"And he said he was in love with her?"

Elaine had as hard a time believing it as I was, not that I could blame her. It was one of the most impossible things I had heard/seen/thought of in the last ten years, and that put it ahead of helping Morgan against the Council and taking on an apprentice of my own, or picking up and putting down one of those Hell-cursed nickels. But it fit far too well.

"He treated her with respect, he listened to her, even though she was clearly the apprentice Sith in the relationship. That's not the kind of behavior you'd expect from your standard bad guy. They tend to be out for number one, and don't give a shit about anyone else."

She shivered. I hoped I hadn't managed to remind her of Justin. Or Aurora. Or the Priscilla Skavis. Or maybe I should just shut up now.

"He treated her as a person," she said. I guess she was thinking about the idea that a bad guy might treat one of their evil henchmen like a person and not like a chess piece to move around the cliche. They didn't usually do that. Not the ones we knew, anyway. Well, Marcone. But Elaine didn't know Marcone, I remembered. "He actually cared about her like a friend."

"Maybe they were lovers," I shrugged. "I don't know. I don't know what to believe but he didn't act like someone who was pissed because they'd lost an advantage, he genuinely sounded heartbroken."

Elaine shook her head, arms folded over her chest, fingers gripping her upper arms tight enough to leave white-edged dents. I sat where I was and kept my mouth shut. I'd gotten myself into enough trouble today by not knowing when to keep quiet, and after all Elaine had gone through, reminding her about Aurora and Justin hadn't been my brightest idea, ever. At least this time I could blame it on being shot.

"Did he ever talk to you after the Darkhallow?" she asked, as though it was a conclusion to some train of thought I wasn't privy to.

I shook my head. "Not unless you count screaming about going to kill me as talking to me. I saw him once when we were all in the caves under the White King's personal cult complex and once before that, when I was tracking down ol' Vittorio to his handler. That was about it."

She nodded. Another piece of her own puzzle into place, and I wasn't much the wiser for it. I did see her point, or at least a point that she could have made. The fact that he was talking to me again meant any of several things, but one of them was probably that he had some kind of respect for me, or maybe that he felt a connection with me. He thought of me as a person enough to tell me his feelings even if we weren't exactly sharing and caring buddies. It didn't give me any more insight into what triggered it, but it gave me an idea of how to talk to him, and how he would treat me.

"He blamed you for her death."

"I didn't kill her, Elaine." I tried to sit up despite the fist of pain in my stomach, feeling defensive about the whole thing. I hadn't set out to kill anyone, dammit, and now of all the people whose deaths I had been a part of (and there were way more of those than I was comfortable with) everyone was harping on the necromancer lady who'd wanted to kill death itself. "If she hadn't tried to ..."

"I know..." Elaine turned and put a hand on my arm and I quieted down. "Harry, I know. I'm just saying. Wouldn't you do the same thing? If someone killed..."

"You?"

She smiled, sad. The thing was, I had thought I had killed her for the longest time. I'd thought I'd killed her and our foster father and mentor Justin DuMorne in a fire. Then again, I'd also thought she'd turned against me, was on his side. That didn't mean it was easy, burning down my childhood home along with the only family, the only love I'd ever known. All of my connections, wiped out in a night of smoke and sulfur. It wasn't the best time in my life.

Maybe that was how Cowl felt, too. Looking over at Elaine, I guessed that was what she was thinking.

She put her arms around my waist and hugged me, and I hugged her back as tightly as I could, with the gunshot wound and all. I didn't want to be alone right then and I don't think she did either. Everything Cowl had said had affected me more than if he'd been aiming for all my weaknesses, and then I had gone and shared my pain with her. Whatever spells were working on everyone that night, the spells of unrest and unease, they didn't help. But this time I didn't think it was Cowl. Too much like the Darkhallow, and he didn't want to remember that any more than I did.

Which didn't tell me what I was going to do next. It didn't tell me anything about what we should do next.

There were things we could have been doing. Maybe things we should have been doing, although we were trying to stop the whole damn thing and not put out a few fires here and there while the rest of the city collapsed. Literal fires, too. The whole place looked like Detroit on Devil's Night, sprays of orange and yellow popping up between the buildings and obliterating any sight of the stars. Cowl hadn't done this. Maybe he'd shown up to rattle my cage while his team was tightening the spell around the city, but this didn't smell like him. This was sadder. Tireder even than he was, right now.

