“Oh no,” I said in a dull tone. “Not that. What do we need to be worried about here?” “How many injured do you have?” Lara asked at once.

“Uh…” I scratched at my head. “Bear, you okay?”

Bear shrugged. “Mostly I’d say I’m better than just okay.”

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We gathered in the gym. Me, Lara, Ramirez, Forthill, Will (wearing a bathrobe and carrying a notepad), and Butters. Bear was hanging out nearby with Freydis, who looked more relaxed than I’d ever seen her.

“A helicopter,” Lara was telling Butters. “It dropped us off in a park about three miles from here and we ran the rest of the way. My security people followed in cars and they’ll take us home. How did you get here in half an hour?”

“We happened to be about a mile off at a B-dubs to watch the fights,” Butters said. “Sometimes things just work out.”

“You don’t really think that, do you?” Lara said, smiling.

Butters grinned. “No, ma’am. Hey, isn’t there supposed to be a wedding? How come I haven’t gotten my invitation?”

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Basil and the gargoyles came out of the walls and floor in the aftermath, gathering around little Cinnamon. The monkey-cat little guy was in half a dozen broken pieces, where one of the Black Court had flung him into the castle’s wall.

“Mmmm,” Basil said, as I approached, still carrying Maggie. “My lord.”

“Uh,” I said. “Is he…”

“He is but injured,” Basil intoned seriously. “This isn’t too bad, my lord. With your permission, we will gather materials to mend him. There are many mounds of rubble in the city nearby where it can be done.”

“Go and be back before dawn,” I said. “Should be foggy tonight.”

“My lord,” Basil said, bowing his head. The gargoyles carefully gathered up Cinnamon’s pieces and vanished into the walls.

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Cleanup was gonna take a lot of mops.

It cost me about five minutes of pure mental effort and some of Bob’s help to get the stones of the second floor over the entry to the main hall put back. The heavy enchanted stone drifted slowly up into the air and locked back into place as securely as ever. We’d have to reseal it, but I was pretty sure Michael and I could manage it on our own with maybe a long day’s work.

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Excellent. They were all inside.

“Boys!” I snarled. “Get out of the way!”

The gargoyles flew back and away from the entry door, vanishing into the walls, the floor, as though the stone had been no more substantial than water.

I slammed my open right hand against the wall of Merlin’s fortress as the three corpses whirled toward me, reorienting after the sudden absence of resistance. There was an instant of frozen silence.

“You should have come on a school night,” I said harshly.

And then, at my will, the enchanted, obdurate stone of the second floor, that entire portion of the second floor, tons and tons and tons of rune-etched rock, slammed down more swiftly than a blinking eyelid, like a vast and ancient sledgehammer coming down on three doomed cockroaches.

It was messy as hell.

Black ichor, thick and sticky as tar, sprayed everywhere in a fine mist.

And that was that.

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The gargoyles had gathered by the entry door. Cinnamon was lying in a heap—a literal heap of broken stone—against the back wall, and as I watched I saw Basil in the doorway, wrestling a Black Court vampire and being forced slowly inward, his lion’s face set in an expression of noble determination. Sage tried to step in, only to be struck by a bolt of lightning that snaked through the doorway, driving him back several paces, and a second vampire added its power to the one struggling with Basil, driving the gargoyle back. The others closed in, but they weren’t as physically powerful as Basil. Lightning struck again and again, and the third vampire shoved its way in through the doorway.

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And lifted a murderous gaze to the last vampire there. The other withdrew a pace at a time as Carlos kept moving forward, and her hood fell back.

It was Mavra. Black Court vampire of old acquaintance. And she was smiling.

She let out a delighted cackle and blurred into motion, avoiding another disintegration beam from Ramirez, and vanished into the mist, leaving only an echo of her rasping laughter behind.

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Ramirez flicked his sword to his other hand, his expression furious, and threw out his right forefinger, barking another word, and a pale blue beam flashed out toward Cleo, striking her center mass—and simply melted a hole in her as shroud and undead flesh alike fell apart into their component elements. Carlos let out a cry of pure rage, walking forward, dragging the beam across more and more of the vampire’s body, melting more and more of it into dust that quickly became a slurry in the misty air, until all that was left was a withered head—eyes burst, mouth gaping, jaws trying to mouth something.

Carlos spat on the head and said, “For my friends.”

Then he disintegrated the head, too.

