Jim Butcher - Cold Days

Fix might have had some foolish idealism going, but he’d never been anywhere close to stupid. “Oh,” he breathed. “Um.”

“Remember when Lily opened the door to Arctis Tor for us, back when?”

“Sure.”

“When we got inside, the Leanansidhe was popsicled in Mab’s garden,” I said. “Because something had invaded her and influenced her actions. Mab was in the middle of some kind of exorcism based on the model of an ice age.”

“And?”

“And what if this invader got into the water before Mab caught it?” I asked. “What if it got into Maeve?”

“That’s crazy,” he said. “Mab’s the one who’s gone mental.”

“Is she?” I asked him. “Is it so crazy? Remember that meeting at Mac’s? Remember how we found out that Mab had cracked a gasket?”

“Maeve told . . .” He stopped speaking suddenly.

“Yeah,” I said. “A minute ago, you told Lily to ignore the words and look at the actions. You know as well as I do which speaks louder. You know who I am and what I’ve done. So I’m going to ask one more question,” I said. “Whose idea was it to be here tonight? Lily’s? Or Maeve’s?”

The blood drained from his face. “Oh. Fuck.”

I bowed my head. Then I said, “Fix, I saved you because you’re a decent guy, and I don’t care if we’re on different teams. I don’t want you dead.”

“Yeah,” he said quietly. “It . . . speaks pretty loud. But maybe you knew I’d think that. Maybe you did it so that you could play me.”

“Maybe you’re giving me way more credit for cunning than I’m due. You know how I work. How often do I get to a neat, elegant solution that ties everything up? Can you look at me right now and honestly say to yourself, ‘Dresden, that wily genius! This must be a part of his master plan’?”

I spread my hands and looked up at him expectantly.

Fix looked at me, dirty, naked, shivering, burned, bruised, covered in soot and ash.

“Fuck,” he said again, and looked back at the Ladies.

“I don’t think Maeve did anything to Lily’s head,” I said. “I don’t think she needed to. I think Lily was insecure and lonely enough that all Maeve needed to do was act sort of like a person. Give Lily someone who she felt understood what she was going through. Someone she thought would have her back.”

“A friend,” Fix said.

“Yes.”

“Everyone wants to have a friend,” he said quietly. “Is that so bad?”

“Thelma and Louise were friends,” I said. I pointed at the triangle. “Canyon.”

The muscles along his jaw jumped several times. “Even if . . . even if you’re being honest, and you’re right—and I’m not copping to either—so what? Those coteries with them are their inner circles. They’ll obey without question. You’ve got nothing left to fight with. And I sure as hell can’t take them all on alone.”

I didn’t want to say it, to give away anything to a potential enemy. Nemesis could have taken Fix, for all I knew. It could be there inside him right then, smirking at the rapport it was establishing with me. That was the ugly fact.

But sometimes you have to ignore the math, and . . .

And follow the wisdom of your heart.

My heart told me that Fix was a decent guy.

“Fix, I know about this island. It’s kind of my stomping grounds. That’s how I got through. And I know that if Maeve has her way, this island is going Mount Saint Helens, and taking Chicago with it.”

He stared at me, frowning, pensive.

“My daughter is in town,” I said in a whisper. “She’ll die.”

He blinked. “You have a . . . ?” Then he rocked back a little, as he realized what I’d entrusted him with. “Oh. Christ, Dresden.”

I took a deep breath and pressed on. “The Hunt is out there taking it to the Outsiders right now,” I said. “And they’re winning. And my crew is here, outside the circle. Murphy, Molly, Thomas, Mouse. If I can take the circle down, we aren’t alone.”

“When did ‘we’ happen?” he asked in a flat, hard tone.

I looked up at him and saw laughter at the corners of his eyes.

Sometimes the wisdom of the heart is not at all a bad thing.

“I won’t let anything hurt Lily,” he said. “For any reason. Period.”

“Agreed,” I said. “Maeve’s the bad guy.”

He tested his right hand again and got a little more motion out of it before he winced. “I don’t know where this will get you,” he said, “but as far as I could tell, this was just a ritual circle, like any other.”

“How so?”

“When we landed, Maeve sent some hounds and some Little Folk after you and went straight for that lighthouse—and the guardian just popped up out of the ground, where it is now. Maeve assaulted the spirit, just like right now. She kept it busy while Lily walked a circle of the hilltop, singing. I’ve seen her set up circles like that a thousand times. But once she’d gone all the way around, kaboom, up came the wall.”

I grunted. “Then . . . it’s a preinstalled defense that can be triggered like . . . Hell’s bells, not like a ward. It is a ward. A huge one. But if anything of the island passes through the circle without disturbing it, and anything that isn’t of the island is destroyed . . .” I followed the logic through and sagged.

“What?” Fix asked.

“Then there’s no way to break the circle,” I breathed. “It’s like a time-lock safe. It isn’t coming down until sunrise.”

“Meaning what?”

I swallowed. Sunrise was too late. So I gathered whatever scraps of strength I had left in me and pushed myself slowly, wearily to my feet.

“Meaning,” I said, “we’re on our own.”

Fix eyed the center of the clearing. He passed me a silvery knife he drew from his belt and said, “There you go with that ‘we’ again.”

Istarted walking. It was iffy for a couple of steps but I got the hang of it.

“Is there a plan?” Fix asked, keeping up with me.

“Maeve. I kill her.”

Which had been Mab’s freaking order in the first place.

He glanced aside. “You know she’s an immortal, right?”

“Yeah.”

His eyes narrowed. “What do I do?”

“They’ve got the guardian pinned down,” I said. “I think one of those crews has got to stay on it, or it will break loose. Otherwise, Maeve would have been stomping on me right next to Lily.”

Fix nodded. “She never passes up the chance to tear the wings off a fly.” He frowned. “What happens if the guardian gets loose?”

I wasn’t sure. Demonreach had enormous power, an absolute dedication to purpose, and no sense of proportion. I had very little idea of its tactical capabilities. It might or might not be able to help in a fight. Actually, I was sort of hoping it wouldn’t—imagine trying to kill specific ants, in a crowd of ants, with a baseball bat. I was pretty sure that if Demonreach ever started swinging at someone, I wanted to be over the horizon at the very least.

In fact, I realized, that was probably the problem here. Demonreach existed on an epic scale. It was neither suited to nor capable of effectively dealing with beings of such relative insignificance. Standing off a Walker and a small army of Outsiders had not been a huge problem for the island. But Maeve and Lily had slipped inside its guard. They and their personal attendants were sparrows attacking an eagle. The eagle was bigger and stronger and capable of killing any of them, and it didn’t matter in the least.

Not only that, but Demonreach was a genius loci, a nature spirit. The fae were intimately connected to nature on a level that no one had ever been able to fully understand. One could probably make an argument that Demonreach was one of the fae, or at least a very close neighbor. Either way, the mantles of the Ladies of Winter and Summer would carry a measure of dominion and power over beings like Demonreach. Clearly they were not sovereign over the guardian spirit, because it was withstanding them. Just as clearly, they had something going for them, because it wasn’t trying to crush them, either.