by Butcher, Jim
She gave me a faint smile. “It’s just…the center cannot hold, Harry. I think things are starting to fall apart. I can’t see it, and I can’t prove it, but I know it.” She shook her head. “Maybe I’m just losing my mind.”
I looked intently at her, frowning. “No, Murph. You aren’t.”
“There are bad things happening,” she said.
“Yeah. And I haven’t been able to put many pieces together. Yet. But we shut down some of the bad guys last night. They were using the Denarians to get to the Archive.”
“What do they want?”
“Don’t know,” I said. “But it’s going to be big and bad.”
“I want in on this fight, Harry,” she said.
“Okay.”
“All the way. Promise me.”
“Done.” I offered her my hand.
She took it.
Father Forthill was already asleep, but Sanya answered the door when I dropped by St. Mary’s. He was rumpled and looked tired, but was smiling. “Michael woke and was talking.”
“That’s great,” I said, grinning. “What did he say?”
“Wanted to know if you made it out all right. Then he went back to sleep.”
I laughed, and Sanya and I traded a hug, a manly hug with a lot of back thumping, which he then ruined with one of those Russian kisses on both cheeks.
“Come in, come in,” he said. “I apologize for trying to rush you earlier. We wanted to be sure to collect the coins and get them safely stored as soon as possible.”
I exhaled. “I don’t have them.”
His smile vanished. “What?”
I told him about Thorned Namshiel.
Sanya swore and rubbed at his face. Then he said, “Come.”
I followed him through the halls in the back of the enormous church until we got to the staff ’s kitchen. He went to the fridge, opened it, and came out with a bottle of bourbon. He poured some into a coffee cup, drank it down, and poured some more. He offered me the bottle.
“No, thanks. Aren’t you supposed to drink vodka?”
“Aren’t you supposed to wear pointy hat and ride on flying broomstick?”
“Touché,” I said.
Sanya shook his head and flexed the fingers of his right hand. “Eleven. Plus six. Seventeen. It could be worse.”
“But we nailed Thorned Namshiel,” I said. “And Eldest Gruff laid out Magog like a sack of potatoes. I’ll get you his coin tomorrow.”
A flicker of satisfaction went through Sanya’s eyes. “Magog? Good. But Namshiel, no.”
“What do you mean, no? I saw Michael cut his hand off and drop it into his pouch.”
“Da,” Sanya said, “and the coin was under the skin of his right hand. But it was not in his pouch when he went to the hospital.”
“What?”
Sanya nodded. “We took off his armor and gear in helicopter, to stop the bleeding. Maybe it fell out into the lake.”
I snorted.
He grimaced and nodded. “Da, I know. That did not happen.”
I sighed. “Marcone. I’ll look into it.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. I know those people. I’ll go see them right now. Though I was looking forward to going home for a while.” I pushed my hips up off the counter they leaned on. “Well, what’s one more thing, right?”
“Two more things,” Sanya said. He vanished and returned a moment later.
He was carrying Amoracchius in its scabbard. He offered it to me.
I lifted both eyebrows.
“Instructions,” Sanya said. “I’m to give it to you and you will kn—”
“Know who to give it to,” I muttered. I eyed the ceiling. “Someone is having a huge laugh right now at my expense.” I raised my voice a little. “I don’t have to do this, You know! I have free will! I could tell You to go jump in a lake!”
Sanya stood there, offering me the sword.
I snatched it out of his hands, grumbling under my breath, and stalked out to my Volkswagen. I threw the sword into the back. “As if I didn’t have enough problems,” I muttered, slamming the passenger door and stalking around to the driver-side door. “No. I gotta be carrying around freaking Excalibur now, too. Unless it isn’t, who knows.” I slammed the driver-side door, and the old paperback copy of The Two Towers Uriel had left me, and which I’d dropped into the pocket of my duster, dug into my side.
I frowned and pulled it out. It fell open to the inside front cover, where there was writing in a flowing hand: The reward for work well-done is more work.
“Ain’t that the truth,” I muttered. I stuffed the book back in my pocket and hit the road again.
It took a phone call and an hour to set it up, but Marcone met me at his office on the floor over Executive Priority. I walked in carrying the sword to find Marcone and Hendricks in his office—a plain and rather Spartan place for the time being. He had only recently moved in, and it looked more like the office of an active college professor, functional and put together primarily from expediency, than that of a criminal mastermind.
I cut right to the chase. “Someone is backstabbing the people who saved your life, and I won’t have it.”
Marcone raised his eyebrows. “Please explain.”
I told him about Thorned Namshiel and the coin.
“I don’t have it,” Marcone said.
“Do any of your people?” I asked.
He frowned at that question. Then he leaned back in his chair and put his elbows on the arms of it, resting the fingertips of his hands together.
“Where is Gard?” I asked.
“Reporting to her home office,” he murmured. “I will make inquiries.”
I wondered if Marcone was lying to me. It wasn’t a habit of his, but that only meant that when he did tell a lie, it was all the more effective. I wondered if he was telling the truth. If so, then maybe Monoc Securities had just acquired their own Fallen angel and expert in magic and magical theory.
