The Ultimate Dresden Omnibus, 0-15

by Butcher, Jim

  I suddenly felt naive and vulnerable and maybe a little stupid.

  “He was already in custody,” I said. “How did he get away?”

  Luccio smiled faintly. “We aren’t sure. He thought of something we didn’t. And he put three Wardens in the hospital when he left.”

  “But you don’t think he’s guilty.”

  “I . . .” She frowned for a moment and then said, “I refuse to let fear turn me against a man I know and trust. But it doesn’t matter what I think. There’s enough evidence to kill him.”

  “What evidence?” I asked.

  “Other than finding him standing over LaFortier’s corpse with a literal bloody knife in his hand?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Other than that.”

  She raked her fingers back through her curly hair. “The information the Red Court has attained was exclusive to a very small pool of suspects, of which he was one. We have telephone records of him in frequent contact with a known operative of the Red Court. We also tracked down an offshore account belonging to him, in which several million dollars had recently been deposited.”

  I snorted derisively. “Yeah, that’s him. Morgan the mercenary, nothing but dollar signs in his eyes.”

  “I know,” she said. “That’s what I mean about fear clouding people’s judgment. We all know that the Red Court is going to come after us again. We know that if we don’t eliminate the traitor, their first blow could be fatal. The Merlin is desperate.”

  “Join the club,” I muttered. I rubbed at my eyes and sighed.

  She touched my arm again. “I thought you had a right to know,” she said. “I’m sorry I wasn’t able to get here sooner.”

  I covered her hand with mine and pressed gently. “Yeah,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “You look awful.”

  “You sweet talker, you.”

  She lifted her hand to touch my face. “I’ve got a few hours before I need to be back on duty. I was thinking a bottle of wine and a massage might be in order.”

  I only barely kept from groaning in pleasure at the very thought of one of Anastasia’s massages. What she didn’t know about inflicting merciless pleasure on a man’s aching body hadn’t been invented. But I sure as hell couldn’t have her back over to the apartment. If she found out about Morgan, and if he truly intended to betray me, it would be frighteningly easy for her head to wind up on the floor next to Morgan’s and mine.

  “I can’t,” I told her. “I’ve got to go to the hospital.”

  She frowned. “What happened?”

  “A skinwalker picked up my trail earlier tonight, when I was at Billy Borden’s place. Kirby’s dead. Andi’s in the hospital.”

  She sucked in a breath, wincing in empathy. “Dio, Harry. I’m so sorry.”

  I shrugged. I watched my vision blur, and realized that I wasn’t only making an excuse to keep her away from my place. Kirby and I hadn’t been blood brothers or anything—but he was a friend, a regular part of my life. Emphasis on the was.

  “Is there anything I can do?” she asked.

  I shook my head. Then I said, “Actually, yeah.”

  “Very well.”

  “Find out whatever you can about skinwalkers. I’m going to kill this one.”

  “All right,” she said.

  “Meanwhile,” I said, “is there anything I can do for you?”

  “For me?” She shook her head. “But . . . Morgan could use whatever help he can get.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Like I’m gonna help Morgan.”

  She lifted her hands. “I know. I know. But there’s not much I can do. Everyone knows he was my apprentice. They’re watching me. If I try to help him openly, they’ll suspend me as captain of the Wardens, at best.”

  “Don’t you just love it when justice can’t be bothered with petty concerns like fact?”

  “Harry,” she said. “What if he’s innocent?”

  I shrugged. “The way I was all those years? I’m too busy admiring the karma to lend a hand to the bastard.” Out on the street, Thomas’s Jag cruised by the end of the alley, then pulled up to the curb and stopped.

  I glanced at the car and said, “There’s my ride.”

  Anastasia arched an eyebrow at Thomas and his car. “The vampire?”

  “He owed me a favor.”

  “Mmmm,” Anastasia said. Her look at Thomas did not say yum. She looked more like someone who was trying to judge by how much she would need to lead a moving target. “You’re sure?”

