I felt a little chill glide over the nape of my neck. “He’s worried that if enough people knew that the Black Council was real, they wouldn’t line up to fight them. They’d join.”
“Everyone loves a winner,” Ebenezar said. “And we haven’t been looking too good lately. People are afraid. Cristos is building his influence on it.”
I stopped in my tracks and all but threw up on the cold stone floor.
Ebenezar stopped, putting his hand on my arm, and frowned in concern. “What is it, boy?”
“Sir,” I said, hearing my voice shake. “When Peabody came to the island . . .”
“Yes?”
“He wasn’t alone. Someone else came with him. Someone we never saw.”
We said nothing for a long minute.
“That’s only one explanation, Hoss,” Ebenezar said. “It’s not even a calculated estimate. It’s a flat-out guess.”
There was no conviction in his voice, though. Ebenezar felt the same thing I did. A hard gut feeling that left me certain—not pretty sure, but certain—that I was right. Besides. We were talking in whispers in an out-of-the-way corridor of our own damn stronghold. If that didn’t tell you something was seriously wrong with the White Council, I don’t know what would.
“They’re inside,” I whispered.
My mentor faced me gravely.
“That’s why they whacked LaFortier. To get their own man into position.” I leaned against the wall and shook my head. “They won.”
“They won the round,” he said. “Fight isn’t over.”
“It is for Morgan,” I said.
“But not for you,” he said with harsh intensity. “Morgan thought that saving your life was worth losing his own.” Ebenezar took a deep breath. Then he said, very quietly, “Hoss, it ain’t over. Some of us are going to do something about it.”
I looked at him sharply. “Do something?”
“It’s just a few, for now. Some wizards. Some key allies. People we know we can trust. I’m the only one who knows everyone involved. We’ve got to take this fight to the enemy. Learn more about them. Determine their goals. Shut them down.”
“Fight fire with fire, eh?”
Ebenezar smiled wryly. “In denying the existence of one conspiracy, Langtry has necessitated another.”
“And got himself a twofer with a side order of irony,” I said. “If the Black Council finds out about us, they’re going to jump for joy. They’ll expose us, call us the Black Council, and go on their merry way.”
“ ‘Us’ already, is it?” His eyes gleamed as he nodded. “And given what we’ll be doing, if the White Council finds out, they’re going to call it sedition. They’ll execute us.”
See what I mean?
Just like Disneyland.
I thought about it for a minute. “You know that in every objective sense, we’re making a Black Council of our own.”
“Aye.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“With pure hearts and good intentions,” he answered. “Our strength shall be the strength of ten.”
I snorted loudly.
Ebenezar smiled wearily. “Well, Hoss, we’re not going to have much choice other than to be walking down some mighty dark alleys. And doing it in mighty questionable company. Maybe we should think of ourselves as . . . a Grey Council.”
“Grey Council,” I said. We started walking again, and after a few minutes, I asked him, “The world’s gotten darker and nastier, even in just the past few years. Do you think what we do will make a difference?”
“I think the same thing you do,” Ebenezar said. “That the only alternative is to stand around and watch everything go to hell.” His voice hardened. “We’re not going to do that.”
“Damn right we’re not,” I said.
We walked the rest of the way to Chicago together.
Murphy drove me down to get my car out of impound, and I caught her up on most of what had happened on the way.
“You’re holding out on me,” she said, when I finished.
“Some,” I said. “Sort of necessary.”
She glanced at me as she drove and said, “Okay.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “It is?”
“You are beginning to deal with some scary people, Harry,” she said quietly. “And people are trusting you with secrets. I get that.”
“Thanks, Murph.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, Harry. It means I’m trusting you to come to me when you’ve got something that intersects with my responsibilities. I’m a cop. If you screw me on something I should know . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t know if we could ever patch something like that up.”
“I hear you,” I said.
She shook her head. “I never really cared for Morgan. But I wish it hadn’t ended that way for him.”
I thought about that for a minute and then said, “I don’t know. He went out making a difference. He took out the traitor who had gotten hundreds of wizards killed. He kept him from getting away with God only knows what secrets.” I shrugged. “A lot of Wardens have gone down lately. As exits go, Morgan’s was a good one.” I smiled. “Besides. If he’d been around any longer, he might have had to apologize to me.
That would have been a horrible way to go.”
“He had courage,” Murphy admitted. “And he had your back.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Did you go to his funeral?”
“No one did,” I said. “Officially, he was corpus non gratus. But we had a kind of a wake, later, unofficially. Told stories about him and came to the conclusion that he really was a paranoid, intolerant, grade-A asshole.”
Murphy smiled. “I’ve known guys like that. They can still be part of the family. You can still miss them when they’re gone.”
I swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Tell me you aren’t blaming yourself.”
“No,” I said, honestly. “I just wish something I’d done had made more of a difference.”
“You survived,” she said. “Under the circumstances, I think you did all right.”
“Maybe,” I said quietly.
“I went through that phone you sent me.” She meant Madeline’s phone, the one Binder had given me.
“What did you find?” I asked.
“The phone numbers to a lot of missing persons,” she said. “Where’s the owner?”
“With them.”
She pressed her lips together. “There were a lot of calls to a number I traced back to Algeria, and another in Egypt. A couple of restaurants, apparently.” She took an index card out of her pocket and passed it to me. It had the names and addresses of two businesses on it.
“What are they?” she asked.
“No clue,” I said. “Maybe Madeline’s contacts in the Black Council. Maybe nothing.”
“Important?”
“No clue. I guess we’ll file this under ‘wait and see.’ ”
“I hate that file,” she said. “How’s Thomas?”
I shrugged and looked down at my hands. “No clue.”
My apartment was a wreck. I mean, it’s never really a surgical theater—except for right after Morgan had shown up, I guess. But several days of frantic comings and goings, various injuries, and serving as Morgan’s sickbed had left some stains not even my faerie housekeepers could erase. The mattress wasn’t salvageable, much less the bedding, or the rug we’d transported his unconscious body on. It was all soaked in blood and sweat, and the various housekeeping faeries apparently didn’t do dry cleaning.
They’d taken care of the usual stuff, but there was considerable work still to be done, and moving mattresses is never joyful, much less when you’ve been thoroughly banged up by a supernatural heavyweight and then stabbed, just for fun, on top of it.
I set about restoring order, though, and I was hauling the mattress out to tie onto my car so that I could take it to the dump, when Luccio arrived.
She was dressed in grey slacks and a white shirt, and carried a black nylon sports equipment bag, which would hold, I knew, the rather short staff she favored and her Warden’s blade, among other things. The clothes were new. I realized, belatedly, that they’d been the sort that she’d favored when I first met her, wearing another body.