Cold Days df-14

by Jim Butcher

  I couldn’t hear the collision over the thunder of Queen’s greatest hit, but it flung objects all over both ships around with the impact—more so on the Beetle than on the barge. The barge wallowed, stunned, its nose turned away from the beach, its long side being presented to the island, while the Water Beetle rebounded violently, drunkenly, and crunched up onto her hull in the shallows, listing badly to one side.

  Mac and Molly were up at the wheel. She had nearly been thrown from the craft, but Mac had grabbed my apprentice around the waist and kept her from getting a flying lesson. I’m not sure she even noticed. Her face was contorted in a concentration so deep, it was practically dementia, her lips moving frantically, and she held a wand in either hand, moving them in entirely disconnected movements, as if directing two different orchestras through two different speed-metal medleys.

  And as I watched, two other forms bounded up onto the Water Beetle’s rail, then into graceful leaps that carried them over onto the barge—directly into the center of the ritual that was still running at a frantic pitch.

  Thomas had gone into the fight with his favorite combination of weapons—a sword and a pistol. Even as I watched, my brother whirled into a mass of figures on the deck, blade spinning, blood flying out in wide, clean arcs. He moved so swiftly that I could barely track him, just a blur of steel here, a flash of cold grey eyes there. His gun fired in quick rhythm between strokes of his falcata, scything down the Outsiders’ mortal henchmen like sheaves of wheat.

  The second figure was grey and shaggy and terrifying. Mouse’s lionlike ruff of fur flew out like a true mane as he whirled and lunged into the ritual’s participants wherever Thomas hadn’t. I saw him rip a shotgun from the hands of a stunned guard and fling it with a snap of his head into another one before bounding forward and bringing half a dozen panicked men to the deck under his weight—and smashing them through the circle that had surrounded the ritual.

  The reduced energy the ritual had been able to use, the framework that the ley line would have turned into a deadly construction, vanished, released into the night sky to be shaken to pieces by the music. We will, we will, rock you.

  “Hey, Sharkface!” I shouted, stepping forward, gathering Winter and soulfire as I went.

  The furious Walker whirled back to me just in time to have the heavy, octagonal barrel of the Winchester slam through the ridge of bone that he had instead of front teeth, and drive all the way to the back of his mouth.

  “Get rocked,” I said, and pulled the trigger.

  Along with the .45-caliber bullet, I sent a column of pure energy and will surging down the barrel and into the Walker’s skull. His head exploded, literally exploded, into streamers and gobbets of black ichor. His cloak of rags went mad, throwing the headless body into the air and sending it thrashing through the shallow water like a half-squashed bug. Dark vapor began issuing from the frantically twitching body—then suddenly gathered into a single cloud, all in a rush, and shot away, emitting a furious and agonized and terrorized scream as it went, alien but unmistakable.

  Then the body went limp in the water. The cloak continued flopping and thrashing for a few seconds before it, too, went still.

  A unified howl of dismay rose from the surface of the lake, from the Outsiders, and V-shaped wakes appeared on the surface, retreating from the island in every direction, chased by flickering spears of light and music—and the horns of the Hunt began to blare in a frenzy, ringing up from the water’s quivering surface. I saw a massive black-and-white form seize a fleeing Outsider and roll, while a shadow-masked rider lashed out over and over with a long spear. In another place, a shark exploded from the waves, hanging against the sky for a second, jaws gaping, before plunging down directly atop another Outsider, driving it beneath the waves where a dozen wickedly sharp fins abruptly converged.

  The woods stirred behind me and Murphy came panting out of them, her P90 hanging from its sling. She came to my side, staring at the chaos.

  I couldn’t blame her. It was horrible. It was unique. It was glorious. It was . . .

  Suddenly it felt like my heart had stopped.

  It was distracting.

  “Molly!” I screamed. “Molly!”

  Mac heard me through that mess, and shook Molly. When she didn’t react, he grimaced and then delivered a short, sharp smack to her cheek.

