His eyes flashed. “I did,” he said. “It shattered in my coat when he kicked me.”

I ran my finger along the blades. Considering how little time he had, they were amazingly well made.

“I won’t get anywhere near him with this one.” I put the large blade down and picked up the smaller one. With this one I’d have to get close to the upir. Very close.

“You get one shot,” Nick said.

I nodded and tucked it into my knife sheath.

“You still have the sphere?” he asked.

I nodded.

“Still planning to use it?”

My hand twitched to check the comforting weight of the metal in my pocket. Somewhere deep down I knew I wouldn’t use it. I would fight to the end, fight until he would be forced to cut me to pieces. I would make him kill me if I had to. After all I was only human. It wouldn’t take much.

I glanced at Nick and realized he knew exactly what I was thinking. “Only if I have no choice,” I said.

I RODE ONE OF THE PACK’S HORSES, A SOLID, THICK-MUSCLED creature of undeterminable shade somewhere halfway between mud and soot. He pounded the ground with his hooves as if suspecting that the thin layer of soil masked a nest of wriggling snakes and he could get at them if he just stomped hard enough.

“Wind,” the surly werewolf had told me after presenting me with the reins. Given that I had smothered his face with wolfsbane less than twenty-four hours ago, I wasn’t high on his list of favorite people. “His name’s Wind.”

I had thought of asking him what possessed someone to give this illegitimate offspring of a knight’s war stallion and an oversized plow horse a star-of-the-racetrack name but had decided against it. Now Wind was merrily pounding his way through the darkened city at the velocity of a tired speed walker. Curran’s howling jeep wasn’t even getting a workout and Nick I couldn’t see. His red gelding had taken off at the first snarl of the magic-powered engine and insisted on maintaining the distance.

I patted the charger’s neck. “At least you’re not skittish.”

Might just as well have screamed into a tornado. The bloody jeep drowned any sound in its tortured battle for sonic supremacy.