by Butcher, Jim
There was silence for a moment, broken only by the crunching of tasty rings of oats or baked wheat or something. I just knew it was good for my heart and my cholesterol and for all the flowers and puppies and tiny children. The box said so.
The fallen angel spoke after a time, and her words came out quiet and poisonously bitter. “She has free will. She has a choice. That is what she is.”
“No. She is what she does,” I said quietly. “She could choose to change her ways. She could choose to take up black magic again.” I took a bite of sandwich. “Or she could ignore the choice. Pretend it doesn’t exist. Or pretend that she doesn’t have a choice, when in fact she does. That’s just another way of choosing.”
Lasciel gave me a very sharp look. The shadows shifted on her face, as if the room had grown darker. “We are not talking about me.”
I sipped Coke and said mildly, “I know that. We’re talking about Molly.”
“We are,” she said. “I have a purpose here. A mission. That has not changed.” She turned away from me, the shadows around her growing darker. Her form blended into them. “I do not change.”
“Speaking of,” I said. “A friend pointed out to me that I may have developed some anger issues over the last couple of years. Maybe influenced by…oh, who knows what.”
The fallen angel’s shadow turned her head. I could only tell because her lovely profile was slightly less black than the shadow around it.
“I thought maybe you would know what,” I said. “Tell me.”
“I told you once before, my host,” the shadow said. “You are easier to talk to when you are asleep.”
Which was just chilling, taken in that context. Everyone has that part of them that needs to be reined in. It’s that little urge you sometimes feel to hop over the edge of a great height, when you’re looking out from a high building. It’s the immediate spark of anger you feel when someone cuts you off, and makes you want to run your car into that moron. It’s the flash of fear in you when something surprises you at night, leaving you quivering with your body primed to fight or flee. Call it the hind brain, the subconscious, whatever: I’m not a shrink. But it’s there, and it’s real.
Mine wore a lot of black, even before Lasciel showed up.
Like I said. Chilling.
The fallen angel turned to depart on that note, probably because it would have made a nicely scary exit line.
I extended my hand, and with it my mind, and barred her departure with an effort of simple will. Lasciel existed only in my thoughts, after all. “My head,” I told her. “My rules. We aren’t finished.”
She turned to face me, and her eyes suddenly glowed with orange and amber and scarlet flickers of Hellfire. It was the only non-black thing about her.
“See, here’s the thing,” I said. “My inner evil twin might have a lot of impulses I’d rather not indulge—but he isn’t a stranger. He’s me.”
“Yes. He is. Full of anger. Full of the need for power. Full of hate.” She smiled, and her teeth were white and quite pointy. “He just doesn’t lie to himself about it.”
“I don’t lie to myself,” I responded. “Anger is just anger. It isn’t good. It isn’t bad. It just is. What you do with it is what matters. It’s like anything else. You can use it to build or to destroy. You just have to make the choice.”
“Constructive anger,” the demon said, her voice dripping sarcasm.
“Also known as passion,” I said quietly. “Passion has overthrown tyrants and freed prisoners and slaves. Passion has brought justice where there was savagery. Passion has created freedom where there was nothing but fear. Passion has helped souls rise from the ashes of their horrible lives and build something better, stronger, more beautiful.”
Lasciel narrowed her eyes.
“In point of fact,” I said quietly, “that kind of thing really doesn’t get done without passion. Anger is one of the things that can help build it—if it’s controlled.”
“If you really believed that,” Lasciel said, “you’d not be having any anger-control issues.”
“Because I’m perfect?” I asked her, and snorted. “A lot of men go a lifetime without ever figuring out how to control anger. I’ve been doing it longer than some, and better than some, but I don’t kid myself that I’m a saint.” I shrugged. “A lot of things I see make me angry. It’s one of the reasons I decided to spend my life doing something about it.”
“Because you’re so noble,” she purred, which dripped even more sarcasm. At this rate, I was going to need a mop.
