There wasn’t time for anything more than that. Fanatics they might be, but they weren’t stupid. It took them less than a couple of seconds to clear away from the porch and our lines of fire. Even the guy who went down scrabbled away, leaving a smear of blood behind him as he did.
I stopped shooting, frustrated at the lack of targets, but Butters kept pumping shell after shell into the empty doorway. He didn’t stop until the shotgun clicked on an empty chamber three or four times.
I darted a look at him, to find him staring at the doorway, trembling visibly, his face pale as a sheet.
“Dude,” I said. “Reload.”
He stared at me with goggle-eyes for a second, then jerked his head in a nod and started fumbling at one of his pockets. I waited until he had the shotgun reloaded and said, “Cover the door. I’m going to check on Charity.”
“Right,” he said.
I turned and paced toward the back of the house, trying to remember where the walls were so that I didn’t walk into them-and as I rounded the corner nearly walked into a squire with a shotgun.
No time to think. I swept my staff from left to right, knocking it against the shotgun. The weakened grip of my left hand didn’t give me a lot of leverage, but when fire and thunder bloomed from the barrel, instead of dying I reeled in sudden agony at the pain of the sound so near my eardrum, so it was enough. The squire knocked the staff from my weak grip with a slash of the shotgun’s barrel.
I shot him twice in the stomach with my big revolver.
He let out a gasp and went down, and I kicked the shotgun out of his hands as he fell.
Behind him, his partner drew a bead on me with an assault carbine and had me dead to rights. Terror spiked through me. I tried to fling myself away, knowing as I did that it wouldn’t do me any good.
Uriel melted out of the shadows behind the second squire with his kitchen knife, and opened both of the squire’s big arteries and his windpipe with a single slice. The man collapsed, and Uriel rode him to the floor, pinning the assault rifle down with one hand for a few seconds, until the squire stopped struggling.
He looked up at me, his expression sickened.
I stared at the two squires. They’d come in the back.
Charity.
By the time I got to the back door, it was standing open, one side of it twisted and blackened with the force of the breaching charge that had opened it. Charity’s shotgun lay on the floor, a couple of expended flashbangs next to it. There was a smear of blood in a trail leading to the door and out into the ice.
Charity was gone.
It wasn’t hard to figure. The bad guys had blown the back door, only she hadn’t had a wizard there to stop the flashbangs. They’d sailed in, stunned her, and she’d been taken before she could fire a shot.
I saw a flash of movement outside the door, and leapt back as another shotgun roared. The squire missed me, but not by much, and a section of drywall the size of my fist vanished from the wall behind where I’d been.
“Harry!” Butters howled.
I hurried back to the front of the house to find Butters staring out through the curtains, his expression twisted up in horror.
Nicodemus was standing on the sidewalk outside the Carpenter house, his shadow writhing.
Tessa stood beside him in human form, wearing black trousers and a black shirt. Her expression was distant, haunted. She looked awful, thin and wasted away, like those movies of people rescued from concentration camps, but her eyes burned with some dark emotion that the word hate didn’t begin to cover.
As I watched, two squires half dragged, half carried Charity over to him. They dumped her on the sidewalk in front of Nicodemus. She seemed stunned. Her leg was covered in blood. The armored coat was chewed and torn over her wounded thigh, where most of the shotgun pellets had been caught and stopped.
Nicodemus seized a handful of Charity’s hair and dragged her faceup, to where she could see her house.
My heart twisted and rage filled me. I knew what he was doing. Nicodemus planned to leave a message for Michael. It wasn’t enough for Nicodemus simply to kill the Knight’s children-not when he could kill them and leave Charity’s corpse behind in such a fashion as to make clear that she had been forced to watch them die, first.
“Watch, Mrs. Carpenter,” Tessa hissed. “Watch.”
Nicodemus turned his head toward three squires, who were standing by with bottles of vodka fitted into Molotov cocktails with bits of cloth. The bottles were already lit.
His gravelly voice came out low and hard. “Burn it down.”
Fifty
I stepped up to the door with my staff in hand just as the three men hurled the bottles of vodka, pointed the staff, and snarled, “Infriga!”
Icy air screamed. The bottles soared up toward the house and hit the roof with a number of dull thunks, then came rattling back down to fall to the lawn, glass cracking, their contents frozen solid.
A number of things happened, all at once.
Tessa let out a hellish screech. She lifted a hand toward me, gathering power in her palm, but as she released it, Nicodemus seized her arm and directed the blast straight up into the air.
Squires started shooting at me. A bullet smacked into my duster over my left lung and hit me like a fist, spinning me to one side.
Mouse hurtled toward the rear of the house.
And, as I fell, Mab’s earring burst, the two pieces flying out of my ear in different directions and bouncing off the walls of the entry hall, and all the pain in the universe came crashing down on me at the same time.
Dimly, I heard Butters calling my name. Bullets hit the entry hall and the doorway and darted past me in spiteful, hissing whispers to thwack into the stairs behind me. I lay there in a stupor of pain, and another round hit my duster again, and then Butters was hauling me out of the doorway by main force.
I tried to care about other things that were happening, but mostly I was trying to work up enough energy to curl up into a defensive fetal position-and failing.
“Harry!” Butters screamed, propping me up. “Harry, get up! They’re coming back!”
“Burn it!” Tessa shrieked. “Burn them! Burn them all!”
“Harry!” Butters howled. “Do something!”
I didn’t have enough left in me to contort my face.
“Oh, God,” Butters said. “OhGodohGodohGod. .”
And that was when I saw Waldo Butters choose to be a hero.
He looked up the stairs, toward where the children were hidden. Then he looked out toward the men outside. Then he hardened his jaw.
And with businesslike motions, he stripped me out of my leather duster. He put it on. The sleeves were too long and it was grotesquely oversized, but I had to admit that he got a lot more coverage out of the thing than I ever did.
“Bob,” he said.
Glowing lights surged up out of one of the pouches on his Batman vest, dancing nervously in the slowly growing light of dawn. “Yeah, boss?”
“We’re going in.”
“Uh. .”
“If anything happens to me,” he said, “I want you to head back to the skull. Tell Andi everything you saw. Tell her I said to get you to someone responsible. And tell her that I said that I loved her. Okay?”
“Boss,” Bob said, his voice subdued. “You sure about this?”
“There’s nobody else here,” Butters said quietly. “Harry’s down. Charity’s been captured. We can’t risk Uriel’s demise. And if we wait for help, they’ll burn the kids to death while we wring our hands.”
“But. . you aren’t up for this. You can’t possibly beat them.”
“Gotta try,” Butters said.
“You’ll die trying,” Bob said. “And it won’t make any difference.”
“I’ve got to believe that it will,” he said. “Maybe I can slow them down until some real help gets here.”