“Okay. You know where she’s going to be. You want me to saddle up and help you get Maggie back, like we did with Molly?”
“Not unless there’s no other choice. I don’t think we would survive a direct assault on the Red King and his retinue on their home turf.”
“Well, maybe you and I couldn’t, naturally. But with the Council behind y—”
“Way behind me,” I interrupted, my voice harsh with anger. “So far behind me you wouldn’t know they were there at all.”
My brother’s deep blue eyes flashed with an angry fire. “Those assholes.”
“Seconded, motion carried,” I agreed.
“So what do you think we should do?”
“I need information,” I said. “Get me whatever you can. Any activity at Chichén Itzá or a nearby Red stronghold, sightings of a little girl surrounded by Reds, anything. There’s got to be something, somewhere that will show us a chink in their armor. If we find out where they’re holding her, we can hit the place. If I can learn something about the defensive magic around the site, maybe I can poke a hole in it so that we can just grab the girl and go. Otherwise . . .”
“Yeah,” Thomas said. “Otherwise we have to take them on at Chichén Itzá. Which would suck.”
“It’s a couple of miles beyond suck.”
Thomas frowned. “What about asking Lara for help? She can command a lot of firepower from the other Houses of the White Court.”
“Why would she help me?” I asked.
“Self-preservation. She’s big on that.”
I grunted. “I’m not sure if the rest of your family is in any danger.”
“You aren’t sure they aren’t, either,” Thomas said. “And anyway, if you don’t know, Lara won’t.”
“Don’t be too sure,” I said. “No. If I go to her with this, she’ll assume it’s a ploy motivated by desperation.”
Thomas folded his arms. “A lame ploy, at that. But you’re missing another angle.”
“Oh?”
Thomas lowered his arms and then brought them up to frame his own torso the way Vanna White presents the letters on Wheel of Fortune. “Incontestably, I’m in danger. She’ll want to protect me.”
I looked at him skeptically.
Thomas shrugged. “I play for the team now, Harry. And everyone knows it. If she lets something bad happen to me when I ask for her help, it’s going to make a lot of people upset. And not in the helpful, ‘I sure don’t want to mess with her’ kind of way.”
“For that to work as leverage, the stakes would have to be known to the rest of the Court,” I said. “They’d have to know why you were in danger from a bloodline curse aimed at me. Then they’d all know about our blood relation. Not just Lara.”
Thomas frowned over that for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Still. It might be worth the effort to approach her. She’s a resourceful woman, my sister.” His expression smoothed over into neutrality. “Quite gifted when it comes to removing obstacles. She could probably help you.”
Normally I slap down suggestions like that without a second thought. This time . . .
I had the second thought.
Lara probably knew the Red Court as well as anyone. She’d been operating arm in arm with them, to one degree or another, for years. She was the power behind the throne of the White Court, which prided itself on its skills of espionage, manipulation, and other forms of indirect strength. If anyone was likely to know something about the Reds, it was Lara Raith.
The clock just kept on ticking. Maggie was running out of time. She couldn’t afford for me to be squeamish.
“I would prefer not to,” I said quietly. “I need you to find out whatever you can, man.”
“What happens if I can’t find it?”
“If that happens . . .” I shook my head. “If I do nothing, my little girl is going to die. And so is my brother. I can’t live with that.”
Thomas nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Don’t see it. Do it.”
It came out harsh enough that my brother flinched, though it was a subtle motion. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s—”
His head whipped around toward Rudolph’s house.
“What?” I asked.
He held up a hand for silence, turning to focus intently. “Breaking glass,” he murmured. “A lot of it.”
“Harry!” Molly called.
I turned to see the Beetle’s passenger door swing open. Molly emerged, hanging on to Mouse’s collar with both hands. The big dog was focused on Rudolph’s house as well, and his chest bubbled with the deep, tearing snarl I’d heard only a handful of times, and always when