“The child,” Marcone said. “Is she well?”
“She’s safe,” I said. “She’s with people who care about her.”
He nodded. “Good. Was there anything else?”
“No,” I said.
“Then you should get some rest,” Marcone said. “You look”—his mouth twitched up at the corners—“like a raccoon. Who has been run over by a locomotive.”
“Next time I leave your wise ass on the island,” I said, scowling, and stalked out.
I was on the way out of the building when I decided to make one more stop.
Madam Demeter was in her office, dressed as stylishly as ever.
“Hello, Mister Dresden,” she said as she put several files away, neatly, precisely ordering them. “I’m quite busy. I hope this won’t take too long.”
“No,” I said. “I just wanted to share a theory with you.”
“Theory?”
“Yeah. See, in all the excitement and explosions and demonic brouhaha, everyone’s forgotten a small detail.”
Her fingers stopped moving.
“Someone gave the Denarians the location of Marcone’s panic room. Someone close to him. Someone who would know many of his secrets. Someone who would have a good reason to want to hurt him.”
Demeter turned just her head to face me, eyes narrowed.
“A lot of men talk to the women they sleep with,” I said. “That’s always been true. And it would give you a really good reason to get close to him.”
“He’s like a lot of men,” Demeter said quietly.
“I know you’ve got a gun in that drawer,” I told her. “Don’t try it.”
“Why shouldn’t I?” she said.
“Because I’m not going to give you to Marcone.”
“What do you want from me?” she asked.
I shrugged. “I might ask you for information sometimes. If you could help me without endangering yourself, I’d appreciate it. Either way, it doesn’t affect whether or not I talk to Marcone.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Why not?”
“Maybe I want to see him go down someday,” I said. “But mostly because it’s none of my damned business. I just wanted you to know that I’d seen you. This time maybe he won’t put it all together. He’s got more likely suspects than you inside his organization—and I’d be shocked if you hadn’t already realized what a great patsy Torelli is going to make.”
Demeter gave me a wintry smile.
“But don’t get overconfident. If you make another move that obvious, he’ll figure it out. And you’ll disappear.”
Demeter let out a bare laugh and shut the filing cabinet. “I disappeared years ago.” She gave me a steady look. “Are you here to do business, Mister Dresden?”
Granted, there was a building full of very…fit girls who would be happy to, ah, work on my tone. And my tone was letting me know that it would be happy to be worked on. The rest of my body, however, thought that a big meal and about two weeks of sleep was a much better idea. And once you got up to my neck, the rest of me thought that this whole place was looking prettier and hollower every time I visited.
“It’s done,” I said, and left.
At home, I couldn’t sleep.
Finally I had enough spare time to worry about what the hell was wrong with my right hand.
I wound up in my lab, dangling the packet of stale catnip for Mister and filling Bob in on the events of the past few days.
“Wow,” Bob said. “Soulfire. Are you sure he said soulfire?”
“Yeah,” I said wearily. “Why?”
“Well,” the skull said. “Soulfire is…well. It’s Hellfire, essentially. Only from the other place.”
“Heavenfire?”
“Well…” Bob said, “yes. And no. Hellfire is something you use to destroy things. Soulfire is used the opposite way—to create stuff. Look, basically what you do is, you take a portion of your soul and you use it as a matrix for your magic.”
I blinked. “What?”
“It’s sort of like using rebar inside concrete,” Bob said. “You put a matrix of rebar in, then pour concrete around it, and the strength of the entire thing together is a great deal higher than either one would be separately. You could do things that way that you could never do with either the rebar or the concrete alone.”
“But I’m doing that with my soul?” I demanded.
“Oh, come on, Harry. All you mortals get all hung up over your precious souls. You’ve never seen your soul, never touched it, never done anything with it. What’s all the to-do?”
“So what you’re saying is that this hand construct was made out of my soul,” I said.
“Your soul and your magic fused together, yeah,” Bob said. “Your soul converted into energy. Soulfire. In this case, the spirit energy drawn from your aura right around your right hand, because it fit the construct so well, it being a big version of your right hand and all. Your standard force-projection spell formed around the matrix of soulfire, and what had been an instantaneous exertion of force became a long-term entity capable of manipulation and exertion to the same degree. Not really more powerful than just the force spell, as much as it was more than simply the force spell.”
I wiggled my tingling fingers. “Oh. But my soul’s going to get better, right?”
“Oh, sure,” Bob said. “Few days, a week or two at most, it’ll grow back in. Go out and have a good time, enjoy yourself, do some things that uplift the human spirit or whatever, and it’ll come back even faster.”
I grunted. “So what you’re saying is that soulfire doesn’t let me do anything new. It just makes me more of what I already am.”
“A lot more,” Bob said, nodding cheerfully from his shelf. “It’s how angels do all of their stuff. Though admittedly, they’ve got a lot more in the way of soul to draw upon than you do.”
“I thought angels didn’t have souls,” I said.
“Like I said, people get all excited and twitchy when that word gets used,” Bob said. “Angels don’t have anything else.”
“Oh. What happens if I, uh, you know. Use too much of it?”
“What’s five minus five, Harry?”
