“Harry!” Michael said, offering me the harness.

I was about to take it, but by chance I looked up and saw Gard looking down at us through the Plexiglas bubble around the pilot’s seat-looking at Michael with an absolutely unnerving intensity that I had seen on her face once before, and my heart started hammering in terror.

The last time she’d looked like that, I’d been in an alley outside Bock Ordered Books back in Chicago, and a necromancer named Corpsetaker and a ghoul named Li Xian had been about to murder me. A few minutes later Gard had told Marcone that she had seen that it was my fate to die then and there. The only reason that I survived it was that Marcone had intervened.

But even if I’d never seen that look on her face before, I figured that anytime a Valkyrie hovering over a battlefield suddenly gets real interested in a particular warrior, it ain’t good.

I’d made the grasshopper a promise. If things were about to get hairy for whoever was left on the ground, it wouldn’t be Molly’s dad that had to deal with it.

“You first,” I said.

He started to argue.

I shoved the harness into his chest. “Dammit, Michael!”

He grimaced, shook his head at me, and then sheathed Amoracchius . Still holding Fidelacchius in his hand, he shrugged quickly into the harness. I gave Luccio the thumbs-up, and Michael began to rise. Gard frowned faintly, and some of my screaming tension started to ease.

Tessa and Rosanna came out from behind veils that were as good as anything Molly could have done, and I didn’t have to be Sherlock to deduce who had done the lion’s share of the work on the greater circle that had contained the Archive. I had half a second to act, but I got tangled in the strap of Sanya’s gun, which he’d handed me so that I could defend myself in case I was suddenly attacked. Thank you, Sanya.

Tessa, her pretty human face showing, her eyes gleaming with manic glee, swept a mantis claw at my head, and I at least managed to interpose the rifle before she ripped my head off. Only instead of smashing the gun, as I’d expected, she ripped it out of my hand, just as easily as taking candy from a baby and spun away from me.

Then she winked at me, blew me a kiss, and opened fire on Michael with the Kalashnikov on full automatic from no more than ten feet away.

My friend didn’t scream as bullets tore into him. He just jerked once in a spray of scarlet and went limp.

Fidelacchius tumbled from his fingers and fell to the ground.

Sparks flew from the Huey as the bullets tore into it, too, and a burst of flame and smoke poured from a vent on one side of its fuselage. It dipped sharply to one side, and for a second I thought it was simply going to roll over and into the ground-but then it recovered, drunkenly, gathering momentum like a car sliding down an icy hill, still dragging my friend’s unmoving body on the trailing cable like a baited hook at the end of a fishing line, and vanished into the darkness.