I tried to scream, but couldn’t. A slow, gargling moan came out instead, and I coughed blood into the freezing air.

“You knew this was coming,” said a voice, a voice that still made my entire body thrum in response, something simple and elemental that did not care how long she had held me in torment. “You knew this day would come. I am what I am. As are you.”

Mab walked into my vision from the left. I barely had enough strength to keep my eyes focused on her.

“You saw what happened to my last Knight,” she said, and began to take slow steps closer to me. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction, but I couldn’t help it—I heard myself make a soft noise, felt myself make a feeble effort to move or escape. It made her wide eyes glint for an instant. “I gave you power for a purpose, and that purpose is complete.” She turned her hand over slowly, and showed me something she held in it—a small metal spike, too large to be a needle, too small to be a nail. She walked closer to me, rolling the fine-pointed etcher between two fingers, and smiled.

Her fingertips traced over my chest and ribs, and I shuddered. She’d carved the word weak upon my body in dozens of alphabets and hundreds of languages, etching it into my flesh, the palms of my hands, the soles of my feet, with miles upon miles of scars.

I wanted it to be over. I wanted her to kill me.

She leaned close to my face. “Today,” she breathed, “we start carving your teeth.”

Cold enveloped me, and water slithered into my mouth though I tried to keep it out. Some seeped through my cracked lips. More went up my nostrils and took the long way around—and then it froze into ice, slowly forcing my jaws apart. Mab leaned in close to me, lifting the etcher, and I caught the faint scent of oxidation as the instrument began scratching at my incisors. . . .

Oxidation. The smell of rust.

Rust meant steel—something no Faerie I’d ever seen, apart from Mother Winter, could touch.

This wasn’t actually happening to me. It wasn’t real. The pain wasn’t real. The tree wasn’t real. The ice wasn’t real.

But . . . I still felt them. I could feel something behind them, a will that was not my own, forcing the idea of pain upon me, the image of helplessness, the leaden fear, the bitter vitriol of despair. This was a psychic assault like nothing I’d ever seen before. The ones I’d felt before this one were feeble shadows by comparison.

No, I thought.

“Nnngh,” I moaned.

And I then I drew a deep breath. This was not how my life would end. This was not reality. I was Harry Dresden, Wizard of the White Council, Knight of Winter. I had faced demons and monsters, fought off fallen angels and werewolves, slugged it out with sorcerers and cults and freakish things that had no names. I had fought upon land and sea, in the skies above my city, in ancient ruins and in realms of the spirit most of humanity did not know existed. I bore scars that I’d earned in dozens of battles, made enemies out of nightmares, and laid low a dark empire for the sake of one little girl.

And I would be damned if I was going to roll over for some punk Outsider and his psychic haymaker.

The words first. Damned near everything begins with words.

“I am,” I breathed, and suddenly the ice was clear of my mouth.

“I am Harry . . .” I panted, and the pain redoubled.

And I laughed. As if some freak who had never loved enough to know loss could tell me about pain.

“I AM HARRY BLACKSTONE COPPERFIELD DRESDEN!” I roared.

Ice and wood shattered. Frozen stone cracked with a sound like a cannon’s blast, a spiderweb of tiny crevices spreading out from me. The image of Mab flew away from me and blew into thousands of crystalline shards, like a shattering stained-glass window. The cold and the pain and the terror reeled away from me, like some vast and hungry beast suddenly struck on the nose.

The Outsiders loved their psychic assaults, and given that this one happened about two seconds after Sharkface came up out of the water, it was pretty clear who was behind it. But that was fine. Sharkface had chosen a battle of the mind. So be it. My head, my rules.

I lifted my right arm to the frozen sky and shouted, wordless and furious, and a bolt of scarlet lightning flashed from the seething skies. It smashed into my hand and then down into the earth. Frozen dirt sprayed everywhere, and when it had cleared, I stood holding an oaken quarterstaff carved with runes and sigils, as tall as my temple and as big around as my joined thumb and forefinger.

Then I stretched my left arm down to the earth and cried out again, sweeping it up in a single, beckoning gesture. I tore metals from the ground beneath me, and they swirled like mist up around my body, forming into a suit of armor covered in spikes and protruding blades.

“Okay, big guy,” I snarled out at the dark will that even now gathered itself to attack again. “Now we know who I am. Let’s see who you are.” I took the staff and smote its end down on the ground. “Who are you!” I demanded. “You play in my head, you play by my rules! Identify yourself!”

In answer, there was only a vast roaring sound, like an angry arctic wind gathering into a gale.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” I muttered. “You started this, creep! You want to get up close and personal, let’s play! Who are you?”

A vast sound, like something you’d hear in the deep ocean, moaned through the sky.

“Thrice I command thee!” I shouted, focusing my will, sending it coursing into my voice, which boomed out over the landscape. “Thrice I bid thee! By my name I command thee: Tell me who you are!”

And then an enormous swirling form emerged from the clouds overhead—a face, but only in the broadest, roughest terms, like something a child would make from clay. Lightning burned far back in its eyes, and it spoke in the voice of gale winds.

I AM GATEBREAKER, HARBINGER!

I AM FEARGIVER, HOPESLAYER!

I AM HE-WHO-WALKS-BEFORE!

For a second, I just stood there, staring up at the sky, shocked.

Hell’s bells.

It worked.

The thing spoke, and as it did, I knew, I knew what it was, as if I’d been given a snapshot of its core identity, its quintessential self.

For one second, no more than that, I understood it, what it was doing, what it wanted, what it planned and . . .

And then that moment was past, the knowledge vanished the way it had come—except for one thing. Somehow, I’d held on to a few crumbling fragments of insight.

I knew the thing trying to tear my head apart was a Walker. I didn’t know much about them except that nobody else knew much about them either, and that they were extremely bad news.

And one of them had tried to kill me when I was sixteen years old. He-Who-Walks-Behind had nearly done it. Except . . . from where I stood now, I wasn’t sure he’d really been trying to kill me. He’d been shaping me. I don’t know for what, but he’d been trying to provoke me.

And this thing in my head, the thing I’d named Sharkface, was like him, a Walker, a peer. It was huge, powerful, and in a way utterly different from the kinds of power I had seen before. This thing wasn’t bigger than Mab. But it was horribly, unbearably deeper than her, like a photograph of a sculpture compared to the sculpture itself. It had power at its command that was beyond anything I had seen, beyond measure, beyond comprehension—just plain beyond.