Sarissa exhaled slowly and nodded.
Just then, a door I hadn’t seen before opened in the center of what had looked exactly like a wall. Cat Sith stood on the other side of the door. He ignored me pointedly, turning his golden eyes to Sarissa. “It is time.”
“Very well,” Sarissa said. “We are ready.”
I rose and offered Sarissa a hand up. She took it, and I tucked her arm into mine. Her fingers gave my forearm one quick squeeze, and then we turned to follow Cat Sith down another hallway.
Sarissa leaned a little closer to me and whispered, “You know what this is, don’t you?”
I grunted quietly. “Yeah,” I said. “It’s my first day in the prison yard.”
Chapter
Four
Sith led us down yet another passageway, this one darker than the others, until finally I couldn’t see the malk at all in the dimness. Instead, a very dim phosphorescence in the shape of his paw prints began to rise from the floor, giving us just enough light to move by. I could feel Sarissa growing increasingly tense beside me, but she said nothing. Smart. If anything was going to jump up and eat us, our ears would tell us about it first.
The sound of our steps on the floor changed, and I realized that we had moved into a large open space. Just as I did, the glowing paw prints in front of us vanished.
I stopped at once, pulling Sarissa in closer against my side. Again, she remained completely silent, except for one sharp little inhalation.
Silent seconds went by.
“Sith,” I said quietly. “You are a suck guide. I don’t care how big your shadow is.”
My voice echoed cavernously while I waited, but apparently Sith didn’t have a comeback. After a few seconds, I reached up and tugged my amulet out of the tux.
I held it up and concentrated, sending a microcurrent of my will into the design, and an instant later it began to glow with a blue-white light. I held it aloft and looked around.
We were in another ice cave, this one filled with enormous, bizarre . . . structures, was the only thing I could think to call them. I might have called them sculptures, except no one does sculptures the size of buildings these days, even in ice. I looked around the place slowly. There was something odd about the structures, something almost . . .
Sarissa was looking, too. She seemed alert, but not frightened. “Are those . . . giant pieces of furniture?”
. . . familiar.
The structures were sculpture, built on a scale of maybe one to eight, of a couch, two easy chairs, a brick fireplace, bookshelves. . . . Mab had re-created my old basement apartment in ice, right down to textured carvings of all of my area rugs crafted into the ice of the floor.
I had about a second to take that in before the cavern exploded with sound, color, and motion. A wave front of pure noise slapped against me as a sudden horde of beings from every dark folktale ever told surged into view at the edges of my light, their screams and cries coming from all around me.
This was a worst-case scenario for a mortal wizard. We can do amazing things, but we need time to make them happen. Sometimes we get that time by preparing well in advance—creating tools that help us focus our abilities more quickly and with greater precision. Sometimes we get the time by picking where and when to begin our battles. Sometimes we do it by slinging the spell from a couple or a couple hundred miles away. But I didn’t have any of that going for me.
My convalescence with Mab had kept me way too busy recovering or sleeping to have enough time to create new tools, and my amulet was all I had. On the upside, Mab had given me a serious workout, magically speaking. I’d been forced to use my abilities without any kind of tools or crutch to help me, or else perish. I was better at wielding raw magic now than I’d ever been in my life.
It just wasn’t going to be enough to survive what was coming at me.
I moved without thinking, putting myself between Sarissa and as many of them as I could, and bringing my will to bear upon my right hand. Pallid blue-white fire suddenly engulfed my fingers as I let the pentacle fall. I raised my hand—no time to think or aim or plan—determined to take someone down with me.
Sarissa’s hand snapped out and she grabbed my wrist, jerking my arm down before I could unleash the spell, and I heard two things in the vast roar of sound:
First, Sarissa screaming, “No bloodshed!”
Second, I realized that everything else in the cavern was bellowing, “SURPRISE!”
The horde of all things dark and hideous stopped maybe twenty feet short of Sarissa and me, and the walls and floor and ceiling began to glow with light. Music began to play, a full symphonic freaking orchestra, live, somewhere on the other side of the giant replica of my old secondhand sofa. High up on the ceiling of the cavern, thousands of wisps of eerie light swarmed deep within the ice, swiftly forming up like a flotilla of synchronized swimmers until they formed the words: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, DRESDEN.
I stood there with my heart beating too fast for several seconds and blinked at the entire place. “Uh. Oh.”
Sarissa studied the ceiling for a moment and then looked up at me. “I didn’t know.”
“Neither did I, really,” I said. “Is it Halloween already?”
“Just barely, I think,” Sarissa said back.
It got weirder.
They started to sing.
They sang “Happy Birthday.”
Remember when I said that a malk’s voice made my skin crawl? It’s nothing next to the cackling rasp of a swamp hag, or the freaky-weird whistling voice of a manticore. Goblins can’t carry a tune if it has handles, and the huge bat things that served as Mab’s air force shrieked in pitches that could barely be heard. Trolls, hideous giant thugs towering over ten feet tall, sound like laryngitic foghorns.
But layered all throughout that cacophony were voices that went to the other extreme, voices that carried the melody with such perfect, razor-edged clarity that it made me want to slash my wrists on it. People always equate beauty with good, but it just ain’t so. Amongst the Winter Court were beings of haunting beauty, mesmerizing beauty, disarming beauty, flawless beauty, maddening beauty, bloodthirsty beauty. Even in the mortal world, a lot of predators are beautiful, and if you’re quick and motivated enough, you can admire that beauty while they kill you and eat you. Like all the other things there, the Sidhe sang to me, and I could feel the weight of their attention on me like the pressure wave from an onrushing shark.
You don’t listen to music like that. You survive it.
The voices ended abruptly, and left one crystalline alto singing, “And many more.”
The crowd of creatures parted suddenly, and a girl stepped out of their ranks. She paused for a moment, for dramatic effect, and to give everyone time to admire her.
She’d changed her hair again. Now it was a kind of extra-wide Mohawk, long except for where it had been shaved completely away from the sides of her head, where the cut could show off the tips of her gently tapering ears. It was still colored in all glacial shades of blue and green and deep violet, and hung down over much of one side of her face, allowing her to borrow enough of Veronica Lake’s vibe to give her wide, wide eyes a little extra hint of cheerily wicked mystery. She was tallish, for a girl, maybe five-ten, and built with that perfect balance of lean and lush proportions that some girls are lucky enough to have for maybe a year, the kind of look that gets girls that age in trouble with men who should be old enough to know better.
And she was naked. Gloriously, disconcertingly naked—and just as fresh and vibrant and unspoiled-looking as she’d been the first time I’d met her, most of ten years before.
Only, you know, she’d been less naked then.
Man, was I ever noticing that part.
“Here’s the birthday boy!” Maeve said in a singsong voice, flinging both arms up. She started toward me in a slow and slightly exaggerated walk. Technically, she wasn’t entirely naked. She had silver piercings at the tips of her breasts, beneath her lip, in her navel, and probably elsewhere. I didn’t let myself look quite that close. Her flawless pale skin was also spangled with gemstones. I don’t know how they’d been attached, but they clung to her and sent little flashes of color glittering around the cavern when she moved. They were concentrated most densely around her . . . well . . . She’d been, ah, vajazzled.