Cold Days

Chapter Thirty-one

I whistled 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.

The echoes of my summoning bounced around the graveyard over my head a few times and then . . .

And then . . .

And then nothing.

I sat there for a moment, waiting, while the burning oil hissed and sputtered on the ice. A running tendril of oil ran out to my blood and hair, and a tongue of flame followed a moment later. That part was fine by me. It wasn’t like I wanted to leave a target that juicy lying around for someone to steal, anyway.

I waited until the fire burned out entirely, and quiet settled over my grave again, but nothing happened. Dammit. I wasn’t going to figure out what was really going on tonight by carefully sifting all the facts and analyzing how they all fit together. Not in the time I had left. My only real chance was to get to someone who knew and get them to talk. Granted, going to talk to Mother Winter was about half an inch shy of trying to call up Lucifer, or maybe Death itself (if there was such a being—no one was really sure), but when you need information from witnesses and experts, the only way to get it is to talk to them.

Maybe my summons hadn’t been deathy enough, but I hadn’t wanted to kill some poor animal just to get the old girl’s attention. I might have to, though. There was just too much at stake to get squeamish.

I shook my head, put my tools away, and then the ice just beneath my toes shattered and a long, bony arm, covered in wrinkles and warts and spots, and belonging to a body that would have been at least twenty feet tall, shot up and seized my head. Not my face. My entire head, like a softball. Or maybe an apple. Stained black claws on the ends of the knobby fingers dug into me, piercing my skin, and I was abruptly jerked down into the freaking ice with so much power that for a second I was terrified my neck had snapped.

I thought I would be broken for certain when I hit the ice, but instead I was drawn through it and down into the mud, and through that, and then I was falling, screaming in sudden, instinctive, blind terror. Then I hit something hard and it hurt, even through the power of the mantle, and I let out a brief, croaking exhalation. I dangled there, stunned for a moment, with those cold, cruel pointed claws digging into my flesh. Distantly I could hear a slow, limping step, and feel my feet dragging across a surface.

Then I was flung and spun twice on the horizontal, and I crashed into a wall. I bounced off it and landed on what felt like a dirt floor. I lay there, not able to inhale, barely able to move, and either I’d gone blind or I was in complete blackness. The nice part about having your bells rung like that is that mind-numbing horror sort of gets put onto a side burner for a bit. That was pretty much the only nice thing about it. When I finally managed to gasp in a little air, I used it to make a whimpering sound of pure pain.

A voice came out of the darkness, a sound that was dusty and raspy and covered in spiders. “Me,” it said, drawing the word out. “You attempt to summon. Me.”

“You have my sincerest apologies for the necessity,” I said, or tried to say to Mother Winter. I think it just came out, “Ow.”

“You think I am a servant to be whistled for?” continued the voice. Hate and weariness and dark amusement were all mummified together in it. “You think I am some petty spirit you can command.”

“N-n-nngh, ow.” I gasped.

“You dare to presume? You dare to speak such names to draw my attention?” the voice said. “I have a stew to make, and I will fill it with your arrogant mortal meat.”

There was a sound in the pitch-darkness. Steel being drawn across stone. A few sparks went up, blinding in the darkness. They burned into my retinas the outline of a massive, hunched form grasping a cleaver.

Sparks danced every few seconds as Mother Winter slowly sharpened her implement. I was able to get my breathing under control and to fight past the pain. “Mmm . . .” I said. “M-Mother Winter. Such a pleasure to meet with you again.”

The next burst of sparks gleamed off of an iron surface—teeth.

“I n-need to speak to you.”

“Speak, then, manling,” said Mother Winter. “You have a little time left.”

The cleaver rasped across the sharpening stone again.

“Mab has ordered me to kill Maeve,” I said.

“She is always doing foolish things,” said Mother Winter.

“Maeve says that Mab’s gone insane,” I said. “Lily concurs.”

There was a wheezing sound that might have been a cackle. “Such a loving daughter.”

I had to believe that I was going to get out of this somehow. So I pressed her. “I need to know which of them is right,” I said. “I need to know who I should turn my hand against to prevent a great tragedy.”

“Tragedy,” said Mother Winter in a purr that made me think of rasping scorpions. “Pain? Terror? Sorrow? Why should I wish to prevent such a thing? It is sweeter than an infant’s marrow.”

It is a good thing I am a fearless and intrepid wizardly type, or that last bit of sentence would have set my flesh to crawling hard enough to carry me across the dirt floor.

I was kind of hosed anyway, so I took a chance. I crossed my fingers in the dark and said, “Because Nemesis is behind it.”

The cleaver’s rasp abruptly stopped.

The darkness and silence were, for a moment, absolute.

My imagination treated me to an image of Mother Winter creeping silently toward me in the blackness, cleaver lifted, and I stifled an urge to burst into panicked screams.

“So,” she whispered a moment later. “You have finally come to see what has been before you all this time.”

“Uh, yeah. I guess. I know there’s something there now, at least.”

“So very mortal of you. Learning only when it is too late.”

Rasp. Sparks.

“You aren’t going to kill me,” I said. “I’m as much your Knight as Mab’s.”

There was a low, quiet snort. “You are no true Knight of Winter, manling. Once I have devoured your flesh, and your mantle with it, I will bestow it upon someone worthier of the name. I should never have given it to Mab.”

Uh, wow. I hadn’t thought of that kind of motivation. My guts got really watery. I tried to move my limbs and found them numbed and only partially functional. I started trying to get them to flip me over so that I could get my feet under me. “Uh, no?” I heard myself ask in a panicked, cracking voice. “And why is that, exactly?”

“Mab,” said Mother Winter in a tone of pure disgust, “is too much the romantic.”

Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know about Mother Winter, right there.

“She has spent too much time with mortals,” Mother Winter continued, withered lips peeled back from iron teeth as the sparks from her cleaver’s edge leapt higher. “Mortals in their soft, controlled world. Mortals with nothing to do but fight one another, who have forgotten why they should fear the fangs and the claws, the cold and the dark.”

“And . . . that’s bad?”

“What value has life when it is so easily kept?” Mother Winter spat the last word. “Mab’s weakness is evident. Look at her Knight.”

Her Knight was currently trying to sit up, but his wrists and ankles were fastened to the floor by something cold, hard, and unseen. I tested them, but couldn’t feel any edges. The bonds couldn’t have been metal. And they weren’t ice. I didn’t know how I knew that, but I was completely certain. Ice would have been no obstacle. But there was something familiar about it, something I had felt before . . . in Chichén Itzá.

Will.

Mother Winter was holding me down by pure, stark will. The leaders of the Red Court had been ancient creatures with a similar power, but that had been a vague, smothering blanket that had made it impossible to move or act, a purely mental effort.

This felt like something similar, but far more focused, more developed, as if thought had somehow crystallized into tangibility. My wrists and ankles wouldn’t move because Mother Winter’s will said that was how reality worked. It was like magic—but magic took a seed, a kernel of will and built up a framework of other energies around that seed. It took intense practice and focus to make that happen, but at the end of the day anyone’s will was only part of the spell, alloyed with other energy into something else.

What held me down now was pure, undiluted will—the same kind of will that I suspected had backed up events presaged by phrases like “Let there be light.” It was far more than human, beyond simple physical strength, and if I’d been the Incredible Hulk, I was pretty sure there was no way I’d have been able to tear myself free.

“Ahhh,” said Mother Winter, during one last stroke of the cleaver. “I like nice clean edges to my meat, manling. Time for dinner.”

And slow, limping steps came toward me.