  I nodded. “The White King told him to play nice. He will.”

  “Until he doesn’t,” she said.

  “Walkers can’t be choosers,” I said.

  “The Beetle died again?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Why don’t you get a different car?” she asked.

  “Because the Blue Beetle is my car.”

  Anastasia smiled faintly up at me. “I wonder how you make something like that so endearing.”

  “It’s my natural good looks,” I said. “I could make athlete’s foot endearing, if I really had to.”

  She rolled her eyes, but was still smiling. “I’ll head back to Edinburgh and help coordinate the search. If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  I nodded. “Thank you.”

  She put her hands on my cheeks. “I’m sorry about your friends. When this is over, we’ll find some quiet spot and relax.”

  I turned my head to one side and kissed the pulse in her wrist, then gently clasped her hands with mine. “Look, I’m not making any promises. But if I see something that might help Morgan, I’ll let you know.”

  “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  She stood up on her toes and kissed me goodbye. Then she turned and vanished into the shadows farther down the alley.

  I waited until she was gone to turn around and join my brother in the white Jag.

  “Damn, that girl is fit,” Thomas drawled. “Where to?”

  “Stop looking,” I said. “My place.”

  If Morgan was going to give me the shaft, I might as well find out now.

  Chapter Eleven

  Thomas stopped his Jag in front of the boardinghouse where my apartment was and said, “I’ll have my cell phone on me. Try to call me before things start exploding.”

  “Maybe this time it’ll be different. Maybe I’ll work everything out through reason, diplomacy, dialogue, and mutual cooperation.”

  Thomas eyed me.

  I tried to look wounded. “It could happen.”

  He reached into his jeans pocket, pulled out a plain white business card with a phone number on it, and passed it to me. “Use this number. It’s to a clone.”

  I looked at him blankly.

  “It’s a supersecret sneaky phone,” he clarified. “No one knows I have it, and if someone traces your calls and goes looking for me, they’ll find someone else.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Right.”

  “You sure you don’t want to just load Morgan up and go?”

  I shook my head. “Not until I give him the score. He sees me coming in with a vampire in tow, he’s going to flip out. As in try to kill us both.” I got out of the Jag, glanced at the house, and shook my head. “You stay alive for a dozen decades doing what Morgan does, paranoia becomes reflex.”

  Thomas grimaced. “Yeah. Give me an hour or so to get what you need. Call me when you’ve got him ready to go.”

  I glanced at the number, committed it to memory, and pocketed the card. “Thanks. I’ll pay you back for the gear.”

  He rolled his eyes. “Shut up, Harry.”

  I snorted out a breath, and nodded my head in thanks. We rapped knuckles, and he pulled out onto the street and cruised out into the Chicago night.

  I took a slow look around the familiar shapes of dark buildings where only a few lights still burned. I’d lived in this neighborhood for years. You’d think I’d be confident about spotting anything out of the ordinary fairly quickly. But, call me crazy, there were just too man
y players moving in this game, with God only knew what kinds of abilities to draw upon.

  I didn’t spot anyone out there getting set to kill me to get to Morgan. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t there.

  “If that’s not paranoid reflex,” I muttered, “I don’t know what is.”

  I shivered and walked down the steps to my apartment. I disarmed the wards, and reminded myself, again, that I really needed to do something about the deep divots in the steel security door. The last thing I needed was for old Mrs. Spunkelcrief, my near-deaf landlady, to start asking me why my door looked like it had been shot a dozen times. I mean, I could always tell her, “because it has been,” but that isn’t the sort of conversation one has with one’s landlady if one wants to keep one’s home.

  I opened the bullet-dented door, went inside, turned toward the bedroom door, and was faced with a bizarre tableau.

  Morgan was off the bed, sitting on the floor with his back to it, his wounded leg stretched out in front of him. He looked awful, but his eyes were narrowed and glittered with suspicion.

  Sprawled in the bedroom doorway was my apprentice, Molly Carpenter.

