by Butcher, Jim
I heard brisk, somewhat heavy footsteps below me, and beyond the fence at the back of the little yard. I froze in place in the tree house, Listening.
The heavy footsteps padded up to the fence at the back of the yard, and I heard the scrape of chain link dragging against dry leaves and other late-winter detritus. I heard a muted grunt of effort and a long exhalation. Then the footsteps came to the base of the tree.
Leather scraped against a wooden step, and the tree shivered almost imperceptibly. Someone was climbing up.
I looked around me but the ladder was the only way down, unless I felt like jumping. It couldn’t have been more than nine or ten feet down. Odds were I could land more or less in one piece. But if I misjudged the jump I could sprain an ankle or break a leg, which would make running away both impractical and embarrassing. Jumping would have to be a last resort.
I gathered in my will and settled my grip on my blasting rod, pointing it directly at where the ladder met the platform. The tip of the blasting rod glowed with a pinpoint of bright red energy.
Blond hair and the top half of a girl’s angelic young face appeared at the top of the ladder. There was a quiet gasp and her blue eyes widened. “Holy crap.”
I jerked the tip of the blasting rod up and away from the girl, releasing the gathered energy. “Molly?”
The rest of the girl’s face appeared as she climbed on up the ladder. “Wow, is that an acetylene torch or something?”
I blinked and peered more closely at Molly. “Is that an earring in your eyebrow?”
The girl clapped her fingers over her right eyebrow.
“And your nose?”
Molly shot a furtive look over her shoulder at the house, and scrambled the rest of the way up to the tree house. As tall as her mother, Molly was all coltish legs and long arms. She wore a typical private-school uniform of skirt, blouse, and sweater—but it looked like she’d been attacked by a lech with razor blades where fingers should have been.
The skirt was essentially slashed to ribbons, and underneath it she wore black tights, also torn to nigh indecency. Her shirt and sweater had apparently endured the Blitz, but the bright red satin bra that peeked out from beneath looked new. She had on too much makeup. Not as bad as most kids too old to play tag but too young to drive, but it was there. She wore a ring of fine gold wire through one pale gold eyebrow, and a golden stud protruded from one side of her nose.
I worked hard not to smile. Smiling would have implied that I found her outfit amusing. She was young enough to be hurt by that kind of opinion, and I had a vague memory of being that ridiculous at one time. Let he who hath never worn parachute pants cast the first stone.
Molly clambered in and tossed a bulging backpack down on the wooden floor. “You lurk in tree houses a lot, Mister Dresden?”
“I’m looking for your dad.”
Molly wrinkled up her nose, then started removing the stud from it. I didn’t want to watch. “I don’t want to tell you how to investigate stuff, but generally speaking you won’t find him in tree houses.”
“I came over, but no one answered the door when I knocked. Is that normal?”
Molly took out the eyebrow ring, dumped the backpack out onto the floorboards, and started sorting out a long skirt with a floral print, a T-shirt, and a sweater. “It is on errands day. Mom loads up the sandcrawler with all the little snot-nosed Jawas and goes all over town.”
“Oh. Do you know when she’s due back?”
“Anytime,” Molly said. She hopped into the skirt, and wriggled out of the tattered skirt and tights in that mystifyingly modest way that girls always seem to manage to acquire sometime in their teens. The shirt and pink sweater went on next, and the ripped up sweater and, to my discomfort, the bright red bra came out from under the conservative clothes and got tucked back into the backpack.
I turned my back on the girl as well as I could in the limited space. The link of handcuff Anna Valmont had slapped onto my wrist chafed and pinched. I scratched at it irritably. You’d think I’d been cuffed enough times that I should have gotten myself a key by now.
Molly took a wet-wipe from somewhere and started peeling the makeup from her face. “Hey,” she asked a minute later. “What’s wrong?”
I grunted and waved my wrist vaguely, swinging the cuff around.
“Hey, neat,” Molly said. “Are you on the lam? Is that why you’re hiding in a tree house, so the cops won’t find you?”
