by Jim Butcher
“God,” Butters muttered, using a wipe to try to clean up the deep, gashing cuts on my hands. “You’ve got motor oil in the gashes.”
“That a problem?”
He gave me a sleepy, unamused look. “Considering all the debris it collects, yes. Yes, it is.” He sighed. “Gotta debride it. Sorry, man.”
I nodded. “Just get it over with.”
After that, it was about twenty minutes of water, Betadine solution, and a stiff-bristled brush being applied to the area around and inside the wound. Could have been worse. Butters could have used iodine. Could have been worse—but it wasn’t exactly a picnic, either. Hands are sensitive.
Twenty minutes later, I was sweating and grumpy, and Butters was glowering at the injuries with dissatisfaction. “That’s the best I can do here. I’ll wrap them up, but you’ll need to change the bandages every day and watch like hell for any sign of infection. But in the ‘ounce of prevention’ department, until you get invulnerable skin, buy some gloves to protect your hands, Hulk.”
“Not a bad idea,” I said. “How bad is the damage?”
I have this issue with feeling pain. It’s part of the Winter Knight package. When something happens to me, I sort of notice it, but ongoing pain just fades into my background. So bad things can happen to me without my knowing it, if I don’t use my head.
“I don’t think there’s damage to the actual working structure of your hands,” Butters said. “But the human body isn’t really made for flipping trucks, man. You’ re … developed to something like the maximum potential for your height and build, but your joints are still human joints. Your cartilage is still only cartilage, and even though your body will actually heal damage to it, it has a failure point. And your bones are still just made of bone.” He shook his head. “Seriously. One of these days you’re going to try to lift something too heavy, and even if your muscles can handle it, your bones and joints won’t.”
“What’s that gonna look like?” I wondered aloud.
“An industrial accident,” Butters said. He wiped down my hands one more time, thoroughly, and then began wrapping the injuries. “Okay. So the White Council wants to give you a hard time. So what else is new?”
Butters was not up on the concept of the Black Council, a covert group of wizards who were nebulous and impossible to identify with absolute certainty, working toward goals that seemed nefarious at best. That information was being held under wraps by the wizards dedicated to fighting them. Partly because we had little hard evidence about the Black Council, what they wanted, and who their members were, and partly because the bad guys would have more trouble taking action against us if they couldn’t even be sure who was their enemy.
Butters was trustworthy, but the Black Council was a wizard problem.
“Yeah,” I said. “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”
Butters gave me a look, because I’m not a very good spy, and lying to a friend doesn’t come naturally to me. But he shrugged and let it pass. “Okay.” He yawned. “When you called, you said something about health issues, plural. What else is bothering you?”
I told him about my sneezes and the conjuritis.
His eyes narrowed and he said, “This isn’t some kind of prank you’re playing on the new guy in the game, is it? Cause I’ve sort of been expecting that.”
“What? No, that’s crazy talk,” I said, and tried hard not to think about my “Dino Serenade,” due for his birthday. “This is a real problem, man.”
“Sure,” Butters said, snapping his rubber gloves off and beginning to clean up. “Whatever.”
Augh, of all the crazy things to happen in my life, I wouldn’t think that my randomly involuntarily conjuring objects out of nothing at the drop of a hat would really ping anyone’s radar. All the things happening right now, and this is the point that Butters picks to decide to stonewall me on?
I sneezed again. Hard.
There was an enormous crash as a section of mortared stone wall, maybe four feet square, landed on Butters’s kitchen floor so hard that the tables and chairs jumped off the floor. Butters yelped and fell over backwards out of his chair—into a backwards roll that brought him onto his feet right next to the steak-knife holder on the counter. He had his hand on a knife before I could get all the way to my feet.
Little guy. But fast. Knights of the Sword aren’t ever to be underestimated.
“Dere,” I said, swiping awkwardly at my nose with my forearms. “Dere, do yuh see dow?”
