by Butcher, Jim
“Clean living,” I said. “Plus my mondo wheels and killer bachelor pad.”
Morgan looked at me with flat eyes. “You think you’re funny.”
“Oh, Iknow I’m funny. Unappreciated, but funny.”
Morgan shook his head. “Do you know what I think, Dresden?”
“You think?” Morgan didn’t smile. Like I said, unappreciated.
“I think that you’ve planned all of this. I think you are in with the vampires and the Winter Court. I think this is part of a deeper scheme.”
I just stared at him. I tried not to laugh. I really did.
Well. Maybe I didn’t try all that hard.
The laughter must have gotten to Morgan. He balled up his fist and slammed a stiff jab into my belly that took the wind out of my sails and half dropped me to my knees.
“No,” he said. “You aren’t going to laugh this off, traitor.” He stepped into my apartment. The threshold didn’t make him blink. The wards I had up caught him six inches later, but they weren’t designed to be too much of an impediment to human beings. Morgan grunted, spoke a harsh word in a guttural tongue, maybe Old German, and slashed his hand in front of him. The air hissed and popped with static electricity, sparks flashing from his fingertips. He shook his fingers briefly, then walked in.
He looked around the place and shook his head again. “Dresden, you might not be a bad person, all in all. But I think that you’re compromised. If you aren’t working with the Red Court, then I am certain that they are using you. Either way, the threat to the Council is the same. And it’s best removed by removing you.”
I tried to suck in a breath and finally managed to say, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“Susan Rodriguez,” Morgan said. “Your lover, the vampire.”
Anger made bright lights flash behind my eyes. “She’snot a vampire,” I snarled.
“They turned her, Dresden. No one goes back. That’s all there is to it.”
“They haven’t. She’s not.”
Morgan shrugged. “That’s what you would say if she’d addicted you to the venom. You’d say or do just about anything for them by now.”
I looked up at him, teeth bared. “Get the fuck out of my house.”
He walked over to the fireplace and picked up a dust-covered gift card I’d left sitting on the mantel. He read it and snorted. Then he picked up a picture I had of Susan. “Pretty,” he said. “But that’s easy to come by. Odds are she was their pawn from the first day she met you.”
I clenched my hands into fists. “You shut your mouth,” I said. “You just shut your mouth about her. That’s not how it was.”
“You’re a fool, Dresden. A young fool. Do you really think that a normal mortal woman would want anything to do with you or your life? You can’t accept that she was just a tool. One of their whores.”
I spun to the corner, letting go of my staff, and picked up my sword cane. I drew the blade free with a steely rasp and turned toward Morgan. He saw it coming and had already drawn the bright silver blade of the Wardens from the golf bag.
Every tired, aching, angry bone in my body wanted to lunge at him. I’m not heavy with muscle, but I’m not slow, and I’ve got arms and legs miles long. My lunge is quick, and I can do it from a long way back. Morgan was a seasoned soldier, but in such close quarters it would be a question of reflexes. Advantage to the guy with the sword weighed in ounces instead of stones.
In that moment, I was sure that I could have killed him. He might have taken me with him, but I could have done it. And I wanted to, badly. Not in any sort of intellectual sense, but in the part of the brain that does all of its thinking after the fact. My temper had frayed to bloody tatters, and I wanted to vent it on Morgan.
But a thought snuck in past the testosterone and spoiled my rage. I stopped myself. Shaking, and with my knuckles white on my sword cane, I drew myself up straight. And I said, very quietly, “That’s number three.”
Morgan’s brow furrowed, and he stared at me, his own weapon steadily extended toward me. “What are you talking about, Dresden?”
“The third plan. The Merlin’s ace in the hole. He sent you here to pick a fight with me. With my door still standing open. There’s another Warden outside, listening, isn’t there? A witness, so that you have a clean kill. Hand the body over to the vampires. End of problem, right?”
Morgan’s eyes widened. He stammered over the first word. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
I picked up the sheath half of the sword cane and slipped the blade back into it. “Sure, you don’t. Get out, Morgan. Unless you’d prefer to stab an unarmed man who isn’t offering you violence.”