  She gasped and blinked her eyes, and the sky show and sound track abruptly vanished, right in the middle of the guitar solo.

  “Get them out of the water!” I screamed. “Get onto the shore! Hurry!”

  Molly blinked at me several times. Then she seemed to get it and nodded her head quickly. She and Mac hurried down to the Beetle’s slanted deck, to the door to below. She called out and Sarissa and Justine appeared, both looking terrified. Molly pointed them at the island, and the three jumped from the ship to the waist-deep water and started wading ashore.

  Mouse caught what was happening and let out a short, sharp bark. Mouse doesn’t bark often, but when he does he can make bits of spackle fall from the ceiling. He and Thomas plunged from the bloodied deck of the barge into the water, and began swimming swiftly toward the island.

  The cries of the Hunt and frantic Outsiders filled the air now, and even as they did, I forced myself to calm my thoughts, to take slow breaths, to focus on my intellectus of the island. I couldn’t sense anything specifically, but an instinct dragged my chin around, turning me to stare up toward the crest of the island, where the old ruined lighthouse stood among the skeletal forms of the late-autumn trees.

  Then it hit me. I shouldn’t have been able to see the lighthouse or the trees from down here, not on a cloudy night, but their silhouettes were clear.

  There was light up there.

  And as my friends reached the shore and hurried over to me, I realized that there was an empty place in my awareness of the island. I would never have sensed it if I hadn’t been looking. I couldn’t feel anything from around the top of the hill.

  “The Walker was just the distraction,” I breathed. “Dammit, they’re not pulling that same trick on me this time.” I turned to them and said, “I think someone’s up at the top of the hill, and whatever they’re doing, it ain’t good. Stay right behind me. Come on.”

  I was pretty sure I knew who was up there, and I wasn’t about to do this alone.

  So I started toward the top of the hill, taking the agonizingly slow route that I knew would enable my friends to keep up with me.

  Chapter Forty-six

  Whoever was up at the top of the hill had things ready to stop me from getting there. It didn’t work out well for them.

  I knew about the trip lines that had been strung up between the trees at ankle level, and knew where the gaps were—more harassment-level opposition from the enemy Little Folk, I was guessing. The people with me didn’t even realize that there were any trip lines.

  After that was a trio of particularly vicious-looking fae hounds, the little cousins of Black Dogs. I had taken a Black Dog on once, in my calmer days, and didn’t care for a rematch. I clipped one of the hounds with a shot from the Winchester while it was crouching in the brush ahead, waiting for me to come a few steps closer, and I set on fire a thicket where another one hid before we got within thirty feet. Ambush predators become unnerved when their would-be prey spots them. Fae hound number three hustled out of a hollow log where he’d been planning to rush out and attack with his buddies, and retreated with the two wounded hounds to the far side of the island.

  “How did they get on the island?” Molly asked as we kept moving. She was breathing hard, both from her efforts on the lake and from the hike up. “I thought it kept everyone away.”

  Demonreach was meant to keep things in, not out, but I didn’t want to blab about that in front of mixed company. “It encourages everyone to stay away, and turns up the heat slowly for anyone who doesn’t,” I said back. “But that’s when it isn’t being attacked by an army of cultists and a horde of howling freaks from bey
ond reality. It was busy making sure none of the Outsiders could come up onto shore—and none of them could. It just outmuscled an army led by something that could go toe-to-toe with Mab. Everything has its limits.” I checked with my intellectus and realized that Mac and Sarissa were bringing up the rear. That wouldn’t do. I still didn’t know the role they were playing in this game. “Mouse,” I called. “Take rear guard, in case those hounds circle around and try to sneak up on us.”

  The big furball made a huffing sound, an exhalation somewhere between a bark and a sneeze, but chewier. Heh. Chewie. I reminded myself to keep track of Mac and Sarissa as we went, but I felt better once Mouse was back there. Intellectus was handy as a reference guide, but not as an early-warning system. If either of them tried anything shady, the shaggy Tibetan guardian was probably the one most likely to notice first, anyway. Might as well have him close.