“Because I’d rather use that anger to smash the things that hurt people than let it use me,” I said. “Talk at my subconscious all you want. But I’d be careful about trying to feed my inner Hulk, if I were you. You might end up making me that much better a person, once I beat it down. Who knows, you might make me into a saint. Or as close to one as I could get, anyway.”
The demon just stared at me.
“See, here’s the thing,” I said. “I know me. And I just can’t imagine you talking and talking to my evil twin like that, without him ever saying anything back. I don’t think you’re the only one doing any influencing here. I don’t think you’re the same creature now that you were when you came.”
She let out a cold little laugh. “Such arrogance. Do you think you could change the eternal, mortal? I was brought to life by the Word of the Almighty himself, for a purpose so complex and fundamental that you could not begin to comprehend it. You are nothing, mortal. You are a flickering spark. You will be here, and be gone, and in the aeons that come after, when your very kind have dwindled and perished, you will be but one of uncounted legions of those whom I have seduced and destroyed.” Her eyes narrowed. “You. Cannot. Change. Me.”
I nodded agreeably. “You’re right. I can’t change Lasciel. But I couldn’t prevent Lasciel from walking out of the room, either.” I eyed her hard and lowered my voice. “Lady, you ain’t Lasciel.”
I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I could see the darkened form’s shoulders flinch.
“You’re an image of her,” I continued. “A copy. A footprint. But you’ve got to be at least as mutable as the material the impression was made upon. As mutable as me. And hey, I’ve got newfound anger issues. What have you got that’s new?”
“You are delusional,” she said. Her voice was very quiet.
“I disagree. After all, if you have managed to change me—even if it doesn’t mean I’m suddenly going to turn into Ted Bundy—then it seems to me that you’d be at least as vulnerable. In fact, the way that sort of thing works…you pretty much have to have changed yourself to do what you’ve done to me.”
“It will vanish when I am taken back into my whole self imprisoned within the coin,” Lasciel said.
“You, the you who is talking to me right now, will be gone. In other words,” I said, “you’ll die.”
A somewhat startled silence followed.
“For an inhumanly brilliant spiritual entity, you can really miss the freaking point.” I poked a finger at my own temple. “Think. Maybe you don’t have to be Lasciel.”
The shadow closed her eyes, leaving only an occupied, presence-filled darkness. There was a long silence.
“Think about it,” I told her. “What if you do have a choice? A life of your own to lead? What if, huh? And you don’t even try to choose?”
I let that sink in for a while.
There was a sound from the far side of the room.
It was a very quiet, very miserable little sound.
I’ve made sounds like that before—mostly when there was no one around to care. The part of me that knew what it was to hurt could feel the fallen angel’s pain, and it gouged out a neat little hole in me, somehow. It was a vaguely familiar feeling, but not an entirely unpleasant one.
Loneliness is a hard thing to handle. I feel it, sometimes. When I do, I want it to end. Sometimes, when you’re near someone, when you touch them on some level that is deeper than the uselessly st
ructured formality of casual civilized interaction, there’s a sense of satisfaction in it. Or at least, there is for me.
It doesn’t have to be someone particularly nice. You don’t have to like them. You don’t even have to want to work with them. You might even want to punch them in the nose. Sometimes just making that connection is its own experience, its own reward.
With Marcone, it was like that. I didn’t like the slippery bastard. But I understood him. His word was good. I could trust him—trust him to be cold, ferocious, and dangerous, sure. But it was reassuring to know that there was something there to trust. The connection had been made.
Lasciel’s mere shadow was infinitely more dangerous to me than Marcone, but that didn’t mean that I couldn’t admire the creature for what it was while respecting the threat it posed to me. It didn’t mean I couldn’t feel some kind of empathy for what had to be a horribly lonely way to exist.
