namshiel strangulation

"Amateur puppy," Namshiel snarled, and began to gather more sickly green power at his fingertips. He made an odd little gesture and flicked his fingers, and suddenly five tiny threads of green light leapt toward me on five separate, spiraling paths.
I brought my shield around to intersect the new attack-and realized at the last second that each individual thread of energy was coming at me on a slightly different wavelength of the spectrum of magical energy, a variance of frequencies that my shield couldn't stretch to cover. Not all at the same time, anyway. I countered three of them and nearly got the fourth, but it slipped by me, and I never even touched the fifth strand.
Something that felt like cold, greasy piano wire wrapped around my throat, and I couldn't breathe.
"Insufferable, arrogant little monkey," Namshiel hissed. "Playing with the fires of creation. Binding your soul to it, as if you were one of us. How dare you so presume. How dare you wield soulfire against me. I, who was there when your pathetic kind was hewn from the muck."
It wasn't so much being strangled to death that I objected to, or even the megalomaniacal monologue I was being subjected to in the process. I just wished that I knew what the hell he was talking about. Granted, I had busted him up pretty good with that silver hand thing, but he was taking it so freaking personally.
I lost track of what I'd been thinking. My head hurt. So did my neck. Thorned Namshiel was ranting about something. Practically foaming at the mouth, really-right up until Amoracchius flashed in a line of silver fire, and Thorned Namshiel's head hopped up off his shoulders, tumbled twice, and fell into the snow.
Suddenly I took a deep breath and the world started sorting itself out again.

Small Favor Chapter 43, Page 357-358


"Something like that," he said. "The coins, Dresden."
I reached into the pocket of my duster and...
"What the hell," I said.
The Crown Royal bag was gone.
I checked my other pockets, careful of the coin I'd taken from Magog-and careful not to reveal its presence to Nicodemus. No bag. "It's gone."
"Dresden, don't even try such a pathetic lie on m-"
"It's gone!" I told him with considerable heat, none of it feigned. Eleven coins. Eleven freaking cursed coins. The last time I remembered definitely having them had been up at the tower, when I'd jingled them for Nicodemus.
He stared at me for a moment, his eyes searching, and then murmured something under his breath. Whispers rolled from the shadows around him. I didn't recognize the language, but I did recognize the tone. I wondered if the angelic tongue had swear words, or if they just said nice words backward or something. Doog! Teews doog!
Nicodemus's sword came up as swiftly as a flickering snake's tongue and came to rest against my throat. I didn't have time to flinch; it was that fast. I sucked in a quick breath and held very, very still.
"These marks," he murmured. "Thorned Namshiel's strangler spell." His eyes drew a line from the last apparent mark on my neck down to the duster pocket that the bag of coins had been in. "Ah. The strangulation was the distraction. He picked your pocket with one of the other wires before he was incapacitated. He did that to Saint...someone-or-other, in Glasgow in the thirteenth century."
There's nothing like getting taken with an old trick, I guess. But that meant that Namshiel had been working together with someone else-someone else who had to have been hanging around to collect the coins after he'd taken them from my pocket and tossed them off to the side in the confusion. Someone who hadn't been pulling a fade after all.
"Tessa and Rosanna," I said quietly. "They got their collection of thugs back. They bailed at just the right moment to ruin your plan, too."

Small Favor Chapter 45, Page 379