by Butcher, Jim
“Well, gosh,” I said. “I’m just so ignorant, I don’t know what else to do.”
He stared at me intently. “You don’t know what this place is.”
“It’s out of the way of innocent bystanders,” I said. “And I know it better than most of the people who are on the way.”
He nodded, frowning. “I suppose that is logical.”
“So?”
“Hmm?”
I sighed. Wizards. “So? What is this place?”
He considered his words for a moment. “What do you think it is, beyond the obvious physical and tactical terrain?”
“Well,” I said. “I know there’s a ley line that comes through here. Very dark and dangerous energy. I know that there’s a genius loci present and that it is real strong and isn’t very friendly. I know that they tried to start up a small town here, linked with the shipping interests in the Great Lakes, but it went sour. Demonreach drove them away. Or insane, apparently.”
“Demonreach?” he asked.
“Couldn’t find a name on the books,” I said. “So I made up my own.”
“Demonreach,” the Gatekeeper mused. “It’s . . . certainly fitting.”
“So?”
He gave me a tight smile. “It wouldn’t help you for me to say anything more—except for this: one of your facts is incorrect. The ley line you speak of does not go through the island,” he said. “This is where it wells up. The island is its source.”
“Ah,” I said. “Wells up from what?”
“In my opinion, that is a very useful question.”
I narrowed my eyes. “And you aren’t going to give me anything else.”
He shrugged. “We do have other matters to discuss.”
I glanced back at my unconscious friends. “Yeah. We do.”
“I am willing to accept that your intentions are noble,” he said. “But your actions could set into motion a catastrophic chain of events.”
I shrugged. “I don’t know about that,” I said. “What I do know is that you don’t kill a man for a crime he didn’t commit. And when someone else tries to do it, you stop them.”
“And you think that this will stop them?” the Gatekeeper asked.
“I think it’s my best shot.”
“You won’t succeed,” he said. “If you press ahead, it will end in violence. People will die, you amongst them.”
“You don’t even know what I have in mind,” I said.
“You’re laying a trap for the traitor,” he said. “You’re trying to force him to act and reveal himself.”
A lesser man might have felt less clever than he had a moment before. “Oh.”
“And if I can work it out,” the Gatekeeper said, “then so can the traitor.”
“Well, duh,” I said. “But he’ll show up anyway. He can’t afford to do anything else.”
“And he’ll come ready,” the Gatekeeper said. “He’ll choose his moment.”
“Let him. I’ve got other assets.”
Then he did something strange. He exhaled slowly, his living eye closing. The gleaming steel eye tracked back and forth, as if looking at something, though I could only tell it was moving because of the twitches of his other eyelid. A moment later, the Gatekeeper opened his eye and said, “The chances that you’ll survive it are minimal.”
“Yeah?” I asked him. I stepped around him and hopped off the dock and onto the island, immediately feeling the connection with Demonreach as I turned to face him. “How about now?”
He frowned at me, and then repeated the little ritual.
Then he made a choking sound. “Blood of the Prophet,” he swore, opening his eyes to stare at me. “You . . . you’ve claimed this place as a sanctum?”
“Uh-huh.”
“How?”
“I punched it in the nose. Now we’re friends,” I said.
The Gatekeeper shook his head slowly. “Harry,” he said, his voice weary. “Harry, you don’t know what you’ve done.”
“I’ve given myself a fighting chance.”
“Yes. Today,” he replied. “But there is always a price for knowledge. Always.”
His left eyelid twitched as he spoke, making the scars that framed the steel orb quiver.
“But it will be me paying the price,” I said. “Not everyone else.”
“Yes,” he said quietly. We were both silent for several minutes, standing in the rain.
“Been longer than five minutes,” I said. “How do you want it to be?”
The Gatekeeper shook his head. “May I offer you two pieces of advice?”
I nodded.
“First,” he said, “do not tap into the power of this place’s well. You are years away from being able to handle such a thing without being altered by it.”
