Peace Talks

by Jim Butcher

  But she was still Molly. Still the girl I’d met years ago, still the young woman I’d trained, still the woman who’d fought by my side on too many occasions to easily count. My instincts told me that she was something to be feared. And my instincts were right.

  But people are often more than one thing. Molly was a very pretty, very dangerous monster now. But she was also the Padawan. She was also my friend.

  I leaned down and broke the circle with my hand, releasing its energy back into the universe with a subaudible popping sensation.

  Molly exhaled and calmly stepped out of the circle. She regarded me for a long moment and said, “God, you look tired.”

  I tilted my head at her and suddenly smiled. “You mean ‘old.’ ”

  “Weathered,” she countered. “Like Aragorn.”

  I laughed at that. As a wizard, I could expect three centuries and change. Maybe more. I still had a decade and change to go before my body started settling into what it would look like for most of my life. “Wanna know a secret?”

  “Always.”

  “Only the young think being called old is an insult,” I said, still smiling. “I am what I am, regardless of what anyone calls it. No one can change it, regardless of what anyone calls it. And it mostly means that nothing has managed to kill me yet.”

  Molly gave me a small, bitter smile. “One thing did.”

  “I asked for your help with that,” I said sternly. “You had a hell of a tough choice to make, and you chose loyalty to your friend. I will never forget that, Molly.”

  “Neither will I,” she said quietly.

  I pursed my lips. There is no guilt like wizard guilt, because there is no arrogance like wizard arrogance. We get used to having so much power, so much ability to change things, that we also tend to assume that whatever happens is also our responsibility. Throw in a few shreds of human decency, where you actually worry about the results of your actions upon others, and you wind up with a lot of regrets.

  Because it’s hard, it’s really, really hard, in fact damned near impossible, to exercise power without it having some unexpected consequences. Doesn’t matter what kind of power it is—magic, muscle, political office, electricity, moral authority. Use any of it, and you’re going to find out that as a result, things happen that you didn’t expect.

  When those consequences are a blown light bulb, no big deal.

  But sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes they die. Sometimes innocents. Sometimes friends.

  Molly probably wasn’t going to forgive herself for assisting in what had amounted to a very complicated near suicide. There’d been a lot of fallout, on every conceivable scale. Very little of it had been Molly’s fault, directly or otherwise, but she’d been a mover on that scene, and she probably felt at least as bad as I did about it, and I’d been way more in the middle of things.

  And, being a wizard, I felt guilty as hell for walking her into that. I hadn’t had much choice, if I wanted to save my daughter’s life, but though the cost was worthy, it still had to be paid—and Molly had laid down cold, hard cash.

  So cold and so hard that Mab had wound up choosing her to be the new Winter Lady, in fact.

  Suddenly I wondered if maybe I hadn’t been hard enough on myself. I mean, hell, at least when I’d become the Winter Knight, I’d made a choice. My back had been to a wall and my options had all sucked, but I’d at least sought out my bargain with Mab.

  Molly hadn’t been consulted, and Mab’s policy on dissenting opinion was crystalline: Deal with it or die.

  Of course, for inveterate dissenters like myself, it created a pretty simple counterpolicy for when I was tired of Mab’s crap: Deal with it or kill me. Mab was a lot of things, but irrational wasn’t one of them, and as long as it was easier to put up with me than replace me, we had attained a state of balance. I imagined that Molly had come to similar arrangements.

  I put my hand on her shoulder, squeezed slightly, and gave her another smile. “Hey. It was hard, for everyone. But we came through it. And with all these scars, we have to have learned a lesson somewhere, right?”

  “I’m not sure how well that logic holds up,” she said, giving me a wry smile.

  “I think of it as the idiot’s version of optimism,” I said. I eyed the lightening sky. “How up are you on current events?”

  She glanced that way as well. “I’ve been working in eastern Russia for two weeks,” she said. “I’m busy as hell.”

