Cold Days (49 page)

But I wasn’t. I was standing behind him, within inches of his back, and before he could rise, I struck. A moment before, I’d used my intellectus to locate an old nail on the ground, about four inches long, partly coated in rust. Thomas or I must have dropped it while walking to or from the cottage, back when we’d been beginning repairs on it and building the Whatsup Dock. The nail had lain out through several seasons, only lightly touched by them.

I put my thumb behind its head, used the strength of the Winter mantle, and drove it straight through mail that had never been designed to stop such a small point, and two inches into the muscle of Fix’s shoulder blade.

Fix let out a scream of shock and pain and swung his sword at me—but with cold steel piercing his skin, and his access to the Summer mantle disrupted, he had only his own reflexes, strength, and skill to rely on. He hadn’t trained in them without the power of the Summer Knight to back them up, and he hadn’t learned in the brutal school of hard knocks that Mab had put me through. The sword’s slash was slowed and clumsy, and I struck him twice—once on the wrist, breaking it with a clear snap, sending the sword tumbling away, and once on the jaw, not quite as hard, sending Fix to the ground in a senseless heap.

“Knight takes Knight,” I called into the cloudy night air. “Check.”

The struggle between the Queens and Demonreach had already been a silent one, but now the air abruptly went still. I couldn’t see them, but I knew that Lily had turned her body partly away from Demonreach, toward me, breaking her connection with one of the two Sidhe supporting her. Demonreach, for its part, had altered its facing to square off against Maeve. I could sense that the little bits of its body that had been eroding away were now moving in the opposite direction, reaccruing to its main mass.

“Fix?” the Summer Lady called, her voice vaguely confused. Then it was touched by sudden, cold fear.
“Fix!”

“What are you doing?” Maeve snarled. “You stupid cow! I cannot defeat the guardian alone!”

Lily ignored her. I sensed her move her hand, an almost absent gesture.

And a sudden wind brushed the fog Fix and I had created from the hilltop as easily as a young mother sweeping fallen Cheerios from a toddler’s tray.

Holy crap.

I knew the Ladies were powerful, but I hadn’t realized what that meant in practical terms. Making that much air move that precisely and that suddenly is
hard
, and it would take a serious investment of energy to make it happen. I could have done it, but it would have been enough heavy lifting to make me want a cold beer and a nice sit-down when I was finished. If I’d had to do it two or three times in a row, I’d have been too tired to lift the beer.

Lily had done it with a comparative flick of her fingers.

And there I was, standing naked on the hilltop over the unmoving form of Fix. I still had my veil up, but it was so rudimentary as to be useless against someone as savvy as the Sidhe. I shouldn’t have bothered to hold on to it at all, but some irrational instinct made me condense it instead to a small field of blurry energy around my hips.

“He’s alive, Lily,” I said, quickly. “We need to talk.”

The whites showed all the way around Lily’s eyes. “What?” she demanded, fury swelling in her tone. “What did you say to me?”

Whoa. On my worst diplomatic day, I still shouldn’t have garnered a reaction like that from what I’d said. “Lily, calm down. Fix is alive. But I think you’re still you over there, and I don’t think you’ve been given the whole truth. Let’s talk before things happen that everyone regrets.”

“How dare you!” she snarled, her rage turning incandescent. Literally. Fire burst from her hands and wreathed her forearms. “How
dare
you!”

I held up my own hands in front of me, empty. I was pretty sure I looked confused. “Hell’s bells, Lily, what the hell? I do
not
want a fight here!”

Lily screamed, and Summer fire engulfed her, causing her courtiers to leap away. Gold and green and starlight silver, the fire danced around her, mesmerizing—and swelling. Suddenly I saw the same rage that I’d seen in Titania’s eyes, but that had been the smoldering coals left over after the passing of years, after mourning and grief had eased. The power Lily held on to now came from the same kind of passion—but it was fresh and white-hot, and it wasn’t going to cool anytime soon.

Then I realized what was going on. Maeve had extended her other hand toward me, and her fingers were dancing merrily. She gave me the briefest flash of a look, and it was poisonously amused. I reached into the air in front of me and felt it there, an elegant little glamour, simple enough that Maeve could have done it in her sleep, complex enough to slip by anyone not looking for it, even one of the Sidhe. I’d been talking, but it hadn’t been my words getting to Lily. Maeve had chosen my words for me.

