Chapter Forty-Eight
Chapter
Forty-Eight
Empty Night.
The mindless, heedless, reckless end of all thought and light and life.
No wonder the White Court used it as a curse.
It was the first time I’d felt that one, too, felt it as a tangible, real thing, chewing into me from a mad Outsider, its claws twisting, fangs clamping, to rake at my spiritual self.
But it also got worse.
My spiritual self was stuck there. I mean, the whole point of the greater circle was to contain beings physically and spiritually. Simultaneous eye contact with my Sight wide open had drawn my essence, my spirit, maybe my soul even, into the circle with the Hunger.
Now it was a cage match.
I wasn’t getting out until it was over.
My physical body was sagging and would have fallen without Lara’s support.
“What’s happening?” she demanded of Mab. “What is happening?”
Mab’s voice came coolly through the chilly chamber.
“He has successfully detached the demon from your brother’s physical form,” she said.
Her breathing slightly labored? As much as I liked to think of myself as a rebel to the forms of the White Council, I didn’t lightly break the Laws of Magic, and I’d never, ever screwed with time.
Neither had anyone I ever knew. I had no idea how heavy a lift it was—but I knew how powerful Mab was, and if it had taxed her, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be messing with that one anytime soon.
“What does that mean?” Lara snapped.
“Your Hunger exists in a state of balance,” Mab said, with about as much excitement as an announcer at a golf tournament. “Your brother’s demon is quite mad. Dresden contends with it. It seeks to devour him utterly.”
“What can we do to help?”
“Nothing,” Mab said. “Nothing whatsoever. This is up to him.” The Queen of Air and Darkness paused, and then added, absently, “Also, your brother’s heart is failing. He is dying.”
Lara’s head snapped around, her expression horrified. “Thomas?”
And the whole time they talked, the cold became increasingly vicious, increasingly bitter, taking up more and more and more of my consciousness.
The Hunger rose over me, growing stronger by the second, the cold growing deeper, forcing me to bend backwards before its rising power.
I was entwined with it, with its thoughts, with its pain and desperate emptiness, a personification of the void itself.
I knew that it would devour the energy of my spirit without a second thought, and when it was finished with me it would take whatever was left of my brother, even if doing so meant its own destruction.
The thing was simply that focused upon devouring all that it could reach.
The cold of it threatened to drown me. And the most horrible part of it was that…
I thought about it.
I’d been through a lot. Hurt a lot. Lost a lot.
The pain of the burdens I bore had only grown, year after year.
I could have ended that pain. Could have let go.
Could have found the ultimate end of suffering.
Part of me thought about it. Thought about letting that emptiness consume me.
Thought about letting the cold take me and feeling nothing, not pain, not doubt, not uncertainty, not shame, not grief—not ever again.
And all I had to do was not fight.
I thought about it.
But I had promises to keep.
And then I started giggling.
I mean, seriously. Me. Not fighting.
That would be something suspiciously close to sensible, and that had never been my style.
I opened my eyes and met the Hunger’s silver ones and felt my lips spread into a wolfish smile.
It stared back at me, eagerness and hate and madness in its swirling silver eyes.
“Stupid bastard,” I snarled. “Using cold? On the Winter Knight? You should read more.”
The Hunger’s inhuman face twisted in something between frustration, pure confusion—and fear.
And when I saw that, the Winter mantle surged up within me. It didn’t know about family or love or sacrifice—but it knew all about fear. All about how to respond to weakness. And this demon, hungry and mad as it might have been, was weak.
The cold that rose in me was something else entirely.
Not the emptiness of nothing, but the savage cold of a world at war with the night.
The cold of January. Where if chill winds sucked the warmth from the marrow, it was because elsewhere in the world was sunshine and light giving them energy.
Where living waters, kissed by the life-giving sun, rose into the air to come slashing back down as crystalline snow.
Where creatures lived in hunger and terror knowing full well that they had prepared themselves for this time, and had every intention of surviving it, of seeing life return to the world, of feeling the heat of summer upon their skin and seeing their offspring gamboling through green days.
Winter wasn’t Empty Night.
It was the war against it.
The wisdom and the will required to fight it.
The strength to stand fast, even when all was dark and seemed hopeless, holding to the truth that ahead were better days.
My physical body slammed my staff down onto the green crystal floor of the chamber, and the earth itself shook around me.
The lightning-blasted oak of the tree from Demonreach connected me to the island, to the life within it, in the earth, rising to the waters surrounding it and to the spring sun shining down.
I drew upon that warmth, upon the power flowing through the island, and when the walls of the summoning chamber began to glow with sunlight, the Hunger howled in sudden terror and confusion, tearing its hands from me, lifting them to shield its mirrored eyes from the light.
And my spiritual body drove forward, planting a shoulder in the thing’s gut, half lifting it from the floor and slamming it down firmly into the other half of the infinity symbol.
