by Jim Butcher
I felt my eyes drawn to the Sidhe woman, trailing down the length of pale flesh left bared between the idle drapes of emerald silk, following the length of her legs. That hunger rose again in me, a raw and unthinking need. Scent flooded over me—a perfume of wind and mist, of heated flesh. Scent evoked more phantom sensations of the silken caress of delicate fae-hands, sweetly hot rake of nails, winding strength of limbs tangled with mine.
Maeve’s eyes brightened. "Perhaps she is not enough for you? Perhaps you would wish another. Even myself." As I watched, Jen leaned her cheek against Maeve’s thigh and placed a soft kiss upon the tight leather. Maeve shifted, a slow, sensual motion of her hips and back, and murmured, "Mmmm. Or more, if your thirst runs deep enough. Drive a hard bargain, wizard. All of us would enjoy that."
The longing, an aching force of naked need, redoubled. The two faeries were lovely. More than lovely. Sensuous. Willing. Perfectly unrestrained, perfectly passionate. I could feel that in them, radiating from them. If I made the bargain, they would make the evening one of nothing but indulgence, sensation, satiation, delight. Maeve and her handmaiden would do things to me that you only read about in magazines.
"Dear Penthouse," I muttered, "I never thought something like this would happen to me …"
"Wizard," Maeve murmured, "I see you weighing the consequences in your eyes. You think too much. It weakens you. Stop thinking. Come down into the earth with us."
Some mathematical and uncaring part of my brain way the hell in the back of my head reminded me that I did need that information. A simple statement from Maeve would tell me if she was the killer or not. Go ahead, it told me. It isn’t as though it’s going to be painful for you to pay her price. Don’t you deserve to have something pleasant happen to you for a change? Make the bargain. Get the information. Get wasted on kisses and pleasure and soft skin. Live a little—before that borrowed time you’re on runs out.
I reached out with a shaking hand to the crystal ewer on the table. I clenched it. It clinked and rattled against the glass as I poured cool, sparkling water into it.
Maeve’s smile grew sharper.
"Harry," Billy said, his voice uncertain. "Didn’t you just say something bad about—you know, taking food or drink from fa—uh, from these people?"
I put the pitcher down and picked up the glass of water.
Jen rubbed her cheek against Maeve’s thigh and murmured, "They never really change, do they?"
"No," Maeve said. "The males all fall to the same thing. Isn’t it delicious?"
I unbuttoned the fly in my jeans, undid the zipper a little, and dumped the cold water directly down my pants.
Some shocks of sensation are pleasant. This one wasn’t. The water was so cold that tiny chips of ice had formed in it, as though it was trying to freeze itself from the inside out. That cold went right down where I had intended it to go, and everything in my jeans tried to contract into my abdomen in sheer, hypothermic horror. I let out a little yelp, and my skin promptly crawled with gooseflesh.
The gesture had its intended effect. That overwhelming, almost feral hunger withered and vanished. I was able to take my eyes off the Winter Lady and her handmaiden, to clear my thoughts into something resembling a sane line of reason. I shook my head a bit to be sure and then looked up at Maeve. Anger surged through me, and my jaw clenched tight, but I made an effort to keep my words at least marginally polite. "Sorry, sweetie, but I have a couple problems with that offer."
Maeve’s lips tightened. "And those would be?"
"One. I’m not handing over a child to you. Not mine, not anyone’s, not now, and not ever. If you had a brain in your head, you’d have known that."
Maeve’s already pale face blanched even more, and she sat bolt upright on her throne. "You dare—"
"Shut up," I snarled, and it came out loud enough to ring off the walls of the ballroom. "I’m not finished."
Maeve jerked as though I’d slapped her. Her mouth dropped open, and she blinked at me.
"I came here under your invitation and protection. I am your guest. But in spite of that you’ve thrown glamour at me anyway." I stood up, my hands spread on the table, leaning toward her for emphasis. "I don’t have time for this crap. You don’t scare me, lady," I said. "I only came here for answers—but if you keep pushing me, I’m going to push back. Hard."