I don’t know what she’d said, but she’d picked something exactly right to drive her Summer counterpart mad with rage. Lily’s gentler, more compassionate nature had been used against her. Maeve had employed her simple little glamour with exquisite timing, at the one instant when there was no way the relatively inexperienced Lily would have expected it—when she was full of concern for the fallen Fix. With a sinking feeling I realized that the passionate young Lady of Summer was no Titania. She had all the heat, but none of the restraint, the balance, and there was no way in hell that she was going to be able to think, to reason, to hold back her fury.

“Destroy him!” she screamed. Trees shook and rocks cracked as she spoke. The sound of it ripped at my ears, and I felt a sudden hot wetness in them. “Destroy Harry Dresden!”

She threw forth her hands and a wall of fire twenty feet high and as wide as a football field roared toward me.

   Chapter   

Forty-eight

F
or a fraction of a second, my brain squealed like the last little piggy running all the way home, a spinal-level fear reaction. I had an experience with fire once. It’s the kind of memory that sticks pretty hard.

Fire’s tough to defend against. That’s one of the reasons it’s always been my favorite form of attack. Even if you don’t actually set your target on fire, you can still roast it by heating up the air around it, unless it just throws away everything to get out of your way, in which case it isn’t thinking about doing anything back to you. As weapons go, fire is top-drawer.

But.

Fire’s tricky and fickle. Without focus, it’s just chaos, the random release of stored chemical energy. It isn’t enough to just have fire. You’ve got to know when and where and how to use it to best effect—and Lily didn’t.

I threw myself down over the unconscious Fix and focused, thrusting my hands out to either side, shouting,
“Defendarius!”

As I formed a shield around us in a bubble, the firestorm roared down onto us, washing over us like an ocean tide. My shield held the fire back, but it couldn’t stop it entirely, and heat began to burn through. That was why I reached for Winter and filled the little bubble around us with the cold. That wave of fire was too massive for me to overcome—but I didn’t have to overcome it. It was spread out over such a huge area that all I had to do was beat a relatively tiny portion of it, to hold out against it like a large stone on a beach. I didn’t have the strength to beat it—but I did have the strength to hold it away, and to keep just the air within my shield from becoming an oven.

The fire washed over us, and I held on to the shield for a few seconds more, as long as I thought I could. Without my bracelet or my staff to help direct the energy, a few seconds were all I could do—but it was enough to survive. It left me on my hands and knees, gasping, on a small circle of frost-covered earth, but I made it, and so did Fix.

Go, me.

Maeve’s mocking laughter rang out over the hilltop.

Hot air touched the side of my face and grew gently, along with an approaching light. I looked up to see Lily walking toward me over the scorched earth, naked now but for the flames curling around her body, her own clothing burned away in the firestorm. Her eyes weren’t there. There were only a pair of searing fires burning where they had been, wisps of orange and scarlet flame rising up from them as she came closer. Her silken white hair rose into a wavering column like a flame itself, lifted by the hot air and colored golden green and orange by the light of her fiery nimbus.

Behind her, the other Summer Sidhe were shadows, with fire dancing in the reflection of silvery weapons, and with the echoes of it flickering in their hands and upon their brows, power and weapons alike spreading out around me to leave me no escape—but at the flick of a hand from Lily, they stopped and withdrew, back to their original positions near the tower.

I guessed that she didn’t want to incinerate her Summer buddies along with me. I started to lift my hand, to ready another shield, but my other arm couldn’t take the weight of my body and I nearly collapsed.

That was it, then.

I was out of gas.

I managed to get myself up onto my knees and sat back on my heels, panting. Then I tugged the nail out of Fix’s back, gripped it grimly, and faced Lily.

She stopped about six feet away from me, covered in living fire, and stared down, her eyes like spotlights.

“He’s okay, Lily,” I said. “Fix is okay. God, Lily. Can you even hear me?”

Evidently she could not. Lily lifted a hand, and a minuscule sphere of white-hot light formed in the air above it, a tiny star.

Now there, that was focus. I couldn’t have stopped something that concentrated without a major amount of preparation. I could appreciate it in a professional sense, even if it was about to kill me horribly.

And suddenly I felt very stupid. What the fuck had I been thinking? The Queens of Faerie, even the least of them, were elemental powers, something that was simply out of the league of any mortal. I should have tried to contact my grandfather and the Grey Council, should have at least put out a scream to the White Council, even if they were less likely to help.

And I should have sent Michael and his family—and Maggie—out of town the second I’d realized the danger. I’d saved the day before, maybe often enough to make me overconfident. I sneer about the White Council being arrogant all the time, but I’d walked into the exact same stupid trap, hadn’t I? Confident of my ability to handle anything that came along, I’d gathered together my little band of enablers and cruised right into this disaster.

“Lily,” I said wearily. “Listen to me. We’ve both been set up by Maeve.”