Butters just stared at the stone wall. Then he quivered when it shuddered, went transparent, and then collapsed into gallons and gallons of ectoplasm. The supernatural gelatin kind of spread out slowly over the floor, like a test shot for a remake of The Blob.
“Okay,” Butters said. “ So … that just happened.” He regarded the ectoplasm and then me and shook his head. “Your life, Harry. What the hell?”
“Dod’t asg be,” I said. I sloshed across the kitchen floor, got a paper towel, and started trying to blow my nose clean. It was kind of a mess. It took several paper towels’ worth of expelled ectoplasm to be able to breathe properly again. “Look, I can’t be randomly making things appear out of nowhere.”
“I’m a medical examiner,” Butters wailed. “Christ, Harry! Some kind of virus that has an interaction with your nervous system, or your brain or your freaking subconscious? This is something to take to Mayo or Johns Hopkins. Or maybe Professor Xavier’s school.”
“None of those guys are weird enough. You do weird.”
He put the knife back and threw up his hands. “Augh. Okay. Is there always a sneeze?”
“Yeah, so far,” I said.
“Then go get whatever cold medicine you use when you have a cold. Maybe if you stop the sneezing, you’ll stop the conjuring, too.”
I eyed him blearily and then said, betrayed, “I could have worked that out for myself.”
“Weird,” he said, “it’s almost as if you’re a grown damned man who could make some commonsense health decisions for himself, if he chose to.”
I flipped him a casual bird, idly noting the pain of my wounded hand as I did. “What about the nausea? I feel like I’m stuck on one of those rides where you go in circles.”
“Infrasound is pretty wild and unexplored stuff,” Butters said. “There’s too many potential weapon and military communication applications for it, and it’s hard to measure, so there hasn’t been a ton of publicly available research. But, the Paranet being the Paranet, I found some Bigfoot researchers who say that the Bigfoot use it all the time to encourage people to leave the area. Tigers and other large predators use it, too, as part of the roar. You know when you hear stories about people freezing when a tiger roars? That’s infrasound, having an effect on the parasympathetic nervous system.”
“Thank you for confirming that infrasound is real and has real effects on people,” I said, “but I sort of worked that one out for myself. How do we fix it?”
“According to the Bigfoot guys, mostly what it takes to recover is a solid sleep cycle. So if you’re going to insist on treating me like your personal physician, here: Take two aspirin and call me in the morning.”
I grimaced. “Yeah, sleep probably isn’t an option, either.”
“Course not.” Butters sighed. He went to a cabinet, got a plastic bottle out, and tossed it to me.
“Allergy meds?” I asked skeptically.
“Are you a doctor now?” Butters went to the sink and filled a cup of water.
“Maybe I’m only a medical examiner.”
Butters dipped a finger in the water and flicked it at me, then sloshed carefully through the slime and put the cup down on the table in front of me. “Diphenhydramine,” he said. “Sneezing is usually a histamine reaction. This is an antihistamine. Should help. Take two.”
I did as I was told without uttering any intelligible complaints, thus proving that I am not a contrary, obstreperous stiff neck who resents any authority figure telling him what to do
. I mean, it’s documented now. So that’s settled.
I heard a soft sound and looked up at the doorway to the kitchen as a young woman appeared in it. Andi had long, wavy red hair and bombshell curves. She wore an emerald green terry-cloth robe, which she held closed with one hand, her eyes were sleepy, and she was possibly the most adorable werewolf I knew. “Waldo? What was that bang? What happened to the floor? Oh, Harry.” She gathered the robe closed a little more closely and belted it. “I didn’t realize you were here.”
“Andi,” I said. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to wake you up.”
She gave me a tired smile. “Word is that things are getting tense out there.”
“Word’s right,” I said. “Be a good idea for you to get as much sleep as possible, in case you’re needed.”
“And yet,” Butters protested, “here you are waking me up, I notice.”
