chokes nic

Nicodemus sighed and shook his head. "Dresden, I truly regret this necessity, but time is growing short. I must act, and your talents could prove useful. You'll see. Once we've cleared some of these well-intentioned idiots out of our way..." He reached for Fidelacchius.
And I punched him in the neck.
Then I seized the noose and jerked it tight. I hung on, pulling it tighter. The noose, another leftover from Judas's field, made Nicodemus more or less invulnerable to harm-from everything but itself. Nicodemus had worn the thing for centuries. As far as I knew,
I was the only one who had worked out how to hurt him. I was the only one who had truly terrified him.
He met my eyes for a panicked second.
“Lasciel's shadow," I told him, "doesn't live here anymore. The Fallen have no power over me. And neither do you."
I jerked the noose a little tighter.
Nicodemus would have screamed if he could have. He thrashed uselessly, reaching for his sword. I kicked it out of reach. He reached up and raked at my eyes, but I hunched my head down and hung on, and his motions were more panicked than practiced. His shadow rose up in a wave of darkness and fury-but as it plunged down to engulf me, white light shone forth from the slits in the wooden cane sheath of the holy sword on my back, and the shadow itself let out a hissing, leathery scream, flinching away from the light.
I was no Knight, but the sword did for me what it had always done for them-it leveled the field, stripping away all the supernatural trappings and leaving only a struggle of mind versus mind and will versus will, one man against another. Nicodemus and I fought for the sword and our lives.
He threw savage kicks into my wounded leg, and even through the blocks Lash had taught me to build, I felt them. I had a great handle on his neck, so in reply I slammed my forehead against Nicodemus's nose. It broke with really satisfying crunching sounds. He hammered punches into my short ribs, and he knew how to make them hurt.
Unfortunately for him, I knew how to be hurt. I knew how to be hurt with the best of them. It was going to take a whole hell of a lot more pain than this loser could dish out in the time he had left to put me down, and I knew it. I knew it. I tightened my grip on that ancient rope and I hung on.
I took more blows to the body as his face turned red. He got one of my knees with a vicious kick as his face turned purple. I was screaming with the pain of it when the purple started looking more like black-and he collapsed, body loosening and then going completely limp.
A lot of people let up when that happens, when their opponent drops unconscious. But it could have been a trick.
Even if it hadn't been I'd been planning to hang on.
I'm not a Knight.
In fact, I squeezed harder.
I wasn't sure how much longer I'd had him down. Might have been thirty seconds. Might have been a minute and a half. But I saw a flash of furious green light and looked up to see Deirdre coming down the hillside toward me on her hair and three limbs, one leg bound up in white bandages. She had twenty or thirty tongueless soldier types with her, and her glowing eyes burned with verdant fury, like a pair of spotlights. She focused on me for half a second, hissed like a furious alley cat, and screamed, "Father!"


Small Favor Chapter 45, Page 381-382