  “Okay,” I said, and I caught her up on recent events. Everything. Except for Butters and Andi and Marci because Butters had asked me and because I wasn’t quite sure what to think about that myself.

  “Before we go any further and just to be clear,” she asked, “did my apartment actually burn down?”

  “No.”

  She nodded and exhaled. “ So … let’s see …” She closed her eyes and thought for a moment about what I had told her. “Oh God, you’re going to go get Thomas, aren’t you?”

  “I’m exhausting all possibilities for a diplomatic solution first,” I said.

  She gave me a wary look.

  “I like the svartalves,” I explained. “They’re good people. And they’ve got kids. I’m not going to wade into them, guns blazing.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “And you think I can get something done?”

  “The svartalves like you,” I said. “As far as I can tell, you’re an honorary svartalf. And every single one of them is a sucker for pretty girls, and that’s you also.”

  A flicker of her hand acknowledged fact without preening. “I think you’re overestimating my influence in the face of events like this,” she said. “Etri and his people are old-school. Blood has been spilled. There’s going to be an accounting, period, and they are not going to be interested in mercy.”

  “You underestimate how much faith I have in your creativity, intelligence, and resourcefulness, Molly.”

  She grimaced. “You understand that if it comes to that, I can’t directly help you get him out. If a Faerie Queen violated the Accords so blatantly, they would collapse. It would mean worldwide havoc.”

  “I figured,” I said.

  Her expression turned into a lopsided smile. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

  “This can’t possibly be more difficult to handle than moving back into your parents’ place after you got all the piercings and tattoos.”

  She bobbed her head to one side to acknowledge the point. “That seemed pretty impossible at the time, I suppose.”

  “Help me,” I said. I helpfully bent down and picked up the can of Dr Pepper, offering it to her. “I got you Nutella and everything.”

  “All that did was give me an excuse not to bitch-slap you for daring to summon me,” she said frankly. “Honestly, I do have a job, you know. It’s kind of important. I really can’t afford to encourage people to interrupt me all the time.”

  She took the soda and sipped.

  “It’s Thomas,” I said.

  “It’s Thomas,” she agreed. She exhaled. “You understand that you’ve asked for my help. You know what that means, right?”

  “Obligation,” I said.

  “Yes. You’ll owe me. And those scales will have to be balanced. It’s … like an itch I can’t scratch until they are.”

  “You’re still you, grasshopper.”

  She regarded me for a moment, her maybe-not-quite-as-human eyes huge, luminous, and unsettlingly, unnervingly beautiful in her gaunt face. Her voice came out in a whisper I had last heard in a greenly lit root-lined cavern on the island. “Not always.”

  I felt a little chill slide around inside me.

  She shook her head and was abruptly the grasshopper again. “I’m willing to do whatever I can to help you. Are you willing to balance whatever I offer up?”

  “He’s my brother,” I said. “Duh.”

  She nodded. “What is it you want?”

  I told her.

  She was quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Tricky. Diffic
ult.”

  “If I could do it myself, I wouldn’t be asking you, grasshopper. Can you do it?”

  She sipped more of the drink, her eyes sparkling as they narrowed. “Are you questioning my phenomenal cosmic powers?”

  “Well, you’ve been so busy globet-rotting doing Winter Lady stuff,” I drawled. “Let’s just say I’m curious if you’ve kept your wizard muscles in shape.”

  “Hah!” she said, grinning. Then her expression sobered. “I’ve done some work like it lately. The skills aren’t the issue.” She leaned toward me a little, her eyes intent. “Harry. I need you to be absolutely sure. Once a bargain is done, there’s no going back. And I will hold you to it.” Her expression flickered, for just a second suddenly looking much less sure. “I don’t get a choice about that.”

  “He’s my brother,” I said. “I’m sure.”

