The storage rental facility was located a couple of blocks from Deerfield Square in a fairly upscale suburban neighborhood north of Chicago proper. Most of the buildings nearby were residential, and it was tough to go more than a quarter of an hour without spotting a patrol car.
I'd picked it as the spot for my bolt hole for one reason: shady characters would stand out against the upper-middle-class background like mustard stains under a black light.
Granted, it would probably work even better if I wasn't one one of them. of them.
I used my key at the security gate, and Thomas pulled the van around to my unit, a storage unit the size of a two-car garage. I unlocked the steel door and rolled it up while Thomas got Morgan out of the van. Molly followed, and when I beckoned, she wheeled Morgan into the storage space. Mouse got down out of the van and followed us. I rolled the door back down, and called wizard light to the amulet I held up in my right hand, until its blue-white glow filled the unit.
The interior of the place was mostly empty. There was a camp cot, complete with sleeping bag and pillow, placed more or less in the middle of the room, along with a footlocker I had filled with food, bottled water, candles, and supplies. A second footlocker sat next to the first one, and was filled with hardware and magical gear-a backup blasting rod, and all manner of useful little items one could use to accomplish a surprisingly broad spectrum of thaumaturgic workings. A camp toilet with a couple of jugs of cleaning liquid sat on the opposite side of the cot.
The floor, the walls, and the ceiling were covered in sigils, runes, and magical formulae. They weren't proper wards, like the ones I had on my home, but they worked on the same principles. Without a threshold to build them upon, no single one of the formulae was particularly powerful-but there were lots lots of them. They began to gleam with a silvery glow in the light coming from my amulet. of them. They began to gleam with a silvery glow in the light coming from my amulet.
"Wow," Molly said, staring slowly around her. "What is this place, Harry?"
"Bolt hole I set up last year, in case I needed someplace quiet where I wouldn't get much company."
Morgan was looking, too, though his face was pale and drawn with pain. He swept his eyes around and said, "What's the mix?"
"Concealment and avoidance, mostly," I replied. "Plus a Faraday cage."
Morgan nodded, glancing around. "It looks adequate."
"What's that mean?" Molly asked me. "A Faraday what?"
"It's what they call it when you shield equipment from electromagnetic pulses," I told her. "You build a cage of conductive material around the thing you want to protect, and if a pulse sweeps over it, the energy is channeled into the earth."
"Like a lightning rod," Molly said.
"Pretty much," I said. "Only instead of electricity, this is built to stop hostile magic."
"Once," Morgan corrected me primly.
I grunted. "Without a threshold to work with, there's only so much you can do. The idea is to protect you from a surprise assault long enough for you to go out the back door and run."
Molly glanced at the back of the storage unit and said, "There's no door there, Harry. That's a wall. It's kind of the opposite of a door."
Morgan nodded his head at the back corner of the space, where a large rectangular area on the floor was clear of any runes or other markings. "There," he said. "Where's it come out?"
"About three long steps from one of the marked trails the Council has right of passage on in Unseelie territory," I said. I nodded at a cardboard box sitting in the rectangle. "It's cold there. There're a couple of coats in the box."
"A passage to the Nevernever," Molly breathed. "I hadn't thought of that."
"Hopefully whoever was coming after me wouldn't, either," I said.
Morgan eyed me. "One can't help noting," he said, "that this place seems ideally suited to hiding and sheltering a fugitive from the Wardens."
"Hunh," I said. "Now that you mention it, yeah. Yeah it does does seem kind of friendly to that sort of purpose." I gave Morgan an innocent look. "Just an odd coincidence, I'm sure, since I happen to seem kind of friendly to that sort of purpose." I gave Morgan an innocent look. "Just an odd coincidence, I'm sure, since I happen to be be one of those paranoid lunatics, myself." one of those paranoid lunatics, myself."
Morgan glowered.
