He snapped his fingers and the world around us shimmered. I steeled myself, reaching to the Vestments for the same suit of armor I’d used to fight both Quilliam and Mammon. I hadn’t forgotten about Greed, either. It was only a matter of time until it showed up to crash the party.

“Where are you taking us?” I said, glancing around me, backing slowly away.

Quill shook his head. “No where. We’re right where we were, out on a sidewalk in Valero. Only this way, the normals don’t get to see us.” Quilliam’s teeth gleamed in the sunlight when he smirked at me. “And the Lorica won’t, either.”

He’d put up a cloaking shield, then, one that would keep us hidden from the normals. Yet it also meant that the Lorica couldn’t be alerted to the magical essences we’d release during our fight. Both a good and a bad thing. I didn’t want the Lorica on my ass any more than Quill did, but if it came down to fighting dirty – and knowing Quill, this fight was going to be extra filthy –

“I don’t like where this is going,” Florian muttered.

“Me neither,” I said. “But Quill’s a magus. Just another mage. Knife in the throat will end him just fine.”

Quilliam threw his head back and laughed. “It will, will it? I suppose you aren’t wrong. It’d be prudent for me to stack things in my favor. Again, two against one is hardly fair.” He gestured with both hands, then spread them apart, filaments of magic trailing after his fingers. “Libris grandia.”

The air around us shimmered again, and I waited for the inevitable swarm of demons that Quilliam had summoned. But the things that appeared weren’t demons. In fact, they weren’t humanoid at all.

“What the hell?” Florian said, totally taken off guard. “They’re just books.”

About half a dozen of them, each floating in midair, rotating like rocks spinning through empty space. They rustled with the soft crackle of parchment and aged leather, the flipping of their pages like the sighs of old, dead scribes.

A bunch of books? That was it? I changed my mind about the suit of armor, reaching instead into the Vestments for a trusty sword. The warmth of divine steel felt good in my hand, my fingers gripping tightly around the sword’s hilt.

“Some dictionaries,” I said, scoffing. I slashed at the closest book, cutting easily through its pages and its spine, watching with relish as it fluttered to the ground, useless. “Seriously, Quill? What are you going to do with these, bore us to death?”

I should have known something was off from the way Quilliam was smiling. He gestured once more. When he spoke his words of power, they came as a whisper.

“Ignis grandia.”

The five remaining books stopped spinning, spreading themselves open and turning precisely towards me. From the depths of their pages roared five enormous gouts of guttering fire.

Ah, nuts.

11

Here’s that tired old cliché of time slowing down, or at least seeming to, in moments of truest danger. My life did not, however, flash before my eyes. Eighteen years doesn’t seem like much to anyone who isn’t eighteen years old, I suppose, but it still didn’t matter. I didn’t feel sad, or regretful, or remorseful of anything I’d done in my life.

What I wanted to do in that moment was crush Quilliam’s throat in my own two hands. What I felt was my blood boiling as hot as the fire threatening to scorch my skin and flesh completely off my bones. I could smell the fire, too, or rather the absence of its scent, the way the flames burned everything so cleanly in the air between me and the pages of Quilliam’s accursed books. It smelled like nothing, like how the afterlife must smell.

To an outsider, summoning and engaging the Vestments seems like something that happens instantaneously. I’m here to tell you that this simply isn’t true. It takes time for me to decide on what piece of gear to requisition. In light of that, I should recant my previous statement. I did have one regret. I should have summoned an entire suit of armor, damn it.

And besides, would suiting up in full armor even protect me from five jets of arcane flame? I would have been roasted alive either way. The armor might even speed up the process, the equivalent of pouring myself into a cake pan. I closed my eyes and waited for death, the roar of fire so much louder than Florian’s screams.

Then, through the skin of my eyelids, came a flash of golden light. My eyes fluttered open in time to see a golden hand reach for my throat, clutching me by the collar of my shirt. A second hand reached for Beatrice Rex’s pink bag – what I then realized was Quilliam’s actual target. I reached for the bag as the golden hand hurled it towards the flames, but a pressure in the center of my chest took me off my feet.

I landed heavily on my ass, dull pain shooting up my spine as my tailbone connected with the cement. I finally understood what had happened. A man in a full suit of gold armor had pushed me out of the path of the flames, the point where the five streams intersected. The golden knight threw himself across me, covering me with his body.

Beatrice’s bag and all the jars of wine that Florian had so painstakingly brewed spun in midair ever so briefly before the fires ate through the enchanted leather, silk lining and all. An ungodly crack split the air, my ears, and my skull, and the world turned a terrible shade of brilliant, life-ending orange.

I shouldn’t have survived that explosion. The white-hot blast that burst from the center of the five flames was fueled by fifty jars of highly flammable material, but it was the catastrophic act of utterly destroying a magical artifact that really gave it that extra face-melting punch.

A massive, horrible groan issued from where Beatrice’s prized handbag used to be, the sound of the pocket dimension built into it imploding. The fires that were just seconds ago threatening to destroy everything under Quilliam’s dome of force were receding into the collapsing dimension, sucked hopelessly into a spherical vortex of furious, swirling void. My fingers dug into the ground, desperate for purchase as the vacuum pulled harder, this time tugging at my entire body.

“Stab it,” the golden knight told me.

“Raziel?” I said. “Is that you?”

He lifted the visor of his helmet. “Well, who the hell else did you think it was? No time to talk. Just stab it.”

Raziel didn’t even give me time to answer. He rolled off me, allowing the vortex to pull even more forcefully. The wind tore at me, shearing through my clothes and my hair. The hell was he doing? Stab it, he said, as if that was even going to work. Only one way to find out.

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