I held the light and the shield.

Please, brother. Don’t let me down.

I never heard anything until a wave of cold water hit my shoulder blades and all but knocked me over. Then the heavy chug-chug-chug of the Water Beetle ’s engines shook the water around me as my brother’s battered old ship bellied up dangerously close to the reef, and I turned to find the ship wallowing broadside behind me.

I liked to give Thomas a hard time about the Water Beetle, teasing him that he’d stolen it from the prop room of Jaws. But the fact of the matter was that I didn’t know a damned thing about boats, and that I was secretly impressed that he could sail the thing around the lake so blithely.

“Harry!” Murphy called. She came hurrying down the frozen deck, slipping here and there on patches of ice as she did. She slapped a line attached to a harness she wore to the ship’s safety railing, and threw the other end of the line to me. “Come on!”

“It’s about time you got outside the reef,” Thomas complained from the top of the wheelhouse. As I watched, he drew his heavy Desert Eagle from his side, aimed, and loosed a round. A dark form on one of the oncoming rafts let out a cry and fell into the water with a splash.

I scowled at Thomas. He doesn’t even practice.

I stumbled forward and grabbed the line, wrapping it around my right arm. That was pretty much all I had enough energy left to do. Murphy began hauling it in, and started yelling for Thomas to help her.

“Cover me!” Thomas yelled.

He came down from the wheelhouse pirate style, just jumping down, all graceful and stylish despite the roll of the ship, despite the ice and the cold. Murphy, her feet planted, secured to the railing, shifted her grip and produced the little assault weapon she’d had on a strap around her back—the P-90 Kincaid had given her as a gift. She raised it to her shoulder, sighted through the scope at one of the oncoming rafts, and started calmly squeezing out rounds, one and two at a time. Fam. Fam fam. Fam. Fam fam. Fam. Fam.

One of the rafts foundered. Maybe she’d struck whoever was steering it and caused him to misguide it. Maybe the lake had simply swamped it. I don’t know. But a second raft immediately turned to start picking up men who had spilled into the water from the first. Murphy turned her gun onto the remaining raft.

Thomas started hauling me out of the water by the line around my arm, just pulling me up arm over arm as if I’d been a child and not an adult a hundred pounds heavier than he was. He doesn’t even work out.

I was tired enough that I just let him do it. As a result I had enough spare attention to notice when my feet cleared the water, and Deirdre surged out of the blackness and seized my ankles.