by Jim Butcher
"Troll," I said quietly.
She nodded. "Yeah. I don’t know the details about what happened, but yeah. And every time I let those feelings get loose, the more I lost my temper and used my strength, the bigger and stronger I got. And the worse I felt about what I did." She shook her head. "Sometimes I think it would be easier to just choose the Sidhe half. To stop being human, stop hurting. If it wasn’t for the others needing me …"
"It would turn you into a monster."
"But a happy monster." She finished her beer. "I should go check on Fix—he’s sleeping now—and try to call Ace. What are you going to do?"
"Try to add up some facts. Meet some contacts. Interview more Queens. Maybe get a haircut."
Her teeth showed again in a smile, and she rose. "Good luck." She went back into the noisy apartment and shut the door.
I closed my eyes and tried to think. Whoever had sent the Tigress, Grum, the chlorofiend, and the lone gunman after me had been trying to kill me. It was a reasonable assumption, then, that I was on the right track. Generally speaking, the bad guys don’t try to bump off an investigator unless they’re worried he’s actually about to find something.
But if that was true, then why had the Tigress taken a shot at me the day before I’d gotten the case? She could have been working for the Red Court and taken a new contract that just happened to be me, but it didn’t sound likely. If the ghoul had been on the same contract, it meant that I’d been judged a threat to the killer’s plans from day one, if not sooner.
The frost on my car’s windows had probably been the doing of someone from Winter. I mean, a wizard could do the same thing, but as devastating spells go, that one seemed to be kinda limited. The ghoul, presumably, would work for anyone who paid. The chlorofiend, though … I hadn’t expected it to talk, or to be intelligent.
The more I thought about the plant monster, the more things didn’t add up. It had picked a spot and had its allies herd me to it. That wasn’t the behavior of your average thug, even of the magical variety. It had a sense of personal conflict about it, as if the chlorofiend had a particular bone to pick with me.
And how the hell had Murphy killed it? It was stronger than your average bulldozer, for crying out loud. It had socked me once when I had my full shield going, and it still hurt. It had clipped me a couple of times and nearly broken bones.
The chlorofiend should have flattened Murphy into a puddle of slurry. It had hit her at least a dozen times, yet it seemed like it had only tapped her, as though unable to risk doing more damage. Then a lightbulb flashed on somewhere in my musty brain. The chlorofiend hadn’t been a being, as such. It had been a construct—a magical vessel for an outside awareness. An awareness both intelligent and commanding, but one who could not, for some reason, kill Murphy when she attacked it. Why?
"Because, Harry, you idiot, Murphy isn’t attached to either of the Faerie Courts," I told myself. Out loud.
"What’s that got to do with it?" I asked myself. Again out loud. And people think I’m crazy.
"Remember. The Queens can’t kill anyone who isn’t attached to the Courts through birthright or bargain. She couldn’t kill Murphy. Neither could the construct she was guiding."
"Damn," I muttered. "You’re right."
A Queen seemed reasonable, then—probably from Winter. Or, more realistically, the frosted windshield could have been a decoy. Either way, I couldn’t figure who would have had a reason to come after me with something as elaborate as a mind fog and a veritable army of assassins.
Which reminded me. The mind fog had to have come from somewhere. I wasn’t sure if the Queens could have managed something like that outside of Faerie. If they couldn’t, it meant that the killer had a hired gun, someone who could pull off a delicate and dangerous spell like that.
I started running down that line of thought, but only a moment later the wind picked up into a stiff, whistling breeze that roared through the air and swept down through the city. I frowned at the sudden shift in the weather and looked around.
I didn’t find anything obvious, but when I glanced up, I saw the lights going out. A vast cloud bank was racing north, fast enough that I could see it eating the stars. A second wall of clouds was sailing south, toward the first bank. They met in only moments, and as they did, light flashed from cloud to cloud, brighter than daylight, and thunder shook the balcony beneath my feet. Not long after that, a drop of freezing-cold water landed on my head, quickly followed by a mounting torrent of chilly rain. The still-rising wind whipped it into a miserable downpour.
