Watsonian McAnally: the son of the chief physician.

[Eldest Gruff]

You can all blame Serack for this one  Doylist Mac

TL;DR version based on the original post I made in Serack's topic that spurred this all on:

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Not that i'm a fan of the 'Chosen one' trope but, introducing Mac as a supernatural figure (former, current or somewhere in-between) would certainly fit the notion that Harry has been 'watched over' most of his life if not all, by interested outside parties and figures. Consider all of Mac's appearances as a more Watsonian variation:

-SF and FM: Introduction to his bar and character as a sort of 'Supernatural hangout' for Chicago. A place where various important events can and might go down early on. FM also has the last meeting between Harry and Kim Delany, the first apprentice and first 'major' direct loss/death to Harry in the books (discounting off screen deaths or supposed deaths like Malcolm, Justin, Elaine etc.), in Macs.

-Death Masks gives us out first real intro to the Accords and how they might work in the DV. Major potential turning point in the war between the Reds and WC. Additionally first introduction to the Nickleheads. Meeting with Ortega takes place there.

-Dead Beat is the mini 'war council' where Harry becomes a Warden. Mac's again is the meeting spot for a major event in Harry's life, his growing potential reliance on the Council and theirs to him. Introduction to Kemmler, Necromancy and the stronger consequences of the war/possibility of the Council 'rotting' from within.

-Proven Guilty the summit between Winter Lady and Summer Lady occur at Mac's. The idea of Mab being 'crazy' is brought to the forefront, (hand in hand with the first likely examples of Maeve's N-fected lying behavior), as well as Harry's ever increasing involvement in the Fae realm.

-Small Favor surrounds the events that would involve the Denarians once more as well as the Archive in greater detail. Additionally we are introduced to Uriel, and greater insight into the potential 'behind the scenes' machinations at hand. Mac's serves as the confrontation between Tiny and Harry/Murph. Also introduces us to Mac's secret 'Gods beer' brew.

-Changes of course has Mac as the first person Harry confides in about Maggie. He tells Dresden that he will be heading into the 'badlands, it'll be easy to get lost' and calling the situation a 'hard thing'. He offers more insight than he ever has and indeed sets the tone in his own way for everything we will come to know as a Change for Harry.

-Cold Days addressed in this topic to a degree. Following this general line of thought Harry (now the WK, another BIG change) is given insight into Nemesis and one step closer to the real answers behind everything. Mac's of course serves for the meeting between Odin and Harry where he gains some important perspective, the assault by Sharkface/introduction of Mac as a 'Watcher' and of course Mac's presence on the island.

-Skin Game has the flashback meeting between Kringle and Harry there, we are given info on the abilities of Nic and greater insight into a major plan taking place that come to surround the artifacts, Harry finds out he has an SOI in his noodle and an archangel gives up his Grace, temporarily.

So, from this general perspective pretty much every 'important' step of the way, Mac has been there either on the fringes or directly involved. Either intentionally or by dint of having the most known 'hub' of supernatural community gatherings in Chicago, the Watcher has pretty much been watching Harry's growth all the while.

If I forgot certain books feel free to point them out.

Ultimately I would reiterate my position, I very much do not like the Chosen One trope, especially as it applies to Harry. The trend or parallel's heading in that direction at the moment however bear noting. Ironically the topic above regarding 'out of universe' reasoning for Mac's presence where it didn't seemed to fit spurred a thought that led to my 'in-universe' line of reasoning surrounding Mac and his importance to the story. This list in essence is meant to catalog Mac's appearances within the books as well as the surrounding storyline to illustrate that our favorite barkeep might, in fact, be yet another link in the chain of major parties interested in the Ragged Wizard from the outset and all this time.

What we know about Mac: he opened his pub a few years before Harry Dresden came to Chicago; nobody knows where he’d been before that or what he’d done.

(Thanks to knnn for the above. This is also specifically commented on by Harry in DB but that is for a bit later on in the topic.)

• Mac set's up shop in Chi-town. Per our series timeline Harry left Eb at about 19 years of age and wandered hermit style for about a year or two before finally settling down in Chicago and beginning work with Nick Christian at Ragged Angel. He is now, conveniently enough, just about at legal drinking age and as we know a creature of habit. A favorite haunt like Mac's, especially as it tailors to the supernatural community, would be just the thing for an intrepid young wizard. More conveniently still, it's close by:

Where was Harry’s apartment?
In the same mythical four or five blocks where his office was, and where Mac’s is. It’s really dangerous to use an actual location because there’s always that occasional unbalanced person who just decides “Well, this needs to be true to the books, I’m going to burn this house down.” *audience laughter* I knew I was gonna be wrecking the place, so maybe I’ll just kind of make it semi-mythical and that will be healthier for everyone.

• Happy coincidence or an indicator of well planned forethought? We have a nice Doylist perspective with a hint at a Watsonian one.
  
  
  

Storm Front:

• Introduces us to Mac's and possibly his place in the story:

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McAnally's is a pub a few blocks from my office. I go there when I'm feeling stressed, or when I have a few extra bucks to spend on a nice dinner. A lot of us fringe types do. Mac, the pub's owner, is used to wizards and all the problems that come along with us. There aren't any video games at McAnally's. There are no televisions or expensive computer trivia games. There isn't even a jukebox. Mac keeps a player piano instead. It's less likely to go haywire around us.

I say pub in all the best senses of the word. When you walk in, you take several steps down into a room with a deadly combination of a low clearance and ceiling fans. If you're tall, like me, you walk carefully in McAnally's. There are thirteen stools at the bar and thirteen tables in the room. Thirteen windows, set up high in the wall in order to be above ground level, let some light from the street into the place. Thirteen mirrors on the walls cast back reflections of the patrons in dim detail, and give the illusion of more space. Thirteen wooden columns, carved with likenesses from folktales and legends of the Old World, make it difficult to walk around the place without weaving a circuitous route - they also quite intentionally break up the flow of random energies, dispelling to one degree or another the auras that gather around broody, grumpy wizards and keeping them from manifesting in unintentional and colorful ways. The colors are all muted, earth browns and sea greens. The first time I entered McAnally's, I felt like a wolf returning to an old, favorite den. Mac makes his own beer, ale really, and it's the best stuff in the city. His food is cooked on a wood-burning stove. And you can damn well walk your own self over to the bar to pick up your order when it's ready, according to Mac. It's my sort of place.

• Telling us from the outset how much he feels at home in Mac's and it's purpose to the supernatural community at large. This is also Harry's first major case, his grand introduction into the plot at large and how it extends into all corners of the supernatural world. At a most critical juncture he aids Harry directly in his task to confront Victor Sells and save his life:

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It didn't take me long to walk to McAnally's. I came through the door in a storm of long legs, rain, wind, flapping duster, and angry eyes.

The place was packed, people sitting at every one of the thirteen stools at the bar, at every one of the thirteen tables, leaning against most of the thirteen columns. Pipe smoke drifted through the air in a haze, stirred by the languidly spinning blades of the ceiling fans. The light was dim, candles burning at the tables and in sconces on the walls, plus a little grey storm light sliding in through the windows. The light made the carvings on the columns vague and mysterious, the shadows changing them in a subtle fashion. All of Mac's chessboards were out on the tables, but my sense of it was that those playing and watching the games were trying to keep their minds off of something that was disturbing them.

They all turned to stare at me as I came in the door and down the steps, dripping rainwater and a little blood onto the floor. The room got really quiet.

They were the have-nots of the magical community. Hedge magi without enough innate talent, motivation, or strength to be true wizards. Innately gifted people who knew what they were and tried to make as little of it as possible. Dabblers, herbalists, holistic healers, kitchen witches, troubled youngsters just touching their abilities and wondering what to do about it. Older men and women, younger people, faces impassive or concerned or fearful, they were all there. I knew them all by sight, if not by name.

I swept my gaze around the room. Every one of the people I looked at dropped their eyes, but I didn't need to look deep to see what was happening. Word has a way of getting around between practitioners of magic, and the arcane party line was working as it usually did. Word was out. There was a mark on my head, and they all knew it. Trouble was brewing between two wizards, white and black, and they had all come here, to the shelter offered by McAnally's winding spaces and disruptive configurations of tables and columns. They'd come here to shelter until it was over.

It didn't offer any shelter to me, though. McAnally's couldn't protect me against a sharply directed spell. It was an umbrella, not a bomb shelter. I couldn't get away from what Victor would do to me, unless I cared to flee to the Nevernever itself, and for me that was more dangerous, in some ways, than staying at Mac's.

I stood there in the silence for a moment, but said nothing. These people were associates, friends of a casual sort, but I couldn't ask them to stand beside me. Whatever Victor thought he was, he had the power of a real wizard, and he could crush any of these people like a boot could a cockroach. They weren't prepared to deal with this sort of thing.

"Mac," I said, finally. My voice fell on the silence like a hammer on glass. "I need to borrow your car."

Mac hadn't quit polishing the bar with a clean white cloth when I entered, his spare frame gaunt in a white shirt and dark breeches. He hadn't stopped when the room had grown still. And he didn't stop when he pulled the keys out of his pocket and tossed them to me with one hand. I caught them, and said, "Thanks, Mac."

"Ungh," Mac said. He glanced up at me, and then behind me. I took the gesture for the warning it was, and turned.

...

Mac stooped and picked up the keys, where I'd dropped them on the floor as I swung the chair. I hadn't noticed that I had. Mac handed them back to me and said, "Council will be pissed."

"Let me worry about that."

He nodded. "Luck, Harry." Mac offered me his hand, and I took it. The room was still silent. Fearful, worried eyes watched me.

I took the keys and walked up, out of the light and shelter of McAnally's and into the storm, my bridges burning behind me.

• He gives him his '89 Trans Am without so much as a blink. He warns him about Morgan's presence and then offers his own blunt, passive support. (Note too they shake hands without a single inkling of a practitioner's tingle.) Ultimately as we know Harry triumphs.
  

Fool Moon:

• Offer's up Mac's right from the outset as the meeting place between Harry and sometimes apprentice Kim Delany. The conversation surrounds the notion of circles and containment. The notion of 'higher powers' is touched upon for the first time in the their conversation:

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Her cheeks glowed with excitement, and her eyes shone. "I knew it. And what's this last one?"

I squinted at the innermost ring of symbols, frowning. "A mistake."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that it's just gobbledygook. It doesn't mean anything useful. Are you sure you copied this correctly?"

Kim's mouth twisted into a frown. "I'm sure, I'm sure. I was careful."

I studied her face for a moment. "If I read the symbols correctly, it's a third wall. Built to withhold creatures of flesh and spirit. Neither mortal nor spirit but somewhere in between."

She frowned. "What kind of creatures are like that?"

I shrugged. "None," I said, and officially, it was true. The White Council of wizards did not allow the discussion of demons that could be called to earth, beings of spirit that could gather flesh to themselves. Usually, a spirit-circle was enough to stop all but the most powerful demons or Elder Things of the outer reaches of the Nevernever. But this third circle was built to stop things that could transcend those kinds of boundaries. It was a cage for demonic demigods and archangels.

• Perhaps even more importantly it serves as a critical lesson for Harry:

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And I abruptly understood Kim Delaney's request. She had to have known Harley MacFinn, maybe through her environmental activism. She must have learned of his curse, and wanted to help him. When I had refused to help her, she had attempted to recreate the greater summoning circle upstairs in the bedroom, to hold in MacFinn once the moon rose. As I had warned her would happen, she had failed. She hadn't had the knowledge necessary to understand how such a construct would function, and consequently, she hadn't been able to make it work.

MacFinn had killed her. Kim was dead because I had refused to share my knowledge with her, because I hadn't given her my help. I had been so secure in my knowledge and wisdom; withholding such secrets from her had been the action of a concerned and reasoned adult speaking to an overeager child. I couldn't believe my own arrogance, the utter confidence with which I had condemned her to death.

• This was the last time he would see Kim alive. And it's a hard learned lesson for him that will ultimately help shape the way he handles sharing information with those he loves and trusts throughout the rest of the series. He would also have the door opened about his less than saintly mother:

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"Indeed," Chauncy agreed. "Your mother was a most direct and willful woman. Her loss was a great sadness to all of us."

I blinked, startled, and the pencil fell from my fingers. I stared at the demon for a moment. "You ... you knew my mother? You knew Margaret Gwendolyn Dresden?"

Chauncy regarded me without expression or emotion. "Many in the underworld were ... familiar with her, Harry Blackstone Dresden, though under a different name. Her coming was awaited with great anticipation, but the Dark Prince lost her, in the end."

"What do you mean? What are you talking about?"

Chauncy's eyes gleamed with avarice. "Didn't you know about your mother's past, Mr. Dresden? A pity that we didn't have this conversation sooner. You might have added it into the bargain we made. Of course, if you would like to forfeit another name, to know all about your mother's past, her ..." his voice twisted with distaste, "redemption, and the unnatural deaths of both mother and father, I am certain we can work something out."

I gritted my teeth in a sudden rush of childlike frustration. My heart pounded in my ears. My mother's dark past? I had expected that she was a wizardess, but I had never been able to prove anything, one way or another. Unnatural deaths? My father had perished in his sleep, of an aneurism, when I was young. My mother had died in childbirth.

Or had they?

A sudden, burning desire to know filled me, starting at my gut and rolling outward through my body - to know who my mother was, what she had known. She had left me her silver pentacle, but I knew nothing of the sort of person she was, other than what my gentle and too-generous father had told me before his death. What were my parents like? How had they perished and why? Had they been killed? Did they have enemies lurking out there, somewhere? If so, had I inherited them?

