face a cold truth: Uncounted billions now living and yet to be born will be saved if we stop the Red Court from feeding on humanity ever again.” His voice became even colder. “No one life, innocent or not, is worth more than that.”
I said nothing for several long, silent seconds.
Then I stood up. I faced the Merlin for a moment. I could feel the obdurate, adamant will that drove the man, and made his power the greatest well of mortal magic on the face of the earth.
“You’ve got it backward, you know,” I told him quietly. “No life is worth more than that? No, Merlin. No life is worth less.”
His expression never changed. But his fingers tightened slightly on his staff. His cold blue eyes touched lightly upon Molly, and then returned to me.
The threat was plain to see.
I leaned over close to his ear and whispered, “Go ahead, Arthur. Try it.” Then I straightened slowly away, letting every emotion and every thought drain out of my expression. The tension in the air was thick. No one moved. I could see Molly trembling where she sat.
I nodded slowly at the Merlin.
Then I said in a quiet, clear voice, “Grasshopper.”
Molly stood up immediately.
I kept myself between the girl and Langtry as we walked to the door. He didn’t offer any challenge, but his eyes were arctic and absolute. Behind him, Luccio gave me a single, tiny, conspiratorial nod.
Hell’s bells. She’d known who she would be working against all along.
Molly and I left Edinburgh behind and headed back home to Chicago.
9
I watched out for trouble all the way back to Chicago, but it didn’t show up.
The trip from Edinburgh would be a difficult one if limited by strictly physical means of transport. Wizards and jet planes go together like tornados and trailer parks, and with similarly disastrous results. Boats are probably the surest means of modern transport available to us, but it’s a bit of a ride from Scotland to Chicago.
So we do what a good wizard always does when the odds are stacked up against us: We cheat.
The Nevernever, the spirit world, exists alongside our own, sort of like an alternate dimension, but it isn’t shaped the same way as the mortal world. The Nevernever touches upon places in the mortal world that have something in common with it, a resonance of energies. So, if point A is a dark and spooky place in the Nevernever, it touches upon a dark and spooky place in the real world—let’s say, the stacks at the University of Chicago. But the space five feet away from point A in the Nevernever, point B, is only dark and sad, not really scary. Maybe point B attaches to a cemetery in Seattle.
If you’re a wizard, you could then start at the stacks at UC, open a doorway into the Nevernever, walk five feet, open another doorway back to the real world, and emerge into the cemetery in Seattle. Total linear distance walked, five or six feet. Total distance traveled, better than seventeen hundred miles.
Neat, huh?
Granted, it’s almost never as little as five feet you walk in the Nevernever, and that stroll just might introduce you to some gargantuan, tentacular horror so hideous that it drives you insane just by looking at it. The Nevernever is a scary place. You don’t want to go exploring without a whole lot of planning and backup, but if you know the safe paths—the Ways—then you can get a lot of traveling done nice and quick, and with a minimum incidence of spontaneous insanity.
Once upon a time, I would have refused even to enter the Nevernever except in the direst of emergencies. Now, the idea wasn’t much more stressful to me than the thought of hitting a bus station. Things change.
We were back in Chicago before lunchtime, emerging from the Nevernever into an alley behind a big old building that used to be a slaughterhouse. I’d parked the Blue Beetle, my beat-up old Volkswagen Bug, nearby. We went back to my apartment.
Susan and Martin were waiting. About two minutes after we got back, there was a knock at the door, and I opened it to find both half vampires standing on my doorstep. Martin carried a leather valise on a sling over his shoulder.
“Who is the girl?” Martin asked, his eyes calm and focused past me, on Molly.
“It’s nice to see you again, too, man,” I said. “And don’t mention it. I save people’s lives all the time.”