Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,17

up just as much as the girls, but they weren’t nearly as much of a distraction to me.

Partly it’s because of their grace. The Sidhe aren’t human, even though they look like close relatives. When you see an Olympic gymnast or ice skater or a professional dancer performing a routine, you can’t help but be impressed with the sheer, casual grace with which they move, as if their bodies are lighter than air. The clumsiest of the Sidhe operate at about that same level, and the exceptional leave the mortals eating dust behind them. It’s hard to describe because it’s hard for the brain to process—there’s no frame of reference for what I saw, the motion, the balance, the power, the effortless subtlety. It was like suddenly discovering an entirely new sense with an enormous amount of input: I kept seeing things that made my brain scream at me to stop and watch so that it could catalog and process them properly.

And partly it’s because of their magic. The Sidhe use magic the way the rest of us breathe, instinctively and without thinking about it. I’d fought them before, and their power was largely invoked through simple gestures, as if the spells had been hardwired into their motor reflexes. For them, movement was magic, and at no time so much as when they danced.

Their power didn’t come after me, specifically—it was more like I had plunged into it, as if it were a pool of water occupying the same space as the dance floor. It subsumed my mind almost at once, and it was all I could do to grit my teeth and hang on. Ribbons of colored light flared in the air around the dancing Sidhe. Their feet struck the floor and their hands struck upon bodies, their own or otherwise, adding rippling layers of syncopated rhythm to the music. Gasps and cries joined with the beat and the melody, primal and fierce, echoing and challenging one another from all quarters, as if they’d practiced it. They hadn’t. It was just what they were.

Sound and rhythm struck from either side, thrumming against my ears, disorienting me. Light danced and fluttered through the spectrum in subtle, seductive patterns. Bodies twisted and strained in inhuman artistry, their very grace an assault upon my reason. Part of me wanted to just stand there and drink it in, gawking like some ugly, clumsy behemoth among the Sidhe. Plenty of mortals had been lulled into tearful rapture by such dances—and generally speaking, it hadn’t ended real well for them.

I put up every mental defense I could, reaching for that core of cold, clear power that had been within me since the night I’d murdered my predecessor with Medea’s bronze dagger. I hadn’t even realized what was happening to me at the time, since other things had been on my mind, but I now realized that the power had restored my shattered body, and given me strength and speed and endurance at the very limits of human ability—and maybe past them. I felt it only when I sought it out, but apparently my instinctive need to survive had been enough to tap into it back when I’d set out to rescue my daughter from the late Red Court of vampires.

Now it poured into my mind like an ice-cold breeze, and withered away the bedazzlement the Sidhes’ dance had wrought on my thoughts. I started forward through the throng, and for a few feet I tried to skip and slip and duck my way through the moving crowd without hitting anyone. Then I realized that even with whatever I had gained from becoming the Winter Knight, I was still hopelessly dull-witted and slow-footed when compared to the Sidhe.

So I just started walking and left it up to them to get out of the way. It kinda fit my mood better, anyway. They did it, too. None of them were obvious about it, and some of them came within a fraction of an inch of striking me with whirling limbs, but none of them did.

The Sidhe are tall, generally speaking, but I’m NBA tall, and I could see over the crowd. I spotted the red ball cap and a flash of Sarissa’s wide eyes and went after them. I caught up to them near the back wall of the cavernous chamber. The Sidhe who had grabbed Sarissa stood behind her, one of his arms wound around her neck, the other around her waist, holding her back against