Cassius smiled at me. "Don't bother. We've used those manacles on wizards and witches for centuries. Nicodemus himself designed them."

"Yeah. Ouch." I winced, but no amount of writhing would move my arms very much, and I couldn't move to try to make the thorny manacles hurt less.

Cassius stared down at me, his eyes bright. He stood there, watching me try to writhe, enjoying my helplessness and pain.

An image flashed through my mind—an old man of faith and courage who had willingly given himself into the hands of the Order in exchange for my freedom. Shiro had died after sustaining the most hideous torments I had ever seen visited upon a human body—and some of them had come at the hands of Cassius. I closed my eyes. I knew what he wanted. He wanted to hurt me. He wanted to see how much pain he could deliver before I died. And there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

Unless…

I thought of what Shiro had told me about having faith. For him it was a theological and moral truth upon which he had based his life. I didn't have the same kind of belief, but I had seen how forces of light and darkness came into conflict, how imbalances were redressed. Cassius was in the service of some of the darkest forces on the planet. Shiro would have said that nothing he did could have prevented a balancing force of light—such as Shiro and his brother Knights—from being placed in his way. In my own experience, I had noticed that when something truly, deeply evil arose, one of the Knights tended to show up.

Maybe one would show up to face Cassius.

Hell's bells. That was mighty thin.

But it was technically possible. And it was all I had.

I almost laughed. What I needed to survive this lunatic was something I had never had much of: faith, I had to believe that some other factor would intervene. I had no other option.

But that didn't mean I couldn't try to help intervention along. The longer I kept breathing, the more likely it was that someone would happen across the scene—maybe even someone who could help. Maybe even someone like my friend Michael.

I had to keep Cassius talking.

"What happened to you?" I asked him a moment later, opening my eyes. I'd read somewhere that people love to talk about themselves. "The last time I saw you, you could have passed for forty."