Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,203
said. “For any reason. Period.”
“Agreed,” I said. “Maeve’s the bad guy.”
He tested his right hand again and got a little more motion out of it before he winced. “I don’t know where this will get you,” he said, “but as far as I could tell, this was just a ritual circle, like any other.”
“How so?”
“When we landed, Maeve sent some hounds and some Little Folk after you and went straight for that lighthouse—and the guardian just popped up out of the ground, where it is now. Maeve assaulted the spirit, just like right now. She kept it busy while Lily walked a circle of the hilltop, singing. I’ve seen her set up circles like that a thousand times. But once she’d gone all the way around, kaboom, up came the wall.”
I grunted. “Then . . . it’s a preinstalled defense that can be triggered like . . . Hell’s bells, not like a ward. It is a ward. A huge one. But if anything of the island passes through the circle without disturbing it, and anything that isn’t of the island is destroyed . . .” I followed the logic through and sagged.
“What?” Fix asked.
“Then there’s no way to break the circle,” I breathed. “It’s like a time-lock safe. It isn’t coming down until sunrise.”
“Meaning what?”
I swallowed. Sunrise was too late. So I gathered whatever scraps of strength I had left in me and pushed myself slowly, wearily to my feet.
“Meaning,” I said, “we’re on our own.”
Fix eyed the center of the clearing. He passed me a silvery knife he drew from his belt and said, “There you go with that ‘we’ again.”
Chapter
Fifty
I started walking. It was iffy for a couple of steps but I got the hang of it.
“Is there a plan?” Fix asked, keeping up with me.
“Maeve. I kill her.”
Which had been Mab’s freaking order in the first place.
He glanced aside. “You know she’s an immortal, right?”
“Yeah.”
His eyes narrowed. “What do I do?”
“They’ve got the guardian pinned down,” I said. “I think one of those crews has got to stay on it, or it will break loose. Otherwise, Maeve would have been stomping on me right next to Lily.”
Fix nodded. “She never passes up the chance to tear the wings off a fly.” He frowned. “What happens if the guardian gets loose?”
I wasn’t sure. Demonreach had enormous power, an absolute dedication to purpose, and no sense of proportion. I had very little idea of its tactical capabilities. It might or might not be able to help in a fight. Actually, I was sort of hoping it wouldn’t—imagine trying to kill specific ants, in a crowd of ants, with a baseball bat. I was pretty sure that if Demonreach ever started swinging at someone, I wanted to be over the horizon at the very least.
In fact, I realized, that was probably the problem here. Demonreach existed on an epic scale. It was neither suited to nor capable of effectively dealing with beings of such relative insignificance. Standing off a Walker and a small army of Outsiders had not been a huge problem for the island. But Maeve and Lily had slipped inside its guard. They and their personal attendants were sparrows attacking an eagle. The eagle was bigger and stronger and capable of killing any of them, and it didn’t matter in the least.
Not only that, but Demonreach was a genius loci, a nature spirit. The fae were intimately connected to nature on a level that no one had ever been able to fully understand. One could probably make an argument that Demonreach was one of the fae, or at least a very close neighbor. Either way, the mantles of the Ladies of Winter and Summer would carry a measure of dominion and power over beings like Demonreach. Clearly they were not sovereign over the guardian spirit, because it was withstanding them. Just as clearly, they had something going for them, because it wasn’t trying to crush them, either.
“I’m not sure,” I answered. “But the point here is that if we jump Maeve, Lily is going to be too busy keeping a lid on the guardian to get involved.”
“The two of us,” Fix said, “are going to take on all ten of them?”
“Nah,” I said. “I take Maeve. You get the other nine.”
“What if they don’t cooperate?”
“Chastise them.”
Fix snorted. “That’ll be quick. One way or the other. And . . . it’s going to mean war if the Summer Knight assaults nobles of the Winter Court.”