Morgan stared at me for a moment more. Then he shoved the sword back into the golf bag, swung it onto his shoulder, and headed for the door.
He was almost out when there was a clunk from my bedroom. I shot a look at the doorway.
Morgan stopped. He looked at me and then at my bedroom. Something ugly sparkled in his gaze. “Who is in the bedroom, Dresden? The vampire girl, perhaps?”
“No one,” I said. “Get out.”
“We’ll see,” Morgan said. He turned and walked to my bedroom door, one hand still on the sword. “You and those who consort with your like will be brought to task very soon. I’m looking forward to it.”
My heart started pounding again. If Morgan found Elaine, there were about a million things that might happen, and none of them were good. There seemed little I could do, though. I couldn’t warn her, and I couldn’t think of a way to get Morgan out of my apartment any faster.
Morgan peered through the doorway and looked around, then abruptly let out a hoarse cry and jumped back. At the same time, there was a harsh feline yowl, and Mister, my bobtailed grey cat, came zooming out of the bedroom. He darted between Morgan’s legs and then streaked past him, out of the apartment and up the stairs into the summer evening.
“Gosh, Morgan,” I said, “my cat might be a dangerous subversive. Maybe you’d better interrogate him.”
Morgan straightened, his face slightly red. He coughed and then stalked to the door. “The Senior Council members wish me to tell you that they will be nearby but that they will not interfere in this Trial or aid you in any way.” He took a business card out of his shirt pocket and let it fall to the floor. “That’s the contact number for the Senior Council. Use it when you have failed the Trial.”
“Don’t let the door hit you on the brain on the way out,” I responded.
Morgan glared at me as he left. He slammed the door behind him and stomped up the stairs.
I started trembling maybe half a minute after he left—reaction to the stress. At least I hadn’t done it in front of him. I turned around, leaned back against the door with my eyes closed, and folded my arms over my chest. It was easier not to feel myself shaking that way.
Another minute or two passed before I heard Elaine move quietly out of my bedroom. The fire popped and crackled.
“Are they gone?” Elaine asked. Her voice was very carefully steady.
“Yeah. Though I wouldn’t put it past them to watch my place.”
I felt her fingers touch my shoulder. “You’re shaking, Harry.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“You could have killed him,” Elaine said. “When you first drew.”
“Yeah.”
“Was he really setting you up like you said?”
I looked at her. Her expression was worried. “Yeah,” I said.
“God, Harry.” She shook her head. “That’s way past paranoia. And you want me to give myself to those people?”
I covered her hand with mine. “Not to them,” I said. “Not everyone on the Council is like that.”
She looked at my eyes for a moment. Then, carefully, she drew her hand out from under mine. “No. I’m not going to make myself vulnerable to men like that. Not again.”
“Elaine,” I protested.
She shook her head. “I’m leaving,
Harry.” She brushed her hair back from her face. “Are you going to tell them?”
I took a deep breath. If the Wardens found out that Elaine was still alive and avoiding them, there would be a literal witch-hunt. The Wardens weren’t exactly known for their tolerance and understanding. Morgan was walking, talking proof of that. Anyone who helped shield her from the Wardens would get the same treatment. Didn’t I already have enough problems?
“No,” I said. “Of course not.”
Elaine gave me a strained smile. “Thank you, Harry.” She lifted her staff closer to her, holding it with both hands. “Can you get the door for me?”
“They’re going to be out there watching.”
“I’ll veil. They won’t see me.”
“They’re good.”
She shrugged and said without emphasis, “I’m better. I’ve had practice.”
I shook my head. “What are we going to do about the faeries?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll be in touch.”
“How can I contact you?”
She nodded toward the door. I opened it. She stepped up beside me and kissed my cheek again, her lips warm. “You’re the one with the office and the answering service. I’ll contact you.” Then she stepped to the door, murmuring quietly under her breath. There was a glitter of sudden silver light around her that made me blink. When I opened my eyes again, she was gone.