“For you, sleep time was yesterday,” I said. “You’re needed now.”
There were soft footsteps and a second female voice said, “Is everything okay?”
Another young woman appeared, built slim but strong, legs like a long-distance runner’s beneath an Avengers T-shirt big enough to serve her as a dress. She had very fine mousy brown hair to her shoulders, and she was squinting her large brown eyes against her lack of glasses, her narrow face disrupted by sleep marks on one cheek. “Oh,” she said. “My goodness. Hello, Harry. I’m, um, sleeping over. After the LAN party. Oh, did you hurt your hands?”
“Marci,” I said, to possibly the second-cutest werewolf I knew. “Um, hello. Yeah, just having ol’ Doc Butters take a look and make sure I didn’t void the warranty.”
“Oh,” Marci said. “Oh. I see.”
There followed a long, awkward silence, in which Butters turned a sufficient shade of pink to advertise for breast cancer awareness and in which Marci looked at everything in the apartment except me.
“Oh for God’s sake,” Andi said. “He’s an adult human being, guys. And I’m tired. Draw conclusions, Harry. You won’t be far off. And I’m not cleaning this mess up.” She turned, took Marci’s hand, and walked firmly back toward the bedroom. Marci’s cheeks flushed bright red, but she went with Andi.
I looked at Butters, whose earlobes could have been mistaken for tamales, and arched an eyebrow.
The little guy took a deep breath. Then he said, in a calm and sincere tone, “Harry, tease me about this or screw it up for me and I’ll knock your teeth out.”
And he said it right.
I mean, there’s a way to convey your sincere willingness to commit violence. Most people seem to think it involves a lot of screaming and waving your arms. It doesn’t. Really dangerous people don’t feel a need to shout about it. Delivering that kind of warning, sincerely, takes mostly the sort of confidence that only comes from experience.
Butters had only had the Sword since the end of winter. He’d only been doing full-speed Knight work for about a month. But I’d seen him square off against maybe the scariest and most dangerous bad guy I personally knew—and Butters won.
And here he was, facing off with me like a grouchy badger. He told me to back off and made me want to do it.
Damn. Little guy had gotten all grown up on me.
I lifted my hands, palms out in a gesture of peace, and said, “Okay. But I reserve the right to talk to you about it later.”
“Oh God, can we not?” Butters said. He went to rummage in the fridge, restless and uncomfortable as a schoolboy caught with adult magazines. “We’re sort of keeping this low-key.”
“Low-key, huh?”
“Look,” he said plaintively, “I’m honestly not quite sure how this happened, and I am not going to let anyone screw it up.”
“Butters,” I said. I waited until he turned to look at me. Then I said, “You’re not sitting in my kitchen asking for my help, man. I’m pretty sure you can make the choices for your own damned life. And there’s too much glass in my house to throw stones at anyone.”
His eyes searched my expression for a moment before some of the tension went out of him. “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Sorry, man.”
“Nothing to be sorry for,” I said. I glanced back toward where the women had disappeared to and opened my mouth. Then I ran my tongue thoughtfully over my teeth and closed it.
Honestly, it’s really kind of startling how many problems that avoids. I should think about doing it more often.
“Well,” Butters said, in the tone of a man getting back to business. “The Paranet has sent out advance warning. Everyone’s been told to see something, say something. How about some details?”
I nodded and let him know what was up with the Accorded nations and their peace talks, and what had happened to Thomas.
He listened, his expression growing increasingly concerned. “That sounds, um, like it could get interesting.”
Something in his tone made me look up at him. “Oh?”
“Sanya’s in town,” Butters explained. “Hotel by the airport. He was just transferring through O’Hare, but his flight got delayed. Seven times.”
There were currently two Knights operating in the whole world. Two of them. And the Knights of the Sword (or Cross, depending on how you looked at their professional priorities) tended to wind up wherever they were needed most, always by pure coincidence. In fact, the coincidence was so freaking pure that it basically told me that it wasn’t. I have a dubious relationship with God—but judging from the timing of the entrances of the Knights He sponsored, He would have made one hell of a travel agent.
