Cold Days (The Dresden Files, #14)

by Jim Butcher

Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness, monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe, has unique ideas regarding physical therapy.

Man. Being mostly dead is hard on a guy. I was in a bed. A bed the size of my old apartment.

could describe the next few weeks in detail, but as bad as they were, they did have a certain routine to them. Besides, in my head, they’re a music video montage set to the Foo Fighters’ “Walk.”

Seventy-seven days. Seventy-seven attempted murders. Use your imagination. Mab sure as hell did. There was even a ticking crocodile.

I hit the floor, keeping the barrier up, and Mab advanced, her eyes glittering through every shade of opal, wild and ecstatic and incongruous against her otherwise calm expression.

Mab let out a delighted silvery laugh and clapped her hands like a little girl who has just been told she’s getting a pony. “Yes!” she said. “Lovely. Brutal, vicious, and lovely.”

“The fun begins when the games end, my Knight.”

The guy looking at me out of the mirror looked raw and hard. My cheekbones stood out starkly. I’d lost a lot of weight while I was in what amounted to a coma, and my rehabilitation had added only lean muscle back onto me. You could see veins tight against my skin. My brown hair hung down past my jawline, clean but shaggy.

I’d ditched the beard, though. Beards grow out so fast that if you shave every day, there isn’t much of a window for anyone to use them against you—and shaved stubble is too diffuse to make a decent channel anyway.

“Who are you?” The malk bowed his head once. “A faithful servant of the Queen of Air and Darkness. I am most often called Sith.” “Heh,” I said. “Where’s your red lightsaber?”

“Wait. You work for me?” “I prefer to think of it as managing your incompetence,” Sith replied.

“Lewis Carroll’s estate should be collecting a licensing fee from that guy.” Unless, of course, it was maybe the other way around.

Everything was perfectly healthy and normal here in Denial Land.

Her eyes blazed, and the temperature in the air dropped suddenly, painfully, enough to cause icy frost crystals to start forming on the ice. The freaking ice iced over.

“I know who you are, Dresden,” he rumbled. “Call me Kringle.” “Wow, seriously? ’Cause . . . wow.”

He certainly expected me to react with fear and caution. Which just goes to show you that no matter how old something is, centuries don’t necessarily make it all that bright.

Build a man a fire and he’s warm for a day,” I said. “But set a man on fire and he’s warm for the rest of his life. Tao of Pratchett.

The aurora was mesmerizing and blinding at the same time, and little disco balls hoped that they could grow up to be half as brilliant one day.

Maeve’s first attempt to get me to start a fight at court had been a distraction, then. She’d wanted me to focus on her, to unnerve me with her high-voltage psychic sex moves. That way I wouldn’t be thinking clearly enough to avoid it when the Redcap sprang his surprise.

I don’t know how much stronger Mab’s gift had made me, because I’d never been much of a weight lifter until I’d started therapy. I didn’t know too much about how much weight lifters could, for example, bench-press. So I didn’t have a very good idea how I stacked up against plain old me. Or plain old anybody. Plus the weights for the bench press were marked in metric units, and I kind of fell asleep the day we learned to convert them to pounds. But I’m pretty sure four hundred kilos isn’t bad.

Again there was a chorus of marrow-curdling laughter from the Sidhe. It wasn’t any more pleasant to have them laughing with me than it had been to have them laughing at me.

Zero warnings. Zero excuses. Subzero tolerance.” I paused again and then asked, “Any questions?”

This time I aimed much of the force up. Grisly bits of frozen Sidhe noble came pattering and clattering down to the ice of the dance floor. When the mist cleared, the Sidhe looked . . . stunned. Even Maeve.

“Wizard,” she said, her breathy voice trembling. Every syllable bubbled with venom, with hate. “Kill my daughter. Kill Maeve.”

Inside my closet, there was a bit of sidewalk and then Michigan Avenue stretching out to the storefront opposite.

I found myself blinking my eyes very rapidly. Home.

“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.

“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!”

“Major General Toot-toot of the Sir Za Winter Lord Knight’s Guard reporting for duty! It is good to see you, my lord!”

“This is why you’re all kernels and I’m a major general. ’Cause you got corn silk in your ears.”

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.

A human skull sat on the table, facing the monitor, and faint orange flickers of light danced in its eyes. Despite its utter inability to form any expression, it somehow gave the impression of a happily glazed look.

