by Butcher, Jim
“I can give you that,” Lara said, her lips slinking into a smile. “You wear your pain like a suit of armor. But one day, it will be too heavy to bear. And you’ll remember this moment. And you’ll know who can give you what you need.” She let out a small, sensual sigh. “I don’t require more food, Dresden. I have that in plenty. But a partner . . . You and I could do much together that we could not alone.”
“Sounds swell,” I croaked, barely able to get the words out. “Maybe we’ll start with getting Thomas back.”
She straightened her spine and leaned back from me, her beautiful pale face full of lust and hunger. She closed her eyes and stretched a little in place, the way cats sometimes will. It was a mind-numbing display of lithe femininity. She nodded slowly, then rose and regarded me with her usual cool detachment. “You’re right, of course. Business first. You want me to help you.”
“I want you to help yourself,” I said. “We’ve both got the same problem.”
“And that would be?” she asked.
“Traitors within the organization,” I said. “Inciting conflict and destabilizing the balance of power.”
She arched a raven black eyebrow. “The Warden is innocent?”
“Only if I can find the guy who set him up.”
“You think there’s a connection between your traitor and the skinwalker.”
“And another connection that led me here,” I said. “One of your folk paid that lawyer and rewired her head.”
Lara’s mouth twisted with distaste. “If that’s true, then someone was hideously gauche. One never leaves such obvious and overt blocks behind—and especially not in a contact only one layer removed. Such things call too much attention to themselves.”
“So,” I said. “A White Court vampire who is gauche, overt, impatient. Oh, and who did not show up to defend the homestead when the skinwalker broke in. And who Thomas recently beat and humiliated in public.”
“Madeline,” Lara murmured.
“Madeline,” I said. “I think whoever is pulling the strings on this operation is using her. I think we need to find her and follow the strings back to the puppeteer.”
“How?”
I reached into my duster pocket and took out the sheet of paper with Morgan’s supposed account on it, along with a photocopy of the huge deposit check. “Find out who set up this account. Find out where the money came from.” I passed her the pages. “After that, see if you can’t find some way to track down where Thomas’s cell phone is.”
“His cell phone?”
“Shagnasty said we could contact him by calling Thomas’s phones. Isn’t there some way that they can track where those things are?”
“It depends on a number of factors.”
“Well I’m betting the skinwalker doesn’t have a subscription to Popular Science. He’ll probably have some kind of countermeasure for a tracking spell, but he might not even realize that it’s possible to physically trace the phone.”
“I’ll see what I can find out,” she said. One of the medics approached us and stood back respectfully. Lara turned to the young man. “Yes?”
He held up a clipboard. “The triage report you wanted.”
She held out her hand. He passed her the clipboard as if he didn’t want to move his feet too close to her. Lara scanned over the topmost page, and murmured, “Hennesy and Callo both have broken backs?”
“It’ll take an X-ray to confirm it,” the medic said nervously. “But from what I was told, the, uh, the attacker just broke them over his knee and threw them down. They’re paralyzed. Probably permanently.”
“And Wilson lost both eyes,” Lara murmured.
The medic avoided looking at her. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Very well,” Lara said. “Take Hennesy to Natalia’s chambers. Callo will go to Elisa.”
“Yes, ma’am. Should I send Wilson to the infirmary?”
Lara stared at him with absolutely no expression on her lovely face. Then she said, “No, Andrew. I’ll come for him in a moment.” She held out the clipboard, and the medic took it and hurried away.
I watched Lara for a moment and said, “You’re going to kill those men. When Elisa and Natalia wake up . . .”
“They will feed and their lives will be spared. Annoying as it may be to lose what I invested in those men, I can replace hired guns,” she said. “I cannot so easily replace members of my family and my House. As their leader, it is my responsibility to provide adequate care and sustenance in times of need—particularly when loyalty to the House is what created that need.”
“They’re your own men,” I said.
“That was before they became useless to the House,” she replied. “They know too much of our internal affairs to be allowed to leave. Lives must be lost if my kin are to survive their injuries. Rather than inflict that upon one who can still be of use to us, I preserve lives by seeing to it that these men serve us one last time.”