  “Who’s up there?” Karrin asked, her voice low and tense.

  “Faerie Queens, I think. Plural.”

  “Whoa,” Thomas said. “Why?”

  “Complicated, no time,” I said. “No one does anything until I do. Don’t even talk. If the balloon goes up, go after whoever I light up first. After that, improvise.”

  Then I continued, increasing the pace a little. The trees near the crown of the island were older, thicker, and taller. The spreading canopy of their branches had shaded out most of the brush beneath them, and the ground was easier to move across, being mostly an irregular, soggy carpet of years and years’ worth of fallen leaves. The scent of molds was thick as we went through, disturbing them.

  We emerged into the clearing at the top of the hill, and I stopped in my tracks six inches before I would have come out of the shadow of the forest. Thomas bumped into me. I looked partly over my shoulder with a little push of air through my teeth. He elbowed me in the lower back.

  The hilltop had been closed in a circle of starlight.

  I didn’t know how else to describe it. I didn’t know what I was looking at. Twelve feet off the ground was a band of illumination, glowing rather than glaring, something that filled the hilltop with gentle light, like an enormous ring floating above the earth. It was of precise width, as if drawn with a compass, and I knew that it was exactly one foot thick—twelve inches. The color was something I had never seen before, changing subtly moment to moment, holding silver and blue and gold, but it wasn’t any of those things and . . . and words fail. But it was beautiful, like love, like music, like truth, something that passed through the eyes and plunged straight to the soul. Gentle, softly glowing light slid from the outer edge of the circle like a sheet of water from an elegant fountain, falling to the ground in a slow-motion liquid curtain of pure light, hiding what was behind it.

  I felt the grasshopper move up beside me, her eyes wide. “Boss,” she whispered. “This would make my mom talk in her church voice. What are we looking at?”

  “Merlin’s work, I think,” I breathed. “That circle. I think it’s part of the island’s architecture.”

  “Wow.”

  “I . . . It’s beautiful,” Sarissa murmured. “I’ve never seen anything like it. And I’ve been looking at incredible things my whole life.”

  I spoke something I was certain was true in the same moment that I understood it. “It had to be beautiful. It had to be made from beauty. There is too much ugly inside for it to be made of anything else.”

  “What do you mean, ugly?” Karrin asked, her voice hushed.

  “Later,” I said. I shook my head and blinked my eyes several times. “City to save.” I tried to find something about the circle in my intellectus, but I had apparently already learned everything I could learn about it that way. I knew its exact dimensions; I knew it was part of the structure of the massive spell that made the Well exist. And that was it. It was like the entire thing had been . . . classified, top secret, need-to-know only—and apparently I didn’t need to know.

  Which, I supposed, made sense. We were talking about a massive security system.

  Molly stooped and picked up a rock. She gave it a gentle underhand toss at the wall of light and it passed through without making a ripple. “Safe?” she asked.

  “I doubt it. Give me something that isn’t a part of the island,” I said.

  I heard her slip her backpack off her shoulder and open a zipper. Then she touched my arm and passed me a granola bar wrapped in plastic. I tossed it at the wall, and when it touched, it was destroyed. It didn’t go violently. It simply became a flicker of softly glowing light in the precise shape of the bar of “food.”

  Then it was gone.

  “That also was pretty,” Thomas noted. “In a completely lethal kind of way.”

  “Look who’s talking,” Molly said.

  “It’s not all that high,” he said. “Maybe I could jump it.”

  “Molly,” I said.

  She passed me another granola bar, and I threw it over the wall.

  The wall destroyed it in midair.

  “Maybe not,” Thomas said.

  “Okay,” Karrin said. “So . . . How do we get through it?”

  I thought about it for a second. Then I licked my lips and said, “We don’t. I do.”

  “Alone?” Thomas said. “Sort of defeats the point of bringing us. Also, death. Bad plan.”

  “I think it will let me through,” I said.

  “You think?”

