And if I played it like that, Fix was going to leave my guts on the ground.

Instead of charging ahead, I veered to one side for several steps and then froze. An instant later, another bolt of fire lit up the mist, right through where I would have been if I’d followed the mantle’s instinct.

Of course—it had to be that way. Winter’s Knight was the mountain lion, the wolf. Summer’s was the stag, the bison. Winter was oriented to stalking, hunting, and killing prey. Summer to avoiding a confrontation until an advantage could be had, then savagely pressing that advantage for all it was worth. Fix would have a wealth of instinctive knowledge to draw on if I went after him Winter’s way, and would be at his most dangerous the same way as, for example, a student of pure aikido. He would use the strength of an attack to assist his own defense, turning it back on the attacker. But if I didn’t give him that kind of aggressive assault, I would rob him of his instinctive advantage.

Screw being the Winter Knight. Before everything else, I was a wizard.

So I flicked my wrist, whispered, “Obscurata,” and vanished behind a veil.

My veils aren’t much good compared to the grasshopper’s, or almost anyone else’s, really, but when you’re standing in a giant fog bank they don’t need to be very good to make you effectively invisible—and I know how to move very quietly. I wouldn’t have trusted them against one of the Sidhe, but Fix wasn’t one. He was a changeling, with one mortal parent and one fae one, but except for the Summer mantle, he was as human as the next guy.

I prowled ahead, Listening, sharpening the acuity of my ears to a far greater level than that of which they were normally capable, and heard Fix’s smooth breathing before I’d taken a dozen steps. I froze in place. I couldn’t locate him exactly, but—

I kept myself from making an impatient sound and consulted my intellectus. Fix was standing thirty-six feet, four inches away, about twenty-two degrees to the left of the way my nose was facing. If I’d had a gun, I was pretty sure I could have shot him.

Fix had frozen in place, too.

Bah. His mantle was probably advising him to be patient, just as mine was screaming at me to stop waiting, stalk him, and pounce. I took advantage of it for maybe a minute, consulting my intellectus and moving fifty feet to one side, where I could pick something up off the ground. Then I went back and waited—but he still hadn’t stirred.

This wouldn’t work if he stood his ground. I had to make him move.

I retreated a few more steps into the mist and spoke away from him, hoping the lousy visibility and my veil would confuse the exact origin of my voice. “I get Lloyd Slate a little better now, you know,” I said. “The mantle. It drove him. Made him want things.”

“Lloyd Slate was a monster,” came Fix’s voice.

I hated to do it but . . . I had to push his buttons. “He was as human as the next man,” I said. “It just . . . made his desires louder and louder. There wasn’t anything he could have done about it.”

“Do you hear yourself, Harry?” Fix called. There was an edge in his voice. “You sound like a man making excuses—or justifications.”

“Yeah, but I’m not Slate,” I shot back, my voice hotter. “Slate was some pathetic bully. I had as much power as a hundred Slates way before I cut his throat.”

Fix’s breathing came faster. He had it under control—but he was scared. “The Harry Dresden I knew never would have said something like that.”

“That was ten years, a persecution complex, and a war ago, Fix,” I told him, “and you haven’t got room to get all righteous with me. I know you’re feeling things, too, just like I am.” Time to sink the right barb, to goad him into movement, aggression. “What do you see when you look at Lily, man? She’s gorgeous. I have a hard time thinking about anything else when she’s there.”

“Shut up,” he said in a quiet voice.

“Seriously,” I continued. The dialogue came easily—too easily. The Winter mantle was talking to a part of me that did not have much in the way of restraint. “That hot little ass? I mean, gosh, just thinking about it . . . If you could see me now, I’d be a little embarrassed.”

“Shut up,” he said again.

“Come on, bros before hos, man. That Summer mantle got a herd instinct going? ’Cause for something as sweet as that, I’m thinking we could share i—”

If my intellectus hadn’t been focused on him, to let me see what was coming, I’d have been burned alive. I flung myself to one side as he turned and hurled another bolt of fire at me. I had to gather more Winter around myself to protect my vulnerable hide, thickening the mists even more—and Fix seemed to key on the surge of cold. He pivoted toward me, took two steps, and leapt with his sword held in both hands.

Thirty-seven feet. That was how far he jumped, and it had come effortlessly—he could have done more. I knew exactly how much force he pressed the ground with when he left it, exactly what angle he’d jumped at. My intellectus could track the air and the mist he was displacing as he leapt through it.

I took two steps away just as he leapt.

I felt sick, like I was fighting a blind man.

Fix landed exactly two feet short of where I’d been, and his sword came down through the space where I’d been standing. If I’d still been there, he would have split me into two gruesome halves.

But I wasn’t. I was standing behind him, within inches of his back, and before he could rise, I struck. A moment before, I’d used my intellectus to locate an old nail on the ground, about four inches long, partly coated in rust. Thomas or I must have dropped it while walking to or from the cottage, back when we’d been beginning repairs on it and building the Whatsup Dock. The nail had lain out through several seasons, only lightly touched by them.

I put my thumb behind its head, used the strength of the Winter mantle, and drove it straight through mail that had never been designed to stop such a small point, and two inches into the muscle of Fix’s shoulder blade.

Fix let out a scream of shock and pain and swung his sword at me—but with cold steel piercing his skin, and his access to the Summer mantle disrupted, he had only his own reflexes, strength, and skill to rely on. He hadn’t trained in them without the power of the Summer Knight to back them up, and he hadn’t learned in the brutal school of hard knocks that Mab had put me through. The sword’s slash was slowed and clumsy, and I struck him twice—once on the wrist, breaking it with a clear snap, sending the sword tumbling away, and once on the jaw, not quite as hard, sending Fix to the ground in a senseless heap.

“Knight takes Knight,” I called into the cloudy night air. “Check.”

The struggle between the Queens and Demonreach had already been a silent one, but now the air abruptly went still. I couldn’t see them, but I knew that Lily had turned her body partly away from Demonreach, toward me, breaking her connection with one of the two Sidhe supporting her. Demonreach, for its part, had altered its facing to square off against Maeve. I could sense that the little bits of its body that had been eroding away were now moving in the opposite direction, reaccruing to its main mass.

“Fix?” the Summer Lady called, her voice vaguely confused. Then it was touched by sudden, cold fear. “Fix!”