“No,” I said. “It’s kind of a long story.”
“Ohhhh,” Molly said wisely. “Those are fun-time handcuffs, not bad-time handcuffs. I gotcha.”
“No!” I protested. “And how the hell would you know about fun-time handcuffs anyway? You’re like ten.”
She snorted. “Fourteen.”
“Whatever, too young.”
“Internet,” she said sagely. “Expanding the frontiers of adolescent knowledge.”
“God, I’m old.”
Molly clucked and dipped into the backpack again. She grabbed my wrist firmly, shook out a ring of small keys, and started trying them in the lock of the cuffs. “So give me the juicy details,” she said. “You can say ‘bleep’ instead of the fun words if you want.”
I blinked. “Where the bleep did you get a bunch of cuff keys?”
She looked up at me and narrowed her eyes. “Think about this one. Do you really want to know?”
I sighed. “No. Probably not.”
“Cool,” she said, and turned her attention back to the handcuffs. “So stop dodging the issue. What’s up with you and Susan?”
“Why do you want to know?”
“I like romance. Plus I heard Mom say that you two were a pretty hot item.”
“Your mom said that?”
Molly shrugged. “Sorta. As much as she ever would. She used words like ‘fornication’ and ‘sin’ and ‘infantile depravity’ and ‘moral bankruptcy.’ So are you?”
“Morally bankrupt?”
“A hot item with Susan.”
I shrugged and said, “Not anymore.”
“Don’t move your wrist.” Molly fiddled with one key for a moment before discarding it. “What happened?”
“A lot,” I said. “It’s complicated.”
“Oh,” Molly said. The cuffs clicked and loosened and she beamed up at me. “There.”
“Thanks.” I rubbed my sore wrist and put the cuffs in my coat pocket.
Molly bent over and picked up a piece of paper. She read it and said, “Ask Michael about duel? Whiskey and tobacco?”
“It’s a shopping list.”
Molly frowned. “Oh.” She was quiet for a moment and then asked, “So was it the vampire thing?”
I blinked at the girl again. “Was there a PBS special or something? Is there some kind of unauthorized biography of my life?”
“I snuck downstairs so I could listen to Dad tell Mom what had happened.”
“Do you eavesdrop on every private conversation you can?”
She rolled her eyes and sat down on the edge of the platform, her shoes waving in the air. “No one says anything interesting in a public conversation, do they? Why did you guys split up?”
I sat down next to her. “Like I said. It was complicated.”
“Complicated how?”
I shrugged. “Her condition gives her…an impulse-control problem,” I said. “She told me that strong emotions and uh, other feelings, are dangerous for her. She could lose control and hurt someone.”
“Oh,” Molly said, and scrunched up her nose again. “So you can’t make a play for her or—”
“Bad things could happen. And then she’d be a full vampire.”
“But you both want to be together?” Molly asked.
“Yeah.”
She frowned. “God, that’s sad. You want to be with her but the sex part—”
I shuddered. “Ewg. You are far too young to say that word.”
The girl’s eyes shone. “What word? Sex?”
I
put my hands over my ears. “Gah.”
Molly grinned and enunciated. “But the bleep part would make her lose control.”
I coughed uncomfortably, lowering my hands. “Basically. Yeah.”
“Why don’t you tie her up?”
I stared at the kid for a second.
She lifted her eyebrows expectantly.
“What?” I stammered.
“It’s only practical,” Molly stated firmly. “And hey, you’ve already got the handcuffs. If she can’t move while the two of you are bleeping, she can’t drink your blood, right?”
I stood up and started climbing down the ladder. “This conversation has become way too bleeping disturbing.”
Molly laughed at me and followed me back to the ground. She unlocked the back door with another key, presumably from the same ring, and that was when Charity’s light blue minivan turned into the driveway. Molly opened the door, darted into the house, and returned without her backpack. The minivan ground to a halt and the engine died.
