Silence followed that.
“That’s . . . a lie, right?” Butters asked.
“They can’t lie,” I said. “They physically can’t. And, yes, I got them to speak directly about it. There’s no confusion of signals, no room for obfuscation.”
Thomas whistled quietly.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Uh,” Molly said. “We’re up against Mab? Your boss?”
“Not necessarily,” I said. “Lily and Maeve may not be lying but they could still be wrong. Lily has never been a cerebral titan. And Maeve is . . . maybe ‘insane’ is the only word that really describes it, but she’s definitely firing on an odd number of cylinders. It’s possible that they’ve been deceived.”
“Or,” Thomas said, “maybe they haven’t.”
“Or maybe they haven’t,” I said, nodding.
“What would that mean?” Molly asked.
“It would mean,” Karrin said quietly, “that Mab sent Harry to kill Maeve because either she wanted Maeve out of the way or she wanted Harry out of the way. Which is good, because it means that she’s worried that there’s someone who could stop her.”
“Right,” I said. “Or maybe . . .” I frowned, studying a new thought.
“What?” Thomas asked.
I looked slowly around the room. If Mab had been taken by the contagion, which really needed a better name, that certainly meant that Lea had been taken as well—and Lea had been tutoring Molly. If it had spread into the White Court, my brother could have been exposed. Murphy was maybe the most vulnerable—she was isolated, and her behavior had changed radically over the past couple of years. Hell, Butters was the person in the room least likely to have been exposed or turned or whatever—which made him the most ideal candidate for being turned.
Paranoia—because why should the conspiracy theorists get to have all the fun?
I just couldn’t see any of these people turning on me, no matter the influence. But if you could see treachery coming all that easily, Julius Caesar might have lived to a ripe old age. I’d always been slightly inclined to the paranoid. I had a sinking feeling I was going to start developing my latent potential.
I picked my words very carefully.
“Over the past several years,” I said, “there have been several conflicts between two different interests. Several times, events have been driven by internal conflicts within one or both of those interests.”
“Like what?” Butters asked.
“Dual interests inside the Red Court, for one,” I said. “One of them trying to prevent conflict with the White Council, one of them trying to stir it up. Multiple Houses of the White Court rising up to vie for control of it. The Winter and Summer Courts posturing and interfering with each other when Winter’s territory was violated by the Red Court.” I didn’t want to get any more specific than that. “Do you guys see what I’m getting at here?”
“Oh!” Butters said. “It’s a phantom menace!”
“Ah!” Molly said.
Thomas grunted.
Karrin glanced around at all of us and then said, “Translate that from nerd to English, please.”
“Someone is out there,” I said. “Someone who has been manipulating events. Playing puppet master, stirring the pot, stacking the deck—”
“Mixing metaphors?” Thomas suggested.
“Fuck off. I’m just saying that this situation has the same shape as the others. Mab and Maeve at each other’s throats, with Summer standing by ready to get involved, and Outsiders starting to throw their weight around.”
“The Black Council,” Molly whispered.
“Exactly,” I said, which it wasn’t. Up until earlier today, I had known someone was covertly causing the world a lot of grief—and due to their connections with some grim events within the White Council I had assumed it was a group of wizards, which was both naturally arrogant and extremely nearsighted of me. But what if I’d been wrong? What if the Black Council was just one more offshoot of one enormous, intangible enemy? If what I’d gotten from Lily was accurate, the problem was a hell of a lot bigger than I had realized.
And I did not want that problem to know that I had spotted it.
“The Black Council,” I said. “A group of practitioners using dark magic to influence various events around the world. They’re powerful, they’re bad news, and if I’m right, they’re here. If they’re here, I figure it’s a good bet that Sharkface and his chums—”
“Shark,” Butters said. “Chums. Funny.”
“Thank you for noticing,” I said, and continued the sentence. “—are working for the Black Council.”
“The theoretical Black Council,” Karrin said.
“They’re out there, definitely,” I said.
Karrin smiled faintly. “If you say so, Mulder.”
“I’m going to ignore that. The only question is whether or not they’re here now.”
Molly nodded seriously. “If they are? How do we find them?”
“We don’t,” I said. “There isn’t enough time to go sniffing around methodically. We know someone’s going to mess with the island. It doesn’t really matter who’s pressing the button that sets off the bomb. We just have to keep it from getting pressed. The Little Folk find us that ritual site, and then we go wreck it.”
“Um,” Butters said. “Not that I lack confidence in you guys, but shouldn’t we be calling in the cavalry? I mean, doesn’t that make more sense?”
“We
I didn’t add in the third reason not to contact the Council—when they found out about my relationship with Mab, the monarch of a sovereign and occasionally hostile supernatural nation, they would almost certainly panic and assume that I was a massive security risk. Which would, for a variety of reasons and to a variety of degrees, be an accurate assumption. And now that I thought about it, given how my, ah, induction had been psychically broadcast to all of Faerie, there was no chance whatsoever that the Council didn’t know. Knowing stuff is what they do.
Butters frowned. “The Paranetters?”
“No,” I said. “The last thing we need is a small army of newbies floundering around and stumbling into us. That’s asking for trouble in the short term, the long term, and every other term there might be. We can go to them for information only. We aren’t dragging them in.”
The little ME took off his glasses and cleaned them absently with the hem of his scrubs. “What about Lara’s team? Or the Einherjaren?”
Thomas shrugged. “I could probably convince Lara to send the team somewhere.”
“Ditto,” Karrin said, “only with Vikings.”
“Good,” I said. “We might need more bodies, and we might need to cover multiple sites. Can you two get that lined up when we break?”
They nodded.
“Molly,” I said. “You’ll take the map up to our little scouts and tell them where to look and what to look for. Keep it simple and promise an entire pizza to whoever finds what we’re after.”
My apprentice grinned. “Drive their performance with competition, eh?”
“Millions of abusively obsessed sports parents can’t be wrong,” I said. “Butters, you’ll go to the Paranetters and ask if anyone’s seen or heard anything unusual anywhere even close to Lake Michigan. No one investigates anything. They just report. Get me all the information you can about any odd activity in the past week. We need to collect data as quickly as possible.”
“Right,” Butters said. “I’ve got some now, if you want.”
I blinked. I mean, I knew the Internet was the fast way to spread information, but . . . “Seriously?”
“Well,” Butters hedged. “Sort of. One of our guys is a little, um, imaginative.”
“You mean paranoid?”
“Yes,” Butters said. “He’s got this Internet lair in his mother’s basement. Keeps track of all kinds of things.
