Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,123

doesn’t that make more sense?”

“We are the cavalry,” I said in a flat tone. “The White Council won’t help. Even if I knew the current protocols to contact them, it would take them days to verify that I am in fact alive and still me, and we only have hours. Besides, Molly’s on their most-wanted list.”

I didn’t add in the third reason not to contact the Council—when they found out about my relationship with Mab, the monarch of a sovereign and occasionally hostile supernatural nation, they would almost certainly panic and assume that I was a massive security risk. Which would, for a variety of reasons and to a variety of degrees, be an accurate assumption. And now that I thought about it, given how my, ah, induction had been psychically broadcast to all of Faerie, there was no chance whatsoever that the Council didn’t know. Knowing stuff is what they do.

Butters frowned. “The Paranetters?”

“No,” I said. “The last thing we need is a small army of newbies floundering around and stumbling into us. That’s asking for trouble in the short term, the long term, and every other term there might be. We can go to them for information only. We aren’t dragging them in.”

The little ME took off his glasses and cleaned them absently with the hem of his scrubs. “What about Lara’s team? Or the Einherjaren?”

Thomas shrugged. “I could probably convince Lara to send the team somewhere.”

“Ditto,” Karrin said, “only with Vikings.”

“Good,” I said. “We might need more bodies, and we might need to cover multiple sites. Can you two get that lined up when we break?”

They nodded.

“Molly,” I said. “You’ll take the map up to our little scouts and tell them where to look and what to look for. Keep it simple and promise an entire pizza to whoever finds what we’re after.”

My apprentice grinned. “Drive their performance with competition, eh?”

“Millions of abusively obsessed sports parents can’t be wrong,” I said. “Butters, you’ll go to the Paranetters and ask if anyone’s seen or heard anything unusual anywhere even close to Lake Michigan. No one investigates anything. They just report. Get me all the information you can about any odd activity in the past week. We need to collect data as quickly as possible.”

“Right,” Butters said. “I’ve got some now, if you want.”

I blinked. I mean, I knew the Internet was the fast way to spread information, but . . . “Seriously?”

“Well,” Butters hedged. “Sort of. One of our guys is a little, um, imaginative.”

“You mean paranoid?”

“Yes,” Butters said. “He’s got this Internet lair in his mother’s basement. Keeps track of all kinds of things. Calls it observing the supernatural through statistics. Sends me a regional status update every day, and my spam blockers just cannot keep him out.”

“Hngh,” I said, as if I knew what a spam blocker was. “What’s he got to say about today?”

“That boat rentals this morning were four hundred percent higher today than the median for this time of year, and dark forces are bound to be at work.”

“Boat rentals,” I muttered.

“He’s a little weird, Harry,” Butters said. “I mean, he has a little head-shot photo tree of the people responsible for the Cubs’ billy goat curse. That kind of odd. He blows the curve.”

“Tell him to take the tree down. The billy goat curse was a lone gunman,” I said. “But paranoid doesn’t necessarily equal wrong. Boats . . .”

I bowed my head and closed my eyes for a moment, thinking, but if Butter’s paranoid basement freak was right, then the puzzle piece he’d handed me was woefully unhelpful. I needed more pieces. “Okay,” I said. “Right. Get more data.” I looked up, jerked my head at Thomas, and headed for the kitchen. “Let’s go talk to our guest about his boss.”

* * *

I leaned down to look into the oven through the glass door. There was no light inside, but I could make out Captain Hook’s armored form huddled disconsolately on a coated cookie sheet. I knocked on the glass, and Captain Hook’s helmet turned toward me.

“I want to talk to you,” I said. “You’re my prisoner. Don’t try to fight me or run away or I’ll have to stop you. I’d rather just have a nice conversation. Do you understand me?”

Hook didn’t give me any indications either way. I took silence as assent.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m going to open the door now.” I cracked open the oven door and opened it slowly, doing my best not to loom. Tough to