And it would give me solid rock on which to plant my feet, and through which to draw power. The water of the lake would wash some of it away—not as much as free-running water, but some—but I would still be able to do something to defend myself.

So before the boat could capsize and dump me into the water, I gritted my teeth and jumped in.

My body immediately informed me that I had made an insane decision.

You have no idea what the depths of cold can be until you have jumped into near-freezing water.

I screamed my way into it, finding places to stand with my frozen feet, being careful of the leg that Nicodemus had rendered gimpy for me. Then I held up my mother’s amulet in my right hand and focused on it, forcing energy into it carefully and slowly. It happened sluggishly, the way everything was happening in the mounting cold, but I was able to draw power up through the stone beneath my feet, and to call silver-blue wizard light from the amulet—brighter and brighter, light that spread out over the waters in a literal beacon that read, clear as day, Here I am.

“T-T-Thomas,” I muttered to myself, shivering so hard I could barely stand. “Y-y-you’d b-better b-be c-c-close.”

Because Deirdre’s men were.

The searchlights oriented on me instantly, and the boats—rubber raft things that would skim right over the reefs—came bouncing toward me over the waves.

It wouldn’t have been impossible to sink one of the rafts. But it would have killed every man inside. And those weren’t people collaborating with demons for their own dark gain. They were just people, most of whom had been brought up from childhood to serve Nicodemus and company, and who probably thought that they were genuinely doing the right thing. I could kill someone like Nicodemus and sleep peacefully afterward. But I wasn’t sure I could live with myself if I sent those rafts down into the lake and condemned the men in them to die. That isn’t what magic is for.

More to the point, killing them wouldn’t save me. Even if I managed to sink every other raft out there, send every man in them into the water, it wouldn’t stop me from freezing to death and drowning. It would just mean that I had a lot of company.

I’m not a Knight. But that doesn’t mean I don’t draw the line somewhere.

They started shooting from about a hundred yards away, and I raised a shield. It was hard to do in the icy waters, but I raised it and held it, a shimmering quarter-dome of silver light. Bullets smashed against it and skipped off it, sending out little concentric rings of spreading energy as their force was distributed over the shield. Most of the shots never really came anywhere close. Shooting from a moving rubber raft at a hundred yards isn’t exactly a recipe for precision marksmanship.

They got closer, and I got colder.