Dangerous Women

by George R. R. Martin

  “You’re sure they’re his?”

  Justine gestured toward her own snow-white mane. “It’s not like they’re easy to confuse.”

  I looked up to find Butters watching me silently from the other side of the room. He was a beaky little guy, wiry and quick. His hair had been electrocuted and then frozen that way. His eyes were steady and worried. He cut up corpses for the government, professionally, but he was one of the more savvy people in town when it came to the supernatural.

  “What?” I asked him.

  He considered his words before he spoke—less because he was afraid of me than because he cared about not hurting my feelings. That was the reverse of most people these days. “Is this something you should get involved in, Molly?”

  What he really wanted to ask me was if I was sane. If I was going to help or just make things a lot worse.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. I looked at Justine and said, “Wait here.”

  Then I got my stuff, took the hairs, and left.

  The first thing Harry Dresden ever taught me about magic was a tracking spell.

  “It’s a simple principle, kid,” he told me. “We’re creating a link between two similar things out of energy. Then we make the energy give us an indicator of some kind, so that we can tell which way it’s flowing.”

  “What are we going to find?” I asked.

  He held up a rather thick grey hair and nodded back toward his dog, Mouse. He should have been named Moose. The giant, shaggy temple dog was pony-sized. “Mouse,” Harry said, “go get lost and we’ll see if we can find you.”

  The big dog yawned and padded agreeably toward the door. Harry let him out and then came over to sit down next to me. We were in his living room. A couple of nights before, I had thrown myself at him. Naked. And he’d dumped a pitcher of ice water over my head. I was still mortified—but he was probably right. It was the right thing for him to do. He always did the right thing, even if it meant he lost out. I still wanted to be with him so much, but maybe the time wasn’t right yet.

  That was okay. I could be patient. And I still got to be with him in a different way almost every day.

  “All right,” I said when he sat back down. “What do I do?”

  In the years since that day, the spell had become routine. I’d used it to find lost people, secret places, missing socks, and generally to poke my nose where it probably didn’t belong. Harry would have said that went with the territory of being a wizard. Harry was right.

  I stopped in the alley outside Butters’s apartment and sketched a circle on the concrete with a small piece of pink chalk. I closed the circle with a tiny effort of will, drew out one of the hairs from the plastic bag, and held it up. I focused the energy of the spell, bringing its different elements together in my head. When we’d started, Harry had let me use four different objects, teaching me how to attach ideas to them, to represent the different pieces of the spell, but that kind of thing wasn’t necessary. Magic all happens inside the head of the wizard. You can use props to make things simpler, and in truly complex spells they make the difference between impossible and merely almost impossible. For this one, though, I didn’t need the props anymore.

  I gathered the different pieces of the spell in my head, linked them together, infused them with a moderate effort of will, and then with a murmured word released that energy down into the hair in my fingers. Then I popped the hair into my mouth, broke the chalk circle with a brush of my foot, and rose.

  Harry always used an object as the indicator for his tracking spells—his amulet, a compass, or some kind of pendulum. I hadn’t wanted to hurt his feelings, but that kind of thing really wasn’t necessary, either. I could feel the magic coursing through the hair, making my lips tingle gently. I got out a cheap little plastic compass and a ten-foot length of chalk line. I set it up and snapped it to mark out magnetic north.

  Then I took the free end of the line and turned slowly, until the tingling sensation was centered on my lips. Lips are extremely sensitive parts of the body, generally, and I’ve found that they give you the best tactile feedback for this sort of thing. Once I knew which direction Thomas was, I oriented the chalk line that way, made sure it was tight, and snapped it again, resulting in an extremely elongated V shape, like the tip of a giant needle. I measured the distance at the base of the V.

  Then I turned ninety degrees, walked five hundred paces, and repeated the process.

  Promise me you won’t tell my high school math teacher about it, but after that I sat down and applied trigonometry to real life.