“Zero.”
“Right. Think about that for a minute. I’m sure you’ll come to the right conclusion.”
“It’s bad?”
“See? You’re not totally hopeless,” Bob said. “And hey, you got a new magic sword to custodianize, too? Merlin, eat your heart out; he only got to look after one! And working a case with Uriel! You’re hitting the big-time, Harry!”
“I haven’t really heard much about Uriel,” I said. “I mean I know he’s an archangel, but…”
“He’s…sort of Old Testament,” Bob said. “You know the guy who killed the firstborn children of Egypt? Him. Other than that, well. There’s only suspicions. And he isn’t the sort to brag. It’s always the quiet ones, you know?”
“Heaven has a spook,” I said. “And Mab likes his style.”
“And he did you a favor!” Bob said brightly. “You just know that can’t be good!”
I put my head down on the table and sighed.
But after that I was able to go upstairs and get some real sleep.
I always like the onion-volcano thing they do at the Japanese steak houses. Me and the other seven-year-olds at the table. I got to catch the shrimp in my mouth, too, when the chef flicked them up into a high arc with his knife. I did so well he hit me with two, one from a knife in either hand, and I got them both, to a round of applause from the table, and a genuine laugh from Anastasia.
We had a delicious meal, and the two of us lingered after everyone else at our little table-grill had left.
“Can I get your take on something?” I asked her.
“Certainly.”
I told her about my experience on the island, and the eerie sense of familiarity that had come with it.
“Oh, that,” Anastasia said. “Your Sight’s coming in. That’s all.”
I blinked at her. “Uh. What?”
“The Sight,” she replied calmly. “Every wizard develops some measure of precognizance as he matures. It sounds to me as if yours has begun to stir, and has recognized a place that may be of significance to you in the future.”
“This happens to everyone?” I said, incredulous.
“To every wizard,” she said, smiling. “Yes.”
“Then why have I never heard about it?” I demanded.
“Because young wizards who are anticipating the arrival of their Sight have an appalling tendency to ignore uncomfortable truths by labeling more appealing fantasies revelations of their Sight. Everything they care about turns into a prophecy. It’s vastly irritating, and the best way to avoid it is to keep it quiet until a young wizard finds out about it for himself.”
I mulled over that idea for a few moments. “Significant to my future, eh?”
“Potentially,” she replied quietly, nodding. “One must proceed with extreme caution when acting upon any kind of precognizant information, of course—but in this case, it seems clear that there is more to that island than meets the eye. If it were me, I’d look into it—cautiously.”
“Thank you,” I told her seriously. “For the advice, I mean.”
“It cost me little enough,” she said, smiling. “May I get your take on something?”
“Seems only fair.”
“I’m surprised at you, Harry. I always thought that you had an interest in Karrin.”
I shrugged my shoulders. “Timing, maybe. It’s never seemed to be the right time for us.”
“But you do care for her,” she said.
“Of course,” I said. “She’s gone with me into too many bad places for anything else.”
“That,” Anastasia said, her eyes steady, “I can understand.”
I tilted my head and studied her face. “Why ask about another woman?”
She smiled. “I wanted to understand why you were here.”
I leaned over to her, touching her chin lightl
y with the fingertips of my right hand, and kissed her very gently. She returned it, slowly, savoring the touch of my mouth on hers.
I broke off the kiss several moments after it had become inappropriate for a public venue and said, “Because it’s good for the soul.”
“An excellent answer,” she murmured, her dark eyes huge. “One that should, perhaps, be further explored.”
I rose and held out her chair for her, and helped her into her coat.
As it turned out, the rest of the night was good for the soul, too.
Author’s Note
ALSO BY JIM BUTCHER
THE DRESDEN FILES
STORM FRONT
FOOL MOON
GRAVE PERIL
SUMMER KNIGHT
DEATH MASKS
BLOOD RITES
DEAD BEAT
PROVEN GUILTY
WHITE KNIGHT
SMALL FAVOR
“THE WARRIOR” IN MEAN STREETS (WITH SIMON R. GREEN, KAT RICHARDSON, AND THOMAS E. SNIEGOSKI)
THE CODEX ALERA
FURIES OF CALDERON
ACADEM’S FURY
CURSOR’S FURY
CAPTAIN’S FURY
PRINCEPS’ FURY
DAY OFF
—from Blood Lite, edited by Kevin J. Anderson
The thief was examining another trapped doorway when I heard something—the tromp of approaching feet. The holy woman was in the middle of another sermon, about attentiveness or was in the middle of another sermon, about attentiveness or something, but I held up my hand for silence and she obliged. I could hear twenty sets of feet, maybe more.
I let out a low growl and reached for my sword. “Company.”
“Easy, my son,” the holy woman said. “We don’t even know who it is yet.”
The ruined mausoleum was far enough off the beaten path to make it unlikely that anyone had just wandered in on us. The holy woman was dreaming if she thought the company might be friendly. A moment later they appeared—the local magistrate and two dozen of his thugs.
“Always with the corrupt government officials,” muttered the wizard from behind me. I glanced back at him and then looked for the thief. The nimble little minx was nowhere to be seen.