The falling coin missed touching my bare flesh by a hair and bounced off the concrete floor. My left hand moved, faster and smoother than I would have thought possible, snapping the coin from the air on the bounce as smoothly and nimbly as if it had been whole and healthy and not burned and scarred and covered in a leather glove.

I looked between it and my numb-tingling right hand for a quarter of a second.

What. The hell.

That was not normal.

Worry about it later, Harry. I mean, sure, obviously Something Has Happened to you, but now is not the time to get distracted. Focus. Save the girl.

I jammed the cursed relic in my pocket, hoped to God my 501s didn’t have a hole in them, and spun toward Ivy.

I know I’m a wizard, a card-carrying member of the White Council and all. I know I’m a Warden, a certified combat expert of wizardkind, a cop, a soldier—have staff, will kick ass, if you will. I thought I’d seen some real professionals in action, the top of the wizarding game.

I was wrong.

It wasn’t that Ivy was slinging around a ton of power. She wasn’t. But think about this one for a moment: What’s really more impressive? A giant truck rumbling around on a great big old smoking engine? Or a little car just barely big enough to get the job done that’s powered by a couple of AA batteries?

Seven of them were going after Ivy with magic, and she was countering them. All of them.

Magog had charged her as he had me, but she hadn’t slammed him to a stop with a brick wall. She’d trapped him inside some kind of frictionless bubble, and he was spinning uselessly in circles half an inch off the floor, every motion making him spin faster. Whatever additional metaphysical mass he’d brought to the fight hadn’t cramped her style much. Her arms, bobbing and weaving continuously between all the workings she had up, flicked by the field containing him every few seconds and, I swear, struck his whirling snare for no reason other than to impart an additional, nausea-inducing vector to his spin.

Deirdre’s tangle of living locks danced with purple Saint Elmo’s fire, lashing out in a deadly webwork, but Ivy constantly cast out a spinning cat’s cradle of light, tiny, tiny threads of power that did not so much stop any of Deirdre’s attacks as they fouled any one of her locks with others near it, tangling them together into useless clumps—sort of an enforced bad-hair day. On the opposite side of Ivy, Rosanna launched more traditional lances of flame from her open palms, much like the ones I—

—a savage pain went through my skull for a second—son of a bitch—

—but Ivy dispersed them with delicately applied wedges of air, intercepting each burst of fire far enough short of her body to prevent the bloom of heat as they died from scorching her—though the two more physical Denarians who strained to force their way past the barrier of snapping sparks that formed whenever they tried to get close had far less luck. The Hellmaid’s flames scorched them badly.