Jim Butcher - Cold Days

“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.

Ilived.

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.

I learned all of that at the same time my regular old five senses registered what was happening: I was not alone. The crown of the hill was covered with faeries.

All right, that wasn’t literally true. There were twenty of them, plus one other mortal.

And Demonreach.

The island’s spirit made manifest stood in the ruins of the lighthouse, in the opening in the wall that led to the entrance to the stairs down to the Well. Its vast form was planted, braced like a man standing against a strong wind, hunched, bent forward slightly, but not in a stance of battle. The spirit did not exist for such things. Instead, I realized, it did only what it always had: It endured. But even as I watched, I saw bits of Demonreach flying backward, away from its mass, but slowly, as if a current of thick syrup flowed past the spirit, slowly wearing it away.

The spirit stood at one point of an equilateral triangle.

At one of the other points stood Lily, the Summer Lady. She stood with her right arm, the arm that projects energy, upraised. She wore the same simple dress I’d seen her in earlier. It was pressed against the front of her body, and her silver-white hair was blown back as if in a strong wind. There was no visible display of energy coming from her other than that, but the ground between her and Demonreach was covered in fresh green grass, and I could feel that she was pouring out power against spirit.

Behind her stood a pair of Sidhe of the Summer Court, each with a hand on her shoulder. Behind them were three more, and four more were behind them, each with their hands on the shoulder of someone in front of them, forming a pyramid shape. They were all projecting power forward, focusing it through Lily, making her even stronger than she already was.

Maeve stood at the third point of the triangle, with her own pyramid of supporters. She wore leather short-shorts, military boots, and a bikini top, all of midnight blue. She stood in the same stance as Lily, the same unseen power flaring from her outstretched hand, but her face was set in a wide, manic smile, and the ground between her and Demonreach was covered in a layer of frost.

The Redcap stood at her right hand, one hand on her shoulder. The massive rawhead from my birthday party was there, too, and its bony claws, drenched in and dripping fresh blood, rested on her other shoulder. Eight other Winter Sidhe were behind them, forming a power pyramid of their own.