by Jim Butcher
Things were going to change.
The mortal world couldn’t take something like this in stride.
I’d known that on an instinctual level for a while, I thought, but I hadn’t consciously processed it until I’d heard Mab addressing the mortal population of Chicago by means entirely and self-evidently magical.
She wasn’t even trying to keep things subtle.
God, that had the potential to be the greatest nightmare I could imagine—the mortal world, turned against the supernatural. The war that would be born from that conflict would redefine barbarism—and it could already be lurching into motion, right here in front of my eyes.
Of course, if Ethniu had her way, it was an absolute certainty. So we’d have to stop her here and now and as quickly as freaking possible.
But whatever happened, after tonight there would be walls coming down between the mortal world and the supernatural one that had stood solidly for centuries. Stars and stones, I didn’t think anyone knew what that might mean.
Focus, Harry.
Save the city.
Stop the Titan.
Don’t mess it up.
While I was busy trying to screw my courage to the sticking place, Mab was already moving. She spoke quietly to Listens-to-Wind and the two had a brief exchange before the old shaman inclined his head to her, murmured to Wild Bill, and then simply leaned and fell off the edge of the building and out of sight.
A heartbeat later, the gliding, silent form of a great owl swept up from below the battlements and soared in the direction of the explosion.
Out in the distance, I heard the sound of gunfire. Not the usual stuff, the kind of thing you might hear from time to time, that could maybe be a car backfiring. This sounded like a war movie, a crackling like deadly popcorn.
Mab listened to the gunfire for a moment. Then she stopped outside Martha Liberty’s circle, speaking quietly, and listened to what one of the poppets had to say. From there she stopped in with Lara Raith, holding a brief conversation that featured several nods from each of them.
Ebenezar stumped over to stand next to me. There was a long moment of strained silence. Then he cleared his throat and said, “How you doing, Hoss?”
“I feel like I should be moving,” I said. “Explosion, gunfire.” I nodded in the direction in which Listens-to-Wind had vanished. “I should be running toward that.”
The old man grunted. “Do you remember the hardest lesson of power?”
“Knowing when not to use it?”
“Aye,” he said, his voice rough. He leaned on a merlon and stared out at the night. Firelight from a circle of road flares several blocks away reflected in his spectacles. He watched the Little Folk take down another assassin squid. “Well. In this fight, you’ve got to be in the right place at the right time. That means hanging back until you know where to throw your weight.”
I clenched my fists. He was right. I knew that. That didn’t mean I had to like it.
“I hate it, Hoss,” he said in a very quiet voice.
I turned toward him and listened.
“Seeing you like this, all the time. In the worst of the cross fire. It was like this with your mother. Getting more and more isolated from other wizards.” He glowered at Lara and Mab. “Getting caught up with a bad crowd. And I didn’t know what the hell to do. What to say to her. Either.” He coughed and blinked his eyes. “Dammit, Hoss. You keep getting hurt. And I can’t stop it.”
I might have blinked my eyes once or twice, too. Then I leaned on the merlon beside him and said, “Well. Could be that I get myself involved in things sometimes.”
His eyes wrinkled at the corners. “You don’t know how to sit things out, and that’s a fact.”
“Maybe I should have had a better teacher.”
He puffed out a breath and glowered at me briefly. “Wiseass.”
I sighed. “You think I’ve made the wrong calls.”
“I think I don’t know anyone who gets into bed with Mab without regretting it,” the old man said, without any heat. “You’re keeping real dangerous company, Hoss.”
“She’s played it pretty straight with me so far,” I said.
“Aye. And it’s making you lower your guard. Like it’s supposed to.” He shook his head. “She’s immortal. She can take her time. Entangle you one strand of web at a time. You and your apprentice, too.”
I thought about Molly’s eyes. Or maybe not-Molly’s eyes, cat-pupiled and alien.
“It’s dangerous,” I said. “I know that. I went in with my eyes open. If Mab compromises my free will, she loses what makes me an effective weapon. It’s still me, sir.”
The old man glanced at me from under his shaggy silver brows. His voice softened slightly.
“You’re betting an awful lot on that,” he said.
“Am I wrong?” I asked.
His jaw muscles tensed and relaxed several times. “There’s falling from grace,” he said, finally. “And there’s being pushed. And you’re standing pretty far out on a ledge, Hoss.”
“My choice,” I said. “Eyes open.”
The old man snorted. “Aye. Don’t mean I got to like it.”
“Neither do I,” I said candidly. “But it’s what I’ve got.”
His eyes glittered brightly behind his spectacles as he stared at Mab. “You should get out.”
“Not without Molly,” I said.
He sighed. “Why do you think Mab roped her in, boy?”
“Not without Molly,” I said, in exactly the same tone.
“Dammit,” he said. But he stopped pressing. “Her next move will be to start putting the nails in. Get you pegged down the way she wants.”
“Like what?”
“God Almighty knows, boy. Responsibility, maybe. God knows you collect enough of that. She would use wealth to weigh you down, if you cared about that kind of thing much. Power, maybe, influence. Maybe she’ll throw some honey on top. But whatever it is, it’ll look good at first glance, and it’ll put you on a tighter leash.”
