by Jim Butcher
“You’ve grown,” I said, bemused.
“Yes, my lord,” Toot-toot barked.
I arched an eyebrow. “Is that the box knife I gave you?”
“Yes, my lord!” he shrilled. “This is my box knife! There are many who like it, but this one is mine!” Toot’s words were crisply precise, and I realized that he was imitating the drill sergeant from Full Metal Jacket. I throttled the sudden smile trying to fight its way onto my face. It looked like he was taking it seriously, and I didn’t want to crush his tiny feelings.
What the hell. I could play along. “At ease, soldier.”
“My lord!” he said. He saluted by slapping the heel of his hand against his forehead and then buzzed a quick circle around the doughnut, staring at it intently. “That,” he declared, in a voice much more like his usual one, “is a doughnut. Is it my doughnut, Harry?”
“It could be,” I said. “I’m offering it as payment.”
Toot shrugged disinterestedly, but the pixie’s dragonfly wings buzzed in excitement. “For what?”
“Information,” I said. I jerked my head at the fallen building. “There was a seriously large sigil-working done in and around that building several hours ago. I need to know anything the Little Folk know about what happened.” A little flattery never hurt. “And when I need information from the Little Folk, you’re the best there is, Toot.”
His Pepto-armored chest swelled up a bit with pride. “Many of my people are beholden to you for freeing them from the pale hunters, Harry. Some of them have joined the Za-Lord’s Guard.”
“Pizza Lord” was the title some of the Little Folk had bestowed upon me—largely because I provided them with a weekly bribe of pizza. Most don’t know it, even in my circles, but the Little Folk are everywhere, and they see a lot more than anyone expects. My policy of mozzarella-driven goodwill had secured the affections of a lot of the locals. When I’d demanded that a sometime ally of mine set free several score of the Folk who had been captured, I’d risen even higher in their collective estimation.
Even so, “Za-Lord’s Guard” was a new one on me.
“I have a guard?” I asked.
Toot threw out his chest. “Of course! Who do you think keeps the Dread Beast Mister from killing the brownies when they come to clean up your apartment? We do! Who lays low the mice and rats and ugly big spiders who might crawl into your bed and nibble on your toes? We do! Fear not, Za-Lord! Neither the foulest of rats nor the cleverest of insects shall disturb your home while we draw breath!”
I hadn’t realized that in addition to the cleaning service, I’d acquired an exterminator too. Handy as hell, though, now that I thought about it. There were things in my lab that wouldn’t react well to becoming rodent nest material.
“Outstanding,” I told him. “But do you want the doughnut or not?”
Toot-toot didn’t even answer. He just shot off down the alleyway like a runaway paper lantern, but so quickly that he left falling snow drifting in contrail spirals in his wake.
Typically speaking, faeries get things done in a hurry—when they want to, at any rate. Even so, I’d barely had time to hum through “When You Wish upon a Star” before Toot-toot returned. The edges of the sphere of light around him had changed color, flushing into an agitated scarlet.
“Run!” Toot-toot piped as he streaked down the alley. “Run, my lord!”
I blinked. Of all the things I’d imagined hearing from the little fae on his return, that had not been on my list.
“Run!” he shrilled, whirling in panicked circles around my head.
My brain was still processing. “What about the doughnut?” I asked, like an idiot.
Toot-toot zipped over to me, set his shoulders against my forehead and pushed for all he was worth. He was stronger than he looked. I had to take a step back or be overbalanced. “Forget the doughnut!” he shouted. “Run, my lord!”
Forget the doughnut?
That, more than anything, jarred me into motion. Toot-toot was not the sort to give in to panic. For that matter, the little fae had always seemed to be…not ignorant so much as innocent of the realization of danger. He’d always been oblivious to danger in the past, when there was mortal food on the line.
In the silence of the snowy evening I heard a sound coming from the far end of the alley. Footsteps, quiet and slow.
A quivering, fearful little voice in my head told me to listen to Toot, and I felt my heart speed up as I turned and ran in the direction he’d indicated.