“I hadn’t planned on touching it,” I said.
“Second,” he said, “you must understand that regardless of the outcome of this confrontation, someone will die. Preferably, it would be the traitor—but if he is killed rather than captured, no one will be willing to accept your explanation of events, no matter how accurate it may be. Morgan will be executed. Odds are excellent that you will be as well.”
“I’m sure as hell not doing this for me.”
He nodded.
“Don’t suppose you’d be willing to lend a hand?”
“I cannot set foot on the island,” he said.
“Why not?”
“Because this place holds a grudge,” he said.
I suddenly thought of the drag-thump limp of the island’s manifest spirit.
Damn.
He turned to the dock behind him and flicked a hand at the air. A neat, perfectly circular portal to the Nevernever appeared without a whisper or flicker of wasted power. The Gatekeeper gave me a nod. “Your friends will awaken in a moment. I will do what I can to help you.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He shook his head. “Do not. It may be that true kindness would have been to kill you today.”
Then he stepped through the portal and was gone. It vanished an instant later. I stood there in the rain and watched the others begin to stir. Then I sighed and walked back to them, to help them up and explain what was going on.
We had to get moving. The day wasn’t getting any younger, and there were a lot of things to do before nightfall.
Chapter Forty
We worked for three hours before I started dropping things, tripping on nice flat ground, and bumping into other people because I’d forgotten to keep an eye out for them.
“That’s it, Harry,” Georgia said firmly. “Your sleeping bag is in the cottage. Get some more sleep.”
“I’ll be all right,” I said.
“Harry, if anything happens to you, we aren’t going to have anyone we know looking out for us. You need to be able to focus. Go rest.”
It sounded awfully good, but my mouth opened on its own. “We’ve still got to lay out the—”
Will had come up behind me in complete silence. He pulled my arm behind my back in a capable, strong grip, and twisted carefully. It didn’t hurt, until he leaned gently into me and I had to move forward to keep the pressure off. “You heard the lady,” he said. “We can finish the rest of it on our own. We’ll wake you up if anything happens.”
I snorted, twisted at the waist, bumping Will off balance with my hip, and broke the lock. Will could have broken my arm and kept hold of me, but instead he let go before it could happen. “All right, all right,” I said. “Going.”
I shambled into the cottage and collapsed onto a sleeping bag that lay on top of a foam camp pad.
Four hours later, when Will shook me awake, I was lying in the exact same position. Late-afternoon light slanted into the half-ruined cottage from the west. Morgan lay on his own pallet, made by stripping the foam mattress from the bunk on the Water Beetle. His eyes were closed, his breathing steady. Will must have carried him up from the boat.
“Okay,” I slurred. “I’m up. I’m up.”
<
br /> “Georgia has been patrolling the shoreline,” he said. “She says there’s a boat approaching.”
My heart began beating a little faster, and my stomach fluttered. I swallowed, closed my eyes for a moment, and imagined a tranquil tropical beach in an effort to calm my thoughts. But the beach kept getting overrun by shapeshifting zombie vampires with mouths on the palms of their hands.
“Well, that’s useless,” I said in sleepy disgust. I got to my feet and gathered my things. “Where’s it coming from?”
“West.”
“He’ll have to sail a third of the way around the island then, to get through the reefs,” I yawned. “Where’s Georgia?”
Claws scraped on hard-packed earth, and a large tawny wolf appeared in the doorway. She sat down and looked at me, her ears perked forward.
“Good work,” I told her. “Molly?”
“Here, Harry,” she called, as she hurried into the cottage. She held a crystal of white quartz about two inches thick and a foot long in her hands.
“Get to work, grasshopper. Don’t hesitate to use the crystal if things get dicey. And good luck to you.”
She nodded seriously and went to Morgan’s side. She reached out and took his limp hand, frowned in mild concentration, and they both vanished behind one of her wonder veils. “God be with you, Harry,” she said, her voice coming out of nowhere.