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Cleo shrieked and spun toward Ramirez, unleashing a bolt of white-hot flame from one hand. Carlos, smiling grimly, whirled his rapier in a tight circular parry, caught the flame on its blade, and promptly sent it hurtling back into Cleo like a miniature comet—which is why sorcerers, even very powerful, very experienced ones, hadn’t ought to square off on wizards.

The fire smashed into Cleo. The rain I’d called down had soaked her shrouds, and a cloud of steam burst out of her as fire met water. Cleo shrieked, reeling back. Black Court vampires are pretty close to physically indestructible, but heat gets to their eyes, and hers had just been boiled.

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The Renfields lunged forward. Renfields are just regular mortals, but they don’t feel much in the way of fear and they will keep trying to carry out their orders as long as they’re still capable of moving.

There was a blur in the air, and Carlos Ramirez emerged from behind a veil of magical energy off to one side, unseen until that moment. He wasn’t wearing his Warden’s cloak, though he bore his enchanted Warden’s blade in his hand, and I didn’t need my Sight to know what he was about to do.

The Wardens’ blades were made to cut through enchantment and disrupt magic, and Carlos did a smooth step and sweep with the sword, speaking a single word, and sent a wave of disruptive energy through the air, across the Renfields at more or less head level. The Renfields’ minds had been badly disrupted by hostile psychomancy, courtesy of the Black Court, and that disruption had effectively made them into puppets.

Ramirez had just cut the strings.

The Renfields collapsed as a single body, falling limply to the ground, immobile, their expressions confused, eyes open and staring and unfocused.

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Lara’s face twisted into a snarl as the sound of the horn washed over her, but it didn’t slow her down. She blurred into motion and hit the stunned ghouls from behind, blades flashing. She went for spines and necks, single, supernaturally powerful slashes, and the wavy blades carved their way through bone and flesh like cutting through so much Jell-O. Green-brown-black ghoul gore swept out in smooth arcs.

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Bear groaned and staggered to her feet, almost falling. Blood was coming from her mouth, though she was grinning a wide scarlet grin. “One of them had armor-piercing rounds,” she gasped. “Had to take them.”

“Cheating vampires,” I muttered. I got a shoulder under one of her arms and half dragged her with me to the stairway. Matias emerged from the stairs, pumping the shotgun, and fired three times at the nearest ghouls to cover us, his expression focused, impassive, and grim.

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I don’t know if I’ve made mention of how much I dislike ghouls.

I dropped the wind spell, drew my blasting rod, pointed it at the thing, sent a fraction of my anger coursing down my right arm, and snarled, “Fuego!”

The blasting rod flooded with golden light, and a blue-white bolt of something a couple of steps beyond fire slammed into its gaping mouth. The ghoul didn’t catch fire so much as its head instantly superheated and exploded like a kernel of gory popcorn. The ghoul crashed to the floor amid glowing runes and sigils, spewing dark, watery blood like the juice from a crushed cockroach, arms and legs still thrashing wildly and randomly, its body having been relieved of its brain so that it couldn’t know it was already dead.

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Someone hit me in the lower back with a heavy stick, maybe a .45 round slamming into my spell-armored leather duster. I sucked in a breath, staggered, but kept the wind spell going, spinning to begin sweeping the back side of the castle of incoming Malvora—but like I said, White Court vamps are fast as hell. Another shot hit my duster over my left thigh before I could get started, and in my peripheral vision I saw half a dozen vampires come sailing up, weapons training on me.

Bear stepped in front of me like a human wall, dropping the four-bore and going for her pistols like an old west gunfighter. I heard her guns speaking and a series of heavy slapping sounds as rounds intended for me struck her instead. She sucked in a breath, staggering, and went to one knee, but kept shooting.

“Fiero, fiero, fiero!” Fitz shrieked, and blazing bolts of white-hot flame leapt out of the doorway to the stairway down to the third floor of the castle, adding his fire to Bear’s. High-pitched shrieks went up from the Malvora. Four of the vampires buckled and staggered when hit by Bear’s heavy rounds. Two of them just went up in flames and dove back off the roof, shrieking.

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Someone hit me in the lower back with a heavy stick, maybe a .45 round slamming into my spell-armored leather duster. I sucked in a breath, staggered, but kept the wind spell going, spinning to begin sweeping the back side of the castle of incoming Malvora—but like I said, White Court vamps are fast as hell. Another shot hit my duster over my left thigh before I could get started, and in my peripheral vision I saw half a dozen vampires come sailing up, weapons training on me.

