“Vervuvvos?”

“A banshee,” he corrected, though I couldn’t tell if he’d understood me. It didn’t matter. His answer stripped the strength from my muscles and I sagged toward the cauldron, eyes closed in something very close to defeat. More or less everybody knew banshees were Irish harbingers of death, that they came to cry on a porch the night someone was due to die.

The one I’d met did a whole lot more, too. Every thirty years or so, when the full moon and the winter equinoxes aligned, it came to kill in the name of its master. If it could do that, I had very little doubt it could do more, like answer the prayers of a desperate man willing to do anything to restore his family. Whatever price it demanded would be unspeakable, but I doubted very much that Redding had cared about or considered that angle of retrieving his family from the dead. Revulsion flowed through me, my power’s answer to a hideous idea, but Redding’s expression remained serene. “It told me how to preserve their bodies in salt and ice and blood, and gave me a charm to chant when I opened my own veins to offer the blood. It offered me an answer to my prayers.”

“Rivvual murvur iv nevvar a good anver.” I felt strongly that this was true. On the other hand, I was a few minutes from dying and very curious. Also, I intended to stage a fanastic rescue just as soon as I figured out how. I’d left the rapier in Petite’s backseat, and I wasn’t sure it’d do me much good for getting out of a hog-tie anyway.

On the other hand, it was a damn sight better than nothing. I fixed my eyes on Redding, doing my best impression of listening hard, and took a long slow breath through my nostrils to steady my breathing. I’d drawn the rapier out of nowhere once before, when the circumstances hadn’t been any more forgiving. If desperation counted for anything, it would materialize in my hand any second now. Redding glanced at his watch again, suggesting my let me explain, Mr. Bond tactic wasn’t working as well as I hoped. He tapped the text he intended to read, checked his watch a third time, then turned his attention back to me. Apparently the timing had to be just perfect, and we were still a little ways out from my impending doom. “The blood had to be my own. Family to family. Nothing else would preserve them through time until they could rise again. But I was already aging, and so the banshee offered me a way to extend my own years so I could tend to my dear wife and children. The death of a child on the eve of the dead,” he said solemly, “at every fiftieth anniversary of the year of my birth. That was the least it would accept, to give me life long enought to see my family restored.”

I kept my mouth shut that time, partly because I suspected what I had to say wouldn’t be helpful: killing somebody else’s kid to bring back your own seemed like a good idea? and partly because my heartbeat had slowed and the calming, serene confidence that I could bend space just enough to grab my sword was starting to come over me. Snarking at Redding seemed like a bad exchange for possibly saving my own neck.

He gave me another startlingly beatific smile. “And it was right. I’ve waited a hundred and sixty-seven years for this night, and you’ve come to help me assure it will be successful. Even if I only have enough time to resurrect you tonight, in another year I can awaken my children and their mother.”

I had the unpleasant idea that my zombie would be his companion for the intervening year, and it turned out that vampires weren’t actually at the top of my Very Bad Undead list. Me as one of the walking dead beat vampires hands down. Inspired by panic, I forgot about trying to be Zen and cool and one with the universe. I’d been trying to save my own life a few hours ago when I’d yanked it through the ether. There’d been no calm involved. Right now, I was all for terror-induced teleportation. One sword coming up, or one dead Joanne going down.

And time ran out. Redding drew his hood farther over his head, making himself a black mark against the night, and took a long slim knife from beneath his robe. A sudden vivid image of Sonata hanging in the air, ghostly blood draining from long cuts on her body, sprang to mind. I wasn’t spread-eagle, and he’d probably cut my throat to make sure I was dead before midnight, but I had no doubt I’d be made victim to the same five-cut ritual Matilda and the others had died in. That was a hell of a way to go.

My fingers, cold as they were, had enough feeling in them to close around the rapier’s haft. I put bursting into tears of relief on my list of things to do about an hour from now, and did my absolute best to whip myself in a circle and cut Redding’s totally insane head off. I was pretty sure I’d seen a movie trailer with a martial-arts expert trussed up like I was. He’d managed to kick the bad guys’ asses. It could be done.

Not, however, by me. I swung around in a lazy circle without anything like enough momentum to do damage. The rapier stuck out from behind my back at a ridiculous angle, enough to make Redding step back in surprise, but I didn’t think I was going to surprise him to death. I swished around again, trying to shift the sword enough to saw through the ropes around my wrists. This was, by any reasonable expectation, impossible. I’d spent a lot of time with the impossible over the last year, though, so I wasn’t quite ready to give up hope. In the worst scenario, I could arch into the ties and attack the rope holding my feet. A living body entering the cauldron was supposed to be what destroyed it. It wasn’t top on my list of choices, but if I couldn’t get free in the next few minutes, there were worse ways to go out.

Sadly, I had not anticipated the silent platoon of undead taking the sudden appearance of my sword as a threat.

Matilda Whitehead had never gotten her bony hands on me. I didn’t know how grateful I was for that until half a dozen cadavers surged forward, grasping for me. The other four swept into place around Redding, making a…prophylactic or phalanx or something like that, of protection. In the good news department, he wasn’t actually all that happy to be protected, since his window of opportunity for murdering me was rapidly coming to a close. Sharp, skinless phalanges digging into my skin fell under less good news. I screamed like a little girl again, and had the bare wittering presence of mind to slam my shields outward, making them into as defensive a weapon as I could.

Three of the warriors staggered back. Another one burst into blue flame, which astonished everyone, including me, enough to stop and gape for a couple of seconds. I recovered before they did, though the two I hadn’t knocked away still had their claws in me. I twisted and bucked, actively trying now, to slice the rope around my ankles so I could fall into the cauldron. Better a willing sacrifice to end a run of evil than being chewed apart by undead soldiers. On my third or fourth flail, the rapier caught in the rope with a soft hiss that signaled parting threads. I said “Shit” as the rope frayed and I fell.

The dead men caught me.

Cold surged through my body as though life itself tried to flee from their unfeeling hands. My shields flared, and the one part of my mind that wasn’t gibbering with fear shut them down. I was balanced precariously on rickety arms whose ropy black muscle held me out of the cauldron. The last thing I wanted to do was make those arms burst into flames.

They didn’t speak, the dead, but they moved together. Three tiny sways, and then a good heave-ho sent me tumbling away from the cauldron and toward Redding’s swimming pool. I hit the concrete edge with my face and tasted blood, but given that I’d been expecting to taste untimely doom, blood was pretty nice.

Behind me, the distinctive note of metal leaving leather hissed. I clenched every muscle in my body and tried to flip myself over, pissed off at the idea of being stabbed in the back at this late date. I almost made it, too, but a booted foot caught me in the back of my ribs and kept me on my stomach. A wordless yell broke from my throat, and for all that it was muffled by the gag, it at least felt like the kind of thing a fighter should go out on. It was angry, full of defiance, ready to face whatever the fates had in store.