by Butcher, Jim
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.”
“Where’s Ace?”
“He had to go to work right after the funeral. But Lily’s why I need to talk to you. She’s missing. I think she’s in trouble.”
I started filling in context on the conversation I’d overheard between them. “Who are you?”
“I told you. My name is Meryl.”
“Okay, fine.What are you, Meryl?”
She flinched at the question. “Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t know what you meant.” She raked at her hair again. “I’m a changeling. We all are.”
“A what?” Billy asked.
I nodded, getting it. “Changeling,” I said to Billy. “She’s half mortal and half fae.”
“Aha,” Billy said. “Which means what?”
I shrugged. “It means that she has to choose whether to remain a mortal or become wholly fae.”
“Yes,” she said. “And until then I’m under the rule of the Court of my fae father. Winter. The others too. That’s why the four of us stuck together. It was safer.”
Billy nodded. “Oh.”
“Meryl,” I said, “what makes you think your friend is in trouble?”
“She’s not very independent, Mister Dresden. We share an apartment. She doesn’t have a very good idea of how to take care of herself, and she gets nervous if she’s out of the apartment for too long.”
“And what do you think happened to her?”
“The Winter Knight.”
Billy frowned. “Why would he hurt people in his own Court?”
Meryl let out a brief, hard laugh. “Because he can. He had a thing for Lily. He would hurt her, frighten her. He got off on it. He was furious when Maeve told him to back off. And once Ron was gone . . .” Her voice trailed off and she turned her head to one side.
“How does Reuel fit into this?” I asked.
“He was protecting us. Maeve had been torturing us for fun, and we didn’t know where to turn. Ron took us in. He put us under his protection, and no one in Winter was willing to cross him.”
“What about your fae dad?” Billy asked. “Didn’t he do anything to look out for you?”
Meryl gave Billy a flat look. “My mother was raped by a troll. Even if he’d been strong enough to do anything about Maeve hurting us, he wouldn’t have. He thinks he’s already done enough by not devouring my mom on the spot.”
“Oh,” Billy said. “Sorry.”
I frowned. “And with the Summer Knight gone, you think Slate grabbed the girl.”
Meryl said, “Someone broke into the apartment. It looked like there had been a struggle.”
I let out a sigh. “Have you contacted the police?”
She eyed me. “Oh, yeah, of course. I called them and told them that a mortal champion of the fae came and spirited away a half-mortal, half-nixie professional nude model to Faerieland. They were all over it.”
I had to admire the well-placed sarcasm. “It doesn’t take a supernatural studmuffin to cause something very bad to happen to a cute girl in this town. Your plain old mortal kidnappers and murderers can manage just fine.”
She shook her head. “Either way, she’s still in trouble.”
I lifted a hand. “What do you want from me?”
“Help me find her. Please, Mister Dresden.”
I closed my eyes. I didn’t have time, energy, or brainpower to spare for this. The smart thing would be to blow her off entirely, or to promise her I’d do it and promptly forget about it. “This just isn’t a good time.” I felt like crap the second I said it. I didn’t look at the changeling’s face. I couldn’t. “There’s too much trouble already, and I don’t even know if I can help myself, much less your friend. I’m sorry.”
I turned to go, but Meryl stepped in front of me. “Wait.”
“I told you,” I said. “There’s nothing I can—”
“I’ll pay you,” Meryl said.
Oh, right. Money.
I was about to lose the office and the apartment, and this faerie work only paid in misery. I needed to pay some bills. Go to the grocery store. My mouth didn’t actually water, but it was close.
I shook my head again. “Look, Meryl, I wish I could—”
“Double your fee,” she said, her voice urgent.
Double. My. Fee. I hesitated some more.
“Triple,” she said. She reached for her back pocket and produced an envelope. “Plus one thousand cash, up front, right now.”
I looked back at Fix, still trembling and leaning against the alley wall, a handkerchief pressed to his mouth. Meryl continued to rock from one foot to the other, her eyes on the ground, waiting.
I tried to look at things objectively. A thousand bucks wouldn’t spend if I got myself killed while distracted by the additional workload. On the other hand, if I lived through this thing the money would be necessary. My stomach growled, and a sharp pang of hunger made me clench the muscles of my belly.
I needed the work—but more to the point, I needed to be able to live with myself. I wasn’t sure I was comfortable with the idea of looking back on this particular patch of memory and seeing myself leave some helpless girl, changeling or not, to the metaphoric wolves. People don’t ask me for help if they’re anything less than desperate. The changelings had been terrified of me only a few hours before. If they had turned to me for help now, it was because they were out of options.
And they also had money.
“Dammit, dammit, dammit,” I muttered. I snatched the envelope. “All right. I’ll look into it and do what I can—but I can’t make you any promises.”
Meryl let out a shuddering breath. “Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Dresden.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a slightly crumpled business card. “Here’s my office number. Call and leave a message to let me know how I can reach you.”