The thought swam through my exhausted brain that maybe we could use that. Trace the spell back to its real source, whoever or whatever had cast it.

Maybe not. The whole city was ground down under this and I didn't have access to Little Chicago anymore. Maybe it was just my imagination. I hugged her a little tighter, because she sounded exhausted when she sighed. Because we had precious little left, and part of that right now was having each other.

We stood there and watched the city burn outside our window.

Murphy was a cop. Born and raised, she was an officer of the law. I'd seen her use that oath she took to serve and protect the people of the city to stare down some of the more powerful enforcers of faerie. That oath and her dedication to it had gotten her the attention of some of the highest powers you can shake a stick at, though she'd turned down their job offer. This city was her home, and she'd sworn to protect it.

From the look on her face it was nothing short of hell for her to have to watch the whole place go up in flames.

"Hey." I spoke when I entered the room so she didn't shoot me. Whoever had cast Cowl's fear and loathing spell this time had sharpened it, made it poke through a lot of the thresholds. It didn't help that the wounded were currently at Murphy's grandmother's place, and we were stuck at hotel rooms with no threshold and no barriers but the ones Elaine and I could raise.

She looked over at her shoulder at me, nodded. I was cleared to approach. "Hey."

I came up and put a hand on her shoulder. Okay, I put an arm around her shoulders, and she didn't lean into it, but I didn't expect her to.

We stood there in silence until I felt awkward. She didn't act as though she noticed the awkwardness, but she'd been pretty much quiet since night had fallen at around eleven in the morning.

"Murph..." I didn't know what to say. What did you say to your friend who just saw everything she'd fought for be destroyed in three days? "I'm sorry." I seemed to be saying that a lot these days, and it didn't get any easier or any more significant, or any more helpful with repetition.

"It's not your fault."

That didn't sound like it was getting any easier to say, either. Or any more meaningful. Repetition of empty phrases because we didn't know how else to fill the silence, but we couldn't stand not to say something.

"This is too big for us to fix, isn't it?"

I hugged her a little tighter because I was clingy, not because she sounded like she was crying. "I don't know. I doubt it. Never met a problem too big for me to fix. Even if I had to blow up a couple of buildings to do it."

She snorted, and slugged me in the chest because I was being ridiculous.

"Thank you," I said, because it wasn't as hard as she could hit.

"Don't mention it."

And just like that, it was easier. Hitting things really did fix everything.

Murphy took a deep breath and straightened her shoulders, raised her chin. Outside the wind was still howling, but it wasn't the wind. Or rather, it wasn't only the wind. It was also the fires in twenty buildings outside in the city, and the creatures that were running around stirring up more. Wailing spirits of the dead, small carnivorous creatures that hunted the weakest prey, everything. The lesser denizens of six or seven different realms were coming out to play because the creatures that kept them under control were gone.

We didn't have a clue where they'd all gone to, they were just gone. At least, all the ones I could think of to look for in the Chicago area. Lara Raith and her father were gone. Fix and Lily had disappeared. The island had gone silent, whatever spirits that had inhabited it fleeing in the face of what was here now. Like the run of animals before the forest fire, everything that could get the hell out of Dodge had gotten, long before we humans had wised up.

Even the streets were empty of normal people, people who knew enough to listen to their instincts when their instincts told them to get the hell indoors, bolt it, and put Grandma's chifferrobe against the door. Even the people who'd started the fires had gone to ground and were probably just watching from the relative safety of their homes.

At least they weren't the only ones who'd made it to safety. "Everyone get out all right?"

She nodded. "Everyone's been evacuated. The only people left are SI die-hards."

"So, all of them?" I didn't smile. Promise.

"Pretty much," she sighed, uncrossing her arms and starting to pace around the room. "Everyone who has families got their families out when the shit first started flying towards the fan... thanks, by the way."