"You came to me for a reason, Chuckles," I said. "Besides. I wasn't thinking about the Wardens nearly so much as I was ..." I shook my head and shut my mouth.
"As who, Harry?" Molly asked.
"I don't know who they are," I said. "But they've been involved in several things lately. The Darkhallow, Arctis Tor, the White Court coup. They're way too handy with magic. I've been calling them the Black Council."
"There is no Black Council," Morgan snapped, with the speed that could only have been born of reflex.
Molly and I traded a look.
Morgan let out an impatient breath. "Any actions that may have been taken are the work of isolated renegades," he said. "There is no organized conspiracy against the White Council."
"Uh-huh," I said. "Gosh, I'd have thought you'd be right on board with the conspiracy thing."
"The Council is not not divided," he said, his voice as hard and cold as I had ever heard it. "Because the moment we turn upon one another, we're finished. There divided," he said, his voice as hard and cold as I had ever heard it. "Because the moment we turn upon one another, we're finished. There is is no Black Council, Dresden." no Black Council, Dresden."
I lifted both eyebrows. "From my perspective, the Council's been turning on me for most of my life," I said. "And I'm a member. I have a robe and everything."
"You," Morgan spat, "are ..." He almost seemed to be choking on something before he blew out a breath and finished, "... vastly irritating." Morgan spat, "are ..." He almost seemed to be choking on something before he blew out a breath and finished, "... vastly irritating."
I beamed at him. "That's the Merlin's line, isn't it?" I said. "There is no conspiracy against the Council."
"It is the position of the entire entire Senior Council," Morgan shot back. Senior Council," Morgan shot back.
"Okay, smart guy," I said. "Explain what happened to you."
He glowered again, only with more purple.
I nodded sagely, then turned to Molly. "This place should protect you from most tracking spells," I said. "And the avoidance wards should keep anyone from wandering by or asking any questions."
Morgan made a growling noise.
"Suggestions, not compulsions," I said, rolling my eyes. "They're in common usage and you know it."
"What do I do if someone does come?" she asked.
"Veil and run," I said.
She shook her head. "I don't know how to open a way to the Nevernever, Harry. You haven't shown me yet."
"I can show her," Morgan said.
Both of us stopped and blinked at him.
He was very still for a second and then said, "I can do it. If she watches, maybe she'll learn something." He glared at me. "But doors open both ways, Dresden. What if something comes in in through it?" through it?"
Mouse went over to the open space and settled down about six inches away from it. He sighed once, shifted his weight a bit, and went to sleep again, though his ears twitched at every noise.
I went to the first footlocker and opened it, took out a boxed fruit drink, and passed it to him. "Your blood sugar's getting low. It's making you grumpy. But if you do get an unexpected visitor from the other side ..." I went to the second locker, opened it, and drew out a pump-action shotgun, its barrel cut to well below the minimum legal length. I checked it, and passed the weapon to Molly. "It's loaded with a mix of steel shot and rock salt. Between that and Mouse, it should discourage anything that comes through."
"Right," Molly said. She checked the weapon's chamber and then worked the pump, chambering a shell. She double-checked the safety, and then nodded at me.
"You taught her guns," Morgan said. "But not how to open passages to the Nevernever."
"There's enough trouble right here in the real world," I said.
Morgan grunted. "True enough. Where are you going?"
"Only one place I can go."
He nodded. "Edinburgh."
I turned toward the door and opened it. I looked from Morgan with his juice box to Molly with her shotgun. "You two play nice."
Chapter Thirteen
Wizards and technology don't get on so well, and that makes travel sort of complicated. Some wizards seemed to be more of a bad influence on technology than others, and if any of them were harder on machinery than me, I hadn't met them yet. I'd been on a jet a couple of times and had one bad experience-just one. After the plane's computers and guidance system went bad, and we had to make an emergency landing on a tiny commercial airfield, I wasn't eager to repeat the experience.
