"Shark," Butters said. "Chums. Funny."

"Thank you for noticing," I said, and continued the sentence. "-are working for the Black Council."

"The theoretical Black Council," Karrin said.

"They're out there, definitely," I said.

Karrin smiled faintly. "If you say so, Mulder."

"I'm going to ignore that. The only question is whether or not they're here now."

Molly nodded seriously. "If they are? How do we find them?"

"We don't," I said. "There isn't enough time to go sniffing around methodically. We know someone's going to mess with the island. It doesn't really matter who's pressing the button that sets off the bomb. We just have to keep it from getting pressed. The Little Folk find us that ritual site, and then we go wreck it."

"Um," Butters said. "Not that I lack confidence in you guys, but shouldn't we be calling in the cavalry? I mean, doesn't that make more sense?"

"We are the cavalry," I said in a flat tone. "The White Council won't help. Even if I knew the current protocols to contact them, it would take them days to verify that I am in fact alive and still me, and we only have hours. Besides, Molly's on their most-wanted list."

I didn't add in the third reason not to contact the Council-when they found out about my relationship with Mab, the monarch of a sovereign and occasionally hostile supernatural nation, they would almost certainly panic and assume that I was a massive security risk. Which would, for a variety of reasons and to a variety of degrees, be an accurate assumption. And now that I thought about it, given how my, ah, induction had been psychically broadcast to all of Faerie, there was no chance whatsoever that the Council didn't know. Knowing stuff is what they do.

Butters frowned. "The Paranetters?"

"No," I said. "The last thing we need is a small army of newbies floundering around and stumbling into us. That's asking for trouble in the short term, the long term, and every other term there might be. We can go to them for information only. We aren't dragging them in."

The little ME took off his glasses and cleaned them absently with the hem of his scrubs. "What about Lara's team? Or the Einherjaren?"

Thomas shrugged. "I could probably convince Lara to send the team somewhere."

"Ditto," Karrin said, "only with Vikings."

"Good," I said. "We might need more bodies, and we might need to cover multiple sites. Can you two get that lined up when we break?"

They nodded.

"Molly," I said. "You'll take the map up to our little scouts and tell them where to look and what to look for. Keep it simple and promise an entire pizza to whoever finds what we're after."

My apprentice grinned. "Drive their performance with competition, eh?"

"Millions of abusively obsessed sports parents can't be wrong," I said. "Butters, you'll go to the Paranetters and ask if anyone's seen or heard anything unusual anywhere even close to Lake Michigan. No one investigates anything. They just report. Get me all the information you can about any odd activity in the past week. We need to collect data as quickly as possible."

"Right," Butters said. "I've got some now, if you want."

I blinked. I mean, I knew the Internet was the fast way to spread information, but . . . "Seriously?"

"Well," Butters hedged. "Sort of. One of our guys is a little, um, imaginative."

"You mean paranoid?"

"Yes," Butters said. "He's got this Internet lair in his mother's basement. Keeps track of all kinds of things. Calls it observing the supernatural through statistics. Sends me a regional status update every day, and my spam blockers just cannot keep him out."

"Hngh," I said, as if I knew what a spam blocker was. "What's he got to say about today?"

"That boat rentals this morning were four hundred percent higher today than the median for this time of year, and dark forces are bound to be at work."

"Boat rentals," I muttered.

"He's a little weird, Harry," Butters said. "I mean, he has a little head-shot photo tree of the people responsible for the Cubs' billy goat curse. That kind of odd. He blows the curve."

"Tell him to take the tree down. The billy goat curse was a lone gunman," I said. "But paranoid doesn't necessarily equal wrong. Boats . . ."

I bowed my head and closed my eyes for a moment, thinking, but if Butter's paranoid basement freak was right, then the puzzle piece he'd handed me was woefully unhelpful. I needed more pieces. "Okay," I said. "Right. Get more data." I looked up, jerked my head at Thomas, and headed for the kitchen. "Let's go talk to our guest about his boss."

* * *

I leaned down to look into the oven through the glass door. There was no light inside, but I could make out Captain Hook's armored form huddled disconsolately on a coated cookie sheet. I knocked on the glass, and Captain Hook's helmet turned toward me.

"I want to talk to you," I said. "You're my prisoner. Don't try to fight me or run away or I'll have to stop you. I'd rather just have a nice conversation. Do you understand me?"

Hook didn't give me any indications either way. I took silence as assent.

"Okay," I said. "I'm going to open the door now." I cracked open the oven door and opened it slowly, doing my best not to loom. Tough to do when you're the size of a building relative to the person over whom you are standing. "Now just take it easy and we will-"

I'd opened the door maybe six inches when Captain Hook all but vanished in a blur of speed. I swiped an arm at him about a second and a half too late, but I didn't feel too bad about missing, because Thomas tried to snatch the little maniac, too, and missed completely.

Hook, who worked for our enemies, and who had been right there in the kitchen the whole time we'd been scheming, shot toward a vent on one wall, crossing the room in the blink of an eye, and none of us could react in time to stop him.

Chapter Twenty-nine

None of us but the major general.

Toot dropped down from where he'd been crouched atop a bookcase, intercepting Hook's darting black form, and tackled the other little faerie to the floor in the middle of the living room. They landed with a thump on the carpeting, wings still blurring in fits and starts, and tumbled around the floor in irregular bursts and hops, sometimes rolling a few inches, sometimes bounding up and coming down six feet away.

Toot had planned for this fight. He'd tackled Hook into the carpet, where the hooks on his armor would get tangled and bind him, slowing him down. Furthermore, Toot's hands were wrapped in cloth until it looked like he was wearing mittens or boxing gloves, and he managed to seize Hook by the hooks on the back of his armor. He swung the other little faerie around in a circle and then with a high-pitched shout flung him into the wall.