Maeve’s evident anger evaporated. She leaned back on her throne, lips pursed, her expression placid and enigmatic. "Well, well, well. Not so easily captured, it would seem."
A new voice, a relaxed, masculine drawl, slid into the silence. "I told you, Maeve. You should have been polite. Anyone who declares war on the Red Court isn’t going to be the sort to take kindly to pressure." The speaker stepped into the ballroom through the double doors and walked casually to the banquet tables and toward Maeve’s throne.
It was a man, maybe in his early thirties, medium build, maybe half an inch shy of six feet tall. He wore dark jeans, a white tee, and a leather jacket. Droplets of dark reddish brown stained the shirt and one side of his face. His scalp was bald but for a stubble of dark hair.
As he approached, I picked out more details. He had a brand on his throat. A snowflake made of white scar tissue stood out sharply against his skin. The skin on one side of his face was red and a little swollen, and he was missing half of the eyebrow and a crescent of the stubble on his scalp on that side—he’d been burned, and recently. He reached the throne and dropped to one knee before it, somehow conveying a certain relaxed insolence with the gesture, and extended the box to Maeve.
"It is done?" Maeve asked, an almost childlike eagerness in her voice. "What took you so long?"
"It wasn’t as easy as you said it would be. But I did it."
The Winter Lady all but snatched the carved box from his hands, avarice lighting her eyes. "Wizard, this is my Knight, Lloyd of the family Slate."
Slate nodded to me. "How are you?"
"Impatient," I responded, but I nodded back to him warily. "You’re the Winter Knight?"
"So far, yeah. I guess you’re the Winter Emissary. Asking questions and investigating and so on."
"Yep. Did you kill Ronald Reuel?"
Slate burst out laughing. "Christ, Dresden. You don’t waste time, do you?"
"I’ve filled my insincere courtesy quota for the day," I said. "Did you kill him?"
Slate shrugged and said, "No. To be honest with you, I’m not sure I could have killed him. He’s been at this a lot longer than me."
"He was an old man," I said.
"So are a lot of wizards," Slate pointed out. "I could have bench-pressed him, sure. Killing him is something else altogether."
Maeve let out a sudden hiss of anger, the sound eerily loud. She lifted her foot and kicked Slate in the shoulder. Something popped when she did, and the force of the kick drove the Winter Knight down a tier, into the table and the Sidhe seated there. The table toppled, and Sidhe, chairs, and Knight went sprawling.
Maeve rose to her feet, sending the green-toothed Jen scooting away from her. She drew what looked like a military-issue combat knife from the carved box. It was crusted with some kind of black gelatinous substance, like burned barbecue sauce. "You stupid animal," she snarled. "Useless. This is useless to me."
She hurled the knife at Slate. The handle hit him in the biceps of his left arm just as he sat up again. His face twisted in sudden fury. He took up the knife, rose to his feet, and stalked toward Maeve with murder in his eye.
Maeve drew herself up, her face shining with a sudden terrible beauty. She lifted her right hand, ring finger and thumb both bent, and murmured something in a liquid, alien tongue. Sudden blue light gathered around her fingers, and the temperature in the room dropped by about forty degrees. She spoke again, and flicked her wrist, sending glowing motes of azure flickering toward Slate.
The snowflake brand flared into sudden light, and Slate’s advance halted, his body going rigid. The skin around the brand turned blue, then purple, then black
, spreading like a stop-motion enhanced film of gangrene. A quiet snarl slipped from Slate’s lips, and I could see his body trembling with the effort to continue toward Maeve. He shuddered and took another step forward.
Maeve lifted her other hand, her index finger extended while the others curled, and a sudden wind whipped past me, cold enough that it stole the breath from my lungs. The wind whipped madly around Slate, making his leather coat flap. Bits of white frost started forming on his eyelashes and eyebrows. His expression, now anguished as well as full of rage, faltered, and his advance halted again.
"Calm him," Maeve murmured.