My mother's dark past. Did that explain my own fascination with the darker powers, my somewhat-less-than-sterling adherence to the rules of the White Council that I considered foolish or inconvenient?

• As well as the introduction to his ID (who as we will see later also seems to show up only in books that involve Mac to one degree or another...make of that what you will ) :
  

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I awoke in a dark place. It was like the inside of a warehouse, or a big, underground garage, all black, with a smooth, even floor, and a pool of bleak, sterile radiance in the middle of it that came from a source I could not see or identify. I felt like hell, and looked down to see myself covered in scratches, bruises, welts, blood, bandages, and ill-fitting clothing. I wore none of my implements or devices, and there was a curious sense of distance between me and the pain of my injuries - I was more than aware of them, but they seemed to be something that was merely noted in passing, and unimportant to my life as a whole.

I stood just outside the circle of light, and it seemed to me proper that I move forward into it. I did. And as I did, there appeared in the circle opposite me ... me. Myself. Only better groomed, dressed in a mantled duster of black leather, not the sturdy, if styleless canvas that I wore. My double's pants and boots and shirt were all black as well, and they fit him as though tailor-made, rather than off-the-rack. His eyes were set deep, overshadowed by severe brows, and glittering with dark intelligence. His hair was neatly cut, and the short beard he wore emphasized the long lines of his face, the high cheekbones, the straight slash of his mouth, and the angular strength of his jaw. He stood as tall as I, as long limbed as I, but carried with him infinitely more confidence, raw knowledge, and strength. A faint whiff of cologne drifted over to me, cutting through my own sour sweat and blood smells.

My double tilted his head to one side, looked me up and down for a long minute, and then said, "Harry. You look like hell."

"And you look like me," I said, and limped toward him, peering.

My double rolled his eyes and shook his head. "Hell's bells, you make me sick with how thick skulled you are, sometimes." He took steps toward me, mirroring my own movements. "I don't look like you. I am you."

I blinked at him for a few seconds. "You are me. How does that work?"

"You're unconscious, moron," my double said to me. "We can finally talk to one another."

"Oh, I get it," I said. "You're Evil Harry, lurking inside Good Harry. Right? And you only come out at night?"

"Give me a break," my double said. "If you were that simple, you'd be so insufferably boring you'd probably blow your own head off. I'm not Evil Harry. I'm just Subconscious Harry. I'm your inner voice, bub. Your intuition, your instinct, your basic, animal reactions. I make your dreams, and I decide which nightmares to pop in the old psychic VCR at night. I come up with a lot of the good ideas, and pass them along to you when you wake up."

"So you're saying you're wiser than me? Smarter than me?"

"I probably am, in a lot of ways," my double said, "but that's not my job, and it's not why I'm here."

"I see. So what are you doing here, then? You're going to tell me how I'm going to meet three spirits of Harry Past, Present, and Future?" I asked.

My double snorted. "That's good. That really is, the banter thing. I can't do the banter very well. Maybe that's why you're in charge. Of course, if I was in charge more often, you'd get laid a lot more - but no, that's not it, either."

"Can we speed this along? I'm too tired to keep on guessing," I complained.

"No joke, jerk. That's why you're asleep. But we don't have long to talk, and there are some issues we need to work through." He said issues in the British manner, iss-ewwws.

"Issues to work through?" I said. "What, am I my own therapist, now?" I turned my back on my double and started stalking out of the lighted circle. "I've had some weird dreams, but this has got to be the stupidest one yet."

My double slipped around me and got in my way before I could leave the circle of light. "Hold it. You really don't want to do this."

"I'm tired. I feel like shit. I'm hurt. And what I really don't want is to waste any more time dreaming about you." I narrowed my eyes at my double. "Now get out of my way." I turned to my right and started walking toward the nearest edge of the circle.

My double slipped in front of me again, apparently without needing to cross the intervening space. "It isn't that simple, Harry. No matter where you go, there you are."

"Look, I've had a long night."

"I know," my double said. "Believe me, I know. That's why it's important to get some of this out now, before it settles in. Before you blow a gasket on your sanity, man."

"I'm not worried about that," I lied. "I'm as solid as a brick wall."

My double snorted. "If you weren't getting pretty close to crazy, would you be talking to yourself right now?"

I opened my mouth. Closed it again. Shrugged. "Okay. You've got a point."

"I've got more than that," my double said. "Things have been happening to you so quickly that you haven't had time to think. You need to work through some of this, and then you need to do some hard thinking, fast."

I sighed and rubbed at my eyes. "All right, then," I said. "What do you want to hear?"

My double gestured, and there was Murphy as she had appeared in the hallway of the police station, the flesh of her bicep tented out by the broken bone, her face pale, spotted with blood, and streaked with tears and hopeless anguish.

"Murph," I said, quietly, and knelt down by the image. "Stars above. What have I done to you?" The image, the memory, didn't hear me. She just wept silent, bitter tears.

My double knelt on the other side of the apparition. "Nothing, Harry," he said. "What happened at the police station wasn't your fault."

"Like hell it wasn't," I snarled. "If I'd have been faster, gotten there sooner, or if I'd told her the truth from the beginning - "

"But you didn't," my double interjected. "And you had some pretty damned compelling reasons not to. Ease up on yourself, man. You can't change the past."

"Easy for you to say," I snarled.

"No, it isn't," my double said quietly. "Concentrate on what you will do, not what you should have done. You've been trying to protect Murphy all along, instead of making her able to protect herself. She's going to be fighting these kinds of things, Harry, and you won't always be there to baby-sit her. Instead of trying to play shepherd, you need to play coach, and get her into shape to do what she needs to do."

"But that means - "

"Telling her everything," my double said. "The White Council, the Nevernever, all of it."

"The Council won't like it. If I tell her and they hear about it, they might consider her a security risk."

"And if you don't make her able to understand what she's fighting, something's going to eat her face some dark night. Murphy's a big girl. The Council had better be careful if they decide to go messing with her." My double considered Murphy for a moment. "You should ask her out sometime, too."

"I should what?" I said.

"You heard me. You're repressing big time, man."

"This is all getting way too Freudian for me," I said, and stood up, intending to walk away again. I was confronted with an image of Susan, as she had appeared on the steps to the police station, tall in her heels and dress suit, elegant and beautiful, her face stretched with worry.

"Think she's going to get a good story out of this?" my double asked.

"Oh, that's below the belt. That's not why she's seeing me."

"Maybe, maybe not. But you're asking yourself that question, aren't you?" My double gestured to himself and to me, demonstratively. "Shouldn't that make you ask a few more questions?"

"Like what?" I asked.

"Like how come you don't trust anyone," my double said. "Not even someone like Susan who has been going out on a limb for you tonight." He lifted a long-fingered hand and stroked at the short beard with his fingertips. "I'm thinking this has to do with Elaine. How about you?"

And then there she was, a girl of elegant height, perhaps eighteen or nineteen years of age - gawky and coltish, all long legs and arms, but with the promise of stunning beauty to add graceful curves to the lean lines of her body. She was dressed in a pair of my blue jeans, cut off at the tops of her muscled thighs, and my own T-shirt, tied off over her abdomen. A pentacle amulet, identical to my own, if less battered, lay over her heart, between the curves of her modest breasts. Her skin was pale, almost luminous, her hair a shade of brown-gold, like ripe wheat, her eyes a startling, storm-cloud grey in contrast. Her smile lit up her face, made her eyes dance with secret fires that still, even after all the years, made me draw in a sharp breath. Elaine. Beautiful, vital, and as poisonous as any snake.

I turned my back on the image, deliberately - before I could see it change into the Elaine that I had last seen - naked, festooned in swirling paints that lent a savage aura to her skin. Her lips had been stained brilliant, wet red, curving around twisting, rolling phrases as she chanted in the midst of her circle, its sigils meant to focus pain and fury into tangible power that had been used to hold a foolish young man helpless while his mentor offered him one last chance to sip from a chalice of fresh, hot blood.

"That's been over for a long time," I said, my voice shaking.

My double answered me quietly, "It isn't over. It isn't over yet, Harry. As long as you hold yourself responsible for Justin's death and Elaine's fall, it still colors everything you think and do."

I didn't answer myself.

"She's still alive," my double said. "You know she is."

"She died in the fire," I said. "She was unconscious. She couldn't have lived through it."

"You'd have known if she died. And they never found a second set of bones."

"She died in the fire!" I screamed. "She's dead."

"Until you stop pretending," my double said, appearing before me, "and try to face reality, you're not going to be able to heal. You're not going to be able to trust anyone. Which reminds me..."

My double gestured, and Tera West appeared as I had seen her crouched behind the garbage bin at the rear of the gas station, naked, her body lean, feral, leaves and bits of bracken in her hair, her amber eyes gleaming with cold, alien intelligence. "Why in the hell are you trusting her?"

"I haven't had much choice," I snapped. "In case you haven't noticed, things have been sort of desperate lately."

"You know she's not human," my double said. "You know she was at the scene of the crime, at Marcone's restaurant, where Spike was torn up. You know she has some kind of hold on a group of young people, the favorite targets of the creatures of the Nevernever. In fact, you can be pretty damn sure that she is a shapeshifter of one kind or another, who isn't telling you the whole truth, but still comes asking for your help."

"Like I can throw stones for not telling the whole truth," I said.

Hngh, my double said in answer. "But you haven't confronted her about what she isn't telling you. Those kids. Who the hell were they, and what were they doing? What is she getting them into? And why was she keeping it a secret from MacFinn? He didn't recognize the names when you dropped them."

"All right, all right," I said. "I was going to talk to her anyway. As soon as I wake up."

My double chuckled. "If things are that leisurely. These murders are still happening, and they're starting to pile up. Are you serious about doing something about them?"

"You know that I am."

My double nodded firmly. "I'm glad we agree on something. Let's look at some facts. MacFinn couldn't have committed all the murders. Most particularly, he couldn't have committed the most important murder - the industrialist, Marcone's partner. He and his bodyguard were killed the night after the full moon. And Spike was wiped out the night before the full moon. MacFinn doesn't have any control over his shapeshifting. He couldn't have been the one to pull off those murders."

"So who could have?" I asked.

"His fiance. The men were ripped apart by an animal."

"But the FBI lab said that it wasn't a true wolf that did it."

"Werewolves are slightly different from real wolves," my double said.

"How do you know that?" I demanded.

"I'm the intuition, remember?" my double said. "Think about it. If you were going to change yourself into a wolf, do you think you could hold that image in your head, perfectly exact? Do you think you could make all the millions of subtle, tiny changes in skeletal and muscular structure? Magic doesn't just work - a mind has to direct it, shape it. Your emotions, your feelings toward wolves would color it, too, change the image and the shape. Ask Bob, next chance you get. I'm sure he'll tell you I'm right."

"Okay, okay," I said. "I'll buy that. But the FBI said that there was more than one set of tooth marks and prints, too."

"MacFinn explains some of them. During last month's full moon, he probably killed some people when his circle went ka-blooey."

"And the group Tera had - they called themselves the Alphas - could explain the rest of them, if they were shapeshifters."

"Now you're catching on," my double said, approval in his tone. "You're smarter than you look."

"Do you think they were behind spoiling MacFinn's containment circle? The fancy one with all the silver and stuff?"

"They had the knowledge to do it, through Tera. Tera could have let them in, providing opportunity," my double said.

"But they didn't have a motive," I said. "Why would they have done it?"

"Because Tera told them to, maybe?"

I frowned and nodded. "She is a creature of the Nevernever. Who knows what's going through her - its head. It doesn't necessarily have to be understandable by human logic."

My double shook his head. "I don't buy that. I saw the way she looked at MacFinn - and how she sacrificed herself to divert the FBI and the police so that he could escape. Your instincts are telling you that she is in love with MacFinn, and that she wouldn't act against him."

"Yeah. You told me that about Elaine, too," I shot back, another pang of memory going through my chest.

"That was a long time ago," my double said defensively. "I've had time to get keener since then. And less easy to distract."

"All right," I sighed. "So where does that leave us?"

"I don't think we've run into the real killers yet. The ones who ruined MacFinn's circle and whacked the mob guys on the non-full-moon nights."

I squinted at my double. "You think so?"

He nodded and stroked his beard again. "Unless the Alphas are doing it without Tera knowing, and they look a little too bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to be doing that. I think it's someone else entirely. Someone trying to set up MacFinn and take him out of the picture."

"But why?"

"Maybe because they didn't want him putting the Northwest Passage Project through. Or, gee, maybe because he's a freaking werewolf, Harry, and someone caught on to it and wanted him dead. You know that there are organizations who would do that - some of the Venatori Umbrorum, members of the White Council, others who are in the know."

"But you don't think I've seen them, yet?"

"I don't think you've picked them out from the background," my double said. "Keep your eyes open, all right? Which brings us to the next topic of discussion."

"Does it?"

My double nodded. "Threat assessment. You've got all kinds of things staring you right in the face, and you're not noticing them. I don't want you to get killed because you're too distracted." He glanced to one side, frowned, and said, "We're almost out of time."

"We wouldn't be if you weren't such a wiseass."

"Bite me," my double said. "Don't forget Marcone. You pissed him off by not taking the deal he offered you. He thinks the killers are coming after him next, and he might be right. He's scared, and scared people do stupid things - like trying to off the only man in town who has a chance of stopping what's going on."

"Let me worry about Marcone," I said.

"I am you, and I'm worried. Next is the cops. Some of Murphy's people are dead. There is going to be hell to pay once she gets that arm fixed - and someone is going to remember that you were around, and with your luck, they won't remember that you kept even more people from dying. You see Murphy and the police again, you'd better be careful or you're going to get shot to death resisting arrest."

