"Thomas," I said.
"Sorry," he said. He didn't sound sincere. He got up off the table with lazy grace. "Say, Harry, do you have any more shirts back there? I bled, nobly and sacrificially, all over mine."
"They're Molly's," I said.
He looked at my apprentice. "Oh? What do I have to do to get one?"
"Go ahead," Molly said. Her voice was not quite a squeak. "Take one."
"Appreciate it," Thomas said, and sauntered into the spare bedroom.
Murphy watched him walk by, openly, then gave me a rather challenging look. "What?" she asked. "He's pretty."
"I heard that," Thomas said from the other room.
"Map," I said, and Molly hurried over to the table. Butters got his stuff off of it in rapid order. He'd evidently pulled the slug out of Thomas's guts without making a horrible bloody mess of things. The bullet had to have been close to the surface. Ace's gun must have been fairly lightweight, a.25 or a.22. Maybe he'd been using cheap ammo and the round had been short on powder. Or maybe Thomas's super-abs had stopped the bullet before it could sink in.
After the table was clean, Molly spread the map out on it. It was a map of Lake Michigan and the shores around it, including Chicago and Milwaukee and on up to Green Bay. Molly passed me a pen, and I leaned over and started making marks on the map with my swollen fingers. It hurt but I ignored it. Karrin got up and came over to watch. Thomas joined us a moment later, freshly attired in a plain white T-shirt, which looked like it had been made to fit him. He's a jerk like that.
"What I'm doing here," I said, "is marking out all the nodes I remember."
"Nodes?" Butters asked.
My clumsy fingers made it a little hard to put the marks exactly where I wanted them. "The meeting points of one or more ley lines," I said. "I got to know all about them a few years ago."
"Those are like magical power cables, right?" Karrin asked.
"More or less," I said. "Sources of power that you can draw on to make major magic. And there are a lot lot of them in the Great Lakes region. I'm drawing from memory, but I'm pretty sure these are right." of them in the Great Lakes region. I'm drawing from memory, but I'm pretty sure these are right."
"They are," Molly confirmed quietly. "Auntie Lea taught them to me a few months ago."
I looked up at her, eyed my battered fingers, and said, "Then why am I doing this?"
Molly rolled her eyes and took the pen. She started marking nodes rapidly and precisely on the map, including the Well on Demonreach (though the island didn't appear on the map).
"Whoever is going to attempt the spell on Demonreach has to do it from somewhere near the shore of the lake," I said. "They're almost certainly going to be at one of these nodes-the closer to the edge of the lake, the better." I pointed out several nodes near the shore. "So we need to send the guard out to check these six locations near the edge of the lake first. After that, they go after the next nearest and so on."
"Some of those are a good way off," Karrin noted. "How fast can these little guys move?"
"Fast," I said. "Faster than anyone gives them credit. They can fly and they can take shortcuts through the Nevernever. They can get to the sites and back before sundown."
Sundown. Which was when the big, bad immortals would come out to play.
"Any questions so far?" I asked, looking at Murphy.
She jerked her chin toward my brother and said, "Thomas filled me in."
"Good," I said. "Exposition gets repetitive fast. A spell like this takes time to set up, and they won't really be able to hide it if we can get eyes on the site. Once we know which of the sites shows signs of use, we can get to it and thwart whatever lunatic is using it."
"Do we know who it is yet?" Murphy asked.
"Answer unclear," I said.
"It's got to be those Outsiders, right?" Thomas asked.
"Stands to reason. But the real question is, who is helping them them?"
I got a bunch of looks at that.
"Outsiders can't just show up in our reality," I said. "That's why they're called Outsiders in the first place. Someone has to open the door and let them in." I took a deep breath. "Which brings me to the next twist. I talked to Lily and Maeve, and they tell me that Mab is the one planning to tinker with the island."
Silence followed that.
"That's... a lie, right?" Butters asked.
"They can't lie," I said. "They physically can't. And, yes, I got them to speak directly about it. There's no confusion of signals, no room for obfuscation."
Thomas whistled quietly.
"Yeah," I said.
"Uh," Molly said. "We're up against Mab? Your boss?"
