Cold Days

“What did you find out?” he called. He started untying the lines and then leapt nimbly up to the deck of the Water Beetle. Molly appeared from the cabin, looking as though she’d been sleeping a few seconds before.

I ran down the dock and hopped up to the ship’s deck. “A bunch of people are gonna be mad at me, I’ve got some kind of medical issue that’s going to kill me in a while if I don’t deal with it, oh, and the island’s blowing up tomorrow and taking a whole lot of the country with it if I don’t fix it.”

Thomas gave me a steady look. “So,” he said. “Same old, same old.”

“I think it’s nice that there are some things in this world you can rely on,” I said.

My brother snorted and started the Water Beetle’s engines. We backed away from the dock, and then he turned, gunned it, and headed back toward town. Like I said before, the boat isn’t a racing machine, but it’s got some horsepower in it, and as the sun rose properly, we were zooming over the orange-gold water, leaving a huge V-shaped wake behind us, while I stood at the front of the boat, my hands on the railing.

I felt it when the dawn broke, the way you almost always can if you stop to pay attention. Something subtle and profound simply shifted in the air around me. Even if I’d been blindfolded, I would have felt the transition, the way that the winds and currents of energy broadly known as magic began to gust and shift, driven by the light of the oncoming sun.

I wasn’t close enough to any of the Ways to the realms of Faerie to be able to sense whether they had been reopened, but it made sense that they would be. Sunrise tends to disperse and dissolve patterns of magical energy—not because magic is inherently a force of the night so much as because the dawn is inherently a force of new beginnings and renewal.

Every sunrise tended to erode ongoing enchantments. A spell spread so wide that it curtained the whole of Faerie away from the mortal world would by necessity be rather thin and fragile. When the sun hit it, it would be like about a zillion magnifying glasses focusing light on old newsprint. It would blacken and wither away. My mind treated me to a gruesome little collage of images—the darkest beings of Faerie suddenly pouring forth from every creepy shadow and unsettling alley and dangerous-looking old abandoned building in the city. You’d think my mind would find better things to do, like fantasize about improbably friendly women or something.

Molly came up and stood with me, facing ahead. I looked at her obliquely. The rising sun behind us painted her hair gold but left her face lightly veiled in shadow. She didn’t look young anymore.

I mean, don’t get me wrong; it wasn’t like her hair had gone grey and her teeth fell out. But there had always been a sense of energy and life and simple joy welling up from the grasshopper. It had been her default setting, and I hadn’t realized how much I had loved that about her.

Now her blue eyes looked weary, wary. She wasn’t looking at the beauty in life as much as she once had. Her eyes scanned for dangers both nearby and farther down the road, heavy with caution and made wise by pain—and they had far, far more steel in them than I had ever seen there before.

Months of training with the Leanansidhe while fighting a street war will do that.

Maybe if I’d been tougher on the grasshopper early on, it wouldn’t have come as such a shock to her. Maybe if I’d focused on different aspects of her training, she would have been better prepared.

Maybe, maybe, maybe, but I was kidding myself. Molly’s eyes were always going to end up like that sooner or later—just like mine had.

This business doesn’t play nice with children.

“I told you,” Molly said, never looking toward me. “It’s in the past. Leave it there.”

“You listening to my head, kiddo?”

Her mouth twitched. “Only when I want to hear the roar of the ocean.”

I grinned. I liked that so much better than all the “Sir Knights” I’d been getting lately.

“How much can you tell me?” she asked.

I looked at her eyes for a moment while she stared ahead and made a decision.

“Everything,” I said quietly. “But not right this second. We’ve got priorities to focus on first. We can get into the details after we’ve dealt with the immediate threat.”

“Maeve?” Molly asked.

“And the island.” I told her about the danger to Demonreach without going into specifics about the island’s purpose. “So if I don’t stop it, boom.”

Molly frowned. “I can’t imagine how you can stop an event from happening if you don’t know who is going to do it, and both where and when it’s going to happen.”

“If the problem was simple and easy, it wouldn’t require wizards to fix it,” I said. “The impossible we do immediately. The unimaginable takes a little while.”

“I’m serious,” she said.

“So am I,” I replied. “Be of good cheer. I think I know the right guy to talk to about this one.”

* * *

Half the sun was over the horizon when Chicago’s skyline came into sight. I just basked in that for a minute. Yeah, I know, stupid, but it’s my town and I’d been gone for what felt like a lifetime. It was good to see the autumn sun gleaming off of glass and steel.

Then I felt myself tense, and I pushed myself up from where I’d been leaning on the forward rail. I took a moment to look around me very carefully. I didn’t know what had set off my instincts, but they were doing the same routine they’d learned to do every time Mab had been about to spring her daily assassination attempt, and I couldn’t have ignored them if I’d wanted to.

I didn’t see anything, but then I heard it—the humming roar of small, high-revolution engines.

“Thomas!” I shouted over the snorting of the Water Beetle’s motor. I gestured toward my ear and then spun my hand in a wide circle.

It wasn’t exactly tactical sign language, but Thomas got the message. From his vantage point in the wheelhouse atop the cabin, he swept his gaze around warily. Then his gaze locked on something northwest of us.

“Uh-oh,” I breathed.

Thomas spun the wheel and rolled the Water Beetle onto a southwesterly course. I hustled over to the ladder up to the wheelhouse and stood on the top rung, which put my head about level with Thomas’s. I shielded my eyes from the glare of the oncoming sun with one hand and peered northwest.

There were five Jet Skis flying toward us over the water. Thomas had altered course enough to buy us a little time, but I could see at a glance that the Jet Skis were moving considerably faster than we were. Thomas opened the throttle all the way and passed me, I kid you not, a shiny brass telescope.

“Seriously?” I asked him.

“Ever since those pirate movies came out, they’re everywhere,” he said. “I’ve got a sextant, too.”

“Any tent you have is a sex tent,” I muttered darkly, extending the telescope.

Thomas smirked.

I peered through the thing, holding myself steady with one hand. Given the speed and bounce of the boat, it wasn’t easy, but I finally managed to get a prolonged glimpse of the Jet Skis. I couldn’t see much in the way of detail yet—but the guy on the lead Jet Ski was wearing a bright red beret.

“We’ve definitely got a problem,” I said.

“Friends of yours?”

“The Redcap and some of his Sidhe buddies, it looks like,” I said, lowering the telescope. “They’re Winter muscle, but I think they’re mostly medieval types. That gives us a couple of minutes to—”

There was a sharp hissing sound and something unseen slapped the telescope out of my hand, sending it spinning through the air in a whirl of torn metal and tiny shards of broken glass.

The report of a gunshot followed a second later.

“Holy crap!” I sputtered, and dropped down to lie flat on the deck. There was another hiss and a loud cracking sound as a round smacked into the wall of the cabin above me.

“Medieval? Are you sure you know what that means?” Thomas demanded. He heeled the boat about a bit and then snaked it back in the original direction, following a serpentine course. That would make us a harder target—but it also meant that we were going slower, cruising in a zigzag while our pursuers were rushing forward in a straight