"I'll be careful," I said.

"One more thing," my double said. "You have forgotten about Parker and the Streetwolves entirely. Parker needs you dead if he's going to remain in control of his people."

"Yeah. You'd have thought he'd have been more on the ball than this."

"Exactly," my double said. "You've been hiding and away from your apartment for a while - but you show up in public again, and you can bet that Parker will be on your trail. And think. He knew the real deal between you and Marcone, and he's a petty thug in Chicago. There's probably a connection between them, and you've been too dumb to think of it."

"Stars above," I muttered. "It's not as if the situation is very complicated. No pressure, right?"

"At least you're willing to deal with it now, instead of just closing your eyes and pretending that they can't see you. Be careful, Harry. It's a real mess, and you're the only one who can clean it up."

"Who are you, my mother?" I asked.

My double snapped his fingers. "That reminds me, right. Your mother - " He broke off, glancing up and around him, an expression of frustration coming over his face. "Oh, hell."

• Murphy, Elaine, Susan, Trust, His Mother, the case, Harry's inner turmoil and what makes him tick, lessons and issues he will continue to battle throughout the series are all introduced here.
  
  And it all started under Mac's roof.

Death Masks:

• Mac's next comes into play as the meeting place between Ortega and Harry to discuss their duel. It introduces us to the Accords in a more tangible, in-depth way and Mac's as a viable example of Accorded Neutral Ground. On the fringe however we have a great many major plot points for Harry. Coming head to head with Nicodemus and the Denarian's for the first time, he meets Ivy and Kincaid for the first time, (important relationships both), obtain's Thomas' help yet again and learns a bit more about his mother's 'darker' associations. But in a more direct application right outside the bar Harry and Shiro discuss the war:

(click to show/hide)

Shiro stood quietly for a moment, lips pursed thoughtfully, before he said, "Ortega means to kill you."

"Yes. Yes, he does," I said. I managed not to grind my teeth as I said it. "Everyone is saying that like I didn't know it already."

"But you do not know how." I frowned and looked down at Shiro. His shaved head gleamed under a nearby streetlight. "The war is not your fault."

"I know that," I said, but my voice lacked conviction.

"No," Shiro said. "It truly is not your fault."

"What do you mean?"

"The Red Court has been quietly building its resources for years," he said. "How else were they ready to start their attacks in Europe only days after you defeated Bianca?"

I frowned at him.

Shiro drew a cigar from inside his jacket and bit off the end. He spat it to one side. "You were not the cause of the war. You were merely the excuse. The Reds would have attacked when they were ready."

"No," I said. "That's not how it is. I mean, damn near everyone I've spoken to on the Council-"

Shiro snorted. He struck a match and puffed on the cigar a few times while he lit it. "The Council. Arrogant. As if nothing significant could happen unless a wizard did it."

For someone who wasn't on the White Council, Shiro seemed to have its general attitude pretty well surrounded. "If the Red Court wanted a war, why is Ortega trying to stop it?"

"Premature," Shiro said. "Needed more time to be completely prepared. The advantage of surprise is gone. He wishes to strike once and be certain it is a lethal stroke."

I watched the little old man for a minute. "Everyone's got advice tonight. Why are you giving it?"

"Because in some ways you are every bit as arrogant as the Council, though you do not realize it. You blame yourself for what happened to Susan. You want to blame yourself for more."

"So what if I do?"

Shiro turned me and faced me squarely. I avoided meeting his eyes. "Duels are a test of fire. They are fought in the will. The heart. If you do not find your balance, Ortega will not need to kill you. You will do so for him."

• The bigger picture begins to focus a bit more now, and Harry is perhaps only just starting to get a glimpse of his place in it all. A certain Fallen Angel's shadow also takes up residence in his head...
  

Apparently these templates actually had character limits...who knew? Blame it on the spoiler quotes counting as text 

[Eldest Gruff]

Dead Beat:

• Zombeh's! Well, that's the fun part anyway. Kemmler's work and the Heirs make their appearance for a whole new world of magic that Harry must counter. Cowl and the Reds give us fringe idea's about the Council being betrayed and unseen hands working in the backround. We also get our first hint of a new KoTC in the works. And thanks to Harry's ignorance, we also get our first hints of Nemesis in the overall plot as well as the workings of favors/obligations:

(click to show/hide)

My mouth went dry and my throat got tight. I leaned on my staff to help me balance as I cast a courtly bow in her direction. "Greetings, Queen Mab. I do beg your pardon. It was not my intention to disturb thee."

My head shifted into panicked, quick thought. Queen Mab had come to me, and that absolutely could not be good. Mab, monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe, the Queen of Air and Darkness, was not a very nice person. In fact, she was one of the most feared beings of power you'd find short of archangels and ancient gods. I'd once used my wizard's Sight to look upon Mab as she unveiled her true self in a working of power, and it had come perilously close to driving me insane.

Mab was not some paltry mortal being like Grevane or Cowl or the Corpsetaker. She was far older, far cruder, far more deadly than they could ever be.

And I owed her a favor. Two, to be exact.

She stared at me for a long and silent moment, and I didn't look at her face. Then she let out a quiet laugh and said, "Disturb me? Hardly. I am here only to fulfill the duties I have been obliged to take upon myself. It is no fault of thine that this summons reached mine ears."

I straightened up slowly and avoided her eyes. "I had expected my godmother to come."

Mab smiled. Her teeth were small and white and perfect, her canines delicately sharp. "Alas. The Leanansidhe is tied up at the moment."

I drew in a breath. My godmother was a powerful member of the Winter Court, but she couldn't hold a candle to Mab. If Mab wanted to take Lea down, she certainly could do it-and for some reason the thought spurred on a protective instinct, something that made me irrationally angry. Yes, Lea was hardly a benevolent being in her own right. Yes, she'd tried to enslave me several times in the past several years. But for all of that, she was still my godmother, and the thought of something happening to her angered me. "For what reason have you detained her?"

"Because I do not tolerate challenges to my authority," she said. One pale hand drifted to the hilt of the knife at her belt. "Certain events had convinced your godmother that she was no longer bound by my word and will. She is now learning otherwise."

"What have you done to her?" I asked. Well. It didn't sound like a question so much as a demand.

Mab laughed, and the sound of it came out silvery and smoother than honey. The laugh bounded around the waves and the earth and the winds, clashing against itself in a manner that made the hairs on my neck stand up and my heart race with a sudden apprehension as I felt an odd kind of pressure settle over me, as if I were closed into a small room. I gritted my teeth and waited the laugh out, trying not to show how harshly it had affected me. "She is bound," Mab said. "She is in some discomfort. But she is in no danger from my hand. Once she acknowledges who rules Winter, she will be restored to her station. I can ill afford the loss of so potent a vassal."

"I need to speak to her now," I said.

"Of course," Mab said. "Yet she languishes in the process of enlightenment. Thus am I here to fulfill her obligation to teach and guide you."

I frowned. "You locked her away somewhere, but you're keeping her promises?"

Something cold and haughty flickered through Mab's eyes. "Promises must be kept," she murmured, and the words made wave, wind, and stone tremble. "My vassal's oaths and bargains are binding upon me, so long as I restrain her from fulfilling them."

"Does that mean that you will help me?" I asked.

"It means that I will give you what she might give you," Mab said, "and speak what knowledge she might have spoken to you were she here in flesh, rather than in proxy." She tilted her head slowly to one side. "You know, wizard, that I may speak no word that is untrue. Thus is my word given to you."

• Later as it more directly relates to Mac we have the Warden War Council where we both find out a bit more about Mac and the overall machinations of those self same unseen hands:

(click to show/hide)

"Come on. I'm a wizard. We have union rules against telling anybody anything," I said. There was a round of muted chuckles. "Seriously. I can't say any more for now," I said. And I couldn't. Odds were better than good that one or more spies lurked among the patrons of the tavern, and the less information they had about White Council plans and activities, the better. "Take this seriously, guys. You don't want to be outside come nightfall."

Mac turned around to the bar and swept his eyes over it, his expression polite and pointed. He grunted and flicked his chin at the door, and the noise from the room rose again as people began speaking quietly to one another, getting up, and leaving money on the tables as they left.

Two minutes later, Mac and I were the only people left in the tavern. Mac walked around the edge of the bar and sat down next to me. He put one steak-laden dinner plate on the bar in front of me, kept the other for himself, and added a couple of bottles of his home-brewed dark ale. Mac flipped the tops off with a thumbnail.

"Bless your soul, Mac," I said, and picked up one bottle. I held it up. Mac clinked his bottle of ale against mine, and then we both took a long drink and fell to on the steaks.

We ate in silence. After a while, Mac asked, "Bad?"

"Pretty bad," I said. I debated how much I could tell him. Mac was a good guy and a long-term acquaintance and friend, but he wasn't Council. Screw it. The man gave me steak and a beer. He deserved to know something more than that there was a threat he probably couldn't do anything about. "Necromancers."

Mac's fork froze on the way to his mouth. He shook his head, put his last bite of steak into his mouth, and chewed slowly. Mac never used a sentence when one word would do. "Wardens?"

"Yeah. A lot of them."

He pursed his lips with a frown. "Kemmler," he said.

I arched an eyebrow, but I wasn't really surprised that he knew the infamous necromancer's name. Mac always seemed to have a pretty darned good idea about what was going on. "Not Kemmler. His leftovers. But that's bad enough."

"Ungh." Mac finished up his plate in rapid order, then rose and started collecting money and clearing the tables in the corner farthest from the door. At some point he collected my barren plate and empty bottle and put a fresh ale down in front of me.

I sipped at it, watching him. He didn't make a production of it, but he checked the short-barreled shotgun he kept on a clip behind the bar, and put a pair of 1911s in unobtrusive spots behind the bar, so that no matter where he stood, one of the weapons would be within easy reach. He handled them like he knew exactly what he was doing.

I sipped at the ale and mused. I knew little of Mac's background. He'd opened the tavern a few years before I'd moved to Chicago. No one I'd talked to knew where he'd been before that, or what he had done. I wasn't surprised that he knew something about weapons. He'd always moved like someone who could handle himself. But since he wasn't exactly a chatterbox, most of what I knew came from observation. I hadn't the faintest idea of why or where he'd learned the business of violence.

...

I stared at Luccio for a second. "That's a joke," I said. "Right?"

She gave me a brief, bitter smile. "Master McAnally," she said to Mac. "I think we could use a round. Do you have anything decent to drink?"

Mac grunted and said, "Got a new dark."

"Is it worth drinking?" Luccio asked. She sounded tired, but there was a teasing tone to her voice.

Mac glowered at her in answer, and she gave him a smile that was part challenge and part apology, and took a seat at one of the tables. She gestured at the table and said, "Wardens, please join me."

Morgan took the seat to Luccio's right, and the look he gave me could have burned holes in sheet metal. I did what I always did when Morgan did that: I eyed him right back, then dismissed him as if he weren't even there. I pulled out the chair opposite Luccio and sat. The two youngest Wardens sat down, but Ramirez stayed standing until Mac had brought over bottles of his dark ale and left them on the table. He headed back over to the bar.

Ramirez glanced at Luccio, and she nodded. "Close the circle, please, Warden."

The young man drew a piece of chalk from his pocket, and quickly drew a heavy line on the floor all the way around the table. He finished the circle, then touched it lightly with the forefinger of his right hand and spoke a quiet word. I felt a flicker of his will as he released a tiny bit of power into the circle. The circle closed around us in a sudden, silent tension, raising a thin barrier around us that was almost entirely impregnable to magical forces. If anyone had been trying to spy on the meeting with magic, the circle would prevent it. If anyone had left some kind of listening device nearby, the magic-saturated air within the circle would be certain to fry it within a minute.

Ramirez nodded to himself and then reversed the last open chair at the table and straddled it, resting one arm on the back. Morgan slid him the last bottle of ale, and he took it in one hand.

"Absent friends," Luccio murmured, holding up her bottle.

I could get behind that toast. The rest of us muttered, "Absent friends," and we had a drink, and Luccio stared at her bottle for a moment.

I waited in the pregnant silence and then said, "So. Making me a Warden. That's a joke, right?"

Luccio took a second, slower taste of the ale and then arched an eyebrow at the bottle.

Behind the bar again, Mac smiled.

"It's no joke, Warden Dresden," Luccio said.

"As much as we all would like it to be," Morgan added.

Luccio gave him a look of very gentle reproof, and Morgan subsided into silence. "How much have you heard about recent events in the war?"

"Nothing in the past several days," I said. "Not since my last check-in."

She nodded. "I thought as much. The Red Court has begun a heavy offensive. This is the first time that they've concentrated their efforts on disrupting our communications. We suspect that a great many wizards never received word through our usual messengers."

"Then they found weaknesses in the communications lines," I said. "But they waited to exploit them until it would hurt us the most."

Luccio nodded. "Precisely. The first attack came in Cairo, at our operations center there. Several Wardens were taken, including the senior commander of the region."

"Alive?" I asked.

She nodded. "Yes. Which was an unacceptable threat."

When vampires take you alive, it isn't so that they can treat you to ice cream. That was one of the really nightmarish facets of the war with the Red Court. If the enemy got you, they could do worse than kill you.

They could make you one of their own.

