by Jim Butcher
Unless it was me.
Something went click somewhere inside.
Ever since the Red Court had taken my daughter, I’d been reeling from one disaster to the next, surviving. This entire situation was just one more entropy barrage hitting my life, forcing me to scramble once again, maybe getting me killed. (Again. Technically.)
Things were different now. I was a part of Maggie’s life. And she might need me to walk her down an aisle one day.
Maybe it was time I started getting ahead of this stuff.
Maybe it was time to get serious.
My brother was lying curled up in a fetal position, naked and shockingly thin, as if he’d lost forty pounds of muscle in the past day. He looked better and worse—the bruises were gone, as was the blood. His hands still looked knotted and horrible, but his face was recognizable again. Being a vampire has its privileges, even if his skin looked like it needed to be a couple of sizes larger, drawn tight against what remained of his formerly muscular frame.
It was his expression that sickened me. He looked up with mercury-colored eyes, dull and glazed with simple animal pain.
“Thomas,” I hissed. “It’s Harry.”
He blinked up at the light without speaking.
“Can you hear me, man?”
He stared and made a small choking sound.
“Hell’s bells,” I said. There was no ladder waiting for me below. So I grimaced, swung my legs over the opening, and then dropped down into it as quietly as I could.
It was a bit of a drop, but I managed not to land on Thomas or fall on my ass.
“Come on,” I said. “We have to go.”
For a long beat, nothing happened. Then he moved, and I felt myself let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. My brother was alive.
But there wasn’t much left of him.
Stars and stones, the svartalves had worked him over badly. They hadn’t put him in irons. They’d just beaten him until there was no possibility of him effecting his own escape. I wanted to be enraged about it, but among the supernatural nations, their actions would be considered effective, not sadistic. Hell, it would have been a simple matter for them to simply kill him out of hand and then announce that an assassin had made an attempt on Etri and been killed before he could do the job. But instead they were holding to the Accords.
He was alive. But his Hunger had evidently cannibalized his own body to keep him that way.
“Thomas, we haven’t got much time,” I said. “Get your lazy ass up. We have to go.”
He looked at me, and his brow furrowed. I wasn’t at all confident that he understood me.
“Of course,” I said. “I have to do all the work myself.”
I lifted my amulet and looked around the room, and my heart hurt. It was my old lab. I’d spent countless hours there, working, studying, brewing, casting, summoning, setting my hair on fire—you know, wizard stuff. So had Molly. There were smoke stains on the floor, and I could see the squares and rectangles where my old furniture had been, the feet of tables, the bases of bookshelves, the holes in the wall where I had screwed in the wire-frame storage shelving. My old copper summoning circle had survived, somehow, at the far end of the room. Maybe the floor of my old living room had collapsed over it, shielding it from the worst of the flames.
But it offered me no help.
I wouldn’t have any trouble reaching up and grabbing the lip of the opening, then hauling myself out. But climbing out while carrying my brother would be a hell of a trick. Damn, I wished I had spent more of my time on earth magic. Altering gravity for a few seconds would make this really simple—but doing it at my current level of skill would take time that we did not have.
I’d have to go with the alternative and hope I didn’t kill us both. Go, me.
I stooped down, wrapped exposed skin in towels as best as I could, and got hold of Thomas’s arms. He hissed out a breath, but he didn’t move, his body putting up all the resistance of boiled pasta. He was shockingly light, but even light, limp people are a pain and a half to move around. It took me a minute to get him up and over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. After that, I positioned myself under the exit, turning my body to, hopefully, make sure I didn’t take any of Thomas’s skin off on the way out.
“I should make a cloak of levitation,” I muttered. “Doctor Strange would never have this problem.”
I felt a flash of guilt at wasting time with smartassery and shoved it down. Time for that when my brother was safe.
And then I crouched, made the best guess I could, gathered my will, and thrust my right hand down at the floor while snarling, “Forzare!”
Raw kinetic force lashed down at the floor below me, and because of Sir Isaac Newton, it also propelled me up. I flew through the air, but I’d misjudged the amount of force needed. Magic is more art than science, and it was considerably harder to work with precision without a few tools to help me. So instead of gracefully sailing up to the level of the hallway’s floor, I sort of lurched up to the level of my belt and then started to fall back down.
I grabbed at the floor of the hallway and desperately levered a knee up into the opening to give me a couple of points of tension—but it was hardly a solid position. I pushed as hard as I could with my right arm, but it was out straight, and there was only so much power in my shoulder and upper back. I strained to lift my brother onto the floor, but I had no leverage, and my position was too precarious to apply much of my strength. My muscles burned and then began, slowly, to falter. I ground my teeth, reaching deep, and strained to gain a few fractions of an inch that began to fade almost at once.
I started preparing to drop in a controlled fall that would, hopefully, protect my brother—but then his weight suddenly vanished from my shoulder.
Lara dragged him to one side with quick efficiency, blue eyes bright, cheeks still flushed, and then seized the guard’s heavy leather jacket and tossed me one sleeve. I took it.
“You’re taking forever,” she said, and hauled me out of the hole.
“And yet you’re the one literally fucking around on the job,” I countered.