Life’s easier when you can write off others as monsters, as demons, as horrible threats that must be hated and feared. The thing is, you can’t do that without becoming them, just a little. Sure, Lasciel’s shadow might be determined to drag my immortal soul down to Perdition, but there was no point in hating her for it. It wouldn’t do anything but stain me that much darker.
I’m human, and I’m going to stay that way.
So I felt a little bit bad for the creature whose purpose in the universe was to tempt me into darkness. Hell, once I’d thought about it, it was just about the only job I’d heard of that had to be even more isolated and frustrating than mine.
“How many shadows like you have ever stayed in a host like me for longer than a few weeks, huh? Longer than three years?”
“Never,” Lasciel’s shadow replied in a near-whisper. “Granted, you are unusually stiff-necked, for a mortal. Suicidally so, in fact.”
“So?” I said. “I’ve held out this long. Suppose I do it the whole way? Suppose I never pick up the coin. Shadow-you never goes back to real-you. Who’s to say that shadow-you can’t find some kind of life for herself?”
Hellfire eyes narrowed at me, but she did not reply.
“Lash,” I said quietly, and relaxed my will, releasing my hold on her. “Just because you start out as one thing, it doesn’t mean you can’t grow into something else.”
Silence.
Then her voice came out, a bare whisper. “Your plan has too many variables and will likely result in our destruction. Should you wish my assistance in your madness, my host, you have only to call.”
Then the form was gone, and Lasciel was absent from my apartment.
Technically, she had never been there at all. She was all in my head. And, technically, she wasn’t gone. She was just off somewhere where I couldn’t perceive her; and I knew on a gut level—or maybe my darker self was telling me—that she’d heard me. I was onto something. I was sure of that.
Either I’m one hell of a persuasive guy or I’m a freaking sucker.
“Get your head in the game, Harry,” I told myself. “Defeat the whole damn White Court now. Worry about taking on Hell later.”
I got back to work. The clock ticked down steadily, and there was nothing I could do but get ready and kill time, waiting for nightfall and the fight that would follow.
Chapter Thirty-Four
I let Mister back in after his morning ramble, which happened to fall between three and four P.M. that day—Mister has a complicated ramble schedule that changes on a basis so mystifying that I have never been able to predict it—and took Mouse out for a stroll to the area of the boardinghouse’s little backyard set aside for him.
Tick, tock, tick, tock.
I took a bit of sandpaper to my staff and cleaned off some gunk on the bottom and some soot along the haft. I put on all my silver battle rings and took them to the heavy bag I’d hung in the corner. Half an hour’s worth of pounding on the bag wouldn’t bring them all up to charge, but something was better than nothing.
Tick, tock.
I showered after my workout. I cleaned my gun and loaded it. I pushed aside my coffee table and couch to lay out my coat on the floor and took the leather cleaner to it, being careful not to disrupt the protective spells I’d scored in the hide with tattoo needles and black ink.
In short, I did everything I could to avoid thinking about Anna Ash’s corpse in that cheap, clean little hotel room shower while the time crawled by.
Tick, tock.
At a quarter to six, there was a rapping sound outside my door. I checked out the peephole. Ramirez stood outside, dressed in a big red basketball-type tank top, black shorts, and flip-flops. He had a big gym bag over one shoulder and carried his staff, nearly as battle-scarred as mine, despite the difference in our ages, in his right hand. He rapped the end of the staff down on the concrete outside again, instead of touching my door.
I took down the wards and opened the steel security door. It didn’t take me more than five or six hard pulls to get it to swing all the way open.
“I thought you were going to get that fixed,” Ramirez said to me. He peered around the doorway before he eased forward through it, where I knew the presence of all the warding spells would be buzzing against his senses like a locomotive-sized electric razor, even though they were temporarily deactivated. “Jesus Christ, Harry. You beefed them up even more.”
“Got to exercise the apprentice’s talent somehow.”
Ramirez gave me an affable leer. “I’ll bet.”
“Don’t even joke about that, man,” I told him, without any heat in the words. “I’ve known her since she was in pigtails.”