I left the door open for a moment, and it was just as well that I did. Mister came padding back down the stairs a moment later and looked up at me with a plaintive meow. He prowled back into the apartment, curling around my legs and purring like a diesel engine. Mister is thirty pounds or so of tomcat. I figure one of his parents must have been a saber-toothed tiger. “Good timing, by the way,” I told him, and shut the door, locking it.
I stood in the dim, warm firelight of the room. My cheek still tingled where Elaine had kissed it. I could smell her lingering perfume, and it brought with it a pang of almost tangible memories, a flood of things I thought I had forgotten. It made me feel old, and tired, and very alone.
I walked to the mantel and straightened the card Susan had sent me the previous Christmas. I looked at her picture, next to the card. She’d been in a park that weekend, wearing a blue tank top and cutoff shorts. Her teeth were impossibly white against her darkly tanned skin and coal-black hair. I’d taken the picture while she was laughing, and her dark eyes shone.
I shook my head. “I am tired, Mister,” I said. “I am ridiculously tired.”
Mister meowed at me.
“Well, resting would be the sane thing to do, but who am I to throw stones, right? I mean, I’m talking to my cat.” I scratched at my beard and nodded to myself. “Just a minute on the couch. Then to work.”
I remember sitting down on the couch, and after that everything went blissfully black.
Which was just as well. The next day things got complicated.
Chapter Ten
I wasn’t too tired to dream. Evidently, my subconscious—we’ve met, and he’s kind of a jerk—had something on his mind, because the dream was a variation on the theme that had taken up most of my sleeping hours since I’d last seen Susan.
The dream began with a kiss.
Susan has a gorgeous mouth. Not too thin and not too full. Always soft, always warm. When she kissed me, it was like the world went away. Nothing mattered but the touch of her lips on mine. I kissed the dream-Susan, and she melted against me with a soft sound, the length of her body pliant, eager. Her fingers reached up and trailed over my chest, nails lightly raking.
I leaned back from the kiss after a long moment, and my eyes felt almost too heavy to open. My lips quivered and tingled with sensation, a feeling that begged for more kisses to make it cease. She looked up at me, dark eyes smoldering. Her hair had been pulled back into a long, silken tail that fell between her shoulder blades. It had grown longer, in the dreams. Her lovely aquiline face tilted up toward mine.
“Are you all right?” I asked her. I always did. And, as always, she gave me a small, sad smile and did not answer. I bit my lip. “I’m still looking. I haven’t given up.”
She shook her head and drew back from me. I had the presence of mind to look around. A dark alley this time, with the heavy, pounding music of a dance club making the nearest wall vibrate. Susan wore dark tights and a sleeveless blouse, and my black-leather duster had been draped over her shoulders and fell to brush her feet. She looked at me intently and then turned toward the entrance to the club.
“Wait,” I said.
She walked to the door and turned back to me, extending her hand. The door opened, and dim, reddish light flooded out over her, doing odd things to the shadows over her face. Her dark eyes grew larger.
No, that wasn’t right. The black of her pupils simply expanded, until the whites were gone, until there was nothing but darkness where her eyes should have been. They were vampire eyes, huge and inhuman.
“I can’t,” I said. “We can’t go in there, Susan.”
Her features grew frustrated, angry. She extended her hand to me again, more forcefully.
Hands came out of the darkness in the doorway, slim, pale, androgynous. They slipped over Susan, slowly, caressingly. Tugging at her clothing, her hair. Her eyes fluttered closed for a moment, her body growing stiff, before her weight shifted slowly toward the doorway.
Longing shot through me, sudden, mindless, and sharp as a scalpel’s blade. Hunger, a simple and nearly violent need to touch, to be touched, followed it into me, and I suddenly could not think. “Don’t,” I said, and stepped toward her.