White fire stared at me.

“The adversary,” I said. “It’s in her. It’s been in her for a long time. Think. It makes the things it takes act against their natures. And you know what it’s done for Maeve?” I leaned forward, holding my weary hands palms up. “It’s let her
lie
. She can lie her ass off and never blink an eye.
Think
. How much of your trust in her, of your awareness of what’s going on in the world is based on knowing that she can’t speak an untruth?”

Fire stared—and did not consume me. So I kept talking.

“Don’t take me at my word,” I said. “Just look at what she is
doing
.”

And Lily spoke, her voice burning with the unleashed power of Summer. “We are working together. We are destroying the largest source of dark energy and corruption in this world. The source
you
are so desperate to protect that you call Outsiders to defend it!”

Oh, God.

Lily didn’t
know
what was in the Well. She understood that it was a source of dark energy, but not
why
.

I kept forgetting that she had had the job for only a comparatively tiny amount of time. Before I’d killed Aurora and left poor Lily holding the mantle of the Summer Lady, she’d been a young woman, no older than Molly, only without Molly’s skills and training. She’d been putting her life back together while dealing with the massive power of her mantle, taking a crash course in faerie leadership, struggling to learn.

And if someone had been there to feed her lies as part of her basic education in the supernatural, someone whose word she had trusted, God only knew how much her knowledge had been twisted and colored.

“Who told you I called up Outsiders?” I asked. “Maeve?”

“So arrogant,” Lily said. “You reek of arrogance and deception, like all wizards. Even the famous Merlin, who built this abomination.” Her eyes narrowed. “But as complex as it is, it is still made of mortal magic. This circle that we used to stop your interference—it’s a part of the architecture here. All we had to do was feed power into it to close this place against your allies while we tore it down from inside.”

“If you keep going,” I told her, “you are going to destroy yourself, Lily, and everyone you brought with you, and a lot of innocent people are going to
die
.”

“Finish it, Lily,” Maeve called. “I told you they would lie. Mortals
always
lie, and that is why we must stand together. We cannot allow ourselves to be divided. Put him down and we will complete what we have begun.”

“Lily, please,” I said. “Don’t take my word for it. Don’t believe me. But be certain. Find out for yourself. Then you’ll know. You don’t have to do this.”

The Summer fire vanished abruptly.

Lily stood over me, her hair mussed, her naked body so beautiful, it hurt. She spoke in a quiet, dreadfully numb voice. “You can’t tell me that,” she said. “Not you. Do you think I wanted this? Do you think I wanted pain and death and fear and war? Do you think I wanted this mantle, this responsibility?” Her eyes welled, though her expression didn’t change. “I didn’t want the world. I didn’t want vast riches, or fame, or power. I wanted a husband. Children. Love. A home that we made together. And that can never happen now.” The tears fell, and as the heat, the fury, came back into her voice, the fire gathered around her again. “Because of you. Because you killed Aurora. Because you
made
me into
this
. You raise your hand against my champion, my
friend
, and when you are defeated you
dare
tell me what I must and must not do?”

“Lily, please,” I said. “You have a choice.”

Maeve was laughing again in the background, an Arkham Asylum kind of laugh that echoed across the bare, burned ground.

“Now,” Lily said, her burning voice bitter. “
Now
you give me a choice.” The ministar flared to life in her palm again. “
Thus
do I choose, you son of a bitch. Knight of Winter, burn and die.”

I got it, I think. Or at least, I got most of it. Lily had spent her life a victim because of her luminous beauty. Lloyd Slate had been the last man to abuse her, but I doubted he was the first. All her life, she had been shut away from making choices, but she clearly had not wanted to be part of the world of Faerie; as a changeling, she could have Chosen to become a full faerie being at any time—and she hadn’t. Then when I killed Aurora, I had even taken the choice to remain human away from her.

I hadn’t meant to do that when I killed Aurora, but that fact made no difference in the outcome. I hadn’t just killed Aurora that night. In many ways, I’d effectively killed Lily, too. I’d thrown her into a world where she was lost and afraid. A grieving and furious Titania had doubtless not been the supportive mentor figure Lily had needed. And even if she’d been a newly minted immortal, she must have been horribly angry, and sad, and afraid—and lonely.

Easy prey for Maeve. Easy prey for Nemesis. I wasn’t sure whether there was anything about that entire situation that I could have changed, even if I’d known that it needed changing, but I still felt like I was the one at fault. Maybe I was. It had been my choice that changed everything.

Maybe it was fitting that Lily kill me, in turn.

Her fiery eyes seared into mine as she launched the little star at my heart.