If they managed to turn a Warden, especially one of the senior commanders, it would give them access to a treasury of knowledge and secrets-to say nothing of the fact that they would effectively gain, in many ways, a wizard of their own. Vampires didn't use magic in the same way that mortal wizards did. They tapped into the same nauseating well of power that Kemmler and those like him used. But from what I understood of it, the skills carried over. A turned wizard would be a deadly threat to the Wardens, the Council, and mortals alike. We never talked about it, but there was a sort of silent understanding among wizards that we would never be taken alive. And an equally silent fear that we might be.

"You went after them," I guessed.

Luccio nodded. "A major assault. Madrid, Sao Paolo, Acapulco, Athens. We struck at enemy strongholds there to acquire intelligence to the whereabouts of the prisoners. Our people were being held in Belize." She waved a hand vaguely at Morgan.

"Our intelligence indicated the presence of the highest-ranking members of the Red Court, including the Red King himself. The Merlin and the rest of the Senior Council took the field with us," Morgan said quietly.

That made me raise my brows. The Merlin, the leader of the Senior Council, was as defensive-minded as it was possible to be. He'd guided the White Council into the equivalent of a cold war with the Red Court, with everyone moving carefully and unwilling to commit, in the hopes that it would give the war time to settle away into negotiations and some kind of diplomatic resolution. An offensive action like a full assault from the Senior Council, the seven oldest and strongest wizards on the planet, had been long overdue.

"What changed the Merlin's mind?" I asked quietly.

"Wizard McCoy," Luccio said. "When our people were taken, he persuaded most of the Senior Council to take action, including Ancient Mai and the Gatekeeper."

That made sense. My old mentor, Ebenezar McCoy, was a member of the Senior Council. He had a couple of longtime friends on the Council, but that didn't give him a majority vote. If he wanted to get anything done, he had to talk someone from the Merlin's bloc into casting their vote with him-either that, or convince the Gatekeeper, a wizard who habitually abstained from voting, to take a stand with him. If Ebenezar had convinced Ancient Mai and the Gatekeeper to vote with him in favor of action, the Merlin would have little choice but to move.

And just because the Merlin was a master of wards and defensive magic did not mean that he couldn't kick some ass if he needed to. You don't get to be the Merlin of the White Council by collecting bottle caps, and Arthur Langtry, the current Merlin, was generally considered to be the most powerful wizard on earth.

I had seen for myself what Ebenezar McCoy was capable of. A couple of years ago he had pulled an old Soviet satellite out of orbit and brought it down into the lap of Duke Ortega, the warlord of the Red Court. He'd killed a ton of vampires in doing it.

He'd also killed people. He'd taken the force of life and creation and used it to wipe out the lives of mortals-victims of the Red Court's power. And it wasn't the first time he'd done it. Ebenezar, I'd learned, held an office that did not officially exist-that of the White Council's assassin. Known as the Blackstaff, he had a license to kill, as well as to break the other Laws of Magic when he deemed it necessary. When I learned that he was violating and undermining the same laws he'd taught me to obey, to believe in, it had wounded me so deeply that in some ways I was still bleeding.

Ebenezar had betrayed what I believed in. But that didn't change the fact that the old man was the strongest wizard I'd ever seen in action. And he was the youngest and least powerful of the Senior Council.

"What happened?" I asked quietly.

"There was no evidence of the presence of the Red King or his entourage, but other than that the attack went as planned," Morgan said. "We assaulted the vampires' stronghold and took our people back with us."

Luccio's face twisted in sudden and bitter grief.

"It was a lure," I said quietly. "Wasn't it?"

"Yes," she said quietly. "We moved out and took our wounded to the hospice in Sicily."

"What happened?"

"We were betrayed," she said, and her words carried more sharp edges than a sack of broken glass. "Someone within our ranks must have reported our position to the Red Court. They attacked us that night."

"When was that?" I asked.

Luccio frowned, then glanced across the table at Ramirez.

"Three days ago, Zulu time," Ramirez provided quietly.

"I've not slept," Luccio said. "Between that and all the travel, I lose track." She took another drink of ale and said, "The attack was vicious.

They were coming for the Senior Council, and their sorcerers managed to cut us off from escaping into the Nevernever for nearly a day. We lost thirty-eight Wardens that day, in fighting all over Sicily."

I sat there for a moment, stunned. Thirty-eight. Stars and stones, there were only about two hundred Wardens on the Council. Not every wizard had the kind of talent that made them dangerous in a face-to-face confrontation. Most of those who did were Wardens. In a single day, the Red Court had killed nearly 20 percent of our fighting force.

"They paid for it," Morgan rumbled quietly. "But... they seemed almost mad to die in order to kill us. Driven. I saw four different death curses unleashed that day. I saw vampires climb over mounds of their own dead without so much as slowing down. We must have taken twenty of their warriors for every loss of our own." He closed his eyes and his sour face was suddenly masked with very real and very human grief. "They kept coming."

"We had many wounded," Luccio said. "So many wounded. As soon as the Senior Council was able to open the ways into the Nevernever, we retreated to the paths through Faerie. And we were pursued."

I sat up straight. "What?"

Morgan nodded. "The Red Court followed us into the territory of the Sidhe," he said.

"They had to know," I said quietly. "They had to know that by pressing the attack in Faerie itself they would anger the Sidhe. They've just declared war on Summer and Winter alike."

"Yes," Morgan said in a flat voice. "But it didn't stop them. They attacked us as we retreated. And..." He glanced at Luccio as if in appeal.

She gave him a firm look and said to me, "They had called demons to assist them." She inhaled slowly. "Not simply beasts from the Nevernever. They had gone to the Netherworld. They had called Outsiders."

I took a longer drink of Mac's ale. Outsiders. Demons were bad enough, but they were at least something I was fairly familiar with. The reaches of the Nevernever, the world of spirit and magic that surrounds the mortal world, are filled with all kinds of beings. Most of them really don't give a damn about mortal affairs, and we are nothing but a remote and unimportant curiosity to them. When beings of the spirit world are interested in mortal business, it's for a good reason. The ones who like to eat us, hurt us, or generally terrify us are what wizards commonly refer to as demons, as a general term. They're bad enough.

Outsiders, though, were so rarely spoken of that they were all but a rumor. I wasn't really clear on all of the details, but the Outsiders had been the servants and foot soldiers of the Old Ones, an ancient race of demons or gods who had once ruled the mortal world, but who had apparently been cast out and locked away from our reality.

There was a specific Law of Magic against contacting them-Thou Shalt Not Open the Outer Gates. No one wanted to be the one suddenly suspected of opening ways for the Outsiders to enter the mortal world. The Wardens absolutely did not play around with violations of the Laws of Magic. Their entire purpose in life was to protect the Council-first from violators of the seven Laws, and then from everyone else.

I eyed the folded grey cloak on the table in front of me.

"I thought only mortal magic could call up Outsiders," I said quietly.

Luccio said quietly, "You are correct."

My stomach lurched a little. Someone had told the Red Court where to find the Council. Someone had blocked off their escape route to the Nevernever so strongly that the most powerful wizards on the planet had required a full day to open them again. And someone had begun calling up Outsiders in numbers, sending them to attack the White Council.

The Council is not what it was, Cowl had said. It has rotted from the inside. It will fall. Soon.

"The Wardens fell back to fight a holding action against the Red Court so that our wounded could escape to safety," Luccio reported, her crisp voice at odds with her weary eyes. "That was when they loosed the Outsiders upon us. We lost another twenty-three Wardens in the first moments of combat, and many more were wounded." There was silence while she took a long pull from her bottle, emptying it, then setting it down sharply on the table, anger flickering in her eyes. "If Senior Council members McCoy and Liberty had not come to our aid, we might have all died there. Even with them, we managed to hold them only long enough for the Gatekeeper and the Merlin to raise a ward behind us, to give us time to escape."

"A ward?" I blurted. "Are you telling me that they stonewalled an entire army of vampires and demons? With one ward?"

"You don't get to be Merlin of the White Council by collecting bottle caps," Ramirez said, his voice dry.

I glanced aside at Ramirez. He grinned at me and swigged beer.

"McCoy was injured," Luccio continued.

Ramirez snorted. "Who wasn't?"

Luccio snapped, "Carlos."

He lifted a hand in surrender and settled back onto his chair again, but his grin never faded.

"There were many injuries," Luccio continued. "But as the hospice in Sicily had been taken, we diverted the worst cases to a hospital we control in the Congo." She stared at her bottle for a moment. Her mouth opened, and then she closed it again. She closed her eyes.

Morgan frowned at her. Then he put a hand on Luccio's shoulder, looked at me, and said, "The vampires knew."

I got a sick, twisting feeling in my stomach. "Oh, God."

"It was daylight there," Morgan said. "And the place was a fortress of the Merlin's wards. There was no way for the vampires to breach it from the Nevernever, and nothing short of a demon lord could have broken through them." His mouth twisted, and his eyes glittered with rage and hate. "They sent mortals against us. Against men and women lying injured, unconscious, helpless in their beds." The anger in his voice seemed to strangle him for a moment.

"But..." I said. "Look, I know what it's like going up against mortals you don't want to kill. It's difficult, but they can be stopped. Fought. Bullets and explosives can be defended against."

"Which is why they used gas," Ramirez said quietly, stepping in where Morgan's and Luccio's voices had failed. His own tone was serious. His grin had vanished. "A nerve agent, probably sarin. They deployed it against the entire hospital, the people we had protecting it, and six square blocks of city around it." He put his own bottle down and said, "No one survived."

"My God..." I whispered.

There was dead silence.

"Ebenezar?" I asked in a whisper. "You said he was wounded. Was he..."

Ramirez shook his head. "Stubborn old bastard wouldn't go to the hospital," the young Warden said. "He went with one of the teams staging a counteroffensive with the Fellowship of Saint Giles."

"Thousands of innocent mortals died," Luccio said, and there was a slow, low snarl in her voice. She kept it tightly leashed and under control, but I heard it. I recognized it, and I knew what it was like to feel it permeating my words. "Women. Children. Thousands. And today I buried one hundred and forty-three Wardens."

I sat there, stunned.

In a single, vicious stroke, the Red Court had very nearly destroyed the White Council.

"They have crossed every line," Luccio said, her voice quiet and precise. "Violated every principle of war of our world and the mortal world alike. Madness. They have gone mad."

"They've committed suicide," I said quietly. "They don't have a prayer against the Council and the Faerie Courts alike."

"The Sidhe were taken by surprise," Morgan rumbled. "They aren't prepared for a fight. And we're holding on by our fingernails. We've got less than fifty Wardens capable of combat. Without our communications network in order, members of the Council have been attacked individually and by surprise. We don't know how many more wizards have died."

"And it gets even better," Ramirez said. "Agents of the Red Court are haunting the ways through Faerie. We were attacked on the way here, twice."

"Our priority," Luccio said, voice crisp, "is to consolidate our forces and to draw upon every available resource to restore the Wardens as a fighting force. We must draw the members of the Council together and make sure that they are protected. We're reorganizing our security." She shook her head. "And frankly, we must protect the lives of the Senior Council. So long as they are concealed from the enemy and still able to take action, they are a dangerous force. Together they wield more power than any hundred members of the Council, and it can be concentrated with deadly effect, as the Merlin showed in the Nevernever. So long as they stand ready to strike, the enemy cannot openly unveil his full strength."

"More important," Morgan growled, "the mortal wizards who betrayed us, whoever they are, fear the Senior Council. That is why their first move was an attempt to destroy them."

Luccio nodded. "If we can hold on until the Faerie Courts mobilize for action, we can recover from this attack. Which brings us to today," Luccio said, and studied me, tired and frank. "Every other Warden able to fight is currently either engaged against the enemy or safeguarding the Senior Council. Our lines of support and communication are tenuous." She gestured at those seated at the table. "This is every resource the White Council has to spare."

• Additionally we have round two of the ID:

(click to show/hide)

"Not precisely a dream," the subconscious me said. "Call it a meeting of the minds."

Lasciel smiled, very slightly.

"No," I said, and pointed at Lasciel. "I've said everything I intend to say to her." I turned to my alter ego-though on thinking about it, maybe alter id was more accurate. "As for you, you're sort of a jerk. And the whole look you've got going there says 'evil wizard,' which I am now professionally opposed to."

Alterna- Harry sighed. "I've told you before. I'm not some sort of dark demon. I'm simply the more primal essence of yourself. The one most concerned with such matters as food. Survival." His dark eyes flickered idly over Lasciel. "Mating," he said, a lazy growl to the tone. He looked back to me. "The important things in life."

"That I am even having this dream probably means that I need a good therapist," I said. I stared at my other self and said, "It was you, wasn't it? You wanted to pick up the coin."

"Make sure you remember that I am a part of you before you point any fingers," he said. "And yes. The potential for power in an alliance with Lasciel"-he inclined his head to her, a courtly, gentlemanly gesture, damn his chivalrous eyes-"was too great to simply ignore. There are too many things out there determined to kill you. So long as you keep Lasciel's coin, you both have the option to seek more power if necessary to protect yourself or others, and you prevent the coin from being used by unscrupulous sorts like Cassius."

I grimaced. "So?"

"So," he said. "This is a time to consider employing a portion of that power."

I stared at him and said, "You've been talking to her behind my back."

"For months," he said calmly. "It was only polite. After all, you wanted nothing to do with her."

"You asshole," I said. "The whole reason I wasn't talking was that I didn't want the temptation."

"I did," my subconscious said. "Honestly, you should listen to me more often. If you'd taken my advice about Murphy, she wouldn't be in Hawaii. In bed with Kincaid."

Lasciel coughed gently and said, "Gentlemen. If I might offer a suggest-"

Both I and my alternative self said, at the same time and in exactly the same voice, "Shut up."

Lasciel blinked, but did.

