by Butcher, Jim
Maybe it was fitting that Lily kill me, in turn.
Her fiery eyes seared into mine as she launched the little star at my heart.
Chapter
Forty-nine
There was a flash of silver, and the little star bounced off of the mirror-bright flat of Fix’s long sword.
It soared into the earth a dozen yards away and hit the ground with a flash and a howl of heated air, creating a brief column of white flame that, presumably, had been intended to replace my head and neck.
Fix was holding himself up on one elbow, and held the sword in his left hand. He looked like hell, but he made a single deft rolling motion and came onto his feet as if he didn’t weigh anything.
And he came to his feet between Lily and me.
“Lily!” Fix said. “What is wrong with you?”
Eyes of flame regarded him. “You . . . you’re all right?”
“I said that,” I said. My voice might have squeaked a little. My heart rate was up.
“Harry, shut up,” Fix said. “Lily, look at him. He isn’t a threat to anyone.”
I guess I must have looked kind of bad, but still . . . “Hey,” I said.
Fix twitched his hips and kicked me in the chest. It wasn’t hard, but in my condition it didn’t need to be. It knocked me over.
“Sir Knight . . .” Lily said. “I . . . Fix, it burns.”
“Stop this,” he urged quietly. “Let’s get out of here, find someplace quiet for you to meditate until you’ve got it under control again.”
“I need to . . . He tried to hurt you.”
Fix’s voice hardened. “The ground is burned black, Lily,” he said. “And there’s frost all over my mail. There are burns all over his arms and shoulders, but I wake up fine, lying in the only grass left on the hilltop.” He held up his sword. The last six inches or so of the blade were simply gone, ending in a melted mess. The point must have been lying outside the area my shield had covered. “But it was hot enough to do this. Forget what anyone said. Who was protecting me, Lily?”
She stared at Fix, the furious fire still curling around her, lifting her hair, burning from her eyes. Then she closed them with a groan, and the fires went out. Lily turned her head sharply away from me. “This is too much,” I heard her whisper. “I’m going to fly apart.”
“My lady?” Fix asked.
Lily made a snarling sound, turning eyes that still flickered with embers toward me. “Stay where you are, Sir Knight,” she said, spitting the last word. “If you move or lift weapon or power against our purpose, I will not show mercy a second time.” Then she turned and swept back toward the pyramid formation of Sidhe assaulting Demonreach. Her feet left clear imprints in the soot and ash on the ground, and little fires flickered up in the wake of her steps, dying away again when she had passed. She did not say a word, just lifted her hand and again something like an invisible sandblaster started pouring into Demonreach.
I watched, too drained to move more. I did, I noted, have burns on my arms. I didn’t feel them. They didn’t look like anything epic, but they were there.
“Fix,” I said. “Thank you.”
He looked at me, his expression guarded, but nodded his head slightly. “It seemed I was in your debt, Winter.” His eyes sparkled, just for a second. “Couldn’t have that.”
I found myself laughing weakly. “No. No, it might break something.”
“It broke my damned wrist.” He snorted. “My jaw isn’t happy either. Good punch.”
“I cheated,” I said.
“Our business, there’s no such thing,” he said. “I should have known you were goosing me, talking like that. Most of the fighting I’ve done, there hasn’t been much in the way of taunt and insult.”
“Raise your standards. There’s almost always time for an insult or two.”
He smiled, though it was a bit pained. He waggled the fingers of his right hand experimentally. “Are you done?”
I exhaled slowly, and didn’t answer.
“How much of what you told her is true?” he asked.
“What did you hear?” I asked him.
“Pretty much everything after you took the knife out of me.”
“Nail,” I corrected him, and held it up so he could see. It still had his blood on it.
He looked a little pained. “Harry, would you mind?”
“No,” I said, and wiped the blood into the earth, scrubbing it off the nail.
“Thanks,” he said. He squinted at the wall and then at me. “How the hell did you get in here?”
