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None of it seemed normal, but I couldn’t quite remember the right word to describe it. Danger. Right. That was it. Danger. I was in danger. A moving target is harder to hit.
Someone had shot me? With a freaking nail gun? What the hell was going on here?
“Get up, Harry,” I panted, fighting through the disorientation, the polar shifts in pain. “Get up before they nail you.” Nail you. Get it?
Okay, I’ve thought a lot of things about Toot-toot over the years. I’ve compared him to a lot of really humorous stuff, and occasionally to people I didn’t admire too much. I’ve made jokes at his expense, though never when I thought it would hurt him. But if you’d asked me for a perfect parallel for the little guy a year ago, I would never, ever, ever have said, “King Leonidas.”
“What’s happening?” Bob shouted blearily from where he’d landed, sideways, in the well of the passenger seat. “I’m getting my ass kicked by tiny faeries!” I shouted back, fumbling to start the car. “They’ve got my freaking number!” There was a loud pop, and a slender miniature steel dagger slammed through the passenger window, transforming it into a broken webwork, as difficult to see through as a stained-glass window. “Ack!” I said. Bob started laughing hysterically.
Sometimes you have to choose between doing something stupid and doing something suicidal. So I kept driving blind and backward through the middle of Chicago while Bob chortled his bony ass off.
Falling in a fight is generally bad. You tend not to get up again. I mean, there’s a reason that the phrase “He fell” was synonymous with death for a bunch of centuries. I fell. And then I heard the most beautiful sound of my life. Somewhere nearby, a cat let out an angry, hissing scream.
Then a young woman’s voice said, in a passable British accent, “The Little Folk are easily startled, but they’ll soon be back. And in greater numbers.” I sagged in sudden, exhausted relief. The bad guys hardly ever quote Star Wars. “Molly,” I breathed. A tall young woman dressed in rather shabby secondhand clothing crouched down next to me and smiled. “Hey, boss. Welcome home.”
I sat there breathing hard, and realized that the real effort of moving that much weight didn’t hit you while you were actually moving it—it came in the moments after, when your muscles recovered enough to demand oxygen, right the hell now.
Bob had almost unlimited knowledge of magic. Molly had a calculated disregard for self-limitation when she thought it justified. They would have made a really scary pair, and I’d kept them carefully separate during her training.
Will Molly eventually be Bob's holder?
She'd be a great blend of Harry's magical ability and Butters' ability to understand magical theory.
Molly had an apartment. She had an apartment big enough for Hugh Hefner’s birthday party.
“All right,” Molly said, picking up the first-aid kit. She beckoned me to follow her to the kitchen. “Your turn. Off with the shirt.” “Not until you buy me dinner,” I said. For a second, she froze, and I wondered whether that had come out like the joke it had sounded like in my mind. Then she recovered. Molly arched her eyebrow in a look that was disturbingly like that of her mother (a woman around with whom a wise man will not mess) and folded her arms.
I like that their relationship is changing after the heaviness of Changes and Ghost Story. Way more flirty. Kinda hope they wind up together.
I didn’t want her involved, but she’d earned the right to make that choice for herself. So I gave it to her, straight, succinct, and with zero editing except for the bit about Halloween. It felt sort of strange. I hardly ever tell anyone that much truth. The truth is dangerous.
“Harry . . . duh. I knew you were alive. That meant you’d be coming back. Lea told me to keep it to myself, so I got a place ready for you.” She took a quick step back into the kitchen, opened a drawer, and came back with a small brass key. “Here, this will get you past the locks, and past the svartalves’ wards and past my defenses.” I took the key, frowning. “Um . . .” “I’m not asking you to shack up with me, Harry,” Molly said, her tone dry. “It’s just . . . until you get back on your feet. Or . . . or just as long as you’re in town and need a place to stay.”
“Harry, I know you’ve got your hands full already, but there’s something you need to know.” I frowned. “Yeah?” “Yeah.” She rubbed her arms with her hands as though cold. “I’ve kind of been visiting your island.”
“Agrees with what?” “Um,” Molly said, looking down. “Harry. I think that within the next few days, the island is going to explode. And I think that when it does, it will take about half the Midwest with it.”
I’m not saying you shouldn’t get in their faces when they’re in the wrong. But you might want to consider the idea that burning your bridges behind you could prove to be a very bad policy a century or two from now.”
They took her orders as if she were some kind of visiting dignitary. Whatever she’d done for the svartalves, they had taken it very, very seriously.
I’d had a key to the marina’s locks at one time, but I’d lost track of it when I got shot, drowned, died, got revived into a coma, haunted my friends for a while, and then woke up in Mab’s bed. (My life. Hell’s bells.)
Harry part. I had it on good authority that it didn’t have to end with me going all nutty and villainous—assuming an archangel was trustworthy, which I didn’t. I also had it on good authority that it would end like that anyway.
If I were the kind of guy who ever got scared by anything, ever, which of course I am not, I would have been feeling extremely nervous at that moment.
The guy barely works out, eats whatever he wants, and gets to look that good and that young his whole life. How is that fair?
“Why?” I asked him tiredly. “What would it have changed? What could you possibly have said that would have made a difference?” “That I was your brother, Harry,” he said. “That I loved you. That I knew a few things about denying the dark parts of your nature. And that we would get through it.” He put his elbows on his knees and rested his forehead on his hands. “That we’d figure it out. That you weren’t alone.” Stab. Twist.
I always thought it would get easier to be a person as I aged. But it just gets more and more complicated.
