“I hate morning people,” I said, and grabbed my breakfast. I stalked over to the couch and said, “Don’t feed Mouse anything. Not good for him.”
Mouse didn’t twitch an ear. He just sat there watching Molly and grinning.
I drank orange juice, which I found a completely inadequate beginning to my day. The bacon turned out to be made of turkey, and the edges were burned. I ate it anyway, along with toast that was not quite done enough. The grasshopper had talents, but cooking was not among them. “Things are up,” I said.
She stood at the sink, scrubbing a pan, and looked up at me interestedly. “Oh? What?”
I grunted and thought about the matter carefully for a moment. Molly was not much for combat. It just wasn’t her field. The next few days would certainly be hazardous for me, and I could live with that. But if Molly got involved, they might well be murderous.
I’d seen both sides of the “ignorance is safety” line of thinking in action. I’d seen people die who wouldn’t have if they hadn’t been told about the supernatural and its hazards, and I’d seen them die because they’d been forewarned, and it just wasn’t enough to really impress the scale of the threat upon them. There was just no way to know what would happen.
And because I had no way to know what would happen, I’d come to the conclusion that, absent factors that might make me believe to the contrary, I just wasn’t wise enough to deny them the choice. Molly was a part of my life. This would affect her strongly, in one way or another. The only responsible thing to do was to let her decide for herself how she wanted to live her life. That included endangering it, if that was what she felt was appropriate.
So, much as I had for Murphy, I laid it out for the grasshopper.
By the time I was finished, Molly was kneeling on the floor next to where I sat at the sofa, her blue eyes wide. “Wow, Harry.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Wow.”
“You said that.”
“This changes everything.”
I nodded.
“How can I help?”
I hoped that she hadn’t just chosen to get herself killed. “You tell me. What’s the smart move, padawan?”
She chewed on her lip for a moment and then peered up at me. “We need information. And we need backup. Edinburgh?”
I drank the last swallow of my orange juice, resented its healthiness, and said, “Bingo.”
We took the Ways to Edinburgh, taking advantage of the weird geography of the spirit world to cover a lot more physical distance in the material world. Only certain previously explored routes were safe and reliable, and you had to have some serious supernatural juice to open the door, so to speak, between the real world and the Nevernever, but if you could do it, the Ways were darned handy. The Chicago-to-Edinburgh trip took us about half an hour.
The headquarters of the White Council of wizards is a dull, dim, drafty sort of place—not unlike the insides of the heads of a great many people who work there. It’s all underground, a network of tunnels, its walls covered in carvings of mystic runes and sigils, of stylized designs and genuinely beautiful artistry. The ceilings are kind of low for me in places. Some of the tunnels are pitch-black, but most of them are bathed in a kind of ambient light without a visible source, which is an awfully odd look—sort of like one of those black lights that makes certain other colors seem to glow.
We passed two security checkpoints and walked for another five minutes before Molly shook her head. “How big is this place?” Her subdued voice echoed down the empty tunnels.
“Big,” I said. “Almost as big as the city above, and it has multiple levels. Way more than we actually use.”
She trailed her fingers over an elaborate carving in the stone as we passed it, a mural depicting a forest scene, its edges and lines crisp and clean despite the smoke from occasional torches and the passage of centuries. Her fingers left little trails in the light layer of dust coating the wall. “Did the Council carve it out?”
“Nah,” I said. “That would have been too much like work. Rumor has it that it used to be the palace of the lord of the Daoine Sidhe. That the original Merlin won it from him in a bet.”
“Like, Merlin Merlin?” she asked. “Sword in the stone and so on?”