“Trade secrets,” I said. “How did you guys get here? I know you didn’t take a boat.”
“Flew in,” Fix said. “Shape-shifters. I dropped from a hang glider over the lake and parachuted in.”
“Damn. You got extreme.”
“I’m getting there,” he said.
“So you landed here and put the circle up?”
“Trade secrets,” he said cautiously. “You realize we still aren’t sitting in the same dugout, right? I can do the frenemies thing. It’s kind of traditional. But we are not on the same side.”
“No. You’re on the wrong side,” I said. “Maybe more than one.”
“That’s what every conflict sounds like,” he said. “Not everyone can be equally right, Harry.”
“But believe you me, everyone can be equally wrong,” I said. “Fix, this is about more than Winter and Summer.”
He frowned at that.
“Tell me this,” I said. “I’m not asking for anything specific, anything that I might be able to use against you later.” As if Maeve would let me have a later. “Just tell me: Has Maeve ever asked you to take something at her word. And just told you something was true? Straight up?”
Fix’s frown deepened.
“And you thought to yourself, ‘Hey, that’s odd. She never just tells anyone anything straight up.’”
His lips parted slightly, and his eyes fixed on Maeve.
“And you thought that if anyone but one of the Ladies had said it, you would wonder if she was lying. But she didn’t leave any wiggle room, so it had to be the truth.”
“So?” he asked, very quietly.
“So let me ask you this,” I said. “If you assume that she can lie, even if it was just that once—how does it change the picture?”
Fix might have had some foolish idealism going, but he’d never been anywhere close to stupid. “Oh,” he breathed. “Um.”
“Remember when Lily opened the door to Arctis Tor for us, back when?”
“Sure.”
“When we got inside, the Leanansidhe was popsicled in Mab’s garden,” I said. “Because something had invaded her and influenced her actions. Mab was in the middle of some kind of exorcism based on the model of an ice age.”
“And?”
“And what if this invader got into the water before Mab caught it?” I asked. “What if it got into Maeve?”
“That’s crazy,” he said. “Mab’s the one who’s gone mental.”
“Is she?” I asked him. “Is it so crazy? Remember that meeting at Mac’s? Remember how we found out that Mab had cracked a gasket?”
“Maeve told . . .” He stopped speaking suddenly.
“Yeah,” I said. “A minute ago, you told Lily to ignore the words and look at the actions. You know as well as I do which speaks louder. You know who I am and what I’ve done. So I’m going to ask one more question,” I said. “Whose idea was it to be here tonight? Lily’s? Or Maeve’s?”
The blood drained from his face. “Oh. Fuck.”
I bowed my head. Then I said, “Fix, I saved you because you’re a decent guy, and I don’t care if we’re on different teams. I don’t want you dead.”
“Yeah,” he said quietly. “It . . . speaks pretty loud. But maybe you knew I’d think that. Maybe you did it so that you could play me.”
“Maybe you’re giving me way more credit for cunning than I’m due. You know how I work. How often do I get to a neat, el
egant solution that ties everything up? Can you look at me right now and honestly say to yourself, ‘Dresden, that wily genius! This must be a part of his master plan’?”
I spread my hands and looked up at him expectantly.
Fix looked at me, dirty, naked, shivering, burned, bruised, covered in soot and ash.
“Fuck,” he said again, and looked back at the Ladies.
“I don’t think Maeve did anything to Lily’s head,” I said. “I don’t think she needed to. I think Lily was insecure and lonely enough that all Maeve needed to do was act sort of like a person. Give Lily someone who she felt understood what she was going through. Someone she thought would have her back.”
“A friend,” Fix said.
“Yes.”
“Everyone wants to have a friend,” he said quietly. “Is that so bad?”
“Thelma and Louise were friends,” I said. I pointed at the triangle. “Canyon.”
