Thirty-nine

Michael’s sword swept out of its sheath, and the silver-white fire of Amoracchius filled the archway. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. He took the Sword in a two-handed grip and settled into a relaxed ready position.

Deirdre and Nicodemus immediately split apart, so that they forced Michael to divide his attention between them. She dropped into a fighting crouch, while Nicodemus narrowed his eyes and became very still. Grey regarded Michael impassively, while in his grasp, Anna Valmont turned completely pale and held very still. I felt the Genoskwa’s summer-sausage fingers tighten painfully.

“Now, now, sir Knight,” Nicodemus said, his voice almost a growl. “There’s no need for this to devolve into general mayhem, is there?”

“I will not allow you to harm them,” Michael said.

“Lower the Sword,” Nicodemus said. “Or I will order Grey to kill Valmont.”

“If you do that,” Michael said calmly, “Dresden and I will fight to the death.”

I felt my eyes get a little bit wider, and my voice might not have been as deep and steady as it usually was, but I managed to say, “Right. We’ll fight you. Not each other. In case that wasn’t clear.”

“How assured is your victory?” Michael asked Nicodemus. “How many times has Amoracchius foiled your plans over the centuries?”

“You’ve never beaten me, Knight,” Nicodemus said.

“Almighty God as my witness, and as He gives me grace,” Michael said, “if you harm that woman, I will strike you down.”

“Right,” I said. “Me too.”

Nicodemus gave me an impatient glance and turned his attention back to Michael. “You should have stayed in your little house, quietly retired,” he said. “You didn’t matter there. I didn’t care about you any longer. If you begin a fight here, you will never see your family again.”

Michael smiled faintly. “That is where you are wrong. With God’s blessing, it will take a good many years. But I will see them again.”

“Think where you are, sir Knight,” Nicodemus said, his mouth quirking up into a mocking smile. “The Underworld is a prison for souls. Do you think yours is so great as to escape it?”

“I am not great,” Michael said quietly. “But God is.”

Nicodemus’s smile was like something you’d see on a shark. “One of the great disappointments in killing a Knight is knowing that he or she does not suffer as a result. But you are in the Underworld, Christian. Here, I think, your eternity will be something entirely different than you have been promised.”

“On the one hand, I have your word,” Michael said. “On the other, I have my Father’s. I think I know to which voice I should listen.”

“This is the land ofDeath,” Nicodemus said. “Death must be part of the offering to let us in. You have been so eager to lay down your life, sir Knight. Perhaps you will do so again, rather than forcing me to slay another.”

Michael’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t think so,” he said. “No force compels you but your own ambition, Nicodemus. You could choose to turn back—and I will not let you destroy a life to serve your purposes.”

“Even if by doing so, you force me to denounce Dresden and his mistress?” Nicodemus asked. “You know the consequences of that, should Mab be shamed by his failure to keep her word—and you are here on his. Should you bring this mission to a halt, Dresden will have broken Mab’s word. I imagine that his death will be a terrible one.”

Michael was silent for a fairly awful moment.

“Michael, no,” I said. “You’re carrying enough of a burden already.”

That made him look at me, his eyes troubled. We had already been standing on some fairly shifty moral ground, and it was only getting muckier as we went forward. Laying down one’s life for a friend was pretty much the definition of a selfless act—but doing it so that a monster could get his hands on a supernatural weapon of tremendous power put it in an entirely different context, and not a flattering one. Especially not for a man carrying an archangel’s grace around like so much priceless china.

“Wait,” Hannah Ascher said, stepping forward, her hands partly lifted, palms showing. “People, wait. This is not the time for us to turn on one another. We’re close. Your precious cup, Nicodemus. Twenty million each for the rest of us. If you let this explode right now, none of us gets anything except trapped down here. And somehow I don’t think our client will be a kind and gracious host, given what we’ve come here to do.”

Nicodemus’s eyes flicked to Ascher and back to Michael. He stared at the Knight for a long moment and then said, “Deirdre. Conference.” He looked over his shoulder at Grey and the Genoskwa. “If they start to struggle, kill them.”

He took a step back from Michael and then turned, walking calmly toward the other end of the archway. Deirdre went with him.

Ascher let out her breath in an explosive hiss. “What is it with you religious types?”

“Name like Hannah Ascher and you aren’t Jewish?” I asked.

She sniffed. “That’s different.”

I snorted, tracking Nicodemus and Deirdre’s movements. They went to the end of the tunnel, where there was another stretch of open cavern and a final stone wall. There was the impression of an archway carved into the stone, but no actual gate there. Shadows hung heavy over it. Nicodemus and his daughter stopped about five feet from the stone wall, and began speaking quietly.