f the two, it was Wendy who recovered first, and she thrust her sword at the belly of the everlost, intending to gut him like a fish.

This time, however, he saw it coming.

In the blink of an eye, he flipped his saber upside down. Catching her blade with his own, he pushed hers off to the side with the metallic screech of steel sliding along steel and then leaped back, his wings bursting outward to catch the air in a rippling explosion of feathers.

He fell to earth lightly, landing easily on the balls of his feet, and began to circle her, watching her with interest, as though she were some sort of exotic creature, the likes of which he had never seen before.

He moved more like a panther than a man, Wendy thought. His reflexes in defending himself had been fast and fierce, but now he moved slowly, his steps graceful and calculated, his eyes fixed indelibly upon her, stalking his prey.

Nana, having fallen back when their initial attack failed, now rushed toward him again in earnest. But a dog’s teeth were no match for the sword of an everlost, and Wendy feared for her life.

“Off, Nana! Off!” she hissed, not wanting the men of the platoon to hear her voice and realize she had left the keep to join them in battle.

Wendy urged the animal behind her, very much against Nana’s better instincts, who did not like the idea of Wendy fighting without her. Not one bit. She backed up reluctantly, growling all the while, hoping for some opportunity to arise in which she might be permitted to rip out the man’s throat.

“What?” Wendy demanded, for the everlost was now staring at her with a mocking sort of smile that tugged at the left corner of his mouth.

“I find it interesting that you would order your guard dog not to protect you,” he replied. “It seems … counterintuitive. What’s the point of the dog then, I wonder?” (Which, as it happens, was precisely what Nana was thinking.)

He looked at her so smugly that Wendy was sorely tempted to tell him her plan—which was to wait until she had distracted him sufficiently and then order the dog to attack while his guard was down—but telling him so would have made the plan far less clever, of course.

She also wanted to tell him that she and Nana were both a proud part of the Nineteenth Light Dragoons of the British Home Office, thank you very much, and who was he to question their methods? But that was the trouble with impressive covert missions: you weren’t allowed to use them to impress anybody.

“Perhaps I promised her fresh meat for dinner, and she’s here to collect when I’m through with you,” Wendy shot back instead, which she regretted almost immediately, as it was rather a gruesome thought. But it only made his smile grow wider.

“Well, then. We’d best get to it, I suppose,” he said. “I wouldn’t want her to go hungry.” His face grew solemn when he said it, but Wendy had the feeling he was still only playacting, enjoying a private game of his own design to which no one else had been invited. She raised her sword before her, acknowledging her enemy with a nod, but her eyes never left his.

“Good form,” he said, nodding back, and all of a sudden he was grinning wickedly again, his canines obvious even in the dark.

With a thunderous clap, his wings disappeared from his back, and Wendy couldn’t help but gasp in surprise. The everlost pounced forward in the blink of an eye and touched the flat of his blade lightly to her left shoulder, moving back out of range as quickly as he had attacked, clearly toying with her.

“Never let your guard down,” he advised. “In battle, surprise is either your best friend or your worst enemy. You don’t want it to be the latter.”

Wendy’s eyes narrowed. You’re not the only one who can play games, she thought. Just keep thinking I’m a foolish little girl. It will be the last mistake you ever make.

Seeing that he was not trying to kill her, or at least not yet anyway, she slowed her attacks, careful to seem hesitant and even a bit clumsy, letting him believe in the untested woman he clearly expected. But all the while, she watched him, studying his moves. When she thrust like this, he would counter with a parry to the left. If she swung in just so, he would spin away to the right.

After all her painstaking hours of training—six years with Olaudah Equiano and another year with the men of the Fourteenth Platoon—mishandling her sword and trying to appear off-balance was more of a challenge than she would have thought. It even proved to be somewhat humiliating, much to Wendy’s annoyance. When she pretended to misstep to her right, overextending a thrust that sailed past his left side, he swatted her rump with the flat of his blade for her trouble and danced away gleefully.

Wendy merely gritted her teeth against the indecency and kept up the charade, biding her time.

“So tell me,” he asked, clearly enjoying the diversion, “when did the army finally decide to allow women to join its ranks?”

“Why would you think me a soldier?” she retorted, chopping clumsily at his left shoulder without any chance of actually hitting him.

