The Ultimate Dresden Omnibus, 0-15

by Butcher, Jim

  I started climbing faster, my stomach turning with reaction to the height and the fear. I heard myself making desperate little grunting sounds. The wind howled, blowing snow into my eyes. Frost formed on my eyelashes. My coat did little to protect me from the wind swirling the length of my body, and I started shaking uncontrollably.

  I lost the staff when I was about fifty feet up. It tumbled from my numbing fingers, and I held my breath. The rattle of its impact could attract the gruffs’ attention and ruin the whole purpose of taking the madman route off the building.

  But the solid length of oak fell into a drift of snow and vanished silently into the white powder. I labored to emulate it, only less quickly.

  I didn’t slip until I was ten feet up. I managed to take the fall well, mostly because I landed in the same snowdrift that had received my staff. I struggled up out of the freezing white, and almost went back down when my staff tangled in my legs. I took it up in mostly nerveless hands and staggered out of the drift.

  A sphere of light whipped past the other end of the alley, then reappeared and shot toward me.

  Toot-toot’s face was unusually sober, even grim. He zipped up to me and held a finger to his lips. I nodded at him and mouthed, I need to know how to get out.

  Toot’s sphere of light bobbed once in acknowledgment and then sped away. I looked up. Other balls of glowing light darted about the skies, flickers that you would barely even notice if you didn’t know what to look for. I took a precaution while I waited.

  As before, I didn’t wait long. Toot returned a moment later and beckoned me. He took the lead and I followed him. I was getting colder. The fall into the drift had covered me in a light layer of snow, which had then melted. Wet clothes are exactly the worst thing to be wearing in that kind of weather. I had to keep moving. Hypothermia isn’t as dramatic a death as being ripped apart by bullets, but it’ll get the job done.

  When I got to the far end of the alley, I heard another bleating cry from a gruff, drifting on the moaning wind, softened by the falling snow. I glanced back and just barely saw motion as a gruff descended the side of the building the same way I had—though much more swiftly.

  A second later there was an agonized, inhuman scream as the gruff got to the bottom and discovered that the snow had hidden the box of nails that I had stolen from the tool room and spread liberally over the ground. The screams went on for several seconds. One of the nails must have pierced the gruff ’s hoof, and as tired and cold as I was, I still had energy enough to grin. That one wasn’t going to be dancing in elf circles anytime soon.

  I’d lamed two of them, and figured it would be enough to make them back off the chase, at least for the moment. But you never can tell. I wasted no time in following Toot through back alleys and away from the chosen emissaries of Summer. Around me the little glowing Christmas balls of light, the Za-Lord’s Guard, darted back and forth, a wary ring of sentinels spread in a perimeter that moved as I did.

  Several blocks away I found an all-night grocery store and staggered in out of the cold. The clerk glared at me until I hobbled over, clumsily dug change out of my pockets, and left it next to the cash register before shuffling to the coffee counter. At that point the clerk evidently decided that he wouldn’t have to get out the shotgun or whatever he had behind the counter, and went back to staring out the window.

  There were a few other shoppers there, and I saw a police car crunch through the snow on the street outside, probably responding to the alarm at the building. Nice and public. Probably safe. I was so cold I could barely fill up the cup. The coffee, which burned my tongue a little, was absolutely delicious, even served black. I guzzled the hot drink and felt sensation begin returning to my body.

  I stood there for a moment with my eyes closed and finished the coffee. Then I crushed the paper cup and tossed it into the trash.

  Someone had snatched John Marcone, and I had to find him and protect him. I had a feeling that Murphy wasn’t going to be thrilled with the circumstances around this one. Hell’s bells, I wasn’t happy with it. But that really wasn’t what was bothering me.

  What really worried me was that Mab had been involved.

  What was the deal with having Grimalkin along to do her talking for her? Aside from making her seem even more extremely disturbing than usual, I mean. Oh, sure, Mab may have seemed fairly straightforward, but there was a lot more going on than she was saying.

