hit the floor a second later.
A gun roared from the smoke. Kincaid grunted and staggered. The spear fell from his hands, but he didn't fall. He drew a gun in either hand and backed unsteadily away, the semiautomatic barking out shots as swiftly as he could send them into the choking smoke down the hall.
More Renfields, roasted but functional, came through the smoke, shooting. Darkhounds bounded around them, the naked and bloody shells of dogs, but filled with horrible rage. Behind them I saw Mavra's slender, deadly form, lit for the first time. She was wearing the same clothing I'd seen her in the last time—a tattered number from the Renaissance, all of black. Hamlet would have been happy to wear it. I saw her filmy dead eyes focus on me, and she lifted an ax in one hand.
The first two darkhounds reached Kincaid, and he went down under them before I could even cry out. One of the Renfields brought a sledgehammer down on him, while the other simply emptied a handgun into the pile as two more darkhounds threw themselves into it.
"No!" I shouted.
Murphy hauled me into the closet and out of the line of fire, just as Mavra threw. Her ax came tumbling end over end down the hall, and struck the stone wall at the back of the closet with such force that the head buried itself to the eye in the rock and the wooden handle shattered into splinters. Two of the children, still chained underneath where the ax hit, let out wails of pain and terror as splinters tore at them.
"Oh, God," Murphy said. "Your hand, oh, God." But she never stopped moving. She shoved me by main force into the back corner of the closet, picked up her gun, leaned into the doorway, and sent eight or nine measured shots down the hall, her face set in grim concentration. Her pale legs were a startling contrast against the black of her Kevlar vest. "Harry?" she shouted. "There's smoke, I can't see anything, but they're at the foot of the stairs. What do we do?"
I stared at a black box up on the wall, near the ceiling. Presumably Kincaid's antipersonnel mine. He'd been right. It was set up to open and spew its deadly projectiles diagonally down, so that they would bounce and fill both closet and hall with death.
"Harry!" Murphy shouted.
I barely had breath enough to answer. "Can you hook up the mine again?"
She looked over her shoulder at me, eyes wide. "You mean we can't get out?"
"Can you do it?" I barked.
She nodded, once.
"Wait for my signal, then arm it and get low."
She spun and leapt up onto a wooden chair near the mine, either something she had dragged there or something the bad guys had used too. She hooked up two alligator clips and held up a third, looking over her shoulder at me, her face pale. The children wept and screamed below her.
I dragged myself over to kneel in front of the children, facing down the hallway. I lifted my left hand, and stared at it in shock for a second. I always thought I looked good in red and black, but as a rule I preferred that to be my clothes. Not my limbs. My hand was a blackened, twisted claw of badly cooked meat, burned dark wherever it wasn't bloodred. My silver shield bracelet dangled beneath it, the charm-shields heat-warped, gleaming and bright.
I raised my other hand to signal Murphy, but then I heard a scream from down the hall, snarling and vicious and hardly human. The smoke swirled and cleared for a second, and I saw Kincaid, dragging one leg, his back against the wall. He had one hand clenched hard to his leg, and a gun in the other. He shot at a target I couldn't see until the gun started clicking.
"Now, Murphy!" I shouted. My voice thundered down the hall. "Kincaid! Bolshevik Muppet!"
The mercenary's head whipped around toward me. He moved like hamstrung lightning, swift and lurching and grotesque. He dropped the gun, released his leg, and threw himself straight at me with his three unwounded limbs.
Again I raised my shield, and prayed that the mine's infrared trip wire functioned.
Time slowed.
Kincaid flung himself through the doorway.
The mine beeped. There was a sharp, snapping click of metal.
Kincaid tumbled past me. I leaned aside to let him, and at the same instant brought every scrap of strength I had left to bear on the shield.
Lumpy metal spheres,