My double and I eyed each other, and I nodded slowly. "We're in agreement, then, that her presence and her influence are dangerous."

"We are," my double said. "She must not be allowed to dictate actions or to direct our choices through suggestion or manipulation." My double looked at her and said, "But she can and should be used as a resource, under careful control. She can offer us enormous amounts of information." He eyed her again and said, "And amusement."

Lasciel left her eyes down and smiled, very slightly.

"No," I said. "I've got Bob when I want information. And if I want sex, I'll... figure out something."

"You don't have Bob now," my double said. "And you've wanted sex since about twenty minutes after the last time you had it."

"That's beside the point," I told him sullenly. "I'm not quite insane enough to let a fallen angel give me virtual nooky, just for kicks."

"Listen to me," he said, and his voice became sharp, commanding. "Here's the cold truth. You are determined to take us into battle against forces you cannot possibly overcome through main strength. Not only that, but your source of assistance, the Wardens, may also turn against you if they learn the truth about what you're attempting. You are wounded. You are out of contact with your other allies."

"It's the right thing to do," I said, setting my jaw.

My double rolled his eyes. "Tell me, is it morally necessary for you to die in the process?"

I glowered at him.

"This meeting is just a formality, you know," he said. "You are already planning on asking Lasciel's shadow for her help. That's why you read through the book as you did before it was taken from you. You wanted it to go through your mind so that she could see it, and provide you with the text as she did for the summoning of the Erlking."

I lifted a finger. "I only did that in case I wasn't able to pry enough out of Grevane to figure out exactly what Kemmler's disciples are doing."

My double arched a brow. "How'd that work out for you?"

"Don't be a wiseass," I said.

"The point," he said, "is that you have little or no chance to prevail if you blindly rush in. You must know how they intend to manipulate these energies. You must know if there is a weak time or place at which to assault them. You must know the details of the Darkhallow, or you might as well cut your own wrists."

"Don't have to," I told him. "I could just sit and wait for the Erlking to come by."

"Six of one, half a dozen of another," my double agreed. "In addition, your body is in no condition to do anything at the moment." He leaned forward. "Free her to help us."

I inhaled slowly and stared at Lasciel for a moment. Then I said, "After I killed Justin and got my head together at Ebenezar's place, I promised myself something. I promised that I would live my life on my own terms. That I knew the difference between right and wrong and that I wouldn't cross the line. I wouldn't allow myself to become like Justin DuMorne."

"Don't you want to survive?" my double asked.

I rose from the chair and started walking into the darkness outside the light. "Of course I do. But some things are more important than survival."

"Yeah," my double said. "Like the people who are going to get killed when you die and don't stop Kemmler's disciples."

I froze at the edge of the darkness.

"Take the high road if you want to," my double said. "Choose to walk away from this strength in the name of principle. But after your noble death, everyone you no longer protect, everyone who might one day have come to you for help, everyone who is killed in the aftermath of the Darkhallow-every life you might have protected in the future will be on your head."

I stared at the darkness and then closed my eyes.

"Regardless of where it came from, Lasciel offers you the power of knowledge. If you turn aside from that power-power only you can take up-then you abandon your commitment to protect and defend those who are not strong enough to do it themselves."

"No," I said. "That isn't... that isn't my responsibility."

"Of course it is," my subconscious said, voice clear and sharp. "You coward."

I stopped and turned, staring at him.

"If you go to your death rather than do everything you might to prevent what is happening, you are merely committing suicide and trying to make yourself feel better about it. That is the act of a coward. It is beneath contempt."

I went through the logic of his argument and didn't make any headway against it-of course. While my double might look like another person, he wasn't. He was me.

• Harry becomes a Warden, the Council is brought to the brink of destruction, the Reds show us yet more strings connected to this war, he accepts Lash in his own way and Mac is yet again the observer of a major event in Harry's life.

Proven Guilty:

• Introducing Molly Carpenter, wayward wizard. The assault on Arctis Tor is introduced, Molly of course is gained as an apprentice and Harry's involvement in the world of the Fae only grows. Mac's again serves as the place for a mini summit between Harry, Lily, Fix and Maeve. In it we get this little tidbit about how Harry feels about Mac:
  

More importantly, at least to me, Mac was a friend. When I came to his place to eat, I considered myself a guest, and he my host. I'd abide by his declared neutrality out of simple respect, but it was good to know that the Accords were there in the background. Not every member of the supernatural community is as polite and neighborly as me.

• Mac is by Harry's own admission a relatively important person in his life. And the meat of the issue, which furthers the subtle nods to Nemesis, we have our meeting:

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"I'm willing to let things go as they are, all accounts settled, in exchange for an honest answer to my question." I settled back in my chair and asked, "Why hasn't Winter moved against the Red Court?"

Maeve regarded me with an odd little twinkle in her eye, then nodded and said, "Mab has not allowed it."

Fix and Lily traded a quick look of surprise.

"Sooth," Maeve said, nodding, evidently enjoying their reaction. "The Queen has readied her forces to strike at Summer, and has furthermore given specific orders preventing her captains from conducting operations against the Red Court."

"That's madness," Lily said quietly.

Maeve folded her hands on the table, frowning at something far away, and said, "It may well be. Dark things stir in Winter's heart. Things even I have never before seen. Dangerous things. I believe they are a portent."

I tilted my head a little, focused on her. "How so?"

"What Aurora attempted was insane. Even among the Sidhe," Maeve replied. "Her actions could have thrown enormous forces out of balance, to the ruin of all."

"Her heart was in the right place," Fix said, his tone mildly defensive.

"Maybe," I told him, as gently as I could. "But good intent doesn't amount to much when the consequences are epically screwed up."

Maeve shook her head. "Hearts. Good. Evil. Mortals are always concerned with such nonsense." She abruptly rose, her mind clearly elsewhere.

Something in her expression or manner gave me a sudden sense that she was worried. Deeply, truly worried. Little Miss Overlord was frightened.

"These mortal notions," Maeve said. "Good, evil, love. All those other things your kind natter on about. Are they perhaps contagious?"

I rose with her, politely. "Some would say so," I told her.

She grimaced. "In the time since her death, I have often thought to myself that Aurora was stricken with some mortal madness. I believe the Queen of Air and Darkness has been taken by a similar contagion." She suddenly shuddered and said, voice curt, "I have answered you with truth, and more than needed be said. Does that satisfy the accounting, mortal?"

"Aye," I told her, nodding. "Good enough for me."

• Deeper and deeper the rabbit hole goes. For Harry while his understanding grows, so too does the ocean he is swimming against.

Small Favor:

• The Denarian's are back and ready for round two and using Lucifer to help. Harry has shed Lash and with it the use of Hellfire. Marcone and more especially Ivy are targeted, Michael is 'retired' and Nic hints further still about his true motivations and the shadow behind everything up to this point. Demonreach and its eventual importance are also introduced. The fallout from Arctis Tor is partially resolved, we are given a hint into Mab's, (and Titania's by her actions thru Summer), states of mind and our favorite Watchman is introduced to gift Harry with the power of Soulfire. MacAnally's direct involvement too is foreshadowing to the eventual anointing of a future KoTC:
  

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I was trying to think of a way of getting out of this without getting anyone killed when Murphy put her gun on the table and said in a very clear, loud, challenging tone, "I don't think so."

The gruff turned to stare at her in surprise.

So did Mac.

So did everyone else there.

Heck, so did I.

Murphy stood straight up and turned to face the enormous gruff with her feet spread. "I will not let this challenge to my authority pass."

The gruff tilted its head to one side. Its horns dug furrows in the wooden ceiling.

Mac winced.

"Lady?" it rumbled.

"Do you know who I am?" Murphy asked.

"A lady knight, a shield bearer of this mortal demesne," the gruff replied. "An...officer of the law, or so I believe it is called."

"That's right," she said calmly.

"I make no challenge to your authority, Dame..."

"Murphy," she said.

"Dame Murphy," rumbled the gruff.

"But you do," Murphy said. "You have threatened one I am sworn to protect."

The gruff blinked-a considerable gesture on his scale-and glanced at me. "This wizard?"

"Yes," Murphy said. "He is a citizen of Chicago, and I am sworn to protect and defend him against those who would harm him."

"Dame Murphy," the gruff said stiffly, "this matter is not one of mortal concern."

"The hell it isn't," Murphy said. "This man lives in Chicago. He pays taxes to the city. He is beholden to its laws." She glanced aside at me, and her mouth quirked wryly. "If he is to suffer the headaches of citizenry, as he must, then it is fair and lawful that he should enjoy the protections offered to every citizen. He is therefore under my protection, and any quarrel you have with him, you also have with me."

The gruff stared at her for a moment, eyes narrowed in thought. "Art thou quite certain of thy position, Dame Murphy?"

"Quite certain," she replied.

"Even knowing that the duty solemnly charged unto me and my kin might require us to kill thee?"

"Master Gruff," Murphy replied, laying a hand on her gun for the first time, "consider for a moment what a steel-jacketed round would feel like as it entered your flesh."

The gruff flicked its ears in surprise. A number of napkins were blown from the surface of a nearby table. "Thou wouldst aim such weapons of the bane at a lawful champion of the Seelie Court?"

"In your case, Master Gruff," Murphy said, "I would hardly need to aim." Then she picked up the gun and aimed it at the gruff 's eyes.

I started to panic. Then I saw where I thought Murph was going with this one, and I had to work to keep myself from letting out a cheer.

The gruff 's knuckles popped again. "This," it growled, "is neutral ground."

"Chicago," she replied, "has never signed any Accords. I will fulfill my duty."

"Attack me here," the gruff said, "and I will crush you."

"Crush me here," Murphy said, "and you will have broken the Accords while acting on behalf of your Queen. Was that your intention in coming here?"

The gruff ground its teeth, a sound like creaking millstones. "My quarrel is not with you."

"If you attempt to take the life of a citizen of Chicago, whom I am sworn to protect, you have made it my quarrel, Master Gruff. Does your Queen wish to declare war upon the mortal authorities of Chicago? Would she wish you to decide such a thing?"

The gruff stared at her, evidently pondering.

"Lady has a point, Tiny," I drawled. "There's nothing to be gained here but trouble, and nothing to be lost but a little time. Walk away. You'll find me again soon enough."

The gruff stared at Murphy, and then at me. If I'd been less intrepid and fearless, I would have held my breath, hoping I'd avoided a fight. As it was, I held my breath mostly to cut down on the smell.

Finally the gruff bowed its head toward Murphy, with more scraping of ceilings and wincing of bartenders. "Courage," he rumbled, "should be honored. Though thou art less a man than I thought, wizard, hiding behind a mortal, however valiant she may be."

I let out a long breath as silently as I could and said, "Gosh. Somehow I'll try to live with myself."

"It will not o'erburden you long. This I promise." The gruff nodded once to Murphy, then turned and scuttled out the way he'd squeezed in. He even shut the door behind him.

Murphy let out her breath and put her gun away in its shoulder holster. It took her two or three tries.

I sank into my chair on weak legs. "You," I said to Murphy, "are so hot right now."

She gave me a weak smile. "Oh, now you notice." She glanced at the door. "Is he really gone?"

"Yeah," I said. "I figure he is. The Summer Court aren't exactly sweetness and light, but they do have a concept of honor, and if any faerie gives his word, he's good for it."

Mac did something I'd rarely seen him do.

He got three black bottles out from beneath the bar and brought them over to the table. He twisted the tops off and put one down in front of me, and another in front of Murphy, then kept the third for himself.

I took up the bottle and sniffed at it. I wasn't familiar with the brew, but it had a rich, earthy aroma that made my mouth water.

Without a word Mac held up his bottle in a salute to Murphy.

I joined him. Murphy shook her head tiredly and returned the salute.

We drank together, and my tongue decided that any other brew it ever had would probably be a bitter disappointment from this day forward. Too many flavors to count blended together into something I couldn't describe if I'd had a week to talk about it. I'd never had anything like it. It was God's beer.

Mac drained the bottle in a single pull, with his eyes closed. When he lowered it, he looked at Murphy and said, "Bravely done."

Murphy's face was flushed with relief and with a reaction to her beer that was at least as favorable as mine. I doubt Mac could have seen it, but I'd known Murph long enough to see that she started blushing, too.

Mac went back to the bar, leaving Murphy and me to finish our bottled ambrosia.

• Of course this courageous act would only be a precursor to our 'tiny, but fierce' Sergeant showing her worth by later drawing Fidelacchius and having it respond to her as a new Knight.

Changes:

• Harry Dresden, father and Winter Knight. This book of course lives up to it's reputation as it turns Harry's world apart from the inside out. The War ends in spectacular fashion, Harry orders his own death, kills Susan, saves Maggie and by way of info gathering meets Odin and receives his mother's Gem from Lea, who in turn hints more at Nemesis in her own way. But right from the outset it is Mac whom Harry seeks out when he learns about his daughter:
  

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"I've got to talk to someone," I heard myself say quietly. "Someone with some objectivity, perspective. I've got to get my head straight before things go to hell."

Mac leaned on the bar and looked at me.

I cradled the glass in my hand and said quietly, "You remember Susan Rodriguez?"

He nodded.

"She says that someone took our daughter. She says she'll be here late tonight."

Mac inhaled and exhaled slowly. Then he picked up the bottle and poured himself a shot. He sipped at it.

"I loved her," I said. "Maybe love her still. And she didn't tell me."

He nodded.

"She could be lying."

He grunted.

"I've been used before. And I'm a sucker for a girl."

"Yes," he said.

I gave him an even look. He smiled slightly.

