Power screamed as it wrenched its way out of my body. It shattered the black-thread bars of my prison and left a streak of metallic light on the air behind it for an instant, reflective, like a trail of liquid chrome. It caught the falling Denarian in a massive silvery simulacrum of my own fist.

I actually felt my fingers close over the gaunt, skeletal, grey-skinned figure, felt the numerous spurs of bone jutting from its joints press painfully into my flesh. I flung it away from me with a cry, and the huge silver hand flung the Denarian into the nearest wall, ripping through several feet of expensive stone terracing and carefully simulated Pacific Northwest.

I stared for a second, first at the stunned Denarian, and then at my own spread fingers-and at the floating silvery hand beyond, mirroring my movements. Then the skeletal Denarian gathered itself and rose, fast as hell-until I shoved the heel of my hand forward and drove his bony ass six inches into the wall of rock behind him.

“Oh, yeah, baby!” I heard myself howl, elated. “Talk to the hand!”

I picked up the thorny fiend by a leg and laughed as it raked and bit and scrabbled at the construct that held it. I could feel the pain of it-but it was a small thing, really, something I might have gotten from a rat. Unpleasant as hell, but I’d felt much, much worse, and it was nothing compared to the agony of the power still burning inside me. I slammed him into the wall again, then swung him twenty feet through the air, shoved him through a pane of unbroken three-inch-thick glass on the outer wall of the Oceanarium, drew him back through, and then rammed him through the next one, and the next one, and the one after that, cutting him to tatters as I did.

I had maybe half of a second’s warning, as my already overloaded nerves screamed that the circle was closing, that the Sign was rising, as I felt the surge of energy approaching from no more than a dozen yards away. There was still no time for a shield.

So Spinyboy would have to do.

I flung him between me and where my instinct warned me the inbound power was coming from, and then there was a roar like a dozen turbine engines howling to life in synchronization. Thirty feet from me the walls exploded in light and Hellfire. Heat, light, and sheer, intangible power slammed against my senses and threw me from my feet. Bits of molten rock hissed through the air, deadlier than any bullet.

Spinyboy caught a bunch of those. They flew out his back and left gaping, smoking, cauterized holes in it. I could see them through the silvery haze of the construct hand that still held him, could feel the heat as they bored through the construct, and-

- and then my head bumped the ground hard enough to make me see stars. I rolled to my feet and nearly wobbled over the railing and into the pool with the whales. I slammed the end of my staff into the ground with my left hand and leaned heavily against it, panting.

I was still alive. I still retained an agonizing amount of energy. So far, I thought woozily, everything was going exactly according to plan.

The skeletal, spiny Denarian lay twitching on the ground ten or twelve feet in front of me. There were big smoking holes in its body. One of its arms was moving. So was its head. But its legs and its lower body were completely limp. I could see the bones of its spine standing out sharply from its gaunt, emaciated back. Two of the smoking holes intersected that spine precisely. He-or she, I supposed, if it mattered-wasn’t going anywhere.

Great currents of energy, eight or nine feet thick, intersected maybe fifty feet away. It was like…looking at the cross-section of a river in flood-if the river had been made of fire instead of water, and if two rivers could have intersected and passed through each other without affecting each other’s courses. I turned my head and saw, through the walls of glass that I’d broken, more of the same beams, all around the Oceanarium in an unbroken wall.

The eerie part was that the fiery current of energy was silent. Absolutely silent. There was no crackle of flame, no roar of superheated air, no hiss of steam as snow and ice melted. I heard some rubble falling, stone landing on stone. I heard a broken electrical line somewhere, spitting and snapping for a few seconds before it, too, went silent.

That was when I realized a couple of things.

The silver energy construct that had gripped the Denarian was gone.

And I couldn’t feel my right hand.

I looked down in a panic, but found that it was still there, at least, flopping loosely at the end of my arm. I couldn’t feel anything below my wrist. My fingers were slightly curled and didn’t respond when I told them to move.

“Crap,” I muttered. Then I gathered my wits about me, gripped my staff more firmly in my left hand, and took several rapid steps until I stood over Spinyboy.

Then I bashed him over the head with the solid length of oak until he stopped moving.

Immobilized wasn’t the same as unconscious. He wouldn’t be the only one of his kind in the building, and I didn’t want him shouting my location to anybody the second my back was turned.

One down. Who knew how many to go.

I crouched in the walkway with the wall on my right, the windows facing the outside of the Oceanarium on my left, and the beam of Hellfire at my back. It was the most secure position I was likely to get. There was still no sound, which meant that they hadn’t tried to take the Archive yet. Kincaid would not go down quietly.

But they were in here with me. They had to be.

But they didn’t necessarily know I was in here with them.

That could be an advantage. Maybe even a huge advantage.

Sure, Harry. What cat ever expects the mouse to come after it?

I stuffed my numb right hand in my duster pocket, tried to ignore the bone-deep ache of unspent power racking my body and the limb-weakening tremors of raw terror radiating through my guts, and stalked silently forward to sucker punch some Fallen angels.