by Butcher, Jim
“What I’m doing here,” I said, “is marking out all the nodes I remember.”
“Nodes?” Butters asked.
My clumsy fingers made it a little hard to put the marks exactly where I wanted them. “The meeting points of one or more ley lines,” I said. “I got to know all about them a few years ago.”
“Those are like magical power cables, right?” Karrin asked.
“More or less,” I said. “Sources of power that you can draw on to make major magic. And there are a lot of them in the Great Lakes region. I’m drawing from memory, but I’m pretty sure these are right.”
“They are,” Molly confirmed quietly. “Auntie Lea taught them to me a few months ago.”
I looked up at her, eyed my battered fingers, and said, “Then why am I doing this?”
Molly rolled her eyes and took the pen. She started marking nodes rapidly and precisely on the map, including the Well on Demonreach (though the island didn’t appear on the map).
“Whoever is going to attempt the spell on Demonreach has to do it from somewhere near the shore of the lake,” I said. “They’re almost certainly going to be at one of these nodes—the closer to the edge of the lake, the better.” I pointed out several nodes near the shore. “So we need to send the guard out to check these six locations near the edge of the lake first. After that, they go after the next nearest and so on.”
“Some of those are a good way off,” Karrin noted. “How fast can these little guys move?”
“Fast,” I said. “Faster than anyone gives them credit. They can fly and they can take shortcuts through the Nevernever. They can get to the sites and back before sundown.”
Sundown. Which was when the big, bad immortals would come out to play.
“Any questions so far?” I asked, looking at Murphy.
She jerked her chin toward my brother and said, “Thomas filled me in.”
“Good,” I said. “Exposition gets repetitive fast. A spell like this takes time to set up, and they won’t really be able to hide it if we can get eyes on the site. Once we know which of the sites shows signs of use, we can get to it and thwart whatever lunatic is using it.”
“Do we know who it is yet?” Murphy asked.
“Answer unclear,” I said.
“It’s got to be those Outsiders, right?” Thomas asked.
“Stands to reason. But the real question is, who is helping them?”
I got a bunch of looks at that.
“Outsiders can’t just show up in our reality,” I said. “That’s why they’re called Outsiders in the first place. Someone has to open the door and let them in.” I took a deep breath. “Which brings me to the next twist. I talked to Lily and Maeve, and they tell me that Mab is the one planning to tinker with the island.”
Silence followed that.
“That’s . . . a lie, right?” Butters asked.
“They can’t lie,” I said. “They physically can’t. And, yes, I got them to speak directly about it. There’s no confusion of signals, no room for obfuscation.”
Thomas whistled quietly.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Uh,” Molly said. “We’re up against Mab? Your boss?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Lily and Maeve may not be lying but they could still be wrong. Lily has never been a cerebral titan. And Maeve is . . . maybe ‘insane’ is the only word that really describes it, but she’s definitely firing on an odd number of cylinders. It’s possible that they’ve been deceived.”
“Or,” Thomas said, “maybe they haven’t.”
“Or maybe they haven’t,” I said, nodding.
“What would that mean?” Molly asked.
“It would mean,” Karrin said quietly, “that Mab sent Harry to kill Maeve because either she wanted Maeve out of the way or she wanted Harry out of the way. Which is good, because it means that she’s worried that there’s someone who could stop her.”
“Right,” I said. “Or maybe . . .” I frowned, studying a new thought.
“What?” Thomas asked.
I looked slowly around the room. If Mab had been taken by the contagion, which really needed a better name, that certainly meant that Lea had been taken as well—and Lea had been tutoring Molly. If it had spread into the White Court, my brother could have been exposed. Murphy was maybe the most vulnerable—she was isolated, and her behavior had changed radically over the past couple of years. Hell, Butters was the person in the room least likely to have been exposed or turned or whatever—which made him the most ideal candidate for being turned.
Paranoia—because why should the conspiracy theorists get to have all the fun?
I just couldn’t see any of these people turning on me, no matter the influence. But if you could see treachery coming all that easily, Julius Caesar might have lived to a ripe old age. I’d always been slightly inclined to the paranoid. I had a sinking feeling I was going to start developing my latent potential.
I picked my words very carefully.
“Over the past several years,” I said, “there have been several conflicts between two different interests. Several times, events have been driven by internal conflicts within one or both of those interests.”
“Like what?” Butters asked.
“Dual interests inside the Red Court, for one,” I said. “One of them trying to prevent conflict with the White Council, one of them trying to stir it up. Multiple Houses of the White Court rising up to vie for control of it. The Winter and Summer Courts posturing and interfering with each other when Winter’s territory was violated by the Red Court.” I didn’t want to get any more specific than that. “Do you guys see what I’m getting at here?”
“Oh!” Butters said. “It’s a phantom menace!”
“Ah!” Molly said.
Thomas grunted.
Karrin glanced around at all of us and then said, “Translate that from nerd to English, please.”
“Someone is out there,” I said. “Someone who has been manipulating events. Playing puppet master, stirring the pot, stacking the deck—”
“Mixing metaphors?” Thomas suggested.