"Not necessarily," I said. "Lily and Maeve may not be lying but they could still be wrong. Lily has never been a cerebral titan. And Maeve is... maybe 'insane' is the only word that really describes it, but she's definitely firing on an odd number of cylinders. It's possible that they've been deceived."
"Or," Thomas said, "maybe they haven't."
"Or maybe they haven't," I said, nodding.
"What would that mean?" Molly asked.
"It would mean," Karrin said quietly, "that Mab sent Harry to kill Maeve because either she wanted Maeve out of the way or she wanted Harry out of the way. Which is good, because it means that she's worried that there's someone who could stop her."
"Right," I said. "Or maybe..." I frowned, studying a new thought.
"What?" Thomas asked.
I looked slowly around the room. If Mab had been taken by the contagion, which really needed a better name, that certainly meant that Lea had been taken as well-and Lea had been tutoring Molly. If it had spread into the White Court, my brother could have been exposed. Murphy was maybe the most vulnerable-she was isolated, and her behavior had changed radically over the past couple of years. Hell, Butters was the person in the room least likely to have been exposed or turned or whatever-which made him the most ideal candidate for being turned.
Paranoia-because why should the conspiracy theorists get to have all the fun?
I just couldn't see any of these people turning on me, no matter the influence. But if you could see treachery coming all that easily, Julius Caesar might have lived to a ripe old age. I'd always been slightly inclined to the paranoid. I had a sinking feeling I was going to start developing my latent potential.
I picked my words very carefully.
"Over the past several years," I said, "there have been several conflicts between two different interests. Several times, events have been driven by internal conflicts within one or both of those interests."
"Like what?" Butters asked.
"Dual interests inside the Red Court, for one," I said. "One of them trying to prevent conflict with the White Council, one of them trying to stir it up. Multiple Houses of the White Court rising up to vie for control of it. The Winter and Summer Courts posturing and interfering with each other when Winter's territory was violated by the Red Court." I didn't want to get any more specific than that. "Do you guys see what I'm getting at here?"
"Oh!" Butters said. "It's a phantom menace!"
"Ah!" Molly said.
Thomas grunted.
Karrin glanced around at all of us and then said, "Translate that from nerd to English, please."
"Someone is out there," I said. "Someone who has been manipulating events. Playing puppet master, stirring the pot, stacking the deck-"
"Mixing metaphors?" Thomas suggested.
"Fuck off. I'm just saying that this situation has the same shape as the others. Mab and Maeve at each other's throats, with Summer standing by ready to get involved, and Outsiders starting to throw their weight around."
"The Black Council," Molly whispered.
"Exactly," I said, which it wasn't. Up until earlier today, I had known someone was covertly causing the world a lot of grief-and due to their connections with some grim events within the White Council I had assumed it was a group of wizards, which was both naturally arrogant and extremely nearsighted of me. But what if I'd been wrong? What if the Black Council was just one more offshoot of one enormous, intangible enemy? If what I'd gotten from Lily was accurate, the problem was a hell of a lot bigger than I had realized.
And I did not want that problem to know that I had spotted it.
"The Black Council," I said. "A group of practitioners using dark magic to influence various events around the world. They're powerful, they're bad news, and if I'm right, they're here. If they're here, I figure it's a good bet that Sharkface and his chums-"
"Shark," Butters said. "Chums. Funny."
"Thank you for noticing," I said, and continued the sentence. "-are working for the Black Council."
"The theoretical Black Council," Karrin said.
"They're out there, definitely," I said.
Karrin smiled faintly. "If you say so, Mulder."
"I'm going to ignore that. The only question is whether or not they're here now."
Molly nodded seriously. "If they are? How do we find them?"
"We don't," I said. "There isn't enough time to go sniffing around methodically. We know someone's going to mess with the island. It doesn't really matter who's pressing the button that sets off the bomb. We just have to keep it from getting pressed. The Little Folk find us that ritual site, and then we go wreck it."
"Um," Butters said. "Not that I lack confidence in you guys, but shouldn't we be calling in the cavalry? I mean, doesn't that make more sense?"