His eyes gleamed with avarice or something near it. “I need broadband, Harry.” “That’s a computer thing, right?” “Philistine,” Bob the Skull muttered.

Some analytical part of my head was going over those facts in a detached and rational fashion. The rest of me went freaking berserk with anger.

closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, reminding myself that the anger was just anger, that it was a sensation, like feeling hot or cold. It didn’t mean anything by itself. It wasn’t a reason to act. That’s what thinking was for.

“I came for the skull,” I said. “I’m invaluable!” Bob piped. “Useful.” I scowled at him. “Don’t get cocky.”

“He’s not the same thing as a human—” “Thank you,” Bob said. “I explain and explain that, but no one listens.” “—but he’s still kind of a friend.” Bob made a gagging sound. “Don’t get all sappy on me, Dresden.”

She’s the Winter Lady.” I frowned. “Huh? I killed the Summer Lady just fine.” Bob made a frustrated sound. “Yeah, but that was because you were in the right place to do it.” “How’s that?” “Mab and Titania created that place specifically to be a killing ground for immortals, a place where balances of power are supposed to change. They’ve got to have a location like that for the important fights—otherwise nothing really gets decided. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and cannon fodder.”

“Man, Bob. I know you can be an annoying git when you want to be one—but what did you do to make Mab mad at you?” “It isn’t what I do, Harry,” Bob said in a very small voice. “It’s what I know.” I lifted an eyebrow. It took a lot to make the skull flinch. “And what is that, exactly?” The lights in the eye sockets dwindled to tiny pinpoints, and his voice came out in a whisper. “I know how to kill an immortal.” “Like Maeve?” I asked him. “Maeve,” Bob said. “Mab. Mother Winter. Any of them.” Holy crap. Now, that was a piece of information worth killing for.

“Right, then!” Bob said. “The only way to kill an immortal is at certain specific places.” “And you know one? Where?” “Hah, already you’re making a human assumption. There are more than three dimensions, Harry. Not all places are in space. Some of them are places in time. They’re called conjunctions.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “And there’s a conjunction when immortals are vulnerable?” “Give the man a cookie; he’s got the idea. Every year.” “When is it?” “On Halloween night, of course.”

“Halloween is when they feed,” Bob said. “Or . . . or refuel. Or run free. It’s all sort of the same thing, and I’m only conveying a small part of it. Halloween night is when the locked stasis of immortality becomes malleable. They take in energy—and it’s when they can add new power to their mantle.

can’t perceive the true state of their existence properly.” “They’re here,” I said slowly. “Feeding and swindling one another for little bits of power.” “Right.” “They’re trick-or-treating?” “Duh,” Bob said. “Where do you think that comes from?”

“Halloween is tomorrow night,” I said. A bank sign I was passing told me it was a bit after two a.m. “Or tonight, I guess, technically.” “What a coincidence,” Bob said. “Happy birthday, by the way. I didn’t get you anything.” Except maybe my life.

When does Halloween night end?” I asked. “At the first natural morning birdsong,” Bob replied promptly. “Songbirds, rooster, whatever. They start to sing, the night ends.” “Oh, good. A deadline.”

“Over time, it changes them. Somewhere down the line, you wouldn’t be able to find much difference between Maeve and her successor. Meet the new Maeve. Same as the old Maeve.”

I nodded thoughtfully. “Then maybe it’s about the timing.” “How so?” I shrugged. “Hell if I know, but it’s the only thing I can think of. Maybe Mab wants a less Maeve-ish Maeve for the next few years.”

Gotta get rid of those Outside corruptions

“Well. Maybe that explains it.” “Explains what?” “Why Mab was so hell-bent on getting you to be the new Knight,” Bob said. “I mean, you’re kind of an avatar of the phrase ‘Things fall apart.’ Mab has a target she wants to be absolutely sure of. You’re like . . . her guided missile. She can’t know exactly what’s going to happen, but she knows there’s going to be a great big boom.”

“I’m not ambivalent.” “You know better, but you’re being a moron about it anyway,” Bob said. “If that ain’t ambivalence, maybe Mab’s getting to you. Because it’s a little crazy.”

Even if something sharp and fast doesn’t go flying through some of your favorite organs, a nearby explosion leaves you half-blind, deaf, and drunkenly impaired. Vulnerable.