I turned and pulled open the door into the apartment with a frown. The Alphas were peering out windows, speaking quietly with one another. Across the room, Billy finished messing around with a television, and a rather rumpled-looking weatherman appeared, the image flickering with interference lines and bursts of snow.
"Guys, guys," Billy said. "Hush, let me listen." He turned up the volume.
"… a truly unprecedented event, an enormous Arctic blast that came charging like a freight train through Canada and across Lake Michigan to Chicagoland. And if that wasn’t enough, a tropical front, settled quietly in the Gulf of Mexico, has responded in kind, rushing up the Mississippi River in a sudden heat wave. They’ve met right over Lake Michigan, and we have received several reports of rain and bursts of hail. Thunderstorm warnings have been issued all through the Lake Michigan area, and a tornado watch is in progress for the next hour in Cook Country. National Weather Service has also issued a flash flood warning and a travel advisory for the eastern half of Illinois. This is some beautiful but very violent weather, ladies and gentlemen, and we urge you to remain in shelter until this storm has time to …"
Billy turned the volume down. I looked around the room and found nearly a dozen sets of eyes focused on me, patient and trusting. Bah.
"Harry," Billy said at last, "that isn’t a natural storm, is it?"
I shook my head, got another Coke out of the cooler, and headed tiredly for the door. "Side effect. Like the toads."
"What does it mean?"
I opened the door and said, without looking back, "It means we’re running out of time."
Chapter Twenty-three
I took the Beetle a ways north of town, keeping to the lake shore. Rain sheeted down, and lightning made the clouds dance with shadow and flame. Maybe ten miles from the center of town, the downpour eased up, and the air became noticeably colder—enough so that in jeans and a tee, I was shivering. I pulled the car off Sheridan Road a couple miles north of Northwestern University, out toward Winnetka, set the parking brake and locked it up, and trudged toward the shore of the lake.
It was a dark night, but I called no lights to guide me, and I didn’t carry a flashlight. It took my eyes a while, but I finally managed to start making out shapes in the darkness and found my way through the light woods around this part of the lake shore to a long, naked promontory of rock thrusting itself a dozen yards into the water. I walked to the end of the stone and stood there for a moment, listening to the thunder rolling over the lake, the wind stirring the water into waves nearly like those of the sea. The air itself felt restless, charged with violence, and the light rain that still fell was uncomfortably cold.
I closed my eyes, pulling together energy from the elements around me, where water met stone, air met water, stone met air, and drawing as well from my own determination. The power coursed into me, dancing and seething with a quivering life of its own. I focused it with my thoughts, shaped it, and then opened my eyes and lifted my arms, wrists out so that the old pale round scars on either side of the big blue veins there felt the rain falling on them.
I pushed out the power I’d gathered and called into the thunder and rain, "Godmother! Vente, Leanansidhe!"
A sudden presence appeared beside me, and a woman’s voice said, "Honestly, child, it isn’t as though I’m far away. There’s no reason to shout."
I jerked in surprise and nearly fell into the lake. I turned to my left
to face my faerie godmother, who stood calmly upon the surface of the water, bobbing up and down a bit as waves passed under her feet.
Lea stood nearly my own height, but instead of dark contrasts and harsh angles, she was a creature of gliding curves and gentle shades. Hair the color of flame coursed in curls and ringlets to below her hips, and tonight she wore with it a gown of flowing emerald silk, laced through with veins of ochre and aquamarine. A belt made from a twisted braid of silken threads of gold wound around her waist, and a dark-handled knife rested on a slant at her hip through a loop in the belt.
She was one of the high Sidhe, and her beauty went without saying. The perfection of her form was complemented by features of feminine loveliness, a full mouth, skin like cream, and oblong, feline eyes of gold, cat-slitted like those of most fae. She took in my surprise with a certain reserved mirth, her mouth set with a tiny smile.
