“Practicality,” Nicodemus said. “Give him to me. I will take him from here. It will be quick and merciful.” His eyes shifted to Butters. “It’s nothing personal, young man. You became involved in something larger than you. That is the price you pay. But I’ve no grudge with you. You will simply stop.”

Butters made a quiet, terrified sound.

“Or,” Nicodemus said, “you can breach Mab’s given word, wizard.” He smiled. “In which case, well, I have no need of you.”

“Without me,” I said, “you’ll never get through the second gate.”

“Once I kill you,” Nicodemus said, “I’m quite certain Mab will loan me her next Knight or another servant as readily as she did you, if it means a chance to make good on her word. Choose.”

“I’m thinking about it,” I said.

Nicodemus opened one hand, a gracious gesture, inviting me to take my time.

Giving him Butters wasn’t on the table. Period. But fighting him did not seem like a good idea either. With Nicodemus on one side and the Genoskwa on the other, I did not like my chances at all. Even with the Winter Knight’s mantle, I didn’t know if I could have beaten either of these guys, let alone both of them at once.

If I gave him Butters, I might live. If I didn’t, both of us were going to die, right here next door to Michael’s house.

I was out of options.

“You take the guy behind us,” I muttered to Butters.

The little guy swallowed, and jerked his head in a tiny nod, gripping his Christmas ornament carefully.

Nicodemus nodded, his dark eyes glittering. The point of the slender sword swept up, lithe as a snake’s flickering tongue, and his shadow began to dance and waver in sudden agitation. The Genoskwa let out another rumbling growl and stepped forward. I gripped my staff, and Butters’s tremors abruptly stilled into an electrified tension.

And then Karrin stepped out of the sleet with her rocket launcher prepped and resting on her shoulder, aimed directly at Nicodemus.

“Hi,” she said. “I really don’t like you very much, Denarian.”

“Hah,” I said to Nicodemus. “Heh, heh.”

His eyes slid from me to Karrin and back. His smile widened. “Ms. Murphy,” he said. “You won’t shoot.”

“Why not?” Karrin asked brightly.

“Because it is obvious to me that you love him,” Nicodemus said. “That weapon will kill the wizard, as well as your friend the doctor, if you fire it. At that range, I’m not at all certain that you would survive the blast, either.”

Karrin seemed to regard that offering thoughtfully. Then she said, “You’re right,” and took several steps closer. “There. That should just about do it, don’t youthink?”

Nicodemus narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t.”

Karrin spoke in a very low, very calm voice. “People do crazy things for love. I’d rather kill us all and take you with us than let you harm him.” Her voice became a bit sharper, and she took another pair of quick strides nearer Nicodemus. “Take one step closer, Tall, Dark and Furry, and I blow us all to hell right now.”

I checked over my shoulder, to see the Genoskwa pause in the act of slipping a little closer. Its cavern-eyes glittered in silent rage.

Karrin took a couple of slow steps toward Nicodemus, her eyes strangely bright. “Crazy, crazy things. Don’t push me.”

Nicodemus’s smile turned into a smirk. “You proceed from a false assumption,” he said. “You assume that your toy can actually threaten me or my companion.”

Guy had a point, even if I didn’t want to admit it. With that Noose around his neck, I was pretty sure Nicodemus would smirk just as hard at a flamethrower, or a giant meat grinder, for that matter.

“Actually, you’re the one proceeding from a false assumption,” Karrin countered in that same deathly calm voice, a decidedly odd light in her eyes, still approaching. “You think I’m holding a rocket launcher.”

And with that she knocked some kind of concealed cap off the back of the rocket launcher’s tube, and from its length withdrew a sword.

Check that. She withdrew a Sword.

It was a Japanese-style katana blade, set into a wooden cane sheath, in the same style as that of the apocryphal Zatoichi. Even as the false rocket launcher casing fell to the ground, the Sword’s blade sprang free of its sheath, and as it did, Fidelacchius, the Sword of Faith, blazed with furious white light.

But more important, the presence of the Sword suddenly filled the night, a nearly subaudible thrumming like the after-vibration of a bass guitar string. It wasn’t something that could be heard, precisely, or seen, or felt on the skin—but its presence was absolute, unquestionable, filling the sleet-streaked air. It was power, bone-deep, earth solid, and terrible in its resolution.

I think it was that power that wiped the smirk from Nicodemus’s face.

His eyes widened in dismay. Even his shadow abruptly went statue-still.

Karrin’s bid to narrow the distance between them as she had been speaking meant that she was only a few strides away. She closed in, her feet sure, barely seeming to touch the icy ground, and he barely lifted his blade to a defensive counter in time. The swords met in a clash of steel and a blaze of furious light, and she carried her momentum into him with a full-body check against his center of gravity.

“Watch the big guy,” I hissed to Butters, and took a step toward Nicodemus and Karrin—then froze in place.