Chapter Forty-Six
Chapter
Forty-Six
I took the reusable ingredients for the greater circle I’d built in my lab out to the island the next week.
Lara went with me. I’d provided her energy again at my place a few nights before, and she carried half the weight up the hill and down the stairs to the tunnels beneath the island. She wasn’t even breathing hard when we got there, though I was.
Her presence was very different, this time.
She was wearing stretch jeans, sneakers, and a mostly red plaid flannel shirt over a white tank top.
Her hair was under a bandana, held back from her face, and while it made her features look sharper, leaner, I took a lot more notice of the fine lines at the corners of her eyes, particularly when she smiled.
She moved with the same liquid grace, but there was none of the sense of electric tension in her I’d almost always seen before.
She was relaxed, her voice quiet and without any artifice when she spoke.
“Are you sure you’re all right for this? ”
“Meaning what?” I asked, panting.
“You poured a lot into me the other night,” she said calmly. “Are you sure you’ve rested enough to do this for Thomas?”
“Just haven’t been able to do much cardio lately,” I said, panting. “Protesters outside, been staying in mostly. I can only run up and down the stairs so many times. Plus, I don’t want to spend the time working out on weekends.”
“Because your daughter is there,” Lara said.
I gave her a look. It might have come out harder than I meant it to. Lara didn’t flinch, but she lifted an eyebrow and said, “That’s only an observation. Not a threat. I understand about family.”
I nodded and said nothing. That came out harder than I meant, too.
Lara looked away and said, “Perhaps we should change the subject.”
“No,” I said in a quiet, steady monotone. “Let’s establish something. You deal with me. You have no connection to her. None. Ever. And if you or anyone in your Court tries to harm her? I. Will. Kill. You. All.”
Lara went entirely marble-statue still.
I faced her, meeting her gaze.
She nodded slowly. “If you can.”
“So far,” I said, “so good. I’m a hundred percent at dealing with entire vampire courts who touched my little girl.”
Her mouth curled at one corner, though it didn’t touch her eyes. “You’re aiming this the wrong way, Dresden.”
“Yeah. Maybe,” I said. I slid the rucksack off my shoulders, stuck the heels of my hands into the small of my back, and stretched. “Just making things clear.”
“Yes,” she said, drawing the word out a little with emphasis I might have used myself in her place. “You are. Maybe because you don’t want to think about what is on the line today.”
A flicker of anger went through me at the words. That happens when people tell you something true that you don’t want to hear.
I took a deep breath. “Okay. You’re right. Better to be focused on here and now.” I took a water bottle from the rucksack and drank it in a single pull. “It’ll take me four or five hours to get things laid out. Maybe a little less, maybe more.”
“What can I do to help?” Lara asked.
“Can you paint?”
“Will Italian realism do?”
I looked at her blankly. “Um. I mostly just need you to stay inside the lines.”
She smiled and it turned a bit impish. “What fun is that?”
“The kind of fun that prevents explosions and a massive cave-in.”
“Oh. That.” She nodded. “Yes. I can do precision.”
“Okay,” I said. “Mab will be there.”
Lara looked wary. Which I could get. I’d been damned wary of Mab when I’d first been in her service, too. “Why?”
“She’s helping.”
Lara looked, if anything, more wary. “Why?”
“Because she takes being an ally seriously,” I said. “And because I made a deal.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You did? You could have asked her for anything. And you asked her to help Thomas?”
I nodded. “I said I would.”
She frowned harder and looked down. “Saying is one thing. Doing it is another.” She looked away, her eyes focused elsewhere, calculating. “Do you think she will?”
“I think she has to,” I said. “It…might not be simple. Or pleasant. But I think she’ll make something happen when it couldn’t have otherwise.”
She swallowed. She blinked her eyes several times, soot-black lashes fluttering over deep blue.
“Okay,” Lara whispered finally. “Thank you for the warning.”
I hesitated. “Are…are you okay?”
She shook her head. “We have a job to do. Let’s do it.”
—
At my direction, Alfred had prepared a special chamber for the greater circle.
It was a perfect half sphere, fifty feet across, hollowed out of a single enormous green crystal.
The entire place pulsed with a living, verdant illumination that took about half an hour to begin becoming vaguely nauseating.
I measured to the center of the chamber using a line and some basic trig, marked the center with a dry-erase marker, and with Lara’s help outlined the pair of circles via the same means.
We painted those in, brought in the anchor crystals and candles, and then marked the positions for each of the containment sigils and runes.
Painting those took the longest, and Lara proved to be a hell of a lot better at it than I was.
After that, I painted in the infinity symbol, very large this time, at the circle’s center.
The whole thing was painstaking, nerve-wracking.
Every move had to be considered, every part of the body controlled so that nothing was smeared by a stray foot or knee or bit of clothing.
It took every bit of five hours, and by the time we were done, my knees and shoulders and back were protesting through the Winter mantle, my head was fuzzy, and I felt vaguely carsick.
“Okay. Let’s take a break,” I said. “Get some food, rest our eyes from all the damned green, give the paint a little more time to dry. Then I’ll start the checks to make sure we’re all set. And I have to let Mab know we’re ready.”