She took the card and nodded. “I don’t know if I can pay your fees all at once. But I’ll be good for it, even if it takes a while.”
“We can worry about that later, when we’re all safe and sound,” I said. I nodded to her, then to Fix, and started walking down the alley again. Billy kept an eye on the pair of them and followed me.
We reached the parking lot of the funeral home a few minutes later. The lights were all out, and the Blue Beetle was the only car left in the lot. No one had bothered to steal it. What a shock.
“So what’s next?” Billy asked.
“I’ll call Murphy. See what she can tell me about Lloyd Slate.”
Billy nodded. “Anything I can do to help?”
“Actually, yeah,” I said. “Get out the phone book and call the hospitals. See if the morgues have a green-haired Jane Doe.”
“You think she’s dead, then?”
“I think it would be a lot simpler if she was.”
He grimaced. “Calling morgues? There must be about a million of
them in Chicagoland. Isn’t there anything else I could do?”
“Welcome to the glamorous world of private investigation. You want to help or not?”
“Okay, okay,” Billy said. “My car’s a block over. I’ll get back to you as soon as I’m done making calls.”
“All right. I’ll probably be at my place, but if not you know the drill.”
Billy nodded. “Be careful.” Then he walked quickly down the street without looking back.
I fumbled my keys out and walked to the Beetle.
I didn’t smell the blood until I was close enough to touch the car. Through the window I saw a form, more or less human-shaped, curled up on my passenger seat. I circled cautiously to the other side of the car, then abruptly opened the door.
Elaine fell out of the car onto the pavement of the parking lot. She was drenched in blood that had soaked through her T-shirt, matted her golden-brown hair on one side, and run down her flanks to saturate her jeans to mid thigh. Her silver pentacle shone with liquid scarlet. The bare skin of her forearms was covered with long slashes and blood, and her face looked white. Dead.
My heart hammered in my chest, and I leaned down to her, fumbling at her throat. She still had a very slow pulse, but her skin felt cool and waxy. She started shuddering and whispered, “Harry?”
“I’m here. I’m here, Elaine.”
“Please,” she whispered. “Oh, God, please help me.”
Chapter Seventeen
I laid Elaine out, first thing, and tried to determine the extent of her injuries. Her forearms had been laced open in several places, but the worst injury was on her back, just inside of her left clavicle—a nasty puncture wound. The edges of it had puckered closed, but it hadn’t stopped the bleeding completely, and if she was bleeding internally she could be done for.
I would need both hands to put pressure on the wound. No help was on the way. There was little I could do for her, so I picked her up and put her back into the Beetle, then jumped in myself and started the ignition.
“Hang in there, Elaine,” I said. “I’m getting you to a hospital. You’re going to be all right.”
She shook her head. “No. No, too dangerous.”
“You’re hurt too badly for me to take care of it,” I said. “Relax. I’ll be with you.”
She opened her eyes and said with sudden, surprising insistence, “No hospitals. They’ll find me there.”
I started up the car. “Dammit, Elaine. What else am I supposed to do?”
She closed her eyes again. Her voice grew fainter by the word. “Aurora. Summer. Rothchild Hotel. There’s an elevator in back. She’ll help.”
“The Summer Lady?” I demanded. “You’re joking, right?”
She didn’t answer me. I looked over at her, and my heart all but stopped as I saw her head lolling, her body slumped. I jammed the Beetle into gear and jounced out onto the road.
“Rothchild Hotel,” I muttered. “More faeries. Keen.”
I got us to the hotel, one of the nice places along the shores of Lake Michigan. I skipped the huge valet-littered front drive and zipped the Beetle into the back parking lot, looking for some kind of service drive, or freight elevator, or maybe just a door with a sign on it that said,SUMMER COURT OF THE FAERIES THIS WAY.
I felt a slight warmth on my ear, and then Elidee zoomed out in front of my face and bumped up against the window. I rolled the window down a bit, and the tiny faerie streaked out ahead of my car, guiding me to the back of the lot. She stopped, circling an unobtrusive, unlit breezeway. Then she sped away, her task evidently completed.
I quickly parked the car and set the brake. Elaine may have been slender, but she had too much muscle to be light. She’d always had the build of a long-distance runner, long and lean and strong. She was only just conscious enough to make it a little easier for me to carry her, wrapping her arms around my neck and leaning her head on my shoulder. She trembled and felt cold. Doubt gnawed at me as I took her down the breezeway. Maybe I should have ignored her and gone to the hospital.
I kept going until it became too dark to see, and I started to put Elaine down so that I could take out my amulet to make some light. Just as I did, a pair of elevator doors swept open, spilling light and canned music onto the breezeway.
A girl stood in the doors. She was five nothing, a hundred and nothing, her sunny hair pulled back into a braid. She wore a blue T-shirt with white painter’s overalls, and she was liberally splattered with flecks of what looked like clay. Her rosy mouth opened in dismay as she saw me standing there with Elaine.
“Oh, no!” she exclaimed. She beckoned me urgently. “Come on, get her inside. The Lady can see to her.”
