"You would kill yourself rather than surrender the Shroud?"

"Rather than letting you kill me."

"Who said I would kill anyone?"

I glared at him and at the demon-girl and said, "Francisca Garcia mentioned it."

The man's shadow boiled but he watched me with flat, calculating eyes. "Perhaps we can reach an arrangement."

"Which would be?"

He drew a heavy-caliber handgun from his pocket and pointed it at Anna Valmont. "Give me the remote and I won't kill this young woman."

"The demon groupie headman uses a gun? You've got to be kidding me," I said.

"Call me Nicodemus." He glanced at the revolver. "Trendy, I know, but one can only watch so many dismemberments before they become predictable." He pointed the gun at the terror-stricken Valmont and said, "Shall I count to three?"

I threw on a puppet's Transylvanian accent. "Count as high as you vant, but you von't get one, one detonator, ah, ah, ah."

"One," Nicodemus said.

"Do you expect me to hand it over on reflex or something?"

"You've done such things repeatedly when there was a woman in danger, Harry Dresden. Two."

This Nicodemus knew me. And he'd picked a pressure tactic that wasn't going to take long, however it turned out, so he knew I was stalling for time. Crap. I wasn't going to be able to bluff him. "Hold on," I said.

He thumbed back the hammer of the revolver and aimed at Valmont's head. "Thr-"

So much for cleverness. "All right," I snapped, and I tossed the remote to him underhand. "Here you go."

Nicodemus lowered the gun, turning to catch the remote in his left hand. I waited until his eyes flicked from Valmont to the remote.

And then I pulled up every bit of power I could muster in that instant, hurled my right hand forward, and snarled, "Fuego!"

Fire rose up from the floor in a wave as wide as the doorway and rolled forward in a surge of superheated air. It expanded as it lashed out, and slammed into Nicodemus's bloodied chest. The force of it threw him back across the hallway and into the wall on the opposite side. He didn't quite go through the wall, but only because there must have been a stud lined up with his spine. The drywall crumpled in from his shoulders to his hips, and his head snapped back in a whiplash of impact. It almost seemed that his shadow was thrown back with him, slapping wetly against the wall around him like blobs of tar.

The snakeman moved with blinding speed, slithering to one side of the blast. The demon-girl shrieked, and her bladed tresses gathered together in an effort to shield her as the fire and concussion threw her back and away from the door.

The heat was unbearable, an oven-hot flash that sucked the air from my lungs. Backwash from the explosion drove me back across the floor, rolling until I hit the wall myself. I cowered and shielded my face as the scarlet flames went out, replaced with a sudden cloud of ugly black smoke. My ears rang, and I couldn't hear anything but the hammering of my own heart.