The ground started shaking as Tiny took up the chase behind me.

My options were limited. To my right was the exterior wall of the building, and I couldn’t go outside into the deepening snow. My imagination treated me to a dandy image of me floundering in hip-deep snow while Tiny, with his far greater height and mass, cruised effortlessly up behind me and beer-canned me. Ahead of me was an empty hallway leading to another wall, and on my left were nothing but rows and rows of……storage lockers.

I fumbled in my pocket again as I ran through the water sheeting the floor, and started trying to get a look at the numbers on the lockers. I spotted the one corresponding to Gard’s key, and I skidded to a halt on the watery floor. I jammed the key in the lock frantically as Tiny, running with a limp but still running, closed the last dozen yards between us.

I had to time it perfectly. I raised my right hand, aimed at the hoof on his wounded leg, and waited for all of his weight to come forward onto it before triggering every energy ring on my right hand, unleashing a rushing column of force that hit him with the power of a speeding car.

The gruff ’s hoof went out from under him again on the wet floor, and he pitched forward with a roar of frustration. He dropped his blade and reached for me with both hands as he fell.

I waited until the last second to jump back, ripping open the door to Gard’s locker as I went.

I could only describe what happened next as a bolt of lightning. It wasn’t lightning—not really. Real lightning did not have the raw, savage intensity of this…thing, and I realized with a startled flash of insight that this energy, whatever it was, was alive. White-hot power tinged with flashes of scarlet streaked out of the locker like a hundred hyperkinetic serpents, zigzagging with impossible speed. That living lightning ripped into Tiny, cutting through his crystalline armor as if it had been made of soft wax. It burned and slashed and pounded the flesh beneath in a long line from Tiny’s shoulder to his lower leg, letting out a screaming buzz of sound unlike anything I had ever heard before.

In the last fraction of a second before it vanished, the energy snapped back and forth like the tip of a whip, and Tiny’s left leg came off at the knee.

The gruff screamed. Whatever that thing had been, it had taken the fight out of Tiny.

Hell’s bells.

I stared at the maimed Summer champion and then at the open, innocent-looking locker. Then I walked slowly forward.

Tiny had only one eye open, and it didn’t look like it would focus on anything. His breathing was rough, quick, and ragged, which translated into a seething, oat-scented breeze anywhere within ten or fifteen feet of his head.

Tiny blinked his other eye open, and though they still wouldn’t focus he let out a weak-sounding grunt. “Mortal,” he rasped, “I am bested.” One of his ears flicked once and he exhaled in a sigh. “Finish it.”