“Fitz,” I said, “I found the father. He’s—”

“That seems reasonable,” Aristedes was saying to Butters. “May I ask one question?”

“Why not?” Butters answered.

Fitz was squirming in Daniel’s grip, leaning away from Aristedes. One look at his face told me why: He’d recognized something in his old teacher’s words or manner. I’d seen the faces of abused wives while they watched their husbands drink, sickly certain that the cycle of abuse would renew itself in the coming hours. Fitz knew what Aristedes looked like when he was about to dispense violence.

“Wardens,” Aristedes said. “Why do you not carry swords?”

Crap.

The question caught Butters off guard. He could have smoothed over the question with a good answer, or maybe even ignored it altogether convincingly—but he did the one thing he absolutely could not do if he was going to sell his false identity to Aristedes.

He hesitated.

Couldn’t blame him, I guess. He’d come lickety-split after Forthill, moving as fast as possible. We’d spent all of maybe ninety seconds on putting our plan together, which had only been possible thanks to Butters’s foresight in packing those cloaks—apparently, he’d thought it might be useful to have them on hand to create a Warden sighting or two, if it seemed like the city’s supernatural scene could use some reassurance. In our hurry to retrieve the good father, I hadn’t thought about the whole sword angle—for good reason. The hell of it was that Aristedes was reaching an accurate conclusion based on an erroneous assumption.

The swords of the Wardens were fairly famous in supernatural circles. Bright silver, supernaturally sharp blades, perfect for chopping off the heads of warlocks, and wrought with spells to deflect or disrupt magical attacks or enchantments. When you saw Wardens, you saw their swords.

Or, at least, that had been the status quo until recently. The enchantress who had made them, Warden Luccio, had lost her capacity to create them when Corpsetaker had swapped her into the body of a young woman with very little natural inclination toward magic. As a result, most of the new Wardens, starting with me, didn’t have a groovy sword. Which meant that most of the Wardens didn’t carry swords any longer.

But that impression, apparently, hadn’t trickled down to street level yet.

Things started happening very quickly.

Aristedes produced his knife, a wicked-looking number with a lot of extraneous points on it—an interpretation of a bowie knife, as done by H. R. Giger.

Daniel Carpenter had evidently noticed Fitz’s behavior and deduced its meaning. He dragged both Fitz and Butters behind him with a sweep of his brawny arms and positioned himself between them and the sorcerer, his hands up in a defensive martial arts stance.

Butters let out a yelp as his ass hit the cold concrete floor.

Fitz took the fall and rolled, his eyes wide with terror as he regained his feet and started to run.

“You are all dead men,” Aristedes snarled.

And then he blurred forward, almost too quickly to be seen, the knife gleaming in his hand.