“Will,” I said. “Get your game face on.” I turned to Will to find the young man gone and a burly dark-furred wolf sitting in his place next to a pile of loose clothes. “Oh,” I said. “Good.”
I checked my gear, my pockets, my shoelaces, and realized that I had crossed the line between making sure I was ready and trying to postpone the inevitable. I straightened my back, nodded once, and began to stride toward the cottage door. “Let’s go, people. Party time.”
It was getting darker over the enormous expanse of the lake. Twilight is a much different experience when you’re far away from the lights of a city or town. Modern civilization bathes us in light throughout the hours of darkness—lighted billboards, streetlights, headlights, airplane lights, neon decorations, the interior lights of homes and businesses, floodlights that strobe across the sky. They’re so much a part of our life that the darkness of night is barely a factor in our daily thinking anymore. We mock one another’s lack of courage with accusations of being afraid of the dark, all the while industriously making our own lights brighter, more energy efficient, cheaper, and longer-lasting.
There’s power in the night. There’s terror in the darkness. Despite all our accumulated history, learning, and experience, we remember. We remember times when we were too small to reach the light switch on the wall, and when the darkness itself was enough to makes us cry out in fear.
Get a good ways out from civilization—say, miles and miles away on a lightless lake—and the darkness is there, waiting. Twilight means more than just time to call the children in from playing outside. Fading light means more than just the end of another day. Night is when terrible things emerge from their sleep and seek soft flesh and hot blood. Night is when unseen beings with no regard for what our people have built and no place in what we have deemed the natural order look in at our world from outside, and think dark and alien thoughts.
And sometimes, just sometimes, they do things.
I walked down the ancient hillsides of Demonreach and felt acutely aware of that fact; night wasn’t falling, so much as sharpening its claws.
I walked out to the end of the floating dock alone. Billy and Georgia remained behind, in the woods. You would not believe how sneaky a wolf is capable of being until you’ve seen one in action. Wolves acting with human-level intelligence—and exceptional human intelligence at that—are all but invisible when they choose to be.
A boat was rounding the buoy that marked the opening in the reef. It was a white rental boat, like any number available to tourists in the area, a craft about twenty feet long and rigged for waterskiing. The wind had risen, coming in from the southwest, and the lake was getting choppier. The rental boat was wallowing a little, and bouncing irregularly against the waves, throwing up small shocks of spray.
I watched it come in over the last few hundred yards, until I could see who was on board. The boat was fairly new. Its engine made an odd, clattering noise, which served to identify the occupants. The White Council, it seemed, had arrived on time.
Ebenezar McCoy was at the wheel of the boat, his bald head shiny in the rain. Listens-to-Wind sat in the passenger seat, wearing a rain poncho , one hand gripping the side of the boat, the other holding on to the dashboard in front him. His weather-seamed face was grim.
In the center of the rear bench was a tiny figure in white silk embroidered with red flowers. Ancient Mai was Chinese, and looked as delicate and frail as an eggshell teacup. Her hair was pure white and long, held up with a number of jade combs. Though she was now old, even by the standards of the White Council, she was still possessed of a sizable portion of what would have been a haunting, ethereal beauty in her youth. Her expression was serene, her dark eyes piercing and merciless.
She frightened me.
Veteran Wardens sat on either side of Ancient Mai, dour in their grey cloaks, and three more were sitting or crouching elsewhere in the boat—all of them from the hard-bitten squad that had been on standby back in Edinburgh. They were all armed to the teeth, and their expressions meant business. Apparently Mai scared them at least as much as she did me: one of them was holding an umbrella for her.
I waited at the end of the dock, inviting Ebenezar by gesture to pull up on the side opposite the Water Beetle. He brought the boat in with considerably more skill than I had shown, killed the ailing engine while it was still moving, and got up to toss me a line. I caught it and secured the boat to the dock without taking my eyes off of anyone in the boat. No one spoke. Once the engine had fallen silent, the only sound was rain and wind.