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I’d already gathered my will, and the second I saw the first of them appear, I rose, shield bracelet charged and ready, left arm bearing both the bracelet and my staff held in front of me as I drew back my right hand and flung it forward as if hurling a stone, screaming, “Ventas servitas!”

Wind howled forth at my will, swatting Malvora out of the air and driving them back from the castle’s walls into wild, tumbling falls. I kept my hand extended, sweeping them back like leaves before a heavy-duty blower.

White Court vampires are faster than striking snakes, and some of them got off shots at me before I could, literally, blow them away. At one point in my career, holding a shield and a wind evocation at the same time would have been a challenge. At one point this year, it would have been impossible. If they’d come a month sooner, things might have gone a lot differently.

But I’d just needed time.

And work.

And rest.

And friends.

Healing isn’t the work of a moment. I still had a way to go.

But I was better now.

More than that, I’d been teaching.

I was better now.

My shield rippled with blue-green light as bullets hit it, and I tried to hold it angled so the shots would reflect as directly upward as possible. Any projectile can be pulled down by gravity, but a lead hailstone was way less dangerous and less likely to harm bystanders than a bullet bouncing directly into a home. I held the shield, focused the wind like a vast broom, and sent Malvora vampires flying.

I could have used fire but, you know. Alliance with Lara’s Court and all. It would probably be less of a headache for her in the aftermath if I didn’t slaughter them wholesale.

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Ghouls are athletic and powerful and tough, but they don’t have the kind of strength and grace that allows them a thirty-foot vertical leap.

Freshly fed Malvora vampires do. These had been feeding on the various protesters for hours, and they bounded up through the air with grace and style, all pale skin and blond hair and glittering eyes in the arcane light of the castle’s glowing runes, coming from the front and back of the rooftop at more or less the same time.

I’d already gathered my will, and the second I saw the first of them appear, I rose, shield bracelet charged and ready, left arm bearing both the bracelet and my staff held in front of me as I drew back my right hand and flung it forward as if hurling a stone, screaming, “Ventas servitas!”

Wind howled forth at my will, swatting Malvora out of the air and driving them back from the castle’s walls into wild, tumbling falls. I kept my hand extended, sweeping them back like leaves before a heavy-duty blower.

White Court vampires are faster than striking snakes, and some of them got off shots at me before I could, literally, blow them away. At one point in my career, holding a shield and a wind evocation at the same time would have been a challenge. At one point this year, it would have been impossible. If they’d come a month sooner, things might have gone a lot differently.

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I waved at Fitz and Matias and shouted to them, “There’s going to be an explosion! We’re going down the stairs not long after! Get into the doorway and hold the stairs!”

Fitz shouted something mostly lost in the gunfire, but Matias, flinching as a ricochet went somewhere near him, held up his thumb in acknowledgment.

“Bob,” I said, “I want the energy from the blast contained to just the gates. Absorb as much of it as you can.”

“Uh,” Bob said. “If I do that, the gates are going to come down.”

“That’s the idea,” I said. “Get to it.”

“Will do, boss!” Bob said, and the blue light zipped off through the transparent stone of the castle. As he did, the stone became real and opaque again, and my eyes stopped burning.

Bear was frowning at me. “You want them inside.”

“Come on,” I said. “They’re Black Court. Why do you think I invited them in? ‘Come and get some’ wasn’t an accident.”

Bear’s frown turned into a fierce grin. “You think you can handle them?”

“Time I get done with them, we’ll need a lot of mops,” I said darkly. “This is my house.”

She nodded, understanding. “You want to handle the lightweights first.”

“Yep. Scatter the riffraff, then I’ll deal with the rest in the main hall.”

Bear reached up over her shoulder to flick a snap on her leather strap and take her double-bladed axe down, setting it near at hand. “Sounds fun.”

Someone shouted something below. The gunfire abruptly stopped, and I slammed my hands over my ears and opened my mouth. Bear mirrored me.

There was a sound so big that it blew back the branches from the trees across the street, shattered the windows of houses and parked cars, and made everything lighter for a second, as if a wave had come along and lifted me a little up off the stones of the roof. The runes of the castle flared painfully bright. It was followed by the sound of stones rattling, smaller rocks bouncing against enchanted stone, and a cloud of dust and powder billowed out from the front of the castle, filling the already misty air. The resulting mixture condensed almost instantly into a kind of mucky, grimy rain.

Then there was a single, rasping, inhuman howl, instantly echoed by dozens of yowling ghoul battle cries, and my enemies came for me.