“Sir,” I said, “how well does history suggest that leashes will work out with me? For anybody at all.”
He snorted quietly. “Mab ain’t a high school gym teacher, Hoss. Or a batch of worried, cautious old fools.” He coughed. “Or a worn-out farmer who cares too much about you.”
I put my hand on his shoulder and squeezed.
He nodded at me.
“You understand,” he said. “I’m going to do what I think is right for you, Hoss. I have to. How can I do any less?”
“You are a stubborn old pain in the ass, sir,” I said, warmly and sadly. “Who ought to know better.”
“Well. I was never much good at learning my own lessons,” he said.
Another explosion happened, only to the other side, farther north. This one was softer and broader, somehow. It didn’t go kapow so much as it went whoomph. Light flared out and showed us the shadows of buildings in a city block for a quarter of a minute, though we couldn’t see the source of the light.
My stomach quivered again, uneasiness going through me. Fire. Gunshots continued.
We weren’t close enough to hear any screams.
Not yet.
My heart started beating faster.
“Gas tank went up, maybe,” I said. My throat felt tight. My voice came out scratchy.
“Aye,” agreed the old man. He eyed me. Then, without a word, reached a hand into his overall pocket and came out with a flask. He offered it to me.
I opened it and sniffed, then sipped. Water. I wetted my whistle gratefully. “That came from up by the svartalf embassy,” I said.
He grunted. “Etri and his svartalves are set up in that area. He and the Archive are commanding from there.”
“Ivy, huh?” I asked. “I thought she was neutral.”
“She was, until Ethniu included her in her threat with the rest of us,” Ebenezar said. “The Archive realizes the need for self-preservation—and if the Titan truly wishes to subjugate humanity, she must destroy literacy as part of the process.”
“Huh. It’s not so much that, I think,” I said thoughtfully.
The old man looked at me.
I shrugged. “Ivy . . . she’s on our side. On the side of people. On a fundamental level.”
“How do you figure?”
“She’s made to record and preserve knowledge,” I said. “No people, no knowledge. Nothing to record and preserve, and no reason to record or preserve it. Her existential purpose requires . . . us.”
“Wouldn’t get my hopes up too far about that one,” Ebenezar said. “But you might be onto something.”
The Redcap must have vanished from the rooftop for a while, because I saw him come back up from below with a big black nylon equipment bag. He took it over to Molly, who looked up, waved away several of the Little Folk playing messenger around her, and rose to her feet. She took the bag from him, carried it over to us, and tossed it down at my feet.
“There,” she said. She eyed me. “I’m just not feeling the suit for this kind of work. Go change.”
I arched an eyebrow at her. Then I leaned down and opened the bag.
It had my stuff in it, from the apartment. A pair of jeans, a T-shirt, and my ensorcelled leather duster. My gun belt was in there, too, with my big old monster-shooting revolver, as well as a short-barreled coach gun in a scabbard on a bandolier loaded with various-colored shells.
“Suit up, Sir Knight,” Molly said, and winked at me.
“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. “I’m just a great big Ken doll for you people to dress up, aren’t I?”
“You’re lucky the Leanansidhe is commanding the outer defenses,” Molly said. “Auntie Lea would have insisted you be properly attired.” Her smile faded. Her eyes searched for words for a moment, and when she spoke, she was choosing them carefully. “Harry. I won’t be here for you tonight.”
I paused and stared at her. “What? Why?”
“I can’t tell you.” She grimaced, frustration in her eyes for a moment. “But it’s necessary. And it’s got to be me.”
I drew a deep breath. I’d been counting on having the grasshopper to back me up. The now-immortal grasshopper, for crying out loud.
On the other hand, this was Molly.
I stared at her eyes for a while. She and I had taken each other’s measure already. And what I had seen in her was a dark and terrible potential, power that could be used for weal or woe, based upon her choices. I guess the real question was whether it was really Molly making the choices any longer. If it was still the young woman I’d known.
I knew where I stood on that one.
If my Molly said she had to leave, she had a damned good reason.
“Okay,” I said. I winked at her. “I mean, dammit, but okay.”
She lifted both her eyebrows in surprise for a moment. Then she clasped my hands and gave me a brief luminous smile. She nodded to Ebenezar and turned away, beckoning with a finger and collecting the Redcap like a well-trained hound. The pair of them hurried from the command center and vanished below, presumably to leave the castle.
And I felt a little more alone than I had a moment before.
My stomach wasn’t quite cramping, but . . . the tension was getting higher. The quivering unrest inside me would not cease. We stood there waiting and doing nothing while a war began around us.
Another car went up, this time farther to the south. An assassin squid made it all the way to the roof before Lacuna rammed her spear through it and pinned it to the map table six inches from Vadderung’s hand. The one-eyed man grunted without looking up from the map, unstuck the spear absently, flicked the squid over the side of the building, and offered the weapon back to the small fae.
Wizard Cristos came over, looking dignified and severe in his suit and robes, and spoke quietly in Ebenezar’s ear. The old man nodded, thumped my shoulder with his fist, and walked off to one corner of the rooftop, speaking quietly to the other Senior Councilman.