  The Winter Lady nodded, her eyes suddenly luminous, suddenly something a man could drown in. Then she stepped over to me, stood on tiptoe, reached up, and drew my mouth down to hers. She gave me a soft kiss on the mouth that was about ninety-nine percent sisterly, and murmured, “Done.”

  There was a sensation of something setting firmly into place, somewhere inside me, as if I’d been made of Legos, one of them had come loose, and Molly had just pressed it solidly back into position. It sent a little frisson through me, and I shivered as the bargain was forged.

  And, Hell’s bells, did Molly have soft, lovely lips, which did not bear thinking on.

  She stepped away from me much more slowly, her eyes down. She brushed her hand over her mouth and muttered, “Mab’s going to be furious if I don’t get the leshyie numbers up, but …” She nodded. “I’ll build your toy for you.”

  “You’re the best.”

  “I’m awesome,” she agreed. “But this is a mess. I don’t know how much direct help I’ll be able to give.”

  “At this point,” I said, “I’ll take whatever I can get.”

  17

  I drove Molly back to town and dropped her off at the svartalf embassy, where the security guard, a conspicuously unfamiliar face, welcomed her at once and with tremendous deference. I still wasn’t clear on what the grasshopper had done for the svartalves to make them so gaga over her, but it was clear that whatever she’d done, she had impressed them with the fact that she was more than a pretty face.

  I watched her go in and made sure she was safely in the building, as if I were a teenager dropping off his date five minutes early, and then started driving.

  I felt awful.

  I felt really, really awful.

  And I wanted to go home.

  Home, like love, hate, war, and peace, is one of those words that is so important that it doesn’t need more than one syllable. Home is part of the fabric of who humans are. Doesn’t matter if you’re a vampire or a wizard or a secretary or a schoolteacher; you have to have a home, even if only in principle—there has to be a zero point from which you can make comparisons to everything else. Home tends to be it.

  That can be a good thing, to help you stay oriented in a very confusing world. If you don’t know where your feet are planted, you’ve got no way to know where you’re heading when you start taking steps. It can be a bad thing, when you run into something so different from home that it scares you and makes you angry. That’s also part of being human.

  But there’s a deeper meaning to home. Something simpler, more primal.

  It’s where you eat the best food because other predators can’t take it from you very easily there.

  It’s where you and your mate are the most intimate.

  It’s where you raise your children, safe against a world that can do horrible things to them.

  It’s where you sleep, safe.

  It’s where you relax.

  It’s where you dream.

  Home is where you embrace the present and plan the future.

  It’s where the books are.

  And more than anything else, it’s where you build that world that you want.

  I drove through Chicago streets in the early morning and wished that I felt numb. My head hurt from lack of sleep and insufficient amounts of insufficiently nourishing food. My body ached, especially my hands and forearms. My head still spun with motion sickness, my guts sending up frequent complaints.

  My brother was in trouble, and I didn’t know if I could get him out.

  I thought of Justine’s misery and fear and the trust in her eyes when I’d promised to help Thomas, and suddenly felt very tired.

  I very much wanted to go home.

  And I didn’t have one.

  My comfy, dumpy old apartment was gone, flattened by Gentleman Johnnie Marcone to make way for his stupid little castle and the Bigger Better Brighter Future Society. I mean, that had only been after the Red Court of Vampires had burned my home down, but I guess I’d settled their hash not long after. I was willing to call that one even.

  But I missed my couch and the comfy chairs in front of my fire. I missed reading for hours on end with Mouse snoozing comfortably beside me and Mister purring between my ankles. I missed my cluttered, thoroughly functional little magical laboratory in the subbasement, and Bob on the shelf. I missed problems as simple as a rogue sorcerer trying to run his own drug cartel.

  And I missed not being afraid for the people I loved.

  I bowed my head at a light and wept. The guy behind me had to honk to get me to look up again. I considered blowing out his engine in a fit of pure pique and decided against it: I was the one who wasn’t moving at a green light.

  I didn’t know what else to do.

  I felt tired and lost and sick. Which left me only one place to go.

