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The edges of the carved runes on my staff began to blacken, and my vision began to narrow.
In my head, Karrin’s voice warned me quietly about how fights with family hurt so much more. But the voice of my anger was so much louder. By now, the Winter mantle was alert and interested in what was going on, sending jolts of adrenaline into my system, preparing me for a fight.
I poured as much of my anger into my voice as I could, my only outlet. “Susan tried your way. And if they’d been smart instead of obsessed with revenge, the Red Court could have killed Maggie that same day, along with her mother and you and me. So tell me again what a great plan it is to send her away.”
“You never should have gotten mixed up in vampire business in the first place,” Ebenezar snarled. “My God, boy. Don’t you see what you’ve done?”
“I’ve done what is right,” I spat.
“How righteous of you,” the old man shot back. “I’m sure that is a great comfort to the families of those who have been killed so you could be right.” He slammed the end of his staff on the ground in frustration, and cracks sprang out through the concrete around it. “Dammit, boy. The extended consequences of your actions have cost lives. They keep costing lives. And if you do this, if you defend that vampire, there’s no chance at all you’ll keep the protection of the White Council.”
“If I do what is right, they’ll throw me to the wolves, huh?”
“Look in the mirror,” Ebenezar said harshly. “You are a wolf. That’s the point.”
That one hit me like a punch in the gut.
And everything went quiet.
There was just the sound of me breathing, harshly.
“When the Red Court took Susan,” I said finally, “the White Council thought I should have done nothing.”
I’m not sure what I sounded like. But the old man looked at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before. And then he slowly, slowly ground in his heels, planting his feet, his eyes focused on the middle of my chest.
“When they took Maggie,” I said, and my throat felt strange, “the White Council would have had me do the same.”
“This is different,” Ebenezar said, his voice suddenly hard, a clear warning. “The vampire is no innocent. He has drawn first blood. The scales will be balanced. There is no escaping that.”
I don’t remember calling up my shield, but my copper-band shield bracelet was suddenly drizzling green-gold sparks and ready to go. “He was used.”
The old man shifted his shoulders, lifting his left hand, fingers spread. He didn’t bother to use the toys like I did, except for his staff. When the master brawler of the White Council wanted a shield, he willed it to be. No trinkets required. “This isn’t a place we have authority,” he pressed, as if trying to drill the words through my thick skull. “He’s not one of ours.”
“He’s one of mine!” I shouted, slamming my own staff down, and fire sizzled out where it struck the ground, a flashing circle of flame that left a black ring scorched on the concrete.
The old man glowered at me and thrust out his jaw. “Boy, tell me you ain’t dumb enough to try this.”
The Winter mantle immediately bayed for blood, for defiance, for violence.
I started drawing in power.
The old man sensed it and did the same.
The universe yawed slightly in his direction as he did, a subtle bending of light, a minor wobble of gravity, a shudder in the very ground as Ebenezar drank power from the earth itself. That’s how much more juice the old man was taking in than me.
In my head, all I could hear was Maggie screaming. She had a lot of nightmares, of when the Red Court had come for her foster family. And he wanted to put the interests of the Council ahead of that? Of her?
“Oh, I’m more than dumb enough,” I said through clenched teeth.
And that was when every hair on my neck suddenly rose and stood on end, all the way down to my heels. Gooseflesh erupted over my entire body at once, and a primal, primeval wave of utter terror flickered through my lizard brain, utterly dislodging every rational thought in my head.
For a wizard, that’s … less than ideal. Control of our own thoughts and emotions is vital. Otherwise, all kinds of horrible things can happen. The first lesson every practitioner learns is how to quiet and focus his or her mind. And in the face of that mindless fear, I ran to that first lesson, allowing emotions to slough away, seeking calm, patience, balance.
I didn’t get any of those. But it was enough to let me shove the terror back and to start processing some degree of rational thought.
That hadn’t been the result of some random eddy of energy. Terror that focused was nothing less than a psychic disruption, a mental attack, the psychic equivalent of an ear-piercing shriek, loud enough to burst eardrums—and whatever had done it wasn’t even in sight yet.
In the sleeping city around me, hundreds or thousands of people had just been seized in the talons of nightmares of pursuit and mindless fear. Those who were awake and didn’t know what they were dealing with would interpret it as a brief, frightening hallucination or a migraine or simply a dizzy spell.
The old man had recovered faster than me, and by the time I’d cleared my head, he was already staring out at the night, his jaw set.
“Is that what I think it is?” I asked him, my voice shaking.
“Outsiders,” he confirmed grimly. “Someone just whistled them in.”
“Super,” I said. “Just once, I’d like to be wrong about these things.”
The old man snorted. “Now, if you were an Outsider, what would you be doing in Chicago the night before a big peace conference?”
The question was almost meaningless. Outsiders were creatures from beyond the borders of reality, from outside of our universe. They weren’t human. They weren’t anything close to human. They were hideous, and they were dangerous, and they … were just too alien to be understood. There are Outsiders who want to eat your face off, and then there are the rest of them, who don’t go in for that kind of namby-pamby cuddly stuff.
Demons they might be. But demons summoned by mortals, the only way for them to get into our reality. They always have a mortal purpose, if not always a rational one.
“Trying to interfere with it in some way,” I suggested. “If a senior member of the Council was torn apart by monsters, it would tend to tilt blame toward the Fomor.”
“Definitely a poor way to begin negotiations,” Ebenezar agreed. “And I don’t think that we—”
He suddenly froze and stared.
I followed his gaze.
In a corner of the alley, where one of the building’s cornices formed a shadowy alcove, blue lines of light had appeared at the intersection of the ground and the two walls.
“Oh, Hell’s bells,” I breathed. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Belike,” growled the old man, his eyes shifting around. “How well do you know this block?”
“It’s Chicago,” I said.
“Good. We need a place without people or much that can catch fire.”
I eyed him and said, “It’s Chicago.”
The light in the corner shifted weirdly, warped, spun into curlicues and spirals that should have existed only in Escher drawings. The stone of the building twisted and stretched, and then rock rippled and bubbled like pancake batter, and something started hauling itself out of the surface of the stone at the intersection of the three lines of light. My chest suddenly vibrated as if I’d been standing in a pool in front of an outflow pipe, and a surge of nausea nearly knocked me down.