“That?” she asked, bobbing her head back toward the guard station and flashing me a wise, wicked smile. “No. That was just feeding. The other thing takes much, much longer. And preferably candles and champagne.”
I pulled my legs out of the way, barely, before she shut the trapdoor—my trapdoor—and threw the bolt.
“How is he?” she asked.
I held up my amulet so that she could see her brother better.
“Empty night,” she cursed. She crouched over him, peeling back one of his eyelids, and then his lips. His gums were swollen and blotchy with dark stains.
“What’s happening?” I asked her.
“He’s sustained too much trauma without feeding,” she said. “His Hunger needs life energy. It’s taking his. It’s turned on him. It’s killing him.”
White Court vampires led a bizarre symbiotic existence: They were born bound to a demon that existed in immaterial tandem with them, called a Hunger. It was the demon who gave them their strength, their speed, their long lives, their capacity to recover from injury. In exchange they had to feed on the life force of others, to sustain the Hunger. My brother was, I knew, a rather potent example of the breed. That meant that his Hunger was strong, too.
And now he was paying for it.
“What can we do?”
She shook her head, her face hard. “This is how White Court vampires die. How my father will die, sooner or later.”
“Justine,” I said.
That word got through. Thomas lifted his head, mirrored eyes on me. He reached out a weak hand toward me in a gesture that died of exhaustion halfway.
“No,” Lara said, her eyes intent on his face. “By the time a Hunger turns on one of us, it’s mad, uncontrollable, insatiable. Even if we could redirect the Hunger, it would kill her and the child, and he’d die anyway.” The muscles in her jaw tensed.
“There’s still part of him in there. I might be able to reach him if we get him out of here—if we hurry.”
“Right,” I said, and slung my brother back up onto my shoulder.
Lara gave me a nod of approval and rose with me, and we both padded as quietly as we could back toward the dumbwaiter shaft. We passed the enormous guard, who was sprawled on his desk, pants back on but unfastened. He reeked of bourbon. I hesitated beside the guard long enough to be sure I saw his chest rise and fall.
“He’ll have a hell of a hangover,” Lara noted.
“You were also drinking?” I asked. “When did you have time? Do you have vampire party superpowers I don’t know about?”
“I found a bottle in his desk after he was finished and poured it on him,” Lara said primly, as if she’d been wearing a Victorian school-marm’s outfit instead of a whole lot of very well-tailored nothing. She strode to the dumbwaiter door and opened it. “Simple explanation for when he wakes up with a headache and a scrambled memory.” She tilted her head. “What was with those spiders? Why did you conjure them?”
I made a frustrated sound. “It just … happened.”
She frowned for a half second and then began fighting a smile from the corners of her mouth. “Oh, Empty Night. You’ve got conjuritis? I’ve heard about how awkward it can be when wizard kids get the disease. Aren’t you a few … decades old for that?”
“It’s not like I made an appointment.”
“It would have been nice if you’d told me,” Lara said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“I took cold medicine,” I said defensively.
Lara arched an eyebrow. “Seriously?”
“Does everybody know about this disease but me?” I complained. And I swiped at my nose with my forearm, fighting back another itch.
There was a soft thump, and a bundle of towels unrolled from the bottom of the shaft, their ends neatly knotted together.
“Hurry up,” Freydis’s voice hissed from the shaft above. “I only made the illusion a quickie.”
“Help me,” I said to Lara, and together we got the makeshift rope around Thomas.
* * *
Getting my brother back up that narrow shaft wasn’t simple, even with Freydis’s arms pulling him as steadily as any heavy-duty winch. He was too weak to even hold his head up steadily, and he collected some scrapes and bangs on the way up—but we got him there.
After that, we moved quick. Freydis pulled out some cleaning wipes and swept them over Lara’s arms and legs, while Lara got her dress back on and stepped into her shoes. I was wearing the suit and had less exposed skin to clean. I used a wipe to swipe off my face, neck, and hands and flicked a comb through my hair, then dressed at my best speed.
The whole time I got dressed, I did my best to ignore the image in the boxing ring, of Lara and me sort of drowsily kissing and moving together in immediate postcoital languor. My image was breathing hard and gurgling out a self-satisfied chuckle against her throat. Her image’s hair was a mess, and her face and throat were the palest shade of pink imaginable, and it was entirely too damned easy to consider what that must feel like against my image’s lips.
“That’s very sweet, really,” Lara noted. “The personal bits in the afterglow. Perhaps not terribly believable, but a pretty fiction.”
“I should get drunk and write fucking romance,” Freydis agreed. She gave me a narrow-eyed glance. “I give the male leads too much credit. But this one seems less useless than some.”
While smoothing her dress Lara gave me a glance that made me want to swing from the various equipment around the gym while pounding my chest, and I looked away, feeling my face heat up. The problem with high-pressure situations was that they forced a lot of basic, primal things out that you could normally keep buttoned down.
“Can we focus, please?” I said, my voice only a little rough.
There was a sudden snap in the air, like an enormous discharge of static electricity, and the image in the ring burst into a spectrum of color and faded, leaving behind only a blackened, smoking wooden plaque about the size of a small domino.