  The sky had just begun to turn golden in the east when I pulled up to the Carpenters’ house. As I got out of the car, a neighbor a few doors down, an elderly gentleman in a flannel shirt and a red ball cap, came out of the door and stumped down the driveway to get his morning paper. He gave me a gimlet glower as he did, as if I’d personally come and put all his newspaper pages out of order, then carefully folded it up again and walked stiffly back into his house.

  Man. I wished I was old enough to be irrationally grumpy at some random guy on the street. I could have blown out his engine.

  I didn’t knock on the door. I went around to the backyard. There I found the Carpenter treehouse, which looked like something out of a Disney movie, in a massive old oak tree in the backyard. A bit behind it was the workshop, the rolling door of which was currently wide open. An old radio played classic rock in the background, and one of the better human beings I knew was on a weight bench, working out.

  Michael Carpenter was in his fifties from the neck up, with silvering hair, grey eyes, and a well-kept salt-and-pepper beard. From the neck down, he could have been twenty or thirty years younger. He was performing basic bench presses with around two hundred and fifty pounds on the bar. Michael was doing slow reps with it.

  I hadn’t seen the start of his set, but I counted fourteen repetitions of the movement before he carefully set the bar back onto the rack, so he was probably doing twenties. The struts of the bench creaked a bit as the weight settled onto them.

  Michael glanced up at me and smiled. He sat up, breathing heavily but in a controlled manner, and said, “Harry! Up early or late?”

  “Late,” I said, and bumped fists with him. “Going light this morning?”

  He grinned a bit wider. “Most mornings. It’s my shoulders. They just can’t take the heavy stuff anymore.”

  I eyed the weights and said, “Yeah, you wimp.”

  He laughed. “Want a turn?”

  I felt awful. And angry about it. The Winter mantle didn’t care if I’d missed sleep and felt terrible. It wanted me to kill or have sex with something. Feeding it exercise was as close as I could get. Dammit. “Sure.”

  He got up amiably, using an aluminum cane lying beside the bench to stand. Michael had taken multiple hits from an AK-style assault rifle out on the island a few
years back. He shouldn’t have survived it. Instead, he’d come out of it with a bad hip, a bum leg, a bad eye, a severe limp, and the only non-posthumous retirement I’d ever heard about for a Knight of the Cross.

  He limped gamely over to the head of the bench to spot me. I took off my duster, lay down, and started working.

  “You look”—Michael paused, considering his words—“distracted.”

  He was my friend. I told him what was up. He listened gravely.

  “Harry, you idiot,” he said gently. “Go get some sleep.”

  I glared at him and kept working.

  He was one of a relatively few people in my life upon whom my glare had no effect. “You aren’t going to muscle your way through this one, and you aren’t going to be able to think your way through it in your current condition. Help your brother. Get some sleep.”

  I thought about that one until the frozen chill of Winter had seeped into my arms and chest and I was breathing like a steam engine. Then I put the weight down.

  “How many was that?” I asked.

  “I stopped counting at forty.” Michael put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Enough, Harry. Get some rest.”

  “I can’t,” I said, my voice suddenly harsh. I sat up, hard. “Somebody pushed my brother into this. Somehow. I have to stop them. I have to fight them.”

  “Yes,” Michael said, his tone patient. “But you need to fight them smarter, not harder.”

  I scowled and glanced back over my shoulder at him.

  “You’re no kid anymore, Harry. But take it from someone who did this kind of thing for a very long time: Take your sleep wherever you can get it. You never know when you’ll have no other choice.”

  I shook my head. “What if something happens while I’m sleeping? What if those lost hours are the difference between saving him and …”

  “What if a meteor hits the planet tomorrow?” Michael replied. “Harry, there is very little in this world that we can control. You have to realize when you’ve reached the limits of what you can choose to do to change the situation.”

  “When you reach the limits,” I said quietly, “maybe it’s time to change your limits.”