Something that felt like cold, greasy piano wire wrapped around my throat, and I couldn’t breathe.

“Insufferable, arrogant little monkey,” Namshiel hissed. “Playing with the fires of creation. Binding your soul to it, as if you were one of us. How dare you so presume. How dare you wield soul fire against me. I, who was there when your pathetic kind was hewn from the muck.”

It wasn’t so much being strangled to death that I objected to, or even the megalomaniacal monologue I was being subjected to in the process. I just wished that I knew what the hell he was talking about. Granted, I had busted him up pretty good with that silver hand thing, but he was taking it so freaking personally.

I lost track of what I’d been thinking. My head hurt. So did my neck. Thorned Namshiel was ranting about something. Practically foaming at the mouth, really—right up until Amoracchius flashed in a line of silver fire, and Thorned Namshiel’s head hopped up off his shoulders, tumbled twice, and fell into the snow.

Suddenly I took a deep breath and the world started sorting itself out again.

Michael stepped forward, took one look at Namshiel’s body, and hewed the right hand off at the wrist. He picked up the hand and dropped it into a pouch on his sword belt. Meanwhile, Sanya shouldered his rifle and dragged me to my feet.

“Go,” I choked out, barely able to get the words out through my half-crushed throat. I regained my own feet and waved Sanya off me, gesturing ahead. “The lighthouse. Fast.”

Sanya looked from me to the hollow tower and promptly sheathed his Sword to take up his rifle again. The big Russian advanced on the tower, the Kalashnikov at his shoulder, and began putting precise shots through the heads of each of the beasts that had been chained to the walls inside to torment Ivy, who still floated bound within the greater circle.

I followed Sanya as quickly as I could, wheezing in breaths through my aching neck. By the time Michael and I had gotten into the shelter of the mostly closed ring of the tower’s stones, the gunfire from around us had begun to close in on us again as the gunmen’s night vision returned. The tiny window of opportunity the flash of the Fireball rounds had created had waned.

“How did you know?” Michael asked, panting. “How did you know they would break if we charged them?”

“You don’t survive two thousand years in a game like this one without predator reflexes,” I replied. “Any predator in the world reacts the same way to a loud noise, a bright flash, and a noisy and unexpected charge. They get the hell out of the way. Can’t really help themselves. Habit of a couple millennia is a bitch to break.”

Sanya calmly shot another beast.

I shrugged. “Nicodemus and company thought that they knew how things were going to proceed, and when they didn’t go the way they expected, they got flustered. So the Nickelheads got clear.” I pursed my lips. “Of course, they’re going to be back in a minute. And very upset. Hey, there, Marcone.”