Lara looked as fresh as she had when we got on the Water Beetle that morning. “All right.”
I nodded. “Mab,” I murmured, putting will into my voice. “Mab. Mab. We’re just about ready.”
I opened my eyes to find Lara looking at me.
“It’s a summoning,” I said. “Technically. At the level of power I used, it’s more like sending a page.”
Lara smiled faintly. “A page? Empty night, Dresden. You really don’t use technology, do you?”
“Yeah. No.”
We went out into the tunnel outside my new ritual chamber and my stomach felt better almost at once.
I opened the rucksack, popped a Coke, slugged most of it away at a swig.
It was pretty warm by then, so I covered my mouth and minimized the belch.
Lara opened a bottle of water, rolling her eyes and smiling at the same time.
“All that green light, and the translucent walls. Makes me a bit sick,” I said.
“Is that what it is?” Lara asked.
I frowned down at the drink.
“You’re good at compartmentalizing your fear,” she said. “You’d have to be.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well.”
This was going to be one of the biggest spells of my life. If I screwed it up, Thomas would get hurt. Maybe die.
I wanted my brother back.
I couldn’t do anything about Karrin.
I didn’t want to lose someone else.
The very thought made me queasy.
I had a sandwich and sipped at the rest of the Coke, and tried to think about the spell, and not what kind of bleak whirlpool might suck me back down if I screwed it up.
Lara nibbled at a sandwich that was probably healthier than mine, watching me with calm, curious eyes.
“I get knocked down a lot,” I said. “This time it took me a while to stand back up. Right now…I don’t know if I could do it again.”
She stared at me.
I felt it. A thrill that went through my limbs. The intensity of her gaze was tactile.
“I’m more at peace with my Hunger than I’ve ever been,” Lara said.
“In centuries. I can feel myself…expanding. It’s a freedom I’ve never allowed myself to so much as dream about.
” Her eyes flickered lazily, paler for a moment.
“But perhaps you shouldn’t show me that kind of weakness while we are alone. ”
I shifted my hips uncomfortably. “Yeah,” I said. “Maybe not.”
“Besides,” she said. “If you have to do it, you will. You’re too stubborn for anything else.”
“Hey,” I said. “Did I ever thank you for saving my ass, the night of the battle? That kick.”
She took a bite of her sandwich and smirked. “I do rather wish someone had got that one on camera.”
“Ah, everyone would say it was special effects.”
“I want to critique my form. It was supposed to cave her head in.”
Without a whisper of sound or the faintest hint of warning from my island-specific intellectus, Mab was suddenly standing over both of us, resplendent in a deep green robe of something that might have been silk, complete with a hood drawn up over her hair.
“You knocked loose the Eye of Balor,” Mab murmured. “Which was the most useful act of the evening. Be content that you did that to a Titan and walked away with your health and sanity.”
I choked on the last bite of my sandwich, tried to wash it down with the last bit of the Coke, and wound up mostly making strangling sounds and snorting bits that shouldn’t have been there out my nose.
Mab stood over me with a small smirk on her lips. Then she turned her head slowly toward Lara.
Lara swayed where she sat, as if some kind of magnetic force had drawn her toward Mab.
Then she squared her shoulders, straightened her back, and made her face a polite mask.
You couldn’t have read her expression with one of those fancy laser scanners and a panel of body language experts.
She inclined her head, slightly, to Mab.
“You understand why?” Mab asked, her voice barely above a whisper.
“Of course,” Lara said. “It reduces complications.”
“And increases efficiency,” Mab noted. She flicked her chin toward me. “My Knight, of course, will attempt chivalry. He is troublesome in that way.”
“And if he should succeed?” Lara asked.
Mab smiled faintly. “Perhaps you will choose to remain as a vassal of Winter. You will do well there. Time will tell.”
“You would not be angry if he pried me loose of you?” Lara asked.
“I would be vexed,” Mab mused. “He is frequently vexing. But only a fool grows angry at a dog for barking, an adder for biting, a scorpion for stinging. It is their nature.” She showed her teeth. “I am willing to play the game fairly. I rarely lose.”
Lara tilted her head, studying Mab thoughtfully.
I fished some paper napkins out of the bag and cleaned myself up while they talked.
“Is what she says true?” Lara asked.
“She can’t speak untruth,” I said. “Don’t confuse that with an inability to deceive.”
“Ah,” Lara said. “She didn’t say very much that was direct, did she?”
Mab smiled benignly upon me.
“You catch on quick,” I said to Lara.
“Lady Raith,” Mab said, “I will not deny my Knight his pursuit of folly, even if it threatened such an excellent acquisition as yourself. I am pleased with his defiance, in general. In retrospect, it has yielded me outstanding results.”
Lara looked even more thoughtful.
“Blah, blah, blah,” I said. “We have a major spell to work.”
“Indeed,” Mab said. “I have inspected your circle. It seems…adequate.”
“I think you meant to say perfect,” I muttered.
Mab sniffed. “I meant to say adequate. Though I suppose to you, the terms are, for this working, similar.”
“You read the outline of the spell? My notes from the experiments?”
“Mmmm. You do have an exceptional gift for this sort of working, my Knight.” She tilted her head. “Shall we begin?”