“Forgive me,” he responded smoothly, dodging the blow and watching her stumble (or at least pretend to stumble) as her blade passed through the empty air. “I only assumed, due to your considerable skill. You have been highly trained, that much is obvious.” He said it with a straight face, but Wendy knew better.

Liar, she thought to herself. No British soldier worth their weight would ever fight this badly, male or female. Clearly, he was trying to flatter her, but to what end, she couldn’t guess.

“Perhaps I am but a lowly serving girl with a patriotic heart,” she replied, to which he laughed out loud.

“Perhaps. But I believe there is more to you than meets the eye, Miss …?” He bowed deeply in mock introduction, ducking beneath a poorly aimed thrust to his chest.

“If you wish to learn my name, you’ll have to earn it,” she replied, pretending to work harder than was truly necessary not to stumble into him.

“As you wish,” he said, reaching out his free hand to steady her, but she only glared at him for his trouble.

She pretended to be even weaker on the left than on the right, slowly moving their encounter away from the rest of the fray, all the while knowing she was doing her part just by keeping one of them occupied. But she couldn’t wait much longer. The false nature of her skirmish allowed her to see what the others could not, each of them too caught up in the deadly fight before him to grasp a sense of the battle as a whole.

The everlost were gaining the advantage.

They were faster and stronger than the human men; that much was clear. Even with their brazenly piratical style, using twice as much energy with every swing and thrust as the well-disciplined Nineteenth Light Dragoons, they exhibited the same level of enthusiasm now as they had from the beginning. They danced about the lawn and darted through the sky, hooting and shouting into the night like wild children, while the human men were beginning to falter.

Here and there across the field a voice rang out in pain when a man was wounded. The Fourteenth Platoon was already outnumbered. If the wounded began to fall, the tide would turn quickly. Whatever Wendy was going to do, she had to do it now.

With a burst of determination, she fell upon her enemy with everything she had.

Her first deliberate thrust pierced the everlost through the left thigh all the way to the bone, and the shock that registered upon his face in that moment satisfied her more deeply than any other thing in all her days.

His surreptitiously mocking grin—whether he had intended it or not—had reflected a thousand equally condescending smiles, each of which had been inflicted upon her throughout all of her seventeen years for no better reason than that she belonged to “the weaker sex.” To see that grin wiped away by the work of her own hand was such a triumph as to feel almost intoxicating.

He winced in pain as she withdrew her weapon from his leg, but he barely evidenced so much as a limp once it was free of his body. Nonetheless, this time she was prepared, pressing her attack without hesitation.

She feinted at him twice, once toward the chest and once in a half-swing toward his left side. When he spun away from the latter, having realized by now that she was in earnest, he discovered too late that her sword was waiting for him. He came to a brutal halt at the end of the turn when her blade pierced his gut, cutting deep into his abdomen and slicing through several inches of entrails.

It was a blow that would have left a human man on the ground in agony, dying in a bloody pile of his own innards.

But what the everlost man did instead was this: He grimaced at the initial pain and then slowly grinned at her once again, his lips parting into a wicked smile as he gripped her blade with both hands and removed it forcefully from his belly.

Wendy shivered, and these words passed through her mind: the soulless, the undead, the everlost. They’re going to kill us all.

“I applaud you, my lady. I truly do,” he told her, each word piercing her heart, another nail in her coffin. “You are an excellent actress. Worthy of the royal stage, I dare say! It was my own folly to think you would join such a fight unprepared, and I have paid a worthy price for it. Surprise was my enemy, after all. But it is not quite so easy as that to kill my kind, I’m afraid.”

An ear-piercing cry split the night, only to be silenced mid-scream, and Wendy knew without question that the first of the men had fallen.

“No,” she whispered. John! Michael!

She turned to try to see who it was, but there was no way to tell. Another voice cried out in agony, and then a third.

“Fall back! To Saint Mary! Fall back!” That was John. He was alive, at least. Wendy waited for Michael to pick up the order and start shouting directions, but the seconds ticked by with no other sounds beyond the clash of steel, more groans of pain, and the creaking of the old church door.

“All in! Bar the entrance!” John’s voice was the last human sound Wendy heard before the door creaked shut, a bar slammed down across it from the inside, and the night fell still.

She was alone with the everlost.

She whirled back to face her adversary only to find that he had moved up behind her while she was distracted. There was hardly a hand’s breadth between them now, and the unmistakable scent of magic permeated the air as he gazed down upon her, a look of cold, merciless appraisal in his ice-blue eyes.