“Harry?” Michael said. “What is it?”

“Feel that breeze?” I asked.

“Da,” Sanya said, confusion in his voice. “Is warm. So?”

Michael caught on. “Summer is on the way,” he said.

Rosanna shot a glance over her shoulder at us. “What?”

“Get us to shore,” I told her. “The things coming after me might not give a damn if they take you out along with me.”

She turned back to the wheel and turned the ignition. The boat’s engine stuttered and wheezed and didn’t turn over.

The breeze picked up. Instead of snowflakes, thick, slushy drops of half-frozen sleet began to fall. More ice began forming on the boat, thickening almost visibly in the green glow of my light. The waves began to grow steeper, rocking the boat more and more severely.

“Come on,” I heard myself saying. “Come on.”

“Look there!” Sanya called, pointing a finger down at the water beside the boat.

Something long, brown, fibrous, and slimy lashed up out of the water and wrapped around the Russian knight’s arm from wrist to elbow.

“Bozhe moi!”

Two more strands whipped up from different angles, one seizing Sanya’s upper arm, one wrapping around his face and skull, and jerked him halfway from the boat in the time it took me to shift my weight and reach for him. I managed to grab one of his boots before he could be pulled all the way over the side into the water. I planted one foot on the wall of the boat and hauled on Sanya’s leg for all I was worth. “Michael!”

The boat’s engine coughed, turned over, stuttered, and died.

“In nomine Dei Patri!” Michael roared as Amoracchius cleared its sheath. The broadsword flashed in a single sweeping slash, and severed the strands strangling Sanya. The edges of the slashed material burned away from the touch of Amoracchius ’s steel like paper from an open flame.

I dragged Sanya back into the boat, and the big Russian whipped his saber from its sheath just in time to neatly sever another lashing brown tendril of animate fiber. “What is it?”

“Kelpies,” I growled. If they tangled up the blades of the engine our boat wasn’t going anywhere. I howled at Rosanna, “Come on!”

The boat suddenly rocked violently to the other side. I twisted my head to look over my shoulder and saw kelpies coming up over the sides. They were slimy, nebulous things, only vaguely humanoid in shape, made up of masses of wet weeds with gaping mouths and pinpoints of glittering silver light for eyes.

I turned and swept my arm in a slewing arc, unleashing my will as I cried out, “Forzare!”

Invisible force ripped the kelpies from the sides of the boat, leaving long strands of wet plant matter clinging limply to the fiberglass hull. They let out gurgling screams as they flew back and splashed into the water.

The boat’s engine caught and rose to a roar. The rear end of the boat sank, and its nose rose as it surged forward.