  Molly was a tall young woman with a bunch of really well-arranged curves and shoulder-length hair that was, this month, dyed a brilliant shade of sapphire. She was wearing cutoff blue jeans and a white tank top, and her blue eyes looked exasperated.

  She was sprawling on the floor because Mouse was more or less lying on top of her. He wasn’t letting his full weight rest on her, because it probably would have smothered her, but it seemed obvious that she was not able to move.

  “Harry!” Molly said. She started to say something else, but Mouse leaned into her a little, and suddenly all she could do was gasp for air.

  “Dresden!” Morgan growled at about the same time. He shifted his weight, as if to get up.

  Mouse turned his head to Morgan and gave him a steady look, his lips peeling back from his fangs.

  Morgan settled down.

  “Hooboy,” I sighed, and pushed the door shut, leaving the room in complete darkness. I locked the door, put the wards back up, and then muttered, “Flickum bicus.” I waved my hand as I spoke, and sent a minor effort of will out into the room, and half a dozen candles flickered to life.

  Mouse turned to me and gave me what I could have sworn was a reproachful look. Then he got up off of Molly, padded into the alcove that served as my kitchen, and deliberately yawned at me before flopping down on the floor to sleep. The meaning was clear: now it’s your problem.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I don’t like it,” Morgan growled, as I pushed the wheelchair over the gravel toward the street and the van Thomas had rented.

  “Gee. There’s a shock,” I said. Morgan was a lot to push around, even with the help of the chair. “You upset with how I operate.”

  “He’s a vampire,” Morgan said. “He can’t be trusted.”

  “I can hear you,” Thomas said from the driver’s seat of the van.

  “I know that, vampire,” Morgan said, without raising his voice. He eyed me again.

  “He owes me a favor,” I said, “from that coup attempt in the White Court.”

  Morgan glowered at me. “You’re lying,” he said.

  “For all you know it’s true.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he said flatly. “You’re lying to me.”

  “Well, yes.”

  He looked from me to the van. “You trust him.”

  “To a degree,” I said.

  “Idiot,” he said, though he sounded like his heart wasn’t in it. “Even when a White Court vampire is sincere, you can’t trust it. Sooner or later, its demon takes control. And then you’re nothing but food. It’s what they are.”

  I felt a little surge of anger and clubbed it down before it could make my mouth start moving. “You came to me, remember? You don’t like how I’m helping you, feel free to roll yourself right out of my life.”

  Morgan gave me a disgusted look, folded his arms—and shut his mouth.

  Thomas turned on the hazard lights as the van idled on the street; then he came around and opened up the side door. He turned to Morgan and picked up the wheelchair the wounded Warden sat in with about as much effort as I’d use to move a sack of groceries from the cart into my car’s trunk. Thomas put the wheelchair carefully into the van, while Morgan held the IV bag steady on its little metal pole clamped to the chair’s arm.

  I had to give Morgan a grudging moment of admiration. He was one tough son of a bitch. Obviously in agony, obviously exhausted, obviously operating in the shambles of his own shattered pride, he was still stubborn enough to be paranoid and annoying. If he wasn’t aiming it all at me, I probably would have admired him even more.

  Thomas slid the door shut on Morgan, rolled his eyes at me, and got back into the driver’s seat.

  Molly came hurrying up, carrying a pair of backpacks, holding one end of Mouse’s leash. I held out my hand, and she tossed me the black nylon pack. It was my trouble kit. Among other things, it contained food, water, a medical kit, survival blankets, chemical light sticks, duct tape, two changes of clothing, a multitool, two hundred dollars in cash, my passport, and a couple of favorite paperbacks. I always kept the trouble kit ready and available, in case I need to move out in a hurry. It had everything I would need to survive about ninety percent of the planet’s environments for at least a couple of days.

  Molly, acting on her own initiative, had begun putting her own trouble kit together the same day she’d learned about mine. Except that her backpack was pink.

