had chosen to form it out of snowflakes a few sizes too large to illustrate details.
Even so, I recognized Marcone when he came stumbling out the front door of the building. Several forms hurried out behind him. They surrounded him. A plain van appeared out of the night, and the unknown figures cast him through its open doors. Then they entered and were gone.
As the van pulled away, the building shuddered and collapsed in on itself, sliding down into the wreckage and ruin I’d seen.
“I have chosen you to be my Emissary,” Mab said to me. “You will repay me a favor owed. You will find the Baron.”
“The hell I will,” I said before my brain had time to weigh in on the sentiment.
Mab let out a low, throaty laugh. “You will, wizard child. An you wish to survive, you have no choice.”
Anger flared in my chest and shoved my brain aside on its way to my mouth. “That wasn’t our deal,” I snapped. “Our bargain stipulated that I would choose which favors to repay and that you would not coerce me.”
Mab’s frozen-berry lips lifted in a silent snarl, and the world turned into a curtain of white agony that centered on my eyes. Nothing had ever hurt so much. I fell down, but I wasn’t lucky enough to hit my head and knock myself unconscious. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t scream.
Then there was something cold beside me. And something very soft and very cold touched my ear. I recognized the sensation, from the far side of the pain. Lips. Mab’s lips. The Queen of Air and Darkness placed a gentle row of kisses down the outside ridge of my ear, then sucked the lobe into her mouth and bit down quite gently.
In the other ear I heard Grimalkin’s voice speaking in a low, tense, hungry whisper. “Mortal brute. Whatever your past, whatever your future, know this: I am Mab, and I keep my bargains. Question my given word again, ape, and I will finish freezing the water in your eyes.”
The pain receded to something merely torturous, and I clenched my teeth down hard over a scream. I could move again. I flinched away from her, scrambling until my back hit a wall. I covered my eyes with my hands and felt some of my frozen eyelashes snap.
I sat there for a minute, struggling to control the pain, and my vision gradually faded from white to a deep red, and then to black. I opened my eyes. I could barely focus them. I felt a wetness on my face, touched it with a finger. There was blood in my tears.
“I have not coerced you, nor dispatched any agent of mine to do so,” Mab continued, as if the break in the conversation had never happened. “Nonetheless, if you wish to survive, you will serve me. I assure you that Summer’s agents will not rest until you are dead.”
I stared at her for a second, still half-dazed from the pain and once again deeply, sincerely, and wisely frightened. “This is another point of contention between you and Titania.”
“When one Court moves, the other perforce moves with it,” Mab said.
I croaked, “Titania wants Marcone dead?”
“Put simply,” she replied. “And her Emissary will continue to seek your death. Only by finding and saving the Baron’s life will you preserve your own.” She paused. “Unless…”
“Unless?”
“Unless you should agree to take up the mantle of the Winter Knight,” Mab said, smiling. “I should be forced to choose another Emissary if you did, and your involvement in this matter could end.” Her eyelids lowered, sleepily sensual, and her surrogate voice turned liquid, heady, an audible caress. “As my Knight you would know power and pleasure that few mortals have tasted.”
The Winter Knight. The mortal champion of the Winter Court. The previous guy who had that job was, when last I knew, still crucified upon a frozen tree within bonds of ice, tortured to the point of death and then made whole, only to begin the process again. He’d lost his sanity somewhere in one of the cycles. He wasn’t a real nice guy when I knew him, but no human being should have to suffer like that.
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to end up like Lloyd Slate.”
“He suffers for your decision,” she said. “He remains alive until you take up the mantle. Accept my offer, wizard child. Give him release. Preserve your life. Taste of power like none you have known.” Her