"What does it mean?"
I opened the door and said, without looking back, "It means we"re running out of time."
Chapter Twenty-three [image]
I took the Beetle a ways north of town, keeping to the lake sh.o.r.e. Rain sheeted down, and lightning made the clouds dance with shadow and flame. Maybe ten miles from the center of town, the downpour eased up, and the air became noticeably colder-enough so that in jeans and a tee, I was shivering. I pulled the car off Sheridan Road a couple miles north of Northwestern University, out toward Winnetka, set the parking brake and locked it up, and trudged toward the sh.o.r.e of the lake.
It was a dark night, but I called no lights to guide me, and I didn"t carry a flashlight. It took my eyes a while, but I finally managed to start making out shapes in the darkness and found my way through the light woods around this part of the lake sh.o.r.e to a long, naked promontory of rock thrusting itself a dozen yards into the water. I walked to the end of the stone and stood there for a moment, listening to the thunder rolling over the lake, the wind stirring the water into waves nearly like those of the sea. The air itself felt restless, charged with violence, and the light rain that still fell was uncomfortably cold.
I closed my eyes, pulling together energy from the elements around me, where water met stone, air met water, stone met air, and drawing as well from my own determination. The power coursed into me, dancing and seething with a quivering life of its own. I focused it with my thoughts, shaped it, and then opened my eyes and lifted my arms, wrists out so that the old pale round scars on either side of the big blue veins there felt the rain falling on them.
I pushed out the power I"d gathered and called into the thunder and rain, "G.o.dmother!Vente , Leanansidhe!" , Leanansidhe!"
A sudden presence appeared beside me, and a woman"s voice said, "Honestly, child, it isn"t as though I"m far away. There"s no reason to shout."
I jerked in surprise and nearly fell into the lake. I turned to my left to face my faerie G.o.dmother, who stood calmly upon the surface of the water, bobbing up and down a bit as waves pa.s.sed under her feet.
Lea stood nearly my own height, but instead of dark contrasts and harsh angles, she was a creature of gliding curves and gentle shades. Hair the color of flame coursed in curls and ringlets to below her hips, and tonight she wore with it a gown of flowing emerald silk, laced through with veins of ochre and aquamarine. A belt made from a twisted braid of silken threads of gold wound around her waist, and a dark-handled knife rested on a slant at her hip through a loop in the belt.
She was one of the high Sidhe, and her beauty went without saying. The perfection of her form was complemented by features of feminine loveliness, a full mouth, skin like cream, and oblong, feline eyes of gold, cat-slitted like those of most fae. She took in my surprise with a certain reserved mirth, her mouth set with a tiny smile.
"Good evening, G.o.dmother," I said, trying for a proper degree of politeness. "You look lovely as the stars tonight."
She let out a pleased sigh. "Such a flatterer. I"m already enjoying this conversation so much more than the last."
"I"m not dying this time," I said.
The smile faded. "That is a matter of opinion," she responded. "You are in great danger, child."
"Thinking about it, I realize I generally have been whenever you were around."
She clucked reprovingly. "Nonsense. I"ve never had anything but your best interests at heart."
I barked out a harsh laugh. "My best interests. That"s rich."
Lea arched a brow. "What reason have you to think otherwise?"
"For starters, because you tricked me out of a big evil slaying magic sword and sold me to Mab."
"Tut," Lea said. "The sword was just business, child. And as for selling your debt to Mab... I had no choice in the matter."
"Yeah, right."
She arched her brows. "You should know better, dear G.o.dchild. You know I cannot speak what is untrue. During our last encounter I returned to Faerie with great power and upset vital balances. Those balances had to be redressed, and your debt was the mechanism that the Queen chose to employ."
I frowned at her for a minute. "Returned with great power." My eyes fell to the knife at her waist. "That thing the vampires gave you?"
She rested her fingers lightly on the knife"s hilt. "Don"t cheapen it. This athame was no creation of theirs. And it was less a gift than a trade."
"Amoracchiusand that thing are in the same league? Is that what you"re saying?" Gulp. My faerie G.o.dmother was dangerous enough without a big-time artifact of magic. "What is it?"
"Not what, but whose," Lea corrected me. "And in any case, you may be a.s.sured that surrendering my claim on you to Mab was in no way an attempt to do you harm. I have never meant you lasting ill."
I scowled at her. "You tried to turn me into one of your hounds and keep me in a kennel, G.o.dmother."
"You"d have been perfectly safe there," she pointed out. "And very happy. I only wanted what was best for you because I care for you, child."
