Fourteen
Whatever it was about the mantle of Winter I held that sustained me during action, it didn’t seem to have nearly as much interest in looking after me once I was safe somewhere.
I had too many stitches to hop into Karrin’s shower, but I bathed myself as best I could with a washcloth and a sink full of warm water and a little soap, and then fell down in the bed. I’d been there for maybe ten seconds before the distant weariness became acute, and the low burn and dull ache of dozens of cuts and bruises swelled up to occupy my full attention.
I was too tired to care. I thought about getting up and getting some aspirin or something for maybe a minute and a half, and then sleep snuck up on me and sucker punched me unconscious.
I dreamed.
It was one of those fever dreams, noisy and bright and disjointed. I don’t remember many of the details—just that I could never keep up with what was happening, and I felt as though as soon as my eyes would focus on something, everything would change, and as soon as I caught up to the action that was happening in the dream, it would roar off in a different direction, leaving me struggling to reorient myself, trying to keep up the pace with my feet dragging in the mud. The whole while, I was conscious of several other Harry Dresdens in the dream, all of them operating a little ways off from me, doing their own confusion dance in parallel to mine, and we occasionally paused to wave at one another and exchange polite complaints.
Toward the end of it, I found myself driving along some random section of road in my old multicolored Volkswagen Bug, the Blue Beetle, scowling ahead through heavy rain. My apprentice, Molly, sat next to me.
Molly was in her midtwenties and gorgeous, though she still looked a little too lean to my eyes. Her hair, which had seemed to be colored at random ever since she was a teenager, was now long and white-blond. She wore old designer jeans, a blue T-shirt with a faded recycling symbol on it, and sandals.
“I hate dreams like this,” I said. “There’s no plot—just random weird things happening. I get enough of that when I’m awake.”
She looked at me as if startled and blinked several times. “Harry?”
“Obviously,” I said. “It’s my dream.”
“No,” she said, “it kind of isn’t. How are you doing this?”
I took my hands off the steering wheel long enough to waggle my fingers and say, in a dramatic voice, “Wizard.”
Molly burst out into a warm laugh. “Oh, good Lord, it’s an accident, isn’t it? Are you finally off the island, then? How’s your head?”
At that, I blinked. “Wait. Molly?”
“Me,” she said, smiling, and leaned across the car. She snaked an arm around my neck for a second and leaned her head against my shoulder in a quick hug. There was a sense of warmth to the touch that went beyond the normal sense of a dream, a sense of another’s presence that was too absolute to question. “Wow, it’s good to hear from you, boss.”
“Wow,” I said. “How is this happening?”
“Good question,” she said. “I’ve been attacked in my dreams, like, fifty times since the New Year. I thought I had my defenses locked up pretty tight.”
“Attacked? By who?” I asked.
“Oh,” she said in an offhand tone, “the Sidhe, mainly.”
“Wait,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be their princess?”
“In the flesh, sure,” Molly said, her eyes sparkling. “In dreams, though, they can come at me anonymously, so every punk thinks he’s tough. It’s like the Internet for faeries.”
“What jerks,” I said.
“No,” she said, “not at all. Look, Harry, Maeve was a really, really awful Winter Lady. I have a job to do. The Sidhe just want to be sure I’m up for it. So they test me.”
“By coming at you?” I asked.
“Quietly, where Mab can’t see,” Molly said. “It actually kind of reminds me of when Mom used to leave me in charge of all my little brothers and sisters at home. Only more felonious.”
I blinked at that and let out a short bark of laughter.
“There, good, a smile,” she said. “They step up. I swat them down. It’s nothing personal,” she continued. “Then I get back to business. Which, by the way, is why you haven’t heard much from me. Sorry. I’ve had about a hundred and fifty years of Maeve’s backlog to deal with. What’s your excuse?”
“I’ve been sending messengers every day for the last six months,” I said.
Molly’s eyes widened, then narrowed. “Mab.”
“Mab.”
“Grrr,” she said. “You need me?”
“The day before yesterday. There’s this thing in my head that’s going to kill me in the next couple of days. Demonreach says you can help. Apparently, Mab thinks so, too.”
Molly’s blue eyes went icy. “Or she wouldn’t have intercepted your messengers. That bitch. If I’d known . . .” She chewed on her lower lip. “She’s got me doing something that I can’t get out of right away.”
“What, it isn’t convenient?” I asked.
“I’m under two miles of ice at the moment,” she said. “It took me a day to get here—that’s why I’m asleep now. What’s the situation?”
I told her.
“Oh, God, Harry!” she said. “Nicodemus, really? Is Sanya there?”
“No,” I said, then amended it. “At least, not yet.”
“A Knight will be there,” she said. “That’s how it works. And I’m on the way.” Her expression became distressed, and a moment later the dream world started flickering, and I was suddenly driving in a small herd of Blue Beetles, all of them filled with slightly different versions of Harry Dresden and Molly Carpenter. I had to slalom the VW through them.
“. . . there as soon as I can . . .” came Molly’s voice, distantly, and then I was driving alone.
The traffic got worse and worse and more confusing, and then there was a loud screech of tires and twisting metal, a bright light, and a sensation of tumbling and falling in exaggerated, graceful slow motion.
The radio blared with static and a woman’s voice spoke in the tones of a news commentator. “. . . other news, Harry Dresden, Chicago wizard, blindly charges toward his own destruction because he refuses to recognize simple and obvious truths which are right there in front of him. Dresden ignored several excellently placed warnings, and as a result is expected to perish in the next forty-eight hours . . .”