I don’t even know what happened. I assume the Genoskwa closed the distance and hit me. One minute I was trying to establish some kind of rapport, and the next I was about a dozen feet in the air, flying across the factory floor, tumbling. I saw the conference table, the windows, the ceiling—and Jordan’s incredulous face staring down at me from a catwalk, and then I hit the brick wall and light briefly filled my skull. I mean, I didn’t even notice when I fell and hit the floor—or maybe I just can’t remember that part.

I do remember that I came up fighting. The Genoskwa walked over the conference table—he just stepped over it—and covered the distance to me in catlike silence, in three great strides, moving as lightly as a dancer despite the fact that he had to weigh in at well over eight hundred pounds.

I threw a blast of Winter at him, only to see him make a contemptuous gesture and spit a slavering, snarling word. The ice that should have entombed him just . . . drained away into the floor beneath him, grounding out my magic as effectively as a lightning rod diverts the power of a thunderbolt.

I had about half of a second to realize that my best shot had bounced off him with somewhat less effect than I would have had if I’d slugged him with a foam rubber pillow, and then he hit me again.

Aerial cartwheels. Another flash of impact against a wall. Before I could fall, he had closed the distance again—and his enormous hands drove a rusty old nail into my left pectoral muscle.

Once the steel nail had broken the surface of my skin, my contact with the mantle of the Winter Knight shattered, and I was just plain old vanilla me again.

And that meant pain.

A whole lot of pain.

The mantle had suppressed the pain of my broken arm, among other things, but once it was taken out of the circuit, all of that agony came rushing into my brain at the same time, an overload of torturous sensation. I screamed and thrashed, grabbing the Genoskwa’s wrist with both hands, trying to force his arm and the nail he still held away from me. I might as well have been trying to push over a building. I couldn’t so much as make him acknowledge my effort with a wobble, much less move him.

He leaned down, huge and grey and horrible-smelling, and pushed his ugly mug right up into mine, breathing hard through his mouth. His breath smelled like blood and rotten meat. His voice came out in a surprisingly smooth, mellow basso.

“Consider this a friendly warning,” he said, his accent harsh, somehow bitter. “I am not one of the whimpering Forest People. Speak of me and that flower-chewing groundhog lover River Shoulders in the same breath again, and I will devour your offal while you watch.”

“Frmph,” I said. The room was spinning like some kind of wacky animated drunk scene. “Glkngh.”

The nail evidently robbed some of the power from Mab’s earring, too. Someone drovea railroad spike into each temple, and I suddenly couldn’t breathe.

The Genoskwa stepped back from me abruptly, as though I was something unworthy of his attention. He faced the rest of the room, while I clawed desperately at the nail sticking out of my chest.

“You,” he said to the people seated at the table. “Do what Nicodemus says, when he says. Or I will twist off your head.” He flexed his huge hands, and I suddenly noticed that they were tipped in ugly-looking, dirty claws. “Been here most of two days, and none of you ever saw me. Followed some of you all over this town last night. None of you saw me. You don’t do your job now, no place you run will keep you from me.”

Those at the table stared at him, stunned and silent, and I realized that my plan for stealing Nicodemus’s thunder and destabilizing his authority over the crew had just gone down in flames.

The Genoskwa was apparently satisfied with his entrance. He strode to the pen and, as if it had been an appetizer at a sports bar and not a nimble animal trying desperately to avoid its fate, he plucked up a goat, broke its neck using only one hand, and vanished again, gone more suddenly than he had appeared.

Karrin was at my side a second later, grabbing the nail with her small, strong hands—but the pain was just too damned much. I was fading.

“Well,” I dimly heard Nicodemus say, “that’s dinner.”

Going, going.

Gone.

Twenty-three

I hadn’t been to this place in a very long time.

It was a flat, empty floor in some vast, open, and unlit space that nonetheless somehow didn’t echo with its emptiness, as if there were no walls from which sounds could reflect. I stood in a circle of light, though I couldn’t quite make out the source of illumination above me.

It was the first time, though, that I’d ever been standing there alone.

“Hey!” I called out into the empty space. “It’s not like my own subconscious can up and disappear, you know! If you’ve got something you want to say, hurry it up! I’m busy!”

“Yeah, yeah,” called a voice from the darkness. “I’m coming. Keep your pants on.”

There were shuffling footsteps, and then . . . I appeared.

Well, it wasn’t me, exactly. It was my double, though, a mental image of myself that had appeared a few times in the past, and that I would probably avoid mentioning to any mental health professionals who had signed mandatory reporting clauses. Call him my subconscious, my id, the voice of my inner jerkface, whatever. He was a part of me that didn’t surface much.

He was dressed in black. A tailored black shirt, black pants, expensive black shoes. He had a goatee, too.

Look, I never said my inner self was hideously complex.