  For example: Mab had said that Summer’s hit men were after me because Mab had chosen me to be her Emissary. But for that to be true, she had to have done it hours ago, at least a little while before the first crew of gruffs had attacked me at the Carpenter place.

  And that had happened several hours before the bad guys grabbed Marcone.

  Someone was running a game, all right. Someone was keeping secrets.

  I had a bad feeling that if I didn’t find out who, why, and how, Mab would toss me into the trash like a used paper cup.

  Right after she crushed me, of course.

  Chapter Eight

  A wide-axled, full-of-itself, military-wannabe truck crunched through the snowy streets and came to a halt outside the little grocery store. The lights glared in through the doors. I squinted at it. After a minute the Hummer’s horn blared in two short beeps.

  “Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered. I hobbled to the door and out to the truck, which blended seamlessly with the background and the foreground, and with most of the air.

  The driver-side window rolled down and revealed a young man whom fathers of teenage daughters would shoot on sight. He had pale skin and deep grey eyes. His dark, slightly curly hair was long enough to declare casual rebellion, and tousled to careless perfection. He wore a black leather jacket and a white shirt, both of them more expensive than any two pieces of furniture at my apartment. In marked contrast, there was a scarf inexpertly crocheted from thick white yarn around his neck, under the collar of the jacket. He faced straight ahead, so that I saw only his profile, but I felt confident that he was smirking on the other side of his face, too.

  “Thomas,” I said. “A lesser man than me would hate you.”

  He grinned. “There’s someone lesser than you?” He rolled his eyes to me on the last word, to deadpan the delivery, and his face froze in an expression of absolute neutrality. He stayed that way for a few seconds. “Empty night, Harry. You look like…”

  “Ten miles of bad road?”

  He forced a smile onto his mouth, but that was as far as it went. “I was going to go with ‘a raccoon.’”

  “Gee. Thanks.”

  “Get in.”

  He took the monorail to the other side of the Hummer’s cab to unlock the passenger-side door. I showed up eventually, and noticed every little ache in my body on the way—especially the throbbing burn centered on my broken nose. I tossed my staff into the back of Das Truck, half expecting an echoing clatter when it landed. I got in, shut the door, and put on my seat belt while Thomas got the truck moving. He peered carefully into the heavy snow, presumably looking for some runty little sedans he could drive over for fun.

  “That’s gotta hurt,” he said after a moment.

  “Only when I exhale,” I said testily. “What took you so long?”

  “Well, you know how much I love getting called in the middle of the night to drive through snow and ice to play chauffeur for grumpy low-life investigators. The anticipation slowed me down.”

  I grunted in what might have been construed as an apologetic manner by someone who knew me.

  Thomas did. “What’s up?”

  I told him everything.

  Thomas is my half brother, my only family. I’m allowed.

  He listened.

  “And then,” I concluded, “I went for a ride in a monster truck.”

  Thomas’s mouth twitched up in a quick smile. “It is kinda butch, isn’t it.”

  I squinted around the truck. “Do TV shows start an hour later in the backseat than they do up here?”<
br />
  “Who cares?” Thomas said. “It’s got TiVo.”

  “Good,” I said. “It might be a little while before I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.”

  Thomas let out a theatrical sigh. “Why me?”

  “Because if I want to find Marcone, the best place to start is with his people. If word gets out that he’s gone missing, there’s no telling how some of them might react when I come snooping around. So you’ve got my back.”

  “What if I don’t want your back?”

  “Cope,” I said heartlessly. “You’re family.”

  “You’ve got me there,” he admitted. “But I wonder if you’ve thought this through very thoroughly.”

  “I try to make thinking an ongoing process.”

  Thomas shook his head. “Look, you know I don’t try to tell you your business.”

  “Except tonight, apparently,” I said.

  “Marcone is a grown-up,” Thomas said. “He signed on to the Accords willingly. He knew what he was going to be letting himself in for.”

  “And?” I said.

  “And it’s a jungle out there,” Thomas said. He squinted through the thick snow. “Metaphorically speaking.”

