Cold Days (8 page)

“Home isn’t there anymore,” I said, and suddenly felt very tired. “They burned my apartment down. My books, my lab. And my friends think I’m dead. How do I just walk back in? ‘Hi, everyone. I’m back, and did you miss me? I’m working for one of the bad guys now, and what good movies came out while I was gone?’” I shook my head. “I’m making fresh enemies. Nasty ones. I’d be pulling them in all over again. I know what they’d say—that it didn’t matter. But I don’t know what I’m going to do yet. Mab seems to trust you. What is it that you do for her, exactly?”

Sarissa smiled faintly. “I’m sort of her humanity Sherpa,” she said. “For all of her power and knowledge, Mab doesn’t always understand people very well. She asks me questions. Sometimes we watch television or go to movies or listen to music. I’ve taken her to rock concerts. We’ve gone ice skating. Shopping. Clubbing. Once we went to Disneyland.”

I blinked. “Wait. Your job is . . . You’re BFFs with
Mab
?”

Sarissa let out a sudden torrent of giggles, until her eyes started to water a little. “Oh,” she said, still giggling. “Oh, I’ve never thought of it like that, but . . . God, it applies, doesn’t it? We do something every weekend.” She shook her head and took a moment to compose herself. Then she asked me, “Is there anyone special for you? Back home?”

Karrin.

But I didn’t dare use her name. No telling what other ears might be listening.

“Maybe,” I said. “It was . . . sort of starting up when I left. I’m not sure where it would have gone. I’d like to think that . . .” I shrugged. “Well. It was bad timing on an epic level. You?”

“Nothing more than casual,” she said. “If I was close to someone, well . . . it would create a target for Mab’s enemies, which I sometimes think is practically everybody in Faerie. Killing the lover of Mab’s pet mortal would be an insult while remaining oblique enough to not allow her room to respond.” She took a deep breath and looked at her hands. “I saw you speaking to her on the dance floor. I saw your face. Who did she tell you to kill?”

I hesitated. “I . . . I’m pretty sure I shouldn’t say. It’s information that could get you into trouble.”

I looked up in time to see the wariness returning to Sarissa’s features. “Ah,” she said. “Well, I suppose our little exchange is over, then.” She bit her lower lip and asked, quite calmly, “Was it me?”

That one caught me off guard. “Uh, what? No. No, it wasn’t you.”

She didn’t move for several heartbeats. “I . . . see.” Then she looked up, gave me a pleasant and false smile, and said, “Well, it’s late. And you should still try to rest as much as you can.”

“Sarissa, wait,” I began.

She rose, her back straight, her shoulders tense. “I think I’m going to my bed. Um. Unless you’d prefer . . .”

I stood up with her. “Don’t think that I’m against the idea, as a general principle. You’re smart, and I like you, and you’re gorgeous. But no. Not like this.”

She chewed on her lip again and nodded. “Thank you for that. For understanding.”

“Sure,” I said. I offered my arm and walked her back to the door of my lair.

(“Lair” worked so much better in my head than “suite.”)

At the door, she looked up at me. “May I ask you a question?”

“Of course.”

“Are you going to obey Mab?”

My brain started gibbering and running in circles at the very thought of what Mab had asked me to do. But I forced it to sit down and start breathing into a paper bag, and then I thought about it for a second. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

“Why?” she asked.

I rocked back onto my heels. It felt like that one little word had thumped me between the eyes with a Wiffle ball bat. Sarissa had hit exactly upon what most bothered me about Mab’s command.

Why? Why now instead of six months ago, or a year ago, or a hundred years ago? Why today instead of tomorrow? Hell, why should I do it in the first place? The whole reason Winter and Summer
had
a Knight was because the Queens of Faerie themselves were forbidden from directly killing any mortal, and they needed a hit man to make it happen. But Maeve wasn’t a mortal. As far as Mab was concerned, Little Miss Spanglecrotch was fair game.

Why?

“I’m not sure yet,” I said. “But I’m damned well going to find out.”

   Chapter   

Nine

“C
at Sith,” I called, once Sarissa had left.

From behind me, a voice said, “Yes, Sir Knight?”

