I didn’t stick around to see how much. It wouldn’t kill him. I only hoped it would slow him down enough for me to get to the others.

“Kincaid!” I shouted as I ran. My voice boomed through the empty halls in the wake of the collapsing rubble. “Kincaid!”

I knew I had only seconds before all Hell broke loose.

“Kincaid, get the kid out of here!” I screamed.“They’re coming for Ivy!”

Chapter Thirty

My brain flew along a lot faster than my feet.

Given the heavy snow outside, the first line of retreat the Archive would take would be into the Nevernever. The spirit world touches on the mortal world at all places and at all times. It gets weird once you realize that totally alien regions of the Nevernever might touch upon relatively close points in the real world. Crossing into the Nevernever is dangerous unless you know exactly where you’re going—I don’t use it as a fallback very often at all. But if you’ve really got your back to the wall, and you have more experience than I do at crossing over, you can get a feel for the crossing and almost always get to someplace relatively benign.

I figured it was safe to assume that the Archive would be savvy enough to feel comfortable stepping over—in fact, she would have chosen this location for the parley for precisely that reason. The Denarians would know it too, and they didn’t want the Archive to escape their ambush and come back loaded for bear. They would have prepared countermeasures, much as they had for Marcone.

No, scratch that. Exactly the way they had for Marcone, I realized. The huge spell that had been used to tear apart the defenses of the crime lord’s panic room hadn’t simply been a way for the Denarians to secure the bait in this scheme. It had been a field test for their means to cut off the magical energy from a large area, and access to the Nevernever with it—and to imprison something big at the same time.

It was a bear trap, custom-designed for Ivy. They were going to spring that monstrous pentagram again.

Only this time I was going to be standing inside it when it happened.

Fortunately, the Shedd was a lot squattier and more stable than Marcone’s old apartment building had been—though that didn’t mean pieces big enough to kill people wouldn’t fall when the beam ripped through the walls. And though a lot of stonework was used, there was still the danger of fire.

Fire. In an aquarium. Breathe in the irony.

But more important, once that pentagram came up—and it was coming now; I could feel it, a faint stirring of power that slid along the edges of my wizard’s senses like some huge and hungry snake passing by in the darkness—it was going to shut the building off from the rest of the world, magically speaking. That meant that I wasn’t going to be able to draw in any power to use to defend myself, any more than I’d be able to breathe if someone plunged my head underwater.