Cold Days

Chapter Eighteen

Okay, for the record: That is one hell of a lot of stairs to go up.

Also for the record: I did them two and three at a time, at a run, and went to the top without stopping.

From there, I went pounding down the hillside, my feet never slipping or faltering, until I got back to the beach, moving at an easy run. The sun was rising behind me, but the solid mass of Demonreach kept it blotted out in shadow, and I could tell only by the light beginning to fill the sky.

Thomas came to his feet as I left the woods, his hands moving to his weapons automatically. I shook my head at him, never slowing down, and said, “Let’s get this tub moving!”

“What did you find out?” he called. He started untying the lines and then leapt nimbly up to the deck of the Water Beetle. Molly appeared from the cabin, looking as though she’d been sleeping a few seconds before.

I ran down the dock and hopped up to the ship’s deck. “A bunch of people are gonna be mad at me, I’ve got some kind of medical issue that’s going to kill me in a while if I don’t deal with it, oh, and the island’s blowing up tomorrow and taking a whole lot of the country with it if I don’t fix it.”

Thomas gave me a steady look. “So,” he said. “Same old, same old.”

“I think it’s nice that there are some things in this world you can rely on,” I said.

My brother snorted and started the Water Beetle’s engines. We backed away from the dock, and then he turned, gunned it, and headed back toward town. Like I said before, the boat isn’t a racing machine, but it’s got some horsepower in it, and as the sun rose properly, we were zooming over the orange-gold water, leaving a huge V-shaped wake behind us, while I stood at the front of the boat, my hands on the railing.

I felt it when the dawn broke, the way you almost always can if you stop to pay attention. Something subtle and profound simply shifted in the air around me. Even if I’d been blindfolded, I would have felt the transition, the way that the winds and currents of energy broadly known as magic began to gust and shift, driven by the light of the oncoming sun.

I wasn’t close enough to any of the Ways to the realms of Faerie to be able to sense whether they had been reopened, but it made sense that they would be. Sunrise tends to disperse and dissolve patterns of magical energy—not because magic is inherently a force of the night so much as because the dawn is inherently a force of new beginnings and renewal.

Every sunrise tended to erode ongoing enchantments. A spell spread so wide that it curtained the whole of Faerie away from the mortal world would by necessity be rather thin and fragile. When the sun hit it, it would be like about a zillion magnifying glasses focusing light on old newsprint. It would blacken and wither away. My mind treated me to a gruesome little collage of images—the darkest beings of Faerie suddenly pouring forth from every creepy shadow and unsettling alley and dangerous-looking old abandoned building in the city. You’d think my mind would find better things to do, like fantasize about improbably friendly women or something.

Molly came up and stood with me, facing ahead. I looked at her obliquely. The rising sun behind us painted her hair gold but left her face lightly veiled in shadow. She didn’t look young anymore.

I mean, don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t like her hair had gone grey and her teeth fell out. But there had always been a sense of energy and life and simple joy welling up from the grasshopper. It had been her default setting, and I hadn’t realized how much I had loved that about her.

Now her blue eyes looked weary, wary. She wasn’t looking at the beauty in life as much as she once had. Her eyes scanned for dangers both nearby and farther down the road, heavy with caution and made wise by pain—and they had far, far more steel in them than I had ever seen there before.

Months of training with the Leanansidhe while fighting a street war will do that.

Maybe if I’d been tougher on the grasshopper early on, it wouldn’t have come as such a shock to her. Maybe if I’d focused on different aspects of her training, she would have been better prepared.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, but I was kidding myself. Molly’s eyes were always going to end up like that sooner or later—just like mine had.

This business doesn’t play nice with children.

“I told you,” Molly said, never looking toward me. “It’s in the past. Leave it there.”

“You listening to my head, kiddo?”

Her mouth twitched. “Only when I want to hear the roar of the ocean.”

I grinned. I liked that so much better than all the “Sir Knights” I’d been getting lately.

“How much can you tell me?” she asked.

I looked at her eyes for a moment while she stared ahead and made a decision.

“Everything,” I said quietly. “But not right this second. We’ve got priorities to focus on first. We can get into the details after we’ve dealt with the immediate threat.”

“Maeve?” Molly asked.

“And the island.” I told her about the danger to Demonreach without going into specifics about the island’s purpose. “So if I don’t stop it, boom.”