“Ah,” I said. “Um. Maybe Sanya could visit for a couple of days. You guys could swap some Knightly stories or something.”
Butters gave me a tight smile. “Right. How do I help you?”
I shook my head. “I’ve learned by now that you guys are gonna show up exactly where the Almighty wants you, and I’m probably smart not to bump anybody’s elbow. So it’s up to you. How do you think you’ll do the most good?”
He regarded me for a moment. Then he said quietly, “It’s the Paranet crowd I’m worried about.”
Magical talent is like the rest of it—not everybody gets the same amount. There are people like me who can sling around the forces of the universe as if they were their personal play toys. And then there are folks who, while gifted, just can’t do that much. The have-nots of the magical world had an unenviable position in life—aware of the world of the paranormal, but without sufficient personal power to affect it.
Until the Paranet, anyway. Use of the Internet had done something for the have-nots that nothing else had before—it had united them. Meeting people, making friends, coordinating activities, had all become more possible to do in relative safety, and it had created something just as powerful as tremendous inborn magical talent: a community. Supernatural predators were having less and less luck against the have-nots these days, as they coordinated actions, communicated with one another about possible threats—and joined their individually unimpressive talents into coordinated efforts that made them, in some senses, damned near as strong as a wizard themselves.
But though they had gathered enough strength to keep the vermin at bay, they still couldn’t stand against a storm like the one that was brewing.
“Agree,” I said quietly. “And they know you. Trust you. Work with them. Get all the intelligence you can and coordinate it with Murphy.”
“What about Thomas?” Butters didn’t know Thomas was my brother, but he knew he was an ally we’d fought beside on too many occasions to consider leaving him behind.
“What I’m working on,” I said. “Could be that a diplomatic solution is the best one.”
Butters slipped on the slime and nearly fell on his ass. He caught the countertop and held himself up instead. Then he stared at me, fighting back a smile, and said, “Who are you, and what have you done with Harry Dresden?”
I glowered at him and rose, careful to keep my balance amid the ectoplasm on the floor. It was already sublimating. Maybe half of it was
gone. I shrugged back into my duster. “I don’t prefer to blow things up and burn things down. It just sort of works out that way.”
Butters nodded. “What’s your next move?”
“Diplomacy,” I said, “with a Vampire Queen.”
“You’re not going out to the château alone, are you?”
Château Raith was White Court headquarters in these parts. “Yeah.”
Butters sighed. “I’ll get my bag.”
“No need,” I told him. “Mab and Lara have a deal going, and Mab’s made it clear what Lara is and is not allowed to do. She’ll play nice.”
Butters frowned. “You sure?”
I nodded. “Rest up. Might need you for real in the next few days.”
He looked from me toward the bedroom, his conscience at war with the rest of him.
“Okay,” he said finally. “Good luck, Harry.”
“I only have one kind of luck.” I nodded my thanks to Butters, grabbed my staff, and set out to visit Lara Raith.
14
The Raith Estates are about an hour north of town, out in the countryside, where the nearest neighbor is too far away to hear you scream. The place is surrounded by a forest of old enormous trees, mostly oak, that look like they were transplanted from Sherwood Forest.
Hell, given how much money and power the White Court had, maybe they had been.
I pulled up to the gates of the estate in the Munstermobile to find them guarded by half a dozen men in full tactical gear and body armor. They weren’t kidding around. As I stopped the car, five men pointed assault rifles at me, and one approached the car. His spine was rigid, his shoulders square, his manner relaxed. Lara recruited her personal security almost exclusively from former military, mostly Marines.
The man who approached my car had a solid blend of the lean athleticism of youth and the weather-beaten edges of experience. He wasn’t even bothering with a friendly smile. I’d run into him before. His name was Riley.