I cleared the alley and turned left, slogging through the deepening snow. There was a police station only two or three blocks from here. There would be lights and people there, and it would probably serve as a deterrent to whatever was after me. Toot flew beside me, just over my shoulder, and he’d produced a little plastic sports whistle. He blew on it in a sharp rhythm, and through the falling snow I dimly saw half a dozen spheres of light of various colors, all smaller than Toot’s, appear out of the night and begin to parallel our course.
I ran for another block, then two, and as I did I became increasingly certain that something was following in my wake. It was a disturbing sensation, a kind of crawly tingle on the back of my neck, and I was sure that I had attracted the attention of something truly terrible. Mounting levels of fear followed that realization, and I ran for all I was worth.
I turned right and spotted the police station house, its exterior lighting a promise of safety, its lamps girded with haloes in the falling snow.
Then the wind came up and the whole world turned frozen and white. I couldn’t see anything, not my own feet as I struggled through the snow, and not the hand I tried holding up in front of my face. I slipped and went down, and then bounced back to my feet in a panic, certain that if my pursuer caught me on the ground, I would never stand again.
I slammed a shoulder into a light pole and staggered back from it. I couldn’t tell which way I was facing in the whiteout. Had I accidentally stumbled into the street? There would probably be no cars moving in this mess, but if one was, even slowly, I’d never see it in time to get out of the way. I wouldn’t be able to hear a car horn either.
The snow was coming so thick now that I had trouble breathing. I picked a direction that seemed as if it would take me to the police station and hurried on. Within a few steps I found a building with one outstretched hand. I used it to guide me, leaning one hand against the solid wall. That worked fine for twenty feet or so, and then the wall vanished, and I stumbled sideways into an alley.
The howling wind went silent, and the sudden stillness around me was a shock to my senses. I pushed myself to my hands and knees and looked behind me. On the street the blinding curtain of snow still swirled, thick and white and impenetrable, beginning as suddenly as a wall. In the alley the snow was barely an inch deep, and except for a distant moan of wind it was silent.
At that instant I realized that the silence was not an empty one.
I wasn’t alone.
The glittering snow on the alley floor blended seamlessly into a sparkling white gown, tinted here and there with streaks of frozen blue or glacial green. I lifted my eyes.
She wore the gown with inhuman elegance, its rippling fabric draping with feminine perfection, her body a perfect balance of curves and planes, beauty and strength. The gown was cut low, and left her shoulders and arms bare. Her skin made the snow seem a bit sallow by comparison. Glittering colors flickered at her wrists, her throat, and upon her fingers, always changing, cycling through deep blue and green and violet iridescence. Her fingernails glittered with the same impossibly shifting hues.
Upon her head was a circlet of ice, elegant and intricate, as if it had been formed from a single crystalline snowflake. Her hair was long, past her hips, long and silken and white, blending into the gown and the snow. Her lips—her gorgeous, sensual lips—were the color of frozen raspberries.
She was a vision of beauty, the kind that has inspired artists for centuries, immortal beauty that is rarel
y imagined, much less actually seen. Beauty like hers should have struck me senseless with joy. It should have made me weep and give thanks to the Almighty that I had been allowed to look upon it. It should have stopped my breath and made my heart lurch with delight.
It didn’t.
It terrified me.
It terrified me because I could also see her eyes. They were wide, feline eyes, vertically slitted like a cat’s. They shifted color in time with her gems—or, more likely, the gems changed color in time with her eyes. And though they, too, were beautiful beyond the bounds of mortality, they were cold eyes, inhuman eyes, filled with intelligence and desire, but empty of compassion or pity.
I knew those eyes. I knew her.
If fear hadn’t taken the strength from my limbs, I would have run.
A second form appeared from the darkness behind her and hovered in the shadows at her side like an attendant. It resembled the outline of a cat—if any domestic cat ever grew so large. I couldn’t see the color of its fur, but its green-gold eyes reflected the cold blue light, luminous and eerie.