The muscles along his jaw jumped several times. “Even if . . . even if you’re being honest, and you’re right—and I’m not copping to either—so what? Those coteries with them are their inner circles. They’ll obey without question. You’ve got nothing left to fight with. And I sure as hell can’t take them all on alone.”
I didn’t want to say it, to give away anything to a potential enemy. Nemesis could have taken Fix, for all I knew. It could be there inside him right then, smirking at the rapport it was establishing with me. That was the ugly fact.
But sometimes you have to ignore the math, and . . .
And follow the wisdom of your heart.
My heart told me that Fix was a decent guy.
“Fix, I know about this island. It’s kind of my stomping grounds. That’s how I got through. And I know that if Maeve has her way, this island is going Mount Saint Helens, and taking Chicago with it.”
He stared at me, frowning, pensive.
“My daughter is in town,” I said in a whisper. “She’ll die.”
He blinked. “You have a . . . ?” Then he rocked back a little, as he realized what I’d entrusted him with. “Oh. Christ, Dresden.”
I took a deep breath and pressed on. “The Hunt is out there taking it to the Outsiders right now,” I said. “And they’re winning. And my crew is here, outside the circle. Murphy, Molly, Thomas, Mouse. If I can take the circle down, we aren’t alone.”
“When did ‘we’ happen?” he asked in a flat, hard tone.
I looked up at him and saw laughter at the corners of his eyes.
Sometimes the wisdom of the heart is not at all a bad thing.
“I won’t let anything hurt Lily,” he said. “For any reason. Period.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Maeve’s the bad guy.”
He tested his right hand again and got a little more motion out of it before he winced. “I don’t know where this will get you,” he said, “but as far as I could tell, this was just a ritual circle, like any other.”
“How so?”
“When we landed, Maeve sent some hounds and some Little Folk after you and went straight for that lighthouse—and the guardian just popped up out of the ground, where it is now. Maeve assaulted the spirit, just like right now. She kept it busy while Lily walked a circle of the hilltop, singing. I’ve seen her set up circles like that a thousand times. But once she’d gone all the way around, kaboom, up came the wall.”
I grunted. “Then . . . it’s a preinstalled defense that can be triggered like . . . Hell’s bells, not like a ward. It is a ward. A huge one. But if anything of the island passes through the circle without disturbing it, and anything that isn’t of the island is destroyed . . .” I followed the logic through and sagged.
“What?” Fix asked.
“Then there’s no way to break the circle,” I breathed. “It’s like a time-lock safe. It isn’t coming down until sunrise.”
“Meaning what?”
I swallowed. Sunrise was too late. So I gathered whatever scraps of strength I had left in me and pushed myself slowly, wearily to my feet.
“Meaning,” I said, “we’re on our own.”
Fix eyed the center of the clearing. He passed me a silvery knife he drew from his belt and said, “There you go with that ‘we’ again.”
Chapter
Fifty
I started walking. It was iffy for a couple of steps but I got the hang of it.
“Is there a plan?” Fix asked, keeping up with me.
“Maeve. I kill her.”
Which had been Mab’s freaking order in the first place.
He glanced aside. “You know she’s an immortal, right?”
“Yeah.”
His eyes narrowed. “What do I do?”
“They’ve got the guardian pinned down,” I said. “I think one of those crews has got to stay on it, or it will break loose. Otherwise, Maeve would have been stomping on me right next to Lily.”
Fix nodded. “She never passes up the chance to tear the wings off a fly.” He frowned. “What happens if the guardian gets loose?”
I wasn’t sure. Demonreach had enormous power, an absolute dedication to purpose, and no sense of proportion. I had very little idea of its tactical capabilities. It might or might not be able to help in a fight. Actually, I was sort of hoping it wouldn’t—imagine trying to kill specific ants, in a crowd of ants, with a baseball bat. I was pretty sure that if Demonreach ever started swinging at someone, I wanted to be over the horizon at the very least.