"She'd be . . . six? Seven?" I shook my head. "I can't even do the math right now."

Mac pursed his lips. "Hard thing."

I finished the second glass. Some of the sharper edges had gotten softer. Mac touched a finger to the bottle, watching me. I shook my head.

"She could be lying to me," I said quietly. "If she's not . . . then . . ."

Mac closed his eyes briefly and nodded.

"Then there's this little girl in trouble," I said. I felt my jaw clench, and the storm inside me threatened to come boiling up. I pushed it down. "My little girl."

He nodded again.

"Don't know if I ever told you," I said. "I was an orphan."

Mac watched me silently.

"There were times when . . . when it was bad. When I wanted someone to come save me. I wished for it so hard. Dreaming of . . . of not being alone. And when someone finally did come, he turned out to be the biggest monster of all." I shook my head. "I won't let that happen to my child."

Mac folded his arms on the bar and looked at me intently and said, in a resonant baritone, "You've got to be very careful, Harry."

I looked at him, shocked. He'd . . . used grammar.

"Something like this will test you like nothing else," Mac said. "You're going to find out who you are, Harry. You're going to find out which principles you'll stand by to your death - and which lines you'll cross." He took my empty glass away and said, "You're heading into the badlands. It'll be easy to get lost."

I watched him in stunned silence as he finished his drink. He grimaced, as though it hurt his throat on the way down. Maybe he'd strained his voice, using it so much.

I stared down at my hands for a moment. Then I said, "Steak sandwich. And something for the pooch."

He grunted in the affirmative and started cooking. He took his time about it, divining my intentions with a bartender's instincts. I didn't feel like eating, but I had a little time to kill while the buzz faded.

He put my sandwich down in front of me. Then he took a bowl with some bones and some meat out to Mouse, along with a bowl of water. I ate my sandwich and idly noted that Mac never carried food out to anyone. Guess he was a dog person.

I ate my sandwich slowly and paid Mac.

"Thanks," I said.

He nodded. "Luck."

• He offers Harry insight and understanding, he offers more than he ever has in all the books prior with his words. A fitting beginning to a series of days that will shape the DV going forward.

[Eldest Gruff]

Cold Days:

• Arguably our most important Mac heavy book. The important events surrounding Harry are his first task as Knight being an order to kill Maeve, we learn how immortals can die, the nature of mantles, what truly lurks within the Well on Demonreach, the Outer Gates and Nemesis are revealed, another Walker is added to the mix and two new Ladies are crowned. Once more Mac's serves as the meeting place for important summits, worldly emotion advice and magical theory:

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The man in the eye patch finished saying whatever it was, and Mac dropped his head back and let out a short, hefty belly laugh. It lasted only a second, and then it was gone, replaced with Mac's usual calm, genial expression, but the man in the suit sat back with an expression of pleasure on his face at the reaction.

...

That drew a quick flicker of an amused smile. "I will accept your offer of one favor-and a nickel."

"I told you. I don't have a nickel."

He nodded gravely. "What do you have?"

I rummaged in my pockets and came out with the jeweled cuff links from my tux. I showed them to him.

"Those aren't a nickel," he said soberly. He leaned forward again, as he had a moment before, and spoke slowly. "What do you have?"

I stared at him for a second. Then I said, "Friends."

He sat back, his blue eye all but throwing off sparks, it was so bright.

"Thomas," I called. "I need a nickel."

"What?" Thomas asked. "In cash?"

"Yeah."

Thomas reached into a pocket and produced a bunch of plastic cards. He fanned them out and showed them to me. "What about these?"

"Those aren't a nickel," I said.

"Oh, for goodness' sake." Molly sighed. She reached into a pocket and produced what looked like a little old lady's coin purse. Then she flicked a nickel toward me.

I caught it. "Thanks. You're promoted to lackey."

She rolled her eyes. "Hail, Ming."

I slid the nickel across the bar to Vadderung. "There."

He nodded. "Talk to me."

"Right," I said. "Um. It's about time."

"No," he said, "it's about your island."

I eyed him warily. "What do you mean?"

"What I mean," he said, "is that I know about your island. I know where it came from. I know what it does. I know what's beneath it."

"Uh," I said. "Oh."

"I'm aware of how important it is that the island be well managed. Most of the people who came to your party in Mexico are."

By which he meant the Grey Council. Vadderung was a part of it. It was a group of folks, mostly wizards of the White Council, who had joined together because it seemed like the White Council was getting close to meltdown, and they wanted to save it. But since the rats were in the walls, the only way to do it was covertly, working in cells. I wasn't sure who, exactly, was a member, except for my grandfather and Vadderung. He had come along with the rest of the mostly anonymous Grey Council when I'd gone to take my daughter back from the Red Court, and seemed to fit right in.

Of course, I was pretty sure he wasn't a wizard. I was pretty sure he was a lot more than that.

So I broke it down for him, speaking very quietly. I told him about the attack being aimed at the island from across time. Hard lines appeared in his face as I did.

"Idiots," he breathed. "Even if they could defeat the banefire . . ."

"Wait," I said. "Banefire?"

"The fail-safe," Vadderung said. "The fire the island showed you."

"Right. It'll kill everything held there rather than let them escape, right?"

"It is the only way," Vadderung said. "If anyone managed to set free the things in the Well . . ."

"Seems like it would be bad," I said.

"Not bad," Vadderung said. "The end."

"Oh," I said. "Good to know. The island didn't mention that part."

"The island cannot accept it as a possibility," Vadderung said absently.

"It should probably put its big-girl pants on, then," I said. "The way I understand it, it might already be too late. I mean, for all I know, someone cast this spell a hundred years ago. Or a hundred years from now."

Vadderung waved a hand. "Nonsense. There are laws that govern the progression of time in relation to space, like everything else."

"Meaning what?"

"Meaning that the echoes caused by the temporal event are proportionately greater than the span of time that was bridged," he said. "Had the attack been launched from a century ago, or hence, the echoes of it would have begun far, far in advance of the event-centuries ago. These echoes have appeared only within the past few days. I would guess, roughly, that the attack must originate only hours from the actual, real-time occurrence."

"Which is tomorrow," I said. "So it's happening sometime today or sometime tomorrow."

"Most likely not tomorrow," Vadderung said. "Altering one's past is more than mildly difficult."

"The paradox thing?" I asked. "Like, if I go back and kill my grandfather, how was I ever born to go back and kill my grandfather?"

"Paradox is an overrated threat. There is . . . a quality similar to inertia at work. Once an event has occurred, there is an extremely strong tendency for that event to occur. The larger, more significant, or more energetic the event, the more it tends to remain as it originally happened, despite any interference."

I frowned. "There's . . . a law of the conservation of history?"

Vadderung grinned. "I've never heard it phrased quite like that, but it's accurate enough. In any event, overcoming that inertia requires tremendous energy, will, and a measure of simple luck. If one wishes to alter the course of history, it's a far simpler matter to attempt to shape the future."

I grunted. "So if I go back in time and kill my grandfather, what happens?"

"He beats you senseless, I suspect," Vadderung said, his gaze direct.

Oh, man. Vadderung knew about Ebenezar. Which meant that either he was higher in the old man's circle of trust than I was, or he had access to an astoundingly scary pool of information.

"You know what I mean," I said. "Paradox? Universe goes poof?"

"If it works like that, I've never seen it, as evidenced by the fact that . . ." He spread his hands. "Here it is. I suspect a different form of apocalypse happens."

I frowned. "Like what?"

"A twinned universe," Vadderung said. "A new parallel reality, identical except for that event. One in which you never existed, and one in which you failed to kill your grandfather."

I pursed my lips. "That . . . doesn't really end well for me in either case."

"An excellent reason not to meddle in the natural course of time, wouldn't you say? Meddling with time is an irrationally, outrageously, catastrophically dangerous and costly business. I encourage you to avoid it at all costs."

"You and the White Council," I said. "So it's going to happen sometime today or tonight."

Vadderung nodded. "And nearby."

"Why?"

"Because the energy requirements are astronomical," he said. "Bridging a temporal gap of any length is something utterly beyond the reach of any mortal practitioner acting alone. Doing such a thing and then trying to project the spell over a distance as well? The difficulty of it would be prohibitive. And do not forget how much water surrounds the island, which will tend to mitigate any energy sent toward it-that's one reason the Well was built there."

I nodded. All of that hung together, based upon everything I knew of magic. People always assume that magic is a free ride-but it isn't. You can't pull energy from nowhere, and there are laws that govern how it behaves.

"So this . . . time bomb. It has to come from how close?" I asked.

"The shores of the lake, I suspect," Vadderung said. "The island itself would be the ideal location, but I doubt that it will cooperate with any such effort."

"Not hardly," I agreed. "And you can't just scribble a chalk circle and pull this spell out of your hat. It's got to have an energy source. A big one."

"Precisely," Vadderung said.

"And those things tend to stand out."

He smiled. "They do."

"And whoever is trying to pull this off, if they know enough about futzing with time to be making this attempt, they know that the echoes will warn people that it's coming. They'll be ready to argue with anyone who tries to thwart them."

"They most certainly will." He finished his coffee.

I had made the right call here. Vadderung's advice had changed the problem from something enormous and inexplicable to something that was merely very difficult, very dangerous, and likely to get me killed.

"Um," I said. "Don't take this the wrong way, but . . . this is a high-stakes game."

"The highest, yes," he agreed.

"I'm thinking that maybe someone with a little more experience and better footing should handle it. Someone like you, maybe."

He shook his head. "It isn't practical."

I frowned. "Not practical?"

"It must be you."

"Why me?"

"It's your island," Vadderung said.

"That makes no sense."

He tilted his head and looked at me. "Wizard . . . you have been dead and returned. It has marked you. It has opened doors and paths that you do not yet know exist, and attracted the attention of beings who formerly would never have taken note of your insignificance."

"Meaning what?" I asked.

There was no humor at all in his face. "Meaning that now more than ever, you are a fulcrum. Meaning that your life is about to become very, very interesting."

"I don't understand," I said.

He leaned forward slightly. "Correct that." He looked at his watch and rose. "I'm afraid I'm out of time."

I shook my head, rising with him, blocking him. "Wait. My plate is already pretty full here, and if you haven't noticed, I'm barely competent to keep myself alive, much less to prevent Arkham Asylum from turning into the next Tunguska blast."

Vadderung met my eyes with his and said in a growl, "Move."

I moved.

I looked away, too. I'd seen too many things with my Sight already. And I had a bad feeling that trading a soulgaze with Vadderung would not improve my performance over the next day or so.

"Where are Hugin and Munin?" I asked.

"I left them at the office," he said. "They don't like you, I'm afraid."

"Birdbrains," I muttered.

He smiled, nodded to Mac, and walked to the door.

"Can I do this?" I asked his back.

"You can."

I made an exasperated sound. "How do you know?"

Odin turned to look back at me with his gleaming eye, his teeth bared in a wolf's smile, the scar on either side of his eye patch silver in the light coming through the door. "Perhaps," he murmured, "you already have."

Then he opened the door and left.

• But even more than all that important discussion, under that self same room we find out more about the barkeep than ever before:
  

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"I don't want to bring any trouble into your place, Mac," I said. "You're my host here. I'll take it outside if you want me to."

In answer, Mac made a growling sound and worked the action on the shotgun, pumping a shell into the chamber. Then he reached under the counter, produced a heavy-caliber automatic pistol, and put it on the bar within easy reach.

Thomas showed his teeth in a predatory grin. "I'm leaving bigger tips from now on."

...

"Harry," said a strange voice. Or rather, it wasn't strange-it was just strange to actually hear it. Mac isn't much of a talker. "Don't chat. Kill it."

Mac's words seemed to do what none of my nonsense had-they made Sharkface pissed off. It whirled toward Mac, dozens of sackcloth strips flicking out in every direction, grabbing whatever objects were there, and its alien voice came out in a harsh rasp. "You!" Sharkface snarled. "You have no place in this, watcher. Do you think this gesture has meaning? It is every bit as empty as you. You chose your road long ago. Have the grace to lie down and die beside it."

I think my jaw might have hung a little loosely for a second. "Uh. Mac?"

"Kill it," Mac repeated, his voice harder. "It's only the first."

...

I paused by it, and looked at Mac.

"It knew you."

Mac stared at nothing and didn't answer.

"Mac, that thing was dangerous," I said. "And it might come back."

Mac grunted.

"Look," I said. "If my guess is right, that twit and its buddies might wipe out a big chunk of the state. Or possibly states. If you know something about them, I need it."

Mac didn't look up. After several seconds, he said, "Can't. I'm out."

"Look at this place," I said quietly. "You aren't out. Nobody is out."

"Drop it," he said. "Neutral territory."

"Neutral territory that is going to burn with all the rest of it," I said. "I don't care who you are, man. I don't care what you've done. I don't care whether or not you think you're retired from the life. If you know something I need it. Now."

"Harry, we need to move," Thomas said, urgency tightening his voice.

I could hear the sirens now. They had to be close. Mac turned and walked back toward his bar.

Dammit. I shook my head and turned to leave.

"Dresden," Mac called.

I turned to look back at him. Mac was standing behind the bar. As I watched, he took three bottles of beer from beneath the counter and placed them down in a straight line, one by one, their sides touching. Then he just looked up at me.

"Three of them," I said. "Three of these things?" Hell's bells, one of them had been bad enough.

Mac neither nodded nor shook his head. He just jerked his chin at me and said, "Luck."

"We're gonna talk," I said to Mac.

Mac turned a look on me that was as distant and as inaccessible as Antarctic mountains.

