by Jim Butcher
“You want me to be safe,” she said harshly.
“If I wanted that, you’d be on the island,” I said. “You’re hurt. And you’re a goddamned adult, Karrin. This is a war. I want you where you will do the most good.”
“And where I won’t distract you,” she said.
I sighed and mopped a hand over my face. “If I could fix your injuries, I would. But the fact is that you can’t keep up right now. It’s just that simple.”
“Fuck you,” she said, her voice raw, and turned away. Then a moment later, and very wearily, she murmured, “Goddammit.”
I put a hand on her shoulder. “Take care of our people. You’re one of the few I’d trust to do it anyway.”
Without turning, she gave a single severe nod.
Then she whirled, seized my coat, and dragged me down to her for a kiss. It was sharp, sweet, fiercely and desperately hot.
When she let me go, it took me a second to open my eyes and straighten up again.
“Harry . . .” she said.
“Be careful of the big bad Titan?” I said.
Her eyes wrinkled at the corners. “You’re not going to do that,” she said. She put her hand on my arm and squeezed, her eyes intent and ferocious. “Kick. Her. Ass.”
Chapter
Four
We left Mac’s office to find the common room silent. Everyone was staring at us. I’m used to the people in Mac’s place sneaking covert glances at me, but it was rarely this crowded there, and the effect was disconcerting.
We stood there for a moment before Murphy nudged me and murmured, “Say something.”
“What?” I asked.
“They’re scared,” Murph said quietly. “They know you have power. They want to hear from you.”
I scanned the room of anxious faces.
Will and Georgia Borden were there, along with Andi and Marci, Chicago’s very own vigilante werewolves. Will and Georgia made an odd couple. Will was about five and a half feet tall and must have weighed two hundred pounds, all of it muscle. Georgia was nearer six feet and looked like she ran a marathon a week. Both of them, as well as Marci and Andi, were dressed in loose, easily removed clothing.
But among those present, they were the only ones with anything like a chance on the streets given what was coming.
The Ordo Lebes was there, kitchen witches with too little power to be considered for bodies like the Council but who had already fought its battle by providing safe houses around the city, warded very nearly as well as a wizard’s premises. Think of it as the magical equivalent of a barn raising—dozens of minor talents working in unison to accomplish much more than they could have alone.
Everyone else was just folks, people with enough talent or the right circumstances to be connected to the supernatural community but who didn’t have much in the way of power. Hell, even Artemis Bock was there, though he kept his head down and didn’t look at me, since he’d kicked me out of his store for good several years ago.
God, that seemed so petty and unimportant now.
I walked by him to get to the center of the room and put a hand on his shoulder encouragingly on the way by.
“Hello, everyone,” I said. “I guess you know me. But if you don’t, I’m Harry Dresden, wizard of the White Council.”
For the moment, anyway.
I took a deep breath. “There’s not a lot of time here. So I’m going to give it to you straight. We’re looking at an apocalypse.”
That got me dead silence and stares. Murphy elbowed me in the ribs.
“Little A,” I said in protest, then clarified. “The Fomor, those kidnapping bastards, are coming with an army. And they mean to kill everyone in the city.”
That got me dead silence. You could have heard half of a pin drop.
“What do we do?” Georgia asked into that void. “What can we do?”
Nervous whispers began to spread.
“You’re not alone,” I said instantly. “There’s considerable power getting ready to argue with them about it. Names out of storybooks are getting ready to fight the Fomor. But that means it’s going to be big-league bad out there,” I said. I blew out a breath and pushed my fingers back through my hair. “Here’s how it is, people. The wolf is at the door. So if you’ve been meaning to take a martial arts class, or you thought maybe you should learn to shoot a gun, it’s too late. You’ve only got three choices now.”
I held up a finger. “You can run, and they’ll chase you.” I held up another. “You can hide, and they’ll hunt you.” I clenched my hand into a fist. “Or you can fight. Because they are coming to kill you.”
I pointed at Will and the Alphas. “These guys have made themselves ready and can maybe survive. But we don’t need theoretical warriors out there. If you don’t think you could win a scrap with Will and his people, the only business you have out there tonight is dying. The safe houses, like this place, will probably be the last to fall. But if the enemy takes the city, they will fall.
“So make your choice. Run. Hide. Or fight. Any of them could get you killed.”
“Jesus,” someone whispered.
Someone’s baby made a fussing noise and was shushed.
“What about the army?” Bock asked quietly.
I shook my head. “They’ll be all over the place. In the morning. The leading elements of the enemy’s forces are already here.”
That went over with a round of whispers.
“I’m sorry, guys,” I said into the sotto voce aura of fear. “But that’s how it is. Choose now and stick with it. The more you dither, the more dangerous changing your mind gets.” I gestured toward Murph. “You all know who Karrin Murphy is,” I said. “She’s going to be coordinating defense here. Will, that all right with you and your people?”
Will didn’t need to check in with the Alphas. He simply nodded and said, “It is.”
“Thank you,” I told him, and meant it.
Georgia was studying Murphy’s expression intently, and the two of them traded a look I couldn’t read. “Of course, Harry. Whatever we can do to help.”
