“As who, Harry?” Molly asked.

“I don’t know who they are,” I said. “But they’ve been involved in several things lately. The Darkhallow, Arctis Tor, the White Court coup. They’re way too handy with magic. I’ve been calling them the Black Council.”

“There is no Black Council,” Morgan snapped, with the speed that could only have been born of reflex.

Molly and I traded a look.

Morgan let out an impatient breath. “Any actions that may have been taken are the work of isolated renegades,” he said. “There is no organized conspiracy against the White Council.”

“Uh-huh,” I said. “Gosh, I’d have thought you’d be right on board with the conspiracy thing.”

“The Council is not divided,” he said, his voice as hard and cold as I had ever heard it. “Because the moment we turn upon one another, we’re finished. There is no Black Council, Dresden.”

I lifted both eyebrows. “From my perspective, the Council’s been turning on me for most of my life,” I said. “And I’m a member. I have a robe and everything.”

“You,” Morgan spat, “are . . .” He almost seemed to be choking on something before he blew out a breath and finished, “. . . vastly irritating.”

I beamed at him. “That’s the Merlin’s line, isn’t it?” I said. “There is no conspiracy against the Council.”

“It is the position of the entire Senior Council,” Morgan shot back.

“Okay, smart guy,” I said. “Explain what happened to you.”

He glowered again, only with more purple.

I nodded sagely, then turned to Molly. “This place should protect you from most tracking spells,” I said. “And the avoidance wards should keep anyone from wandering by or asking any questions.”

Morgan made a growling noise.

“Suggestions, not compulsions,” I said, rolling my eyes. “They’re in common usage and you know it.”

“What do I do if someone does come?” she asked.

“Veil and run,” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t know how to open a way to the Nevernever, Harry. You haven’t shown me yet.”

“I can show her,” Morgan said.

Both of us stopped and blinked at him.

He was very still for a second and then said, “I can do it. If she watches, maybe she’ll learn something.” He glared at me. “But doors open both ways, Dresden. What if something comesin through it?”

Mouse went over to the open space and settled down about six inches away from it. He sighed once, shifted his weight a bit, and went to sleep again, though his ears twitched at every noise.

I went to the first footlocker and opened it, took out a boxed fruit drink, and passed it to him. “Your blood sugar’s getting low. It’s making you grumpy. But if you do get an unexpected visitor from the other side . . .” I went to the second locker, opened it, and drew out a pump-action shotgun, its barrel cut to well below the minimum legal length. I checked it, and passed the weapon to Molly. “It’s loaded with a mix of steel shot and rock salt. Between that and Mouse, it should discourage anything that comes through.”

“Right,” Molly said. She checked the weapon’s chamber and then worked the pump, chambering a shell. She double-checked the safety, and then nodded at me.

“You taught her guns,” Morgan said. “But not how to open passages to the Nevernever.”

“There’s enough trouble right here in the real world,” I said.

Morgan grunted. “True enough. Where are you going?”

“Only one place I can go.”

He nodded. “Edinburgh.”

I turned toward the door and opened it. I looked from Morgan with his juice box to Molly with her shotgun. “You two play nice.”

Chapter Thirteen

Wizards and technology don’t get on so well, and that makes travel sort of complicated. Some wizards seemed to be more of a bad influence on technology than others, and if any of them were harder on machinery than me, I hadn’t met them yet. I’d been on a jet a couple of times and had one bad experience—just one. After the plane’s computers and guidance system went bad, and we had to make an emergency landing on a tiny commercial airfield, I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.

Buses were better, especially if you sat toward the back, but even they had problems. I hadn’t been on a bus trip longer than three or four hundred miles without winding up broken down next to the highway in the middle of nowhere. Cars could work out, especially if they were fairly old models—the fewer electronics involved, the better. Even those machines, though, tended to provide you with chronic problems. I’d never owned a car that ran more than maybe nine days in ten—and most of them were worse than that.

Trains and ships were the ideal, especially if you could keep yourself a good way from the engines. Most wizards, when they traveled, stuck with ships and trains. Either that or they cheated—like I was about to do.

Back at the beginning of the war with the Vampire Courts, the White Council, with the help of a certain wizard private investigator from Chicago who shall remain nameless, negotiated the use of Ways through the near reaches of the Nevernever controlled by the Unseelie Court. The Nevernever, the world of ghosts and spirits and fantastic beings of every description, exists alongside our own mortal reality—but it isn’t the same shape. That meant that in places, the mortal world touched upon the Nevernever at two points that could be very close together, while in the mortal realm, they were very far apart. In short, use of the Ways meant that anyone who could open a path between worlds could use a major shortcut.

In this case, it meant I could make the trip from Chicago, Illinois, to Edinburgh, Scotland, in about half an hour.

The closest entry point to where I wanted to go in the Nevernever was a dark alley behind a building that had once been used for meat packing. A lot of things had died in that building, not all of them cleanly and not all of them cows. There’s a dark sense of finality to the place, a sort of ephemeral quality of dread that hangs so lightly on the air that the unobservant might not notice it at all. In the middle of the alley, a concrete staircase led down to a door that was held shut with both boards and chains—talk about overkill.

I walked down the steps to the bottom of the stairs, closed my eyes for a moment, and extended my otherworldly senses, not toward the door, but toward the section of concrete beside it. I could feel the thinness of the world there, where energy pulsed and hummed just beneath the seemingly rigid surface of reality.

It was a hot night in Chicago, but it wouldn’t be on the Ways. I wore a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, and a couple of pairs of socks beneath my hiking shoes. My heavy leather duster had me sweating. I gathered up my will, reached out my hand, and with a whisper of “Aparturum,” I opened a Way between worlds.

Honestly, it sounds quite a bit more dramatic than it looks. The surface of the concrete wall rippled with a quick flickering of color and began to put out a soft glow. I took a deep breath, gripped my staff in both hands, and stepped directly forward into the concrete.

My flesh passed through what should have been stone, and I emerged in a dark wood that lay covered in frost and a thin layer of snow. At least this time the ground in Chicago had been more or less level with the ground in the Nevernever. Last time, I’d had a three-inch drop I hadn’t expected, and I’d fallen on my ass into the snow. No harm done, I suppose, but this part of the Nevernever was just chock-full of things you did notwant to think you were clumsy or vulnerable.

I took my bearings with a quick look around. The woods were the same, all three times I’d been through them. A hillside sank down ahead of me, and climbed steadily into the night behind me. At the top of the small mountain I stood upon, I was told, was a narrow and bitterly cold pass that led into the interior of the Unseelie Mountains, to Mab’s stronghold of Arctis Tor. Below me, the land sank into foothills and then into plains, where Mab’s authority ended and that of Titania the Summer Queen began.