Molly frowned. “I can’t imagine how you can stop an event from happening if you don’t know who is going to do it, and both where and when it’s going to happen.”

“If the problem was simple and easy, it wouldn’t require wizards to fix it,” I said. “The impossible we do immediately. The unimaginable takes a little while.”

“I’m serious,” she said.

“So am I,” I replied. “Be of good cheer. I think I know the right guy to talk to about this one.”

Half the sun was over the horizon when Chicago’s skyline came into sight. I just basked in that for a minute. Yeah, I know, stupid, but it’s my town and I’d been gone for what felt like a lifetime. It was good to see the autumn sun gleaming off of glass and steel.

Then I felt myself tense, and I pushed myself up from where I’d been leaning on the forward rail. I took a moment to look around me very carefully. I didn’t know what had set off my instincts, but they were doing the same routine they’d learned to do every time Mab had been about to spring her daily assassination attempt, and I couldn’t have ignored them if I’d wanted to.

I didn’t see anything, but then I heard it—the humming roar of small, high-revolution engines.

“Thomas!” I shouted over the snorting of the Water Beetle’s motor. I gestured toward my ear and then spun my hand in a wide circle.

It wasn’t exactly tactical sign language, but Thomas got the message. From his vantage point in the wheelhouse atop the cabin, he swept his gaze around warily. Then his gaze locked on something northwest of us.

“Uh-oh,” I breathed.

Thomas spun the wheel and rolled the Water Beetle onto a southwesterly course. I hustled over to the ladder up to the wheelhouse and stood on the top rung, which put my head about level with Thomas’s. I shielded my eyes from the glare of the oncoming sun with one hand and peered northwest.

There were five Jet Skis flying toward us over the water. Thomas had altered course enough to buy us a little time, but I could see at a glance that the Jet Skis were moving considerably faster than we were. Thomas opened the throttle all the way and passed me, I kid you not, a shiny brass telescope.

“Seriously?” I asked him.

“Ever since those pirate movies came out, they’re everywhere,” he said. “I’ve got a sextant, too.”

“Any tent you have is a sex tent,” I muttered darkly, extending the telescope.

Thomas smirked.

I peered through the thing, holding myself steady with one hand. Given the speed and bounce of the boat, it wasn’t easy, but I finally managed to get a prolonged glimpse of the Jet Skis. I couldn’t see much in the way of detail yet—but the guy on the lead Jet Ski was wearing a bright red beret.

“We’ve definitely got a problem,” I said.

“Friends of yours?”

“The Redcap and some of his Sidhe buddies, it looks like,” I said, lowering the telescope. “They’re Winter muscle, but I think they’re mostly medieval types. That gives us a couple of minutes to—”

There was a sharp hissing sound and something unseen slapped the telescope out of my hand, sending it spinning through the air in a whirl of torn metal and tiny shards of broken glass.

The report of a gunshot followed a second later.

“Holy crap!” I sputtered, and dropped down to lie flat on the deck. There was another hiss and a loud cracking sound as a round smacked into the wall of the cabin above me.

“Medieval? Are you sure you know what that means?” Thomas demanded. He heeled the boat about a bit and then snaked it back in the original direction, following a serpentine course. That would make us a harder target—but it also meant that we were going slower, cruising in a zigzag while our pursuers were rushing forward in a straight line.

But even with the maneuvers, the rounds kept coming in. At that distance, with the relative movements of the vehicles, a purely human marksman could have hit us only through something that went well past good luck and began approaching divine intervention. But the Redcap and his cronies weren’t human. The grace I’d seen the Sidhe displaying on the dance floor had been all precise, subtle elegance and flawless grace. Both of those things transitioned well into marksmanship.

I still had my shiny, gleaming cowboy rifle, but it was worse than useless in this situation. The .45 Colt round would be killer at conventional gunfight distances, most of which happened at about twenty feet—but it would lose a lot of effectiveness shooting at targets that distant. Coincidentally, the guy holding the gun would also lose effectiveness shooting at targets that distant. So blazing away at them seemed like a stupid plan.

“Hey!” I shouted toward my brother. “If I take the wheel, can you pick them off from here?”

“If we drive straight, maybe!” he called back.

A round tore a chunk of wood off the corner of the boat’s dashboard. Thomas stared hard at it for a second. Six inches to the left and it would have hit him in the lower back.

“Uh,” he said, continuing to veer and swerve the boat. “Plan B?”