“Mac, that all right with you?”
Mac didn’t look up from the mug he was polishing with a spotless white cloth. He let his silence be taken as assent.
“Right,” I said. “Gotta move. Saw a bike chained up outside. Whose is it?”
There was a profound silence in the room.
“Oh, come on, guys,” I said plaintively. “It’s not a violation of the Laws of Magic. I just really need wheels to go save the city and whatnot.”
In the back corner of the room, a hand went up, and a skinny kid in sunglasses and a raised, tied hoodie spoke in some kind of Eastern European accent. “It is my bike.”
I squinted at him and said, “Gary?”
Crazy-but-Not-Wrong Gary, the Paranet guy, hunched down so hard that he looked like a cartoon buzzard, and his narrow shoulders nearly knocked off his own sunglasses. “Christ, Dresden,” he said, in a plain midwestern accent, “just out me to everyone.”
I eyed him for a second.
Then I said, “Guys, who knew this was Gary?”
Approximately eighty percent of the people in the room put up a hand, Murphy’s and Mac’s among them.
Gary looked sullen.
“You’re among friends, man,” I said. “Of course they know who you are.”
Gary eyed me suspiciously over the rims of the sunglasses.
“Gary,” I asked, “can I borrow your bike?”
He shrugged. “Sure.”
He threw me a key. I caught it without dropping it, which made me feel cool. Then I said, to the room, “Things are going to be bad tonight, kids. I’m not your father, but if you’re staying here and you want to live to see sunrise, I’d do whatever Ms. Murphy asks you to do.”
“First thing we�
�re going to need is a triage area,” Murphy said to Will. “One way or another, people are going to get hurt.”
“Georgia, get started on that,” Will said. “Marci, Andi, with me. We’ll go round up some more supplies from the drugstore.”
The Alphas got to work with an immediate will, heh-heh. They were good people.
I wondered how many of them would still be alive in the morning.
Will and Georgia had a kid.
I shook myself. I was terrified for them, for the people who were my friends—but if I stood there feeling terrified and sick and worried and helpless to protect them, I wasn’t going to do them any good.
From where I stood, their best bet was for me to coordinate with the rest of the Accorded powers to hit the incoming enemy with as much muscle as could be mustered. The White Council could hit harder than just about anybody else on the planet. I’d personally seen members of the Senior Council tangle with small armies, wrestle with shapeshifting arch demons, and pull satellites down from the sky onto their enemies’ heads, wiping them out by the hundreds.
And, Hell’s bells, my place was among them.
I might be the dumb kid with the sledgehammer from his father’s toolshed, compared to the sword-saint samurai who were the Senior Council—but I had discovered, in my time, that no matter how skilled and elegant a foe might be, a sledgehammer to the skull is a sledgehammer to the skull.
I bounced the binding crystal from the island in my hand and slid it into what was left of my suit coat’s pocket.
I’d find something useful to do.
But I couldn’t do it here. I couldn’t watch over my friends. I couldn’t be the one to protect them. I had to trust that what they’d learned from me, and from the community I’d helped to build, would see them through.
Well. That and an artifact that had been literally stored on the same shelf as the goddamned Holy Grail, and what was left of an ex-angel.
Along with the knife now resting on my left hip and humming with quiet power.
Stop thinking about that, Dresden.
I traded a last look with Karrin. Then I took the key, went out and unlocked Gary’s red twelve-speed, put it in twelfth gear, and pedaled furiously into the night.
I mean, yeah.
I could have run, but come on.
There’s no one human who likes that much cardio.
* * *
* * *
I had gone only a couple of blocks on the bike when I heard someone say, “There he is.”
Another voice shouted, “Dresden! Stop! CPD!”
I thought about not doing it for a second—but assuming the bad guys got stopped tonight, the city would still be here tomorrow, and that would mean dealing with the law. Hell, I was trying to get Maggie into a good school. She’d never get admitted if her dad was, for example, on trial.
So I hit the brakes and let the bike skid to a stop in the darkness between a couple of guard posts. I sat there waiting impatiently as two sets of footsteps came up, one tall and built light and one short and built heavy-duty. The taller, thinner shadow was breathing harder than the massive shorter one.
“Detective Rudolph,” I said. “Detective Bradley. Out for a run?”
“You can fu . . .” Rudolph began, gasping.
Bradley elbowed him in the ribs and said, “Get your breath, sir.”
“Bradley,” Rudolph gasped, barely able to breathe, “goddammit.”
Detective Bradley turned on Rudolph and pointed a finger. Just that. He said nothing and did not move. Bradley was built like an armored vehicle and had hands like a gorilla.
Rudolph, handsome as ever, even with his porn ’stache, wilted.
Bradley held his finger pointed a moment more, nodded, and then turned to me. “Excuse me, Mister Dresden. Lieutenant Stallings has asked you to come in on a consult.”
“No can do,” I said. “You need to seek cover in strong positions. Didn’t you guys get Murphy’s warning?”
“We got it,” Bradley said. “But she ain’t exactly in good odor right now, you know?”