“Empty night, Harry. Didn’t your little adventure in the lake teach you a damned thing?” I scowled some more. “Like what?” “Like life is short,” he said. “Like you don’t know when it’s going to end. Like some things, left unsaid, can’t ever be said.”
“Dude,” I said, making the word a disgusted sound. “Single guys everywhere hate you. Starting with me.”
“Taking her orders is pretty much my job now.” Molly snorted softly. “Maybe I’ll grow into it,” I said. “You don’t know.” Thomas snorted softly.
We are very loud and very self-involved, though, so most people never really understand when they’re in the presence of a spirit of the land, what the old Romans called a genius loci. So, naturally, they also didn’t understand when they were in the presence of a truly powerful spirit of the land—a potent spirit like that of, say, Vesuvius. Or Demonreach.
Upon completion, I had dubbed it the Whatsup Dock, and Thomas had chucked me twenty feet out into the lake, thus proving his utter lack of appreciation for reference-oriented humor.
“Um, Harry . . . I don’t know what these are.” I frowned at him. “Uh. What?” “I don’t know,” he repeated. He sounded genuinely surprised. “I don’t know what they are, Harry.”
“How did they do it?” “If I knew that, it wouldn’t be impossible,” Bob said, an edge to his voice. “But I can tell you this much: It predates wizardry as we know it.”
“Uh. Where are we going?” Demonreach kept walking, slow paces that nonetheless forced me to scurry to keep up. “BELOW.”
“Wait. You want me to fight off something you can’t stop?” I asked. “IT IS TIME FOR YOU TO UNDERSTAND.” “Understand what?” “OUR PURPOSE, WARDEN,” it said.
“Merlin,” I said quietly. “That’s whose sign that is, isn’t it?” Demonreach did not respond. Why say YES when silence will do? I swallowed.
“What is this chamber’s purpose?” “CONTAINMENT.” I frowned. “Uh. Of what?” “THE LEAST.”
“The least,” I said, my voice shaking. “You’re telling me that a naagloshii is one of the least.” I felt like sitting down, so I did, sort of abruptly, onto the floor. “What . . . what else is in here?”
“What are they? What’s down there?” “NIGHTMARES. DARK GODS. NAMELESS THINGS. IMMORTALS.” “Holy crap,” I whispered.
I felt a giggle coming up. “Man. Containment. Hell’s bells, containment.” I tried to stuff the giggles back down and addressed Demonreach. “This isn’t a magical stronghold,” I said. “It’s a prison. It’s a prison so hard that half a dozen freaking naagloshii are in minimum security.” “CORRECT,” Demonreach answered, “WARDEN.”
“Oh, Hell’s bells, this is bad.” I had just inherited myself a world of trouble.
My head was starting to ache again. Dammit, this was all I needed. Over the past few years, my headaches had grown steadily worse, to the point where sometimes they all but knocked me unconscious.
“Whoa,” I breathed. “Uh . . . what did you just do?” “I WARNED IT.” I blinked several times. “You . . . warned away my headache?” “THE CREATURE CAUSING IT. THE PARASITE.”
“It’s explaining the problem,” Bob reported. “It had to take it through several levels of dumbing-down before I was able to get it.” I grunted and relaxed a little. “Oh. So what’s the problem?” “Hang on. I’m trying to figure out how to dumb it down enough for you to get it.” “Thanks,” I growled.
“LESSER BEINGS ONCE KNEW TO RESPECT THEIR ELDERS,” Demonreach said. “I respect the crap out of you,” Bob complained.
“A movie?” I asked. “You can play movies?”
The opening logo bit faded to black and then familiar blue lettering appeared. It read: A LONG TIME AGO, PRETTY MUCH RIGHT HERE . . . “Okay, come on,” I said. “You’re going to buy me a lawsuit, Bob.”
“Go slow and try me.” “Merlin didn’t build the prison five times,” Bob said. “He built it once. In five different times. All at the same time.” I felt my brows knit. “Uh. He was in the same place, doing the same thing, in five different times at once?” “Exactly.”
The shot zoomed out, rising up to give a top-down view of the island, which became a blurry shape. A familiar five-pointed star blazed itself across the surface of the lake, its lines so long that the pentagon shape at its center enfolded the island entirely. Within the pentagon, a second pentacle formed, like the first one drawn in the manner to preserve and protect. The camera tightened in, and I saw that the second pentagon enfolded the entire hilltop where the cottage and ruined tower lay. The camera tightened more, and I saw more pentacles drawn, this time not flat but at dozens of
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I forced myself to look back at the projection, and saw those millions upon millions of spells resonating with one another, spreading and interlocking into an impenetrable barrier. It was, I thought, somehow like watching crystals grow. The spells powering the actual construction of it hadn’t been, alone, too much stronger than some of the work I had done—but when they’d been interconnected with their counterparts across time, they’d fed upon one another, created a perfect resonance of energy that had become something infinitely greater than the sum of its parts. Then I saw the dissonance
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“So . . . I have to stop them from attacking the island tomorrow?” “No,” Bob said, exasperated. “You have to stop them from attacking whenever it is that they actually attack.”
“Right,” I said tiredly. I had my own private purgatory full of sleeping monsters. I had a parasite in my brain that was fixing to burst my skull on its way out of me. My little island paradise was about to explode with enough energy to cook dark gods and Lord only knew what else hanging around under the island. That meant we were talking about a release of energy in the gigaton range. And if I didn’t stop someone from doing it, the continental shelf was about to have a very bad day. Oh, right. And I was supposed to kill an insane immortal—or else face the wrath of her mother. And I had to do
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