Sparks danced every few seconds as Mother Winter slowly sharpened her implement. I was able to get my breathing under control and to fight past the pain. “Mmm . . .” I said. “M-Mother Winter. Such a pleasure to meet with you again.”

The next burst of sparks gleamed off of an iron surface—teeth.

“I n-need to speak to you.”

“Speak, then, manling,” said Mother Winter. “You have a little time left.”

The cleaver rasped across the sharpening stone again.

“Mab has ordered me to kill Maeve,” I said.

“She is always doing foolish things,” said Mother Winter.

“Maeve says that Mab’s gone insane,” I said. “Lily concurs.”

There was a wheezing sound that might have been a cackle. “Such a loving daughter.”

I had to believe that I was going to get out of this somehow. So I pressed her. “I need to know which of them is right,” I said. “I need to know who I should turn my hand against to prevent a great tragedy.”

“Tragedy,” said Mother Winter in a purr that made me think of rasping scorpions. “Pain? Terror? Sorrow? Why should I wish to prevent such a thing? It is sweeter than an infant’s marrow.”

It is a good thing I am a fearless and intrepid wizardly type, or that last bit of sentence would have set my flesh to crawling hard enough to carry me across the dirt floor.

I was kind of hosed anyway, so I took a chance. I crossed my fingers in the dark and said, “Because Nemesis is behind it.”

The cleaver’s rasp abruptly stopped.

The darkness and silence were, for a moment, absolute.

My imagination treated me to an image of Mother Winter creeping silently toward me in the blackness, cleaver lifted, and I stifled an urge to burst into panicked screams.

“So,” she whispered a moment later. “You have finally come to see what has been before you all this time.”

“Uh, yeah. I guess. I know there’s something there now, at least.”

“So very mortal of you. Learning only when it is too late.”

Rasp. Sparks.

“You aren’t going to kill me,” I said. “I’m as much your Knight as Mab’s.”

There was a low, quiet snort. “You are no true Knight of Winter, manling. Once I have devoured your flesh, and your mantle with it, I will bestow it upon someone worthier of the name. I should never have given it to Mab.”

Uh, wow. I hadn’t thought of that kind of motivation. My guts got really watery. I tried to move my limbs and found them numbed and only partially functional. I started trying to get them to flip me over so that I could get my feet under me. “Uh, no?” I heard myself ask in a panicked, cracking voice. “And why is that, exactly?”

“Mab,” said Mother Winter in a tone of pure disgust, “is too much the romantic.”

Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Mother Winter, right there.

“She has spent too much time with mortals,” Mother Winter continued, withered lips peeled back from iron teeth as the sparks from her cleaver’s edge leapt higher. “Mortals in their soft, controlled world. Mortals with nothing to do but fight one another, who have forgotten why they should fear the fangs and the claws, the cold and the dark.”

“And . . . that’s bad?”

“What value has life when it is so easily kept?” Mother Winter spat the last word. “Mab’s weakness is evident. Look at her Knight.”

Her Knight was currently trying to sit up, but his wrists and ankles were fastened to the floor by something cold, hard, and unseen. I tested them, but couldn’t feel any edges. The bonds couldn’t have been metal. And they weren’t ice. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I was completely certain. Ice would have been no obstacle. But there was something familiar about it, something I had felt before . . . in Chichén Itzá.

Will.

Mother Winter was holding me down by pure, stark will. The leaders of the Red Court had been ancient creatures with a similar power, but that had been a vague, smothering blanket that had made it impossible to move or act, a purely mental effort.

This felt like something similar, but far more focused, more developed, as if thought had somehow crystallized into tangibility. My wrists and ankles wouldn’t move because Mother Winter’s will said that was how reality worked. It was like magic—but magic took a seed, a kernel of will and built up a framework of other energies around that seed. It took intense practice and focus to make that happen, but at the end of the day anyone’s will was only part of the spell, alloyed with other energy into something else.

What held me down now was pure, undiluted will—the same kind of will that I suspected had backed up events presaged by phrases like “Let there be light.” It was far more than human, beyond simple physical strength, and if I’d been the Incredible Hulk, I was pretty sure there was no way I’d have been able to tear myself free.

“Ahhh,” said Mother Winter, during one last stroke of the cleaver. “I like nice clean edges to my meat, manling. Time for dinner.”

And slow, limping steps came toward me.

Chapter

Thirty-two

A slow smile stretched my lips back from my teeth.

Mortals had the short end of the stick on almost any supernatural confrontation. Even most wizards, with their access to terrific forces, had to approach conflicts carefully—relatively few of us had the talents that lent themselves to brawling. But mortals had everyone else beat on exactly one thing: the freedom to choose. Free will.

It had taken me a while to begin to understand it, but it had eventually sunk into my thick skull. I couldn’t arm wrestle an ogre, even with the mantle. I couldn’t have won a magical duel with Mab or Titania—probably not even against Maeve or Lily. I couldn’t outrun one of the Sidhe.

But I could defy absolutely anyone.

I could lift my will against that of anything, and know that the fight might be lopsided, but never hopeless. And by thunder, I was not going to allow anyone’s will to stretch me out on the floor like a lamb for slaughter.

I stopped pressing at my bindings with my limbs and started using my mind instead. I didn’t try to push them away, or break them, or slip free of them. I simply willed them not to be. I envisioned what my limbs would feel like coming free, and focused on that reality, summoning up my total concentration on that goal, that ideal, that fact.

And then I crossed my fingers and reached into me, into the place where a covert archangel had granted me access to one of the primal forces of the universe, an energy called soulfire. I had no idea how it might interact with the Winter Knight’s mantle on an ongoing basis. I mean, it had worked out once before, but that didn’t mean that it would keep working out. I felt certain that I was pretty much swallowing bottles of nitroglycerin, then jumping up and down to see what would happen, but at this point I had little to lose. I gathered up soulfire, used it to infuse my raw will, and cast the resulting compound against my bonds.

Soulfire, according to Bob, is one of the fundamental forces of the universe, the original power of creation. It isn’t meant for mortals. We get it by slicing off a bit of our soul, our life energy, and converting it into something else.