My arms and shoulders had begun to burn with the effort of supporting Elaine, so I didn’t waste time talking. I shuffled forward into the elevator and leaned against the back wall with a wheeze. The girl closed the elevator doors, took a key from her overalls pocket, and inserted it into a solitary keyhole where you would expect a bunch of buttons to be. The elevator gave a little lurch and started up.
“What happened to Ela?” the girl asked me. She looked from me to Elaine and chewed on one lip.
Ela? “Beats me. I found her like this in my car. She told me to bring her here.”
“Oh. Oh, God,” the girl said. She looked at me again. “You’re with Winter, aren’t you?”
I frowned. “How did you know?”
She shrugged. “It shows.”
“I’m with Winter for now. But it’s a one-shot deal. Think of me as a free agent.”
“Perhaps. But an agent of Winter all the same. Are you sure you want to be here?”
“No,” I said. “But I’m sure I’m not leaving Elaine until I’m convinced she’s in good hands.”
The girl frowned. “Oh.”
“Can’t this thing go any faster?” My shoulders burned, my back ached, my bruises were complaining, and I could feel Elaine’s breathing growing weaker. I had to fight not to scream in sheer frustration. I wished there had been a bank of buttons to push, just so that I could have slammed the right button a bunch of times in a senseless effort to speed up the elevator.
The doors opened a geological epoch later, onto a scene as incongruous as a gorilla in a garter belt.
The elevator had taken us to what could only have been the roof of the hotel, assuming the roof opened up onto a section of rain forest in Borneo. Trees and greenery grew so thick that I couldn’t see the edge of the roof, and though I could hear the nighttime noises of Chicago, the sounds were vague in the distance and could almost not be heard over the buzz of locusts and the chittering of some kind of animal I did not recognize. Wind rustled the forest around me, and silver moonlight, brighter than I would have thought possible, gave everything an eerie, surreal beauty.
“I’m so glad I was going out for more clay just then. This way,” the girl said, and started off on a trail through the forest. I followed as quickly as I could, puffing hard to keep holding Elaine. It wasn’t a long walk. The trail wound back and forth and then opened onto a grassy glade.
I stopped and looked around. No, not a glade. More like a garden. A pool rested at its center, still water reflecting the moon overhead. Benches and stones of a good size for sitting on were strewn around the landscape. Statuary, most of it marble and of human subjects, stood here and there, often framed by flowers or placed between young trees. On the far side of the pool stood what at first glance I took to be a gnarled tree. It wasn’t. It was a throne, a throne of living wood, its trunk grown into the correct shape, branches and leaves spreading above it in stately elegance, roots spreading and anchoring it in the earth.
People stood here and there. A paint-spattered young man worked furiously on some sort of portrait, his face set in concentration. A tall man, his ageless beauty and pale hair marking him as one of the Sidhe, stood in the posture of a teacher beside a slender girl, who was drawing back a bow, aiming at a target of bundled branches. On the far side of the glade, smoke
rose from stones piled into the shape of an oven or a forge, and a broad-chested man, shirtless, bearded, heavy-browed and fierce-looking, stood on the other side of it, wielding a smith’s hammer in regular rhythm. He stepped away from the forge, a glowing-hot blade gripped in a set of tongs, and dunked it into a trough of silvery water.
When I got a better look at him, I understood what he was. Steam rose in a cloud over his heavy, equine forelegs, then over his human belly and broad chest, and the centaur stamped a rear hoof impatiently, muttering under his breath, while colored lights played back and forth in the water of the trough. Haunting pipe music, sad and lovely, drifted through the glade from a young woman, mortal, sitting with a set of reed pipes, playing with her eyes closed.
“Where is she?” I demanded. “Where is the Lady?”
The centaur’s head snapped around, and he snarled in a sudden, harsh basso. He took up his hammer again, whipped it in a quick circle, and started toward me at a slow canter, Clydesdale-sized hooves striking the ground with dull thumps. “Winterbound? Here? It cannot be borne.”
I tensed, holding Elaine a little closer, and my heart lurched into a higher gear. The centaur was huge and looked ready to kill. “Whoa, there, big fella. I’m not looking for trouble.”
The centaur bared his teeth at me and spoke, his deep voice filled with outrage. “There you stand with our Emissary’s blood on your hands and expect us to believe you?”
The tall Sidhe man barked, “Korrick, hold.”
The centaur drew up short, rearing onto his hind legs and kicking at the air with heavy hooves. “My lord Talos,” he growled in frustration. “This arrogance cannot be tolerated.”
“Peace,” the Sidhe lord said.
“But mylord —”
The Sidhe lord stepped between me and the centaur, his back to me. He wore close-fit trousers of dark green and a loose shirt of white linen. The Sidhe lord said nothing, and I couldn’t see his expression, but the centaur’s face reddened, then blanched. He bowed his head, a stiff gesture, and then walked back over to his forge, hooves striking the ground in sharp, angry motions.