Chapter Forty-six
Whoever was up at the top of the hill had things ready to stop me from getting there. It didn’t work out well for them.
I knew about the trip lines that had been strung up between the trees at ankle level, and knew where the gaps were—more harassment-level opposition from the enemy Little Folk, I was guessing. The people with me didn’t even realize that there were any trip lines.
After that was a trio of particularly vicious-looking fae hounds, the little cousins of Black Dogs. I had taken a Black Dog on once, in my calmer days, and didn’t care for a rematch. I clipped one of the hounds with a shot from the Winchester while it was crouching in the brush ahead, waiting for me to come a few steps closer, and I set on fire a thicket where another one hid before we got within thirty feet. Ambush predators become unnerved when their would-be prey spots them. Fae hound number three hustled out of a hollow log where he’d been planning to rush out and attack with his buddies, and retreated with the two wounded hounds to the far side of the island.
“How did they get on the island?” Molly asked as we kept moving. She was breathing hard, both from her efforts on the lake and from the hike up. “I thought it kept everyone away.”
Demonreach was meant to keep things in, not out, but I didn’t want to blab about that in front of mixed company. “It encourages everyone to stay away, and turns up the heat slowly for anyone who doesn’t,” I said back. “But that’s when it isn’t being attacked by an army of cultists and a horde of howling freaks from beyond reality. It was busy making sure none of the Outsiders could come up onto shore—and none of them could. It just outmuscled an army led by something that could go toe-to-toe with Mab. Everything has its limits.” I checked with my intellectus and realized that Mac and Sarissa were bringing up the rear. That wouldn’t do. I still didn’t know the role they were playing in this game. “Mouse,” I called. “Take rear guard, in case those hounds circle around and try to sneak up on us.”
The big furball made a huffing sound, an exhalation somewhere between a bark and a sneeze, but chewier. Heh. Chewie. I reminded myself to keep track of Mac and Sarissa as we went, but I felt better once Mouse was back there. Intellectus was handy as a reference guide, but not as an early-warning system. If either of them tried anything shady, the shaggy Tibetan guardian was probably the one most likely to notice first, anyway. Might as well have him close.
“Who’s up there?” Karrin asked, her voice low and tense.
“Faerie Queens, I think. Plural.”
“Whoa,” Thomas said. “Why?”
“Complicated, no time,” I said. “No one does anything until I do. Don’t even talk. If the balloon goes up, go after whoever I light up first. After that, improvise.”
Then I continued, increasing the pace a little. The trees near the crown of the island were older, thicker, and taller. The spreading canopy of their branches had shaded out most of the brush beneath them, and the ground was easier to move across, being mostly an irregular, soggy carpet of years and years’ worth of fallen leaves. The scent of molds was thick as we went through, disturbing them.
We emerged into the clearing at the top of the hill, and I stopped in my tracks six inches before I would have come out of the shadow of the forest. Thomas bumped into me. I looked partly over my shoulder with a little push of air through my teeth. He elbowed me in the lower back.
The hilltop had been closed in a circle of starlight.
I didn’t know how else to describe it. I didn’t know what I was looking at. Twelve feet off the ground was a band of illumination, glowing rather than glaring, something that filled the hilltop with gentle light, like an enormous ring floating above the earth. It was of precise width, as if drawn with a compass, and I knew that it was exactly one foot thick—twelve inches. The color was something I had never seen before, changing subtly moment to moment, holding silver and blue and gold, but it wasn’t any of those things and . . . and words fail. But it was beautiful, like love, like music, like truth, something that passed through the eyes and plunged straight to the soul. Gentle, softly glowing light slid from the outer edge of the circle like a sheet of water from an elegant fountain, falling to the ground in a slow-motion liquid curtain of pure light, hiding what was behind it.
I felt the grasshopper move up beside me, her eyes wide. “Boss,” she whispered. “This would make my mom talk in her church voice. What are we looking at?”
“Merlin’s work, I think,” I breathed. “That circle. I think it’s part of the island’s architecture.”
“Wow.”
“I . . . It’s beautiful,” Sarissa murmured. “I’ve never seen anything like it. And I’ve been looking at incredible things my whole life.”
I spoke something I was certain was true in the same moment that I understood it. “It had to be beautiful. It had to be made from beauty. There is too much ugly inside for it to be made of anything else.”
“What do you mean, ugly?” Karrin asked, her voice hushed.
“Later,” I said. I shook my head and blinked my eyes several times. “City to save.” I tried to find something about the circle in my intellectus, but I had apparently already learned everything I could learn about it that way. I knew its exact dimensions; I knew it was part of the structure of the massive spell that made the Well exist. And that was it. It was like the entire thing had been . . . classified, top secret, need-to-know only—and apparently I didn’t need to know.
Which, I supposed, made sense. We were talking about a massive security system.
Molly stooped and picked up a rock. She gave it a gentle underhand toss at the wall of light and it passed through without making a ripple. “Safe?” she asked.
“I doubt it. Give me something that isn’t a part of the island,” I said.
I heard her slip her backpack off her shoulder and open a zipper. Then she touched my arm and passed me a granola bar wrapped in plastic. I tossed it at the wall, and when it touched, it was destroyed. It didn’t go violently. It simply became a flicker of softly glowing light in the precise shape of the bar of “food.”
Then it was gone.
“That also was pretty,” Thomas noted. “In a completely lethal kind of way.”
“Look who’s talking,” Molly said.
“It’s not all that high,” he said. “Maybe I could jump it.”
“Molly,” I said.
She passed me another granola bar, and I threw it over the wall.
The wall destroyed it in midair.
“Maybe not,” Thomas said.
“Okay,” Karrin said. “So . . . How do we get through it?”
I thought about it for a second. Then I licked my lips and said, “We don’t. I do.”
“Alone?” Thomas said. “Sort of defeats the point of bringing us. Also, death. Bad plan.”
“I think it will let me through,” I said.
“You think?”
“Look,” I said. “Me and the island are . . . kind of partners.”
“Oh, right,” Thomas said. He looked at Karrin and said, “Harry’s a geosexual.”
Karrin arched an eyebrow and gave me a look.
“You can’t go alone,” Molly said, her voice worried.
“Looks like it’s the only way I can go,” I said. “So we do this Ulysses-style. I go in, I figure a way to let down the gate and then we sack Troy.”
“Can you do that?” Karrin asked.
I licked my lips and looked at the wall of light. “I’d better be able to.”
“You’re tired,” Molly said.
“I’m fine.”
“Your hands are shaking.”
Were they? They were. “They are fine also.”
I didn’t feel tired. Given how much magic I’d been throwing around this day, I should have been comatose with fatigue hours ago, but I just didn’t feel it. That wasn’t a good sign. Maybe Butters had been right: No matter how much juice I got from the mantle of Winter, bodies have limits. I was pushing mine.
I passed the Winchester to Thomas and took off my new duster. At his lifted eyebrow, I said, “Not of the island. Hold ’em for me.”
He exhaled and took them. “No reruns, okay?”
“Pfft,” I said. “Be like sneaking into the movies.”
Karrin touched my arm. “Just don’t say that you’ll be right back. You’ll jinx it.”
“I am a professional wizard,” I said. “I know all about jinxes.”
Having said that, I checked to make sure my shirt wasn’t red. It wasn’t. Then I realized I was putting this off because if I was wrong, I was about to go join Yoda and Obi-Wan in blue-light country. So I took a deep breath and strode forward into the beautiful, deadly barrier.