Buses were better, especially if you sat toward the back, but even they had problems. I hadn't been on a bus trip longer than three or four hundred miles without winding up broken down next to the highway in the middle of nowhere. Cars could work out, especially if they were fairly old models-the fewer electronics involved, the better. Even those machines, though, tended to provide you with chronic problems. I'd never owned a car that ran more than maybe nine days in ten-and most of them were worse than that.
Trains and ships were the ideal, especially if you could keep yourself a good way from the engines. Most wizards, when they traveled, stuck with ships and trains. Either that or they cheated-like I was about to do.
Back at the beginning of the war with the Vampire Courts, the White Council, with the help of a certain wizard private investigator from Chicago who shall remain nameless, negotiated the use of Ways through the near reaches of the Nevernever controlled by the Unseelie Court. The Nevernever, the world of ghosts and spirits and fantastic beings of every description, exists alongside our own mortal reality-but it isn't the same shape. That meant that in places, the mortal world touched upon the Nevernever at two points that could be very close together, while in the mortal realm, they were very far apart. In short, use of the Ways meant that anyone who could open a path between worlds could use a major shortcut.
In this case, it meant I could make the trip from Chicago, Illinois, to Edinburgh, Scotland, in about half an hour.
The closest entry point to where I wanted to go in the Nevernever was a dark alley behind a building that had once been used for meat packing. A lot of things had died in that building, not all of them cleanly and not all of them cows. There's a dark sense of finality to the place, a sort of ephemeral quality of dread that hangs so lightly on the air that the unobservant might not notice it at all. In the middle of the alley, a concrete staircase led down to a door that was held shut with both boards and chains-talk about overkill.
I walked down the steps to the bottom of the stairs, closed my eyes for a moment, and extended my otherworldly senses, not toward the door, but toward the section of concrete beside it. I could feel the thinness of the world there, where energy pulsed and hummed just beneath the seemingly rigid surface of reality.
It was a hot night in Chicago, but it wouldn't be on the Ways. I wore a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, and a couple of pairs of socks beneath my hiking shoes. My heavy leather duster had me sweating. I gathered up my will, reached out my hand, and with a whisper of "Aparturum," "Aparturum," I opened a Way between worlds. I opened a Way between worlds.
Honestly, it sounds quite a bit more dramatic than it looks. The surface of the concrete wall rippled with a quick flickering of color and began to put out a soft glow. I took a deep breath, gripped my staff in both hands, and stepped directly forward into the concrete.
My flesh passed through what should have been stone, and I emerged in a dark wood that lay covered in frost and a thin layer of snow. At least this time the ground in Chicago had been more or less level with the ground in the Nevernever. Last time, I'd had a three-inch drop I hadn't expected, and I'd fallen on my ass into the snow. No harm done, I suppose, but this part of the Nevernever was just chock-full of things you did not not want to think you were clumsy or vulnerable. want to think you were clumsy or vulnerable.
I took my bearings with a quick look around. The woods were the same, all three times I'd been through them. A hillside sank down ahead of me, and climbed steadily into the night behind me. At the top of the small mountain I stood upon, I was told, was a narrow and bitterly cold pass that led into the interior of the Unseelie Mountains, to Mab's stronghold of Arctis Tor. Below me, the land sank into foothills and then into plains, where Mab's authority ended and that of Titania the Summer Queen began.
I stood at a crossroads-which was only sensible, since I'd arrived from Chicago, one of the great crossroads of the world. One trail led upslope and down. The other crossed it at almost perfect right angles, and ran along the face of the hillside. I took a left, following the face of the hillside in a counterclockwise direction, also known as widdershins, in the parlance of the locals. The trail ran between frozen trees, their branches bowed beneath their burden of frost and snow.
I moved quickly, but not quickly enough to slip and blow out an ankle or brain myself on a low-hanging branch. The White Council had Mab's permission to move through the woods, but they were by no means safe.
