said, my voice hard. “There’s a little girl out there. Someone knows something about where she is. And I know that the Council could dig something up. The White Council already shut the door in my face.” I thrust out my jaw. “What about the Grey?”
Ebenezar sighed, and his tired face looked more tired. “What you’re doing is good and right. But it ain’t smart. And it’s a lesson you haven’t learned yet.”
“What lesson?”
“Sometimes, Hoss,” he said very gently, “you lose. Sometimes the darkness takes everyone. Sometimes the monster escapes to kill again another day.” He shook his head and looked down. “Sometimes, Hoss, the innocent little ones are murdered. And there’s not one goddamned thing you can do about it.”
“Leave her to die,” I snarled. “That’s what you want me to do?”
“I want you to help save millions or billions of little girls, boy,” he said, his own voice dropping into a hard, hard growl. “Not throw them away for the sake of one.”
“I am not going to leave this alone,” I snapped. “She—”
Ebenezar made a gesture with his right hand and my voice box just stopped working. My lips moved. I could inhale and exhale freely—but I couldn’t talk.
His dark eyes flashed with anger, an expression I had seldom seen upon his face. “Dammit, boy, you’re smarter than this. Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re giving Arianna exactly what she wants. You’re dancing like a puppet on her strings. Reacting in precisely the way she wants you to react, and it will get you killed.
“I told you long ago that being a real wizard means sacrifice. It means knowing things no one else does,” he said, still growling. “I told you that it meant that you might have to act upon what you knew, and knew to be right, even though the whole world set its hand against you. Or that you might have to do horrible, necessary things. Do you remember that?”
I did. Vividly. I remembered the smell of the campfire we’d been sitting beside at the time. I nodded.
“Here’s where you find out who you are,” he said, his voice harsh and flat. “There’s a lot of work to do, and no time to do it, let alone waste it arguing with you over something you should know by now.” He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, as if bringing himself back under control. “Meet me at the Toronto safe house in twelve hours.” He spoke in a voice of absolute authority, something I’d heard from him only a handful of times in my life. He expected his order to be obeyed.
I turned my head from him. In the edge of my vision, I saw him scowl again, reach down, and pick up his own black stone—and suddenly I was sitting on the floor of my lab again.
I picked up my sending stone wearily and slipped it into my pocket. Then I just lay back on the floor, breaking the circle as I did, and stared up at the ceiling for a little while. I turned my head to my left, and spotted the green, extra-thick three-ring binder where I stored all my files on entities I could summon from the Nevernever.
No.
I looked away from the book. When you call things up for information, you’ve got to pay their price. It’s always different. It’s never been pleasant.
And the thought frightened me.
This would be the time those beings had been waiting for. When my need was so dire that I might agree to almost anything if it meant saving the child. For her, I might make a deal I would never consider otherwise.
I might even call upon—
I stopped myself from so much as thinking the name of the Queen of Air and Darkness, for fear that she might somehow detect it and take action. She had been offering me temptation passively and patiently for years. I had wondered, sometimes, why she didn’t make more of an effort to sell me on her offer. She certainly could have done so, had she wished.
Now I understood. She had known that in time, sooner or later, there would come a day when I would be more needful than cautious. There was no reason for her to dance about crafting sweet temptations and sending them out to ensnare me. Not when all she had to do was wait awhile. It was a cold, logical approach—and that was very much in her style.
But there were other