"They got to you, didn't they?" I said. "They jumped you back at the Botanic Gardens while you were covering my exit. Freaking Sharkface was watching the whole thing and he got you."

Sith began quivering so hard that he was jitterbugging back and forth in place on the floor, his head twitching, his fur standing on end and then abruptly lying flat again.

"Fight it, Sith," I urged him quietly. "It doesn't have to win. Fight it."

For a second, I thought I saw something of Cat Sith's smug, contemptuous self-assurance on the malk's face. And then it was gone. Just gone. Everything went away, and the malk stood for a second with its head down. Then it lifted its head and the motion was subtly wrong, something that simply didn't have the grace I'd seen in the elder malk before. It faced me for a moment and then it spoke, its voice absent of anything like personality. "A pity. I would have been more useful to them as an active, covert asset."

I shuddered at the utter absence in that voice. I wasn't talking to Sith anymore.

I was speaking with the adversary.

"Like Mab wouldn't have figured it out," I said. "Like she did when you infected Lea."

"Further conversation is not useful to our design," Not-Sith said, and then the malk's form flew at me in a blur.

It was a testament to the power of the Winter Knight's mantle and the Wild Hunt's energy that I survived that first leap at all. Sith struck straight at my throat. I got my arms in the way. The black shadow mask of the Hunt over my arms and chest blew apart into splinters, dispersing some of the impact energy of the malk's spectacular leap, and instead of pulping me against the wall behind me, he just pounded me into it with tooth-rattling force.

Sith bounced off me, which was what I had hoped would happen. In my line of work, I've dealt with more than one critter that is faster than fast. When they've got their feet underneath them, it's the next-best thing to impossible to land anything on them-but when they're in the air, they're moving at the speed gravity and air resistance dictate, like everybody else. For that one portion of a second, Sith was an object moving through space, not a blindingly fast killing machine. Someone who didn't know that wouldn't have known to be ready for it.

But I did. And I was.

The blast of raw force I summoned wasn't my very best punch-but it was the best I was going to get out here over the lake. It slammed into the creature that had been Cat Sith and plowed it out through the Plexiglas window. The plastic didn't break. It came entirely out of its housing, and the malk and a slab of Plexiglas the size of a door went whirling out into the madness of the night. Sith flew out over the bow of the tugboat and plunged down into the water through the open spaces of the pipe-steel rig between it and the barge.

I stared hard after the departed malk for a few seconds, to be sure he wasn't going to bounce right back into my face somehow. As I did, I watched in the other half of the bridge's forward window while the shadow mask of the Hunt slithered back up over my arms and face. I gave it to a three count, nodded, and then went to the tug's wheel. I snapped the plastic ties securing it with a pair of fast jerks, then started rolling the wheel as far as it would go to the right. There was a big lever that looked like a throttle, and when I pushed it forward, the boat's engines started to roar with effort.

The barge groaned as the tug changed the direction in which it applied force, and the barge's back end began slowly slewing out and to the left. That drew shouts of consternation from the deck of the barge. I didn't feel like getting shot in the face, so I knelt down, out of sight, while I pulled the secondhand belt off of my old jeans and used it to secure the wheel in position. Then I recovered the Winchester and backed out of the bridge, hurrying away from it as quietly as I could.

What I'd done was a delaying tactic at best. It wouldn't turn the barge around-but it would set it to spinning in place, and maybe cost the enemy time to turn it around if they took control of it again. But that was exactly what the Hunt needed to sink her-time. The longer the barge played sit-and-spin, the better. So I found a nice quiet patch of shadow where I could see the stairs leading up to the tug's bridge, and where I could stand behind a very large steel pipe. I rested the Winchester on the top bend of the pipe, sighted on the doorway, and waited.

It didn't take long for the first couple of crewmen to arrive. I wasn't sure whether they came up from belowdecks or somehow swarmed over from the barge, but two men in dark clothing, carrying pistols at the ready, came hurrying along and started up the stairs.

I'm not a great shot. But when you're resting a rifle on a solid surface, one that is perfectly still (at least relative to all the solid surfaces around it), and when the range is about forty feet, you don't have to be an expert. You just have to take a breath, let it out, and squeeze.

The Winchester cracked with thunder, and the first man arched into a bow of agony just as he reached the top of the stairs. That ended up working in my favor. He fell back into the second man, just as the second guy spun and raised his pistol. The first man fell into the second, sending his first shot wild, and knocked him about halfway over. The second man couldn't hold the gun with both hands, but he kept pulling the trigger as fast as he could.

At forty feet, terrified, in the dark, unsure of his target's exact location, and sprawled out with the deadweight of another man flopping against him, the poor bastard didn't have a chance. He got off seven or eight rounds, none of them coming anywhere close. I worked the action on the Winchester, took a breath, let half out, and squeezed the trigger.

It wasn't until the flash of light from the shot illuminated him that I recognized Ace, his expression panicked, his gun aimed at a point ten feet to my left. The light flashed and burned his face into my retina for a moment as the dark returned.

And the tugboat was silent again.

* * *

It didn't take long for the Erlking to finish his work. Maybe three minutes later, a chorus of hideous screams went up from the lake's surface, and the Hunt howled its triumph and circled into the sky, horns blaring, hounds baying. I saw green fire burning fiercely from the spot the Hunt had started carving, and then the barge started to list toward that side as the water poured into her. Barges aren't warships, or even maritime vessels. If they have belowdecks spaces at all, they generally aren't fitted with flood compartments and sealable doors. They sure as hell don't have automatic systems. They're just soup bowls. Poke a hole in the bottom, and a bowl isn't gonna hold much soup.

I didn't feel like getting Titanicked, so I hustled over to the spot where I'd boarded the tug. There was a roar from the shadow-tiger mask around the Harley, and Murphy swept up alongside the boat. I leapt down onto the back of the bike in a single smooth motion, which I felt was cool, and landed with way too much of my weight on my genitals, which I felt was not.