Jen slipped behind Slate, wrapping her arms around his neck, leaning her mouth down close to his ear. Slate’s eyes flickered with hot, violent hate for a moment, and then began to grow heavier. Jen ran her hand slowly down the sleeve of his jacket, fingers caressing his wrist. His arm lowered as I watched. A moment later, Jen slid the jacket from his shoulders. The tee was sleeveless, and Slate’s arms were hard with muscle—and tracked with needle marks. Jen held out a hand, and another darting pixie handed her a hypodermic needle. Jen slipped it into the bend of his arm, still whispering to him, sliding the plunger slowly down.
Slate’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he sank to his knees. Jen went down with him, wrapped around him like kelp on a swimmer, her mouth next to his ear.
Maeve lowered her hands, and the wind and the cold died away. She lifted a shaking hand to her face and stepped back to the throne, settling stiffly onto it, narrowed eyes locked on Slate’s increasingly malleable form. Her cheekbones stood out more sharply than before, her eyes looked more sunken. She gripped the arms of the throne, her fingers twitching.
"What the hell was that?" Billy whispered.
"Probably what passes for a polite disagreement," I muttered. "Get up. We’re leaving."
I stood up. Maeve’s eyes darted to me. Her voice came out dry, harsh. "Our bargain is not complete, wizard."
"This talk is."
"But I have not answered your question."
"Keep your answer. I don’t need it anymore."
"You don’t?" Maeve asked.
"We don’t?" Billy said.
I nodded toward Slate and Jen. "You had to push yourself to make him stand still. Look at you. You’re just about out of gas right now from going up against your own Knight." I started down the tiers, Billy coming with me. "Besides that, you’re sloppy, sweetheart. Reckless. A clean killing like Reuel’s takes a plan, and that isn’t you."
I could feel her eyes pressing against my back like frozen thorns. I ignored her.
"I did not give you leave to go, wizard," she said, her voice chilly.
"I didn’t ask."
"I won’t forget this insolence."
"I probably will," I said. "It’s nothing special. Come on, Billy."
I walked to the double doors and out. As soon as we were both outside, the doors swung shut with a huge, hollow boom that made me jump. Darkness fell, sudden and complete, and I fumbled for my amulet as my heart lurched in panic.
The spectral light from my amulet showed me Billy’s strained face first, and then the area immediately around us. The double doors were gone. Only a blank stone wall remained where they had been.
"Gulp," Billy said. He shook his head for a moment, dazed. "Where did they go?"
I rested my fingers against the stone wall, reaching out for it with my wizard’s senses. Nothing. It was rock, not illusion. "Beats the hell out of me. The doors here must have been a way to some other location."
"Like some kind of teleport?"
"More like a temporary entrance into the Nevernever," I said. "Or a shortcut through the Nevernever to another place on Earth."
"Kind of intense in there. When she made it get all cold. I’ve never seen anything like that before."
"Sloppy," I said. "She was laying a binding on Slate. Her power was sloshing over into changing the temperature. A child could do better."
Billy let out a short, quiet laugh. "After what we just saw, anyone else would still be shaking. You’re giving her the rating from the Russian judge."
"So sue me." I shrugged. "She’s strong. Strong isn’t everything."
Billy glanced up at me. "Could you do what she did?"
"I’d probably use fire."
His eyebrows went up, his expression impressed. "Do you really think Maeve’s not the killer?"
"I do," I said. "This murder was clean enough to look like an accident. Maeve’s obviously got impulse-control issues. Doesn’t make for much of a methodical murderer."
"What about Slate?"
I shook my head, my brow tightening. "Not sure about him. He’s mortal. There’s nothing that says he couldn’t lie to us. But I got what I was looking for, and I found out a couple of things on top of that."
"So why are you frowning?"
"Because all I got was more questions. Everyone’s been telling me to hurry. Faeries don’t do that. They’re practically immortal and they’re not in a rush. But Mab and Grimalkin both have tried to rush me now. Maeve went for the high-pressure sales tactic too, like she didn’t have time for anything more subtle."
"Why would they do that?"
I sighed. "Something’s in motion. If I don’t run down the killer, the Courts could go to war with one another."
"That would explain the whole World War Two dress motif back there."