  “Look,” I said. “Me and the island are . . . kind of partners.”

  “Oh, right,” Thomas said. He looked at Karrin and said, “Harry’s a geosexual.”

  Karrin arched an eyebrow and gave me a look.

  “You can’t go alone,” Molly said, her voice worried.

  “Looks like it’s the only way I can go,” I said. “So we do this Ulysses-style. I go in, I figure a way to let down the gate and then we sack Troy.”

  “Can you do that?” Karrin asked.

  I licked my lips and looked at the wall of light. “I’d better be able to.”

  “You’re tired,” Molly said.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Your hands are shaking.”

  Were they? They were. “They are fine also.”

  I didn’t feel tired. Given how much magic I’d been throwing around this day, I should have been comatose with fatigue hours ago, but I just didn’t feel it. That wasn’t a good sign. Maybe Butters had been right: No matter how much juice I got from the mantle of Winter, bodies have limits. I was pushing mine.

  I passed the Winchester to Thomas and took off my new duster. At his lifted eyebrow, I said, “Not of the island. Hold ’em for me.”

  He exhaled and took them. “No reruns, okay?”

  “Pfft,” I said. “Be like sneaking into the movies.”

  Karrin touched my arm. “Just don’t say that you’ll be right back. You’ll jinx it.”

  “I am a professional wizard,” I said. “I know all about jinxes.”

  Having said that, I checked to make sure my shirt wasn’t red. It wasn’t. Then I realized I was putting this off because if I was wrong, I was about to go join Yoda and Obi-Wan in blue-light country. So I took a deep breath and strode forward into the beautiful, deadly barrier.

  Chapter Forty-seven

  I lived.

  Just in case anyone was wondering.

  I stepped through and the liquid light poured over me like warm syrup. There was a little bit of a tingle as it passed over the surface of my body, and then it was gone.

  As were my clothes. Like, completely.

  I had sort of hoped that they would stay—the way Superman’s unitard stays mostly invincible because it’s really close to his skin. Plus I hadn’t felt like stripping in front of everyone for something so relatively trivial as preserving my garage-sale wardrobe and, more important, I didn’t think I had time to start playing Mr. Rogers while someone screwed around with my island. City to save. Check out my focus.

  Of course . . . going into battle full commando could be problematic.

/>   On the other hand, every single time Mab had come at me during my recovery—every time—I’d been just like this, without resources of any kind except what I carried within me. I wasn’t a big believer in coincidence. Had she been trying only to strengthen me generally? Or had she been preparing me for this exact situation?

  Could Mab see that far ahead? Or was this simply a case of superior preparedness proving itself in action? What was it I’d heard in a martial arts studio at some point? Learn to fight naked and you can never be disarmed. Which is fine, I guess, as long as there aren’t mosquitoes.

  I got low and stayed still and opened my senses.

  First thing: I was inside a ritual circle, one that was currently functioning, being used for a spell. It wasn’t the cheap and quick kind I was used to, I guessed, or it would have been broken when I crossed it. Maybe it had kept its integrity because as part of the island, I already existed on either side of the circle. There were certain creatures who could move back and forth across boundaries like that without disturbing them in the slightest—most notably the common cat. It was one reason practitioners so often kept cats as house pets. From a technical standpoint, they are very magic-friendly. Maybe I hadn’t broken it because it had been set up in such a way as to consider the island’s Warden one of those creatures. Or maybe it was the continual, rippling, liquid nature of the circle itself.

  Whatever the case, I was standing inside an active circle. Possibly the most active circle I had ever seen. Magic hummed through the air and the ground, so much that I felt my hair standing on end, and some primitive instinct-level awareness from the Winter Knight’s mantle, the same part that had given me so much trouble all day, started advising me to get the hell out of there along with the rest of the island’s animals. That was why my intellectus hadn’t been able to tell me what was happening here. As a form of magical awareness, an active circle had blocked my intellectus out. Now it worked just fine for what was inside the circle—it was everything outside of it that it could no longer touch.