“Okay, we’re going to get a different sort of attack next,” I said. That’s when it began to snow in Rome. Big fat snowflakes eager to blanket the Eternal City and paralyze it.

Tonsured men of assorted backgrounds, dressed in the billowy white clothing Owen had described, with an orange sash crossing from their right shoulders to their left hips, streamed out of the three buildings. They were heading for a spot opposite the Hammers of God, presumably to form their own Tree of Life. Seeing this, the Hammers of God formation flattened into two lines, staggered so that the line in back could see between the shoulders of the front line, and then in sync they drew silver knives out of their coats and threw them at a single target. Some missed, but most didn’t. The targeted man went down with seven knives buried in his torso and one in his throat.

“Holy shite!” Owen said. “Why did they go after that one?”

“Align yourself with the forces of hell and you’re fair game in their eyes,” I said.

“No, I mean, why that one particular man?”

I shrugged. “Random target of opportunity. It was smart, because they disrupted their formation before it got started. The Hammers didn’t want them to get their own kinetic ward, or anything else, going. They need ten dudes to do anything major.”

“Well, I think they have ten anyway,” Granuaile said. “Another one just appeared—yep. That’s ten. They might have more waiting.”

“Oh, damn.” The Hammers didn’t have additional guys in reserve. If one or more of them went down, they could maintain what they’d already cast but not do anything in addition. Their strength in formation was impressive, but their weakness was needing to maintain that formation.

Their cloak of indifference—or whatever they were using to distract passersby—worked astoundingly well. A woman in heels clicked across the piazza, right by the body of the dead Qabalist—who was an obvious murder victim and could not be mistaken for a sleeping vagrant—and walked into Dolce & Gabbana as if she had seen nothing amiss. I wondered what its range was because while Granuaile and I had the protection of cold iron, Owen did not and he had clearly seen that man sprout steel in his body and go down.

The Hermetic Qabalists began their own chanting and synchronized moves, but the Hammers of God wanted to disrupt them before they completed anything. So Rabbi Yosef Bialik’s beard got unleashed like some hairy nightmare elder god, puffing and expanding and then twisting into thick tentacles, three on either side of his chin. They began to stretch out for the point man of the other formation, and Granuaile gasped while Owen pointed a shaky finger at him.

“What kind of extra-special batshite is that right there? Gods below, Siodhachan, if Brighid was here I’d tell her to kill it with fire!”

“Haha. Told you.”

“I’m gonna have nightmares.” He pawed at his face. “I need to shave.”

The Hermetic Qabalist had a response to the hairy cables coming his way: His tonsure came alive in much the same way, and a halo of tentacles formed around his skull before rushing to meet the rabbi’s.

“Oh, yuck!” Granuaile said. The two sets of hairy ropes met in the middle, struggled to get past each other, failed, then entwined and tore at the enemy in an attempt to pull the other out of formation.

“Are you kidding? This is awesome,” I said.

“Since I’ve become a Druid, I’ve seen some pretty weird shit, Atticus,” Granuaile said, “but Beardy Baggins there squaring off against Squid Head McGee in the snow might be the weirdest.”

“Hold up, now, who’s that lad coming out of the building on the left?” Owen pointed to a slim, pale figure wearing sunglasses and a bespoke Italian suit. I recognized him from Berlin; he was one of the gang that got away.

“That’s a vampire.”

“How? It’s not night yet,” Granuaile said.

“Might as well be. No sun’s getting through that cloud cover except the weakest kind.”

“Easy way to find out,” Owen said, and he began to roll out the words for unbinding. Meanwhile, the vampire moved briskly—not running, just a late-for-a-meeting walk—to position himself behind the rearmost Hammer of God. He was moving too slowly to trigger the kinetic ward, and so he encountered no difficulty. He reached over the shoulder with one hand to grab the Hammer’s bearded chin, placed the other on top of the head, and twisted savagely, snapping his neck. The Hammer’s body went slack and he tumbled to the cobblestones. Just as the rest of the Hammers were becoming aware that their formation had been disrupted and the vampire was moving to take out yet another of them, Owen completed his unbinding, and the contents of that fine Italian suit popped like a swollen tick before collapsing into a dark red puddle on the piazza.

This caused one of the boys in white to cry out in Italian, “A Druid is here!”

A window in the terra-cotta building flew open and a voice boomed, “Do not let him escape.” More windows flew open—probably half of the total available flats—and vampires leapt out of them, regardless of how high off the ground they were. This was far more than the eleven who’d escaped in Berlin. I honestly could not count them all because they kept coming. They began to fan out around the plaza to find me, and using camouflage wouldn’t matter. They’d locate me via smell, because my blood and presumably Owen’s were two-thousand-year-old vintages.

“Shit. Hey, wait: They think there’s only one of us. I’ll be the bait down there on the steps and let them come after me. You guys stay here and pick off all you can.”

Their protests followed after me as I dashed down the stairs. “If ye cock this up, you’ll be dead!” Owen pointed out helpfully.

When I plowed through the front door, the first thing I did was slip on the icy steps and fall on my ass. An inauspicious beginning to battle. But I got up and noticed that the Hammers of God and their tonsured opponents had fallen to hand-to-hand—or rather to beards vs. scalp squids. Both formations were broken up now, and it was a brutal hairy mêlée that I might have enjoyed watching under other circumstances. But there were many speedy vampires spreading out over the piazza and I needed to get myself in position to lure them, hoping that Theophilus himself would come out to play eventually. Beginning to draw on the reserves of my bear charm, I increased my speed and drew out my stake, keeping Fragarach sheathed. Then I chose a vamp as I ran over to the bottom of the Spanish Steps and kept my eyes on him as I mouthed the words of unbinding. He was circling around toward the Keats-Shelley House on the other side of the steps from Babington’s, and just as I completed the unbinding, he realized that I wasn’t admiring Bernini’s fountain like a tourist. His mouth formed a tiny o of surprise, and then he turned into mobile slush.

“He’s there, at the steps!” that same stentorian voice called from the terra-cotta building.

The vampires began to converge from all sides—some had moved fast enough to run to the top of the steps and cut off escape to the road that snaked beneath the Trinità dei Monti church. Not that I wished to escape.

I scooted over to the large block pillar of marble at one end of the steps and put myself on the other side of it, facing the stairs, in case they decided to direct sniper fire in my direction from those buildings. Unlike the Hammers, I had no kinetic ward. I’d handle the vampires coming from above and behind Babington’s and trust Granuaile and Owen to take care of threats coming at me from the piazza.