I twitched and didn’t whirl around like a frightened teenager. I turned in a very urbane and James Bondian fashion, in keeping with my tux, eyed him, and said, “Hell’s bells. Do you always come in like that?”

“No,” the malk replied. He was sitting on the back of the sofa Sarissa and I had recently vacated. “Generally I do not speak. I simply proceed.”

“Are you aware of my orders?” I asked.

“I am aware that you have been given orders. I am to facilitate your ability to comply with them.”

I nodded. “I need to get back to Chicago. Right now. And I need a car.”

Cat Sith turned and padded down the hallway, toward my bedroom. He stopped in the hall at the door to the linen closet and lashed his tail once, then looked at me. “Very well.”

I frowned at him. Then I went to the closet and opened the door.

Autumn air, humid and smothering compared to that of Arctis Tor, flooded into my lair. Brilliant lights shone on the other side of the door, and it took me a few seconds of blinking against them to adjust, and realize that I was being blinded by simple streetlights. Inside my closet, there was a bit of sidewalk and then Michigan Avenue stretching out to the storefront opposite.

I blinked several times. Sith had opened a Way between Faerie and Chicago.

The spirit world, the Nevernever, is vast almost beyond imagining. Faerie is but one part of it, for the most part occupying the realms of spirit that lie most adjacent to the mortal world. The geography of the spirit world isn’t like that of the real world. Different places in the spirit world will connect with places with a similar energy in the real world. So dark, spooky parts of the Nevernever hook up with dark, spooky places in the mortal world.

And my freaking linen closet in Arctis Tor hooked up to Chicago—specifically to Michigan Avenue, to the Gothic stone building across the street from the Old Historic Water Tower. It was night. Cars went by occasionally, but no one seemed to take notice of the open portal to the heart of Winter. Arctis Tor was isolated in the Nevernever, difficult to reach without inside help. Even traveling by Ways takes at least some time, and I’d expected a hike back to the real world.

“How?” I asked quietly.

“Her Majesty had it made,” Sith said.

I whistled. Intentionally forming a connection from a specific place to a specific place took amounts of energy so enormous that even the White Council of Wizards could rarely manage it—I’d seen it done only once in my lifetime, the year before, in Chichén Itzá. “She had it made? For me?”

“Indeed,” Sith said. “In fact, this is, for the time being, the only way in or out of Faerie.”

I blinked several times. “You mean Winter?”

“Faerie,” Sith stated. “All of it.”

I choked. “Wait. You mean all of Faerie is on lockdown?”

“Indeed,” Sith said. “Until dawn.”

“Why?” I asked.

“One presumes it was done to give you a head start.” With that, Sith walked calmly through the door and onto the sidewalk. “Your car, Sir Knight.”

I stepped through the door into the Chicago air, and it slugged me in the face with a legion of scents and sensations and sounds that were as familiar to me as my own breathing. After the cool, dry silence of Arctis Tor, I felt like I’d leapt into the middle of an active circus. There were too many sounds, scents, too much color, too much motion. Arctis Tor was as still as the deepest night of winter, twenty-four/seven. Chicago is . . . well, Chicago.

I found myself blinking my eyes very rapidly.

Home.

I know. It’s corny. Especially since Chicago is what a polite person would call a colorful place. It’s a den of crime and corruption. And it’s a monument to architecture and enterprise. It’s violent and dangerous, and an epicenter of music and the arts. The good, the bad, the ugly, the sublime, monsters and angels—they’re all here.

The scents and sounds triggered a mental avalanche of memories and I shivered at the intensity of it. I almost didn’t notice the car that pulled up to the curb beside me.

It was an ancient hearse, a Caddy that must have been built sometime in the years immediately following World War II, complete with rounded tail fins. It had been painted dark, dark blue, and given a flame job in shades of electric purple. It wavered and bobbed drunkenly down the avenue, turned a bit too sharply toward the curb, lurched ahead with a roar of the engine, and then skidded to a halt with the brakes locked, missing the posts along the edge of the road, and the chains that hung between them, by maybe an inch.

