near Anastasia and in positions of trust: Standing as the sole sentinel at a post that normally required half a dozen. Brewing the Wardens and their captain their tea.
He and I had been the only ones present at the conversation where I’d tacked that nickname on him, thanks to the natty suit and bowler he’d been wearing, and the umbrella he’d accessorized—or maybe it was accessorised, in England—with, so the signature itself served as his bona fides. The flippant tone was very like Chandler, as well. I also knew Anastasia’s handwriting, and besides, the paper on which her letter was written was scented with one of the very gentle, very subtle perfumes she preferred.
The message was as legitimate as it was likely to get, under the circumstances.
Which meant we were in real trouble.
The White Council carried a fearsome reputation not simply because of its capability of engaging in direct action against an enemy, but because it wielded a great deal of economic power. I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to get rich after two hundred and fifty years of compounded interest and open trading. There was an entire brigade of economic warriors for the White Council who constantly sought ways to protect the Council’s investments against hostile economic interests sponsored by other long-lived beings, like vampires. Money like that could buy a lot of influence. Not only that, but the Council could make the world a miserable place for someone who had earned their displeasure, in about a million ways, without ever throwing magic directly at someone. There were people in the Council who could play dirty with the most fiendish minds in history.
Taken as a whole, it seemed like a colossus, an institution as fixed and unmoving as a vast and ancient tree, filled with life, with strength, its roots sunk deep into the earth, a survivor of the worst storms the world had offered it.
But all of it, the power, the money, the influence, revolved around a critical core concept—every member of the White Council acted in concert. Or at least, that was the face that was supposed to be presented to the outside world. And it was mostly true. We might squabble and double-deal one another in peacetime, but when there was an enemy at hand we closed ranks. Hell, they’d even done that with me, and most of the Council thought that I was the next-best thing to Darth Vader. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of them secretly liked the idea of having Vader on the team when the monsters showed up. They didn’t love me, never would, and I didn’t need them to love me to fight beside them. When things got hairy, the Council moved together.
Except now we weren’t doing it.
I looked at the folded letter in my hands and had the sudden, instinctive impression that I was watching an enormous tree begin to fall. Slowly at first, made to seem so by its sheer size—but falling nonetheless, to the ruin of anything sheltered beneath its boughs.
I was pretty tired, which probably explained why I didn’t have any particular emotional reaction to that line of thought. It should have scared the hell out of me for a laundry list of reasons. But it didn’t.
Susan came over to stand near me. “Harry. What is it?”
I stared at the fire. “The White Council can’t help us find Maggie,” I said quietly. “There are things happening. They’ll be of no use to us.”
After all they had wrongly inflicted upon me, after all the times I had risked my neck for them, when I needed them, truly needed their help, they were not there.
I watched my hands crush the letters and envelopes without telling them to do it. I threw them into the fire and glowered as they burned. I didn’t notice that the fire in the fireplace had risen to triple its normal height until the blue-white brightness of the flames made me shade my eyes against them. Turning my face slightly away was like twisting the spigot of a gas heater—the fire immediately died back down to normal size.
Control, moron, I warned myself. Control. You’re a loaded gun.
No one spoke. Martin had settled down on one of the sofas and was cleaning his little pistol on the coffee table. Molly stood at the wood-burning stove, stirring a pot of something.
Susan sat down next to me, not quite touching, and folded her hands in her lap. “What do we have