Small Favor

From back behind us, the still-rising wind carried forward a gurgling, warbling cry. I’d been up north a few times, and it might have been the call of a loon-but all of us there knew better. Summer was still on our trail.

"We aren’t going to make it any drier by waiting here," Michael said quietly.

"There are men in those trees," Sanya murmured, sheathing his sword and taking up the Kalashnikov again. "Thirty yards up, there, and over there. Those are machine-gun positions."

I grunted. "Let’s get moving. Before they get bored and decide to start making like this is Normandy."

"God go with us," Michael prayed quietly.

I unlimbered my shotgun and said, "Amen."

Chapter Forty-two

M ichael had planned ahead. He had a dozen chemical heat bags with him, the kind made for hunters to slip inside the wristbands of their coats. He passed them around to us, and we put them inside our socks after we waded ashore. Otherwise I don’t know if we would have made it through the snow up that hill, not with our pants soaked to the knees.

Rosanna, of course, wasn’t having any issues with the weather. With her wings draped around her like a cloak, the demonic form she wore seemed inured to the cold, and her cloven hooves moved along the frozen, stony hillside as nimbly as a mountain goat’s, her barb-tipped tail lashing back and forth dramatically as she went. Sanya walked along behind her, then me, and Michael brought up the rear. It wasn’t a long walk, but it fit in a lot of unpleasantness into a little bit of time. The little town had been a company town, built up around what looked like an old cannery-a long building, falling to pieces now, at the very end of the ruined street.

Partway up the hill we ran across a trail that had obviously been in use over the past several days. Someone had kept it clear of snow, exposing a path that had been cut into the rock of the hillside, including stone stairs that led up to its summit. As we went up the stairs the shape at the top of the hill became clearer, as light from the large fire beside it revealed it more clearly.

"A lighthouse," I murmured. "Or what’s left of one."

It might have been a fifty-foot tower at one time, but it had been broken off perhaps twenty feet up as if snapped by a giant’s hand. Beacon towers dotted the shorelines and islands of all of the Great Lakes, and like all such structures they had accumulated more than their due of strange stories. I hadn’t heard any stories about this one-but staring up at the rough grey stones, I got the impression that it might have had something to do with the fact that in order for strange stories to spread, someone has to survive a dark encounter in order to start the tale.

This entire creepy place was giving me the idea that I wasn’t merely walking on haunted ground-but that I was walking on major-league haunted ground, the kind of place that had never bowed its head to the advance of progress and civilization, to science and reason, that had no more regard for those children of human intellect than it did for their progenitors. The island seemed almost alive, aware of my presence in a sense that I couldn’t really tangibly define-aware of it and sullenly, spitefully hostile to it.

But that wasn’t the creepy part.

The creepy part was that it felt familiar.

Walking up those stone steps, my legs settled into a steady pattern of motion, as if they’d already walked up that path a thousand times. I swerved slightly on one step, for no reason that I could see, only to hear Michael, behind me, continue walking in a straight line and slip as the stone he stepped on shifted beneath his foot. I found myself counting silently to myself, backward, and when I hit zero we mounted the last step and reached the summit of the hill.

Somehow I knew, even before I saw it, that one side of the old lighthouse would be torn open to the sky, revealing an interior that was as hollowed-out and empty as the inside of a rifle barrel. I knew that the little stone cottage built against the base of the tower would still be reasonably intact, though about half of the slate-tile roof had collapsed inward and would need repairs. I knew that it had been made from the stones of the collapsed lighthouse. I knew that the front door rattled when you opened it, and that the back door, which wasn’t in sight from here, would swell up during a rain and get stuck in its frame, much like the door at…

…at home.

I also knew that as freaking weird as all of that was, I couldn’t afford to let any of it matter right now.

Nicodemus and company were waiting for us.

The sleeting rain was starting to cover everything in a thin layer of ice, but the bonfire laid on the ground before the opening in the wall of the tower was large enough to ignore it. The flames leapt ten or twelve feet in the air, and burned with an eerie, violet-tinged light, and the ice forming everywhere created the illusion of a purple haze that clung to anything inanimate.

Beside the bonfire stones had been piled up into something that resembled the throne of some ancient pagan king. Nicodemus sat atop them, of course. Tessa stood at his right hand, entirely in human form for the first time since I had seen her. She was a little slip of a girl who barely looked old enough to hold a driver’s license, and was dressed in something black and skintight. Deirdre knelt at Nicodemus’s feet, and with the three of them together like that, I could see the blending of the parents’ features in their daughter. Especially around the eyes. Deirdre’s showed a full measure of both Nicodemus’s soulless calculation and Tessa’s heartless selfishness.

Magog crouched at the base of the pile of stones, apelike and enormous, sullen eyes burning with bloodlust. The spined Denarian I had beaten down with the silver construct-hand lay reclining on the ground beside Magog, his face twisted with hate, one hand twisting and clenching-but his maimed body was otherwise motionless.

My heart sped up in sudden excitement. There were still six of them. They hadn’t broken Ivy yet.

I held up a hand. We came to a stop, while Rosanna lightly mounted the steps to kneel down at Tessa’s right hand.

"Wow," I drawled. "That isn’t a contrived tableau or anything. Are you here to do business, or did you get lost on your way to auditions for Family Feud?"

"Gunman in the cottage," Sanya murmured, very quietly.

"Beasts in the shadows behind the tower," Michael whispered.

I kept myself from looking. If my friends said there were bad guys there, they were there, end of story.

"Good evening, Dresden," Nicodemus said. "Have you brought the merchandise?"

I jingled the Crown Royal bag and bumped the hilt of Shiro’s sword, hanging over my shoulder, with the side of my head. "Yep. But you knew that already, or Rosie, there, wouldn’t have brought us this far. So let’s skip the small talk. Show me the girl."