Eric and I stepped up to the doors, readying our weapons, as Oberis took a deep breath. With a firm nod to both of us, he blurred forward, shattering the door and crashing into the room.
I followed him through, riding the rush of the quicksilver as I searched for any Enforcers in the room with the Wizard. It was apparently MacDonald’s bedroom, an opulent throwback to Victorian fantasies of Indian sultans. A giant four-poster bed occupied the center of the room, with heavy drapes and curtains over every wall, and piles of cushions.
MacDonald, wrapped in chains that glittered in silver and gold and cold iron, had been tied upright to one of the posts of the heavy bed. His eyes and mouth were bound, and the nearly immortal Wizard looked old—and terrified.
For a moment, I’m sure the three of us looked absolutely ridiculous. Eric and I were sweeping the room with the muzzles of our shotguns, and Oberis stood just out of reach from MacDonald in a low combat stance, a glowing blade of Power in his hand.
Then the glamor blade shattered into a million pieces as a black iron sword slashed through it, breaking the power that held it together. None of us saw Winters before he attacked, and even Oberis, ridiculously fast as he was, only barely managed to block the strike that followed his initial blow.
But he only had his bare hands to do it with, and the cold iron burnt his flesh. I could see it and smell it from across the room, as well as feel the cold iron, now that whatever had shielded Winters before he attacked was gone.
Winters had a head of height and forty pounds on Oberis’s whip-thin build. With most mortals, it shouldn’t have mattered, as Oberis had the speed and strength of his inhuman nature. Gerard Winters had long since moved past human, and as the fae lord stumbled back, white light flaring around his hands as he tried to heal and defend himself with Power, Winters used every inch of his height and reach to attack.
The black cold iron blade flashed across the room, dimly reflecting the sunlight trickling through the shattered doors, and embedded itself in Lord Oberis’s torso, stabbing clean through his sternum and neatly pinning the fae lord to a post of the giant bed, next to the Magus.
“Drop the guns,” Winters ordered Eric and me. “You can’t hurt me with them.”
I shot him. I knew he was correct about not being able to hurt him, but I was riding the quicksilver high and had just watched him impale Oberis. Obeying him was just not going to happen. Plus, I figured the same force that had bowled over the heavily armored Enforcers would work on him, too.
I was wrong. Three times I managed to cycle the heavy automatic shotgun. Three times I hit the Enforcer with the full blast of the buckshot. Three times the shot simply bounced off of him.
Then he broke the shotgun with a bladed hand strike—the stereotypical karate chop. From him, it sheared the rune-encrusted metal of the barrel in two, destroying the weapon.
“It’s over, Winters,” I told him as I dropped the ruined metal and stood there, facing a man I knew could destroy me in a moment. If guns weren’t going to work, Eric wouldn’t be any help here. He was a smith, not a warrior.
“Madrigal and her cabal are broken and being hunted down. Darius Fontaine is dead. Laurie confessed everything—your plan has failed.”
He laughed and stepped away from me, looking at Oberis. The fae lord was desperately trying to get a grip on the sword impaling him, but the cold iron hilt kept defeating him.
“It’s a sad love story we have here, isn’t it?” he asked the lord, ignoring me like I was useless. “The brave Lord Oberis, coming to rescue the ex-lover who wronged him so. It’s a little untraditional, but that’s how the world works these days, isn’t it.”
Well, that helped explain why there was an access to MacDonald’s personal quarters that Oberis was the only person in the city who could use.
“Did you really think, my lord, that the Magus’s head of security didn’t know about your tryst?” he demanded of the dying Lord. “Or that I wasn’t expecting you after Michael escaped?”
“You know you’ve failed,” I realized aloud. “You can never seize power here now. It’s over.”
Finally, he turned back to me, though he was still speaking to Oberis, I think.
“It’s a shame that this love story ends in a tragedy,” he told us. “But that is the fate of those who create monsters, isn’t it? They die at the hands of their creations.” He met my eyes and, for the first time, actually spoke to me.
“You’ve heard it said, haven’t you, changeling?” he asked softly. “That Gerard Winters is a construct now, not a man—a monster forged by the power and arrogance of the Wizard MacDonald. He took a loyal man—and he made me into nothing.
“You think I’ve lost,” he told me, “but you assume the real plan was to seize power. This was always about MacDonald. And now I know I gain nothing by killing him later, I see no reason not to kill him now,” Winters spat.
A heavy automatic pistol appeared in his hand, and he turned toward the Wizard. Everything we’d done would implode when he pulled the trigger, and I would both fail in the charge given me under fealty and watch an innocent man be murdered.
With or without the chains of fealty, I could not let that happen. Knowing that angering Winters was suicide. Knowing that I could not face him. Knowing that I could not watch the Wizard die. I took a deep breath and annihilated the pistol with a bolt of green faerie flame.
“I think,” I told him quietly, striving to put some semblance of calm in my voice, “that I have an objection to that plan.”
THERE’S that sinking moment in this sort of situation where you realize that you’re David, the other guy’s Goliath, and the only available equivalent to God is trussed up and chained to his bed. The first time Winters hit me was that moment.
I barely saw him move between my blasting the gun out of his hand and him hitting me, but the blow knocked me clean through the wall, out into the corridor around the outside of the Tower. If there was ever a warning that I was even more out of my “weight class” than usual, this was it.
With the quicksilver in my veins, and aware that he was coming at me, I barely managed to dodge the next blow. Blocking or attacking was out of the question as the Enforcer came after me. Finally, I failed to dodge another blow.
Glass shattered around me as I was pitched clean through the next wall and into the atrium, crashing through several decorative trees and bushes before landing in some kind of fern. Winters casually hopped through the shattered glass and came after me. He’d acquired another black cold iron sword from somewhere, and my quicksilver-heightened speed of thought allowed me to wonder just how many weapons he had on him.
Again I found myself dodging his attacks, barely forcing misses from the deadly cold iron. I danced back out of his reach and managed to find enough of a breather to draw the Glock 18 Tamara had given me at the start of the morning.
The Glock 18 is almost unique among light handguns in having a burst-fire setting. Tamara’s Glock 18s had been modified to fire full auto. Of course, with only the easily concealable ten-round magazine, full auto empties the weapon in slightly more than a second.
Throwing the pistol at Winters after I emptied it at him appeared to have about equal effect. The bullets bounced, scattering away from the tattooed man’s skin as he advanced on me like a freight train, drawing the sword back.
“You can’t hurt me, changeling,” he told me. “Surrender, and I’ll make it quick.”