"Good evening, Godmother," I said, trying for a proper degree of politeness. "You look lovely as the stars tonight."
She let out a pleased sigh. "Such a flatterer. I’m already enjoying this conversation so much more than the last."
"I’m not dying this time," I said.
The smile faded. "That is a matter of opinion," she responded. "You are in great danger, child."
"Thinking about it, I realize I generally have been whenever you were around."
She clucked reprovingly. "Nonsense. I’ve never had anything but your best interests at heart."
I barked out a harsh laugh. "My best interests. That’s rich."
Lea arched a brow. "What reason have you to think otherwise?"
"For starters, because you tricked me out of a big evil slaying magic sword and sold me to Mab."
"Tut," Lea said. "The sword was just business, child. And as for selling your debt to Mab … I had no choice in the matter."
"Yeah, right."
She arched her brows. "You should know better, dear godchild. You know I cannot speak what is untrue. During our last encounter I returned to Faerie with great power and upset vital balances. Those balances had to be redressed, and your debt was the mechanism that the Queen chose to employ."
I frowned at her for a minute. "Returned with great power." My eyes fell to the knife at her waist. "That thing the vampires gave you?"
She rested her fingers lightly on the knife’s hilt. "Don’t cheapen it. This athame was no creation of theirs. And it was less a gift than a trade."
"Amoracchius and that thing are in the same league? Is that what you’re saying?" Gulp. My faerie godmother was dangerous enough without a big-time artifact of magic. "What is it?"
"Not what, but whose," Lea corrected me. "And in any case, you may be assured that surrendering my claim on you to Mab was in no way an attempt to do you harm. I have never meant you lasting ill."
I scowled at her. "You tried to turn me into one of your hounds and keep me in a kennel, Godmother."
"You’d have been perfectly safe there," she pointed out. "And very happy. I only wanted what was best for you because I care for you, child."
My stomach did a neat little rollover, and I swallowed. "Yeah. Uh. It’s very … you. I guess. In a demented, insane way, I can understand that."
Lea smiled. "I knew you would. To business, then. Why have you called to me this night?"
I took a deep breath and braced myself a little. "Look, I know we haven’t gotten along really well lately. Or ever. And I don’t have a lot to trade with, but I had hoped you’d be willing to work out a bargain with me."
She arched a red-gold brow. "To what ends?"
"I need to speak to them," I said. "To Mab and Titania."
Her expression grew distant, pensive. "You must understand that I cannot protect you from them, should they strike at you. My power has grown, poppet, but not to those heights."
"I understand. But if I don’t get to the bottom of this and find the killer, I’m as good as dead."
"So I have heard," my godmother said. She lifted her right hand and extended it to me. "Then give me your hand."
"I need my hand, Godmother. Both of them."
She let out a peal of laughter. "No, silly child. Simply put your hand in mine. I will convey you."
I gave her a sidelong look and asked warily, "At what price?"
"None."
"None? You never do anything without a price."
She rolled her eyes and clarified, "None to you, child."
"Who, then?"
"No one you know, or knew," Lea said.
An intuition hit me. "My mother. That’s who you’re talking about."
Lea left her hand extended. She smiled, but only said, "Perhaps."
I regarded her hand quietly for a moment, then said, "I’m not sure I can believe that you’re really going to protect me."
"But I already have."
I folded my arms. "When?"
"If you will remember that night in the boneyard, I healed a wound to your head that may well have killed you."
"You only did it to sucker me into getting you the sword!"
Lea’s tone became wounded. "Not only for that. And if you consider further, I also freed you of a crippling binding and rescued you from a blazing inferno not twenty-four hours later."
"You charged my girlfriend all her memories of me to do it! And you only saved me from the fire so that you could put me in a doghouse."
"That does not change the fact that I was, after all, protecting you."
