“Dammit, Lara!” I said, exasperated.

I checked over my shoulder in time to see Murphy step up beside Lara, catch her eye, and nod firmly.

“Freydis,” Lara said.

The Valkyrie moved for the ropes.

“Do that,” Ebenezar called, “and I’ll sink this boat right now.”

“No,” I said, calmly, firmly. I swallowed and faced the old man. “You won’t.”

The old man’s brows furrowed, and the air suddenly became as brittle and jagged as broken glass.

“If I let you do this,” the old man said to me, his voice desperate, “you’re out of the Council. You’re an outlaw. The svartalves won’t care about who hired who. They’ll know you prevented them from having justice. And they’ll kill you for it. It’s the only outcome their worldview will accept. Don’t you see, boy? You’ll be vulnerable, compromised. Mab, and this creature, they’re isolating you. That’s what abusers do.”

My heart broke.

“I think,” I said quietly, “that I’m just about done making my choices based on your mistakes.”

He stared at me.

“You don’t know me,” I said quietly. “Not really. You haven’t been there for most of it. And you don’t know Thomas.”

Behind me were two quiet thumps, as lines were dropped on the deck of the ship.

“I know enough to know a frog with a scorpion when I see one,” he replied. “You’ve been around them for a decade and change, and you think you know them. But I’ve dealt with their ilk for centuries. They’ll turn on you, frog. Even if it destroys them. They don’t get a choice about it. It’s what they are.”

Lara stared at the old man with furious …

… haunted …

… eyes.

Murphy strode into the wheelhouse and started the Water Beetle’s ancient engine. It was an old diesel, didn’t even have spark plugs. Hexes, EMP, none of it mattered. If a one-eyed, palsied squirrel was all you had to do maintenance, that engine would run until its molecules decayed into their component atoms.

Ebenezar’s eye flickered to the ship and hardened.

I sucked in a breath, ready to unleash Power.

My God.

Was this really about to happen? Was the old man really about to throw down with me?

He wouldn’t listen. Stars and stones, I couldn’t get him to accept that a White Court vampire might be partially human. If I told him that Thomas was his grandson, he would … not receive the news well.

The old man had a volcanic temper.

That wasn’t a metaphor.

If that happened … I really wasn’t sure what came next.

The Water Beetle’s engine didn’t roar so much as sputter and cough loudly to life. Compared with the almost-silent murmur of the water against the docks and the ships, the sound was deafening in the unnatural silence over the city.

Ebenezar McCoy snapped his staff across his body, held vertically—a duelist’s salute.

My heart lurched into overdrive.

I returned my grandfather’s salute with my own staff.

And then me and the old man went to war.

32

Some free advice for you: Never fight an old man.

They’ve been there, done that, written the book, made and starred in the movie, designed the T-shirt, and they’ve got no ego at all about how the fight gets won.

And never fight family.

They know you too well.

Ebenezar slashed his hand down at the boulder beneath him with a word, and in the same spell a blade of unseen force slashed a three hundred-pound section of rock free of the boulder he stood on and sent it zipping toward my boat at several hundred feet per second.

I wasn’t even going to try to stop it. It was just too much energy, too much momentum. It would be like lifting a medieval shield to block a descending war maul. Sure, you can do it, but if you do, you’re gonna wish you hadn’t.

No. The smart thing to do is to give that war maul a single sharp lateral tap just as it begins its forward momentum. A few pounds of pressure in the right place, at the right time, are often more effective than expending heroic levels of energy.

And besides. If I tried to match the old man swing for swing, he’d bury me. Not so much because he was stronger, although he was, but because he was better than me, more energy efficient, milking twice the efficacy out of every single spell while expending half the energy to do it. Wizard fights between the old and the young were a reverse image of mundane confrontations between the same. I was the one who was weaker, slower, limited in what moves I could attempt, and had to play it smart if I wanted to win.

So as the old man sent the section of boulder at the Water Beetle, I lifted my staff, modifying the formula of my simple force-blow spell to send it in from the side instead of straight ahead, and smacked the projectile firmly in the flank as it got moving.

It streaked forward at an angle, wobbling and tumbling as a result, and smashed into one of the boats farther down the dock, plunging through the hull and part of the deck, straight on through the hold and out the other side, with such force that water splashed a hundred feet.

The old man brought his boulder around in a swooping arc, studying me through narrowed eyes, his voice bitter. “Now you learn that you don’t have to swing for the fences every time.”

“Yeah,” I said, studying him right back. The cleave mark where the boulder had been cut was a slightly darker grey than the surface—living rock, with water still inside, then. “Don’t tell anybody. You’ll ruin my maverick rep.”

He looked from me to the Water Beetle, chugging out into the open lake. “But you still ain’t using your brain.”

And he flicked a wrist and started sailing over me, out over the lake toward the boat.

The second his eyes were off me, I unlimbered my blasting rod from the sewn pocket inside my suit coat, aimed for the damp stone of the boulder, and shouted, “Fuego!”

Green-gold fire lanced from the blasting rod and smashed into the boulder—and I poured it on in a steady stream.

The boulder beneath my grandfather’s feet began to let out a kind of hissing, whistling scream, and the old man flung himself off into open air half a second before the water in the stone began to boil and shattered it into dozens of pieces. Some plummeted into the lake, and some onto and through the decks of more of the boats parked in the marina.

That should have been it. The old man should have fallen into the lake, become immersed in deep water, and had the lion’s share of his power washed away for a time. But instead, he barked a pair of words, hurling a blast of force at the surface of the lake that pushed back just as hard against him. He was flung to one side, falling toward the dock. He hurled a second, weaker blast at the dock, slowing his fall without shattering it, and landed with one foot stomping down so hard that I heard the board crack, dropping to one knee for balance, his staff still held in his hands, his pate gleaming, his eyes bright.

Hell’s bells, was he better than me.

That was Ebenezar McCoy, the Blackstaff, the most feared wizard on planet Earth.

Without pause the old man’s staff struck the boards of the dock, and they bowed up in a straight line coming toward me, as if an enormous shark was swimming toward me beneath the dock, its dorsal fin bumping up the wood.