Charity got out of the van, frowning at me and at Molly in more or less equal proportions. She wore jeans, hiking boots, and a heavy jacket. She was a tall woman, only an inch or so under six feet, and carried herself with an assurance that conveyed a sense of ready strength. Her face had the remote beauty of a marble statue, and her long blond hair was knotted behind her head.
Without being told, Molly went to the rolling side panel door, opened it, and reached inside, unloading children from safety seats, while Charity went to the rear of the van and opened the rear doors. “Mister Dresden,” she said. “Lend a hand.”
I frowned. “Uh. I’m sort of in a hurry. I was hoping to find Michael here.”
Charity took a twenty-four-pack of Coke from the van in one arm and a couple of bulging paper grocery sacks in the other. She marched over to me and shoved them at my chest. I had to fumble to catch them, and my blasting rod clattered to the ground.
Charity waited until I had the sacks before heading for the van again. “Put them on the table in the kitchen.”
“But—” I said.
She walked past me toward the house. “I have ice cream melting, meat thawing, and a baby about to wake up hungry. Put them on the table, and we’ll talk.”
I sighed and looked glumly at the groceries. They were heavy enough to make my arms burn a little. Which probably isn’t saying much. I don’t spend much time working out.
Molly appeared from the van, lowering a tiny, tow-headed girl to the driveway. She was wearing a pink dress with a clashing orange sweater and bright purple shoes and a red coat. She walked up to me and said, words edged with babyish syllables, “My name is Amanda. I’m five and a half and my daddy says I’m a princess.”
“I’m Harry, Your Highness,” I said.
She frowned and said, “There’s already a Harry. You can be Bill.” With that, she broke into a flouncing skip and followed her mother into the house.
“Well, I’m glad that’s settled,” I muttered. Molly lowered an even smaller blond girl to the driveway. This one was dressed in blue overalls with a pink shirt and a pink coat. She held a plush dolly in one arm and a battered-looking pink blanket in the other. Upon seeing me, she retreated a couple of steps and hid around the corner of the van. She leaned out to look at me once, and then hid again.
“I’ve got him,” said an accented male voice.
Molly hopped out of the van, grabbed a grocery bag from the back, and said, “Come on, Hope.” The little girl followed her big sister like a duckling while Molly went into the house, but Hope glanced back at me shyly three or four times on the way.
Shiro emerged from the van carrying a baby seat. The little old knight carried the walking stick that concealed his sword on a strap over one wide shoulder, and his scarred hands held the chair carefully. A boy, probably not yet two years old, slept in it.
“Little Harry?” I asked.
“Yes, Bill,” Shiro said. His eyes sparkled behind his glasses
I frowned and said, “Good-looking kid.”
“Dresden!” snapped Charity’s voice from the house. “You’re holding the ice cream.”
I scowled and told Shiro, “Guess we’d better get in.”
Shiro nodded wisely. I took the groceries into the Carpenters’ big kitchen and put them on the table. For the next five minutes, Shiro and Molly helped me carry in enough groceries to feed a Mongol horde.
After all the perishables got put away, Charity fixed a bottle of formula and passed it off to Molly, who took it, the diaper bag, and the sleeping boy into another room. Charity waited until she had left, then shut the door. “Very well,” she said, still putting groceries away. “I haven’t spoken to Michael since you called this morning. I left a message with his cell phone voice mail.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
Shiro laid his cane on the table and sat down. “Mister Dresden, we have asked you not to get involved in this business.”
“That isn’t why I’m here,” I said. “I just need to talk to him.”
“Why are you looking for him?” Shiro asked.
“I’m dueling a vampire under the Accords. I need a second before sundown or I get disqualified. Permanently.”
Shiro frowned. “Red Court?”
“Yeah. Some guy named Ortega.”
“Heard of him,” Shiro said. “Some kind of war leader.”
I nodded. “That’s the rumor. That’s why I’m here. I had hoped Michael would be willing to help.”
Shiro stroked a thumb over the smooth old wood of his cane. “We received word of Denarian activity near St. Louis. He and Sanya went to investigate.”