  The math wasn’t hard. I had the two angles measured against magnetic north. I had the distance between them in units of Molly-paces. Molly-paces aren’t terribly scientific, but for purposes of this particular application, they were practical enough to calculate the distance to Thomas.

  Using such simple tools, I couldn’t get a measurement precise enough to know which door to kick down, but I now knew that he was relatively nearby—within four or five miles, as opposed to being at the North Pole or something. I move around the city a lot, because a moving target is a lot harder to hit. I probably covered three or four times that on an average day.

  I’d have to get a lot closer before I could pinpoint his location any more precisely than that. So I turned my lips toward the tingle and started walking.

  Thomas was in a small office building on a big lot.

  The building was three stories, not huge, though it sat amidst several much larger structures. The lot it stood upon was big enough to hold something a lot bigger. Instead, most of it was landscaped into a manicured lawn and garden, complete with water features and a very small, very modest wrought-iron fence. The building itself showed a lot of stone and marble in its design, and it had more class in its cornices than the towers nearby had in their whole structures. It was gorgeous and understated at the same time; on that block, it looked like a single, small, perfect diamond being displayed amidst giant jars of rhinestones.

  There were no signs outside it. There was no obvious way in, beyond a set of gates guarded by competent-looking men in dark suits. Expensive dark suits. If the guards could afford to wear those to work, it meant that whoever owned that building had money. Serious money.

  I circled the building to be sure, and felt the tingling energy of the tracking spell confirming Thomas’s location; but even though I’d been careful to stay on the far side of the street, someone inside noticed me. I could feel one guard’s eyes tracking me, even behind his sunglasses. Maybe I should have done the initial approach under a veil—but Harry had always been against using magic except when it was truly necessary, and it was way too easy to start using it for every little thing if you let yourself.

  In some ways, I’m better at the “how” of magic than Harry was. But I’ve come to learn that I might never be as smart as him when it came to the “why.”

  I went into a nearby Starbucks and got myself a cup of liquid life and started thinking about how to get in. My tongue was telling me all about what great judgment I had when I sensed the presence of supernatural power rapidly coming nearer.

  I didn’t panic. Panic gets you killed. Instead I turned smoothly on one heel and slipped into a short hallway leading to a small restroom. I went inside, shut the door behind me, and drew my wands from my hip pocket. I checked the energy level on my bracelets. Both of them were ready to go. My rings were all full up, too, which was about as ideal as things could get.

  So I ordered my thoughts, made a small effort of will, whispered a word, and vanished.

  Veils were complex magic, but I had a knack for them. Becoming truly and completely invisible was a real pain in the neck: passing light completely through you was a literal stone-cold bitch, because it left you freezing cold and blind as a bat to boot. Becoming unseen, though, was a different proposition entirely. A good veil would reduce your visibility to little more than a few flickers in the air, to a few vague shadows where they shouldn’t be, but it did m
ore than that. It created a sense of ordinariness in the air around you, an aura of boring unremarkability that you usually only felt in a job you didn’t like, around three thirty in the afternoon. Once you combined that suggestion with a greatly reduced visible profile, remaining unnoticed was at least as easy as breathing.

  As I vanished into that veil, I also called up an image, another combination of illusion and suggestion. This one was simple: me, as I’d appeared in the mirror a moment before, clean and seemingly perky and toting a fresh cup of creamy goodness. The sensation that went with it was just a kind of heavy dose of me: the sound of my steps and movement, the scent of Butters’s shampoo, the aroma of my cup of coffee. I tied the image to one of the rings on my fingers and left it there, drawing from the energy I’d stored in a moonstone. Then I turned around, with my image layered over my actual body like a suit made of light, and walked out of the coffee shop.

  Once outside, the evasion was a simple maneuver, the way all the good ones are. My image turned left and I turned right.

  To anyone watching, a young woman had just come out of the store and gone sauntering down the street with her coffee. She was obviously enjoying her day. I’d put a little extra bounce and sway into the image’s movements, to make her that much more noticeable (and therefore a better distraction). She’d go on walking down that street for a mile or more before she simply vanished.