“And well should you bow, mortal,” mewled the feline shape. Its voice was damned eerie, throbbing in strange cadences while producing human sound from an inhuman throat. “Bow before Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness. Bow before the monarch of the Unseelie fae, the Winter Court of the Sidhe.”
Chapter
Six
I gritted my teeth and tried to summon up a salvo of snark. It wouldn’t come. I was just too scared—and with good reason.
Think of every fairy-tale villainess you’ve ever heard of. Think of the wicked witches, the evil queens, the mad enchantresses. Think of the alluring sirens, the hungry ogresses, the savage she-beasts. Think of them and remember that somewhere, sometime, they’ve all been real.
Mab gave them lessons.
Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if she’d set up some sort of certification process, just to make sure they were all up to snuff.
Mab was the ruler of fully half of the realm of Faerie, those areas of the Nevernever, the spirit world, closest to our own, and she was universally respected and feared. I’d seen her, seen her in the merciless clarity of my wizard’s Sight, and I knew—not just suspected, but knew—exactly what kind of creature she was.
Fucking terrifying, that’s what. So terrifying that I couldn’t summon up a single wiseass comment, and that just doesn’t happen to me.
I couldn’t talk, but I could move. I pushed myself to my feet. I shook with the cold and the fear, but faced the Faerie Queen and lifted my chin. Once I’d done that, proved that I knew where my backbone was, I was able to use it as a reference point to find my larynx. My voice came out coarse, rough with apprehension. “What do you want with me?”
Mab’s mouth quivered at the corners, turning up into the tiniest of smiles. The feline voice spoke again as Mab tilted her head. “I want you to do me a favor.”
I frowned at her, and then at the dimly seen feline shape behind her. “Is that Grimalkin back there?”
The feline shape’s eyes gleamed. “Indeed,” Grimalkin said. “The servitor behind me bears that name.”
I blinked for a second, confusion stealing some of the thunder from my terror. “The servitor behind you? There’s no one behind you, Grimalkin.”
Mab’s expression flickered with annoyance, her lips compressing into a thin line. When Grimalkin spoke, his voice bore the same expression. “The servitor is my voice for the time being, wizard. And nothing more.”
“Ah,” I said. I glanced between the two of them, and my curiosity took the opportunity to sucker punch terror while confusion had it distracted. I felt my hands stop shaking. “Why would the Queen of Air and Darkness need an interpreter?”
Mab lifted her chin slightly, a gesture of pride, and another small smile quirked her mouth. “You are already in my debt,” the eerie, surrogate voice said for her. “An you wish an answer to that question, you would incur more obligation yet. I do not believe in charity.”
“There’s a shock,” I muttered under my breath. Whew. My banter gland had not gone necrotic. “But you missed the point of the question, I think. Why would Mab need such a thing? She’s an immortal, a demigod.”
Mab opened her mouth as Grimalkin said, “Ah. I perceive. You doubt my identity.” She let her head drift back a bit, mouth open, and an eerie little laugh drifted up from her servitor. “Just as you did in our first meeting.”
I frowned. That was correct. When Mab first walked into my office in mortal guise years ago, I noticed that something was off and subsequently discovered who she really was. As far as I knew, no one else had been privy to that meeting.
“Perhaps you’d care to reminisce over old times,” mewled the eerie voice. Mab winked at me.
Crap. She’d done that the last time I’d bumped into her. And once again, no one else knew anything about it. I’d been indulging in wishful thinking, hoping she was fake. She was the real Mab.
Mab showed me her teeth. “Three favors you owed me,” Mab said—sort of. “Two yet remain. I am here to create an opportunity for you to remove one of them from our accounting.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “How are you going to do that?”
Her smile widened, showing me her delicately pointed canines. “I am going to help you.”
Yeah.
This couldn’t be good.
I tried to keep my voice steady and calm. “What do you mean?”
