“So far,” I said, “so good. I’m a hundred percent at dealing with entire vampire courts who touched my little girl.”
Her mouth curled at one corner, though it didn’t touch her eyes. “You’re aiming this the wrong way, Dresden.”
“Yeah. Maybe,” I said. I slid the rucksack off my shoulders, stuck the heels of my hands into the small of my back, and stretched. “Just making things clear.”
“Yes,” she said, drawing the word out a little with emphasis I might have used myself in her place. “You are. Maybe because you don’t want to think about what is on the line today.”
A flicker of anger went through me at the words. That happens when people tell you something true that you don’t want to hear.
I took a deep breath. “Okay. You’re right. Better to be focused on here and now.” I took a water bottle from the rucksack and drank it in a single pull. “It’ll take me four or five hours to get things laid out. Maybe a little less, maybe more.”
“What can I do to help?” Lara asked.
“Can you paint?”
“Will Italian realism do?”
I looked at her blankly. “Um. I mostly just need you to stay inside the lines.”
She smiled and it turned a bit impish. “What fun is that?”
“The kind of fun that prevents explosions and a massive cave-in.”
“Oh. That.” She nodded. “Yes. I can do precision.”
“Okay,” I said. “Mab will be there.”
Lara looked wary. Which I could get. I’d been damned wary of Mab when I’d first been in her service, too. “Why?”
“She’s helping.”
Lara looked, if anything, more wary. “Why?”
“Because she takes being an ally seriously,” I said. “And because I made a deal.”
Her eyes narrowed. “You did? You could have asked her for anything. And you asked her to help Thomas?”
I nodded. “I said I would.”
She frowned harder and looked down. “Saying is one thing. Doing it is another.” She looked away, her eyes focused elsewhere, calculating. “Do you think she will?”
“I think she has to,” I said. “It…might not be simple. Or pleasant. But I think she’ll make something happen when it couldn’t have otherwise.”
She swallowed. She blinked her eyes several times, soot-black lashes fluttering over deep blue.
“Okay,” Lara whispered finally. “Thank you for the warning.”
I hesitated. “Are…are you okay?”
She shook her head. “We have a job to do. Let’s do it.”
—
At my direction, Alfred had prepared a special chamber for the greater circle.
It was a perfect half sphere, fifty feet across, hollowed out of a single enormous green crystal. The entire place pulsed with a living, verdant illumination that took about half an hour to begin becoming vaguely nauseating. I measured to the center of the chamber using a line and some basic trig, marked the center with a dry-erase marker, and with Lara’s help outlined the pair of circles via the same means. We painted those in, brought in the anchor crystals and candles, and then marked the positions for each of the containment sigils and runes. Painting those took the longest, and Lara proved to be a hell of a lot better at it than I was. After that, I painted in the infinity symbol, very large this time, at the circle’s center.
The whole thing was painstaking, nerve-wracking. Every move had to be considered, every part of the body controlled so that nothing was smeared by a stray foot or knee or bit of clothing. It took every bit of five hours, and by the time we were done, my knees and shoulders and back were protesting through the Winter mantle, my head was fuzzy, and I felt vaguely carsick.
