Cold Days (The Dresden Files 14)

"Touch me and I will kill her," he snarled, giving Sarissa a little jerk by way of demonstration.

I looked at Sarissa and hoped that she could read deeper than the surface. "That's bad, but there's not much I can do about it if you decide to kill her now," I said. "Of course, after you do that . . . I don't really like your chances, Red. If she dies, you'll join her."

"You wouldn't break Mab's law," he sneered.

"You're right," I said. "So I figure I'll just open a Way back to the mortal world, drag you through it, and after that . . . well, I've always been partial to fire."

Evidently that line of possibility had not occurred to the Redcap. "What?"

"I know it's not thematically in tune with my new job and all, but I find it effective. Build a man a fire and he's warm for a day," I said. "But set a man on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life. Tao of Pratchett. I live by it. You wanted to face me down in front of everyone, get props for tweaking my nose on my first night here? Well, congratulations, Red. You're the man."

The Redcap's eyes narrowed, gleaming bright, and his foxlike smile widened. "You think I'm afraid of you."

"The last time somebody swiped my date to a party, it got a little messy," I said in a very mild voice. "Ask the Red Court about it. Oh, wait."

The Redcap actually laughed at that, and it was hurtful. Literally. My ears rang painfully at the sharpness of the sound. "It is nothing to me how many cockroaches or vampires you have ended, mortal. I am Sidhe."

"Whatever," I said. "Killed some of them, too."

"Yes," the Redcap said, and there was an ugly, hungry heat in his tone. "The Lady of Summer. I was in that battle, mortal. I saw her blood flow."

I nodded and said, "And what makes you think I won't do it again?"

The Redcap jerked his chin a little to one side and said, "They do."

I froze.

Dammit, Harry, I chided myself. You're dealing with faeries. There is always a scam with faeries. There is always a sucker punch on the way. I'd gotten too forward-focused. The Redcap hadn't been a challenger.

He was the bait.

As if on cue, the wild dancing turned to stillness. The music died. All motion in the chamber, as far as I could tell, ceased entirely, and suddenly I stood in a small glade within a forest of lean, wickedly beautiful figures and weirdly sparkling eyes.

Two beings emerged from that forest, shambling out from the crowd of Sidhe, one on either side of me, maybe fifteen feet away.

The first, on my right, was a huge figure, shuffling forward with its form doubled over beneath a tattered grey cloak that could have covered a small truck. Its legs took strides that were two or three times as long as mine, and when it came to a halt, its long arms spread out to either side of it and rested on the floor. Beneath its hood, I could make out a flat, broad head, as stark as a skull and colored red and glistening. Its arms ended in hands with only three fingers, but they were proportionally too thick and a couple of feet long. They, too, were red and glistening, as if something had been built on a bone framework with flesh and muscle added on over it, but then whoever had made it had forgotten to put the skin on. It dripped little patters of ichor onto the floor and stared at me with very wide, very white eyes that contained only tiny pinpoints of black.

I recognized the thing. It was a rawhead, a creature that assembled itself out of the discarded bones and flesh of slaughtered hogs and cattle. Then they started eating whatever they could catch, usually starting with pets, then working their way up to schoolchildren, and finally hunting down adults. If you caught them early, you should shut them down hard-but no one had caught this one.

As I watched, it rose, slowly, up to its full height of well over ten feet. Its jaws had come from more than a couple of different creatures, and they spread open in a slow, wide gape, into a mouth as wide as a waterslide tunnel. More liquid pattered down out of the rawhead's jaws onto the floor, and its breath rasped in and out in a slow, enormous wheeze.

On the left, the second figure drew back its hood. It was maybe only eight feet tall, and mostly human-looking, except for the thick coat of yellow-white fur that covered it. It was layered in so much muscle that it could be seen even through its pelt, and its eyes were burning, bloodshot orbs shining out from beneath a cavernous brow ridge. It was the Winter Court's version of an ogre, it was a great deal stronger than it looked, and if it wanted to, it could pick me up and drive my head into one of the icy walls, then hammer my spine in like a piton.

"I've been waiting to see that expression on his face all night," the Redcap said to Sarissa. "Isn't it priceless? What's going to happen next? I'm so interested."

Taking on a little friendly training and a grumpy malk was one thing, but going up against three of the nastier creatures in Faerie all at once was probably a losing proposition. Maybe I could survive it, if I was fast and good and a little bit lucky.

But Sarissa wouldn't.

I had only one real chance: instant and overwhelming aggression. If I could knock one of these bozos out of the fight before it even started, that changed the odds from impossible to merely daunting. It meant that there might be a chance of saving the girl.

Of course, it also meant that I would break Mab's law. I'd bragged about opening a Way, and if push came to shove, I probably could-but not before the rawhead and the ogre closed in on me.

Just then there was a sound: a shriek, a blast of cruel trumpets that sounded as if whoever blew them was being beaten with a salted lash. It took me a second to realize that no instruments were playing. Instead, high up on the constructed replica of my favorite chair, at my left shoulder, crystals were thrusting themselves up out of the ice, and screaming as the ice changed form. They rose into a half dome of spikes and frozen blades, and shuddered as the center of the new outgrowth shifted again. Wisps of arctic blue and green and purple buzzed and whirled within those sharp spikes, sending out a wild coruscation of colored light. The aurora was mesmerizing and blinding at the same time, and little disco balls hoped that they could grow up to be half as brilliant one day.

Mab stepped out of the solid ice as if passing through a gauzy curtain. She was in formal wear, a robe of opalescent white, belted with joined crystals of ice. A tall crown of more ice rose from her brow, and her white hair spilled down around her like snow atop a mountain. She was distant and cold, as pure and lovely and merciless as moonlit snow.

She stood for a moment, staring out at the cavern. Then she sat, the motion slow and regal, and the ice within the spiked dome reshaped itself into a seat beneath her. She settled onto it, and the ice screamed again, shrieking out a second tortured fanfare.