I couldn’t stand there doing nothing all by myself. I grabbed the nylon bag and took it down to the locker room next to the gym. Then I started doing what you do in locker rooms, and changed clothes. It was a busy place; the Einherjaren who were still coming in from the blacked-out city surrounding the castle would rush in to suit up and arm themselves from the weapons locker.
I was down to my underwear when a man the size of a small polar bear slammed his locker and departed, still buckling a vambrace onto one arm, and abruptly left me alone in the locker bay with Gentleman John Marcone.
The robber baron of Chicago had undressed down to his undershirt and slacks and was currently fastening the fittings on a vest of overlapping scales of some advanced-looking material that covered his torso closely enough to be custom fit. I’d seen him out of a suit only once before, and he’d been in rough shape at the time. Despite his age, Marcone was built like a light-heavyweight boxer. The muscles moving under his forearms were made of lean steel cable. As I watched, he shrugged into his suit shirt and began buttoning it up.
“Did you forget the next step in the dressing process, Dresden?” he asked, without looking up at me. “Or is this some sort of awkward sexual reconnaissance?”
With massive dignity, I put on my pants one leg at a time. “Locker room talk? Really?”
“It seemed something you would be capable of appreciating.”
I snorted and kept getting dressed. Marcone put on a gun belt and hung a pistol under each arm.
“I saw you earlier,” I said. “Facing Ethniu.”
He eyed me without actually looking at me.
The words tasted bitter and tainted in my mouth, but I said, “That took guts.”
His mouth twisted at one corner. “Ouch. That must have hurt.”
I nodded and spat into a trash can. “No idea.”
Marcone took up his suit jacket and shrugged into it. He adjusted it until the cloth fell without revealing the guns. “Do you know the difference between courage and foolhardiness, Dresden?”
“Any insurance adjuster would say no.”
He waved a hand at my banter, as though that was all the acknowledgment it deserved. “Hindsight,” he said. “Until the extended consequences of any action are known, it is both courageous and foolish. And neither.”
“Well,” I said, “tonight you earned yourself a Schrödinger’s Medal, I guess.”
He seemed to muse on that for a moment. “Yes,” he said, fastening one button. “I suppose I did.” He paused and glanced at me. “I notice you kept quiet.”
“Maybe I’m finally learning my lesson.”
“That’s not it.” Marcone tilted his head, frowning. “The only way that would have happened is, frankly . . . if you had not been present.”
Okay, well. Sometimes even the bad guys are right, more or less. I kept my mouth shut and finished getting dressed.
“Dresden,” Marcone said, “while I have enjoyed working with your queen, and find her business practices admirable, do not presume any sort of personal amity between us. At all.”
“Oh. I don’t.”
“Excellent,” Marcone said. “Then I will not need to explain how severely I will be obliged to react to you should you engage in any of your . . . typical shenanigans in violation of my territory or my sovereign rights under the Accords.”
“Really?” I said. “Right now, you’re comparing testosterone size?”
“I have no intention of dying tonight, Dresden,” Marcone said. “Nor of losing what I have fought to claim. I am a survivor. As, improbably, are you.” He nodded to me politely and spoke in a very quiet, reasonable tone that was all the more chilling for the absolute granite rumbling be
neath the surface. “I only wish you to be aware that I mean to continue as I have begun. After tonight, I will still be here—and you, by God, will show respect.”
“Or what?” I asked him, lightly.
Marcone’s stare was not a matter for lightness. “I will pursue my rights under Mab’s Accords. And she will not protect you.”
I felt a little cold chill go through my guts, way down low. Marcone had me dead to rights there. I had violated his territory under the Accords, more than once. He’d just never wanted to shove it in the face of the White Council, who would have had no interest in bowing to a lesser power. Offhand, I wasn’t sure what the penalty would be for that kind of lawbreaking, but Mab’s idea of justice wasn’t exactly a progressive one. More to the point, her idea of justice was damned near an absolute: If I had broken her laws, I would deserve to be punished under them. My status as the Winter Knight would not matter to her in the least, except that she might be that much more annoyed before she executed me.
Dammit, Thomas. Why in the hell do you get me into messes like this?
“As long as we’re being honest,” I said, “you should probably know that I still think you’re a prick. I still think you’re responsible for a lot of good people getting hurt. And I’m going to tear you down one day.”
Marcone stared hard at me for a moment. He wasn’t afraid of my eyes. He’d taken my measure, too, and I remembered the cold, fearless core of him, of an apex predator who happened to wear a human form. Then he, too, did something eerie.
He smiled.
A wolf would have been jealous.
“Excellent,” he said.
Then he left.
* * *
* * *
I walked back out onto the roof, the heat of the summer night wet and heavy against my face. My duster hung heavy over my shoulders, too hot for the night, the spell-infused leather a comforting weight around me. I gripped my staff in my left hand. From one hip hung my big .50-caliber revolver. The scabbard for the short coach gun, loaded with Dragon’s Breath rounds, hung from the other. My Warden’s cloak was fastened over one shoulder, where it would be adding the least to my discomfort in the sultry air, yet still declare my allegiance to the Council.