“Right,” I muttered. “Right. Plan B.”

I thought furiously while the fusillade continued. Rounds hit the side of the ship in sharp, angry whacks. Surely they didn’t have the ammunition to keep this kind of thing up for very long. Though, thinking about it, I had no idea how rapidly they were going through the ammo. For all I knew, one guy was shooting at us, and getting more and more successful at judging the shot over the surface of the water. And the Sidhe were closing. Their accuracy seemed to be increasing as they did. Once they got into optimal range, where they were close enough to land rounds but we weren’t capable of replying in kind, all they had to do was maintain the distance and kill us to death.

I could start throwing magic at them, but Mab’s training had a gap in it: Everything had been right up in my grille. I’d never engaged her or one of her proxies at more than twenty feet or so, and without a properly prepared staff or blasting rod, I’d never be able to reach out far enough to hit those clowns. Odds were good that they knew it, too. They’d hold the distance.

A weakness. I had to exploit a weakness. The Sidhe hated iron, but even if I found some, how did I get it to them? I mean, a gun shooting jacketed rounds would really screw them up, but for it to work I’d have to hit them. There was a box of nails in the toolbox. I could throw those, maybe, but again there was the issue of actually hitting them. Which wasn’t going to happen as long as they were way out there.

I needed to lure them in closer.

“Grasshopper!” I shouted.

The cabin door swung open and Molly belly-crawled onto the deck until she could see me. “Who started shooting at us?”

“Bad guys!” I cringed as another round hit the side of the boat and peppered me with wooden splinters. “Obviously!”

“Can we outrun them?”

“Not happening,” I said. “Ideas?”

“I could veil us?”

“Going to be hard to hide the boat’s wake, isn’t it?”

“Oh. Right. What do we do?”

“I need mist,” I said. “A bunch of it. Gimme.”

“Oh, ow, I don’t know Harry. I’d have to move an awful lot of fire to give you even a little. You know that’s not my thing.”

“It doesn’t have to be real mist,” I said.

“Oh!” Molly called. “That is exactly my thing!”

“Attagirl!”

“Fuck!” Thomas snarled. I looked up to see him stagger, holding on to the boat’s wheel with his right hand, his face twisted in pain. He’d taken a bullet in his left arm, just above the elbow, and he held it clenched in tight against his body, teeth bared. Slightly too pale blood trickled down his elbow and dribbled to the deck. “Plan B, Harry! Where the hell is plan B?!”

“Go, go, go!” I told Molly.

My apprentice closed her eyes and clenched her fists. I saw her focus, felt the slight stirring in the air as she gathered her will and power. Then she moved her hands in a complicated little gesture, whispering something. She continued making the gesture, and I realized that the motion was duplicating that of weaving three lines into a braid.

From between her fingers a thick white mist began to appear. First it came as a trickle, but as I watched it thickened to a stream. Then Molly bowed her head in concentration and muttered words beneath her breath, and a sudden plume of white mist bigger than the Water Beetle itself began jetting from her hands and spreading out to blanket the surface of the water over the boat’s wake, shutting the pursuing Sidhe away from view.

For a long minute we raced across the water, a wall of white mist spreading out to cover our wake. The enemy fire continued for a few seconds, but then dropped off to nothing. Hell, if we could keep this up, maybe we could make it back to shore without doing anything more. I checked Molly. Her face was pale, twisted into a grimace of concentration, and already the plume of illusory mist was beginning to wane. Mist isn’t a hard illusion to pull off, and it’s usually the first thing an apprentice learns to do with that kind of magic, but Molly was spreading the illusion out over an enormous area, and brute-force approaches were not her strong point in magic. We wouldn’t make it back to shore that way.

Fine, then.

“Thomas!” I shouted. “Throttle down! Let them catch up to us and then gun it!”

Thomas slowed the boat abruptly, and the sound of screaming Jet Ski engines rose up over the Water Beetle’s motor, growing higher-pitched as they approached.

“Molly, drop it on my signal!”

“’Kay,” she gasped.

My brother stood at the wheel with his eyes closed, focused intently on the sound. Then, abruptly, he gunned the Water Beetle’s engines again.

“Molly, now!”

Molly let out a groan and the illusionary cloud of white mist vanished as if it had never existed.