“Evening,” I ventured, nodding to Ebenezar.
He was staring hard at me, frowning. I saw his eyes scan the shoreline and come back to me. “Hoss,” he said. He rose and stepped out onto the dock. One of the Wardens tossed him another line, and he secured the back end of the craft. Then he got off, walked up to me, and offered me his hand. I shook it.
“Rashid?” he whispered so low I could barely hear it over the rain.
“With us,” I replied as quietly, trying not to move my lips.
His head tipped me a tiny nod, and then he turned to beckon the others. Wardens and Senior Council members began clambering out of the boat. I walked down the dock beside Ebenezar, watching the Wardens over my shoulder. They were the sort of men and women who had no illusions about violence, magical or otherwise. If they decided that the best way to deal with me would be to shoot me in the back, they wouldn’t hesitate.
I stepped off the dock and onto the island again, and immediately felt the presence of Demonreach. At the moment, the only persons on the island were those I had brought with me.
Ebenezar followed me, and I felt it the instant he stepped onto the shore. It wasn’t as if someone had whispered in my ear. I simply knew, felt it, the way you know it when an ant is crawling across your arm. He stopped a step later, and I kept going until I was about ten feet away. I turned to face them as their group came down the dock to stand on the shore. I kept close track of them through the link with the island, making sure that there weren’t any Wardens hiding behind veils so that they could sneak up behind me and start delivering rabbit punches.
Ebenezar, Ancient Mai, and Listens-to-Wind, his expression bearing a faintly greenish cast, stood side by side, facing me. The Wardens fanned out behind them, wary eyes watching every possible route of approach, including from the lake.
“Well, Wizard Dresden,” Ebenezar said. He leaned on his staff and regarded me blandly. “We got your note.”
“I figured,” I said. “Did you get as far as the part where I said if you wanted a fight, I would oblige you?”
The Wardens didn’t actually bare their teeth and start snarling, but it was close.
“Aye, aye,” Ebenezar said. “I thought it might be more profitable if we could talk about things first.”
“Indeed,” said Ancient Mai. Her voice was too smooth and too confident to match the tiny fragile person speaking in it. “We can always kill you afterward.”
I didn’t actually break out into rivulets of sweat, but it was close.
“Obviously, the disrespect you have offered the White Council merits some form of response,” she continued. “Do not flatter yourself by thinking that we have come to you because we lack other options.”
Ebenezar gave Mai a mild look. “At the same time,” he said, “your reputation as an investigator is unrivaled within the Council. That, added to the nature of your relationship with the alleged murderer, is reason enough to hear what you have to say.”
“Wizard Dresden,” Listens-to-Wind said. “You said you had proof of Morgan’s innocence. You said you had a witness.”
“And more,” I replied.
“And where are they?”
“We need to wait a moment,” I said, “until everyone arrives.”
Ancient Mai’s eyes narrowed. The Wardens got even more alert, and spread out a bit, hands on their weaponry.
“What others, Hoss?” Ebenezar asked.
“Everyone directly involved in this plot,” I said. “Warden Morgan wasn’t the only one being set up as a patsy. When you manage to track down the source of the money found in Morgan’s account, you’ll find that it comes from a corporation owned by the White Court.”
Listens-to-Wind frowned. “How do you know this?”
“I investigated,” I said. “After further investigation, I concluded that the money had probably been moved without the knowledge of the White Court’s leaders. The guilty party not only wished LaFortier dead, and Warden Morgan to take the blame for it, he also wanted to manipulate the Council into renewing hostilities with the Vampire Courts.”
The Wardens traded looks with one another when I said that. It was getting darker, and I had trouble making out their expressions. Listens-to-Wind’s face became thoughtful, though. “And there is proof of this?” he asked.
