Cold Days

one of those shapes got hit with a slap of force that would have rocked a car up onto two wheels, and that one went soaring away.

But the other forty or fifty crashed down onto my field of ice like cannonballs, smashing through in most places, in some only sending wide cracks through the ice. When that happened, the copies of Sharkface just started tearing it apart with their claws. Thick ice is no joke as an obstacle—unless you’re a Walker of the Outside, I guess, because these things ripped it apart like it was Styrofoam.

There were so damned many of them. I started slamming more of them, but it was heavy work, and there were just too many targets. While some of them ripped apart the remaining ice, others began to tear apart the iceberg and the tugboat, rending them into scrap with an inexorable strength and claws like steel knives. I might have hit seven or eight of them, but it just didn’t matter. I was the wrong tool for the job, so to speak. This was a much larger problem, and I had no idea how to solve it.

The chanting on the barge rolled upward an octave, gaining frenzied volume. Outsiders thrashed through the water, pushing the barge, surging ahead of it to push pulverized chunks of ice out of its way, their howls and weird clicks and ululations like their own horrible music. Other Outsiders came rushing toward me, on the shore—only to smash uselessly against the glowing barrier of Demonreach’s curtain wall. They couldn’t get to me. Which seemed fair enough, because I couldn’t seem to get to them, either. I’d slowed them down, cost them maybe a couple of minutes, and that was all.

The water near me stirred and then a Sharkface rose up out of it as if on an elevator, slow, his mouth tilted up into a small smile. He stood there on the water perhaps five feet away from me. His eyeless face looked smug.

“Warden,” he said.

“Asshat,” I replied.

That only made his smile wider. “The battle is over. You have failed. But you need not be destroyed this day.”

“You’re kidding,” I said. “You’re trying to recruit me?”

“The offer is made,” the Walker said. “We always appreciate new talent.”

“I’m no one’s puppet,” I said.

The Walker actually barked out a short laugh. “At what point have you been anything else?”

“You can forget it,” I said. “I’m not working for you.”

“Then a truce,” Sharkface said. “We do not need you to fight our battles for us. But if you stand aside, we will accord you respect and leave you in peace. You and those you love. Take them to a safe, quiet place. Stay there. You will not be molested.”

“My boss might not go along with this plan,” I said.

“After tonight, Mab will no longer be a concern to anyone.”

I was going to say something badass and cool but . . .

Take the people I love somewhere. Take Maggie. Somewhere safe. Somewhere without mad Queens or insane Sidhe. And just get out of this entire thankless, painful, hideous business. Wizarding just isn’t what it used to be. Not so many years ago, I’d think it was a busy week if someone asked me to locate a lost dog or a wedding ring. It had been horribly boring. I’d had lots and lots of free time. I hadn’t been rich, but I’d gotten to buy plenty of books to read, and I’d never gone hungry. And no one had tried to kill me, or asked me to make a horrible choice. Not once.

You never know what you have until it’s gone.

Peace and quiet and people I love. Isn’t that what everyone wants?

Ah, hell.

The Outsider probably wasn’t good for it anyway. And I did have one more option.

I had been warned not to use the power of the Well. But . . .

What else did I have?

I might have done something extra stupid at that moment if the air hadn’t suddenly filled with a massive sound. Two loud, horrible crunching sounds, followed by a single, short, sharp clap of thunder. It repeated the sequence, again and again. Crunch, crunch, crack. Crunch, crunch, crack.

No, wait. I knew this song.

It was more like: stomp, stomp, clap. Stomp, stomp, clap.

What else did I have?

I had friends.

I looked up at Sharkface, who was scanning the lake’s surface, an odd expression twisting his unsettling face.

I smiled widely and said, “You didn’t see this coming, didja?”

STOMP, STOMP, CLAP!

STOMP, STOMP, CLAP!

This was somebody’s mix version of the song, because it went straight to the chorus of voices, pure, human voices, loud enough to shake the ground—and I lifted my arms and sang along with them.

“Singin’ we will, we will rock you!”

The Halloween sky exploded with strobes of scarlet and blue light, laser streaks of white and viridian flickering everywhere, forming random, flickering impressions of objects and faces, filling the sky with light that pulsed in time with the music.

And as it did, the Water Beetle, the entire goddamned ship, exploded out from under a veil that had rendered it and the water it had displaced and every noise it had made undetectable not only to me, but to a small army of otherworldly monstrosities and their big, bad Walker general, too.

The Walker let out another furious shriek, his hideous features twisted even more by the frenetic explosion of light in the sky, and that was all he had time to do—the Water Beetle slammed into the last barge at full speed.

The mass differential between the two ships was significant—but this was different from when the barge had hit my iceberg. For one thing, it was almost entirely still, having only barely begun to pick up speed again. For another, the Water Beetle didn’t hit it head-on. Instead, it struck the barge from the side, and right up by its nose. With less than ten yards to spare before the barge’s prow ground up onto Demonreach’s shore, the Water Beetle brutally slammed her nose away from contacting the power of the outgoing ley line.

I couldn’t hear the collision over the thunder of Queen’s greatest hit, but it flung objects all over both ships around with the impact—more so on the Beetle than on the barge. The barge wallowed, stunned, its nose turned away from the beach, its long side being presented to the island, while the Water Beetle rebounded violently, drunkenly, and crunched up onto her hull in the shallows, listing badly to one side.

Mac and Molly were up at the wheel. She had nearly been thrown from the craft, but Mac had grabbed my apprentice around the waist and kept her from getting a flying lesson. I’m not sure she even noticed. Her face was contorted in a concentration so deep, it was practically dementia, her lips moving frantically, and she held a wand in either hand, moving them in entirely disconnected movements, as if directing two different orchestras through two different speed-metal medleys.

And as I watched, two other forms bounded up onto the Water Beetle’s rail, then into graceful leaps that carried them over onto the barge—directly into the center of the ritual that was still running at a frantic pitch.

Thomas had gone into the fight with his favorite combination of weapons—a sword and a pistol. Even as I watched, my brother whirled into a mass of figures on the deck, blade spinning, blood flying out in wide, clean arcs. He moved so swiftly that I could barely track him, just a blur of steel here, a flash of cold grey eyes there. His gun fired in quick rhythm between strokes of his falcata, scything down the Outsiders’ mortal henchmen like sheaves of wheat.

The second figure was grey and shaggy and terrifying. Mouse’s lionlike ruff of fur flew out like a true mane as