  Meanwhile, the real me moved silently into an alleyway and watched.

  My image hadn’t gone a hundred yards before a man in a black turtleneck sweater stepped out of an alley and began following it—a servitor of the Fomor. Those jerks were everywhere these days, like roaches, only more disgusting and harder to kill.

  Only … that was just too easy. One servitor wouldn’t have set my instinct alarms to jingling. They were strong, fast, and tough, sure, but no more so than any number of creatures. They didn’t possess mounds of magical power; if they had, the Fomor would never have let them leave in the first place.

  Something else was out there. Something that had wanted me to be distracted, watching the apparent servitor follow the apparent Molly. And if something knew me well enough to set up this sort of diversion to ensnare my attention, then it knew me well enough to find me, even beneath my veil. There were a really limited number of people who could do that.

  I slipped a hand into my nylon backpack and drew out my knife, the M9 bayonet my brother had brought home from Afghanistan. I drew the heavy blade out, closed my eyes, and turned quickly with the knife in one hand and my coffee in the other. I flicked the lid off the coffee with my thumb and slewed the liquid into a wide arc at about chest level.

  I heard a gasp and oriented on it, opened my eyes, and stepped toward the source of the sound, driving the knife into the air before me at slightly higher than the level of my own heart.

  The steel of the blade suddenly erupted with a coruscation of light as it pierced a veil that hung in the air only inches away from me. I stepped forward rapidly through the veil, pushing the point of the knife before me toward the suddenly revealed form behind the veil. She was a woman, taller than me, dressed in ragged (coffee-stained) clothes, but with her long, fiery autumn hair unbound and wind tossed. She twisted to one side, off balance, until her shoulders touched the brick wall of the alley.

  I did not relent, driving the blade toward her throat—until at the last second, one pale, slender hand snapped up and grasped my wrist, quick as a serpent but stronger and colder. My face wound up only a few inches from hers as I put the heel of one hand against the knife and leaned against it slightly—enough to push against her strength, but not enough to throw me off balance if she made a quick move. She was lean and lovely, even in the rags, with wide, oblique green eyes and perfect bone structure that could only be found in half a dozen supermodels—and in every single one of the Sidhe.

  “Hello, Auntie,” I said in a level voice. “It isn’t nice to sneak up behind me. Especially lately.”

  She held my weight off of her with one arm, though it wasn’t easy for her. There was a quality of strain to her melodic voice. “Child,” she breathed. “You anticipated my approach. Had I not stopped thee, thou wouldst have driven cold iron into my flesh, causing me agonies untold. Thou wouldst have spilled my life’s blood upon the ground.” Her eyes widened. “Thou wouldst have killed me.”

  “I wouldst,” I agreed pleasantly.

  Her mouth spread into a wide smile, and her teeth were daintily pointed. “I have taught thee well.”

  Then she twisted with a lithe and fluid grace, away from the blade and to her feet a good long step away from me. I watched her and lowered the knife—but I didn’t put it away. “I don’t have time for lessons right now, Auntie Lea.”

  “I am not here to teach thee, child.”

  “I don’t have time for games, either.”

  “Nor did I come to play with thee,” the Leanansidhe said, “but to give thee warning: thou art not safe here.”

  I quirked an eyebrow at her. “Wow. Gosh.”

  She tilted her head at me in reproof, and her mouth thinned. Her eyes moved past me to look down the alley, and she shot a quick glance behind her. Her expression changed. She didn’t quite lose the smug superiority that always colored her features, but she toned it down a good deal, and she lowered her voice. “Thou makest jests, child, but thou art in grave peril—as am I. We should not linger here.” She shifted her eyes to mine. “If thou dost wish to brace this foe, if thou wouldst recover my Godson’s brother, there are things I must tell thee.”