  I grunted. “He made his bed, and I should let him lie in it?”

  “Something like that,” Thomas said. “And don’t forget that Murphy and the police aren’t going to be thrilled with a ‘Save the Kingpin’ campaign.”

  “I know,” I said, “and I’d love to stand back and see what happens. But this isn’t about Marcone anymore.”

  “Then what is it about?”

  “Mab skinning me alive if I don’t give her what she wants.”

  “Come on, Harry,” Thomas said. “You can’t really think that Mab’s motives and plans are that direct, that cut-and-dried.” He adjusted the setting of the Hummer’s wipers. “She wants Marcone for a reason. You might not be doing him any favors by saving him on Mab’s behalf.”

  I scowled out at the night.

  He held up a hand, ticking off fingers. “And that’s assuming that, one, he’s alive at all right now. Two, that you can find him. Three, that you can get him out alive. And four, that the opposition doesn’t cripple or kill you.”

  “What’s your point?” I asked.

  “That you’re playing against a stacked deck, and that you have no idea if Mab is going to be there to cover your bets when the bad guys call.” He shook his head. “It would be smarter for you to skip town. Go someplace warm for a few weeks.”

  “Mab might take that kinda personal,” I said.

  “Mab’s a businesswoman,” Thomas said. “Creepy and weird, but she’s cold, too. Calculating. As long as you still represent a potential recruit to her, I doubt she’d elect to depreciate your value prematurely.”

  “Depreciate. I like that. You might be right—unless, to return to the original metaphor, Mab isn’t playing with a full deck. Which the evidence of recent years seems to imply with increasing frequency.” I nodded out the window. “And I’ve got a feeling that I’d have had even more trouble with the gruffs I’ve seen so far if we weren’t in the middle of a freaking blizzard. If I waltz off to Miami or somewhere warm, I’ll be putting myself that much nearer to the agents of Summer—who are also planning my murder.”

  Thomas frowned and said nothing.

  “I could run, but I couldn’t hide,” I said. “Better to face it here, on my home ground, while I’m still relatively rested”—I let out a huge and genuine yawn—“instead of waiting for faerie goons from one Court or the other to, ah, depreciate me by surprise after I’ve been on the run for a few weeks.”

  “What about the Council?” Thomas demanded. “You’ve been wearing the grey cloak for how long, now? And you’ve fought for them how many times?”

  I shook my head. “Right now the Council is still stretched to the limit. We might not be in open battle with the Red Court at the moment, but the Council and the Wardens have got years of catch-up work to do.” I felt my jaw tighten. “Lot of warlocks have come up in the past few years. The Wardens are working overtime to get them under control.”

  “You mean kill them,” Thomas said.

  “I mean kill them. Most of them teenagers, man.” I shook my head. “Luccio knows my feelings on the matter. She refuses to assign any of it to me. Which means that other Wardens are forced to pick up the slack. I’m not going to add to their workload by dragging them into this mess.”

  “You don’t seem to mind adding to mine,” Thomas noted.

  I snorted. “That’s because I respect them.”

  “So long as we have that clear,” he said.

  We drove past a city snowplow. It had foundered in a deep drift, like some kind of metallic Ice Age beast trapped in a tar pit. I watched it with bemusement as Thomas’s truck crunched slowly, steadily on by.

  “By the way,” he asked, “where do you want to go?”

  “First things first,” I said. “I need food.”

  “You need sleep.”

  “Tick-tock. Food will do for now.” I pointed. “There, an IHOP.”

  He hauled the big truck into a slow, steady turn. “Then what?”

  “I ask people impertinent questions,” I said. “Hopefully turning up pertinent answers.”

  “Assuming someone doesn’t kill you while you do.”

  “That’s why I’m bringing my very own vampire bodyguard.”

  Thomas parked across three spaces in the tiny, otherwise unoccupied lot of an International House of Pancakes.