That was my fault that they had parents separated from children, spouses separated on either side of the city lines. On the other hand, it was also my fault that several hundred civilians were still alive. Little Chicago had started throwing off sparks and strange signals for two days before I figured out what was going on and called Murphy. They'd gotten everyone out within twenty four hours. I guess I had to take my lucky breaks where I could get them.

"Anything I can do," I shrugged. Special Investigations, the X-Files division of the Chicago police force, had saved my scrawny ass more than once. More than a couple of times, even. "You know that."

"I know," Murphy looked up at me with that sort of smile that said I was a dork. "Thanks."

"Marcone still running his underground railroad?"

I sighed. That still didn't sit well with me, but he was a Freeholding Lord and we were running low on powers and principalities. "Yeah. Mac even let us use that portal in his cellar." Which gave me pause to think about, still. "I didn't even know he had a portal in his cellar."

She gave me another one of those looks. "The things we don't know about Mac could fill an encyclopedia."

"One of those internet ones or one of the older ones you have to send away for?" This time I ducked aside before she slugged me.

It was another second or so before we realized we were actually smiling. Funny, that. It had been a long time since anyone had done any real smiling around here.

"How's Elaine?"

Well, now I wasn't smiling anymore. I sighed and stuffed my hands into my pockets. "Coping. Some of what Cowl said wasn't ... nice. To either of us. Too many similar problems." Which might be symptomatic of wizards, but some of the things he said echoed in ways that couldn't be. We all didn't have that kind of issues. We'd kill each other first.

"How..." Murphy started, then stopped. Frowned. I waited for her to finish her thought.

She didn't. "Words? I can lend you some if you..." She didn't even slug me that time. "Murph?"

"Did he ... say anything? Or do anything to indicate that he was spying on you? Do you think he was playing you somehow, or do you think what he said was real? You did say he was smart."

"He was," I thought back to the Darkhollow. To everything that had led up to it. He'd almost won, too. It had cost him a lot, more than he'd ever expected to, or wanted to, or agreed to pay. No wonder he was pissed. "He was smart. I got lucky."

Murphy looked at me for a second like she was going to say something, but she didn't. All she said was "Let's hope you get lucky this time," and I couldn't really disagree.

"We're doomed."

Everyone glared at Molly, even though she'd said it pretty cheerfully, I'd thought, with a big smile on her face.

"What? I just figured I'd put that out there so we all know it, and then we can get on with our plans."

Murphy rolled her eyes. "So, what do we have?"

I started rattling off the details I knew. "What we have is nothing. We know that someone cast Cowl's fear spell over the city and blacked out the sky, and that they added an additional twist to make it fear and loathing." No one laughed. No one ever laughs at my jokes. "That's probably the White Court's fault, not the Raith but the Skavis or the Malvora."

"Adding even more emotional impact to what was already a pretty nasty and subtle spell." Murphy frowned, and I thought she was going to say something else, but she didn't.

"Yep. Also adding to the complications involved in casting the spell, if there's at least one White Court vampire and one wizard. I don't know the specifics of how you'd even try it, but it's not the first time those kinds of magic have been combined..."

"And it won't be the last, if they have their way," Elaine shook her head. "But it is having a nasty effect. The Skavis and the Malvora are causing fear and panic, pain and suffering. Lots of people running around out there, scared out of their minds. Lots of people giving into despair in what's already a pretty grim situation. Not only is that creating a lot of murders and suicides, a lot of bodies on the ground? It's rattling the walls between the worlds like..."

"Cardboard set pieces."

I smiled. Molly was still young enough to remember a bunch of television shows, from back before she developed a little further and started shorting out everything with a circuit. It made her speech a little more colorful than mine, even if reading was better for you.

"It's not just them, either. Something's turned loose of all the lesser denizens of Faerie, the vampire courts, even the spirit world's gone nuts."

"Especially the spirit world," Molly muttered. She'd been the one who drew the short straw to go talk to Mortimer Lindquist and while he hadn't been there, a couple of his friends had. They hadn't been friendly.

I shook my head and started making a list. "So far we've seen banshees... the real, dangerous kind, not the kind in yellow and green spandex."

No one got it. I was underappreciated in my time.

