This time it had taken more than an hour.
Whatever was in my head, some kind of psychic or spiritual creature that was using me to grow, was getting ready to kill me.
“ALFRED,” the spirit said soberly. “IS THIS TO BE MY NEW NAME?”
“Let’s stick with Demonreach,” I said.
The enormous spirit considered that. “I AM THE ISLAND.”
“Well, yes,” I said, gathering myself to my feet. “Its spirit. Its genius loci.”
“AND I AM ALSO SEPARATE FROM THE ISLAND. A VESSEL.”
I eyed the spirit. “You know the name ‘Alfred’ is a joke, right?”
It stared at me. A wind that didn’t exist stirred the hem of its cloak.
I raised my hands in surrender and said, “All right. I guess you need a first name, too. Alfred Demonreach it is.”
Its eyes flickered brighter for a moment and it inclined its head to me within the hood. Then it said, “SHE IS HERE.”
I jerked my head up, my heart suddenly speeding. It made little echoes of pain go through my head. Had she finally responded to my messages? “Molly?”
“NOT GRASSHOPPER. GRASSHOPPER’S NEW MOTHER.”
I felt tension slide into my shoulders and neck. “Mab,” I said in a low, hard voice.
“YES.”
“Fantastic,” I muttered. Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness, Monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe, mistress and mentor of every wicked being in Faerie-my boss-had been ignoring me for months. I’d been sending her messengers on an increasingly regular basis to no avail. At least, not until today.
But why now? Why show up now, after all those months of silence?
“Because, dummy,” I muttered to myself, “she wants something.” I turned to Demonreach. “Okay, Alfred. Where?”
“DOCK.”
Which was smart. Demonreach, like practically every prison ever, was just as well suited to keeping visitors out as it was to keeping them in. When a freaking Walker of the Outside and his posse had shown up to perform a massive jailbreak on the island’s prisoners, they had been beaten back, thanks to the efforts of the island’s defenses and several key allies.
I’d spent the last year acquainting myself with the island’s secrets, with the defenses that I hadn’t even known existed-defenses that could be activated only by the Warden. If the Walker tried that play again, I could shut him down single-handed. Even Mab, as powerful as she was, would be well-advised to be cautious if she decided to start trouble on Demonreach’s soil.
Which was why she was standing on the dock.
She expected me to be upset. Definitely, she wanted something.
In my experience, when the Queen of Air and Darkness decides she wants something from you, it’s a good time to crawl in a hole and pull it in after you.
But my head pulsed with little twinges of pain. My headaches had slowly gotten worse and worse over several years, and I had only recently discovered their cause-I had a condition that had to be taken care of before whatever was hanging out in my noggin decided to burst its way out of my skull. I didn’t dare leave the island until that happened, and if Mab had finally decided to respond to my messages, I had little choice but to meet with her.
Which was probably why she hadn’t shown up to talk to me-until now.
“Freaking manipulative faeries,” I muttered under my breath. Then I headed for the stairs leading out of the Well and up to the island’s surface. “Stay nearby and pay attention,” I told Demonreach.
“DO YOU SUSPECT SHE MEANS YOU HARM?”
“Heh,” I said, starting up the stairs. “One way or another. Let’s go.”
Two
My brother and I had built the Whatsup Dock down at the shore at one of Demonreach’s three little beaches, the one nearest the opening in the stone reefs surrounding the island. There had been a town on the hillside up above the beach maybe a century before, but it had been abandoned after its residents had apparently been driven slowly bonkers by all the dark energy around the hideous things imprisoned below the island.
The ruins of the town were still there, half swallowed by the forest, a corpse being slowly devoured by fungus and moss. I sometimes wondered how long I could stay on the damned island before I was bonkers, too.
There was an expensive motored yacht tied to the dock, as out of place as a Ferrari in a cattle yard, white with a lot of frosty blue chrome. There were a couple of hands in sight, and they weren’t dressed in sailing clothes so much as they were in sailing costumes. The creases were too straight, the clothes too clean, the fit too perfect. Watching them move, I had no doubt they were carrying weapons, and practiced in killing. They were Sidhe, the lords of Faerie, tall and beautiful and dangerous. They didn’t impress me.
Mostly because they weren’t nearly as pretty or dangerous as the woman standing at the very end of my dock, the tips of her expensive shoes half an inch from Demonreach’s shore. When there’s a Great White Shark in the water with you, it’s tough to be worried about a couple of barracuda swimming along behind her.
Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness, was wearing a tailored business suit somewhere between the color of smeared charcoal on newsprint and frozen periwinkles. The blouse beneath was snow-white, like her hair, which was bound up in an elaborate do that belonged in the forties. Opals flashed on her ears and at her throat, deep colors of green and blue, matching the shifting hues of her cold, flat eyes. She was pale, beautiful on a scale that beggared simple description, and I harbored a healthy and rational terror of her.
I came down the old stone steps in the hillside to the dock, and stopped an arm’s length away from Mab. I didn’t bow to her, but I inclined my head formally. There were other Sidhe there, on the boat, witnessing the meeting, and I had worked out a while ago that though I was no danger to Mab’s pride, she would not tolerate disrespect to her office. I was pretty sure that if the Winter Knight openly defied her in front of her Court, it would basically be a declaration of war, and despite what I now knew about the island, I wanted nothing of the sort with Mab.
“My Queen,” I said pleasantly. “How’s tricks?”
“Functioning flawlessly, my Knight,” she replied. “As ever. Get on the boat.”
“Why?” I asked.
Her mouth turned down into a slight frown, but it was belied by the sudden pleased light in her eyes.
“I’m predictable, aren’t I?” I asked her.
“In many ways,” she replied. “Shall I answer you literally?”
“I’d like that.”
Mab nodded. Then she leaned forward, very slightly, her eyes growing deep, and said in a voice colder and harder than frozen stone, “Because I told you to do so.”
I swallowed, and my stomach did this little roller-coaster number on me. “What happens if I won’t?” I asked.
“You have already made clear to me that you will resist me if I attempt to compel you directly to obey my commands,” Mab said. “Such a thing would render you useless to me, and for the moment, I would find it inconvenient to train a replacement. I would therefore do nothing.”
I blinked at that. “Nothing? I could deny you, and you’d just. . go?”
“Indeed,” Mab said, turning. “You will be dead in three days, by which time I should have made arrangements to replace you.”
“Uh,” I said. “What?”
Mab paused and looked over her shoulder. “The parasite within you will emerge in that time. Surely you have noticed the pains growing worse.”
Boy, had I. And it added up.
“Dammit,” I snarled, keeping my voice too low to be heard by the goons on the boat. “You set me up.”
Mab turned to face me and gave me a very small smile.
“I’ve been sending out Toot and Lacuna with messages for you and Molly every damned day. None of them got through, did they?”
“They are faeries,” Mab said. “I am a Queen of Faerie.”