Turn Coat (The Dresden Files 11)

"Yeah," I said. "From what I hear, bad things happened to everyone who went out there. There used to be some kind of port facility for fishing and merchant traffic, big as a small town, but it was abandoned. Sometime in the nineteenth century, the city completely expunged the place from its records."

"Why?"

"Didn't want anyone to go out there," I said. "If they merely passed a law, they knew that sooner or later some moron would go there out of sheer contrariness. So they pretty much unmade the place, at least officially."

"And in more than a century, no one's ever seen it?"

"That dark ley line puts off a big field of energy," I said. "It makes people nervous. Not insane or anything, but it's enough to make them subconsciously avoid the place, if they aren't making a specific effort to get there. Plus, there are stone reefs around a big portion of the island, and people tend to swing wide around it."

She frowned. "Couldn't that be a problem for us?"

"I'm pretty sure I know where to get through them."

"Pretty sure?"

"Pretty sure."

Maybe she looked a little paler. "Oh," she said. "Good. And we're going there why?"

"The sanctum invocation," I said. "The island has a kind of spirit to it, an awareness."

"A genius loci," she said.

I nodded approval. "Exactly that. And fed by that ley line, it's a big, strong one. It doesn't much care for visitors, either. It's arranged to kill a bunch of them."

Molly blinked. "And you want to do a sanctum invocation? There?"

"Oh, hell no," I said. "I don't want to. But I've got to find some way to give myself an edge tomorrow, or it's all over but the crying."

She shook her head slowly. Then she fell silent until we actually reached the island a little while later. It was dark, but I had enough moonlight and starlight to find the buoy Thomas and I had placed at the entry through the reef. I swung the Water Beetle through it, and began following the coastline of the island until I passed a second buoy and guided the boat into the small floating dock we'd constructed. I managed to get the vessel next to the dock without breaking anything, and hopped off with lines in hand to tie it off.

I looked up to find Molly holding my ritual box. She passed it to me and I nodded to her. "If this works, it should take me an hour or so," I told her. "Stay with Morgan. If I'm not back by dawn, untie the boat, start the engine, and drive it back to the marina. It's not too different from a car, for what you'll be doing."

She bit her lip and nodded. "What then?" she asked.

"Get to your dad. Tell him I said that you need to disappear. He'll know what to do."

"What about you?" she asked. "What will you be doing?"

I slipped the strap to the ritual box over one shoulder, took up my staff, and started toward the interior of the island.

"Not much," I said over my shoulder. "I'll be dead."

Chapter Thirty-six

Grimm's fairy tales, a compilation of the most widely known scary stories of Western Europe, darn near always feature a forest as the setting. Monstrous and terrifying things live there. When the hero of a given story sets out, the forest is a place of danger, a stronghold of darkness-and there's a good reason for it.

It can be freaking frightening to be walking a forest in the dark. And if that isn't enough, it's dangerous, to boot.

You can't see much. There are sounds around you, from the sigh of wind in the trees to the rustle of brush caused by a moving animal. Invisible things touch you suddenly and without warning-tree branches, spiderwebs, leaves, brush. The ground shifts and changes constantly, forcing you to compensate with every step as the earth below you rises or dips suddenly. Stones trip up your feet. So do ground-hugging vines, thorns, branches, and roots. The dark conceals sinkholes, embankments, and the edges of rock shelves that might drop you six inches or six feet.

In stories, you read about characters running through a forest at night. It's a load of crap. Oh, maybe it's feasible in really ancient pine forests, where the ground is mostly clear, or in those vast oak forests where they love to shoot Robin Hood movies and adaptations of Shakespeare's work. But if you get into the thick native brush in the U.S., you're better off finding a big stick and breaking your own ankle than you are trying to sprint through it blind.

I made my way cautiously uphill, passing through the ramshackle, decaying old buildings of what had been a tiny town, just up the slope from the dock. The trees had reclaimed it long since, growing up through floors and out broken old windows.

There were deer on the island, though God knows how they got there. It's big enough to support quite a few of the beautiful animals. I'd found signs of foxes, raccoons, skunks, and wildcats, plus the usual complement of rabbits, squirrels, and groundhogs. There were a few wild goats there as well, probably descendants of escapees from the former human residents of the island.

I began to sense the hostile presence of the island before I'd gone twenty steps. It began as a low, sourceless anxiety, one I barely noticed against the backdrop of all the perfectly rational anxiety I was carrying. But as I continued up the hill, it got worse, maturing into a fluttery panic that made my heart beat faster and dried out my mouth.

I steeled myself against the psychic pressure, and continued at the same steady pace. If I let it get to me, if I wound up panicking and bolted, I could end up a victim of the normal threats of a forest at night. In fact, that was probably what the island had in mind, so to speak.

I gritted my teeth and continued, while my eyes slowly adjusted to the night, revealing the shapes of trees and rocks and brush, and making it a little easier to move safely.

It was a short hike to the mountain's summit. The final bit of hill was at an angle better than forty-five degrees, and the only way one could climb it safely was to use the old steps that had been carved into the rock face. They had felt weirdly familiar and comfortable the first time I went up them. That hadn't changed noticeably in subsequent visits. Even now, I could go up them in the dark, my legs and feet automatically adjusting to the slightly irregular spacing of the steps, without needing to consult my eyes.

Once at the top of the stairs, I found myself on a bald crown of a hilltop. A tower stood there, an old lighthouse made of stone. Well, about three-quarters of it stood there, anyway. Some of it had collapsed, and the stones had been cannibalized and used to construct a small cottage at the foot of the tower.

The silent presence of the island was stronger here, a brooding and dangerous thing that did not care for visitors.