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Toot’s report was accurate. Maybe half the ghouls had peeled off to circle to the rear of the castle, and several Malvora vampires, armed with concealable firearms, had gone with them. There was a back door there, but it was built out of the same stone as the rest of the castle, sealed into place with enchantments that made it damned near as tough as the walls around it, and would be too heavily fortified to open without a serious amount of explosives, which they did not appear to have. That crew would have to climb to the roof and try to win entry to the castle from up here. It would take them a moment to get into position, so they were the secondary problem.

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“Bob!” I called.

Blue light whirled across the rooftop as the spirit of intellect sped through the enchanted stone of the castle to appear at my side like the splash of an immaterial flashlight. “Here!”

“Show me what’s going on,” I said, and placed a hand flat to the stone.

There was a dizzying sensation, and my eyes burned as if I were walking through a pall of smoke and began to water. I squinted through it—and could suddenly see through the stone of the castle as if it had become as clear as glass.

Toot’s report was accurate. Maybe half the ghouls had peeled off to circle to the rear of the castle, and several Malvora vampires, armed with concealable firearms, had gone with them. There was a back door there, but it was built out of the same stone as the rest of the castle, sealed into place with enchantments that made it damned near as tough as the walls around it, and would be too heavily fortified to open without a serious amount of explosives, which they did not appear to have. That crew would have to climb to the roof and try to win entry to the castle from up here. It would take them a moment to get into position, so they were the secondary problem.

At the front gates, seven or eight Renfields were approaching. The gargoyles had indeed transformed the wooden front gate of the castle to a single slab of thick stone that still bore the wood-grain marks of the gate, filling the open area and flush against the castle stone, ruined steel hinges bent and torn. Interestingly, from an academic standpoint, I couldn’t see through the newly transformed stone—but I had a good angle from up here and could clearly see the Renfields shuffling forward and dumping their backpacks on the ground in front of the gates.

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Cleo lowered its hand, black eyes narrowing. Then it spoke, and its voice was as charming as sandpaper on rusted steel. “Malvora.”

I started to say something, and Bear grabbed my collar and jerked me back as a gunshot rang out. I had the flash impression of one of the Malvora moving swiftly, hand extending bearing a long-barreled pistol. Something hissed past my face, close enough to stir some of my hair as I dropped back.

Merlin’s fortress had been designed to be impregnable to supernatural forces. Modern firearms hadn’t really been a factor in its engineering, and while the stone was damned near impregnable, especially while charged with power like it was at the moment, I couldn’t use it to stop bullets from zipping through the air.

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One of them stepped forward and lowered its hood. It had been a female at one time, I thought, though mummified corpses reduce gender considerations to a large degree. It was wearing jewelry that looked like it might have been inspired by ancient Egyptian fashion, definitely somewhere in the Middle East, though historically speaking it was likely an affectation, since Drakul had been a late-fourteenth-century type. I dubbed it Cleopatra anyway. They were doubtless in similar shape.

“Okay, Cleo,” I said. “What you got?”

The vampire’s eyes glittered with pure malevolence and she raised her right hand, sending a bolt of white-hot flame scorching straight at me.

I narrowed my eyes, focused my will upon the castle’s defenses, and otherwise didn’t move a single muscle.

The fire streaked toward me—and stopped cold at the line of the battlements. The runes and sigils there burned brightly for a moment, and a faint impression of a wall of blue light appeared in the air between us, immaterial as a phantom and very much real enough to stop the hostile magic in its tracks. The stones of Merlin’s fortress absorbed the energy as easily as they stopped the wind.

Cleo lowered its hand, black eyes narrowing. Then it spoke, and its voice was as charming as sandpaper on rusted steel. “Malvora.”

I started to say something, and Bear grabbed my collar and jerked me back as a gunshot rang out. I had the flash impression of one of the Malvora moving swiftly, hand extending bearing a long-barreled pistol. Something hissed past my face, close enough to stir some of my hair as I dropped back.

Merlin’s fortress had been designed to be impregnable to supernatural forces. Modern firearms hadn’t really been a factor in its engineering, and while the stone was damned near impregnable, especially while charged with power like it was at the moment, I couldn’t use it to stop bullets from zipping through the air.

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The door slammed open and Fitz came running out onto the roof, wearing biker leathers that hung a little loose on him, because they’d been the closest fit we could find. I’d shown him how to enchant protection sigils into the leather over the past several months, when I’d been refreshing the ones on my duster.

“Harry!” he said. “Basil and the other gargoyles are at the gates, freaking out about evil! And they turned the wood to stone! Straight-up rock!” He paused. “I think you’re going to need new hinges.”

