“Roger Moore Bond villains?” Murphy asked, her tone derisive. “Seriously?”
“Be silent, mortal cow,” snarled one of the Sidhe.
Murphy tracked her eyes calmly over to that one, and she nodded once, as if memorizing something. “Yeah, okay. You.”
The Sidhe fingered his weapons, beautiful features twisting into a scowl.
I tried to rise, but by the time I got to one knee I felt like crawling into a dark room and crying while throwing up. I stopped there and fought back the dizzies that tried to take me back down. I was feeling stronger than before already. If I’d had half an hour, I think I could have been ready to do something vaguely like magical violence. But I didn’t have half an hour. I couldn’t fight our way out of this, and if they didn’t have me supporting them, I was pretty sure Karrin and Thomas couldn’t do it either. We needed another option.
“Look, Red,” I said. “You made your play at my party and it didn’t turn out so well for you. That’s fine. No hard feelings. You tried to kill me and my friends out on Lake Michigan this morning, and I can see why you would. That didn’t go so swell for you, either. So what makes you think it’s going to turn out well for you now?”
“I like my chances,” said the Redcap, smiling.
“No reason this has to get ugly,” I said in reply.
There was something playful in his voice as he responded, “Is there not?”
“We can stop this right here. Turn around and walk away. We’ll do the same. We’ll let Ace here go free as soon as we get to our cars.”
“Oh, kill him if you wish to,” the Redcap said absently. “The halfblood is nothing to me.”
Ace let out a hissing sound and stared at the Redcap.
“You aren’t,” the Redcap said calmly. “I have made that clear several times.”
“But I . . . I snared him for you,” Ace said. “I slowed him down. If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have caught up to him.”
The Redcap shrugged without ever glancing at the young man. “And I find that extremely convenient. But I never asked you to help. And I certainly never asked you to be so incompetent as to be captured by the prey.”
I was glad Molly wasn’t around, because the hate that suddenly flared out from Ace was so palpable that even I felt it. I could hear his teeth grinding, and the sudden flush of anger on his face was like something out of a comic book. Ace’s body tensed as though he were preparing to fling himself to his feet.
At that, the Redcap turned, a too-wide Sidhe smile on his face, and faced Ace for the first time. “Ah. There. You may not have talent, but at least you have spirit. Perhaps if you survive the night, we can discuss your future.”
Ace just sat there seething, staring daggers at the Redcap, and everyone was focused on the two of them.
Which was why no one but me noticed when the situation silently changed.
The Redcap looked back at me and said, “Have the vampire kill the halfblood if you wish. I’ll happily trade my son’s life for yours, Dresden. There are Sidhe who get all sentimental about their offspring, but I can’t say I’ve ever been one of them.” He focused on me and drew a small knife from his pocket, snapping out the blade. It was an instrument for killing at intimate distance. “Companions,” he said, a smug edge to his voice, “with whom should we begin?”
The air crackled with sudden tension. The Sidhe stared with too-bright eyes, their fingers settling on the hilts and grips of various weapons. This was going to be bad. I couldn’t fight. Karrin couldn’t possibly keep up with attackers who both outnumbered her and operated with superhuman speed and near-invisibility. The Sidhe could defend themselves against my magic, unless I was able to throw absolutely everything at one of them—and I wouldn’t get that chance against half a dozen. Physically I was pretty much useless for the moment.
Thomas might make it out, but when this crystalline moment of stillness finally broke, I was pretty sure Karrin and I wouldn’t.
Unless someone broke it exactly right.
“Hey,” I said innocently. “Weren’t there seven of you guys a minute ago?”
The Redcap tilted his head at me and then glanced left and right. Five other Sidhe looked back at him, except on the far side of their line, on my left. The Sidhe warrior who had been there was gone. The only thing remaining where he’d been standing was a single expensive designer tennis shoe.
Right then, in the exact instant of realization, screams, truly agonized
There was a stunned silence. And then an object came sailing out of the brush and landed at the feet of the Sidhe nearest to the one who had been taken. It was a horrible collection of bloody bone, maybe a foot and a half long—a section of spine, ripped clear of its body, bits of tissue still clinging to it.
That got a reaction from everyone. The Redcap dropped into a crouch, hands up in a defensive posture. Several Sidhe took rapid steps back.
“Holy Mother of God,” Murphy breathed.
Everyone’s eyes were fixed on the grisly missile lying on the sidewalk, so their heads weren’t directed toward the future, weren’t able to see that the situation was about to change again.
“Hey,” I said, in exactly the same tone. “Weren’t there six of you guys a minute ago?”
Eyes swept back up in time to see the brush swaying where something had dragged the Sidhe from the opposite end of the line, on my right side, into the bushes, and more screams erupted, clawing at the rain-drizzled air.
“Sith,” hissed one of the female Sidhe, her widened eyes darting everywhere, followed by the barrel of her composite-material pistol. “Cat Sith.”
Her attention wasn’t on me, and I took the opening. I slammed my will down through my numbed right arm, snarling,
At the same instant, Thomas turned his gun on the Redcap and opened fire.
Invisible force hit the female Sidhe with more or less the same energy as a small car doing twenty-five or thirty. It should have been a lot more than that, and focused on a smaller area, but in my current condition it was everything I had thrown into the best single punch I could throw. She hadn’t been able to counter the spell as it struck, and was flung back away from me. She bounced once in a bed of flowers, and then tumbled into the lake.
Meanwhile, the Redcap and the other Sidhe darted in every direction and blurred to near-invisibility behind their veils. Thomas might have hit one of them. It was hard to hear any sounds of impact or screams of pain over the thunder of the ridiculously large rounds used in his Desert Eagle. Other guns went off, too.
Adrenaline surged and I shoved myself to my feet, shouting, “Fall back!”
Something flashed by me, and then Cat Sith appeared from behind his own veil, leaping with all four paws extended, his claws unsheathed. He landed on what looked like empty air, and his legs moved in a blur of ripping, supernaturally powerful strikes. Blood fountained from the empty air, and Sith bounded away, vanishing again, as one of the Sidhe appeared in the space where Sith had been. The Sidhe’s upper body was a mass of blood and shredded flesh, his expression shocked. He crumpled slowly to the ground, his eyes wide, as if trying to see through complete darkness. His hands clenched aimlessly a few times, and then he went still.
I turned to run and staggered woozily. Karrin saw it and darted in close to my side, preventing me from falling. She didn’t see Ace, behind her, produce a small pistol and aim it at her back.
I shouted and lurched down on top of him. The gun went off once, and then I had his gun arm pinned to the ground beneath both of my forearms and the whole weight of my body. Ace cursed and swung a fist at me. I slammed my forehead into his nose a bunch of times. It took the fight out of him, and his head wobbled dazedly.
There was a high-pitched shriek and a tiny armored form covered in fishhooks hurtled into my face and neck. My injuries swelled into agony again as the damned little metal hooks pierced my skin. I got a quick glimpse of a miniature sword flashing toward my eye. I flinched in a big roll that took me off of Ace, flinging my head in a circle to counter the motion of the little sword with centrifugal force. It cut into my eyebrow and missed my eyeball, and a flood of scarlet blocked out half of my vision.
After that, things were fuzzy. I swatted at Captain Hook with my forearm, and on the third blow the barbed
