They loaded the backboard into the rental minivan Sanya had, by happy coincidence, been given at the airport when he arrived, at no additional fee, in order to substitute for the subcompact he’d reserved but couldn’t have. As it drove away during the confusion and before the cops could lock everything down, I got to watch my home burn down through the back window of the van.

Even after we were several blocks away, I could see the smoke rising up in a black column. I wondered how much of that smoke was made of my books. My secondhand guitar. My clothes. My comfy old furniture. My bed. My blankets. My Mickey Mouse alarm clock. The equipment in my lab that I’d worked so hard to attain or create—the efforts of years of patient effort, endless hours of concentration and spellcraft.

Gone.

Fire is as destructive spiritually as it is materially, a purifying force that can devour and scatter magical energy. In a fire that large everything I’d ever built, including purely magical constructs, would be destroyed.

Dammit.

Dammit, but I hated vampires.

I’d had one hell of a day, all in all, but practically the only thing I had left to me was my pride. I didn’t want anyone to see me crying. So I just kept quiet in the back of the van, while Mouse lay very close to me.

At some point, sorrow became sleep.

I woke up in the utility room at St. Mary of the Angels, where Father Forthill kept several spare folding cots and the bedding to go with them. I’d visited several times in the past. St. Mary’s was a surprisingly stout bastion against supernatural villains of nearly any stripe. The ground beneath it was consecrated, as was every wall, door, floor, and window, blessed by prayers and stately rituals, Masses, and communions over and over through the decades, until that gentle, positive energy had permeated the ground and the very stone from which the church was built.

I felt safer, but only a little. Vampires might not be able to set foot on the holy ground, but they knew that, and someone like the Eebs would certainly take that into account. Hired human killers could be just as dangerous as vampires, if not more so, and the protective aura around the building couldn’t make them blink an eye.

And, I supposed, they could always just set it on fire and burn it down around me if they really, really wanted to get me. I tried to imagine myself a century from now, still dodging vampires and getting my home burned to the ground on an irregular basis.

No way in hell was I gonna accept that. I’d have to deal with the Eeb problem.

And then I remembered my legs. I reached a hand down to touch my thigh.

I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. It felt like touching the limb of someone else entirely. I tried to move my legs and nothing happened. Maybe I’d been too ambitious. I pulled at my blanket until I could see my toes. I tried wiggling them. I failed.

I could feel the backboard beneath me, and the band around my head that kept me from moving it to look around. I gave up on my legs with a sharp surge of frustration and lifted my eyes to the ceiling.

There was a piece of paper taped to it, directly over my head. Molly’s handwriting in black marker was scrawled in large letters across it: Harry. Don’t try to get up, or move your neck or back. We’re checking in on you several times an hour. Someone will be there soon.

There was a candle burning nearby, on a folding table. It was the room’s only light. I couldn’t tell how long it had been burning, but it looked like a fairly long-lived candle, and it was nearly gone. I breathed in and out steadily, through my nose, and caught some half-remembered scents. Perfume of some kind, maybe? Or maybe just the scent of new leather, still barely tinged with the harsh aroma of tanning compounds and the gummy scent of dye. Plus I could smell the dusty old room. The church had only recently begun to use its heating system for the winter. I could smell the warm scent of singed dust that always emerges from the vents the first time anyone turns on a heater after it’s been unneeded for a while.

I was glad that I wasn’t cold. I wouldn’t have been able to do anything about it, otherwise.

The candle guttered out and left me alone in the dark.

In my memories, a bloody old caricature of a man, his skin more liver spots than not, leered at me in mad satisfaction and whispered, “Die alone.”

I shivered and shook the image away. Cassius was thoroughly dead. I knew that. An outcast member of the society of demented freaks known as the Knights of the Blackened Denarius, Cassius had thrown in with an insane necromancer in order to get a chance to even a score with me. He’d come within a hairbreadth of dissecting me. I was able to take him down in the end—and he’d uttered a death curse as he croaked. Such a curse, a spell uttered in the last instants of life, could have hideous effects upon its victim. His curse, for me to die alone, was pretty vague as such things went. It might not even have had enough power or focus to take.

Sure. Maybe it hadn’t.

“Hello?” I said to the darkness. “Is anyone there?”

There wasn’t.

Die alone.

“Stop that,” I snapped out loud. “Control yourself, Dresden.”

That sounded like good advice. So I started taking deep, steady, controlled breaths and tried to focus my thoughts. Focus. Forethought. Reason. Sound judgment. That was what was going to get me through this.

Fact one: My daughter was still in danger.

Fact two: I was hurt. Maybe badly. Maybe forever. Even the efficient resilience of a wizard’s body had its limits, and a broken spine was quite likely beyond them.

Fact three: Susan and Martin could not get the girl out on their own.

Fact four: There wasn’t a lot of help forthcoming. Maybe, with Sanya along, the suicidal mission could be considered only mostly suicidal. After all, the Knights of the Cross were a big deal. Three of them were, apparently, enough Knights to protect the whole world. For the past few years, the dark-skinned Russian had been covering all three positions, and apparently doing it well. Which made a vague amount of sense, I suppose—Sanya was the wielder of Esperacchius, the Sword of Hope. We needed hope right now. At least, I did.

Fact five: I had missed the rendezvous with Ebenezar many hours ago. I’d never intended to go, and there was nothing I could do about the fact that he was going to be upset—but my absence had probably cost me the support of the Grey Council, such as it was.

Fact six: Sanya, Susan, Martin, and whatever other scanty help I could drum up couldn’t get to Chichén Itzá without me—and I sure as hell couldn’t get there in the shape I was in. According to the stored memories in my mother’s jewel, the Way required a swim.

Fact seven: I was going to Show Up for my daughter, and to hell with what it would cost.

And there were only so many options open to me.

I took the least terrifying one. I closed my eyes, steadied my breathing, and began to picture a room in my mind. My now-ruined improved summoning circle was in the floor. Candles were lit at five equidistant points around it. The air smelled of sandalwood incense and burned wax. It took a few minutes to picture it all, in perfect detail, and to hold it in my mind, as rock solid to my imagination as the actual room the construct was replacing.

That took considerable energy and discipline.

Magic doesn’t require props to function. That’s a conceit that has been widely propitiated by the wizarding community over the centuries. It helped prove to frightened villagers, inquisitions, and whoever else might be worried that a person was clearly not a wizard. Otherwise he’d have all kinds of wizardly implements necessary to his craft.

Magic doesn’t require the props, but magic is wrought by people, and people need them. Each prop has a symbolic as well as a practical reason for being a part of any spell. Simple stuff, lighting candles and the like, could be accomplished neatly in the mind, eventually becoming a task as easy and thoughtless as tying one’s shoe.