  I narrowed my eyes. Harry’s Faerie Godmother had taken over as my mentor when Harry died, but she wasn’t exactly one of the good faeries. In fact, she was the second in command to Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness, and she was a bloodthirsty, dangerous being who divided her enemies into two categories: those who were dead, and those in which she had not yet taken pleasure. I hadn’t known that she knew about Harry and Thomas—but it didn’t shock me.

  Lea was a murderous, cruel creature—but as far as I knew, she had never lied to me. Technically.

  “Come,” said the Leanansidhe. She turned and walked briskly toward the far end of the alley, gathering a seeming and a veil around her as she went, to hide herself from notice.

  I glanced back toward the building where Thomas was being held, ground my teeth, and followed her, merging my veil with hers as we left.

  We walked Chicago’s streets unseen by thousands of eyes. The people we passed all took a few extra steps to avoid us, without really thinking about it. It’s important to lay out an avoidance suggestion like that when you’re in a crowd. Being unseen is kind of pointless if dozens of people keep bumping into you.

  “Tell me, child,” Lea said, shifting abruptly out of her archaic dialect. She did that sometimes, when we were alone. “What do you know of svartalves?”

  “A little,” I said. “They’re from northern Europe, originally. They’re small and they live underground. They’re the best magical craftsmen on earth; Harry bought things from them whenever he could afford it, but they weren’t cheap.”

  “How dry,” the faerie sorceress said. “You sound like a book, child. Books frequently bear little resemblance to life.” Her intense green eyes glittered as she turned to watch a young woman with an infant walk by us. “What do you know of them?”

  “They’re dangerous,” I said quietly. “Very dangerous. The old Norse gods used to go to them for weapons and armor and they didn’t try to fight them. Harry said he was glad he never had to fight a svartalf. They’re also honorable. They signed the Unseelie Accords and they uphold them. They have a reputation for being savage about protecting their own. They aren’t human, they aren’t kind, and only a fool crosses them.”

  “Better,” the Leanansidhe said. Then she added, in an offhand tone, “Fool.”

  I glanced back toward the building I’d found. “That’s their property?”

  “Their fortress,” Lea replied, “the center of their mo
rtal affairs, here at the great crossroads. What else do you recall of them?”

  I shook my head. “Um. One of the Norse goddesses got jacked for her jewelry—”

  “Freya,” Lea said.

  “And the thief—”

  “Loki.”

  “Yeah, him. He pawned it with the svartalves or something, and there was a big to-do about getting it back.”

  “One wonders how it is possible to be so vague and so accurate at the same time,” Lea said.

  I smirked.

  Lea frowned at me. “You knew the story perfectly well. You were … tweaking my nose, I believe is the saying.”

  “I had a good teacher in snark class,” I said. “Freya went to get her necklace back, and the svartalves were willing to do it—but only if she agreed to kiss each and every one of them.”

  Lea threw her head back and laughed. “Child,” she said, a wicked edge to her voice, “remember that many of the old tales were translated and transcribed by rather prudish scholars.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “That the svartalves most certainly did not agree to give up one of the most valuable jewels in the universe for a society-wide trip to first base.”

  I blinked a couple of times and felt my cheeks heat up. “You mean she had to …”

  “Precisely.”

  “All of them?”

  “Indeed.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I like to accessorize as much as the next girl, but that’s over the line. Way over. I mean, you can’t even see the line from there.”

  “Perhaps,” Lea said. “I suppose it depends upon how badly one needs to recover something from the svartalves.”

  “Uh. You’re saying I need to pull a train to get Thomas out of there? ’Cause … that just isn’t going to happen.”

  Lea showed her teeth in another smile. “Morality is amusing.”

  “Would you do it?”

  Lea looked offended. “For the sake of another? Certainly not. Have you any idea of the obligation that would incur?”

  “Um. Not exactly.”

  “This is not my choice to make. You must ask yourself this question: Is your untroubled conscience more valuable to you than the vampire’s life?”