"No," he said. "We aren't."

• Mac knows the Walkers. He knows Outsiders. We've seen him act with a level of familiarity to many supernatural events or persons but none like this. And we are introduced for the first time to a solid idea that Mac might be something...more. This is of course only furthered later on:

(click to show/hide)

When she spoke, Molly's voice never quavered, but her eyes flickered uncertainly toward Mac. I took a closer look at everyone. Andi, Butters, and Justine had all been bound. Justine was only now getting the ropes cut off of her wrists, and as Molly sawed them away with a pocketknife, I could see the deep red marks they'd left on Justine's slender wrists. Butters and Andi had them, too, visible even in the dimness of the warehouse.

Mac didn't.

That was interesting. Why hadn't Mac been tied up? Or if he had, how come there wasn't a mark to show for it? Either way, that was odd.

...

"What's the story with Mac?" I asked.

Karrin looked over at the sleeping man. "Mab," she said. "She just came in here a few minutes ago and looked at him. Then before anyone could react, she ripped off the bandage, stuck her fingers into the wound, and pulled out the bullet. Dropped it right on his chest."

"No wound now," I noted.

"Yeah. Started closing up the minute she was done. But you remember the time he got beaten so badly in his bar? Why didn't his injuries regenerate then?"

I shook my head. "Maybe because he was conscious then."

"He did turn down the painkillers. I remember it seemed odd at the time," Karrin murmured. "What is he?"

I shrugged. "Ask him."

"I did," she said, "right before he passed out."

"What'd he say?"

"He said, 'I'm out.'"

I grunted.

"What do you think it means?" she asked.

I thought about it. "Maybe it means he's out."

"We just let it go?" she asked.

"It's what he wants," I said. "Think we should torture him?"

"Point," she said, and sighed. "Maybe instead we just let him rest."

• The newest, most important set of events surrounding our 'reborn' Starborn and Mac is a central figure in it all.

Skin Game:

• Our last and most recent book thus far. Mac is back the standard 'watcher' mentality, being present for and facilitating (chronologically) the first important step Harry takes towards furthering Mab's overall plans. We are introduced to five major holy relics, the general 'destruction' of Nicodemus' network a new Knight in Sir Butters and the idea that an Archangel can give up his own Grace...and the risks such an action might bring. But it is at Mac's where this ability to foil Nicodemus is born:

(click to show/hide)

Mac, bald, lean, and silent, stood behind the bar in his usual crisp white shirt and spotless apron. When Mab entered, he put down the rag he was using to polish the wooden bar, and bowed at the waist, somehow giving the gesture an accent of courtesy rather than obeisance.

“Barkeep,” Mab replied, and inclined her head considerably more deeply than she had to Nicodemus a few minutes before. “May your patrons be prosperous and honest.”

Mac, as a rule, rarely uttered multi-syllables. Today, he said, “May your scales always return to balance.”

Her mouth quirked at the corner and she said, “Flatterer.”

He smiled and nodded to me. “Harry.”

“Mac. I haven’t had good food in months. Though, uh, I’m a little short on funds. I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a sandwich and a beer today.”

He nodded.

“Thanks.”

Mab turned to the table nearest the door and gave me a look. It took me a beat to realize what she wanted, and to pull out a chair for her. She sniffed and sat down, folded her hands in her lap, and stared at nothing in particular, dismissing the rest of us from her world as thoroughly as if she had entered a locked room.

My contact was waiting for me at a table in the back corner, and I walked over to join him. He was a big man by every definition of the word, tall and strong and solid, with a barrel for a chest and a smaller keg of a belly to go with it. His hair and beard were white and silver, though the rosy smoothness of his cheeks belied any indication of old age, and his eyes were blue and bright. He wore a chain-mail shirt and hunting leathers, and a long, hooded red coat trimmed in white fur hung from the back of the chair beside him. A simple, worn-looking broadsword hung at his side, and a large, lumpy leather sack sat on the floor beside him, as natural there as a mail carrier with his bag.

“Sir Knight,” he said.

“You’re here as Kringle, seriously?” I asked him.

Kringle winked at me. “The Winter Knight called for me in his official capacity as an agent of the Winter Court. Mab has the right to summon Kringle. If she’d called for Vadderung, I’d have told her to get in line.”

Donar Vadderung was the name of the CEO of Monoc Securities, a corporate security interest that provided information and highly skilled specialists to those with a great deal of money. Vadderung had access to more information than anyone I knew, except maybe the Senior Council of the White Council of Wizardry—only he was a hell of a lot smarter about using it. He was also, I was reasonably certain, Odin. The Odin. Or if he wasn’t, he could do an awfully good impersonation. Oh, and also, he was Santa Claus.

Vadderung is a complicated guy.

“But you and Kringle are the same person,” I said.

“Legally speaking, Kringle and Vadderung are two entirely different people who simply happen to reside in the same body,” he replied.

“That’s just a fiction,” I said, “a little game of protocol.”

“Little games of protocol are how one shows respect, especially to those with whom one does not get along famously well. It can be tedious, but generally is less trouble than a duel would be.”

Mac set a couple of his homebrewed beers down on the bar. I rounded them up and returned to the table, putting both bottles out in the middle. Kringle chose one, nodded to the chair across from him, and I sat.

“To start with, I’m going to assume you know everything I do,” I said.

His eyes wrinkled at the corners as he took a drink. “That seems wise.”

I nodded and sipped my own. Wow. Mac’s beer is an excellent argument that there is a God, and that furthermore, He wants us to be happy. I savored it for a couple of seconds and then wrenched my mind back to business. “I want to float some thoughts at you and see if you think they’re sound.”

“By all means.”

“First,” I said, “Nicodemus is after something powerful. I don’t know what it is, but I do know that if I can get him to tell us what he’s after, it’s going to be a lie. He’d never let anyone know his true goal if he could help it.”

“I concur,” Kringle said.

I nodded. “He’ll assemble a crew. Some of them will be his people, and some of them will be outside specialists, but I’m pretty sure at least one of them is going to be a plant—they’ll look all independent but they’ll have one of those Coins on them and one of the Fallen whispering in their ears.”

“I would consider that a high probability,” Kringle said.

“Third,” I said, “he’s going to betray me at some point along the line. He’s proactive, and obsessed with control, so he’ll be the one who wants to stick the knife in first. He knows the limits Mab has placed on me, so he’ll want to do it after I’ve gotten him to wherever he wants to go, but before we finish the job, to guarantee him the first blow.”

“Also sound reasoning,” Kringle said.

“Dammit,” I said. “I had hoped I was wrong about something. If I’m to follow Mab’s rules, my options are limited.”

Kringle’s eyes went to the slender figure at the table by the door. “May I offer you a word of advice, based purely upon my knowledge of the Queen’s nature?”

“Sure.”

“Mab moves in mysterious ways,” he said, looking back at me with a grin. “Nasty, unexpected, devious, patient, and mysterious ways. I don’t think she’d throw away a piece as valuable as you on a lost cause. Look for an opening, a weakness. It will be there.”

“Have you seen this guy in action?” I asked. “Nicodemus Archleone is . . . He’s better than me. Smart, dangerous, ruthless, and experienced. All by himself, he’d be bad enough. I’ve never even seen him go to his bench. All the other Denarians whip out their Fallen buddies left and right, but Nicodemus, as far as I can tell, mostly uses his to chauffeur him around. I’ve got no idea what Anduriel can do, because Nick has never had to fall back on him.”

“Perhaps that’s because Nicodemus understands just as well as you do where true power comes from,” Kringle said.

I arched an eyebrow at that. “Knowledge,” I said. I thought about it, putting pieces together. “Wait. You’re telling me that he doesn’t use Anduriel in fights because Anduriel isn’t a fighter.”

“Any of the Fallen are absolutely deadly in battle,” Kringle said severely, “even hampered as they are. But the Master of Shadows doesn’t prefer to operate that way, no.”

Nicodemus’s control over the gang of superpowered lunatics was starting to make more sense now. “Master of Shadows. That’s an old, old phrase for a spy master.”

“Exactly,” Kringle said. “Nicodemus knows very nearly as much as I do. Anduriel has the potential to hear anything uttered within reach of any living being’s shadow, and sometimes to look out from it and see.”

My eyes widened and I looked down at my own shadow on the table.

“No,” Kringle said. “That’s why Mab remains here, to secure this conversation against Anduriel. But you must exercise extreme discretion for the duration of this scenario. There are places Anduriel cannot reach—your friend Carpenter’s home, for example, or your island, now that you have awakened it. And the Fallen must know to pay attention to a given shadow, or else it’s all just a haze of background noise—but you can safely assume that Anduriel will be listening very carefully to your shadow during this entire operation. Anything you say, Nicodemus will know. Even writing something down could be compromised.”

“Hell’s bells,” I said. If that was the case, communicating with my friends would just get them set up for a trap. Man, no wonder Nicodemus was always a few steps ahead of everyone else. “I’m . . . going to have to play the cards really damned close to my chest, then.”


“If I were you, I’d hold them about three inches behind my sternum, just to be sure,” Kringle said.

I swigged beer and drummed my fingers on the table. “Yeah,” I said. “Okay. Good to know. But it’s not enough. I need another advantage.”

“I never find having too many advantages any particular burden.”

“What would be perfect is a plant of my own,” I said. “Someone Nicodemus doesn’t see coming. But to work that angle, I’d have to know who he was getting together, someone he already planned to have in place.”

Kringle took on the air of a professor prompting a stumbling protégé. “How could you work with this theoretical person, without the ability to speak with him, to coordinate your efforts?”

“Hide it in plain sight,” I said, “disguised as something else. Code.”

“Interesting. Go on.”

“Uh . . . ,” I said. “He’d be taking his cues from me, so mostly he’d be the one asking me questions. Tell him to refer to me as ‘wizard’ just before he asks a question relating to the situation at hand. The first word of my response would be the answer. Then we could make the actual conversation sound like something else entirely. We play along until it’s time for me to make my move. Then I use the phrase ‘game over’ and we hit them.”

Kringle took a pull of his beer. “Not bad. Not perfect, but then, it never is.” He set his bottle aside and reached down into the sack by his foot. He rummaged for a moment and then produced a large envelope, which he offered to me.

I regarded it carefully. Gifts have an awful lot of baggage attached to them among the Fae, and both Kringle and I were members of the Winter Court. “I didn’t get you anything,” I said.

He waved his other hand negligently. “Consider it a belated holiday gift, free of obligation. That island is a tough delivery.”

“Prove it,” I said. “Say ‘ho, ho, ho.’”

“Ho, ho, ho,” he replied genially.

I grinned and took the envelope. I opened it and found a photo and a brief description inside.

“Who is this?”

“A covert operative, a mercenary,” Kringle replied. “One of the best.”

“I’ve never heard of him.”

He arched an eyebrow. “Because he’s covert?”

I bobbed my head a bit in admission of the point. “Why am I looking at his picture?”

“There are four operatives who could play one role Nicodemus needs filled in this venture,” he said. “Two of them are currently under contract elsewhere, and the third is presently detained. That leaves Nicodemus only one option, and I know he won’t exercise it until the last possible moment—and he’s not far away.”

“You think if I get to him first, I can hire him?”

“If I make the introduction and we establish your communication protocol under Mab’s aegis? Yes.”

“But if he’s a mercenary, he can by definition be bought. What’s to stop Nicodemus from outbidding me?”

Kringle sat back in his seat at that, considering the question. Then he said, “If you buy this man, he stays bought. It’s who he is.”

I arched an eyebrow. “You’re asking me to trust a stranger’s professional integrity?”

“I wouldn’t do that,” Kringle said. “I’m asking you to trust mine.”

I exhaled, slowly. I took a long pull of beer.

“Well, hell,” I said. “What’s the world coming to if you can’t trust Santa Claus?” I leaned forward, peering at the printed summary and said, “So let’s meet with Goodman Grey.”

We see too of course a deeper relationship between he and Mab further hinted upon.

• Of course we have the ID making his third appearance, all within Mac-laden books and funnily enough he finds out about his second kid:

(click to show/hide)

The figure next to him made a soft sound.

“Right,” the double said. “We don’t have much time. Murphy’s pulling the nail out.”

“Time for what?” I asked. “And who is that?”

“Seriously?” he asked. “You aren’t going to use your intuition even a little, huh?”

I scowled at him and at the other figure and then my eyes widened. “Wait . . . Is that . . . is that the parasite?”

The shrouded figure shuddered and let out a pained groan.

“No,” my double said. “It’s the being that Mab and that stupid Alfred have been calling a parasite.”

I blinked several times. “What?”

“Look, man,” my double said. “You’ve got to work this out. Think, okay. I can’t just talk to you. This near-dream stuff is my best, but you’ve got to meet me halfway.”

I narrowed my eyes. “Wait. You’re saying that the parasite isn’t actually a parasite. But that means . . .”

“The wheel is turning,” my double said, in the tone of a reporter covering a sports event. “The fat, lazy old hamster looks like he’s almost forgotten how to make it go, but he’s sort of moving it now. Bits of rust are falling off. The cobwebs are slowly parting.”

“Screw you,” I said, annoyed. “It’s not like you’ve showed up with a ton to say ever since . . .” I trailed off and fell entirely silent for a long moment.

“Ah,” he said, and pointed a finger at me, bouncing up onto his toes. “Ah hah! Ah hah, hah, hah, the light begins to dawn!”

“Ever since I touched Lasciel’s Coin,” I breathed quietly.

“Follow that,” my double urged me. “What happened next?”