  “I like the scarf,” I said. I leaned over and inhaled through my nose as best I could. It stung, but I detected a faint whiff of vanilla and strawberries. “She make it for you?”

  Thomas nodded without saying anything. The leather-gloved fingers of one hand traced over the soft, simple yarn. He looked quietly sad. I felt bad for mentioning Justine, my brother’s lost lover. Then I understood why he wore the gloves: If she’d made it for him, a token of her love, he didn’t dare touch it with his skin. It would sear him like a hot skillet. So he kept it close enough for him to smell her touch upon it, but he didn’t dare let it brush against him.

  Every time I think my romantic life is a wasteland, I look at my brother and see how much worse it could be.

  Thomas shook his head and killed the engine and we sat for a moment in silence.

  So I clearly heard a deep male voice outside the truck say, “Don’t either of you move.” There was the distinct click-clack of a shotgun’s pump working. “Or I will kill you.”

  Chapter Nine

  When there’s a gun pointed at you, you’ve got two options: Either you move, fast and unexpectedly, and hope that you get lucky, or you freeze and try to talk your way clear. Given that I had really limited room in which to attempt to dodge or run, I went with option B: I held still.

  “I don’t suppose,” I asked hopefully, “that this is the full military model?”

  “It has individually heated seats and a six-disk CD changer,” Thomas said.

  I scowled. “Uh-huh. Those are way cooler than silly features like armor and bulletproof glass.”

  “Hey,” Thomas said, “it’s not my fault you have special needs.”

  “Harry,” said the man with the shotgun, “hold up your right hand, please.”

  I arched an eyebrow at that. Typically the vocabulary of thugs holding guns to your head ran a little light on courtesy phrases like please.

  “You want me to kill him?” Thomas murmured, barely audible.

  I twitched my head in a tiny negative motion. Then I lifted up my right hand, fingers spread.

  “Turn it around,” said the man outside. “Let me see the inside of your wrist.”

  I did.

  “Oh, thank God,” breathed the voice.

  I’d finally placed it. I turned my head to one side and said through the glass, “Hey, there, Fix. Is that a shotgun you’re holding to my head, or are you just glad to see me?”

  Fix was a y
oung, slender man of medium height. His hair was silver-white and very fine, and though no one would ever accuse him of beauty, there was a confidence and surety in his plain features that gave them a certain appeal. He was a far cry from the nervous, scrawny kid I’d first met several years ago.

  He wore jeans and a green silk shirt—nothing more. He obviously should have been freezing, and he just as obviously wasn’t. The thickly falling snowflakes weren’t striking him. Every single one seemed to find its way to the ground around him somehow. He held a pump-action shotgun with a long barrel against his shoulder, and wore a sword on a belt at his hip.

  “Harry,” he said, his voice steady. His tone wasn’t hostile. “Can we have a polite talk?”

  “We probably could have,” I said, “if you hadn’t started off by pointing a gun at my head.”

  “A necessary precaution,” he said. “I needed to be sure you hadn’t taken Mab’s offer.”

  “And become the new Winter Knight?” I asked. “You could have asked me, Fix.”

  “If you’d become Mab’s creature,” Fix said, “you would have lied. It would have changed you. Made you an extension of her will. I couldn’t trust you.”

  “You’re the Summer Knight,” I replied. “So I can’t help but wonder if that wouldn’t make you just as controlled and untrustworthy. Summer’s not all that happy with me right now, apparently. Maybe you’re just an extension of Summer’s will.”

  Fix stared at me down the barrel of the shotgun. Then he lowered it abruptly and said, “Touché.”

  Thomas produced from nowhere a semiautomatic pistol scaled to fit his truck, and had it trained on Fix’s head before the other man had finished speaking the second syllable of the word.

  Fix’s eyes widened. “Holy crap.”

  I sighed and took the gun gently from Thomas’s grip. “Now, now. Let’s not give him the wrong idea about the nature of this conversation.”

  Fix let out a slow breath. “Thank you, Harry. I—”

  I pointed the gun at Fix’s head, and he froze with his mouth partly open.