My stomach did a neat little rollover, and I swallowed. "Yeah. Uh. It"s very... you. I guess. In a demented, insane way, I can understand that."
Lea smiled. "I knew you would. To business, then. Why have you called to me this night?"
I took a deep breath and braced myself a little. "Look, I know we haven"t gotten along really well lately. Or ever. And I don"t have a lot to trade with, but I had hoped you"d be willing to work out a bargain with me."
She arched a red-gold brow. "To what ends?"
"I need to speak to them," I said. "To Mab and t.i.tania."
Her expression grew distant, pensive. "You must understand that I cannot protect you from them, should they strike at you. My power has grown, poppet, but not to those heights."
"I understand. But if I don"t get to the bottom of this and find the killer, I"m as good as dead."
"So I have heard," my G.o.dmother said. She lifted her right hand and extended it to me. "Then give me your hand."
"Ineed my hand, G.o.dmother. Both of them." my hand, G.o.dmother. Both of them."
She let out a peal of laughter. "No, silly child. Simply put your hand in mine. I will convey you."
I gave her a sidelong look and asked warily, "At what price?"
"None."
"None?You never do anything without a price."
She rolled her eyes and clarified, "None to you, child."
"Who, then?"
"No one you know, or knew," Lea said.
An intuition hit me. "My mother. That"s who you"re talking about."
Lea left her hand extended. She smiled, but only said, "Perhaps."
I regarded her hand quietly for a moment, then said, "I"m not sure I can believe that you"re really going to protect me."
"But I already have."
I folded my arms. "When?"
"If you will remember that night in the boneyard, I healed a wound to your head that may well have killed you."
"You only did it to sucker me into getting you the sword!"
Lea"s tone became wounded. "Notonly for that. And if you consider further, I also freed you of a crippling binding and rescued you from a blazing inferno not twenty-four hours later." for that. And if you consider further, I also freed you of a crippling binding and rescued you from a blazing inferno not twenty-four hours later."
"You charged my girlfriend all her memories of me to do it! And you only saved me from the fire so that you could put me in a doghouse."
"That does not change the fact that I was, after all, protecting you."
I stared at her in frustration for a minute and then scowled. "What have you done for me lately?"
Lea closed her eyes for a moment, then opened her mouth and spoke. Her voice came out aged and querulous. "What"s all that racket! I have already called the police, I have! You fruits get out of our hall or they"ll lock you away!"
I blinked. "Reuel"s apartment. That was you?"
"Obviously, child. And at the market, earlier this eve." She lifted her hand in the air, made an intricate motion with long, pale fingers, and opened her mouth again, as if singing a note of music. Instead, the sound of police sirens emerged, somewhat muted and indistinguishable from the real thing.
I shook my head. "I don"t get it."
She moved her fingers again, and the sirens blended into another silver-sweet laugh, her expression amused, almost fond. "I am sure you do not, poppet." She offered her hand again. "Come. Time is pressing."
She had that part right at least. And I knew she was telling me the truth. Her words had left her little room for evasion. I"d never gotten anything but burned when making deals with the faeries, and if Lea was offering to help me for free, there had to be a catch somewhere.
Lea"s expression told me that she either knew what I"d been thinking or knew me well enough to guess, and she laughed again. "Harry, Harry," she said. "If it is of any consequence to you, remember that our bargain is still in effect. I am bound to do you no harm for several weeks more."
I"d forgotten about that. Of course, I couldn"t fully trust to that, either. Even if she had sworn to do me no harm, if I asked her to take me somewhere she could drop me off in a forest full of Unseelie nasties without breaking her word. She"d done something very similar to me last year.
Thunder rumbled again, and the light flared even more brightly in the clouds. Tick, tick, tick, the clock was running, and I wasn"t going to get anything done standing here waffling. Either I trusted myself to my G.o.dmother or I went back home and waited for something to come along and squash me.
Going with Lea wasn"t the best way to get what I wanted-it was just the only way. I took a breath and took her hand. Her skin felt like cool silk, untouched by the rain. "All right. And after them, I need to see the Mothers."
Lea gave me an oblique glance and said, "Survive the flood before hurling yourself into the fire, child. Close your eyes."
"Why?"
Annoyance flickered over her eyebrows. "Child, stop wasting time with questions. You have given me your hand. Close your eyes."
I muttered a curse to myself and did it. My G.o.dmother spoke something, a string of liquid syllables in a tongue I could not understand-but it made my knees turn rubbery and my fingers suddenly feel weak. A wave of disorientation, dizzying but not unpleasantly so, scrambled my sense of direction. I felt a breeze on my face, a sense of movement, but I couldn"t have said whether I was falling or rising or moving forward.