Fury and wild exultation filled me with strength, with the tingling exhilaration of hot blood flowing against the cold of night.
This fight was about more than me and my pain. It was about more than me and my fear. It was even about more than my brother and his life.
It was about denying death. Denying despair. Denying the Empty Night.
Maybe, on a long enough scale, that cold and darkness was inevitable. Maybe no matter what any of us did, one day the universe would settle into unbroken silence, eternal darkness, endless nothing.
But not today.
“Not today!” I bellowed, and slammed my staff on the floor again, and far above me from a clear blue sky, a bolt of lightning as big around as a tree trunk slammed into the stones around the entrance, coursed down through the earth, leaving a streak of green-gold glowing runes carved into the stones by the same man who had built the island and the castle alike, old Merlin’s craft and will, and blazed through the crystalline walls with the sheer, fiery power of the living world.
That was power enough to have incinerated my physical form.
But my spiritual body was more than up to handling it.
I gathered it up, heat and fire and pure spinning energy whirling through uncounted trillions of wandering ions, by very definition a tide of positive energy, and sent it coruscating up through the crystal, up through the spirit-body of the Hunger, whirling through it and around it in a matrix, savage and vital and scalding and nourishing all at once.
The thing fell to its knees, covering its head with its arms, curling down in agony.
I was dimly aware of Lara falling away from me, shielding her eyes from the light.
Mab remained standing where she had been, wild light playing across her face, her eyes wide as any axe murderer’s, her smile spreading out more than should have been possible as she watched me at the center of a veritable thunderstorm of energy, as she watched me contend with my foe.
I could have killed it then. I could have destroyed the demon, the Outsider, utterly. I could have freed my brother from its foul touch forever.
But in the Sight of my physical body, I could still see the blurring connection it had to Thomas.
I could see the blur in the air between the Hunger and my brother, could see his faltering breaths, the utter exhaustion of his body.
To tear asunder that connection would be to leave his spirit torn and ragged, like separating conjoined twins with two teams of wild horses.
The kind of skill required to do that and leave his mind and spirit intact and ready to survive was beyond me.
The Winter mantle howled for me to do exactly that, to send my enemy screaming back into the void whence it came.
But I fought against that savagery and mastered it.
Because at the end of the day, the demon had been right.
At Thomas’s will, it had fought beside me, time after time.
And if it was mad with the need to devour, it was because it had also labored to keep my brother alive when he had been so savagely beaten.
Whether the Hunger realized it or not, we were fighting side by side again.
I couldn’t kill it simply for the sense of satisfaction it would give me.
Both my forms lifted my right hands and began to feed the wild, vital magic of life to the demon.
The thing let out a sudden quavering paean of raw need, spreading its arms wide in supplication and embrace at once, and as it did, its mirrorlike eyes, still panicked, flickered over to my brother’s still—utterly still—form.
“Oh, no, you don’t, you meathead,” I panted. “I haven’t walked through the wastes of war and death and my own soul to lose you now.”
And with a flick of my hand, I redirected a fraction of the energy I was sending into the demon and hit Thomas with a miniature lightning bolt.
Thunder rumbled through the crystalline chamber, making the walls ring like an enormous bell.
My brother’s body arched up into a bow—and the Hunger let out a desperate shriek, arching in time with him.
“Thomas!” I screamed. “Wake up!”
Mab’s voice rose in a wild cackle like ten times ten thousand violins shrieking in dissonance all at once.
“Demonreach!” she shrieked, raising bare white arms as the sleeves of her green robe slid down from them. “Bring forth my gifts!”
My head whipped around toward her.
Gifts. From the Queen of Air and Darkness.
What fresh hell was this?
The floor of the chamber rippled again, and from it rose what at first looked like a large crystal of glacier-blue stone.
And then I realized that it wasn’t stone.
It was ice. The agonizing true ice of the heart of Winter.
And bound upon its surface, and partly within it, was a very, very pregnant Justine.
She looked awful. She looked as if she hadn’t eaten healthily or enough for months and hadn’t cleaned herself properly for weeks.
She’d shaved her glorious dark hair to a brief stubble.
Her skin was blotchy, oily, her face was far too lean and twisted in agony, and a cage of translucent ice that reminded me of those Hannibal Lecter movie masks bound her face with her head tilted back at a painful angle.
She was bent back into a spread-eagled bow, gravid belly outthrust, and encased in ice to her upper arms and to her knees.
And there was nothing I could do. It was all I could do to hold the Hunger in place, prevent it from devouring me, while simultaneously trying to ease its starvation and keep Thomas’s heart beating. If I turned my attention from that, even for a moment, it might all fly apart.
“Hear me, Raith!” Mab’s voice rang out. She drew from her belt a bronze knife.
A knife I remembered, from a Red Court ball long, long ago.
Medea’s bodkin.
“I have your haunted love!” Mab caroled. “I have your unborn son! And if you do not arise, I swear by stars and stones that I will end both lives in a single stroke!”