I took more blows to the body as his face turned red. He got one of my knees with a vicious kick as his face turned purple. I was screaming with the pain of it when the purple started looking more like black—and he collapsed, body loosening and then going completely limp.

A lot of people let up when that happens, when their opponent drops unconscious. But it could have been a trick.

Even if it hadn’t been I’d been planning to hang on.

I’m not a Knight.

In fact, I squeezed harder.

I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d had him down. Might have been thirty seconds. Might have been a minute and a half. But I saw a flash of furious green light and looked up to see Deirdre coming down the hillside toward me on her hair and three limbs, one leg bound up in white bandages. She had twenty or thirty tongueless soldier types with her, and her glowing eyes burned with verdant fury, like a pair of spotlights. She focused on me for half a second, hissed like a furious alley cat, and screamed, “Father!”

Crap.

I grabbed Nicodemus by the shirt and pitched him over the side, into the black waters of the lake. He went down with hardly a splash, his dark clothing making him all but invisible an instant after he hit the water.

I scanned the bottom of the boat frantically. There, the key. I scooped it up and jammed it into the ignition.

“Don’t shoot!” Deirdre screamed. “You might hit my father!” She bounded into the air, all that writhing hair folding back into a single, sharklike swimming tail as she dove, and hit the water with barely a splash.

I turned the key. The old boat’s engine coughed and wheezed.

“Come on,” I breathed. “Come on.”

If I didn’t get this boat moving before Deirdre found her daddy, game over. She’d order her soldiers to open fire. I’d have to raise a shield to stop the bullets, and once I did that the already wonky engine would sure as hell never get moving. I’d be stuck, and it would only be a matter of time before a combination of weariness, mounting pain, number of attackers, and wrathful daughter took me down.

Deirdre surfaced, cast a glance around to orient herself, and dove into the featureless darkness again.

The engine caught, and then turned over drunkenly.

“Boo-ya!” I screamed.

Then I remembered that I hadn’t untied the boat.

I lunged awkwardly up to the front and untied the rope, very much aware of all the guns pointing at me. The boat came free. I pushed off the pole, and the vessel began to sluggishly turn. I hobbled back to the steering wheel, cranked it around, and gave the engine some power. The boat throbbed and then roared and began to gather speed.

Deirdre surfaced maybe twenty feet in front of me, carrying her father. Before she even looked around she screamed, “Kill him, shoot him, shoot him!”