Because I was.
Marcone the gangster had been bad enough. Marcone the supernatural power broker had been nerve-racking. Marcone the Knight of the Blackened Denarius was a nightmare I had barely considered.
But it didn’t matter what else you added to it. He was Marcone. And one of these days, he and I would settle things between us.
Maybe today. Right here. It would be a good time for him. I was exhausted after that binding, and he had to know it. If he acted, he could eliminate me and gain the Spear of Destiny and the Eye of Balor, all in an evening. In all this confusion, who was to say what had really happened?
The victor. That’s who.
Marcone hadn’t survived as long as he had without being able to read faces. And from the look on his, he’d figured out what had been going on in my head. I’d seen his small sharklike smile before. But it was more frightening now.
Because I wasn’t standing outside an aquarium. I was in the bloody, desperate water with him. And he was more than large enough to rip me to pieces.
He smiled and stared at with me without blinking while those cold pale green eyes did the math.
Evidently, the numbers didn’t turn out far enough in his favor to suit him.
His smile for a second turned almost human, and he said, “Not today.”
Water lapped on the shore. Shouts and cries and desperate clicks drifted down to us, seemingly from another world.
“Why?” I asked.
For a second, a look of contempt touched his face—but then he became pensive. His fingers came to rest lightly against his chest, and then he regarded me more seriously. “Because I am beginning to learn what it means to think in the long term,” he replied, his voice serious. “And time favors me. You and I will face one another eventually. But for now, I think it best you take the Eye for safekeeping, wizard.”
I scowled. “You’re just yielding the Eye to the White Council?”
“Do I look like a moron? Certainly not,” Marcone said. “To the Wizard of Chicago. This was, after all, your kill. By the terms of the Accords, you deserve first claim.”
“We did it together,” I objected warily.
Marcone’s smile sharpened.
“Prove it,” he purred, “hero.”
He twitched two fingers and vanished behind a veil.
And I sat there in the cold and the damp, exhausted, momentarily safe, and certain in the sinking sensation that the future I was facing had suddenly become about a thousand times more complicated.
Footsteps began to sound in the haze nearby, along with desperate clicking noises.
I grabbed up the Eye and dumped it in my duster’s pocket. Then I reached up and unlatched and unscrewed the dagger from the end of my staff, sticking it back in its sheath at my hip. There was a sense of frustration from the weapon, as I undid it, but the throbbing power behind the blade eased and quieted.
Then I slopped up a veil that would do and shambled back up the rock-and-gravel beach to the street level of the city. I staggered to one side and sat down on a bench and watched as the coalition led by Baron Marcone and the Winter Lady drove the Fomor legions from the field—first in a trickle, and then in a wave.
I was too exhausted to do anything but sit there as the enemy was driven away—and the rest of my team wasn’t much better off than I was. Once the defenders had driven the foe to the waterfront, they staggered to an exhausted stop themselves, casting weary cheers and jeers after the fleeing foe, and swiping with exhausted, halfhearted energy at the enemies who were still fleeing past them.
It was odd seeing citizens of Chicago, armed with baseball bats and shotguns and whatever else had been at hand, standing shoulder to shoulder with armored warriors of Winter, even the high-and-mighty Sidhe, shouting defiance and scorn in unison at the fleeing foe.
And then we all heard it together.
Whupwhupwhupwhupwhupwhupwhupwhup.
We’d all heard choppers coming before. But not like this. This was magnified tenfold over anything I’d heard from the machines. This sounded more like weather.
Our side immediately began withdrawing from the shoreline, and the enemy broke into a desperate sprint for the water. I saw King Corb and his retinue leading the way, mainly because they blasted to death any of their own people too slow to clear their path and leapt over their bodies. They hit the water maybe ten seconds before the cavalry came.
It was just poetry that the broken overcast had begun to lighten out over the lake, and that the first rays of dawn turned the eastern horizon to a band of gold.
The enemy did their best to get away—but the very destruction they’d leveled in order to come ashore laid them bare to the guns of the Apache attack ships that came overhead. Those big cannons under their chins started going chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk-chunk, like a thundercloud playing steel percussion. Explosions started ripping through the Fomor as they tried to flee.
What came next was every bit as hideous and savage and thorough as anything that had happened that evening.
But it was a lot more impersonal.
That cavalry unit swept the “beach” clean. Which was an odd turn of phrase to use, given what a mess they made of it. By the time they were done, everyone there looked like they had gone through a food processor.
I bore witness, too tired to care about the odd clatter of shrapnel that came near. Then I turned my back on it and started slogging my way back toward the Bean.
There would be a lot of people in uniforms asking questions soon. I wanted to get Murph clear of them.
As I walked, a gentle, steady rain began. At first, it almost seemed black—even with what had already fallen, there was so much particulate matter in the air that the rain literally came down muddy. But after a few moments, that lessened, and then the water began to fall clean over the war-torn city.
I stopped for a moment and let it fall over me, too, with my eyes closed.
When I opened them, a pair of large wolves sat on the street in front of me, and I realized they’d been standing guard. The bulkier of the two looked at me with obvious relief. The taller and leaner came and leaned against my side a little.
Will and Georgia had come through okay.
We all walked together toward the Bean.
There were knots of order, here and there, of the city beginning to lurch into motion again as the light began to gather. A group of EMTs and medics had arrived and established a triage station for the injured. They were working frantically to save the wounded defenders of the city. I saw Lamar crouching down beside a dazed-looking Ramirez, pressing a bottle of water into the Warden’s hands as medics bundled Ebenezar onto a stretcher. I saw my grandfather wave a vague, irritated hand at a medic trying to press an oxygen mask over his mouth, and part of me sagged in relief that my friend and the crusty old bastard had survived.