Jim Butcher - Cold Days

A relatively small flock of birds, only a few hundred, blurred by between me and Titania. When they had passed, she was gone.

I stood there, letting my heart rate slow down, along with the spinning clouds. I felt like crap. When I’d killed Aurora, there hadn’t been much in the way of a choice—but I’d still taken someone’s little girl away from her forever. I felt like a man in a rowboat with only one oar. No matter how hard I worked, I wasn’t really getting anywhere.

But at least I had a name now, for the force the Ladies had told me about.

Nemesis.

And it was aware .

The rain that had been held back abruptly began to come down in a torrent, and I sourly suspected that Titania had made sure I was going to get drenched. She hadn’t killed me, at least not yet. But I knew she sure as hell didn’t like me.

Night was coming on fast, and when it got here, all hell was going to break loose. And that was a best-case scenario.

I bowed my head, hunched my shoulders against the rain, and started out of the Magic Hedge.

Iwhistled down a cab and went to my next destination: Graceland Cemetery.

The place was actually kind of busy, it being Halloween and all. Graceland is one of the great cemeteries of the nation, the Atlantic City of graveyards. It’s filled with monuments to men and women who evidently had too much money to throw around while they were still alive. There are statues and mausoleums everywhere, made from granite and ornate marble, some of them in the style of ancient Greece, some obviously more influenced by ancient Egypt. There’s one that’s practically a full-size temple. The actual style of the various monuments ranges from incredible beauty to absolutely outrageous extravagance, with artists and tycoons and architects and inventors all lying silently together now.

Walk in Graceland and you can find yourself lost in a maze of memories, a cloud of names that no one living could attach to a face anymore. I wondered, passing some of the older monuments, whether anyone ever visited them now. If you’d died in 1876, it would mean that your great-great- or even great-great-great-grandchildren were the ones living now. Did people visit the graves of those who had been gone that long?

No. Not for any personal reason. But that was all right. Graves aren’t for the dead. They’re for the loved ones the dead leave behind them. Once those loved ones have gone, once all the lives that have touched the occupant of any given grave had ended, then the grave’s purpose was fulfilled and ended.

I suppose if you looked at it that way, one might as well decorate one’s grave with an enormous statue or a giant temple. It gave people something to talk about, at least. Although, following that logic, I would need to have a roller coaster, or maybe a Tilt-A-Whirl constructed over my own grave when I died. Then even after my loved ones had moved on, people could keep having fun for years and years.

Of course, I’d need a slightly larger plot.

My grave was still open, a six-foot pit in the ground. An old enemy had bought it for me as a form of murderous foreplay. That one hadn’t fallen out the way she had expected it would. But apparently whatever mechanism she used to secure the grave and to have it (illegally) left open was apparently still in place, because when I got there, I found it just as gaping and threatening as it had always been. A chill rolled up my spine as I read my headstone.

It was a pretty thing, white marble with gold-inlaid letters and a gold-inlaid pentacle:

HERE LIES HARRY DRESDEN.

HE DIED DOING THE RIGHT THING.

“Well,” I muttered, “once, sure. But I guess I’ll have to go best two out of three.”

I looked around. I’d passed several groups that might have been Halloween haunted theme tours, and a gaggle of kids wearing expensive black clothing and grim makeup, smoking cigarettes and trying to look like they were wise to the world. A couple of older people seemed to actually be visiting graves, putting out fresh flowers.

I paused thoughtfully over my own grave and waited until no one was looking. Then I hopped down into it. My feet splashed into an inch of water and another six inches of mud, courtesy of the drizzling rain.

I crouched a little lower, just to be sure no one saw me, and got into my bag again.

My hands were shaking too much to get the bag open on the first try. It wasn’t the cold. It wasn’t even standing at the bottom of my own grave—hell, when I’d been a ghost, my own grave had been the most restful place in the whole world, and there was a certain amount of that reassurance that was still present. I still had no desire to get dead; don’t get me wrong.

The scary thing was imagining what would happen to all the people I cared about if I died in the next few minutes. If I was right, this next interview might get me everything I needed. If I wasn’t . . . well, I could hope to wind up dead, I guess. But I had a bad feeling that wizards who pissed off people on this level didn’t get anything that pleasant and gentle.

I made my preparations quickly. Earth and water were all around, no problem there. I’d have to hope that what little air I had was right for the calling. Fire would have been an issue if I hadn’t planned ahead. I needed to represent one other primal force, too, something that would call to the exact being I had in mind:

Death.

If working the spell from your own grave on Hallo-freaking-ween wasn’t deathy enough, I wasn’t sure what would be.

I stood on one foot, and with a gesture and a word froze most of the water in the grave. I put my free foot down on the ice and pulled my other foot out of the part I’d left as mostly slush. Then I froze that, too. I didn’t have any problems slipping on the ice—or rather, I did slip a little, but my body seemed to adjust to it as naturally as it would have to small stones turning underfoot on a gravel road. No big deal.

Once the water was nice and solid, I got out my other props. A bottle of cooking oil, a knife, and matches.

I took the knife and drew a short cut into the skin of my left hand, in the fleshy bit between my thumb and forefinger, over an old scar where I had been hurt at the bidding of a Queen of Faerie before. While that welled up and began to bleed, I reached up and slashed off a lock of my hair with the same knife. I took the lock and used the freshly shed blood as an adhesive to hold it together, and dropped it onto the surface of the ice. More death, just in case. Then I poured a circle of oil around the hair and the blood and set it quickly alight with the matches.

Fire and water hissed and spit, and wind moaned over the top of my grave. I braced my hands on either side of it, closed my eyes, and spoke the invocation I’d chosen, infusing my voice with my will. “Ancient crone, harbinger!” I began, then raised my voice, louder. “Longest shadow! Darkest dream! She of the endless hunger, the iron teeth, the merciless jaws!” I poured more of my wind and my will into the words, and the inside of my grave rang with the sheer volume. “I am Harry Dresden, the Winter Knight, and I needs must speak with thee! Athropos! Skuld! Mother Winter, I summon thee!”

I released the pent-up power in my voice, and as it rang out I could hear birds erupting up from where they sheltered all over the graveyard. There were shouts and cries of surprise, too, from the tourists or the Gothlings or both. I ground my teeth and hoped that they wouldn’t come my way. Getting killed by Mother Winter wouldn’t be like being killed by Titania. That might at least have been huge and messy—not really a fight, but at least a proper slaughter.

If Mother Winter showed up and wanted to kill me, I’d probably just fall into dust or something. Mother Winter was to Mab as Mab was to Maeve—power an order of magnitude above the Winter Queen. I’d met with her once before, and she’d literally knitted up some of the most powerful magic I’d ever seen while carrying on a conversation.