Grey hadn’t just made himself bigger. He’d made himself seven or eight times bigger, and done it as quick as blinking. My pounding head was making it hard for the thoughts to get through, but I got my staff tucked under my arm so that I could hold on to the horse’s mane with the fingers of my good hand, and realized that I was babbling them aloud.

“Oh,” I heard myself realize, “ectoplasm. You bring in the mass the same way Binder’s goons make some for themselves.”

Grey snorted, as if I had stated the very obvious.

And then he shook his head and started running.

When I’m running with Winter on me, I can move pretty fast, as fast as any human being can manage, and I can do it longer. Call it twenty-five or thirty miles an hour. A Thoroughbred horse runs a race at about thirty-five. Quarter horses have been clocked at fifty-five miles an hour or so, over short distances.

Grey started moving at quarter-horse speed, maybe faster, and he didn’t stop. I just tried to hang on.

The ice storm had brought Chicago to a relative standstill, but there were still some cars out moving, a few people on the sidewalks. Grey had to weave through them, as none of them was fast enough to get out of the way by their own volition. By the time they could see Grey moving toward them through the fog, it was too late for them to avoid him, and there was very little I could do but hang on and try not to fall off. At the pace Grey was moving, a tumble would be more like a car wreck than anything else, only I wouldn’t have the protection of, you know, a car around me when it happened. The experience gave me a new appreciation for Karrin and her Harley—except that her Harley didn’t freaking jump over mailboxes, pedestrians, and one of those itty-bitty electric cars when they got in its way.

I noticed, somewhere along the line, that Grey was as subject as anyone else to the slippery ice on the streets and sidewalks of the town. At some points, he was more skating than running, though he seemed to handle it all with remarkable grace.

If it wouldn’t have reduced my odds of surviving the ride, I’d have closed my eyes.

We were moving in the right direction, and it didn’t occur to me until we were nearly there that I’d never told Grey where to find Michael’s house.

By the time we got there, Grey was breathing like a steam engine, and the hide beneath me was coated with sweat and lather and burning hot. His wide-flared nostrils were flecked with blood. As remarkable as he was, moving that much mass that quickly for that long apparently had a metabolic cost that not even Grey could escape. We thundered past Karrin’s little SUV—still stuck where she’d crashed it yesterday evening—and it was as he tried to turn down Michael’s street that Grey’s agility met his exhaustion and faltered.

He hit a patch of ice, and we went sideways toward the house on the corner.

I felt his weight leave the ground and we startedto tumble in midair. It was going to be an ugly one. Most of a ton of horse and about two hundred and fifty pounds of wizard were going to bounce along the frozen earth together and smash into a building, and there wasn’t a whole hell of a lot I could do about it.

Except that it didn’t happen that way.

As we tumbled, the horse blurred, and suddenly Grey was back, along with a great, slobbering heap of steaming ectoplasm. He grabbed me in midair, pulling my shoulders back hard against his torso, and when we first hit the ground, his body cushioned the shock of impact, taking it on his back instead of on my skull. We bounced and it hurt, spun wildly once, and then slammed into the side of the house about a quarter of a second after all the ectoplasmic goo. Again, Grey took the impact on his body, sparing mine, and I heard bones snapping as he did. Between him, some thick bushes at the base of the house, and the cushion of slime, I came to a bone-jarring, but nonfatal halt.

I pushed myself up and checked on Grey. He was lying in a heap, his eyes closed, his nose and mouth bloody, but still breathing. His chest was grotesquely misshapen, but even as I watched, he inhaled and a couple of ribs seemed to expand back toward a more natural shape. Hell’s bells, that guy could take a beating. And that was me saying that.

“The things . . . I do . . . ,” he rasped, “for . . . Rent money.”

I lifted my head, blearily, to see the big unmarked vans Nicodemus had used for transport at the start of the job turn the corner at the other end of the street and lumber slowly toward Michael’s house.

Grey had gotten me there in time, if only barely.

Of course, now that I was here, the question was what I was going to do about it.

I stood up, calling my veil about myself again. It might not accomplish much, but at least it didn’t take a lot of energy to do it, and I started moving quietly toward the enemy. The Winter Knight’s feet were absolutely soundless on the ice.

My head was killing me, a steady pounding. My arm, ditto, even through the insulation offered by the Winter mantle. Fatigue and hard use had tied knots in my back, and I didn’t know how many more spells I could pull off before I fell over—if any.

So why, I asked myself, was I walking toward the vans, preparing for a fight?

I blamed the Winter mantle, which continually pushed at my inner predator, egging me on to fight, hunt, and kill my way to a solution. There was a time and a place for that kind of thing, but as I watched the vans begin to slow carefully on the icy streets, my sanity told me that it wasn’t here or now. I might be able to drop an explosive fire spell on the vans, but explosions are hardly ever as neat and as thorough as the people who create them hope for—and the effort might just drop me unconscious onto the sleet-coated ground. I could lie there senseless while the survivors murdered my daughter.