It was also a completely inappropriate response to the ropes binding me being slashed apart by someone else’s blade.

My hands flopped to the ground and my feet smashed downward, thunking into the lawn that bordered the swimming pool’s patio. I’d pushed blood back into my system, but actual non-magically-assisted blood flow let me know just how inadequate my efforts had been. Good enough to let me grab the rapier, but not nearly good enough to keep pins and needles that felt like pitons and spikes from driving into my extremities. I lay there for a few seconds just gasping with pain, unable to even care that my back was exposed to a bunch of presumably murderous corpses.

Once that thought worked itself through my over-oxygenated brain, I rolled over on my back and lifted my rapier in a feeble defense. The five warriors who’d taken me down stood in a loose circle, and Redding was caught in the midst of his phalanx, shouting furiously. Apparently they didn’t consider him their general, because they stayed where they were, watching their mates, who were watching me. Waiting for me to do something. After a while I realized what it was.

They wanted a fair fight.

I yanked the gag out of my mouth, spat bile and jumped to my feet. My feet protested this treatment with a shriek of agony, and I had a brief dazzling image of Petite’s brake pads going. Replacing brakes took a while, time I didn’t have, so I slammed the idea of a little extra brake lube through my system and the dancing anguish faded. I didn’t really need new brakes. I just needed to not fall down while I took on undead warriors in man-to-man combat.

All five of the semi-circle of fighters moved forward at once, as one. I guessed they didn’t want a totally fair fight. On the other hand, I’d torched one of them already, so maybe me against nine wasn’t such bad odds. Especially since I only had to stay alive about six more minutes and the witching hour would be ended.

Teeth bared in a grin, rapier aglow with life magic, I fell into a fencing stance and for the second time that day, lifted a hand to say bring it on.

Archie Redding threw his sacrificial knife and caught me in the belly.

I had learned something during the break-neck three days in January when my shamanic talents had awakened from their slumber. Well, I’d learned quite a few things, but the relevant one right now was this:

Getting a knife in the gut really hurts. I’d done it twice then, both times in fights with Cernunnos. It turned out having a mortal, or semi-mortal, human being wielding the blade didn’t make it hurt one little tiny bit less at all. My vision went black, because going white seemed like too much effort. It was already dark out, after all. Pain didn’t have to go very far to turn everything to swimming, blinding darkness. It wasn’t quite a mortal injury sort of darkness—I’d had those, and this was different—but it was very calm and very reassuring and very easy. Easier than I thought it should be, which I blamed on the presence of the cauldron. It took everything I had to draw in a breath, and even doing that brought a host of regrets.

The knife moved in my belly. I honestly couldn’t decide if it would be better to take it out and start bleeding, or if I should leave it in and hope I didn’t cut myself up more while I fought undead warriors. I was pretty certain that either way they weren’t going to give me the time to heal myself. This was not a three-second repair job, not any more than rewelding a torn door or hood would be a quick fix.

I pulled the knife out before I let myself think about it anymore. While I was doing that, I realized I wasn’t wearing my Kevlar vest anymore. Not that it mattered: it was meant to stop bullets, not knives. Edged weapons had a whole different manner of entry. Still, it wasn’t the sort of thing I should’ve lost. Redding must’ve taken it off me before suspending me over the cauldron. I hoped I was right about zombies not using guns.

Focusing on the missing vest in no way stopped the world turning white and spinning violently. I supposed it always did the latter, but I wasn’t usually intimately aware of it. I couldn’t clear my vision, so I reached for the Sight, and found it more fragile and uncertain than I was accustomed to. Still, it gave me shadows, and that was more than I could see with my normal eyes.

Redding’s face was split in another of those saintly smiles. He gave me an encouraging nod: encouraging me to die, I imagined, so he could throw me in the cauldron. His bodyguards didn’t look happy, though I wasn’t sure what happy looked like on a dead man. My five warriors were still standing there, though they’d lifted their swords now, and I was pretty sure I could either start fighting or just get cut down.

Fighting seemed better. I was Inigo Montoya. I wasn’t going to let my guts spill out on the ground while the six-fingered man got away. I stuffed my left hand against my belly, admiring how the world swam red, and raised the rapier with my right. It wobbled, but at least it offered some kind of defense. I wished I had a wall to lean against, but I didn’t think the swimming pool would suddenly become a solid vertical surface at my whim.

The cauldron warriors moved in, and did it like bats out of hell. None of this sluggish-zombie routine for them, oh no. They could move fast enough to keep me from falling into the cauldron, and they could sure as hell move fast enough to look like emaciated death swooping down on me. A sword glittered in my Sight, cutting the air on its way to doing the same to my neck. I made an absolutely pathetic parry and silver skittered away. A tiny wellspring of hope opened in my chest. Maybe I could beat them after all.

A much larger wellspring of blood opened in my left shoulder as one of the others drove his sword into it. A raw yell that was more surprise than pain tore my throat, and red film poured through my vision, blocking out the Sight. The pain in my gut faded, and my nerves never got a chance to tell me how much the wound in my shoulder hurt.

Glorious, savage power rushed into me like I was drawing it from the earth. My eyes cleared, though everything remained tainted a dangerous crimson. I whipped around, totally uncaring that I was exposing my back to half the undead soldiers, and shoved my rapier hilt deep into the one who’d stuck my shoulder. His jaw dropped open in a fair impression of astonishment, and I jerked upward with my sword, severing the monster’s breastbone and continuing toward the sky.

I did not have the strength to do that. Don’t get me wrong: I’ve got decent upper-body strength from working on cars, and I had a noticeable height advantage over the undead guy. Moreover, his bones were probably a little fragile, since death wasn’t usually good for structural integrity. And the rapier, while basically a stabbing weapon, did have an edged blade all the way to the crossguard. Still, these things did not make for splitting a body from the sternum up.

It felt awesome. Blazing blue magic roared along my rapier and exploded into my opponent, shattering what little of his body wasn’t already cut in half. Beneath the sound of ancient flesh ripping apart, I heard another whisper of sound, and twisted to slam my sword into another soldier’s oncoming blow. My teeth bared themselves in a bloody grin, taste of iron burning my mouth. Intellectually I knew that couldn’t be good, but what I thought of as my intellect had largely gone to cower in a corner while I went medieval on a bunch of zombie asses.

My opponent gave me a rictus of a grin in return, undead gaze flickering over my shoulder in a classic feint. I swept my blade around, knocking his aside, recovered from my lunge and flung my left hand behind me to catch an oncoming blow with my palm. It hurt. It had to hurt, but that was like saying the sky had to be blue above the clouds: I knew it was true, but when rain poured down from the heavens, it didn’t matter. The soldier drew his blade back, destroying the muscle and tendons of my fingers along the way.