Cold Days by Jim Butcher Page B

Historic Water Tower. It was night. Cars went by occasionally, but no one seemed to take notice of the open portal to the heart of Winter. Arctis Tor was isolated in the Nevernever, difficult to reach without inside help. Even traveling by Ways takes at least some time, and I’d expected a hike back to the real world.
    “How?” I asked quietly.
    “Her Majesty had it made,” Sith said.
    I whistled. Intentionally forming a connection from a specific place to a specific place took amounts of energy so enormous that even the White Council of Wizards could rarely manage it—I’d seen it done only once in my lifetime, the year before, in Chichén Itzá. “She had it made? For me?”
    “Indeed,” Sith said. “In fact, this is, for the time being, the only way in or out of Faerie.”
    I blinked several times. “You mean Winter?”
    “Faerie,” Sith stated. “All of it.”
    I choked. “Wait. You mean all of Faerie is on lockdown?”
    “Indeed,” Sith said. “Until dawn.”
    “Why?” I asked.
    “One presumes it was done to give you a head start.” With that, Sith walked calmly through the door and onto the sidewalk. “Your car, Sir Knight.”
    I stepped through the door into the Chicago air, and it slugged me in the face with a legion of scents and sensations and sounds that were as familiar to me as my own breathing. After the cool, dry silence of Arctis Tor, I felt like I’d leapt into the middle of an active circus. There were too many sounds, scents, too much color, too much motion. Arctis Tor was as still as the deepest night of winter, twenty-four/seven. Chicago is . . . well, Chicago.
    I found myself blinking my eyes very rapidly.
    Home.
    I know. It’s corny. Especially since Chicago is what a polite person would call a colorful place. It’s a den of crime and corruption. And it’s a monument to architecture and enterprise. It’s violent and dangerous, and an epicenter of music and the arts. The good, the bad, the ugly, the sublime, monsters and angels—they’re all here.
    The scents and sounds triggered a mental avalanche of memories and I shivered at the intensity of it. I almost didn’t notice the car that pulled up to the curb beside me.
    It was an ancient hearse, a Caddy that must have been built sometime in the years immediately following World War II, complete with rounded tail fins. It had been painted dark, dark blue, and given a flame job in shades of electric purple. It wavered and bobbed drunkenly down the avenue, turned a bit too sharply toward the curb, lurched ahead with a roar of the engine, and then skidded to a halt with the brakes locked, missing the posts along the edge of the road, and the chains that hung between them, by maybe an inch.
    “Will there be anything else, Sir Knight?” Cat Sith asked.
    “Not right now,” I said warily. “Um. Who is driving that thing?”
    “I recommend it be you,” Sith said with unmistakable contempt, and then with a swish of his tail, he vanished.
    The engine roared once more, and the car lurched but didn’t move from its rest. The lights went on and then off, and then the wipers swept on a few times before the engine dropped to an idle and the brake lights shut off.
    I approached the car warily, leaned across the chains, and rapped on the driver’s-side window.
    Nothing happened. The windows were tinted a little, enough to make the dark interior invisible on the well-lit street. I couldn’t see anyone inside. I opened the door.
    “Three cheers, boys!” piped a tiny cartoon-character voice. “Hip, hip!”
    “Hip!” shrilled maybe a dozen more tiny voices.
    “Hip, hip!”
    “Hip!”
    “Hip, hip!”
    “Hip!” That was followed by a heartfelt chorus of “Yay!”
    Sitting in the driver’s seat of the hearse were a dozen tiny humanoids. Their leader, the largest of them, was maybe eighteen inches tall. He looked like an extremely athletic youth, drawn down to scale. He was dressed in armor made from castoff bits of garbage and