"Ghosts, no ghouls yet but at this point I'd say it's only a matter of time. There's been redcaps sighted, hobgoblins, Marcone says a few individual vampires from Bianca's old crew have surfaced again, most of them supposedly dead... there's no Black Court in the city at all as far as anyone can tell, which is..."

"Odd." Murphy frowned.

"To say the least."

Molly leaned forward a little. "We're not getting any Warden help..."

Elaine and Murphy looked at her, then Murphy looked at me. I shrugged. She was twenty years old, and if she wasn't her own woman by now she never would be. And she had her own contacts in the Wardens who kept in touch with her even when all the crazy shit going down made it hard for any of us to get word in or out.

"Carlos says there isn't anything they can do. They can't spare people to come into town and they've lost contact with everyone else who was here. We're on our own until we can either break this ... bubble that they've got over us, or until something changes on the outside."

Murphy shook her head. "Are we still the test run?" It wouldn't be the first time the Black Council had used Chicago as a base of operations or as a petri dish. Usually, though, when that kind of thing happened we got some kind of help to cover it. Or I got insanely lucky. Neither of which seemed to apply right now.

"I don't know," was my answer, inadequate though it was. "I just don't know. I would say yes, but there don't seem to be any of the heavy hitters in town right now. Except Cowl. Everything that's going on is the result of an overwhelming number of little problems all piling up on us at once, plus someone casting ritual spells from one source that I can't even pinpoint. It's got to be coming from outside Chicago, that's the only explanation I can think of."

"Which would mean even more power and organization to direct it against a city you're not even in..."

Not necessarily true. I could have done it if I'd moved Little Chicago outside of the city before casting the spell. But that would also presume that someone else had had the foresight or the ingenuity or the sheer insanity to build a Little Chicago in the first place.

Then again, someone had gone down and messed around in there before. It wasn't inconceivable that someone had done so again. Or copied it the first time they were in there. I had an idea of who had been down there the first time but I still wasn't sure. Dammit. Too little information and too much chaos. We were playing catch up. I hated catch up. And speaking of which, I was being left behind in the conversation while Molly and Elaine explained to Murph the logistics behind casting a spell like this.

"So, whatever else is going on, this is Black Council business."

"More than likely. They're the only ones with the resources and the organization to pull off something like this."

Murphy raised her eyebrows at me. "Raith did it."

"Raith was working by himself, on an entropy curse..." Now that was an idea. Could the whole city be under some kind of entropy curse? It would explain the increasing improbability of events. Everything stacking up on top of each other and cascading down like a hill of dominos. If someone, or a group of someones, was able to...

"Entropy curse?" Murphy glared at me, impatient and making rude gestures.

"Sorry. Raith was working by himself, on an entropy curse, using women he found easy to manipulate or bribe or overwhelm. Okay, he wasn't working entirely by himself, but he was the guiding force, the focus behind everything. The Black Council doesn't have one person focusing them, as far as we know. Even Cowl didn't talk about one leader, just the council."

"The entire Council would have to be bending their will to this," Elaine frowned. "Which is a scary thought."

Molly looked at her with something resembling confusion. "Why? Aren't they scary enough?"

"When was the last time you saw a bunch of people that smart and that nasty bend their will to something? And thinking about that, when was the last time you saw them fail to get it?"

That had more of an effect on the conversation than Molly's pronouncements of doom. And we were getting nowhere with possible solutions. I found myself with my head in my hands and my hair pushed up into even more of a mess. Murphy made a noise of amusement in front of me. "Can anyone think of anything we can do other than sit here and try to put out as many fires as we can?"

Of all of us, it was Molly who started ticking things off on her fingers. "Try and contact the Archive. If anything, she would at least be able to tell us more than we know. We can hope."

I hadn't even thought of that. I blinked at her, and she tapped the paper where I'd written the list of suspects and symptoms.

"Try and find where they're casting the spell from. I can contact Carlos for that, they can search around the outskirts of the city. And try and come up with something to combat it. If they can go around slinging group spells then we should be able to, too, right? And it's not like we're not going to have the focus for it."

Murphy snorted. "Nothing brings allies together like a common enemy?"

"I thought the most common blunder was never fight a land war in Asia."

No one appreciates my sense of humor sometimes.

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