Cold Days

water, flinging the Redcap off of it at full speed. He’d been doing maybe sixty when I hit him, and he skipped twice across the water’s surface before he slammed into a swell from the Water Beetle’s wake and vanished under the surface.

Thomas, meanwhile, had seized another opportunity. As the Jet Skis split off to swing around us, he whirled the steering wheel, turning the Water Beetle sharply to her left. I heard one scream, and a crunching sound accompanied by a heavy reverberation in the deck beneath my feet as a Jet Ski slammed into our boat’s nose—with results very similar to a deer slamming into a speeding semi.

“Hexus!” Molly shouted from where she was crouched on the deck. Her aim was good, even if her hex wouldn’t carry the same kind of raw power mine did. The Jet Ski Thomas had missed suddenly began billowing smoke, and its roaring engine cut away to a gasping, labored rattle.

I spun to face the other direction, pitching another hex at the two Jet Skis passing on the far side of the ship. They were at the edge of my range and racing away, so my hex didn’t convince their engines to tear themselves apart, the way the short-range, focused curse had the Redcap’s vehicle—but one of the Jet Skis abruptly began coasting to a stop, and the other took a sharp right turn and then simply went on turning in a furious, continuous circle.

Thomas opened up the throttle all the way, and the Water Beetle left the lamed flotilla of would-be assassins bobbing in her wake.

I didn’t relax until I’d swept the ship’s exterior with my eyes and magical senses alike to make sure no one was hanging on to a rail or something. Then, just to be certain, I double-checked the cabin and hold, until I was certain that no one had infiltrated the boat in the chaos.

And then I sank down in relief on a chair in the cabin. But only for a second. Then I grabbed the first-aid kit and went up to the bridge to see to Thomas.

Molly was sprawled on the deck in the morning sunshine, exhausted from her efforts, and obviously asleep. She snored a little. I stepped over her and went up to my brother. He saw me and grunted. “We should be pulling into port in another fifteen minutes,” he said. “I think we’re clear.”

“That won’t last,” I said. “How’s your arm?”

“Through and through,” Thomas said. “Not too bad. Just stop the leak.”

“Hold still,” I told him. Then I started working on his arm. It wasn’t bad, as bullet wounds go. It had entered the lean muscle at the bottom of his triceps in back and come out the other side, leaving a small hole. That had probably been the Redcap, then—the rounds from his M4 would be armor-piercing, metal-jacketed military rounds, specifically designed to punch long, fairly small holes. I cleaned it up with disinfectant, got a pressure bandage positioned over the holes, and taped it down. “Okay, you can stop complaining now.”

Thomas, who had been silent the whole time, gave me a look.

“You can have your harem change out the bandages later,” I said. “How busy are you today?”

“Oh,” he mused. “I don’t know. I mean, I’ve got to get a new shirt now.”

“After that,” I asked, “would you like to help me save the city? If you don’t already have plans.”

He snorted. “You mean, would I like to follow you around, wondering what the hell is going on because you won’t tell me everything, then get in a fight with something that is going to leave me in intensive care?”

“Uh-huh,” I said, nodding, “pretty much.”

“Yeah,” he said. “Okay.”

Chapter Nineteen

We took Thomas’s car back to his apartment.

“You got the Hummer fixed,” I said approvingly.

He snorted. “After I let you ride in it, it went undamaged for what, about thirty minutes?”

“Come on,” I said, stretching out my legs. There was room. “It was at least an hour. How you doing back there, Molly?”

From the backseat, Molly snored. I smiled. The grasshopper had shambled to the truck and flung herself down on the backseat without saying a word.

“She okay?” Thomas asked.

“She pushed it today,” I said.

“With that mist thing? She does illusions all the time, I thought.”

“Dude,” I said. “It was hundreds of yards long and hundreds of yards across. That’s a huge freaking image to project, especially over water.”

“Because water grounds out magic?” Thomas asked.

“Exactly right,” I said. “And be glad it does, or the Sidhe would have been chucking lightning bolts at us instead of bullets. Molly had to sustain her image while the energy from which it was made kept on draining away. And then she hexed one of the Jet Skis. For her, that’s some serious heavy lifting. She’s tired.”

He frowned. “Like that time you collapsed at my dad’s place?”

“More or less,” I said. “Molly’s still relatively new at this. The first few times you hit your wall, it just about knocks you out. She’ll be fine.”

“So how come the Sidhe didn’t hex up their own engines? I mean, I’m guessing a Jet Ski would run for about ten seconds with you on it.”

“I’d give it ten or fifteen minutes,” I said. “And it worked for the Sidhe because they aren’t human.”

“Why should that make a difference?”

I shrugged. “No one really knows. Ebenezar thinks it’s because human beings are inherently conflicted creatures. Magic responds to your thoughts and to your emotions—and people’s thoughts and emotions are constantly conflicting with one another. The way he figures it, that means that there’s a kind of turbulence around people with magical talent. The turbulence is what causes mechanical failure.”

“Why?”

I shrugged again. “It’s just the way things are. The specific effects this turbulence causes tend to change slowly over time. Three hundred years ago, it made cream turn sour, disturbed animals, and tended to encourage minor skin infections in wizards. Gave them blemishes and moles and pockmarks.”

“Fun,” Thomas said.

“Yeah, I’m not upset about missing out on that kind of fun,” I said. “Then sometime between then and now, it segued into triggering odd flashes of hallucination in the people who hung around in close proximity to us. You know the whole ergot theory of history? People with talent, especially people who didn’t even know they had it, probably had a lot to do with that. Now it mucks around with probability where machines are concerned.”

Thomas eyed me. Then he carefully powered off his truck’s stereo.

“Funny,” I said. After a moment I added, “I don’t mean to do it. I mean, I try not to do it, but . . .”

“I don’t mind if you break my stuff,” Thomas said. “I’ll just make Lara buy me new stuff.”

Lara, Thomas’s half sister, was the power behind the throne of the White Court of vampires. Lara was gorgeous, brilliant, and sexier than a Swedish bikini team hiking up a mountain of money. As a potential enemy, she was a little scary. As an occasional ally, she was freaking terrifying.

I wasn’t ever going to tell Thomas this, but when I’d been arranging my own murder, Lara had been the runner-up on my list of possible administrators of my demise. I mean, hey, if you’re going to go, there are worse ways to do it than to be taken out by the freaking queen of the world’s succubi.

“How’s Lara doing?” I asked.

“She’s Lara,” Thomas said. “Always doing business, planning plans, scheming schemes.”

“Like the Brighter Future Society?” I asked. The BFS was an alliance of unlikely bedfellows of the supernatural scene in Chicago, headquartered out of a small but genuine castle, guarded by hired guns from Valhalla.

Thomas bared his teeth in a smile. “That was Lara’s idea, actually. Marcone imported that freaking castle and had it rebuilt over your old boardinghouse. Lara says it’s impregnable.”

“The Death Star was impregnable,” I said. “So Lara got in bed with Marcone?”

“She tried,” Thomas said, “but Marcone kept it purely business. That’s two men who have turned her down in the same century. She was annoyed.”