“Will there be anything else, Sir Knight?” Cat Sith asked.

“Not right now,” I said warily. “Um. Who is driving that thing?”

“I recommend it be you,” Sith said with unmistakable contempt, and then with a swish of his tail, he vanished.

The engine roared once more, and the car lurched but didn’t move from its rest. The lights went on and then off, and then the wipers swept on a few times before the engine dropped to an idle and the brake lights shut off.

I approached the car warily, leaned across the chains, and rapped on the driver’s-side window.

Nothing happened. The windows were tinted a little, enough to make the dark interior invisible on the well-lit street. I couldn’t see anyone inside. I opened the door.

“Three cheers, boys!” piped a tiny cartoon-character voice. “Hip, hip!”

“Hip!” shrilled maybe a dozen more tiny voices.

“Hip, hip!”

“Hip!”

“Hip, hip!”

“Hip!” That was followed by a heartfelt chorus of “Yay!”

Sitting in the driver’s seat of the hearse were a dozen tiny humanoids. Their leader, the largest of them, was maybe eighteen inches tall. He looked like an extremely athletic youth, drawn down to scale. He was dressed in armor made from castoff bits of garbage and refuse. His breastplate had been made from a section of aluminum can, a white one bearing a Coca-Cola logo. The shield on his left arm was made from the same material, this one sporting Coke’s seasonal Christmas polar bears. Part of a plastic toothpaste travel container had been fixed to his belt, and what looked like a serrated butter knife was thrust into it, its handle wrapped in layers of duct tape and string. His hair was violet, a few shades of blue darker than the lavender I remembered, silky, and nearly weightless, drifting around his head like dandelion down. Wings like a dragonfly’s hung from his back like an iridescent cloak.

He was standing atop a formation of smaller sprites stacked up in a miniature human pyramid, and his hands rested on the wheel. Several weary-looking little wee folk were leaning against the gearshift, and several more were on the floor, holding the brake down in a dog pile of tiny bodies. They were all dressed in similar outfits of repurposed garbage.

The leader gave me a sharp salute, beaming. “Major General Toot-toot of the Sir Za Winter Lord Knight’s Guard reporting for duty! It is good to see you, my lord!” His wings buzzed and he fluttered out of the hearse to hover in front of my face, spinning in circles. “Look, look! I got new gear!”

“We’re all Winter and stuff!” piped up one of the smaller members of the guard. He brandished his shield, which was made out of a section of plastic that had come from a solid-stick deodorant container, bearing the words “Winter Clean.”

“Go, Winter!” shouted Toot, thrusting a fist into the air.

“Go, pizza!” echoed the others.

Toot spun around and scowled at them. “No, no, no! We practiced this!”

“GO, PIZZA!” they bellowed, louder and more in unison.

Toot-toot sighed and shook his head. “This is why you’re all kernels and I’m a major general. ’Cause you got corn silk in your ears.”

Toot and company were kind of my minions. I’d gotten along well with the Little Folk over the years, mostly by virtue of bribing them with pizza. A few snitches and stool pigeons had developed into a band of cute little moochers, and then into an army—and at some point after that, Toot had somehow gotten the idea to make them into a real army. And they tried—they honestly did—but it’s tough to form a disciplined military when most of the guys in it have an attention span about twenty seconds long. Discipline is boring.

“Guys, guys,” I said. “Break it up and shove over. I’m in a hurry.”

The wee folk complied at once, all of them scrambling into the passenger seat or over into the rear compartment. I got in as quickly as I could and shut the door behind me.

I buckled in and pulled out into the sparse traffic. The big Caddy moved out with a satisfied rumble and way more power than I was used to in an automobile. My last car had been a vintage VW Bug with an engine about the size of a deck of cards.

“Toot,” I said, “have you grown?”

“Yes,” Toot said, disgusted. “Even though I stand around with weights on my head for, like, twenty whole minutes every day. I even got laundered. Twice! And nothing!”

“I think you look dashing,” I said.

He settled down at the center of the dashboard, his legs hanging off and kicking idly. “Thank you, my lord!”

“So the pizza came on schedule while I was, uh, away?”

