Cold Days

"Only two? Man, how do Unseelie lawyers make a living?"

"First," Sarissa said, ignoring my wiseassery, "Blood may not be spilled upon the floor of the court without the Queen's express command."

"No murder without getting the nod first. Got it. Second?"

"No one may speak to the Queen without her express command."

I snorted. "Seriously? Because I'm not much for keeping my mouth shut. In fact, I'm pretty sure I physically can't. Probably because I was influenced at an impressionable age. Did you ever read any Spider-Man comics when you were-"

"Harry," Sarissa said, her voice suddenly tight. She put her hand on my arm, and her lean fingers were like heavy wires. "No one speaks to the Queen," she whispered intently. "No one. Not even the Lady Maeve dares disobey that law." She shuddered. "I've seen what happens. We all have."

I pursed my lips and studied her hand thoughtfully for a moment. Then I nodded. "Okay," I said. "I hear you."

Sarissa exhaled slowly and nodded.

Just then, a door I hadn't seen before opened in the center of what had looked exactly like a wall. Cat Sith stood on the other side of the door. He ignored me pointedly, turning his golden eyes to Sarissa. "It is time."

"Very well," Sarissa said. "We are ready."

I rose and offered Sarissa a hand up. She took it, and I tucked her arm into mine. Her fingers gave my forearm one quick squeeze, and then we turned to follow Cat Sith down another hallway.

Sarissa leaned a little closer to me and whispered, "You know what this is, don't you?"

I grunted quietly. "Yeah," I said. "It's my first day in the prison yard."

Chapter Four

Sith led us down yet another passageway, this one darker than the others, until finally I couldn't see the malk at all in the dimness. Instead, a very dim phosphorescence in the shape of his paw prints began to rise from the floor, giving us just enough light to move by. I could feel Sarissa growing increasingly tense beside me, but she said nothing. Smart. If anything was going to jump up and eat us, our ears would tell us about it first.

The sound of our steps on the floor changed, and I realized that we had moved into a large open space. Just as I did, the glowing paw prints in front of us vanished.

I stopped at once, pulling Sarissa in closer against my side. Again, she remained completely silent, except for one sharp little inhalation.

Silent seconds went by.

"Sith," I said quietly. "You are a suck guide. I don't care how big your shadow is."

My voice echoed cavernously while I waited, but apparently Sith didn't have a comeback. After a few seconds, I reached up and tugged my amulet out of the tux.

I held it up and concentrated, sending a microcurrent of my will into the design, and an instant later it began to glow with a blue-white light. I held it aloft and looked around.

We were in another ice cave, this one filled with enormous, bizarre . . . structures, was the only thing I could think to call them. I might have called them sculptures, except no one does sculptures the size of buildings these days, even in ice. I looked around the place slowly. There was something odd about the structures, something almost . . .

Sarissa was looking, too. She seemed alert, but not frightened. "Are those . . . giant pieces of furniture?"

. . . familiar.

The structures were sculpture, built on a scale of maybe one to eight, of a couch, two easy chairs, a brick fireplace, bookshelves. . . . Mab had re-created my old basement apartment in ice, right down to textured carvings of all of my area rugs crafted into the ice of the floor.

I had about a second to take that in before the cavern exploded with sound, color, and motion. A wave front of pure noise slapped against me as a sudden horde of beings from every dark folktale ever told surged into view at the edges of my light, their screams and cries coming from all around me.

This was a worst-case scenario for a mortal wizard. We can do amazing things, but we need time to make them happen. Sometimes we get that time by preparing well in advance-creating tools that help us focus our abilities more quickly and with greater precision. Sometimes we get the time by picking where and when to begin our battles. Sometimes we do it by slinging the spell from a couple or a couple hundred miles away. But I didn't have any of that going for me.

My convalescence with Mab had kept me way too busy recovering or sleeping to have enough time to create new tools, and my amulet was all I had. On the upside, Mab had given me a serious workout, magically speaking. I'd been forced to use my abilities without any kind of tools or crutch to help me, or else perish. I was better at wielding raw magic now than I'd ever been in my life.

It just wasn't going to be enough to survive what was coming at me.

I moved without thinking, putting myself between Sarissa and as many of them as I could, and bringing my will to bear upon my right hand. Pallid blue-white fire suddenly engulfed my fingers as I let the pentacle fall. I raised my hand-no time to think or aim or plan-determined to take someone down with me.

Sarissa's hand snapped out and she grabbed my wrist, jerking my arm down before I could unleash the spell, and I heard two things in the vast roar of sound:

First, Sarissa screaming, "No bloodshed!"

Second, I realized that everything else in the cavern was bellowing, "SURPRISE!"

The horde of all things dark and hideous stopped maybe twenty feet short of Sarissa and me, and the walls and floor and ceiling began to glow with light. Music began to play, a full symphonic freaking orchestra, live, somewhere on the other side of the giant replica of my old secondhand sofa. High up on the ceiling of the cavern, thousands of wisps of eerie light swarmed deep within the ice, swiftly forming up like a flotilla of synchronized swimmers until they formed the words: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DRESDEN.

I stood there with my heart beating too fast for several seconds and blinked at the entire place. "Uh. Oh."

Sarissa studied the ceiling for a moment and then looked up at me. "I didn't know."

"Neither did I, really," I said. "Is it Halloween already?"

"Just barely, I think," Sarissa said back.

It got weirder.

They started to sing.

They sang "Happy Birthday."

Remember when I said that a malk's voice made my skin crawl? It's nothing next to the cackling rasp of a swamp hag, or the freaky-weird whistling voice of a manticore. Goblins can't carry a tune if it has handles, and the huge bat things that served as Mab's air force shrieked in pitches that could barely be heard. Trolls, hideous giant thugs towering over ten feet tall, sound like laryngitic foghorns.