I put the butane torch out, put it back in my duffel, and then slung my staff down off my shoulder. Nicodemus was eyeing me as I did.

“Fireworks,” he said.

“You think you’re the only guy in the world who can get things done without his supernatural gadgets?” I asked him.

He waved a hand at the smoke in his face and said mildly, “Let us hope that their firefighting systems do not include—”

An alarm began to blare, and sprinkler heads all around the first floor started up, spraying chilly, slightly stale-smelling water everywhere.

“—sprinklers,” Nicodemus finished on a sigh.

Hannah Ascher came in, moving quickly, and eyed me with disgust. “Fireworks? Seriously?”

“Loud and distracting, remember?” I called after her, as she descended the stairs. “I am the king of loud and distracting.”

“Not only do I have to burn through a wall,” she muttered. “I’ve got to do it in a downpour, too.”

“Get tough. It should help muffle the excess magical energy,” I said, maybe a bit grumpily.

Ascher shot a look back up at me, and gestured at the sprinklers. “You did this on purpose?”

“Yeah, well. Sometimes, when I get bored, I stop and think.”

She held up a small spray can. “How am I supposed to lay out a circle on the floor when there’s a layer of water over it? Did you think about that?”

“Deirdre,” Nicodemus said.

Deirdre promptly swarmed halfway down the stairs, and then there were several sharp sounds of impact, as her metallic hair shot out, surrounding Ascher, and slammed onto the floor around her. The flat ribbonlike hairs spread out, edge down, scraping along the marble tile like a squeegee, sweeping the standing water away.

Ascher looked like she nearly had a heart attack when Deirdre did that, and cast a glare up at the Denarian. But then she took the can and sprayed a layer of what looked like some kind of aerosolized plastic or rubber onto the floor. She laid it out in a large circle around her, overlapping the circle onto the wall and continuing it up to a few inches above her head. It was lopsided, but technically a circle didn’t have to be a perfect one to contain the magic. It was just a lot more efficient—not to mention professional—that way.

Ascher, who was looking damned appealing in her wet clothes (and dammit, how could I blame my reaction on the Winter mantle when it was being held at bay by iron?), went over the circle again, making sure the plastic spray was especially thick at the joints of the floor and wall. Then she nodded once, bent, and twisted her wrist so that a couple of drops of her blood fell from the manacles onto the circle. It snapped up into place at once, a screen of invisible energy, and she promptly unlocked her manacles and dropped them onto the floor ather feet. Then she narrowed her eyes, touched her finger to the wall inside the circle, and murmured a quiet word.

Light sprang out from her fingertip, sudden and fierce, and steam began to hiss up where droplets of water fell onto her hand or the wall. She began to move her fingertip slowly, and I watched as marble and the drywall and the concrete and metal beneath it began to crack and blacken and part. Glowing motes and sparks flew back from her, falling thickly on her hand and her arm, then blackening and dropping to the floor, burning holes in her sleeve but leaving her flesh, as far as I could see, untouched.

I lifted my eyebrows at that. I mean, I guess I could turn my finger into an arc welder, sure, but that wouldn’t mean that my entire hand wouldn’t burn to a crisp as I did it. That kind of inurement to the elements required an entirely different order and magnitude of talent—talent very few wizards, in my experience, possessed.

Man. When Ascher said she mostly worked with fire, she wasn’t kidding.

Binder and his troops came into the bank while she was working, and Binder immediately scouted out the place and started assigning groups to various defensive positions. As he did that, Anna Valmont slid silently across the floor until she stood near me. She looked at the thorn manacles on my wrist.

“I can’t stand to look at those things,” she said. “It must hurt.”

I bit down on a sharp reply. She wasn’t looking for that by standing near me. “Yeah, pretty much.”

She fiddled with her gear and licked her lips. “How long, do you think, before you can take them off?”

“No idea,” I said. “Depends on Ascher, I guess.”

There was a loud snapping sound and a squeal of parting metal from below, and Ascher half snarled, “That’s right, bitch,” and began putting her manacles back on in a businesslike fashion.

It had taken her less than three minutes to slice an opening large enough to admit a big guy into the reinforced wall.

She smeared the circle with her foot, and the excess energy of the spell dispersed into the air to be immediately smothered by the falling water. Then she put her hand on the cut section and began to push.

Grey slid in front of her and said, “Best let me go first, Miss Ascher.” He set his shoulders and almost casually shoved the cut section of wall down, and it fell through to the hallway beyond with a satisfying boom—and was instantly echoed by the hollow, coughing blast of a shotgun from the hallway beyond.

Grey was flung off of his feet to the ground, where he promptly became the origin point of a growing puddle of blood.

Ascher let out a choked sound and flattened herself desperately to the side of the opening, into the shelter of the unexposed side of the stairwell.