"We are are the cavalry," I said in a flat tone. "The White Council won't help. Even if I knew the current protocols to contact them, it would take them days to verify that I am in fact alive and still me, and we only have hours. Besides, Molly's on their most-wanted list." the cavalry," I said in a flat tone. "The White Council won't help. Even if I knew the current protocols to contact them, it would take them days to verify that I am in fact alive and still me, and we only have hours. Besides, Molly's on their most-wanted list."
I didn't add in the third reason not to contact the Council-when they found out about my relationship with Mab, the monarch of a sovereign and occasionally hostile supernatural nation, they would almost certainly panic and assume that I was a massive security risk. Which would, for a variety of reasons and to a variety of degrees, be an accurate assumption. And now that I thought about it, given how my, ah, induction had been psychically broadcast to all of Faerie, there was no chance whatsoever that the Council didn't know. Knowing stuff is what they do.
Butters frowned. "The Paranetters?"
"No," I said. "The last thing we need is a small army of newbies floundering around and stumbling into us. That's asking for trouble in the short term, the long term, and every other term there might be. We can go to them for information only. We aren't dragging them in."
The little ME took off his glasses and cleaned them absently with the hem of his scrubs. "What about Lara's team? Or the Einherjaren?"
Thomas shrugged. "I could probably convince Lara to send the team somewhere."
"Ditto," Karrin said, "only with Vikings."
"Good," I said. "We might need more bodies, and we might need to cover multiple sites. Can you two get that lined up when we break?"
They nodded.
"Molly," I said. "You'll take the map up to our little scouts and tell them where to look and what to look for. Keep it simple and promise an entire pizza to whoever finds what we're after."
My apprentice grinned. "Drive their performance with competition, eh?"
"Millions of abusively obsessed sports parents can't be wrong," I said. "Butters, you'll go to the Paranetters and ask if anyone's seen or heard anything unusual anywhere even close to Lake Michigan. No one investigates anything. They just report. Get me all the information you can about any odd activity in the past week. We need to collect data as quickly as possible."
"Right," Butters said. "I've got some now, if you want."
I blinked. I mean, I knew the Internet was the fast way to spread information, but... "Seriously?"
"Well," Butters hedged. "Sort of. One of our guys is a little, um, imaginative."
"You mean paranoid?"
"Yes," Butters said. "He's got this Internet lair in his mother's basement. Keeps track of all kinds of things. Calls it observing the supernatural through statistics. Sends me a regional status update every day, and my spam blockers just cannot keep him out."
"Hngh," I said, as if I knew what a spam blocker was. "What's he got to say about today?"
"That boat rentals this morning were four hundred percent higher today than the median for this time of year, and dark forces are bound to be at work."
"Boat rentals," I muttered.
"He's a little weird, Harry," Butters said. "I mean, he has a little head-shot photo tree of the people responsible for the Cubs' billy goat curse. That kind of odd. He blows the curve."
"Tell him to take the tree down. The billy goat curse was a lone gunman," I said. "But paranoid doesn't necessarily equal wrong. Boats..."
I bowed my head and closed my eyes for a moment, thinking, but if Butter's paranoid basement freak was right, then the puzzle piece he'd handed me was woefully unhelpful. I needed more pieces. "Okay," I said. "Right. Get more data." I looked up, jerked my head at Thomas, and headed for the kitchen. "Let's go talk to our guest about his boss."
I leaned down to look into the oven through the glass door. There was no light inside, but I could make out Captain Hook's armored form huddled disconsolately on a coated cookie sheet. I knocked on the glass, and Captain Hook's helmet turned toward me.
"I want to talk to you," I said. "You're my prisoner. Don't try to fight me or run away or I'll have to stop you. I'd rather just have a nice conversation. Do you understand me?"
Hook didn't give me any indications either way. I took silence as assent.
"Okay," I said. "I'm going to open the door now." I cracked open the oven door and opened it slowly, doing my best not to loom. Tough to do when you're the size of a building relative to the person over whom you are standing. "Now just take it easy and we will-"
I'd opened the door maybe six inches when Captain Hook all but vanished in a blur of speed. I swiped an arm at him about a second and a half too late, but I didn't feel too bad about missing, because Thomas Thomas tried to snatch the little maniac, too, and missed completely. tried to snatch the little maniac, too, and missed completely.