“When will they get back?”
Shiro shook his head. “I do not know.”
I looked at the clock and bit my lip. “Christ.”
Charity walked by with an armload of groceries and glared at me.
I lifted my hands. “Sorry. I’m a little tense.”
Shiro studied me for a moment, and then asked, “Would Michael help him?”
Charity’s voice drifted out of the cavernous walk-in pantry. “My husband is sometimes an idiot.”
Shiro nodded and said, “Then I will assist you in his stead, Mister Dresden.”
“You’ll what?” I asked.
“I will be your second in the duel.”
“You don’t have to do that,” I said. “I mean, I’ll figure out something.”
Shiro lifted an eyebrow. “Have the weapons been set for the duel?”
“Uh, not yet,” I said.
“Then where is the meeting with the emissary and your opponent’s second?”
I fished out the card I’d gotten from the Archive. “I don’t know. I was told to have my second call this number.”
Shiro took the card and rose without another word, heading for the phone in the next room.
I put my hand on his arm and said, “You don’t need to take any chances. You don’t really know me.”
“Michael does. That is enough for me.”
The old Knight’s support was a relief, but I felt guilty, somehow, for accepting it. Too many people had been hurt on my behalf in the past. Michael and I had faced trouble together before, looked out for each other before. Somehow, it made it easier for me to go to him and ask for help. Accepting the same thing from a stranger, Knight of the Cross or not, grated on my conscience. Or maybe on my pride.
But what choice did I have?
I sighed and nodded. “I just don’t want to drag someone else into more trouble with me.”
Charity muttered, “Let me think. Where have I heard that before?”
Shiro smiled at her, the expression both paternal and amused, and said, “I’ll make the call.”
I waited while Shiro made a call from the room that served as the family study and the office for Michael’s contracting business. Charity stayed in the kitchen and wrestled a huge Crock-Pot onto the counter. She got out a ton of vegetables, stew meat, and a spice rack and set to
chopping things up without a word to me.
I watched her quietly. She moved with the kind of precision you see only in someone who is so versed at what they are doing that they are already thinking of the steps coming twenty minutes in the future. I thought she took her knife to the carrots a little more violently than she needed to. She started preparing another meal somewhere in the middle of making the stew, this one chicken and rice and other healthy things I rarely saw in three dimensions.
I fidgeted for a bit, until I stood up, washed my hands in the sink, and started cutting vegetables.
Charity frowned at me for a moment. She didn’t say anything. But she got a few more veggies out and put them down next to me, then collected what had been cut so far and pitched them into the Crock-Pot. A couple of minutes later she sighed, opened a can of Coke, and put it on the counter next to me.
“I worry about him,” she said.
I nodded, and focused on cucumbers.
“I don’t even know when he’ll be home tonight.”
“Good thing you have a Crock-Pot,” I said.
“I don’t know what I would do without him. What the children would do. I’d feel so lost.”
What the hell. An ounce of well-intentioned but irrational reassurance didn’t cost anything. I took a sip of the Coke. “He’ll be all right. He can handle himself. And he has Shiro and Sanya with him.”
“He’s been hurt three times, you know.”
“Three?” I asked.
“Three. With you. Every time.”
“So it’s my fault.” My turn to chop vegetables like teenagers in a slasher movie. “I see.”
I couldn’t see her face but her voice was, more than anything else, tired. “It isn’t about blame. Or whose fault it is. All that matters is that when you’re around, my husband, my children’s father, gets hurt.”
The knife slipped and I cut off a neat little slice of skin on my index finger. “Ow,” I snarled. I slapped the cold water on in the sink and put my finger under it. You can’t tell, with cuts like that, how bad they’re going to be until you see how much you’re leaking. Charity passed me a paper towel, and I examined the cut for a minute before wrapping the towel around it. It wasn’t bad, though it hurt like hell. I watched my blood stain the paper towel for a minute and then I asked, “Why didn’t you get rid of me, then?”