Cold Days

“OUR PURPOSE, WARDEN,” it said. “FOLLOW ME.”

Then it went down the stairs and vanished into the unknown.

“Here there be monsters!” Bob whispered, half hysterically. “Run! Run already!”

“Think it’s a little late for that,” I said.

But for a second there, I thought about taking his advice. Some part of me wondered what Tibet looked like this time of year. For a minute, it seemed like an awesome idea to go find out.

But only for a minute.

Then I swallowed, gripped the plastic glow stick in fingers that felt very slippery for some reason, and followed Demonreach down into the dark.

Chapter Sixteen

I don’t know how far down those stairs went.

I’m not even kidding. I’m not taking poetic license. The stairs went down twelve steps, took a right angle, and went down twelve more, took another right-angled turn, and went down twelve more, and so on. I stopped counting in the low two hundreds and resorted to my awareness of the island to feel out the rest of them. Duh. Seventeen hundred and twenty-eight—twelve cubed.

The stairs were about eight inches each, which meant eleven hundred feet and change, straight down. That was well below the water level of the lake. Hell, it was below the bottom of the lake. The staircase echoed with deep, groaning sounds pitched almost too low to be heard. In the wan light of the chemical glow stick, the place took on a kind of amusement-park fun-house atmosphere, where you suddenly realize that you’ve been routed into a circle with no apparent way out.

“Down, down to goblin town you go, my lad!” I sang in a hearty, badly pitched baritone. I was panting. “Ho, ho, my lad!”

Demonreach’s glowing eyes flicked toward me. Maybe irritated.

“Oh, come on,” I said. “You never saw the Rankin-Bass animated version of The Hobbit? The one they made before they did the movies in New Zealand?”

It didn’t answer.

“Harry,” Bob muttered at me. “Stop trying to piss it off.”

“I’m bored,” I said. “And I’m not looking forward to coming back up. I get that we’re going a long, long way down, but couldn’t we use an elevator? Ooh, or a fireman’s pole. Then it’d be like going down to the Batcave. Way more fun.” I raised my voice a little. “And more efficient.”

Maybe it was my imagination, but when I said that last, I thought I saw Demonreach’s steady pace slow for a thoughtful second or two.

Nah.

“Hey, how come you called me Warden?” I asked. “I mean, I’ve been a Warden, but there are a lot of other guys who are better at it than me. I’m not exactly the poster child.”

“WARDEN,” Demonreach said. “NOW THERE ARE MANY. FIRST THERE WAS ONE.”

I counted down the last ten steps out loud, stopped at two, and jumped over the last one to the floor beneath with both feet. My hiking boots clomped on the stone.

We had reached a small chamber, the floor and walls lined in the same stone used in the lighthouse and cottage. I put a hand on them and could feel them quivering with power, with the dissonance of conflicting energies. Actually, looking back, I saw that at some point, the walls of the stairway, and the stairs themselves, had begun to be constructed of the same material—every single stone of it invested with impossible amounts of power and skill.

“Uh,” I said. “Question?”

Demonreach had stopped at a stone doorway shape in the wall. It was surrounded with larger stones covered in intricate carving. The burning eyes turned toward me.

“Um. Who made this place?”

It didn’t speak. It pointed to the door. I looked. There was a sign in the middle of it, a sigil. It wasn’t something I recognized as part of any set of runes that I knew, but I knew I’d seen it somewhere before. It took me several seconds of sorting through memories to run it down—I’d seen it on the spine of a very, very, very old journal on my mentor’s bookshelf.

“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. The original Merlin was the real deal, Arthur and Excalibur and everything. Merlin had, according to legend, created the White Council of Wizards from the chaos of the fall of the Roman Empire. He plunged into the flames of the burning Library of Alexandria to save the most critical texts, helped engineer the Catholic Church as a vessel to preserve knowledge and culture during Europe’s Dark Ages, and leapt tall cathedrals in a single bound. There were endless stories about Merlin. Popular theory among contemporary wizards was that they were more apocryphal than accurate. Hell, I’d always figured it that way, too.

But staring around at this place, I suddenly felt less sure.

“WATCH.”

Demonreach stretched out one long arm, still shadowy and indistinct in the feeble light of my glow stick. It touched one of the stones framing the door, and the stone erupted into emerald light.

I hissed and shielded my eyes against it, and took note of the fact that the air suddenly crackled with power.

Demonreach touched a second stone, which also began to glow. When it did, the sense of building energy was palpable in the air, and the hairs on my arms began to stand up. That was when I got what was happening here: Demonreach had wards around whatever was beyond the door—much like the wards that had been put into position around Butters’s apartment. Only they had to be fueled with freaking mystic plutonium or something to generate this much ambient energy simply from being bypassed.

The giant spirit reached for another stone, but paused before touching it.

“REMEMBER.”

The stones. They were like a security keypad. Demonreach was giving me the combination to its security system. And given how much dangerous energy was in the air right now, it stood to reason that if I ever got the combination wrong, well . . . you’d need a bloodhound, a Ouija board, a forensic anthropologist, and a small army of Little Folk to find what was left of me.

I took careful note of which stones the spirit had indicated. Really careful note. Demonreach touched the last stone, and the granite doorway in front of us didn’t move, exactly—it simply stopped being there. The leashed violence in the air, that angry, watchful energy dwindled and vanished, and Demonreach moved forward through the doorway. I followed.

We emerged into a familiar cavern, and once again my chest lit up with phantom remembered pain.

It was surprisingly well lit, for a subterranean chamber. When I’d last been there, I hadn’t been in any shape to go over the details, but I could now see that several glimmering clusters of crystal in the floor, some kind of pale green quartz maybe, gave off a dim glow. No single patch of them really provided adequate illumination, but as a whole they filled most of the cavern with wan green-white light.

Roots burrowed down into the cavern through its ceiling, though I had no idea how in the hell they’d gotten there. No plant sent roots down as deep beneath the surface as this chamber. No normal, earthly plant did, anyway. Water dripped slowly down from above, and where it fell from the ceiling was where the patches of crystal lay.

Over to one side of the chamber was a hollowed-out section of soft earth no deeper than a very shallow bathtub, about seven feet long. I recognized it, even without seeing the withered vines that lay strewn forgotten all around the area. It was my sickbed, where my body had lain for months while Mab and Demonreach exerted themselves to keep the pumps working while my mind and spirit were doing a Casper impersonation.

My chest panged again and I looked away. Waking up from that particular nap had been one of the top two or three most painful moments of my life. Something inside me had changed. Not because of the pain of the experience—though that had been profound. Staring at that place, I felt as if the pain had been a side effect of a