In fact, I realized, that was probably the problem here. Demonreach existed on an epic scale. It was neither suited to nor capable of effectively dealing with beings of such relative insignificance. Standing off a Walker and a small army of Outsiders had not been a huge problem for the island. But Maeve and Lily had slipped inside its guard. They and their personal attendants were sparrows attacking an eagle. The eagle was bigger and stronger and capable of killing any of them, and it didn’t matter in the least.
Not only that, but Demonreach was a genius loci, a nature spirit. The fae were intimately connected to nature on a level that no one had ever been able to fully understand. One could probably make an argument that Demonreach was one of the fae, or at least a very close neighbor. Either way, the mantles of the Ladies of Winter and Summer would carry a measure of dominion and power over beings like Demonreach. Clearly they were not sovereign over the guardian spirit, because it was withstanding them. Just as clearly, they had something going for them, because it wasn’t trying to crush them, either.
“I’m not sure,” I answered. “But the point here is that if we jump Maeve, Lily is going to be too busy keeping a lid on the guardian to get involved.”
“The two of us,” Fix said, “are going to take on all ten of them?”
“Nah,” I said. “I take Maeve. You get the other nine.”
“What if they don’t cooperate?”
“Chastise them.”
Fix snorted. “That’ll be quick. One way or the other. And . . . it’s going to mean war if the Summer Knight assaults nobles of the Winter Court.”
“Not at all,” I said. “They aren’t nobles. They’re outlaws. I just outlawed them by the authority invested in me and stuff. I also hereby declare us a joint task force.”
“We’re a task force?”
“As of now,” I said.
Fix bobbed his head amiably. “If we dance fast enough, maybe we can sell that. Then what?”
“If we’re both alive, we’ll figure it out.”
We took a few more steps before Fix said, “You can’t take Maeve, wizard. Not in the shape you’re in. Not even if she was alone.”
“No,” I said. “I can’t.”
But maybe the Winter Knight could.
Ever since I’d gotten out of my bed in my quarters in Arctis Tor, I’d felt the power of the Winter mantle inside me, and held it back. I’d felt the primal drives that were its power, the need to hunt, to fight, to protect territory, to kill. Winter’s nature was beautiful violence, stark clarity, the most f
eral needs and animal desires and killer instinct pitted against the season of cold and death—the will and desire to fight, to live, even when there was no shelter, no warmth, no respite, no hope, and no help.
I’d fought against that drive, repressed it, held it at bay. That savagery was never meant for a world of grocery stores and electric blankets and peaceable assembly. It was meant for times like this.
So I let Winter in, and everything changed.
My weariness vanished. Not because my body was no longer weary, but because my body was no longer important—only my will. My fear vanished, too. Fear was for prey. Fear was for the things I was about to hunt.
My doubts vanished as well. Doubt was for things that did not know their purpose, and I knew mine. This was a Winter matter, a Faerie matter, a family matter, and it was precisely correct that only beings of Faerie resolve it. I knew exactly what I had to do.
There was a throat that needed ripping.
“Harry?” asked Fix. “Uh. Are you okay?”
I looked aside at him. As hunting partners went, Fix didn’t look like much, but I’d seen him in action before. He was no one to underestimate. And I needed him. Once I didn’t, things might change, because he was on my island and that wasn’t something I could let slide. But for now I could do worse than to have him at my side.
“I’m a little hungry,” I said, and smiled. “Here. Don’t need it.” I tossed the knife to him, point first.
He caught it deftly by the handle. I saw the minor shifts in shadow on his neck as his shoulders tensed up. “Remember. You’ve got iron.”
I didn’t sneer at him, because what would be the point? But I did roll the nail back and forth between my fingers, and heard it scraping on ice.
I looked down and found that ice had condensed out of the water in the air and formed over my fingertips. I put the nail between my teeth so that I could hold up my fingers. As I watched, icicles began to form, guided by raw instinct, stretching out from my fingertips. I flexed my fingers a few times, and saw the edges form, the ice hard and razor sharp. Nice.