Cold Days

easier to move across, being mostly an irregular, soggy carpet of years and years’ worth of fallen leaves. The scent of molds was thick as we went through, disturbing them.

We emerged into the clearing at the top of the hill, and I stopped in my tracks six inches before I would have come out of the shadow of the forest. Thomas bumped into me. I looked partly over my shoulder with a little push of air through my teeth. He elbowed me in the lower back.

The hilltop had been closed in a circle of starlight.

I didn’t know how else to describe it. I didn’t know what I was looking at. Twelve feet off the ground was a band of illumination, glowing rather than glaring, something that filled the hilltop with gentle light, like an enormous ring floating above the earth. It was of precise width, as if drawn with a compass, and I knew that it was exactly one foot thick—twelve inches. The color was something I had never seen before, changing subtly moment to moment, holding silver and blue and gold, but it wasn’t any of those things and . . . and words fail. But it was beautiful, like love, like music, like truth, something that passed through the eyes and plunged straight to the soul. Gentle, softly glowing light slid from the outer edge of the circle like a sheet of water from an elegant fountain, falling to the ground in a slow-motion liquid curtain of pure light, hiding what was behind it.

I felt the grasshopper move up beside me, her eyes wide. “Boss,” she whispered. “This would make my mom talk in her church voice. What are we looking at?”

“Merlin’s work, I think,” I breathed. “That circle. I think it’s part of the island’s architecture.”

“Wow.”

“I . . . It’s beautiful,” Sarissa murmured. “I’ve never seen anything like it. And I’ve been looking at incredible things my whole life.”

I spoke something I was certain was true in the same moment that I understood it. “It had to be beautiful. It had to be made from beauty. There is too much ugly inside for it to be made of anything else.”

“What do you mean, ugly?” Karrin asked, her voice hushed.

“Later,” I said. I shook my head and blinked my eyes several times. “City to save.” I tried to find something about the circle in my intellectus, but I had apparently already learned everything I could learn about it that way. I knew its exact dimensions; I knew it was part of the structure of the massive spell that made the Well exist. And that was it. It was like the entire thing had been . . . classified, top secret, need-to-know only—and apparently I didn’t need to know.

Which, I supposed, made sense. We were talking about a massive security system.

Molly stooped and picked up a rock. She gave it a gentle underhand toss at the wall of light and it passed through without making a ripple. “Safe?” she asked.

“I doubt it. Give me something that isn’t a part of the island,” I said.

I heard her slip her backpack off her shoulder and open a zipper. Then she touched my arm and passed me a granola bar wrapped in plastic. I tossed it at the wall, and when it touched, it was destroyed. It didn’t go violently. It simply became a flicker of softly glowing light in the precise shape of the bar of “food.”

Then it was gone.

“That also was pretty,” Thomas noted. “In a completely lethal kind of way.”

“Look who’s talking,” Molly said.

“It’s not all that high,” he said. “Maybe I could jump it.”

“Molly,” I said.

She passed me another granola bar, and I threw it over the wall.

The wall destroyed it in midair.

“Maybe not,” Thomas said.

“Okay,” Karrin said. “So . . . How do we get through it?”

I thought about it for a second. Then I licked my lips and said, “We don’t. I do.”

“Alone?” Thomas said. “Sort of defeats the point of bringing us. Also, death. Bad plan.”

“I think it will let me through,” I said.

“You think?”

“Look,” I said. “Me and the island are . . . kind of partners.”

“Oh, right,” Thomas said. He looked at Karrin and said, “Harry’s a geosexual.”

Karrin arched an eyebrow and gave me a look.

“You can’t go alone,” Molly said, her voice worried.

“Looks like it’s the only way I can go,” I said. “So we do this Ulysses-style. I go in, I figure a way to let down the gate and then we sack Troy.”

“Can you do that?” Karrin asked.

I licked my lips and looked at the wall of light. “I’d better be able to.”

“You’re tired,” Molly said.

“I’m fine.”

“Your hands are shaking.”

Were they? They were. “They are fine also.”

I didn’t feel tired. Given how much magic I’d been throwing around this day, I should have been comatose with fatigue hours ago, but I just didn’t feel it. That wasn’t a good sign. Maybe Butters had been right: No matter how much juice I got from the mantle of Winter, bodies have limits. I was pushing mine.

I passed the Winchester to Thomas and took off my new duster. At his lifted eyebrow, I said, “Not of the island. Hold ’em for me.”

He exhaled and took them. “No reruns, okay?”

“Pfft,” I said. “Be like sneaking into the movies.”

Karrin touched my arm. “Just don’t say that you’ll be right back. You’ll jinx it.”

“I am a professional wizard,” I said. “I know all about jinxes.”

Having said that, I checked to make sure my shirt wasn’t red. It wasn’t. Then I realized I was putting this off because if I was wrong, I was about to go join Yoda and Obi-Wan in blue-light country. So I took a deep breath and strode forward into the beautiful, deadly barrier.

Chapter Forty-seven

I lived.

Just in case anyone was wondering.

I stepped through and the liquid light poured over me like warm syrup. There was a little bit of a tingle as it passed over the surface of my body, and then it was gone.

As were my clothes. Like, completely.

I had sort of hoped that they would stay—the way Superman’s unitard stays mostly invincible because it’s really close to his skin. Plus I hadn’t felt like stripping in front of everyone for something so relatively trivial as preserving my garage-sale wardrobe and, more important, I didn’t think I had time to start playing Mr. Rogers while someone screwed around with my island. City to save. Check out my focus.

Of course . . . going into battle full commando could be problematic.

On the other hand, every single time Mab had come at me during my recovery—every time—I’d been just like this, without resources of any kind except what I carried within me. I wasn’t a big believer in coincidence. Had she been trying only to strengthen me generally? Or had she been preparing me for this exact situation?

Could Mab see that far ahead? Or was this simply a case of superior preparedness proving itself in action? What was it I’d heard in a martial arts studio at some point? Learn to fight naked and you can never be disarmed. Which is fine, I guess, as long as there aren’t mosquitoes.

I got low and stayed still and opened my senses.

First thing: I was inside a ritual circle, one that was currently functioning, being used for a spell. It wasn’t the cheap and quick kind I was used to, I guessed, or it would have been broken when I crossed it. Maybe it had kept its integrity because as part of the island, I already existed on either side of the circle. There were certain creatures