I said nothing for several long, silent seconds.

Then I stood up. I faced the Merlin for a moment. I could feel the obdurate, adamant will that drove the man, and made his power the greatest well of mortal magic on the face of the earth.

“You’ve got it backward, you know,” I told him quietly. “No life is worth more than that? No, Merlin. No life is worth less.”

His expression never changed. But his fingers tightened slightly on his staff. His cold blue eyes touched lightly upon Molly, and then returned to me.

The threat was plain to see.

I leaned over close to his ear and whispered, “Go ahead, Arthur. Try it.” Then I straightened slowly away, letting every emotion and every thought drain out of my expression. The tension in the air was thick. No one moved. I could see Molly trembling where she sat.

I nodded slowly at the Merlin.

Then I said in a quiet, clear voice, “Grasshopper.”

Molly stood up immediately.

I kept myself between the girl and Langtry as we walked to the door. He didn’t offer any challenge, but his eyes were arctic and absolute. Behind him, Luccio gave me a single, tiny, conspiratorial nod.

Hell’s bells. She’d known who she would be working against all along.

Molly and I left Edinburgh behind and headed back home to Chicago.

Chapter 9

I watched out for trouble all the way back to Chicago, but it didn’t show up.

The trip from Edinburgh would be a difficult one if limited by strictly physical means of transport. Wizards and jet planes go together like tornados and trailer parks, and with similarly disastrous results. Boats are probably the surest means of modern transport available to us, but it’s a bit of a ride from Scotland to Chicago.

So we do what a good wizard always does when the odds are stacked up against us: We cheat.

The Nevernever, the spirit world, exists alongside our own, sort of like an alternate dimension, but it isn’t shaped the same way as the mortal world. The Nevernever touches upon places in the mortal world that have something in common with it, a resonance of energies. So, if point A is a dark and spooky place in the Nevernever, it touches upon a dark and spooky place in the real world—let’s say, the stacks at the University of Chicago. But the space five feet away from point A in the Nevernever, point B, is only dark and sad, not really scary. Maybe point B attaches to a cemetery in Seattle.

If you’re a wizard, you could then start at the stacks at UC, open a doorway into the Nevernever, walk five feet, open another doorway back to the real world, and emerge into the cemetery in Seattle. Total linear distance walked, five or six feet. Total distance traveled, better than seventeen hundred miles.

Neat, huh?

Granted, it’s almost never as little as five feet you walk in the Nevernever, and that stroll just might introduce you to some gargantuan, tentacular horror so hideous that it drives you insane just by looking at it. The Nevernever is a scary place. You don’t want to go exploring without a whole lot of planning and backup, but if you know the safe paths—the Ways—then you can get a lot of traveling done nice and quick, and with a minimum incidence of spontaneous insanity.

Once upon a time, I would have refused even to enter the Nevernever except in the direst of emergencies. Now, the idea wasn’t much more stressful to me than the thought of hitting a bus station. Things change.

We were back in Chicago before lunchtime, emerging from the Nevernever into an alley behind a big old building that used to be a slaughterhouse. I’d parked the Blue Beetle, my beat-up old Volkswagen Bug, nearby. We went back to my apartment.

Susan and Martin were waiting. About two minutes after we got back, there was a knock at the door, and I opened it to find both half vampires standing on my doorstep. Martin carried a leather valise on a sling over his shoulder.

“Who is the girl?” Martin asked, his eyes calm and focused past me, on Molly.

“It’s nice to see you again, too, man,” I said. “And don’t mention it. I save people’s lives all the time.”

Susan smiled at me, giving Molly the Female Once-Over—a process by which one woman creates a detailed profile of another woman based upon about a million subtle details of clothing, jewelry, makeup, and body type, and then decides how much of a social threat she might be. Men have a parallel process, but it’s binary: Does he have beer? If yes, will he share with me?

“Harry,” Susan said, kissing me on the cheek. I felt like a pine tree in cougar country. I’d just have to hope territorial scoring of my bark wasn’t next. “Who is this?”

“My apprentice, Molly Carpenter,” I said. “Grasshopper, this is Susan Rodriguez. That’s Marvin someone-or-other.”

“Martin,” he corrected me, unruffled, as he entered. “Can she be trusted?”

“Every bit as much as you trust me,” I said.

“Well.” Martin’s voice couldn’t have been any drier, but he tried. “Thank goodness for that.”

“I know who they are, Harry,” Molly said quietly. “They’re from the Fellowship of St. Giles, right? Vampire hunters?”

“Close enough,” Susan said, standing right next to me, well inside my personal space perimeter. It was an intimate distance. She touched my arm for a moment with fever-hot fingers, but never looked away from Molly. “An apprentice wizard? Really? What’s it like?”

Molly shrugged, averting her eyes, frowning slightly. “A lot of reading, a lot of boring practice, with occasional flashes of pure terror.”

Susan looked from Molly to me and seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. She drifted out of my personal space again. “Did you speak to the Council?”

“A bit,” I said. “The duchess was at headquarters. Spoke to her, too.”

Susan drew in a sharp breath. “What? She hasn’t left Mexico in more than a hundred and eighty years.”

“Call Guinness. She broke her streak.”

“Good God,” she said. “What was she doing there?”

“Being compassionate and understanding and forgiving me for challenging her to a duel in front of about a thousand fellow wizards.”

Martin made a choking sound. Susan’s eyes looked a little wide.

“I wanted a piece of her right there,” I said, “but she was operating under a pledge of safe conduct. Council intelligence says there’s all kinds of vampire activity starting up. I’ve got feelers out for any other word, but it will take a little time.”

“We already knew about the mobilization,” Susan said. “The Fellowship warned the Council three days ago.”

“Nice of the Council to inform everybody, I guess. But I’ll get whatever else the Council knows in the next few hours,” I said. “You guys turn up anything?”

“Sort of,” Susan said. “Come on.”

We went to the seating around the coffee table, and Martin plopped the valise down onto its surface. He drew out a manila folder and passed it to me.

“Out of nearly a petabyte of information—” he began.

“Petawhat?” I asked.

“One quadrillion bytes,” he clarified. Helpfully.

Susan rolled her eyes and said, “Several libraries’ worth of in formation.”

“Oh. Okay.”

Martin cleared his throat and continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “We retrieved fewer than three hundred files. Most of them were inventory records.”

I opened the folder and found several sheets of printer paper covered with lists, and several more that consisted of photographs of any number of objects accompanied by identification numbers.

“The objects in this file,” Susan said, “were all categorized as metacapacitors.”

I grunted, paging through the photos more slowly. A stone knife. An ancient, notched sword. A soot-stained brick. An urn covered in odd, vaguely unsettling abstract designs. “Yeah. Can’t be sure without physically examining it, but this stuff looks like ritual gear.”