I felt her hand take mine. I felt her press herself to me with another moan, and her lips, her mouth, devoured mine with ravenous kisses, kisses I answered with my own, harder and more demanding as my doubts faded. I felt it when her kiss turned poisonous, when the sudden narcotic numbness swept through my mouth and began to spread through my body. It didn’t make any difference. I kissed her, tore at her clothes, and she tore at mine. The hands helped, but I didn’t pay any attention to them anymore. They were an unimportant background sensation in comparison to Susan’s mouth, her hands, her skin velvet and warm beneath my fingers.
There was no romance, nothing but need, animal, carnal. I pushed her against a wall in the dim scarlet light, and she wrapped herself around me, frantic, her body urging me on. I pressed into her, sudden sensation of silk and honey, and had to fight for control, throwing my head back.
She quivered then, and as always, she struck. Her mouth closed on my throat, a flash of heat and agony that melted into a narcotic bliss like that of her kiss—but more complete. Languid delight spread through me, and I felt my body reacting, all traces of control gone, thrusting against her, into her. The motion slowly died as sheer, shivering ecstasy spread through me. I began to lose control of my limbs, muscles turning to gelatin. I sank slowly to the floor. Susan rode me down, her mouth hot and eager on my throat, her body, her hips moving now, taking over the rhythm.
The pleasure of the venom melted my thoughts, and they slid free of my flesh, floating over the ground. I looked down on my body, beneath Susan, pale and still on the floor, eyes empty. I saw the change take her. I saw her body twist and buck, saw her skin split and rip open. I saw something dark and horrible tear its way out, all gaping dark eyes and slippery black hide. Blood, my blood, smeared its mouth.
The creature froze in shock, staring down at my corpse. And as I began to drift away, the creature threw back its head, its body rubbery and sinuous as a snake’s, and let out an inhuman, screeching yowl full of rage, pain, and need.
I bolted up out of sleep with a short cry, my skin sheathed in a cold sweat, my muscles aching and stiff.
I panted for a moment, looking around my apartment. My lips tingled with remembered kisses, my skin with dreamed caresses.
I forced myself to my feet with a groan and staggered toward my shower. There were times when it was just as well that I had disconnected the wate
r heater to head off magically inspired mishaps. It made bathing sheer torture in the winter, but sometimes there’s no substitute for a cold shower.
I stripped and stood under chilly water for a while, shaking. Not necessarily from cold, either. I shook with a lot of things. First with raw and mindless lust. The shower took the edge off of that in a few moments. Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t have any particular death-sex fixation. But I had been used to a certain amount of friendly tension relieving with Susan. Her absence had killed that for me, completely—except for rare moments during the damned dreams when my hormones came raging back to the front of my thoughts again as though making up for lost time.
Second, I trembled with fear. My nightmares might be one part lusty dream, but they were also a warning. Susan’s curse could kill me and destroy her. I couldn’t forget that.
And finally, I shook with guilt. If I hadn’t let her down, maybe she wouldn’t be in this mess. She was gone, and I didn’t have the vaguest idea where she was. I should have been doing more.
I stuck my head in the water, and shoved those thoughts away, washing myself off with a ton of soap and the last shampoo in the bottle. I scrubbed at my beard and finally reached out and got my straight razor, then spent a few minutes and a lot of care removing it. Dark, wiry black hair fell in clumps to the shower floor, and my face tingled as it breathed its first air for a couple of months. But it felt good, and as I went through the routine of grooming, my thoughts cleared.
I dug some clean clothes out of my closet, padded out into the living room, and pulled back the rug that covered the trapdoor leading to the subbasement. I swung the door open, lit a candle, and descended the stepladder staircase into my lab.
My lab, in contrast to the havoc upstairs, looked like something run by a particularly anal-retentive military clerk. A long table ran down the middle of the room, between a pair of other tables, one on either wall, leaving only narrow walkways. White steel wire shelves on the walls held the host of magical components I used in research. They resided in a variety of jars, bottles, boxes, and plastic containers, most with labels listing the contents, how much was left, and when I had acquired the item. The tables were clean except for stacks of notes, a jar of pens and pencils, and myriad candles. I lit a few of them and walked down to the other end of the lab, checking the copper summoning circle set into the floor and making sure that nothing lay across it. You never knew when a magic circle would come in handy.