“And that’s good enough for you?” I asked.
“It isn’t perfect,” she admitted. “But it’s better than anything else we’ve come up with. And the things I’ve spent my lifetime building are there.”
“Touché,” I said.
“Thank you.”
I stroked her fingers with my thumb. “So you’re saying my mother was short-sighted.”
“She was a complex woman,” Anastasia said. “Brilliant, erratic, passionate, committed, idealistic, talented, charming, insulting, bold, incautious, arrogant—and short-sighted, yes. Among a great many other qualities. She loved pointing out the areas of ‘grey’ magic, as she called them, and constantly questioning their legitimacy.” She shrugged. “The Senior Council tasked the Wardens to keep an eye on her. Which was damn near impossible.”
“Why?”
“The woman had a great many contacts among the Fey. That’s why everyone called her Margaret LaFey. She knew more Ways through the Nevernever than anyone I’ve ever seen, before or since. She could be in Beijing at breakfast, Rome at lunch, and Seattle for supper and stop for coffee in Sydney and Capetown in between.” She sighed. “Margaret vanished once, for four or five years. Everyone assumed that she’d finally run afoul of something in Faerie. She never seemed able to restrain her tongue, even when she knew better.”
“I wonder what that’s like.”
Anastasia gave me a rather worn sad smile. “But she didn’t spend all that time in Faerie, did she?”
I looked up at the rearview mirror, back toward Château Raith.
“And Thomas is the son of the White King himself.”
I didn’t answer.
She exhaled heavily. “You look so different from him. Except perhaps for something in the jaw. The shape of the eyes.”
I didn’t say anything until we got to the apartment. The Rolls went together with the gravel lot like champagne and Cracker Jacks. I turned the engine off and listened to it click as it began to cool down. The sun was gone over the horizon by that time, and the lengthening shadows began to trigger streetlights.
“Are you going to tell anyone?” I asked quietly.
She looked out the window as she considered the question. Then she said, “Not unless I think it relevant.”
I turned to look at her. “You know what will happen if they know. They’ll use him.”
She gazed straight out the front of the car. “I know.”
I spoke quietly to put all the weight I could into each word I spoke next. “Over. My. Dead. Body.”
Anastasia closed her eyes for a moment, and opened them again. Her expression never flickered. She took her hand slowly, reluctantly from mine and put it in her lap. Then she whispered, “I pray to God it never comes to that.”
We sat in the car separately.
It seemed larger and colder, for some reason. The silence seemed deeper.
Luccio lifted her chin and looked at me. “What will you do now?”
“What do you think?” I clenched my fists so that my knuckles popped, rolled my neck once, and opened the door. “I’m going to find my brother.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Two hours and half a dozen attempted tracking spells later, I snarled and slapped a stack of notepads off the corner of the table in my subbasement laboratory. They thwacked against the wall beneath Bob the Skull’s shelf, and fell to the concrete floor.
“It was to be expected,” Bob the Skull said, very quietly. Orange lights like the flickers of distant campfires glittered in the eye sockets of the bleached human skull that sat on its own shelf high up on one wall of my lab, bracketed by the remains of dozens of melted candles and half a dozen paperback romances. “The parent-to-child blood bond is much more sympathetic than that shared by half siblings.”
I glared at the skull and also kept my voice down. “You just can’t go a day without saying that you told me so.”
“I can’t help it if you’re wrong all the time yet continually ignore my advice, sahib. I’m just a humble servant.”
I couldn’t scream at my nonmaterial assistant with other people in the apartment above me, so I consoled myself by snatching up a pencil from a nearby work shelf and flinging it at him. Its eraser end hit the skull between the eyes.
“Jealousy, thy name is Dresden,” Bob said with a pious sigh.
I paced up and down the length of my lab, burning off frustrated energy. It wasn’t much of a walk. Five paces, turn, five paces, turn. It was a dank little concrete box of a room. Work benches lined three of the walls, and I had installed cheap wire shelving above them. The work benches and shelves were crowded with all manner of odds and ends, books, reagents, instruments, various bits of gear needed for alchemy, and scores of books and notebooks.
A long table in the middle of the room was currently covered by a canvas tarp, and the floor at the far end of the lab had a perfect circle of pure copper embedded in it. The remains of several differently structured tracking attempts were scattered on the floor around the circle, while the props and foci from the most recent failure were still inside it.
“One of them should have gotten me something,” I told Bob. “Maybe not a full lock on Thomas’s position—but a tug in the right direction, at least.”
“Unless he’s dead,” Bob said, “in which case you’re just spinning your wheels.”
“He isn’t dead,” I said quietly. “Shagnasty wants to trade.”
“Uh-huh,” Bob scoffed. “Because everyone knows how honorable the naagloshii are.”
“He’s alive,” I said quietly. “Or at least I’m going to proceed on that assumption.”
Bob somehow managed to look baffled. “Why?”
Because you need your brother to be all right, whispered a quiet voice in my head. “Because anything else isn’t particularly useful toward resolving this situation,” I said aloud. “Whoever is behind the curtains is using the skinwalker and probably Madeline Raith, too. So if I find Thomas, I find Shagnasty and Madeline, and I’ll be able to start pulling threads until this entire mess unravels.”
“Yeah,” Bob said, drawing out the word. “Do you think it’ll take long to pull all those threads? Because the naagloshii is going to be doing something similar to your intestines.”
I made a growling sound in my throat. “Yeah. I think I got its number.”
“Really?”
“I keep trying to punch Shagnasty out myself,” I said. “But its defenses are too good—and it’s fast as hell.”
“He’s an immortal semidivine being,” Bob said. “Of course he’s good.”
I waved a hand. “My point is that I’ve been trying to lay the beating on it myself. Next time I see it, I’m going to start throwing bindings on it, just to trip it up and slow it down, so whoever is with me can get a clean shot.”
“It might work . . .” Bob admitted.
“Thank you.”
“. . . if he’s such an idiot that he only bothered to learn to defend himself from violent-energy attacks,” Bob continued, as if I hadn’t spoken. “Which I think is almost as likely as you getting one of those tracking spells to work. He’ll know how to defend himself from bindings, Harry.”
I sighed. “I’ve got gender issues.”
Bob blinked slowly. “Uh. Wow. I’d love to say something to make that more embarrassing for you, boss, but I’m not sure how.”
“Not my . . . augh.” I threw another pencil. It missed Bob and bounced off the wall behind him. “With the skinwalker. Is it actually a male? Do I call it a he?”