Turn Coat (The Dresden Files 11)

Or maybe not.

Chapter Thirty-seven

I didn't return to the dock by the same route I'd taken to the tower. There was a much shorter, easier way, down what looked like a sheer rock wall. It proved to have an ancient narrow gully worn into the stone, almost completely hidden by brush. The gully's floor had a thin layer of silt in it, leaving little room for plants to grow, and was as easy to traverse as a sidewalk, even in the dark. Following it brought me back to the island's shoreline in half the time it had taken to go up.

I didn't wonder how I'd known about the path until I stepped out of the woods and saw the dock again. I hadn't been that way before. I hadn't known it existed. Yet when I decided to take that trail, the knowledge had come to me as completely and immediately as if I had lived there for years: pure information.

I paused and looked around me. I knew not to walk directly to the dock from where I stood. There was a large hornet's nest in the earth at the base of a fallen tree, and I would risk arousing their anger if I accidentally crushed it while walking by. I also knew that a grumpy old skunk was trundling its way back to its den, thirty yards in the other direction, and that it would happily douse me with musk if I came anywhere close.

I glanced over my shoulder, back toward the tower, casting out my supernatural senses. The island's awareness continued being that same constant presence I'd felt ever since leaving the tower. I considered going back, taking the old stairs this time, to see what would happen, and immediately I understood that there was a cottonmouth that made its home in a large crack on the twenty-sixth step. If I delayed the trip until later in the morning, the snake would be out on the stones, sun-bathing to build up its body heat for the day.

The dawn was approaching, and the sky had begun to lighten from black to blue. I could see the tower standing, lonely and wounded, but unbowed, a black shape against the sky. Demonreach began to awaken to the first trills of songbirds.

I walked down to the dock, thoughtfully, and walked out to where the Water Beetle was moored. "Molly," I called.

Feet pounded on the deck, and Molly burst up out of the ship's cabin. She flew across the distance between us, and nearly tackled me into the water on the far side of the dock with the enthusiasm of her hug. Molly, the daughter of two ferocious warriors, was no wilting violet. My ribs creaked.

"You came back," she said. "I was so worried. You came back."

"Hey, hey. I need my rib cage, kid," I said, but I hugged her in return for a quiet moment, before straightening.

"Did it work?" she asked.

"I'm not exactly sure. God, I need something to drink." We both boarded the Water Beetle, and I went below and removed a can of Coke from a cabinet. It was warm, but it was liquid, and more important, it was Coke. I guzzled the can's contents and tossed it into the trash bin.

"How's Morgan?" I asked.

"Awake," Morgan rumbled. "Where are we?"

"Demonreach," I said. "It's an island in Lake Michigan."

Morgan grunted without emphasis. "Luccio told me about it."

"Oh," I said. "Oh, good."

"Miss Carpenter says you were attempting a sanctum invocation."

"Yeah."

Morgan grunted. "You're here. It worked."

"I think so," I said. "I'm not sure."

"Why not?"

I shook my head. "I thought that when a bond was formed with the land in question, it gave you access to its latent energy."

"Yes."

Which meant that my magic would be subsidized by the island, whenever I was here. I'd get a lot more bang for my buck, so to speak. "I thought that was all it did."

"Generally," Morgan said. I saw him turn his head toward me in the dim cabin. "Why? What else has happened?"

I took a deep breath and told him about the hidden trail, the hornets, and the skunk.

Morgan sat up in his bunk by the time I got to the end. He leaned forward intently. "You're sure you aren't mistaken? Confrontations with a genius loci can leave odd aftereffects behind."

"Hang on," I said.

I went back to the woods where I knew the hornets were, and found their nest in short order. I retreated without crushing anything and went back to the boat.

"Yeah," I said. "I'm sure."

Morgan sank back onto the bunk as if he was being slowly deflated. "Merciful God," he said. "Intellectus."

I felt my eyebrows go up. "You're kidding."

Molly muttered a couple of candles to light so that we could see each other clearly. "Intell-whatsis?" she asked me.

"Intellectus," I said. "Um. It's a mode of existence for a very few rare and powerful supernatural beings-angels have it. I'm willing to bet old Mother Winter and Mother Summer have it. For beings with intellectus, all reality exists in one piece, one place, one moment, and they can look at the whole thing. They don't seek or acquire knowledge. They just know things. They see the entire picture."

"I'm not sure I get that," Molly said.

Morgan spoke. "A being with intellectus does not understand, for example, how to derive a complex calculus equation-because it doesn't need the process. If you showed him a problem and an equation, he would simply understand it and skip straight to the answer without need to think through the logical stages of solving the problem."

"It's omniscient?" Molly asked, her eyes wide.

Morgan shook his head. "Not the same thing. The being with intellectus has to be focused on something via consideration in order to know it, whereas an omniscient being knows all things at all times."

"Isn't that pretty close?" Molly asked.

"Intellectus wouldn't save you from an assassin's bullet if you didn't know someone wanted to kill you in the first place," I said. "To know it was coming, you'd first need to consider the question of whether or not an assassin might be lurking in a dark doorway or on top of a bell tower."

Morgan grunted agreement. "And since beings of intellectus so rarely understand broader ideas of cause and effect, they can be unlikely to realize that a given event might be an indicator of an upcoming assassination attempt." He turned to me. "Though that's a terrible metaphor, Dresden. Most beings like that are immortal. They'd be hard-pressed to notice bullets, much less feel threatened by them."

"So," Molly said, nodding, "it might be able to know anything it wants to know-but it still has to ask the right questions. Which is always harder than people think it is."