“We’ll file that under ‘deal with it later,’ ” I said.

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I shaped the channels in my thoughts, years and years of experience in working with spells, with power formulae, with elemental forces, coming together in a whole. I took that fraction of power, focusing upon it with the forces of Winter, and even with my eyes closed, I could suddenly see the burning white light of Soulfire pouring out of the runes of the staff I held in my left hand.

And then I raised my right hand and sent that energy hurtling into the skies above me, calling, “Ventas tempestas!” at the top of my lungs.

My voice rang out, far too loud, and I opened my eyes to see blinding energy of many colors come washing up through me from the rune circle beneath my feet and go lashing into the sky. A crash of thunder loud and close enough to shake my chest smashed the air, and over the course of seconds, the water in the air, now being drawn from the icy depths of the lake, condensed into low, thick, angry storm clouds, lit by a continuous rumble of wildly colored lightning.

The storm boiled up out of absolutely nowhere, not a thousand feet above the street, clouds billowing down and closer, continuous thunder growling and echoing like some enormous and furious beast.

I kept my opened right hand over my head, fingers held in a rigid claw, keeping the energy going, containing the energy I’d unleashed through sheer, unbroken concentration.

“Bob!” I screamed over the fury. “Oz me!”

“On it!” Bob chirped through my staff, his voice in a near panic.

And a second later, I felt my perceptions blur, and my perspective shifted. Suddenly, I felt I was floating about twenty feet above the street outside the front of the castle, and my physical eyes could see that only my head was showing up as an enormous image, bigger than ten men, lightning that echoed the storm above flashing in my eyes.

People screamed. They began retreating to either side of the street, looking up at me in sheer terror. Smartphones were exploding into clouds of sparks on every side.

“All right, people!” I shouted, and my voice was louder than the storm. “I tried to share hot chocolate with you! I tried to be nice! And now you’re shedding blood in front of my home!” The last word boomed out loud enough to crack the glass of windows all around.

“I have had it!” I thundered on. “Fulmen! Fulmen! Fulmen!”

And at each word, bolts of lightning crashed down from the storm above, thundered down into the center of the street, driving the two sides back even farther from each other, sending people to the earth, screaming and covering their ears and heads.

“Pluvias!” I screamed.

And rain, rain barely warmer than ice, rain so thick that you’d have to cover your mouth and nose to breathe, crashed down from the skies above. It smashed into the crowds, driving everyone left standing to their knees, crouching to cover their heads and faces.

And the falling water flowed down, water thick enough to melt through magical energy not grounded in the castle’s stone, smothering the fires of fear the Malvora vampires were spreading, bringing sudden, cold clarity to everyone being influenced.

“Nonpluvias!” I called. “Nontempestas!”

And like that, the rain stopped. The lightning stopped. The thunder stopped.

The silence was deafening.

The giant floating head of me said, in a voice all the more terrible for its softness, “I’m tired of the disturbance to my home. Tired of you making the good people who live here afraid. So unless you want the next communication from any of your insurance companies to include the words act of God, I suggest you all leave in peace. While you can.”

There was a long moment of stillness.

And then they scattered, running back down the streets, soaked and shaking, shocked and terrified looks on their faces, fleeing for their lives.

I closed my fist, cutting off the energy, sent it back into the conjunction of the river of ley lines beneath me. The vast projection of my head went with it. Spells backed by that much energy wouldn’t be of any help to what was coming next. The castle was in a residential neighborhood. It would have been like bringing a howitzer to a fistfight.

For the first time, I looked around and saw the pulsing fire of blue and green and gold energy burning from every inscribed rune in the castle. It lit the streets around it for a couple of blocks at least.

I blew out a breath and disentangled myself from the stone and rock of Merlin’s fortress, felt the power fade, felt myself returning to my normal self, felt myself become wholly human again. I felt a little tired, but not as much as I’d thought I would. Most of what I’d done had been a matter of concentration, not drawing energy out of myself, out of my own emotions.

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I walked to the center of the roof and told everyone, “Stay back from me. You don’t want to get too close to this.”

“Too close to what?” Fitz called.

“The big time,” I said, and rapped my staff on the stones of the roof, sending out a burst of my will along with it.

Green-gold light swept out from the end of the staff in a circle, rolling over the barely visible carvings in the stones, picking out a circle of glowing sigils around me that formed into a magic circle almost at once. I could feel the power congeal around me, feel unseen walls snap up in a cylinder above me—and simultaneously thrust down into the castle and the earth below.