I found that out for myself about fifteen minutes into my walk, when snow suddenly fell softly from the trees all around, and silent black shapes descended to encircle me. It happened quickly, and in perfect silence-maybe a dozen spiders the size of ponies alit upon the frozen ground or clung to the trunks and branches of the surrounding trees. They were smooth-surfaced, sharp-edged creatures, like orbweavers, long-limbed and graceful and deadly-looking. They moved with an almost delicate precision, their bodies of a color of grey and blue and white that blended flawlessly with the snowy night.
The spider who had come down onto the trail directly in front of me raised its two forelegs in warning, and revealed fangs longer than my forearm, dripping with milky-white venom.
"Halt, man-thing," said the creature.
That was actually scarier than the mere appearance of economy-sized arachnids. Between its fangs, I could see a mouth moving-a mouth that looked disturbingly human. Its multiple eyes gleamed like beads of obsidian. Its voice was a chirping, buzzing thing. "Halt, he whose blood will warm us. Halt, intruder upon the Wood of the Winter Queen."
I stopped and looked around the circle of spiders. None of them seemed to be particularly larger or smaller than the others. If I had to fight my way clear, there wasn't any obvious weak link to exploit. "Greetings," I said, as I did. "I am no intruder, honored hunters. I am a Wizard of the White Council, and I and my folk have the Queen's permission to tread these paths."
The air around me shivered with chitters and hisses and clicks.
"Man-things speak often with false tongues," said the lead spider, its forelimbs thrashing the air in agitation.
I held up my staff. "I guess they always have one of these, too, huh?"
The spider hissed, and venom bubbled from the tips of its fangs. "Many a man-thing bears such a long stick, mortal."
"Careful, legs," I said. "I'm on speaking terms with Queen Mab herself. I don't think you want to play it like this."
The spider's legs shifted in an undulating motion, and the spider rippled two or three feet closer to me. The other spiders all shifted, too, moving a bit nearer. I didn't like that, not even a little. If one of them jumped, they'd be all over me-and there were just too many of the damn big things to defend myself against them effectively.
The spider laughed, the sound hollow and mocking. "Mortals do not speak to the Queen and live to tell the tale."
"It lies," hissed the other spiders, the phrase a low buzzing around me. "And its blood is warm."
I eyed all those enormous fangs and had an acutely uncomfortable flashback to Morgan driving his straw through the top of that damn juice box.
The spider in front of me flowed a little to the left and a little to the right, the graceful motion intended to distract me from the fact that it had gotten about a foot closer to me. "Man-thing, how are we to know what you truly are?"
In my professional opinion, you rarely get handed a straight line that good.
I thrust the tip of my staff forward, along with my gathered will, focusing it into an area the size of my own clenched fist as I shouted, "Forzare!" "Forzare!"
An invisible force hammered into the lead spider, right in its disturbing mouth. It lifted the huge beast off all eight of its feet, drove it fifteen feet backward through the air, and ended at the trunk of an enormous old oak. The spider smacked into it like an enormous water bottle, making a hideous splattering sound upon impact. It bounced off the tree and landed on the frozen ground, its legs all quivering and jerking spasmodically. Maybe three hundred pounds of snow shaken loose by the impact came plummeting down from the oak tree's branches and half buried the body.
Everything went still and silent.
I narrowed my eyes and swept my gaze around the circle of monstrous arachnids. I said nothing.
The spider nearest its dead companion shifted its weight warily from leg to leg. Then, in a much quieter voice, it trilled, "Let the wizard pass."
"Damn right let him pass," I muttered under my breath. Then I strode forward as though I intended to smash anything else that got in my way.
The spiders scattered. I kept walking without slowing, breaking stride, or looking back. They didn't know how fast my heart was beating or how my legs were trembling with fear. And as long as they didn't, I would be just fine.
After a hundred yards or so, I did look back-only to see the spiders gathered over the body of their dead companion. They were wrapping it up in silk, their fangs twitching and jerking hungrily. I shuddered and my stomach twisted onto itself.