“A Freydis production,” the Valkyrie noted. “Oh, one of the servers looked in and caught the show. He bought it and left discreetly, so as far as everyone at the peace talks is concerned, you guys are totally a thing as of, oh, an hour after tonight’s business.”
I blinked. “Um, what?”
“Potion,” Lara said, producing a test tube from her tiny handbag. She shook it up, uncorked it, and wrinkled her nose at the muddled, messy liquid inside. Then she closed her eyes, downed a quick swallow, and passed the tube to Freydis.
The Valkyrie looked at it askance. “I don’t normally accept drinks from guys like you, seidrmadr. What if this potion of yours makes me forget I’m protecting Lara?”
“Everyone who drinks it will be on the inside of the … the grey field,” I said. “We’ll be clear to each other. But to everyone else, we’ll seem like bland, unobtrusive background, already identified and not worthy of noticing.”
Freydis looked even more skeptical. “And this stuff actually works?”
“Too well, is the problem,” I said darkly. “Drink.”
She glowered but did. I took the tube and went to Thomas, dripping some into his mouth. He choked and twitched but he swallowed it down. Then it was my turn.
The details of all the contents aren’t terribly important, but magical potions rarely taste like anything you’d feed to an actual human. This one tasted like, and had the texture of, stale and mushy cardboard that might have had a little mold growing on it. I sort of fought it down, wishing the Mission: Impossible plan had included bringing enough water to get the taste out of my mouth afterward.
It took a couple of heartbeats and then the world sort of shifted, changing by subtle degrees, like when clouds gradually cover the sun. Color began to bleed out of the room, until the world was left in all subtle shades of grey—except for the others. I could clearly see my brother, Lara, and Freydis in full color against the monochromatic background. The air turned a little chillier, a little clammier, or maybe we just thought it did. The psychic resonance that the potion set up had some weird blowback effects on the drinker, and I’d experienced them once before, a long time ago.
“Okay,” I said. I hunched down and got one of Thomas’s arms over my shoulder. Lara got his other arm and we hauled him to his feet. “Move smoothly and calmly. If we start running around, we’ll wrinkle the seams at the edges of the glamour and make people take a second look. Once they do that, we’re screwed. So stay cool and we’ll be just fine.”
Freydis traded a look with Lara, smirking, and said, “Kids.”
“I think he’s being very sweet,” Lara said.
Right. Of the three of us in the conversation, I was the youngest by centuries at least. They had both probably faced enough dangerous situations to regard the entirety of my career as a promising rookie year. I felt like a bit of a jackass. When that happens, it’s an excellent idea to shut your mouth.
So I just started walking, leaving Lara to keep up, which she did, without effort, her blue eyes bright. We had to support maybe ninety percent of Thomas’s weight, and we stayed as close together as we could. Freydis paced along behind us, also keeping very near. Even in the realm of the supernatural, there are laws and limitations. Only so much power could go into the potion’s glamour. The less physical space the glamour would have to cover, the denser and more effective it would be. Spread it out too much, and we’d be better off shouting for the world to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
It was an incredibly subtle working of magic—one that would have been far beyond my skill without the skull’s tutelage, back in the day. It had hidden me so effectively that even screaming at people in an attempt to warn them they were about to die had gone unnoticed.
But those people hadn’t been the most skillful, potent masters of the supernatural world and its various Arts. This would be a much, much
tougher room. And I was about to pit the wiliness of Bob the Skull against the wariness and suspicion of some of the most powerful beings of the supernatural world—with utter disaster looming, should anything go amiss. We reached the doors back to the great hall, and I paused there, taking a breath and fighting down a slow shudder that tried to run up my spine.
“You’re sure,” Lara said, very quietly, “that the people here won’t see through this … disguise?”
“It’s the best I’ve got,” I said.
“That wasn’t exactly an answer.”
“Yeah,” I said, and put my hand on the door to open it. “But it’s the best I’ve got.”
28
My father, Malcolm, died when I was young. I don’t have very many memories of him, even though I realized, maybe around the age of ten, that I would lose even those if I didn’t keep them. So when I was young, I would lie awake quietly at night, thinking of him—of his face, his voice, the things he had said, and the things he had done.
Once, on the way to one of his gigs, we picked up two hitchhiking couples and drove them three hundred miles. Dad bought them a meal and replaced two of their pairs of shoes, even though we barely had enough to get by. He once found a sick and puny kitten in an alley outside a club he’d been playing, somewhere in Ohio, and spent the next three weeks carrying the little creature around with us so that he could nurse it back to health and find it a stable home. And he never passed a used bookstore. He loved books.
He took me to see Star Wars movies.
Him and me.
But it was always him and me. Until he was gone.
The brightest and best memories I had of him were getting lessons from him on magic. Not the Art—Dad was a performing illusionist.
“Everyone who comes to the show knows I’m going to try to trick them,” my father said one night. We were sitting in an all-night diner when he said it, getting dinner on the way to a show he was playing in Colorado. He was a lean, dark-haired man, with serious eyes and a quick smile. He wore a denim jacket and a Cubs baseball cap. “I know that they know. And that’s how you play the game.”