The stones beneath my feet began to vibrate.

“Bob,” I said quietly.

The spirit of intellect’s voice came, conducted through the stone beneath me, up the length of the dense wood grain of my staff, to buzz in my ear. “Yeah, boss?”

“You got those ley lines called up?”

Merlin’s fortress, they had called it, this castle. And it had been built not only to shelter and protect, but to channel magical energy as well. Its layered enchantments gave it a metaphysical mass far beyond the weight of mere stone. Magically speaking, it was made of a superdense substance, like the material of a collapsed star.

And like that material, it had its own kind of gravity.

“It’s ready to bring them together,” Bob said. “But…Harry, are you absolutely sure? You haven’t worked with stuff this big before. And even though everything seems to check out, they might not have put this place back together just right, you know? When Marcone brought it here?”

“He had a fallen angel whose province is magic advising him when he did,” I noted. “Marcone is a lot of things, but one thing he isn’t is incompetent.”

I took a deep breath.

A month ago, I wouldn’t have even considered this, much less actually tried it.

Either I’d been healing…or just getting crazier.

Or both. You know.

Things are rarely monolithic.

“Bring it up to power,” I said to Bob.

“Got it, boss,” Bob said nervously. I supposed I couldn’t blame him. Bob was living in the stone of the castle itself now, and I was about to flood that stone with dangerous amounts of energy.

I closed my eyes, shutting out distractions, the shouts from the crowd. Rocks had begun being thrown, judging from the clack of stone on stone coming from the walls at the castle’s front. Screams rose, some of fury, some of pain. I shut those out, too, and sent my senses completely into the stone beneath me.

At first, it was like lying in a dark room, cold enough that I’d lost sensation in my arms and legs. I started pushing with my will, like testing the muscles of my fingers and limbs. I breathed in and out slowly, continuing to apply more will against what faced me, sinking my mind into the weave of magical constructs within the stone.

They were old. Stars and stones, I could feel the age bound within the rock, the slow memory of the witness of millennia passing like days. The rock remembered ice covering the earth and retreating over and over. The rock remembered rain that lasted for hundreds of thousands of years. The rock remembered shocks of impact from stone hurtling through the void and the sweeping wind that followed, spinning off in explosions of myriad hurricanes. The rock remembered eons of molten fire and smoke—all primordial forces that regarded mere flecks of organic matter, like me, the way a mortal would note the passing of a speck of dust in a beam of sunlight.

Dimly, back in my physical body, I felt the stone of the castle begin to shake.

Layer upon layer of memory, of enchantment to enhance that memory, began to envelop me, spreading out over me and pressing down with a heavy, even weight, with a terrible gravity that I knew could have ripped my thoughts to pieces if I allowed it, the superdense supernatural energy showing me that the castle itself had gained its own form of slow and obdurate sentience. I kept focusing harder and harder, sinking myself into that gravity, holding my thoughts together.

As Bob began activating the castle’s enchantments, that gravity spread out, drawing toward it flowing rivers of natural magical energy in the earth—ley lines—drawing them toward it like a star being drawn into a black hole, like rivers caught in a massive earthquake suddenly forced to a new course.

I planted myself in the rock and stone. Anchored myself in my thoughts, in myself, as that energy coursed over me in a tidal flood of power, because before those forces, I was a speck of dust. But I knew who I was.

I was a man.

I was a father.

I was a protector.

I was imperfect and flawed.

I was stubborn as hell.

I was a fighter.

I was a helper.

I was someone who worked every day to be a better man than I’d been the day before.

I was someone who would not stand by doing nothing when there was a clear need for action.

I was a wizard.

I was Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden.

The enormous power of the energy of conjoined ley lines flowed over me, and I stood before it like a great tree before a flood, balanced and ready, roots sunk deep into the earth beneath me, swaying slightly before the pressure and then stubbornly pushing back.

Power washed through me. Pure power. Power that could bring a forest erupting up through the streets of Chicago. Power that could level it flat. Power that could destroy those who made me afraid. Power that could warp and bend and break reality itself.

Hell’s bells.

In that moment, I knew what it was to be a little-G god.

With power like that, there was no place for fear. No place for anger. No place for passion. No place for outrage. No place for desire.

Only focus.

Only balance.

Only restraint.

Only thought.

Only pure will.

This wasn’t like when a Titan had tried to crush my mind. This power wasn’t being directed and focused upon me with intent. It was simply power, wild and rushing and as primordial as the first day of Creation.

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