“Behold.” Mab gestured with her right hand, and the layer of snow on the ground stirred and moved until it had risen into a sculpture of a building, about eighteen inches high. It was like watching a sand castle melt in reverse.
I thought I recognized the building. “Is that…?”
“The building the lady knight asked you to examine,” confirmed Mab’s surrogate voice. It’s amazing what you can get used to if your daily allowance of bizarre is high enough. “As it was before the working that rent it asunder.”
Other shapes began to form from the snow. Rather disconcertingly detailed shapes of cars rolled smoothly by beside the building, typical Chicago traffic—until one of them, an expensive town car, turned down the alley beside the building, the one I’d walked down not an hour before. I had to take a couple of steps to follow it as it came to a halt and stopped. The snow car’s doors opened, and human shapes the size of the old Star Wars action figures came hurrying out of the vehicle.
I recognized them. The first was a flat-top, no-neck bruiser named Hendricks, Marcone’s personal bodyguard and enforcer. His mother was a Kodiak bear; his father was an Abrams tank, and after he got out of the car, he reached back into it and came out with a light machine gun that he carried in one hand.
While Hendricks was doing that, a woman got out of the other side of the car. Gard was tall, six feet or so, though Hendricks made her look petite. She wore a smart business suit with a long trench coat, and as I watched she opened the car’s trunk and removed a broadsword and an all-metal shield maybe two feet across. She passed her hand over the surface of the shield, and then quickly covered it with a section of cloth that had apparently been cut to fit it.
Both of them moved in a tense, precise, professionally concerned cadence.
The third man out of the car was Marcone himself, a man of medium height and build, wearing a suit that cost more than my car, and he looked as relaxed and calm as he always did. Marcone was criminal scum, but I’ll give the rat his due—he’s got balls that drag the ground when he walks.
Marcone’s head whipped around abruptly, back down the alley the way they’d just come, though neither Hendricks nor Gard reacted with a similar motion. He produced a gun with such speed that it almost seemed magical, and little puffs of frost blazed out from the muzzle of the snow-sculpted weapon.
Hendricks reacted immediately, turning to bring that monster weapon to bear, and tiny motes of blue light flashed down the alley, representing tracer fire. Gard put her shield and her body between Marcone and what
ever was at the end of the alley. They hurried into a side door of the building, one that had been destroyed in the collapse. Hendricks followed, still spraying bursts of fire down the alley. He, too, vanished into the building.
“Hell’s bells,” I breathed. “Marcone was inside?”
Mab flicked her hand in a slashing gesture, and the top two-thirds of the little snow building disintegrated under a miniature arctic gale. I was left with a cutaway image of the building’s interior. Marcone and his bodyguards moved through the place like rats through a maze. They sprinted down a flight of stairs. At the bottom Marcone stabbed at some kind of keypad with short, sharp, precise motions and then looked up.
Heavy sheets of what looked like steel fell into place at the top and bottom of the stairs simultaneously, and I could all but hear the ominous boom! as they settled into place. Gard reached up and touched the center of the near door, and there was a flash of light bright enough to leave little spots in my vision. Then they hurried down a short hallway to another keypad and repeated the process. More doors, more flashes of light.
“Locking himself in…” I muttered, frowning. Then I got it. “Wards. Blast doors. It’s a panic room. He built a panic room.”
Grimalkin made a low, lazy yowling sound that I took for a murmur of agreement.
My own apartment was set up with a similar set of protections, which I could invoke if absolutely necessary—though, granted, my setup was a little more Merlin and a little less Bond. But I had to wonder what the hell had rattled Marcone enough to send him scurrying for a deep hole.
Then Gard’s head snapped up, looking directly at where Mab currently stood, as if the little snow sculpture could somehow see the titanic form of the Winter Queen looking down upon her. Gard reached into her suit pocket, drew out what looked like a slender wooden box, the kind that really high-end pen sets come in sometimes, and took a small, rectangular plaque of some kind from the box. She lifted it, facing Mab again, and snapped the little plaque in her fingers.