“Fuck off. I’m just saying that this situation has the same shape as the others. Mab and Maeve at each other’s throats, with Summer standing by ready to get involved, and Outsiders starting to throw their weight around.”
“The Black Council,” Molly whispered.
“Exactly,” I said, which it wasn’t. Up until earlier today, I had known someone was covertly causing the world a lot of grief—and due to their connections with some grim events within the White Council I had assumed it was a group of wizards, which was both naturally arrogant and extremely nearsighted of me. But what if I’d been wrong? What if the Black Council was just one more offshoot of one enormous, intangible enemy? If what I’d gotten from Lily was accurate, the problem was a hell of a lot bigger than I had realized.
And I did not want that problem to know that I had spotted it.
“The Black Council,” I said. “A group of practitioners using dark magic to influence various events around the world. They’re powerful, they’re bad news, and if I’m right, they’re here. If they’re here, I figure it’s a good bet that Sharkface and his chums—”
“Shark,” Butters said. “Chums. Funny.”
“Thank you for noticing,” I said, and continued the sentence. “—are working for the Black Council.”
“The theoretical Black Council,” Karrin said.
“They’re out there, definitely,” I said.
Karrin smiled faintly. “If you say so, Mulder.”
“I’m going to ignore that. The only question is whether or not they’re here now.”
Molly nodded seriously. “If they are? How do we find them?”
“We don’t,” I said. “There isn’t enough time to go sniffing around methodically. We know someone’s going to mess with the island. It doesn’t really matter who’s pressing the button that sets off the bomb. We just have to keep it from ge
tting pressed. The Little Folk find us that ritual site, and then we go wreck it.”
“Um,” Butters said. “Not that I lack confidence in you guys, but shouldn’t we be calling in the cavalry? I mean, doesn’t that make more sense?”
“We are the cavalry,” I said in a flat tone. “The White Council won’t help. Even if I knew the current protocols to contact them, it would take them days to verify that I am in fact alive and still me, and we only have hours. Besides, Molly’s on their most-wanted list.”
I didn’t add in the third reason not to contact the Council—when they found out about my relationship with Mab, the monarch of a sovereign and occasionally hostile supernatural nation, they would almost certainly panic and assume that I was a massive security risk. Which would, for a variety of reasons and to a variety of degrees, be an accurate assumption. And now that I thought about it, given how my, ah, induction had been psychically broadcast to all of Faerie, there was no chance whatsoever that the Council didn’t know. Knowing stuff is what they do.
Butters frowned. “The Paranetters?”
“No,” I said. “The last thing we need is a small army of newbies floundering around and stumbling into us. That’s asking for trouble in the short term, the long term, and every other term there might be. We can go to them for information only. We aren’t dragging them in.”
The little ME took off his glasses and cleaned them absently with the hem of his scrubs. “What about Lara’s team? Or the Einherjaren?”
Thomas shrugged. “I could probably convince Lara to send the team somewhere.”
“Ditto,” Karrin said, “only with Vikings.”
“Good,” I said. “We might need more bodies, and we might need to cover multiple sites. Can you two get that lined up when we break?”
They nodded.
“Molly,” I said. “You’ll take the map up to our little scouts and tell them where to look and what to look for. Keep it simple and promise an entire pizza to whoever finds what we’re after.”
My apprentice grinned. “Drive their performance with competition, eh?”
“Millions of abusively obsessed sports parents can’t be wrong,” I said. “Butters, you’ll go to the Paranetters and ask if anyone’s seen or heard anything unusual anywhere even close to Lake Michigan. No one investigates anything. They just report. Get me all the information you can about any odd activity in the past week. We need to collect data as quickly as possible.”
“Right,” Butters said. “I’ve got some now, if you want.”
I blinked. I mean, I knew the Internet was the fast way to spread information, but . . . “Seriously?”
“Well,” Butters hedged. “Sort of. One of our guys is a little, um, imaginative.”
“You mean paranoid?”
“Yes,” Butters said. “He’s got this Internet lair in his mother’s basement. Keeps track of all kinds of things. Calls it observing the supernatural through statistics. Sends me a regional status update every day, and my spam blockers just cannot keep him out.”
“Hngh,” I said, as if I knew what a spam blocker was. “What’s he got to say about today?”
“That boat rentals this morning were four hundred percent higher today than the median for this time of year, and dark forces are bound to be at work.”
“Boat rentals,” I muttered.
“He’s a little weird, Harry,” Butters said. “I mean, he has a little head-shot photo tree of the people responsible for the Cubs’ billy goat curse. That kind of odd. He blows the curve.”
“Tell him to take the tree down. The billy goat curse was a lone gunman,” I said. “But paranoid doesn’t necessarily equal wrong. Boats . . .”
I bowed my head and closed my eyes for a moment, thinking, but if Butter’s paranoid basement freak was right, then the puzzle piece he’d handed me was woefully unhelpful. I needed more pieces. “Okay,” I said. “Right. Get more data.” I looked up, jerked my head at Thomas, and headed for the kitchen. “Let’s go talk to our guest about his boss.”
* * *
I leaned down to look into the oven through the glass door. There was no light inside, but I could make out Captain Hook’s armored form huddled disconsolately on a coated cookie sheet. I knocked on the glass, and Captain Hook’s helmet turned toward me.
