Birds flew shrieking in every direction as if released from a centrifuge. Titania raised a hand, and a bolt of lightning fell from the tornadic sky and blew a smoking crater the size of my head in the ground a yard away.

“You dare to come here! To ask for me to interfere in my sister’s business! You who gave my Aurora an iron death!”

I tried to get up, only to have Titania grab the front of my jacket and lift me off the ground. With one hand. She held me straight up, over her head, so that her fist was pressed against my chest.

“I could kill you in a thousand ways,” she snarled, her opalescent eyes whirling with colors. “I could scatter your bones to the far corners of the earth. I could feed you to my garden and make you scream the entire while. I could visit torments on you that would make Lloyd Slate’s fate seem kind by comparison. I want to eat your heart.”

I hung there over the furious Queen of Summer and knew, knew for certain, that there was not a damned thing I could do to save my own life. I can do things, sure—remarkable things. But Titania had no more to fear from me than a polar bear does a field mouse. My heartbeat became something close to a solid tone, and it was all I could do not to wet my freaking pants.

And then something really unsettling happened.

Tears filled her eyes. They came forth and spilled over her cheeks. Titania seemed to sag. She lowered me to the ground and released me.

“I could do these things. But none of them,” she whispered, “would give me my daughter back. None of them would fill the emptiness within me. It took time, but Elder Gruff’s wise counsel helped me to see that truth.”

Hell’s bells. Elder Gruff had spoken on my behalf? I owed that guy a beer.

“I am not a fool, wizard. I know what she had become. I know what had to be done.” More tears fell, shining like diamonds. “But she was mine. I cannot forget that you took her from me. I cannot forgive you for that. Take your life and leave this place.”

I sounded a little unsteady to my own ears when I spoke. “If the Well is ruptured, your realm stands to lose as much as the mortal one does.”

“The wisdom of my heart tells me to hate you, mortal,” Titania said, “whatever my reason might say. I will not help you.”

“No? What does your heart tell you is going to happen if those things in the Well are set free? They’re immortals. The fire in the fail-safe might keep them down for a while, but they’ll be back.”

Titania didn’t turn to face me. Her voice was weary. “My heart tells me that all things end.” She paused. “But this thing I will tell a Winter Knight who believes in freedom: You must learn greater discretion. The power you have come to know and fear has a name. One should know the proper names of things.”

She turned and walked toward me. My body told me to run like hell, but I told it to shut up, that my legs were shaking too hard anyway. Titania leaned up onto her toes and whispered, very close to my ear.

“Nemesis,” she breathed. “Speak it carefully—or it may hear you.”

I blinked. “It . . . it what?”

With that she turned and began walking away. “Fare thee well, wizard. You say that people should be free. I agree. I will not shackle you with my wisdom. Make your choices. Choose what the world is to be. I care not. There is little light left in it for me, thanks to you.”

A relatively small flock of birds, only a few hundred, blurred by between me and Titania. When they had passed, she was gone.

I stood there, letting my heart rate slow down, along with the spinning clouds. I felt like crap. When I’d killed Aurora, there hadn’t been much in the way of a choice—but I’d still taken someone’s little girl away from her forever. I felt like a man in a rowboat with only one oar. No matter how hard I worked, I wasn’t really getting anywhere.

But at least I had a name now, for the force the Ladies had told me about.

Nemesis.

And it was aware.

The rain that had been held back abruptly began to come down in a torrent, and I sourly suspected that Titania had made sure I was going to get drenched. She hadn’t killed me, at least not yet. But I knew she sure as hell didn’t like me.

Night was coming on fast, and when it got here, all hell was going to break loose. And that was a best-case scenario.

I bowed my head, hunched my shoulders against the rain, and started out of the Magic Hedge.

Chapter

Thirty-one

I whistled down a cab and went to my next destination: Graceland Cemetery.

The place was actually kind of busy, it being Halloween and all. Graceland is one of the great cemeteries of the nation, the Atlantic City of graveyards. It’s filled with monuments to men and women who evidently had too much money to throw around while they were still alive. There are statues and mausoleums everywhere, made from granite and ornate marble, some of them in the style of ancient Greece, some obviously more influenced by ancient Egypt. There’s one that’s practically a full-size temple. The actual style of the various monuments ranges from incredible beauty to absolutely outrageous extravagance, with artists and tycoons and architects and inventors all lying silently together now.

Walk in Graceland and you can find yourself lost in a maze of memories, a cloud of names that no one living could attach to a face anymore. I wondered, passing some of the older monuments, whether anyone ever visited them now. If you’d died in 1876, it would mean that your great-great- or even great-great-great-grandchildren were the ones living now. Did people visit the graves of those who had been gone that long?

No. Not for any personal reason. But that was all right. Graves aren’t for the dead. They’re for the loved ones the dead leave behind them. Once those loved ones have gone, once all the lives that have touched the occupant of any given grave had ended, then the grave’s purpose was fulfilled and ended.

I suppose if you looked at it that way, one might as well decorate one’s grave with an enormous statue or a giant temple. It gave people something to talk about, at least. Although, following that logic, I would need to have a roller coaster, or maybe a Tilt-A-Whirl constructed over my own grave when I died. Then even after my loved ones had moved on, people could keep having fun for years and years.

Of course, I’d need a slightly larger plot.

My grave was still open, a six-foot pit in the ground. An old enemy had bought it for me as a form of murderous foreplay. That one hadn’t fallen out the way she had expected it would. But apparently whatever mechanism she used to secure the grave and to have it (illegally) left open was apparently still in place, because when I got there, I found it just as gaping and threatening as it had always been. A chill rolled up my spine as I read my headstone.

It was a pretty thing, white marble with gold-inlaid letters and a gold-inlaid pentacle:

HERE LIES HARRY DRESDEN.

HE DIED DOING THE RIGHT THING.

“Well,” I muttered, “once, sure. But I guess I’ll have to go best two out of three.”

I looked around. I’d passed several groups that might have been Halloween haunted theme tours, and a gaggle of kids wearing expensive black clothing and grim makeup, smoking cigarettes and trying to look like they were wise to the world. A couple of older people seemed to actually be visiting graves, putting out fresh flowers.