He hit a patch of ice, and we went sideways toward the house on the corner.
I felt his weight leave the ground and we started to tumble in midair. It was going to be an ugly one. Most of a ton of horse and about two hundred and fifty pounds of wizard were going to bounce along the frozen earth together and smash into a building, and there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot I could do about it.
Except that it didn’t happen that way.
As we tumbled, the horse blurred, and suddenly Grey was back, along with a great, slobbering heap of steaming ectoplasm. He grabbed me in midair, pulling my shoulders back hard against his torso, and when we first hit the ground, his body cushioned the shock of impact, taking it on his back instead of on my skull. We bounced and it hurt, spun wildly once, and then slammed into the side of the house about a quarter of a second after all the ectoplasmic goo. Again, Grey took the impact on his body, sparing mine, and I heard bones snapping as he did. Between him, some thick bushes at the base of the house, and the cushion of slime, I came to a bone-jarring, but nonfatal halt.
I pushed myself up and checked on Grey. He was lying in a heap, his eyes closed, his nose and mouth bloody, but still breathing. His chest was grotesquely misshapen, but even as I watched, he inhaled and a couple of ribs seemed to expand back toward a more natural shape. Hell’s bells, that guy could take a beating. And that was me saying that.
“The things . . . I do . . . ,” he rasped, “for . . . Rent money.”
I lifted my head, blearily, to see the big unmarked vans Nicodemus had used for transport at the start of the job turn the corner at the other end of the street and lumber slowly toward Michael’s house.
Grey had gotten me there in time, if only barely.
Of course, now that I was here, the question was what I was going to do about it.
I stood up, calling my veil about myself again. It might not accomplish much, but at least it didn’t take a lot of energy to do it, and I started moving quietly toward the enemy. The Winter Knight’s feet were absolutely soundless on the ice.
My head was killing me, a steady pounding. My arm, ditto, even through the insulation offered by the Winter mantle. Fatigue and hard use had tied knots in my back, and I didn’t know how many more spells I could pull off before I fell over—if any.
So why, I asked myself, was I walking toward the vans, preparing for a fight?
I blamed the Winter mantle, which continually pushed at my inner predator, egging me on to fight, hunt, and kill my way to a solution. There was a time and a place for that kind of thing, but as I watched the vans begin to slow carefully on the icy streets, my sanity told me that it wasn’t here or now. I might be able to drop an explosive fire spell on the vans, but explosions are hardly ever as neat and as thorough as the people who create them hope for—and the effort might just drop me unconscious onto the sleet-coated ground. I could lie there senseless while the survivors murdered my daughter.
Too many variables. Why duke it out with the bad guys when maybe I could grab the Carpenters and Maggie and slip out ahead of them?
So instead of starting a rumble, I kept the veil up and sprinted around the house on the corner, and started leaping fences, moving through backyards to the Carpenter house. I came up to the back door and tried the doorknob. It didn’t move, and I risked a light rap on the glass of the storm door. “Charity!” I said in a hushed, urgent tone. “Charity, it’s me!”
I checked the corners of the house, in case the squires had deployed people on foot, to move through the backyards the way I had. And when I looked back to the storm door, the heavy security door beyond it had been opened and, the twin barrels of a coach gun gaped in front of my eyes.
I dropped my veil in a hurry and held up my hands. I think I said something clever, like “Glurk!”
Charity lowered the shotgun, her blue eyes wide. She was wearing pajamas and one of her handmade tactical coats over them—a layer of titanium mail between two multilayered coats of antiballistic fabric. She had what looked like a Colt Model 1911 in a holster on her hip. “Harry!” she said, and hurriedly opened the storm door.
I hurried in and said, “They’re coming.”
“Michael just called,” she said, nodding, and shut the security door behind me, throwing multiple bolts closed as she did.
“Where are the kids?”
“Upstairs, in the panic room.”
“We’ve got to get them out,” I said.
“Too late,” said a voice from the front room. “They’re here.”
I padded forward intently, and found Waldo Butters crouching by the front windows, staring out. He was wearing his Batman vest with all its magical gadgets, and holding a pump-action shotgun carefully, as if he knew how to use it, but only just.
In the doorway to the kitchen stood Uriel. He was wearing an apron. There was what appeared to be pancake flour staining his shirt. Instead of looking dangerous and absolute, the way an archangel should, he looked slender and a little tired and vulnerable. He didn’t have a gun, but he stood holding a long kitchen knife in competent hands, and there was a quiet balance to his body that would have warned me that he might be dangerous if I hadn’t known him.
Mouse sat next to Uriel, looking extremely serious. His tail thumped twice against the vulnerable archangel’s legs as he saw me.
“Da . . . ,” Charity began, when she saw Uriel. “Darn it,” she continued, her voice annoyed. “You’re supposed to be upstairs with the children.”
“I was fighting wars when this planet was nothing but expanding gasses,” Uriel said.
“You also didn’t leak and die if someone poked a hole in you,” I said.
The angel frowned. “I can help.”
“Help what?” I asked him, drawing the monster revolver from my duster pocket. “Slice up bananas for pancakes? This is a gunfight.”
“Harry,” Butters said urgently.
“Ennghk,” I said in frustration, and went to Butters. “Mouse, stay with him, boy.”
“Woof,” Mouse said seriously. That was obviously the mutt’s plan, but I read somewhere that a good commander never gives an order he knows won’t be obeyed. It therefore stood to reason that he might as well give orders that he knows will be obeyed whenever poss
ible.
“Kill the lights,” I said to Charity.
She nodded. Most of the lights were already out, but a few night-lights that could double as detachable flashlights glowed in power outlets here and there. She went around detaching them, and the interior of the home became darker than the predawn winter light outside.
I moved to Butters’s side and peered out through the translucent drapes while I reloaded my big revolver. I could dimly see squires unloading from the two vans, now parked in front of the house. They carried shotguns and rifles, as they had before.
“Nine,” Butters said quietly, counting gunmen. “Ten. Eleven. Jesus.”
“Keep counting,” I said. “It might matter.”
Butters nodded. “Fourteen. Fifteen. Sixteen? Sixteen.”
“Stay down,” I told everyone. “Stay away from the windows. Don’t let them know anything.”
Someone moved through the dark and crouched quietly next to me. “I called the police already,” Charity said.
“They’re responding to a big emergency,” I replied. “Be a while before they get here.” I noted two pairs of gunmen splitting off from the others, heading around either side of the house. “They’re going around.”
“I’ll take the back,” Charity said.
“You know how to use guns, too, huh?” I asked her.
I saw her teeth gleam in the dimness. “I like hammers and axes better. We’ll know in a minute.”
“Luck,” I said, and she vanished back into the rear of the house.
Michael’s house had been fortified the same way mine had been, with heavy-duty security doors that would resist anything short of breaching charges or the determined use of a ram. With anything like a little luck, they might try the doors, find them tough, and waste some time figuring it out.
But Nicodemus didn’t leave room for luck in his plans. Eight men started carefully toward the front door over the lawn. Two of them were carrying small charges of plastic explosives. Of course, he’d already scoped the place out. Or maybe he just planned to blow the door off its hinges even if it was made of painted paper.