“I want to talk to you,” I said. “You’re my prisoner. Don’t try to fight me or run away or I’ll have to stop you. I’d rather just have a nice conversation. Do you understand me?”
Hook didn’t give me any indications either way. I took silence as assent.
“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to open the door now.” I cracked open the oven door and opened it slowly, doing my best not to loom. Tough to do when you’re the size of a building relative to the person over whom you are standing. “Now just take it easy and we will—”
I’d opened the door maybe six inches when Captain Hook all but vanished in a blur of speed. I swiped an arm at him about a second and a half too late, but I didn’t feel too bad about missing, because Thomas tried to snatch the little maniac, too, and missed completely.
Hook, who worked for our enemies, and who had been right there in the kitchen the whole time we’d been scheming, shot toward a vent on one wall, crossing the room in the blink of an eye, and none of us could react in time to stop him.
Chapter
Twenty-nine
None of us but the major general.
Toot dropped down from where he’d been crouched atop a bookcase, intercepting Hook’s darting black form, and tackled the other little faerie to the floor in the middle of the living room. They landed with a thump on the carpeting, wings still blurring in fits and starts, and tumbled around the floor in irregular bursts and hops, sometimes rolling a few inches, sometimes bounding up and coming down six feet away.
Toot had planned for this fight. He’d tackled Hook into the carpet, where the hooks on his armor would get tangled and bind him, slowing him down. Furthermore, Toot’s hands were wrapped in cloth until it looked like he was wearing mittens or boxing gloves, and he managed to seize Hook by the hooks on the back of his armor. He swung the other little faerie around in a circle and then with a high-pitched shout flung him into the wall.
Captain Hook slammed into the wall, putting gouges in the freshly painted drywall, then staggered back and fell to the ground. Toot bore down with a vengeance, drawing his little sword, and the armored figure held up a mailed fist. “Invocation!” he piped in a high, clear voice. “I am a prisoner! I invoke Winter Law!”
Toot’s sword was already in midswing, but at those last two words he checked himself abruptly, pulling the weapon back. He hovered there over Hook with his feet an inch off the ground, gritting his teeth, but then he buzzed back from Hook and sheathed the sword.
“Uh,” I said. “Toot? What just happened?”
Toot-toot landed on the kitchen counter next to me and stomped around in a circle, clearly furious. “You opened your big fat mouth!” he screamed. After a moment, he added, sullenly, “My lord.”
I frowned at Toot and then at Hook. The enemy sprite just sat there on the floor, making no further effort to escape. “Okay,” I said. “Explain that.”
“You offered to take him prisoner,” Toot said. “By Winter Law, if he accepts your offer he may not attempt escape or offer any further resistance to you for as long as you see to his needs. Now you can’t kill him or beat him up or anything! And I was winning!”
I blinked. “Yeah, okay, fine. So let’s make with the questions already.”
“You can’t!” Toot wailed. “You can’t try to make him betray his previous covenants or terror-gate him or anything!”
I frowned. “Wait. He’s a guest?”
“Yes!”
“By Winter Law?” I asked.
“Yes! Sort of.”
“Well,” I said, starting toward Hook. “I never signed on to that treaty. So screw Winter Law—”
And abruptly, as if someone had just slammed a row of
staples into my skin, the mantle of the Winter Knight vanished completely. Pain soared back into my body, inflamed tissue crying out, my bruises throbbing, the edemas beneath my skin pounding with a horrible tightness. Fatigue hit me like a truck. The sensations were so intense, the only way I could tell that I had fallen to the floor was by looking.
And my body abruptly went numb and useless from my stomach down.
That scared the hell out of me and confirmed one of my worst fears. When I’d consented to serve Mab, my back had been broken, my spine damaged. Taking up the mantle had covered what would probably have been a crippling and long-term injury. But without it, my body was only mortal. Better than most at recovering over time, but still human. Without the mantle, I wouldn’t have legs, bladder or bowel control, or, most important, independence.
I was on the ground like that for a subjective week, but it could have been only a few seconds before Thomas reached my side, with Murphy, Butters, and Molly right behind him. I knew they were there because I could see them, but their voices swam down to me from what seemed like a great distance among the cacophony of raking sensations scouring my nervous system. They lifted me to a sitting position—and then abruptly the pain was gone, and my legs started moving again, jerking in a single, gentle spasm.
The mantle had been restored.
“Okay,” I said in a ragged voice. “Uh. Maybe we won’t screw Winter Law.”
“Harry,” Thomas said, as if he’d said my name several times already. “What happened?”
“Uh,” I said. “I think it’s . . . a side effect. Fallout from defying the order of things.”
“What?” he asked.
“Faeries,” I said. “They’re kind of insane, and mischievous, and dangerous as hell, but they all share one trait—they’re good to their word. They obey what they recognize as law. Especially Mab.”
“You aren’t making much sense right now,” Thomas said.
“The mantle of power comes from Mab. And now it’s in me. But it’s still a piece of her. If I go violating her own realm’s laws, it looks like the mantle isn’t going to have my back.”