"Yeah, but not why time would be so pressing." I shook my head. "If we could have stayed longer, I might have been able to work out more, but it was getting too nervous in there."
"Discretion, valor," Billy said by way of agreement. "We leave now, right?"
"Elidee?" I asked. I felt a stirring in my hair, and then the tiny pixie popped out to hover in the air in front of me. "Can you lead us back to my car?"
The pixie flashed in the affirmative and zipped away. I lifted my amulet and followed.
Billy and I didn’t speak until our guide had led us out of the underground complex not far from where I’d parked the Blue Beetle. We cut through an alley.
About halfway down it, Billy grabbed my arm and jerked me bodily behind him, snapping, "Harry, get back!"
In the same motion he swung out one foot and kicked a metal trash can. It went flying, crashing into something I hadn’t seen behind it. Someone let out a short, harsh gasp of pain. Billy stepped forward and picked up the metal lid that had fallen to the ground. He swung it down at the shape. It struck with a noisy crash.
I took a couple of steps back to make sure I was clear of the action, and reached for my amulet again. "Billy," I said, "what the hell?"
I felt the sudden presence at my back half a second too late to get out of the way. A hand the size of a dinner plate closed on the back of my neck like a vice and lifted. I felt my heels rise until my toes were just barely touching the ground.
A voice, a feminine contralto, growled, "Let go of the amulet and call him off, wizard. Call him off before I break your neck."
Chapter Sixteen
Being held up by your neck hurts. Trust me on this one. I lifted my hands by way of attempting to convey compliance and said, "Billy, get off him."
Billy took a step back from the pale-haired young man he’d knocked down. Fix whimpered and scuttled away on his hands and butt. His borrowed brown suit was soiled and torn, and his yellow polyester tie hung from his collar by only one of its clips. He put his back against the alley wall, eyes wide beneath his shock of white dandelion hair.
Billy’s eyes flicked from my assailant to Fix and back. He squinted at her for a moment, then set his jaw in an expression of casual determination. "Harry? You want me to take her?"
"Wait a minute," I managed to say. "Okay, he’s off. Put me down."
The grip on the back of my neck relaxed, and as I touched ground again I took a step toward Billy, turning to face the woman who had held me.
As I expected, it was the tall, muscular young woman from the funeral home, her muddy green hair hangi
ng lankly over her eyes and one cheek. She folded her arms and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. "Fix? Are you okay?"
The smaller man panted, "My lip is cut. It isn’t bad."
The woman nodded and faced me again.
"All right," I said. "Who the hell are you?"
"My name’s Meryl," she said. Her voice was surprisingly quiet, contrasting with her size. "I wanted to apologize to you, Mr. Dresden. For hitting you and throwing you into the Dumpster."
I raised my eyebrows. "Are you sure you got the right guy, Meryl? No one ever apologizes to me for anything."
She pushed at her hair with one hand. It fell right back over her face. "I’m sorry. I was scared earlier, and I acted without thinking."
I traded a glance with Billy. "Uh, okay. I’m pretty sure lurking in a dark alley to mug me with your apology isn’t the usual way to go about saying you’re sorry. But I didn’t read that Mars-Venus book, so who knows."
Her mouth twitched, and she relaxed her stance by a tiny degree. "I didn’t know how else to find you, so I was just waiting near your car."
"Okay," I said. My neck still throbbed where her fingers had clamped on. Five to one I would have wonderful stripy bruises the next day. I nodded and turned away. "Apology accepted. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have things I need to do."
A note of panic crept into her voice. "Wait. Please."
I stopped and looked back at her.
"I need to talk to you. Just for a minute." She took a deep breath. "I need your help."
Of course she did.
"It’s very important."
Of course it was.
The headache started coming back. "Look, Meryl, I’ve got a lot on my plate already."
"I know," she said. "Investigating Ron’s death. I think I can help you."
I pursed my lips. "You were close to Reuel?"
She nodded. "Me. Fix. Ace. And Lily."
I flashed back on the photo of Reuel and the four young people. "Green-haired girl? Very cute?"
"Yes."