Cold Days

Lily frowned and studied me, her expression drawn with worry. “You . . .” She shook her head. “God, Harry. You really mean it. You aren’t her creature?”

“No,” I said. “Not yet.”

Lily nodded and seemed to think for a moment. Then she asked, “Would it pain you for me to touch you?”

“Why?” I asked.

“Because I must know,” she said. “I must know if it is upon you yet.”

“What?”

She shook her head. “I cannot risk answering any questions until I am sure.”

I grunted. I thought about it. Yeah, I could keep my inner caveman on a leash, if it meant getting some answers. “Okay,” I said. “Go ahead.”

Lily nodded. Then she walked toward me. She reached up and her slender, warm fingers touched my forehead, like a mother checking a child for a temperature. She stayed that way for a long moment, her eyes distant.

Then abruptly she let out a little cry and flung her arms around me. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, oh, oh. We thought you taken.”

Okay, inner caveman or not, when a girl that pretty is giving you a full-body hug, you don’t come up with the wittiest dialogue. “Uh. I haven’t had a girlfriend for a while now.”

Lily leaned her head back and laughed. The sound of it was like eating hot cookies, melting into a warm shower, and snuggling a fuzzy puppy all at the same time. “Enough,” she said. “Enough, come out. He is a friend.”

And, just like that, faeries popped out of absolutely everything in sight. Elves, tiny humanoids no more than a couple of feet high, rose up out of the bushes. A serpent the size of a telephone pole slithered out of the bridge’s rafters. Seven or eight silver-coated faerie hounds emerged from behind a stand of groomed arbor vitae. Two massive centaurs and half a dozen Sidhe of the Summer Court simply blinked into visibility from behind their veils. They were all armed with bows. Yikes. If I’d meant Lily any harm, my body would have resembled a feathery porcupine. The water stirred, and then a number of otters who were all too big to have been born this side of the last ice age came rushing out.

“Ee-aye, ee-aye, oh,” I said. “Uh, wow. All this for me?”

“Only a fool wouldn’t respect your strength,” she said. “Particularly now.”

Personally, I thought she’d gotten to overkill about one elf after those bows, but I didn’t want her to know that. “Okay,” I said. “You touched me. Make with some answers.”

“Certainly,” she said. Then she moved her hand, and the open air suddenly had the enclosed feeling of a small room. When she spoke, her voice sounded odd, as if it were coming over a radio. She’d put up a privacy spell so that no one could listen in. “What would you like to know?”

“Um, right,” I said. “Why did you touch my head like that? What were you looking for?”

“A disease,” she replied. “A parasite. A poison.”

“Could you repeat that answer, only without the poetry?”

Lily faced me squarely, her lovely face intent. “Sir Knight, you must have seen it. You must have seen the contagion spreading. It has been before your eyes for years.”

“I haven’t seen . . .” Then I paused. My head started adding things together. “You . . . you aren’t talking about a physical disease, are you?”

“Of course not,” Lily said. “It is a kind of spiritual malady. A mental plague. An infection slowly spreading across the earth.”

“And . . . this plague. What does it do?” I asked.

“It changes that which ought not change,” she said quietly. “It destroys a father’s love for his family by twisting it into maniacal ambition. It distorts and corrupts the good intentions of agents of mortal law into violence and death. It erodes the sensible fear that keeps a weakly talented sorcerer from reaching out for more power, no matter how terrible the cost.”

I felt my head rock back as if she’d slammed a croquet mallet into it, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach again.

“Victor Sells the Shadowman,” I whispered. “Agent Denton and the Hexenwolves. Leonid Kravos the Nightmare. My first three major cases.”

“Yes,” Lily whispered. “Each of them was tainted by the contagion. It destroyed them.”

I put a hand on the rail and leaned against it. “Fourth case. Aurora. A champion of peace and healing who set out to send the natural world into havoc.”

Lily’s eyes glistened with tears. “I saw what it did to her,” she said. “I didn’t know what was happening to my friend, but I saw it changing her. Twisting her day by day. I loved Aurora like a sister, Sir Knight. But in the end, even I could see what she had become.” Tears fell, and she made no effort to wipe them away. “I saw. I knew. In the end, you may have killed her, Harry. But you also did her a kindness.”

I shook my head. “I . . . I don’t understand why you didn’t want to tell me about it.”

“No one who knows of this speaks of it,” Lily said.

“Why not?”

“Don’t you see?” Lily said. “What if you had been tainted as well? And I revealed to you that I recognized what was happening?”

I kicked my brain into gear and thought. “Uh . . . then . . .” I felt sick. “You’d be a threat. I’d have to kill you to keep you quiet. Or make you the next recruit.”

“Exactly,” Lily said.

“But why suspect me of being tainted . . . ?” I heard my own voice trail off as I realized the only thing that could have moved Lily against me so strongly.

“Be at ease,” Lily said, and beckoned.

And freaking Maeve, the Winter Lady, strolled onto the far end of the bridge and sauntered toward us. She was dressed in leather pants of dark purple and a periwinkle sweater whose sleeves fell past the ends of her fingers, and her mouth was curled into a tiny, wicked smirk. “Hey, there, big guy,” she purred. “Lily give you the skinny?”

“Not yet,” Lily said. “Maeve, this isn’t the sort of thing one should simply ram down another’s throat.”

“Of course it is,” Maeve said, her smile widening.

“Maeve—” Lily began.

Maeve did a little pirouette that wound up with her toes practically touching mine as she smiled up at me, her too-sharp teeth very white. “Do you have a camera? I want someone to get a picture.”

“Oh, dear,” Lily said.

Maeve leaned in close, her smile widening. “Mab,” she breathed, “my mother, the Queen of Air and Darkness, and your liege . . .” She leaned closer and whispered, “Mab has been tainted and has gone utterly mad.”

My spine turned to brittle ice. “What?”

Lily looked up at me with a sad, sober expression.

Maeve let out a peal of giggles. “It’s true,” she said. “She means to destroy the mortal world, wizard, and to do it this very night—to unleash chaos and havoc that have not been known since the fall of Atlantis. And make no mistake, she will destroy it.”

Lily nodded, her eyes pained. “Unless,” she began. “Unless . . .”

I finished the thought Lily obviously did not want to complete. “Unless,” I whispered, “someone destroys her first.”

Chapter Twenty-five

This day had begun so simply: I’d nearly been killed at my birthday party and Mab had ordered me to kill an immortal. I’d survived the first, and if I’d had the good sense to shut up and do the second without asking questions, I might be somewhere reading a nice book or something, and waiting out the clock until it