“Yes, my lord! The Lady Leanansidhe provided it in your stead!” Toot lowered his voice and talked from between clenched teeth. “If she hadn’t, these knuckleheads would have deserted!”

“Well, we do have a deal,” I said. “That’s what a deal means, right?”

“Right,” Toot said firmly. “We trust you, Harry. You’re barely like a human at all!”

I knew he meant it as a compliment, but something chilly slithered down my back at the statement. My faerie godmother, the Leanansidhe, had covered my obligations at home while I was gone? Man, that could get complicated. Among the Sidhe, favors are hard currency.

But I was glad to see Toot and his gang. They were damned handy, and could be far more dangerous and capable than most, even in the supernatural world, I realized.

“I never doubted you or the guard for a second, Major General.”

Which was true: I had no doubt at all that as long as the pizza kept flowing, I’d have their absolute loyalty.

Toot beamed at the compliment, and his body pulsed with a gentle aura of cool blue light. “How can the guard serve you, my lord?”

They’d started off the evening nearly crashing the car, but it was impressive they’d managed it at all. “I’m on a case,” I said seriously. “I’ll need someone to watch my back.”

“Lean forward a little, my lord,” Toot said instantly, and shouted, “Hey, Kernel Purpleweed! Come watch the Za Winter Lord Knight’s back!”

I fought not to smile. “No, that’s a metaphor,” I said.

Toot frowned and scratched his head. “I don’t know what it’s for.”

Mustn’t laugh. Mustn’t. It would crush his little feelings. “In a minute, I’m going to pull over and go into a building. I want guards to stay inside and around the car, and I want a couple more to go with me and make sure no one sneaks up on me when I’m not looking.”

“Oh!” Toot said. “That’s easy!”

“Good,” I said, as I pulled the car over. “Make it so.”

Toot saluted, leapt into the air, and zipped back to the rear compartment, piping orders as he went.

I set the old Caddy’s parking brake and got out, wasting no time. I didn’t hold the door open any longer than I would have if I’d been alone. The Little Folk do not need that kind of coddling. They’re not always bright, but they’re fast, tough, and resourceful. I’d have had trouble keeping them in the car if I wanted to.

Once I was out and moving, I was to all appearances alone. Whoever Toot had sent to watch my back would be silent and nearly invisible, and I didn’t bother rubbernecking around to try to spot them. One thing about the Little Folk that held as well with every faerie—when they made a deal, they stuck to it. They’d had my back before, and they had it now. Heck, since I was committing a felony, they probably thought it was fun to come along for the ride.

It’s tough to get one of the Little Folk to care about discipline. On the other hand, they really aren’t terribly impressed with danger, either.

I walked about a block to the right apartment building, a brownstone blockhouse that had all the flair and imaginative design of a brick of baking chocolate. It wasn’t an upscale place like where my brother lived, but it wasn’t one of the projects at their worst, either. It didn’t have a doorman, and the security wouldn’t be top-of-the-line, and that was, for now, the important thing.

I got a little bit lucky on the way in—a resident, a man in his twenties who had apparently been out drinking, opened the door on his way home, and I called out, “Hold that, please?”

He did. He probably shouldn’t have, but guys in tuxes, even without a tie, don’t strike anyone as a criminal upon first impression. I nodded to him and thanked him with a smile. He muttered something bleary and turned down a side hallway. I hit the elevators and took one up.

Once I was on the right floor, the rest wasn’t too tough. I walked calmly down the hallway to the proper door and leaned against it.

A ripple of gooseflesh washed up my arm, beginning on the back of my hand, and I jerked my fingers back in pure instinct. Huh. There were wards on the door, magical defenses. I hadn’t expected that. Wards can do all kinds of things to an intruder, from suggesting that he turn around and leave, to giving him a stiff push away, to frying him like a bug zapper.

I took a moment to study the wards. They were a smooth patchwork of enchantment, probably the result of several lesser talents working together. Somebody like me can put up a ward that is like a huge iron wall. This was more like a curtain of tightly interwoven steel rings. For most purposes, both would serve fairly well—but with the right tool, the latter kind of wall is easily dealt with.