of a second, striking Daniel in the chest and belly on every blow.
Anyone other than Michael and Charity Carpenter’s son would have been gutted like a fish.
The kid had gotten some serious training—maybe from Murphy, maybe from the Einherjaren, maybe from his father. Probably from all of them. I’m not a professional when it comes to hand-to-hand combat, of the supernatural variety or otherwise, but I know enough to know how little I know. And one of the things I know is that you don’t just decide to time your moves a second in advance to compensate for a lack of supernatural speed. You have to learn that stuff, to build it into your reflexes with weeks or months of painstaking practice.
Daniel had.
He started rolling with the slashes of the knife before Aristedes had fully closed the distance, even as he stumbled backward from the force of the sorcerer’s initial impact. The knife bit into his chest and belly—and found armor waiting for it.
Beneath his winter coat, Daniel was wearing a garment I recognized as Charity’s handiwork: a double-thick Kevlar vest with a coat of thick titanium rings sandwiched in between the layers of ballistic cloth. Kevlar could stop bullets, but it didn’t do squat for blades. That was what the titanium mail was for.
Sparks flew up in rapid succession as the knife struck armor. The impact sounded like someone hitting a side of beef with a baseball bat, but Daniel’s body was in motion, giving in with each of the blows, robbing them of the most savage portion of their power. The knife never touched his skin.
Aristedes came to a stop after that blinding-fast combination of attacks and crouched, his arm out to one side, parallel to the ground, the knife gripped hard in it. He looked like an extra in a martial arts movie—the goober.
Daniel turned his backward momentum into a roll and came up on his feet. It didn’t look very graceful, but he was obviously in control of the motion, and he dropped into a fighting crouch about twenty feet from the sorcerer. One hand went into his hip pocket and came out with a simple folding lock knife with a black plastic handle. With his thumb he snapped out a blade maybe four inches long and held the weapon tucked in close to his body, point toward Aristedes. He jerked the cloak off his back, and with a few flicks of his arm wrapped the heavy material around his left forearm. Then he held his left hand a little in front of him, palm down, fingers loose—ready to block or grab.
Aristedes had a good poker face, but for the moment, I didn’t have anything to do except watch what was going on, and I knew his type. The sorcerer hadn’t been psychologically prepared for Daniel’s reaction. The stupid bruiser was supposed to be bleeding on the floor, maybe begging for his life. At the very least, he should have been running, terrified, but instead, the very large young man had apparently shrugged off the deadly