I stared at her in frustration for a minute and then scowled. "What have you done for me lately?"
Lea closed her eyes for a moment, then opened her mouth and spoke. Her voice came out aged and querulous. "What’s all that racket! I have already called the police, I have! You fruits get out of our hall or they’ll lock you away!"
I blinked. "Reuel’s apartment. That was you?"
"Obviously, child. And at the market, earlier this eve." She lifted her hand in the air, made an intricate motion with long, pale fingers, and opened her mouth again, as if singing a note of music. Instead, the sound of police sirens emerged, somewhat muted and indistinguishable from the real thing.
I shook my head. "I don’t get it."
She moved her fingers again, and the sirens blended into another silver-sweet laugh, her expression amused, almost fond. "I am sure you do not, poppet." She offered her hand again. "Come. Time is pressing."
She had that part right at least. And I knew she was telling me the truth. Her words had left her little room for evasion. I’d never gotten anything but burned when making deals with the faeries, and if Lea was offering to help me for free, there had to be a catch somewhere.
Lea’s expression told me that she either knew what I’d been thinking or knew me well enough to guess, and she laughed again. "Harry, Harry," she said. "If it is of any consequence to you, remember that our bargain is still in effect. I am bound to do you no harm for several weeks more."
I’d forgotten about that. Of course, I couldn’t fully trust to that, either. Even if she had sworn to do me no harm, if I asked her to take me somewhere she could drop me off in a forest full of Unseelie nasties without breaking her word. She’d done something very similar to me last year.
Thunder rumbled again, and the light flared even more brightly in the clouds. Tick, tick, tick, the clock was running, and I wasn’t going to get anything done standing here waffling. Either I trusted myself to my godmother or I went back home and waited for something to come along and squash me.
Going with Lea wasn’t the best way to get what I wanted—it was just the only way. I took a breath and took her hand. Her skin felt like cool silk, untouched by the rain. "All right. And after them, I need to see the Mothers."
Lea gave me an oblique glance and said, "Survive the flood before hurling yourself into the fire, child. Close your eyes."
"Why?"
Annoyance flickered over her eyebrows. "Child, stop wasting time with questions. You have given me your hand. Close your eyes."
I muttered a curse to myself and did it. My godmother spoke something, a string of liquid syllables in a tongue I could not understand—but it made my knees turn rubbery and my fingers suddenly feel weak. A wave of disorientation, dizzying but not unpleasantly so, scrambled my sense of direction. I felt a breeze on my face, a sense of movement, but I couldn’t have said whether I was falling or rising or moving forward.
The movement stopped, and the whirling sensations passed. Thunder rumbled again, very loudly, and the surface I stood on shook with it. Light played against my closed eyelids.
"We are here," Lea said, her voice hushed.
I opened my eyes.
I stood on a solid surface among grey and drifting mist. The mist covered whatever ground I was on, and though I poked at it with my foot, I couldn’t tell if it was earth, wood, or concrete. The landscape around me rolled in hills and shallow valleys, all of it covered in ground fog. I frowned up at the skies. They were clear. Stars glittered impossibly bright against the velvet curtain of night, sparkling in dozens of colors, instead of in the usual pale silver, jewels against the blackness of the void. Thunder rumbled again, and the ground shook beneath the mist. Lightning flashed along with it, and the ground all around us lit with a sudden angry blue fire that slowly faded away.
The truth dawned on me slowly. I pushed my foot at the ground again, and then in a circle around me. "We’re …" I choked. "We’re on … we’re on …"
"The clouds," my godmother said, nodding. "Or so it would seem to you. We are no longer in the mortal world."
"The Nevernever, then. Faerie?"
She shook her head and spoke, her voice still hushed, almost reverent. "No. This is the world between, the sometimes place. Where Chicago and Faerie meet, overlap. Chicago-Over-Chicago, if you will. This is the place the Queens call forth when the Sidhe desire to spill blood."
