I blinked. "Ramirez?"

"Yeah," Bob said. "I figured that you were a Warden now and stuff, and that you would probably want me to help out some other Warden. So just before the big bang, I had the dinosaur stand over him, soak up the blast."

I grunted. "Okay," I said. "We've got to help him. But one thing first."

"What's that?" Bob asked.

I squinted around until I found Grevane's battered corpse. Then I crawled over to it. I fumbled in the trench coat's pockets until I found Kemmler's slender little book. I squinted around me, but there was no one to look as I put it in my pocket.

"Okay," I said. "Come on. Watch my back while I help Ramirez."

"You betcha, boss," Bob said, and his voice was very smug. "Hey, you know what? Size really does matter."

Ramirez made it out of that evening alive. He had four broken ribs and two dislocated shoulders, but he came through. With Butters's help, I was able to get him, Luccio, and Morgan back to my place. At some point in the evening, Butters had taken off his drum and let Morgan take over the drumming duties while he tried to help Luccio, and as a result her wound hadn't been quite as fatal as she had thought it would be.

They were far too badly hurt to stay at my place, though, and Senior Council member "Injun Joe" Listens-to-Wind himself showed up with half a dozen more stay-at-home wizards who knew something about medicine and healing to move them to a more secure location.

"Just don't get it," Morgan was telling Listens-to-Wind. "All of these things happening at once. It can't be a coincidence."

"It wasn't," I heard myself say.

Morgan looked at me. The resentment in his eyes hadn't changed, but there was something else there that hadn't been before—dare I hope it, some modicum of respect.

"Think about it," I said. "All those heavy vampire attacks just when Cowl and his buddies most needed the White Council not to be involved."

"Are you saying that you think Cowl was using the vampires as a tool?" Morgan asked.

"I think they had a deal," I said. "The vampires throw their first major offensive at the right time to let Cowl pull off this Darkhallow."

"But what do they get out of it?" Morgan asked.

I glanced at Listens-to-Wind and said, "The Senior Council."

"Impossible," Morgan said. "By that time, they had to know that the Senior Council was back at Edinburgh. The defenses there have been built over thousands of years. It would take…" Morgan paused, frowning.

I finished the sentence for him. "It would take a god to break through them and kill the Senior Council."

Morgan stared at me for a long time, but didn't say anything. It wasn't long before they left, pulling out the wounded Wardens and leaving.