“Touching the Coin put an imprint of Lasciel in my head,” I said. “Like a footprint in clay, the same shape as the original. She tried to tempt me into accepting the true Lasciel into my head along with her, but I turned her down.”

My double rolled his wrist in a “keep it moving” gesture. “And then?”

“And then the imprint started to change,” I said. “Lasciel was immutable, but the imprint was made of me. A shape in the clay. As the clay changed, so did the imprint.”

“And?”

“And I gave her a name,” I said. “I called her Lash. She became an independent psychic entity in her own right. And we kind of got along until . . .” I swallowed. “Until there was a psychic attack. A bad one. She threw herself in the way of it. It destroyed her.”

“Yeah,” my double said quietly. “But . . . look, what she did was an act of love. And you were about as intimate with her as it gets, sharing the same mental space. I mean, it’s funny, you get twitchy when you start considering living with a woman, but having one literally inside your head was not an issue.”

“What do you mean?”

“Christ, you’re supposed to be the intellect here,” my double said. “Think.” He stared at me for a long moment, visibly willing me to understand.

My stomach fell into some unimaginable abyss at the same time my jaw dropped open. “No,” I said. “That isn’t . . . that’s not possible.”

“When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much,” my double said, as if speaking to a small child, “and they live together and hug and kiss and get intimate with each other . . .”

“I’m . . .” I felt a little ill. “You’re saying . . . I’m pregnant?”

My double threw up his arms. “Finally, he gets it.”

In years and years and years of experience as a wizard, I’d dealt with concepts, formulae, and mental models that ranged from bizarre to downright insanity-inducing. None of them had, in any way whatsoever, ever prepared my head to wrap around this. At all. Ever. “How is that . . . That isn’t even . . . What the hell, man?” I demanded.

“A spiritual entity,” my double said calmly. “Born of you and Lash. When she sacrificed herself for you, it was an act of selfless love—and love is fundamentally a force of creation. It stands to reason, then, that an act of love is fundamentally an act of creation. You remember it, right? After she died? When you could still play the music she’d given to you, even though she was gone? You could hear the echoes of her voice?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling dazed.

“That was because a part of her remained,” my double said. “Made of her—and made of you.”

And very gently, he drew back the black blanket.

She looked like a child maybe twelve years old, in the last few weeks of true childhood before the sudden surge of hormones brought on the chain of rapid changes that lead into adolescence. Her hair was dark, like mine, but her eyes were a crystalline blue-green, the way Lash’s had often appeared. Her features were faintly familiar, and I realized in a surge of instinct that her face had been constructed from those of people in my life. She had the square, balanced chin of Karrin Murphy, the rounded cheeks of Ivy the Archive, and Susan Rodriguez’s jawline. Her nose had come from my first love, Elaine Mallory, her hair from my first apprentice, Kim Delaney. I knew because they were my memories, right there in front of me.

Her eyes were fluttering uncertainly, and she was shivering so hard that she could barely stand. There was frost forming on her eyelashes, and even as I watched it started spreading over her cheeks.

“She’s a spiritual entity,” I breathed. “Oh, my God. She’s a spirit of intellect.”

“What happens when mortals get it on with spirits,” my double confirmed, though now without heat.

“But Mab said she was a parasite,” I said.

“Lot of people make jokes, refer to fetuses like that,” he said.

“Mab called her a monster. Said she would hurt those closest to me.”

“She’s a spirit of intellect, just like Bob,” my double said. “Born of the spirit of a fallen freaking angel and the mind of one of the most potent wizards on the White Council. She’s going to be born with knowledge, and with power, and be absolutely innocent of what to do with them. A lot of people would call that monstrous.”

“Argh,” I said, and clutched at my head. I got it now. Mab hadn’t been lying. Not precisely. Hell, she’d as much as told me that the parasite was made of my essence. My soul. My . . . me-ness. Spirits of intellect had to grow, and my head was a limited space. This one had been filling it up for years, slowly expanding, putting more psychic and psychological pressure on me—reflected in the growing intensity of my migraines over that time.

So what then can we gleam from all of this? It has long been debated about what Mac IS or might be. We don't know very much, but we do know what he is not:

2009 Dayton Book Signing @3:25
Could MacAnally possibly be a son of Dionysus?
He's not a Greek god nor a scion of the gods, I'll tell you that much, but we will probably won't get to see much about MacAnally until the big trilogy at the end. 

Audience member: Are we going to see anything about Mac in terms of backstory and is Mac a Norse god?

Jim: Are we going to see anything with Mac in backstory and is Mac a Norse god?  No, he’s not a Norse god; yes, we will find out more about him.

Reddit AMA 5-16-2014
Is Mac more than a human? I think he's not, but there's a growing faction that believes he's either Merlin or some sort of Gray Angel
Mac has never once done anything beyond the capability of a plain old vanilla human being.

But we do know a bit of what he is:

Sarks: Edit: One last little question, that reading other questions below made me think of. How did Mac get his pub declared neutral ground?
Jim: 6) He filled out the proper paperwork, as cited under the Unseelie Accords. Which is about as involved as a mid-level quest that leads into epic weaponry quests, so it's kind of a story in itself. I mean, /Mab/ designed it. The summary of it is: It's a giant pain in the ass, but anyone can theoretically do it if they have the mildest of supernatural contacts and are determined enough.

2011 DC signing
Is Mac ever going to speak more than ten words?
Not for a while. He's not a man of many words, as most truly dangerous people are.

And someone, somewhere in life has apparently worked it out to some degree which means ultimately he IS worth the theorizing:

KC Signing
Are we going to learn more about Mac? His background?

Are we going to learn more about Mac and his background? Yeah, of course, I’m going to keep throwing little bits and things out there. There’s already been somebody who worked it out.  I’ve been contacted by one person who successfully worked it out, and said “Hey, is Mac THIS”, and I have to write back, “I’m not saying he is, and I’m not saying he isn’t.” So, if you want to dig into the clues that are there and figure it out, have fun.

In an attempt to find a Doylist method for explaining Mac we end up with a Watsonian one. Mac 'the Watcher' lives up to that billing at every turn. He is present and involved in just about every major event of change in Harry's life in Chicago. Whether he is Tam Lin, a Grigori or Tran-substantiated Raphael...whether you favor the idea of him as a God of some kind or THE White God himself, his presence is undeniable. Could it be that Harry has truly never been alone all this time? That higher powers and factions have kept a close watch on his involvement since day one? And is Mac yet another party or representative of a group that got in on the ground floor relatively early to be their for our Starborn...to watch, and even sometimes to aid him on his journey? Is it more of a personal interest that a being who so famously has told us he is out decided to take up after getting the measure of Harry's character?

Or is it all just an over-analyzed set of events that just happen to include a prime supernatural hub in the same city?

Personally I feel there is something to this notion about Mac being a 'guardian angel' of sorts for Dresden...my thoughts anyway, not meant to be indicative of one particular race, job or anything. And trust me when I say the hatred I have for the Chosen One trope makes this immensely difficult. But it was too prevalent an idea not to bring to light.

Mac has been there from the outset, the most important events, discussions, magical theory, mysteries, he's been privy or present to it all...directly or indirectly, whether it happens in his bar on on the fringe to Harry, Mac is there. Watching. Hell Harry's own ID only shows up after Harry has been to Mac's in the same book.

The rest as they say, is up to you all to decide.

One fun final point...MacAnally's etymology in the title 'the son of the chief physician' led to a rather interesting door when digging thru google:

The White Christ

Make of THAT lineage idea what you will 

[Argonometra]

Your theory is very well cited, but I have one quibble: what is the point of sending someone to watch Dresden if that person can do nothing to influence and/or protect him? If Harry went evil, for example, I doubt Mac could do anything to neutralize him.

[Eldest Gruff]

Your theory is very well cited, but I have one quibble: what is the point of sending someone to watch Dresden if that person can do nothing to influence and/or protect him? If Harry went evil, for example, I doubt Mac could do anything to neutralize him.

Well Grigori for instance were essentially just that...Watcher Angels. Meant to guide humanity and aid them in their own way. Some stories have them as not even being permitted to aid humanity and when they did they were cast out of Heaven's good graces, (of course plenty of the stories lean more towards the whole forbidden mating aspect as the reason). Angels in general in the DV cannot act until the other side does first, one could argue that's a rather ineffective role at times.

Now i'm not necessarily asserting one way or another Mac IS any of those types of beings but the template exists for beings that are meant to be more passive observers who aid from time to time or even possibly not at all. Mac DOES aid Harry in a number of ways, directly in action or in word and I don't believe I asserted (or certainly didn't mean to) that his watching over Harry was meant to include intervention if he went evil necessarily or any such equivalent.

Just that all in all Mac is there, at someone's behest or his own, to 'look in' on Harry so to speak. How he does or does not handle him is partly up to his discretion I imagine but also at least somewhat beholden to whatever nature he is or turns out to be and the choices that came of it.

[Griffyn612]

I don't think you have to guess where I stand on this.  I'll just say that I don't really get the vibe that Mac, or anyone else other than Lea, has been watching over Harry.  I think the 'Watcher' is more of a description rather than a title; it's more "what he's doing" as opposed to "what his job is/was".  Likewise, I think his position has to be somewhat relevant for Before to know who he is/was.  Your run of the mill Watcher, whether he be Fallen or Chained or Active Duty or Retired, probably wouldn't show up on Before's radar.  We're talking about angels not any different from those watching Michael's house.  Sure, Before might know all of them by name or reputation, since they've all been around for billions of years.  But his digs at Mac seemed personal. 

[Eldest Gruff]

I don't think you have to guess where I stand on this.  I'll just say that I don't really get the vibe that Mac, or anyone else other than Lea, has been watching over Harry.  I think the 'Watcher' is more of a description rather than a title; it's more "what he's doing" as opposed to "what his job is/was".  Likewise, I think his position has to be somewhat relevant for Before to know who he is/was.  Your run of the mill Watcher, whether he be Fallen or Chained or Active Duty or Retired, probably wouldn't show up on Before's radar.  We're talking about angels not any different from those watching Michael's house.  Sure, Before might know all of them by name or reputation, since they've all been around for billions of years.  But his digs at Mac seemed personal.

And I still tend to follow your line of thought. This just seemed like an area in general that wasn't explored perhaps quite this way...and that who or whatever Mac is, was or will be very much surrounds, (if only recently, i.e. the last twenty years more or less), or has to do with out protagonist ultimately.

[Griffyn612]

And I still tend to follow your line of thought. This just seemed like an area in general that wasn't explored perhaps quite this way...and that who or whatever Mac is, was or will be very much surrounds, (if only recently, i.e. the last twenty years more or less), or has to do with out protagonist ultimately.

Yeah, but my issue with that is in the M=R theory, Mac is there to specifically watch over DR, seeing as he's invested in it.  He's not really there for Harry.  His presence probably preceded Harry's arrival in Chicago by millennia.  He's been this bald white dude, hanging out with Indian tribes and Cubs fans for 1,500+ years.

[knnn]

So can we say that Mac opened his bar around the time Harry killed Justin?   If we're going on an Outsider theme, then maybe HHWB made the first move by getting Harry to use Black Magic against Justin.  Then, all the eventual roads lead to Chicago/Demonreach, and so Mac decides to open a pub to intercept.

I'm not saying I'm in love with this theory, but it does kinda fit whatever we got.

[peregrine]

So can we say that Mac opened his bar around the time Harry killed Justin?   If we're going on an Outsider theme, then maybe HHWB made the first move by getting Harry to use Black Magic against Justin.  Then, all the eventual roads lead to Chicago/Demonreach, and so Mac decides to open a pub to intercept.

I'm not saying I'm in love with this theory, but it does kinda fit whatever we got.

It's possible, but nothing certain.  Per the timeline, Harry killed Justin four years before he wound up in Chicago.

[Lash Dresden]

Mac is able to call Harry for help, also (Heorot).  If Mac has been around for millenia, it seems he's likely to know who took Elizabeth (was that her name?), and how dangerous it would be for Harry to face the Grendelkin (although assuming he knew all that, it's likely he knew Sigrun would be involved so Harry wouldn't be going in alone).  Involving himself as he did there (by getting Harry involved) seems sort of non-neutral to me.

(Just tossing this out there - I don't have an opinion on Mac either way.)

[Argonometra]

I don't believe I asserted (or certainly didn't mean to) that his watching over Harry was meant to include intervention if he went evil necessarily or any such equivalent.

No, it was just an example I thought up.

probably preceded Harry's arrival in Chicago by millennia.

So is the Our World quote non-canonical, then? It says that he arrived only a few years before Harry.

[Griffyn612]

No, it was just an example I thought up.

So is the Our World quote non-canonical, then? It says that he arrived only a few years before Harry.

I've never bothered with any of the RPG stuff.  I don't hold any of it as canon.  It's too easy to dismiss as flawed. 

[Second Aristh]

I've never bothered with any of the RPG stuff.  I don't hold any of it as canon.  It's too easy to dismiss as flawed.

Honestly, from what I've seen the RPG couches most of its speculation as clearly speculation.  I don't recall any statements they try to pass off as fact that aren't detailed in the text.  If anything, they err on the other end of the spectrum and hedge their bets.

[Eldest Gruff]

I've never bothered with any of the RPG stuff.  I don't hold any of it as canon.  It's too easy to dismiss as flawed.

Honestly, from what I've seen the RPG couches most of its speculation as clearly speculation.  I don't recall any statements they try to pass off as fact that aren't detailed in the text.  If anything, they err on the other end of the spectrum and hedge their bets.

Luckily in this instance Harry says it himself in DB as also sourced somewhere up there