The movement stopped, and the whirling sensations pa.s.sed. Thunder rumbled again, very loudly, and the surface I stood on shook with it. Light played against my closed eyelids.
"We are here," Lea said, her voice hushed.
I opened my eyes.
I stood on a solid surface among grey and drifting mist. The mist covered whatever ground I was on, and though I poked at it with my foot, I couldn"t tell if it was earth, wood, or concrete. The landscape around me rolled in hills and shallow valleys, all of it covered in ground fog. I frowned up at the skies. They were clear. Stars glittered impossibly bright against the velvet curtain of night, sparkling in dozens of colors, instead of in the usual pale silver, jewels against the blackness of the void. Thunder rumbled again, and the ground shook beneath the mist. Lightning flashed along with it, and the ground all around us lit with a sudden angry blue fire that slowly faded away.
The truth dawned on me slowly. I pushed my foot at the ground again, and then in a circle around me. "We"re..." I choked. "We"re on... we"re on..."
"The clouds," my G.o.dmother said, nodding. "Or so it would seem to you. We are no longer in the mortal world."
"The Nevernever, then. Faerie?"
She shook her head and spoke, her voice still hushed, almost reverent. "No. This is the world between, the sometimes place. Where Chicago and Faerie meet, overlap. Chicago-Over-Chicago, if you will. This is the place the Queens call forth when the Sidhe desire to spill blood."
"They call it forth?" I asked in a quiet voice. "They create it?"
"Even so," Lea said, her voice similarly low. "They prepare for war."
I turned slowly, taking it in. We stood on a rise of ground in a broad, shallow valley. I could make out what looked like a mist-shrouded lake sh.o.r.e not far away. A river cut through the cloudscape.
"Wait a minute," I said. "This is... familiar." Chicago-Over-Chicago, she had said. I started adding in mental images of buildings, streets, lights, cars, people. "Thisis Chicago. The land." Chicago. The land."
"A model of it," Lea agreed. "Crafted from clouds and mist."
I kept turning and found behind me a stone, grey and ominous and enormous, startlingly solid amid all the drifting white. I took a step back from it and saw the shape of it-a table, made of a ma.s.sive slab of rock, the legs made of more stones as thick as the pillars at Stonehenge. Writing writhed across the surface of the stone, runes that looked a little familiar. Norse, maybe? Some of them looked more like Egyptian. They seemed to take something from several different sources, leaving them unreadable. Lightning flashed again through the ground, and a wave of blue-white light flooded over the table, through the runes, lighting them like Las Vegas neon for a moment.
"I"ve heard of this," I said after a moment. "A long time ago. Ebenezar called it the Stone Table."
"Yes," my G.o.dmother whispered. "Blood is power, child. Blood spilled upon that stone forever becomes a part of who holds it."
"Who holds it?"
She nodded, her green eyes luminous. "For half of the year, the Table lies within Winter. For half, within Summer."
"It changes hands," I said, understanding. "Midsummer and Midwinter."
"Yes. Summer holds the Table now. But not for much longer."
I stepped toward the Table and extended a hand. The air around it literally shook, pressing against my fingers, making my skin ripple visibly as though against a strong wind-but I felt nothing. I touched the surface of the Table itself, and could feel the power in it, buzzing through the flowing runes like electricity through high-voltage cables. The sensation engulfed my hand with sudden heat and violence, and I jerked my fingers back. They were numb, and the nails of the two that had touched the table were blackened at the edges. Wisps of smoke rose from them.
I shook my fingers and looked at my G.o.dmother. "Let me get this straight. Blood spilled onto the Table turns into power for whoever holds it. Summer now. But Winter, after tomorrow night."
Lea inclined her head, silent.
"I don"t understand what makes that so important."
She frowned at the Table, then began pacing around it, slowly, clockwise, her eyes never leaving me. "The Table is not merely a repository for energy, child. It is a conduit. Blood spilled upon its surface takes more than merely life with it."
"Power," I said. I frowned and folded my arms, watching her. "So if, for instance, a wizard"s blood spilled there..."
She smiled. "Great power would come of it. Mortal life, mortal magic, drawn into the hands of whichever Queen ruled the Table."
I swallowed and took a step back. "Oh."
Lea completed her circuit of the table and stopped beside me. She glanced furtively around her, then looked me in the eyes and said, her voice barely audible, "Child. Should you survive this conflict, do not let Mab bring you here. Never."