After your appearance at Cristos’s grandstand, a number of ugly things happened. Several young Wardens were caught debating amongst themselves about whether or not they should simply destroy the duchess in Edinburgh to ensure that the war continued—after all, they reasoned, the vampires wouldn’t be suing for peace if they could still fight. On Cristos’s orders, they were arrested and detained by older members of the Council, none of whom were Wardens, in order to Prevent Them from Destabilizing Diplomatic Deliberations.
Ramirez heard about what had happened and I suspect you can guess that his Spanish-by-way-of-America reaction was more passionate than rational. He and a few friends, only one of whom had any real intelligence, hammered their way into the wing where the Wardens were being detained—at which point every single one of them (except for the genius, naturally) was captured and similarly imprisoned.
It’s quiet desperation here. No one can seem to locate anyone on the Senior Council except Cristos, who is quite busily trying to Save Us from Ourselves by sucking up to Duchess Arianna. The Wardens’ chain of command is a smashing disaster at the moment. Captain Luccio went to Cristos to demand the release of her people and is, at this time, missing, as are perhaps forty percent of the seniormost Wardens.
She asked me to tell you, Dresden, that you should not return to Edinburgh under any circumstances until the Senior Council sorts this mess out. She isn’t sure what would happen to you.
She also wanted me to tell you that you were On Your Own.
I will send dispatches to you as events unfold—assuming I don’t Vanish, too.
“Steed”
PS—Why, yes, I can in fact capitalize any words I desire. The language is English. I am English. Therefore mine is the opinion which matters, colonial heathen.
I read over the letter again, more slowly. Then I sat down on the fireplace mantel and swallowed hard.
“Steed” was an appellation I’d stuck on Warden Chandler, who was a fixture of security in Edinburgh, one of the White Council’s home guards, and, once I had thought upon it, one of the guys who I’d always seen operating near Anastasia and in positions of trust: Standing as the sole sentinel at a post that normally required half a dozen. Brewing the Wardens and their captain their tea.
He and I had been the only ones present at the conversation where I’d tacked that nickname on him, thanks to the natty suit and bowler he’d been wearing, and the umbrella he’d accessorized—or maybe it was accessorised, in England—with, so the signature itself served as his bona fides. The flippant tone was very like Chandler, as well. I also knew Anastasia’s handwriting, and besides, the paper on which her letter was written was scented with one of the very gentle, very subtle perfumes she preferred.
The message was as legitimate as it was likely to get, under the circumstances.
Which meant we were in real trouble.
The White Council carried a fearsome reputation not simply because of its capability of engaging in direct action against an enemy, but because it wielded a great deal of economic power. I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to get rich after two hundred and fifty years of compounded interest and open trading. There was an entire brigade of economic warriors for the White Council who constantly sought ways to protect the Council’s investments against hostile economic interests sponsored by other long-lived beings, like vampires. Money like that could buy a lot of influence. Not only that, but the Council could make the world a miserable place for someone who had earned their displeasure, in about a million ways, without ever throwing magic directly at someone. There were people in the Council who could play dirty with the most fiendish minds in history.
Taken as a whole, it seemed like a colossus, an institution as fixed and unmoving as a vast and ancient tree, filled with life, with strength, its roots sunk deep into the earth, a survivor of the worst storms the world had offered it.
But all of it, the power, the money, the influence, revolved around a critical core concept—every member of the White Council acted in concert. Or at least, that was the face that was supposed to be presented to the outside world. And it was mostly true. We might squabble and double-deal one another in peacetime, but when there was an enemy at hand we closed ranks. Hell, they’d even done that with me, and most of the Council thought that I was the next-best thing to Darth Vader. But at the end of the day, I think a lot of them secretly liked the idea of having Vader on the team when the monsters showed up. They didn’t love me, never would, and I didn’t need them to love me to fight beside them. When things got hairy, the Council moved together.
Except now we weren’t doing it.
I looked at the folded letter in my hands and had the sudden, instinctive impression that I was watching an enormous tree begin to fall. Slowly at first, made to seem so by its sheer size—but falling nonetheless, to the ruin of anything sheltered beneath its boughs.
I was pretty tired, which probably explained why I didn’t have any particular emotional reaction to that line of thought. It should have scared the hell out of me for a laundry list of reasons. But it didn’t.
Susan came over to stand near me. “Harry. What is it?”
I stared at the fire. “The White Council can’t help us find Maggie,” I said quietly. “There are things happening. They’ll be of no use to us.”
After all they had wrongly inflicted upon me, after all the times I had risked my neck for them, when I needed them, truly needed their help, they were not there.
I watched my hands crush the letters and envelopes without telling them to do it. I threw them into the fire and glowered as they burned. I didn’t notice that the fire in the fireplace had risen to triple its normal height until the blue-white brightness of the flames made me shade my eyes against them. Turning my face slightly away was like twisting the spigot of a gas heater—the fire immediately died back down to normal size.
Control, moron, I warned myself. Control. You’re a loaded gun.
No one spoke. Martin had settled down on one of the sofas and was cleaning his little pistol on the coffee table. Molly stood at the wood-burning stove, stirring a pot of something.
Susan sat down next to me, not quite touching, and folded her hands in her lap. “What do we have left?”
“Persons,” I said quietly.
“I don’t understand,” Susan said.
“As a whole, people suck,” I replied. “But a person can be extraordinary. I appealed to the Council. I told them what Arianna was doing. I went to that group of people looking for help. You saw what happened. So . . . next I talk to individuals.”
“Who?” she asked me quietly.
“Persons who can help.”
I felt her dark eyes on me, serious and deep. “Some of them aren’t very nice, I think.”
“Very few of them, in fact,” I said.
She swallowed. “I don’t want you to endanger yourself. This situation wasn’t of your making. If there’s a price to be paid, I should be the one to pay it.”
“Doesn’t work like that,” I said.
“He’s right,” Martin confirmed. “For example: You paid the price for his failure to sufficiently discourage you from investigating the Red Court.”
“I made my choice,” Susan said.
“But not an informed one,” I said quietly. “You made assumptions you shouldn’t have, because you didn’t have enough information. I could have given it to you, but I didn’t. And that situation wasn’t of your making.”
She shook her head, her expression resigned. “There’s no point in all of us fighting to hold the blame stick, I guess.”