I needed to find the Way this site was guarding, the back door to the Corpsetaker’s hideout, the one I’d seen Evil Bob and the Fomor servitor use. I closed my eyes and shut away the recent horrors. I willed away my worry and my fear. I didn’t have to breathe, but I did anyway, because that was the only way I’d ever learned to attain a state of clarity. In. Out. Slowly.

Then I carefully quested out with my senses, looking for the energy that would surround an open Way. I found it immediately, and opened my eyes. It was coming from straight ahead of me, away from the cliff and the beach, several hundred yards back up among some rolling, wooded hills. I could see the head of a footpath that led into the woods. There had been regular traffic on it, for it to be so evident, and I doubted that many hikers or Boy Scout troops had been tromping through. That was our next step.

An instant, violent instinct screamed at me without warning. I didn’t question it. I flung myself to one side, rolling in the air to bring up my shield again.

A wrecking ball of pure psychic force hit the shield, and half of the little shield charms dangling from my bracelet screamed and then shattered into tiny shards. The blow flung me a good twenty feet and I hit the ground rolling, until said ground vanished from underneath me. I dropped to the floor of one of the defensive trenches and lay there for a second, stunned at the sheer savagery of the assault.

I heard slow, heavy, confident footsteps. Clomp. Clomp. Then a pair of black jackboots appeared at the top of the trench. My gaze tracked up the SS officer’s uniform, which included a black leather trench coat not too unlike my own. It wasn’t one of the wolfwaffen. Instead of a deformed, monstrous wolf face, this being had only a bare skull sitting atop the uniform’s high collar. Blue fire glowed in its eye sockets and it regarded me with cold disdain.

“A worthy effort for a novice,” Evil Bob said. “I wish you to know that I regret your death as the loss of significant potential.” He lifted what was probably not actually a Luger pistol and aimed it calmly at my head. “Good-bye, Dresden.”

Chapter Forty-four

Stall, I thought desperately. Sir Stuart and company wouldn’t be busy for long. Stall.

“It isn’t in your best self-interest to do that,” I said.

Evil Bob’s eyelights flickered. The gun didn’t waver. “That hypothesis assumes that I possess self-interest.”

“If you didn’t,” I said, “you would have pulled the trigger already.”

For a second, nothing happened. Then the skull tilted slightly to one side, and I got the impression that Evil Bob had become suddenly pensive.

I rushed to continue. “There’s no percentage for your boss in hesitation. And since I know you aren’t doing it for my sake, your hesitation must therefore be an act of self-interest.”