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."