the haze-covered city. Then I recognized the song.
The opening notes of the Guns N’ Roses hit “Welcome to the Jungle” began to echo from the buildings behind us, Slash’s guitar sending those tones bouncing around the concrete and towers, somehow resonating with the steel and stone of the streets and buildings of the city. Chicago herself became the speaker, music ringing off every surface, setting the ground to quivering in resonance.
Chicago. The place that invented the phrase “concrete jungle.”
Molly had chosen just the right song.
The enemy hesitated, eyes shifting left and right, scanning above and below. Fear hit their ranks like a slow, powerful wave, causing steps to falter, formations to stretch and warp.
And then the primal opening vocals and the lead guitar line came in.
And Winter came with them.
Mab’s cohort of personal guardsmen came flying out of the night, as nimble and graceful as if they’d been on wires, and they landed around us, congealed into a formation, and locked shields.
The northern sky split with a sudden rush of wind that carried the dry, frozen clarity of the arctic, and with it came a rush of . . . not snowflakes, so much as frozen chips of arctic clouds, hurled forward in a blinding wave. I had to lift a hand to shield my face and eyes, and when I lowered my arm, figures in armor of blue and green and deep purple hues had appeared in ranks on the street, on low rooftops, crouching on the frozen corpses of automobiles. Each succeeding gust of wind seemed to blow more of them into reality. First by the dozen. Then by the score. Then by the hundred.
I turned and saw the Winter Lady step from a particularly dense swirling cloud of frost crystals at street level, at the head of her army. Her long white hair streamed before her like a banner, hiding her face above her smiling lips, and she was clad in sparkles, a few patches of frost, and little else. The serpent tattoo that wove from one of her ankles to her wrist writhed and swirled inside her skin, slithering wildly in animated excitement. In one pale hand she bore a slender white sword. A squad of freaking trolls, each one a twelve-foot-tall, leathery, warty monstrosity with more muscle than the NFL, emerged from the suddenly swirling ice with her. Each of them held a sword as long as I was tall, which they lifted with dull-minded eagerness as they stepped out of the sleet and took position around the Winter Lady.
Power surrounded her, violent and lightning quick to my wizard’s senses, the power to turn heads and bend minds. To look upon her was to want, desperately, to throw yourself upon her sword, if that was what would please her, and the Winter mantle in me thrummed in pure primal resonance to her presence. The pure emotional need to either kill or die for that presence washed over me in a flood.
The Winter Lady let her head fall back and let out a banshee shriek that could have been heard from one end of Chicago to the other.
It was answered from thousands of throats, a great, baying chorus of screams.
Ah. So that’s what had been keeping Molly so busy lately.
She’d been building an army.
She lifted the pale white sword, and thousands of gleaming weapons rose in response. Then she dropped the sword, and the army of Winter went abruptly silent and rushed forward across the sleet-riddled ground.
Ethniu took this in without expression for several seconds and then whirled toward Mab, striding forward, as if intent upon finishing her—only to draw up short as Mab was surrounded by her bodyguard again, and as Grimalkin and the contingent of local Winter Fae appeared with them and fell in around Mab, adding their mass to the group protecting the Winter Queen.
Mab was not strong enough to do much more than lift her own head, as the Sidhe warriors surrounding her picked her up and drew her back into the solidity of the formation.
But she did that much and gave Ethniu a smirk of pure defiance.
The Titan screamed, and the Eye flared brighter for a second—before dying down again almost instantly.
Apparently, using the Eye before it was ready was inadvisable. Ethniu’s scream of rage turned into a shriek of pain, and she clamped both hands over the Eye and staggered.
Meanwhile, behind Ethniu, I finally spotted Corb, in the center of the Fomor legion and at the rear. He was shrieking