  “You sure about this?” I asked her, pitching my voice low enough that Morgan wouldn’t hear.

  She nodded. “He can’t stay there alone. You can’t stay with him. Neither can Thomas.”

  I grunted. “Do I need to search your bag for candlesticks?”

  She gave me a chagrined shake of her head.

  “Don’t feel too bad, kid,” I told her. “He had a couple of hours to work you up to that. And he’s the guy who nearly cut your head off, during that mess around SplatterCon.”

  “It wasn’t that,” she said quietly. “It’s what he said to you. What he’s done to you.”

  I put my hand on her arm and squeezed gently.

  She smiled faintly at me. “I’ve never . . . never really felt . . . hate before. Not like that.”

  “Your emotions got the better of you. That’s all.”

  “But it isn’t,” she insisted, folding her arms against her stomach, her shoulders hunching a little. “Harry, I’ve seen you all but kill yourself to help people who were in trouble. But for Morgan, that doesn’t matter. You’re just this . . . this thing that did something wrong once, and you’ll never, ever be anything else.”

  Aha.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Wizards and technology don’t get on so well, and that makes travel sort of complicated. Some wizards seemed to be more of a bad influence on technology than others, and if any of them were harder on machinery than me, I hadn’t met them yet. I’d been on a jet a couple of times and had one bad experience—just one. After the plane’s computers and guidance system went bad, and we had to make an emergency landing on a tiny commercial airfield, I wasn’t eager to repeat the experience.

  Buses were better, especially if you sat toward the back, but even they had problems. I hadn’t been on a bus trip longer than three or four hundred miles without winding up broken down next to the highway in the middle of nowhere. Cars could work out, especially if they were fairly old models—the fewer electronics involved, the better. Even those machines, though, tended to provide you with chronic problems. I’d never owned a car that ran more than maybe nine days in ten—and most of them were worse than that.

  Trains and ships were the ideal, especially if you could keep yourself a good way from the engines. Most wizards, when they traveled, stuck with ships and trains. Either that or they cheated—like I was about to do.

  Back at the beginning of the wa
r with the Vampire Courts, the White Council, with the help of a certain wizard private investigator from Chicago who shall remain nameless, negotiated the use of Ways through the near reaches of the Nevernever controlled by the Unseelie Court. The Nevernever, the world of ghosts and spirits and fantastic beings of every description, exists alongside our own mortal reality—but it isn’t the same shape. That meant that in places, the mortal world touched upon the Nevernever at two points that could be very close together, while in the mortal realm, they were very far apart. In short, use of the Ways meant that anyone who could open a path between worlds could use a major shortcut.

  In this case, it meant I could make the trip from Chicago, Illinois, to Edinburgh, Scotland, in about half an hour.

  The closest entry point to where I wanted to go in the Nevernever was a dark alley behind a building that had once been used for meat packing. A lot of things had died in that building, not all of them cleanly and not all of them cows. There’s a dark sense of finality to the place, a sort of ephemeral quality of dread that hangs so lightly on the air that the unobservant might not notice it at all. In the middle of the alley, a concrete staircase led down to a door that was held shut with both boards and chains—talk about overkill.

  I walked down the steps to the bottom of the stairs, closed my eyes for a moment, and extended my otherworldly senses, not toward the door, but toward the section of concrete beside it. I could feel the thinness of the world there, where energy pulsed and hummed just beneath the seemingly rigid surface of reality.

  It was a hot night in Chicago, but it wouldn’t be on the Ways. I wore a long-sleeved shirt and jeans, and a couple of pairs of socks beneath my hiking shoes. My heavy leather duster had me sweating. I gathered up my will, reached out my hand, and with a whisper of “Aparturum,” I opened a Way between worlds.

  Honestly, it sounds quite a bit more dramatic than it looks. The surface of the concrete wall rippled with a quick flickering of color and began to put out a soft glow. I took a deep breath, gripped my staff in both hands, and stepped directly forward into the concrete.