Kringle sat back in his seat at that, considering the question. Then he said, “If you buy this man, he stays bought. It’s who he is.”

I arched an eyebrow. “You’re asking me to trust a stranger’s professional integrity?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Kringle said. “I’m asking you to trust mine.”

I exhaled, slowly. I took a long pull of beer.

“Well, hell,” I said. “What’s the world coming to if you can’t trust Santa Claus?” I leaned forward, peering at the printed summary and said, “So let’s meet with Goodman Grey.”

Forty-five

I hadn’t quite finished the “r” sound in “game over” before Grey had crossed forty feet of intervening space and was on top of Ursiel and the Genoskwa.

One second, Grey was standing there, looking smug and anticipatory. The next, there was a blur in the air and then a creature was clawing its way up Ursiel’s back. It was about the size and vaguely the shape of a gorilla, but the head on its shoulders might have belonged to some kind of hideous werewolf-bulldog hybrid, and grotesquely elongated claws tipped its hands. Its weird golden eyes were Grey’s. Before Ursiel could realize that he was under attack, the Grey-creature was astride its ursine back, fangs sinking into the huge hump of muscle there, oversized jaws locked into place. The huge bear-thing reared up onto its hind legs, only for Grey to reach around to its head with gorilla-length arms and sink nine-inch claws like daggers into its eyes.

Ursiel and the Genoskwa let out an ear-tearing roar of agony.

I whirled the heavy end of my staff toward Nicodemus and snarled, “Forzare!” The hailstone flew at him like a bullet, but though the shock of Grey’s betrayal was still evident on his face, Nicodemus’s superb reflexes were still in fine operating order, and he dropped into a lateral roll, dodging the missile.

Michael shouted, “Harry!” and hauled me to one side an instant before an orb of absolutely searing white heat appeared precisely where my head had been. The blast coming off of it was so intense that it singed the hair on that side of my head. I turned my head to see Ascher and Lasciel lifting her other hand, preparing to hurl a second sphere at me.

“You get Nick,” I panted.

“Seems fair,” Michael said.

In the background, Ursiel continued to roar and thrash. I couldn’t see how it was going for Grey, but Ursiel crashed off of the stage and into a display featuring at least a dozen statues of various saints and holy figures, reducing them to rubble and scattering fabulously valuable gems in every direction.

The second sphere came flying at me and I countered by lifting my staff and shouting, “Defendarius!” A broad wall of force shimmered into being in front of me, and the sphere smashed against it and explodedinto a cloud of flame that spread out along its length and breadth, as if seeking a way around it. The heat was viciously intense, and enough of it would have burned through the shield—but it was a question of volume. Ascher had struck at me with pinpoint precision and intensity. I’d countered her with raw power, using a shield big enough to spread the heat over a wide enough area to keep it from burning through.

Ascher let out a snarl of frustration and hurled another sphere. Her thinking was obvious—if she could keep pouring fire onto me and force me to hold up shield after shield against it, eventually she could either burn through it or exhaust my ability to keep holding it up. I’d have taken that fight against a lot of practitioners: There are relatively few wizards on the White Council who can stay with me in terms of pure magical horsepower. But while there are plenty of wizards who could wear themselves out pounding on my shields, I had a pretty solid intuition that Ascher could keep throwing fire until I was a gasping heap on the ground, especially with Lasciel’s knowledge and experience backing her up. Worse, Lasciel knew me, inside and out.

Or at least, she had known me. So it was time to use a few tricks I’d developed since we’d parted ways.

In the past, I’d worn rings designed to store a little excess kinetic energy every time I moved my arm. Then I could let loose the saved energy all in one place to pretty devastating effect when I really needed to do it. I hadn’t had the resources I needed to make new rings, but I’d carved the same spell in my new wizard’s staff.

Seventy-seven times.

It wasn’t as handy as my layered rings had been—instead of being broken up into multiple units, the energy of the spell was all stored in one reservoir, so I only had the one shot.

But it was a doozy.

So as another white-hot sphere splashed into flame against my shield, I whirled the butt end of the staff where the energy storage spells were carved toward Ascher, focused my concentration on the shield, braced my feet, and shouted, “Arietius!”

The staff bucked in my hands like a living thing and shoved my shoes several inches across the floor as the stored energy unleashed itself and drove into the rear of my shield. For a second, I worried about the staff shattering—I had never tried it with this much stored energy before, and there was always the chance that I had exceeded the design tolerance of the spell at some point. If I had, I would be the center of my own spectacular and splintery explosion. But my work was good and the staff functioned perfectly. I held the structure of the shield together and let the energy from the staff drive it forward, toward Ascher, and suddenly a large, obdurate, and extremely solid invisible wall was rushing at her like an oncoming freight train, shedding a trail of fire in its wake.