He wasn’t wrong.
WE STOLE UP to the Betsy Lee under my best veil, moving quickly and quietly. We’d already worked out the plan. Carlos was going in first and was going to raise a hell of a racket and attract everyone’s attention. My job was to stay veiled, grab the kids, and get them off the ship.
Then we’d kill things.
But halfway across the deck toward the door leading below, Carlos paused. He tilted his head to one side and narrowed his eyes. He glanced at me, lifting his brows in an unspoken question.
I paused, frowned at him, and then looked carefully around the deck. It was empty. The boat rolled and pitched with the waves, but there was no other motion. It was still and silent as a tomb. In fact …
It just felt empty, like an apartment with no furniture, like a school playground on the weekend.
Carlos suddenly moved faster, gliding to the stairs. He held up a hand, telling me to wait, and went down them in a rush. He reappeared within a minute.
“Empty,” he reported. “There’s no one down there.”
“Dammit, something must have tipped them off,” I said.
He nodded. “They’ve got eyes somewhere, all right.”
I went back to the dock and then to where it met dry land. I couldn’t see very well, but I murmured, “Akari,” flicked my wrist, and created an orb of glacial green light in the air over my right shoulder. Green was a good color for this kind of work. The mortal eye can detect more shades of green than any other color on the spectrum.
I cast back and forth, but it took only a few seconds to find what I was after: a depression in the accumulating sleet, the marks of the passage of many feet. “Carlos,” I said, and pointed at the ground. “Tracks.”
He came over and squinted down. “Aren’t these from when they came back to the boat the first time?”
“Can’t be,” I said. “Our tracks from an hour ago are gone. These were made after we left.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Seriously, Aragorn? Where’d you learn this stuff?”
“Mom taught me. She was scoutmaster for my brothers.”
“And to think I wasted my youth learning magic,” Carlos said. “Can you tell if the kids were with them?”
“Dammit, man. I’m a Faerie Princess, not a forensic analyst.” I jerked my head to tell him to follow me, and we set out after our quarry.
THE TRAIL ENDED at a church.
It was a Russian Orthodox church, complete with a couple of onion domes, and the sign out front read HOLY ASCENSION OF OUR LORD CATHEDRAL. It was also creepy and ominous as hell in the freezing night. Odd blue-green light glowed within the windows of the sanctuary. I thought I saw a shadow move past a window, sinuous and smooth, like a cruising shark.
“Oh,” Carlos said, stopping short. I could see calculations and connections forming behind his eyes. “Uh-oh.”
“What-oh?”
“This just got worse.”
“Why?”
He licked his lips nervously. “Uh. How much Lovecraft have you read?”
“I haven’t kept track,” I said. “Somewhere between zero and none. Should I have?”
“Probably,” he said. “It’s always the last thing a formally trained apprentice learns about.”
“I have a funny feeling my training wasn’t formal,” I said.
“Yeah. Neither was Harry’s. Have you heard of the Old Ones?”
“I don’t think it’s a very kind nickname for the Rolling Stones. They still put on a great show.”
He nodded and squinted at me. “I kind of need you to put on your serious face now.”
“That bad?” I asked.
“Maybe,” he said. “They’re … kind of a collection of entities. Really old, really powerful entities.”
“What, like gods?” I asked.
“Like the things gods have nightmares about,” he said.
“Outsiders.”
He nodded. “Only they aren’t outside. They’re here. Caged, bound, and sleeping, but they’re here.”
“That seems kind of dangerous.”
“Yes and no,” he said. “They feed on psychic energy. On fear. On the collective subconscious awareness of them that exists within humanity.”
I squinted at him. “Meaning what?”
“The more people who know about them and fear them, the more awake and more powerful they become,” he said. “That’s why the people who know about them don’t talk about them much.”
“What’s that got to do with the price of beer in Unalaska?”
“One of the Old Ones is known as the Sleeper. It’s said his tomb is somewhere under the Pacific. And that goddamned moron Lovecraft published stories and easy-to-remember rhymes about the thing.” He shook his head. “The signal boost gave the Sleeper enough power to influence the world. It has a number of cults. People get … infested, I guess. Slowly go insane. Lose their humanity. Turn into something else.”
I remembered the captain’s open mouth and writhing tentacles and shivered. “So you think that’s what is happening here? A Sleeper cult?”
“It’s the Holy Ascension of Our Lord Cathedral,” he pointed out. “That means something way different to a Sleeper cultist than it does to most folks. They aren’t exactly making it difficult to suss out.”
“Okay. So, how does that change anything about what we have to do tonight?”
He nodded toward the cathedral. “You feel that?”
“It’s capital-C creepy,” I said, and nodded.
“It’s worse than that,” he said. “It’s holy ground. Consecrated to the Sleeper. We go in there, we won’t be dealing with a bunch of ’roided-up fishermen with tentacle mouth. They’ll have power. It’s a nest of sorcerers in there.”
“Oh,” I said. “Ouch.” I thought about it for a moment. “So, how does that change anything about what we have to do tonight?”
He bared his teeth. “Guess it doesn’t.”
“I guess it doesn’t,” I agreed.
“You know,” he said, “I am pretty damned valorous.”
“I know,” I said.
“But I am not stupid. You’re a Faerie Queen now, right?”
“Uh-huh, I guess,” I said.
“Couldn’t you whistle up a squad of ogres or something to help make this happen?”
I thought about it for a second and said, “Yeah, I could.”
“Maybe something like that should happen?” he suggested.
I was quiet for a second before I said, “No.”
“Uh-huh,” he said, and nodded. “Why not?”
“In the first place, it would take time to get them here. In the second, this is Miksani territory, and the ogres would have to arrange payment for intruding and observe customs, and it would take even longer. And in the third place …”
I blinked. Oh. That’s what Mab meant.
“What?” Carlos asked.
“This is my first showing. Everyone in Winter, every wicked and predatory thing in Faerie, is going to pay attention to it, and will interact with me based off what I do here. First impressions matter, and I’m not going to be a child who screams for help the first time she hits a bump in the road. I’m going to be the predator who freaking takes you apart if you cross her. I’m going to make sure I don’t have to prove my strength to them over and over for the rest of this gig. So, you and I are going to go in there and handle it.”
Carlos sniffed, then gave a short nod. “Right. Well. These people—they aren’t human anymore. Something else moved into their bodies. There’s nothing left to save. You get me?”
I got him. He meant that I could play hardball without fear of running afoul of the White Council. I squinted at the cathedral and said, “Okay. New plan.”
HARRY WAS A big believer in kicking in the teeth of whoever you planned to fight. Granted, those kinds of tactics played to his strengths, and it wasn’t always smart or possible—but it was always a way to seize the initiative and control the opening seconds of a conflict.