Mouse made a chuffing sound, and his tail thumped against my leg.

Michael sighed.

“You’re awfully persnickety about the law all of a sudden,” I said. “Especially considering that you’re toting a concealed weapon.”

“Please, Harry. I’m uncomfortable enough.”

“I won’t tell anyone about your Sword if you won’t tell anyone about my gun.”

Michael sighed and started walking. Mouse and I followed.

The parking garage proved to be very cold, very dark, very creepy, and empty of any threat. We crossed the half-buried street, Mouse leading the way through the snow.

“Snow’s coming down thicker again now that the sun’s down,” Michael noted.

“Mab’s doing, maybe,” I said. “If it is, Titania would be less able to oppose her power after the sun went down. Which is also when Titania’s agents would be able to move most freely through town.”

“But you aren’t certain it’s Mab’s doing?” Michael asked.

“Nope. Could just be Chicago. Which can be just as scary as Mab, some days.”

Michael chuckled and we went into Union Station. It doesn’t look like that scene inThe Untouchables, if you were wondering. That was shot in this big room they rent out for well-to-do gatherings. The rest of the place doesn’t look like something that fits into the Roaring Twenties. It’s all modernized, and looks more or less like an airport.

Sorta depressing, really. I mean, of all the possible aesthetic choices out there, airports must generally rank in the top five or ten most bland. But I guess they’re cost-effective. That counts for more and more when it comes to beauty. Sure, all the marble and Corinthian columns and soaring spaces were beautiful, but where do they fall on a cost-assessment worksheet?

The ghost of style still haunts the bits of the original Union Station that have been permitted to stand, but, looking around the place, I couldn’t help but get the same feeling I had when I looked at the Coliseum in Rome, or the Parthenon in Athens—that once, it had been a place of splendor. Once. But a long, long time ago.

“Which way are the lockers?” Michael asked quietly.

I nodded toward the northeast end of the building and started walking. The ticketing counters were closed, except for one, whose clerk was probably in a back room somewhere. There weren’t a lot of people walking around. Late at night train stations in general don’t seem to explode with activity. Particularly not in weather like ours. One harried customer-service representative from Amtrak was dealing with a small knot of angry-looking travelers who had probably just been stranded in town by the storm. She was trying to get them a hotel. Good luck. The airport had been closed since yesterday, and the hotels would be doing a brisk business already.

“You know your way around the station,” Michael commented.

“Trains are faster than buses and safer than planes,” I said. “I took a plane to Portland once, and the pilot lost his radio and computer and so on. Had to land without instruments or communications. We were lucky it was a clear day.”