The formation of oncoming Jet Skis was only about fifty yards away, charging hard after us over the water, and they were moving so much more swiftly than us that within seconds they were almost on top of the Water Beetle. Jet Skis started swerving left and right to avoid a collision with our boat.

All except for the Redcap. He was guiding the Jet Ski with one hand and held a military carbine in the other. His eyes widened as the vehicle rushed closer, but rather than swerving to one side, he broke out into a wild smile, swung the gun around to point toward me, and accelerated.

Before he could shoot, I unleashed my gathered will into a burst of completely unfocused magical energy, shouting, “Hexus!”

I think I mentioned before how technology doesn’t get along with wizards. Put any kind of intricate machine in a wizard’s presence, and suddenly everything that might go wrong with the machine does go wrong. And that’s when we’re not even trying to make it happen. Electronics generally get hit the hardest, like poor Butters’s computers, but that particular law of magical forces is good across the spectrum.

Jet Skis, especially the brand-new ones, are intricate machines. They focus tremendous power and energy into a tiny space, and their systems are regulated by little computers and so on. They’re a gathering of tiny, nearly continuous explosions in a box, moving water under intense pressure—and a world of things can go wrong with them.

The Redcap’s Jet Ski suffered an abrupt, catastrophic engine failure. There was a hideous sound of tearing metal, a flash of flame, and the handlebar twisted abruptly from his hands. The Jet Ski’s nose plunged down into the water, flinging the Redcap off of it at full speed. He’d been doing maybe sixty when I hit him, and he skipped twice across the water’s surface before he slammed into a swell from the Water Beetle’s wake and vanished under the surface.

Thomas, meanwhile, had seized another opportunity. As the Jet Skis split off to swing around us, he whirled the steering wheel, turning the Water Beetle sharply to her left. I heard one scream, and a crunching sound accompanied by a heavy reverberation in the deck beneath my feet as a Jet Ski slammed into our boat’s nose—with results very similar to a deer slamming into a speeding semi.

“Hexus!” Molly shouted from where she was crouched on the deck. Her aim was good, even if her hex wouldn’t carry the same kind of raw power mine did. The Jet Ski Thomas had missed suddenly began billowing smoke, and its roaring engine cut away to a gasping, labored rattle.

I spun to face the other direction, pitching another hex at the two Jet Skis passing on the far side of the ship. They were at the edge of my range and racing away, so my hex didn’t convince their engines to tear themselves apart, the way the short-range, focused curse had the Redcap’s vehicle—but one of the Jet Skis abruptly began coasting to a stop, and the other took a sharp right turn and then simply went on turning in a furious, continuous circle.

Thomas opened up the throttle all the way, and the Water Beetle left the lamed flotilla of would-be assassins bobbing in her wake.

I didn’t relax until I’d swept the ship’s exterior with my eyes and magical senses alike to make sure no one was hanging on to a rail or something. Then, just to be certain, I double-checked the cabin and hold, until I was certain that no one had infiltrated the boat in the chaos.

And then I sank down in relief on a chair in the cabin. But only for a second. Then I grabbed the first-aid kit and went up to the bridge to see to Thomas.

Molly was sprawled on the deck in the morning sunshine, exhausted from her efforts, and obviously asleep. She snored a little. I stepped over her and went up to my brother. He saw me and grunted. “We should be pulling into port in another fifteen minutes,” he said. “I think we’re clear.”

“That won’t last,” I said. “How’s your arm?”

“Through and through,” Thomas said. “Not too bad. Just stop the leak.”

“Hold still,” I told him. Then I started working on his arm. It wasn’t bad, as bullet wounds go. It had entered the lean muscle at the bottom of his triceps in back and come out the other side, leaving a small hole. That had probably been the Redcap, then—the rounds from his M4 would be armor-piercing, metal-jacketed military rounds, specifically designed to punch long, fairly small holes. I cleaned it up with disinfectant, got a pressure bandage positioned over the holes, and taped it down. “Okay, you can stop complaining now.”

Thomas, who had been silent the whole time, gave me a look.

“You can have your harem change out the bandages later,” I said. “How busy are you today?”

“Oh,” he mused. “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve got to get a new shirt now.”

“After that,” I asked, “would you like to help me save the city? If you don’t already have plans.”

He snorted. “You mean, would I like to follow you around, wondering what the hell is going on because you won’t tell me everything, then get in a fight with something that is going to leave me in intensive care?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, nodding, “pretty much.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”