“Uh,” I said. “What do you mean, ‘too Harvey’?”

“Shifting this deep isn’t for chumps,” he said. “It’s nothing you need to worry about. Trust me.”

“Why should I do that?”

His voice turned annoyed. “Because I’m a freaking shapeshifter and I’m the one who knows, that’s why.” He eyed me. “You’d better wait here. Manacles or not, those retina scanners are damned finicky.”

“I’ll stop short,” I said, and started walking to the end of the vault. I didn’t doubt that Grey was right about the scanners, but I’d have to be a lot more gullible than I was to let someone like him out of my sight if I could help it. I stopped thirty or forty feet short of the back wall, and Grey-Harvey sidled up to the panel. He lifted his fingers and tapped out a sequence of maybe a dozen or fifteen numbers into the keypad, swiftly, as if his fingers knew it by pure reflex. A panel rotated when he was done, and a little tube appeared. He leaned down and peered into it, and red light flashed out. He straightened, blinking, and a second later there was a quiet clack.

“Here goes nothing,” he said, and turned the handle on the door to the strong room.

The door to the mortal vault of the God of the Underworld (labeled HADES—00000013) opened smoothly, soundlessly. It would have taken more muscle to get into Michael’s fridge.

Grey turned to me, resuming his own shape, and his mouth twisted into a perfectly invincible smirk. “Damn, I’m good.”

“Okay,” I said. “Go get everybody else. I’ll get the Way ready.”

Grey turned to go and then paused, eyeing me.

“If I wanted to shut this thing down,” I said, “I could have done it pretty much anytime in the past twenty minutes.” I shifted to a maniacally indeterminate European accent and said, “We’re going through.”

“The Black Hole?” Grey asked, incredulously. “Nobody quotes The Black Hole, Dresden. Nobody even remembers that one.”

“Hogwash. Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Perkins, and Roddy McDowall all in the same movie? Immortality.”

“Roddy McDowall was just the voice of the robot.”

“Yeah. And the robots were awesome.”

“Cheap Star Wars knockoffs,” Grey sneered.

“Not necessarily mutually exclusive,” I said.

“I wasn’t worried about you scrubbing the mission,” he said. “I was thinking you might indulge yourself in a little Robin Hood action against this Marcone character.”

“Doubt it would make him any angrier than he’s already going to be,” I said. “But ripping off this vault isn’t the job.”

Grey considered me for a moment and then nodded. “Right. I’ll get the crew.” He turned and jogged to the entrance to the vault—

—and was suddenly pulled out of the vault and into the security room beyond by an abrupt andsevere force.

“Yeah, that can’t be goo—,” I started to say.

Before I could finish, Tessa in her mantis form blurred through the vault door, fantastic in her speed, terrifying in her strength, and slammed the door closed behind her. Her rear legs rotated the inside works of the door—meant to allow the door to be locked or unlocked from the inside—and the lock of the heavy vault door shut with a very final-sounding clack.

Suddenly, the only light came from some tiny floor lamps along either wall, and they gleamed madly from the mantis’s thousands of eye facets.

“You,” came her buzzing, two-layered voice, poisonous with hate. “This is your fault.”

“What?” I said.

My hand went to the thorn manacles still on my wrist—and then froze. Michael and the others were outside, in the booby-trapped security room. If I started throwing magic around, even at this distance, I would almost certainly trip the antiwizard fail-safe Marcone had built into it.

“No matter,” Tessa spat. “Your death will end the chain even more readily than the accountant’s.”

And then a furious Knight of the Blackened Denarius came hurtling toward me with insectile speed—and if I used a lick of magic to fight her, I’d blow my friends to Kingdom Come.

Thirty-six

Tessa’s wings blurred and she came at me, scythe-hook arms raised to strike.

The voice inside my head was screaming a high-pitched, girly scream of terror, and for a second I thought I was going to wet my pants. There wasn’t any time to get cute, there wasn’t any space to run, and without the superstrength of the Winter mantle, I was as good as dead.

Unless . . .

If Butters was right, then the strength I’d gained as the Winter Knight was something I’d had all along—latent and ready for an emergency. The only thing that had been holding me back was the natural inhibitors built into my body. Not only that, but I had another advantage—during the past year and a half or so, since I’d been dead and got better, I’d been training furiously. First, to get myself back on my feet and into shape to fight if I had to, and then because it had provided a necessary physical outlet for the pressures I was under.

The thing about training of any kind is that you get held back by an absolute limit—it freaking hurts. Little injuries mount up, robbing you of your drive, degrading the efficiency of whatever training you’re into, creating imbalances and points of relative weakness.

But not me.

For the duration of my training, I’d been shielded from pain by the aegis of the Winter mantle. It wasn’t just that it made me physically stronger—it also allowed me to train longer and harder and more thoroughly than I could possibly have done without it. I wasn’t faster and stronger than I’d been before solely because I wore the Winter Knight’s mantle—I’d also worked my ass off to do it.