Small Favor

Gunfire erupted from the shore, meanwhile, and it wasn’t blinded by bright lights or hurried or panicked. It started ripping the boat to splinters all around me. I started shouting curse words and crouched down. Bullets hit my duster. For several seconds the range was pretty close, at least for the military-grade weapons they were using, and while the duster was up to the chore of stopping those rounds, it wasn’t any fun to experience. My back got hit with half a dozen major-league fastballs over the next few seconds.

And cold water washed over my feet.

And, half a minute later, over my ankles.

Double crap.

The engines were making really odd noises too. My back protested when I turned to look. It was damned dark out here on the lake, as I got farther and farther from shore, but the disappearing form of the island was being blotted by a lot of black smoke coming out of the boat’s engines.

The pain blocks were falling now. I was hurting a lot. The water in the bottom of the boat was up to the bottom of my calves now, and…

And there were three searchlights coming toward me from the direction of the island.

They’d sent out pursuit boats.

"This just isn’t fair," I muttered to myself. I gave the engine all the power I could, but from the way it was rattling around that was more or less a formality. It wasn’t going to last long, and it was sinking in any case.

I knew that if I went into the water I’d have about four or five minutes to live, given the temperature. I also knew that I had to get past the stone reefs around the islands, the ones Rosanna had needed the beacon light to navigate through.

Nothing for it but to keep going.

I was struck by a sudden thought: Bob the skull was going to be crushed that he missed this one, a genuine pirate adventure. I started singing, "Blow the Man Down" at the top of my lungs.

Then there was a horrible noise, and the boat just stopped. The steering wheel hit me in the chest pretty hard, and then I bounced back into the driver’s seat.

Water started pouring in thick and fast and dark.

"Ahoy!" I slurred drunkenly. "Reef!"

I made sure I still had the coin and the sword. I grabbed up my staff and got out the pentacle amulet from around my neck. The lights of the pursuing boats were getting nearer by the moment. This was going to be a close one.

The old ski boat was literally breaking apart around me, its prow shattered on a thick spike of stone that had penetrated it just left of its center, up by the front of the boat. The old stone ridge that rose up through the waters of the lake came to within a couple of feet of the surface here. It would give me a place to do something besides instantly immerse myself in cold water and go into hypothermia.

And it would give me solid rock on which to plant my feet, and through which to draw power. The water of the lake would wash some of it away-not as much as free-running water, but some-but I would still be able to do something to defend myself.

So before the boat could capsize and dump me into the water, I gritted my teeth and jumped in.

My body immediately informed me that I had made an insane decision.

You have no idea what the depths of cold can be until you have jumped into near-freezing water.

I screamed my way into it, finding places to stand with my frozen feet, being careful of the leg that Nicodemus had rendered gimpy for me. Then I held up my mother’s amulet in my right hand and focused on it, forcing energy into it carefully and slowly. It happened sluggishly, the way everything was happening in the mounting cold, but I was able to draw power up through the stone beneath my feet, and to call silver-blue wizard light from the amulet-brighter and brighter, light that spread out over the waters in a literal beacon that read, clear as day, Here I am.

"T-T-Thomas," I muttered to myself, shivering so hard I could barely stand. "Y-y-you’d b-better b-be c-c-close."

Because Deirdre’s men were.

The searchlights oriented on me instantly, and the boats-rubber raft things that would skim right over the reefs-came bouncing toward me over the waves.

It wouldn’t have been impossible to sink one of the rafts. But it would have killed every man inside. And those weren’t people collaborating with demons for their own dark gain. They were just people, most of whom had been brought up from childhood to serve Nicodemus and company, and who probably thought that they were genuinely doing the right thing. I could kill someone like Nicodemus and sleep peacefully afterward. But I wasn’t sure I could live with myself if I sent those rafts down into the lake and condemned the men in them to die. That isn’t what magic is for.

More to the point, killing them wouldn’t save me. Even if I managed to sink every other raft out there, send every man in them into the water, it wouldn’t stop me from freezing to death and drowning. It would just mean that I had a lot of company.

I’m not a Knight. But that doesn’t mean I don’t draw the line somewhere.

They started shooting from about a hundred yards away, and I raised a shield. It was hard to do in the icy waters, but I raised it and held it, a shimmering quarter-dome of silver light. Bullets smashed against it and skipped off it, sending out little concentric rings of spreading energy as their force was distributed over the shield. Most of the shots never really came anywhere close. Shooting from a moving rubber raft at a hundred yards isn’t exactly a recipe for precision marksmanship.

They got closer, and I got colder.

I held the light and the shield.

Please, brother. Don’t let me down.

I never heard anything until a wave of cold water hit my shoulder blades and all but knocked me over. Then the heavy chug-chug-chug of the Water Beetle’s engines shook the water around me as my brother’s battered old ship bellied up dangerously close to the reef, and I turned to find the ship wallowing broadside behind me.

I liked to give Thomas a hard time about the Water Beetle, teasing him that he’d stolen it from the prop room of Jaws. But the fact of the matter was that I didn’t know a damned thing about boats, and that I was secretly impressed that he could sail the thing around the lake so blithely.

"Harry!" Murphy called. She came hurrying down the frozen deck, slipping here and there on patches of ice as she did. She slapped a line attached to a harness she wore to the ship’s safety railing, and threw the other end of the line to me. "Come on!"

"It’s about time you got outside the reef," Thomas complained from the top of the wheelhouse. As I watched, he drew his heavy Desert Eagle from his side, aimed, and loosed a round. A dark form on one of the oncoming rafts let out a cry and fell into the water with a splash.

I scowled at Thomas. He doesn’t even practice.

I stumbled forward and grabbed the line, wrapping it around my right arm. That was pretty much all I had enough energy left to do. Murphy began hauling it in, and started yelling for Thomas to help her.