“Because of you twits,” I snarled, about ninety-nine percent of it at Rudolph. “Well, tell Stallings my official consulting advice is that he’d goddamned well better listen to every word she said.”
“I knew it,” Rudolph said to Bradley. “It’s some kind of terrorist attack and he’s in on it.”
I stared at him, in my smudged, soaked, slashed suit that still smelled like dead fish and lake water, on my kind-of-stolen twelve-speed, and said, “Yeah, I’m Osama bin Laden over here. Hell’s bells, I don’t have time for this.”
“You should come with us, sir,” Bradley said.
The timbre of his voice had changed. He meant business. He hadn’t changed his stance yet, but he was the kind of guy who would let you know his intentions—and I was still standing there astride a bicycle.
“Bradley,” I said, “I know you’re doing your job right now. But you don’t know how much you could be screwing things up for, um, everyone. Just everyone.”
“Mister Dresden,” Bradley said, “you’ve done some good for us before. You know this drill by now. Just come in. You’ll be done in a couple of hours.”
“We don’t have a couple of hours,” I said. And because I can let people know my intentions, too, I met Bradley’s gaze and said, “Any of us.”
When I give people that look, they look away.
Bradley didn’t.
The eyes, they say, are the windows to the soul. They’re right. How long it takes to trigger the soulgaze varies, but it seems to work faster for people in heightened states of emotion—and we were standing in the middle of millions of people in heightened states of emotion. It was fertile ground for such a connection.
So I got to See Bradley, and where he stood was not only a man in a modest custom suit, but also the spreading trunk of some oak tree so enormous as to look squat, rising to branches that cast far more shade than its source occupied.
It didn’t take a genius to realize that I was looking at the man’s character—that he bore the burden of his duty with stolid responsibility. It didn’t mean that he was impervious to corruption or anything—but, like that solid tree, barring some injury or illness of character, it would hold up under the strain for a good long while. The image hit me with the same kind of impact you might experience in the ocean, as a wave lifts you off your feet. I had to take a stagger step to keep my balance, fighting to break the connection.
I don’t know what I look like in a soulgaze. The only mirrors for the human soul are the people around us. All the people who had been my mirrors hadn’t generally reacted with great positivity to what they’d seen.
Bradley let out a sharp, huffing cry and took a staggering step back. He stumbled and went down, catching himself awkwardly on his elbows and wrenching his neck. He lay there for a second, gasping.
“The fuck!” Rudolph screamed. He’d cleared his jacket from his gun and had his hand on the grip. “The fuck! The fuck did you do to him, Dresden!?”
I shook out my shield bracelet, just in case, and said, “Nothing! Just give him a minute!”
Rudolph drew the gun and aimed it at me, his voice panicked. “Goddammit, what did you do?!”
His finger was on the trigger.
Rudolph was one of those blessed idiots who thought that the world was a rational place. Though he’d been repeatedly exposed to the real score with the supernatural when he had worked at Special Investigations, he’d somehow remained impervious to reality, or at least gave every outward appearance of doing so. I guess it had made him really good at writing the reports Special Investigations had to turn in, where they reduced the paranormal into lowest common denominators until everything fit neatly inside all the categories.
Rudolph wasn’t stupid. You can’t be entirely dim and manage as a p
olice detective and smarmy politico. His denial was less a function of intelligence than a complete lack of the moral courage necessary—a paralyzing inability to face truths that he found personally terrifying.
Rudolph was a coward.
“Trigger discipline, Detective,” I said in a quiet voice, not moving. “I’m not close enough to get to you, and I’ve got this damned bike between my legs. There’s no need to have your finger on the trigger yet.”
“Shut the fuck up,” he snarled, making a little gesture with his shoulders on the expletive. “Put your hands up! Slow!”
The Winter mantle didn’t appreciate the aggression in his voice—or maybe it appreciated it way too much. My first blind instinct was to lunge at the screaming twit, take my chances, and break his scrawny neck. But that would have been impolite.
I did what he said, slowly, seething with rising impatience and anger the entire time. Hell’s bells, of all the times to have to tangle with the normie bureaucracy, this was not it.
Unless . . . Maybe that wasn’t what was happening here.
Rudolph had been on someone’s payroll for a while, we’d been pretty sure. Suppose he’d been given orders to stop me and take me out of the picture for the evening?
Or for keeps.
And that accidental soulgaze with Bradley had just given him an excuse.
Rudolph might have been someone’s creep, but a creep he remained, and he was scared. If I brought up a shield or tried any of my usual tricks, he’d pull the trigger before he even thought about it, and he was too close to miss. My suit would probably stop the rounds when whole—fae tailors seemed to regard bulletproofing as a standard feature—but the kraken had slashed sections of it to ribbons, and there was always the chance he’d aim for the head or neck, or that the shot would go up the sleeve or something. He could get off three or four shots while I was calling up my shield.
I might chance that. But it wasn’t really Rudolph that was the problem.
The problem was what happened after I openly resisted a duly enabled officer of the Chicago Police Department. Once he started shooting at me, I’d have to disarm him at the least, and after that it might get really complicated, really fast. I preferred to be something other than a wanted fugitive.