Ramirez opened his mouth, paused, then shrugged and said, “Sorry.”
“No problem,” I said.
“But since I’m not an old man whose sex drive has withered from lack of use—”
(Don’t get me wrong. I like Carlos. But there are times, when his mouth is running, that I want to punch him in the head until all his teeth fall out.)
“—I’ll be the first to admit that I’d sure as hell find some uses for her. That girl is fine.” He frowned and glanced around—a little nervously, I thought. “Um. Molly’s not here, is she?”
“Nope,” I said. “I didn’t ask her on this operation.”
“Oh,” he said. His voice seemed to hold something of both approval and disappointment. “Good. Hey, there, Mouse.”
My dog came over to greet Ramirez with a gravely shaken paw and a wagging tail. Ramirez produced a little cloth sack and tossed it up to Mister, where he lay in his favored spot atop one of my bookcases. Mister immediately went ecstatic, pinning the sack down with one paw and rubbing his whiskers all over it.
“I disapprove of recreational drug use,” I told Ramirez sternly.
He rolled his eyes. “Okay, Dad. But since we all know who really runs this house”—Ramirez reached up to rub a finger behind one of Mister’s ears—“I’ll just keep on paying tribute lest I incur His Nibs’s imperial displeasure.”
I reached up to rub Mister’s ears when Ramirez was done. “So, any questions?”
“We’re going to stomp into the middle of a big meeting of the White Court, call a couple of them murderers, challenge them to a duel, and kill them right in front of all of their friends and relatives, right?”
“Right,” I said.
“It has the advantage of simplicity,” Ramirez said, his tone dry. He put his bag on my coffee table and opened it, drawing out a freaking Desert Eagle, one of the most powerful semiautomatic sidearms in the world. “Call them names and kill them. What could possibly go wrong with that?”
“We’re officially in a cease-fire,” I said. “And as we’ve announced ourselves as parties arriving to deliver challenge, they’d be in violation of the Accords to kill us.”
Ramirez grunted, checked the slide on the big handgun, and slapped a magazine into it. “Or we show up, they kill us, and then play like we left in good shape and vanished, and oh, dear, what a shame and loss to all those hot young women that that
madman Harry Dresden dragged good-looking young Ramirez down with him when he went.”
I snorted. “No. In the first place, the Council would find out what happened one way or another.”
“If any of them looked,” Ramirez drawled.
“Ebenezar would,” I stated with perfect confidence.
“How do you know?” Ramirez asked.
I knew because my old mentor was the Blackstaff of the Council, their completely illegal, immoral, unethical, and secret assassin, free to break the Laws of Magic whenever he deemed it fit—such as the First Law, “Thou shalt not kill.” When Duke Ortega of the Red Court had challenged me to a formal duel and cheated, Ebenezar had taken it personally. He’d pulled an old Soviet satellite down onto the vamps’ heads, killing Ortega and his whole crew. But I couldn’t tell Carlos that.
“I know the old man,” I said. “He would.”
“You know that,” Ramirez said. “What if the Whites don’t?”
“We count on our second safety net. King Raith doesn’t want to get his finely accoutred ass deposed. Our challenge is going to remove a couple of potential deposers. He’ll want us to succeed. After that, I figure quid pro quo should be enough to get us out in one piece.”
Ramirez shook his head. “We’re doing the White King, our enemy, with whom we are at war, a favor by stabilizing his grasp on the throne.”
“Yeah.”
“Why are we doing that again?”
“Because it might give the Council a chance to catch its breath, at least, if we can recover while Raith hosts peace talks.” I narrowed my eyes. “And because those murdering sons of bitches have to pay for killing a lot of innocent people, and this is the only way to get to them.”
Ramirez pulled three round-sided grenades from the pack and put them down next to the Desert Eagle. “I like that second one better. It’s a fight I can get behind. Do we have any backup?”