Cold Days (The Dresden Files 14)

"Um, right," I said. "Why did you touch my head like that? What were you looking for?"

"A disease," she replied. "A parasite. A poison."

"Could you repeat that answer, only without the poetry?"

Lily faced me squarely, her lovely face intent. "Sir Knight, you must have seen it. You must have seen the contagion spreading. It has been before your eyes for years."

"I haven't seen . . ." Then I paused. My head started adding things together. "You . . . you aren't talking about a physical disease, are you?"

"Of course not," Lily said. "It is a kind of spiritual malady. A mental plague. An infection slowly spreading across the earth."

"And . . . this plague. What does it do?" I asked.

"It changes that which ought not change," she said quietly. "It destroys a father's love for his family by twisting it into maniacal ambition. It distorts and corrupts the good intentions of agents of mortal law into violence and death. It erodes the sensible fear that keeps a weakly talented sorcerer from reaching out for more power, no matter how terrible the cost."

I felt my head rock back as if she'd slammed a croquet mallet into it, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach again.

"Victor Sells the Shadowman," I whispered. "Agent Denton and the Hexenwolves. Leonid Kravos the Nightmare. My first three major cases."

"Yes," Lily whispered. "Each of them was tainted by the contagion. It destroyed them."

I put a hand on the rail and leaned against it. "Fourth case. Aurora. A champion of peace and healing who set out to send the natural world into havoc."

Lily's eyes glistened with tears. "I saw what it did to her," she said. "I didn't know what was happening to my friend, but I saw it changing her. Twisting her day by day. I loved Aurora like a sister, Sir Knight. But in the end, even I could see what she had become." Tears fell, and she made no effort to wipe them away. "I saw. I knew. In the end, you may have killed her, Harry. But you also did her a kindness."

I shook my head. "I . . . I don't understand why you didn't want to tell me about it."

"No one who knows of this speaks of it," Lily said.

"Why not?"

"Don't you see?" Lily said. "What if you had been tainted as well? And I revealed to you that I recognized what was happening?"

I kicked my brain into gear and thought. "Uh . . . then . . ." I felt sick. "You'd be a threat. I'd have to kill you to keep you quiet. Or make you the next recruit."

"Exactly," Lily said.

"But why suspect me of being tainted . . . ?" I heard my own voice trail off as I realized the only thing that could have moved Lily against me so strongly.

"Be at ease," Lily said, and beckoned.

And freaking Maeve, the Winter Lady, strolled onto the far end of the bridge and sauntered toward us. She was dressed in leather pants of dark purple and a periwinkle sweater whose sleeves fell past the ends of her fingers, and her mouth was curled into a tiny, wicked smirk. "Hey, there, big guy," she purred. "Lily give you the skinny?"

"Not yet," Lily said. "Maeve, this isn't the sort of thing one should simply ram down another's throat."

"Of course it is," Maeve said, her smile widening.

"Maeve-" Lily began.

Maeve did a little pirouette that wound up with her toes practically touching mine as she smiled up at me, her too-sharp teeth very white. "Do you have a camera? I want someone to get a picture."

"Oh, dear," Lily said.

Maeve leaned in close, her smile widening. "Mab," she breathed, "my mother, the Queen of Air and Darkness, and your liege . . ." She leaned closer and whispered, "Mab has been tainted and has gone utterly mad."

My spine turned to brittle ice. "What?"

Lily looked up at me with a sad, sober expression.

Maeve let out a peal of giggles. "It's true," she said. "She means to destroy the mortal world, wizard, and to do it this very night-to unleash chaos and havoc that have not been known since the fall of Atlantis. And make no mistake, she will destroy it."

Lily nodded, her eyes pained. "Unless," she began. "Unless . . ."

I finished the thought Lily obviously did not want to complete. "Unless," I whispered, "someone destroys her first."

Chapter Twenty-five

This day had begun so simply: I'd nearly been killed at my birthday party and Mab had ordered me to kill an immortal. I'd survived the first, and if I'd had the good sense to shut up and do the second without asking questions, I might be somewhere reading a nice book or something, and waiting out the clock until it was Maeve-whacking time.

Instead I had this.

"I love watching him think," Maeve told Lily. "You can almost hear that poor little hamster running and running on its wheel."

"You clubbed him over the head with it," Lily said. "What did you expect?"

"Oh, this," Maeve said, her eyes sparkling. "Wizards are always so sure of themselves. I love seeing them off balance. This one in particular."

"Why me?" I said. I wasn't really participating in their conversation.

"You did kill my cousin, wizard," Maeve said. "Aurora was a prissy little bint, but she was family. It makes me happy when you suffer."

I glowered at Maeve and said, "One of these days, you and I are going to disagree." I turned to Lily. "You say Mab wants to hold an Armageddon-thon, fine. How is she going to do it?"

"We aren't completely certain," Lily said, her eyes earnest.

"It's something to do with that island," Maeve said carelessly.

Gulp.

Wrecking someone's powerful and deadly ritual wasn't such a scary concept. I'd done that before, more than once. But somehow, knowing that it was Mab's ritual I was supposed to derail made this situation a whole lot worse. I'd Seen Mab before, with the unadulterated perception of my Sight, and I remembered the kind of might she wielded with absolute clarity. Mab had the kind of power you had to describe using exponents. I felt like a man with a shovel and a couple of gunnysacks who has just been told to stop an oncoming tsunami.

And Mab knew the place. She'd taken care of me for months there. She knew Demonreach's strengths, its defenses, and its potential. Hell, I'd been her ticket through the door-in fact, I was the only one who could have gotten her onto that island.

"You know," I said aloud, "it's just possible that I made a mistake in taking Mab's deal."