“Yeah. You’re a real humanitarian. A regular Mother Teresa.”
She turned that flat, empty gaze to me again. “At what point did you forget that I am a vampire, Dresden? A monster. A habitually neat, polite, civil, and efficient monster.” Her eyes drifted down the hallway, to where a well-muscled young man was being helped to sit down, while a medic secured bandages over his eyes. Lara stared intently at him, the color of her eyes lightening to silver, and her lips parted slightly. “I am what I am.”
I felt sick to my stomach. I pushed myself to my feet, and said, “So am I.”
She glanced obliquely at me. “Is that a threat, Dresden?”
I shook my head. “Just a fact. One day I’m going to take you down.”
Her eyes went back to the wounded man, her lips shifting to one side in a smirk. “One day,” she murmured. “But not today.”
“No. Not today.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you, wizard mine?”
“Yeah,” I said.
She glanced at me and raised an eyebrow.
“I need a car.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
I sort of shambled up one floor and down a wing to the Château’s infirmary, escorted there by a guard who was being very careful not to limp on a wounded leg. The skinwalker had smacked my bean against hardwood and knocked something loose. I felt fairly confident that if I jumped up and down and wiggled my head, my brain would slosh squishily around the inside of my skull.
Not that I was going to be doing any of those things. Walking was hard enough.
In the infirmary, I found a white-coated young woman tending to the wounded. She moved with the brisk professional manner of a doctor, and was just finishing seeing to Justine’s injuries. The young woman was laid out on a bed, her midsection swathed in bandages, her eyes glazed with the distant, peaceful expression of someone on good drugs.
Anastasia sat on the bed next to Justine’s, her back straight, her expression calm. Her right arm was bound up close against her body in a black cloth sling. She came to her feet as I entered the room. She looked a little pale and shaky, but she stood without leaning on her slender wooden staff. “We’re leaving now?”
“Yeah,” I said. I moved to her side to support her. “You okay to walk?”
She leaned her staff toward me, stopping me from coming any closer, though she smiled slightly as she did. “I’ll bloody well walk out of here,” she said. And she said it in an atrocious Scottish accent.
I lifted both eyebrows at her in shock. “You told me you fell asleep during Highlander.”
Her dark eyes sparkled. “I always say that when I find myself at a vintage movie showing at a drive-in theater while in the company of a man two centuries younger than me.”
“And not because you didn’t want to hurt my feelings with your professional opinion of the swordsmanship on display?”
“Young men can be so delicate,” she said, her dimples making a brief appearance.
“We should get you to a hospital,” I said, nodding at her sling.
&nb
sp; She shook her head. “The break is set back in place already. From here, all one can do is wear a sling and wait for it to stop hurting so badly.”
I grimaced. “I’ve got some meds at my place.”
She smiled again, but this time I could see how much she was straining to keep up appearances. “That would be lovely.”
“Harry,” said a soft voice.
I turned to face the wounded Justine, who looked at me with drowsy eyes. I turned to the bed and bent down to smile at her. “Hey there.”
“We heard that thing talking,” she said. All the hard consonants in her words had blurred, rounded edges. “We heard it talking to you and Lara.”
I glanced up at Anastasia, who gave me a short nod of her head.
“Yeah,” I said to Justine. I desperately did not want her to say anything she ought not to be saying. “I’ll take care of it.”
Justine smiled at me, though she looked like she could hardly keep her eyes open. “I know you will. He loves you, you know.”
I did not look up at Anastasia. “Uh. Yeah.”
Justine took my hand in one of hers, her eyes reaching for mine. “He always worried that he’d never be able to talk to you. That the world he came from was so different. That he wouldn’t know enough about being human to relate. That he wouldn’t know about being a br—”
“Brass-plated pain in my ass,” I said. “He knows that plenty well.” I avoided her eyes. The last thing I needed was to endure another soulgaze now. “Justine, you need to rest. I’ll dig him up. Don’t worry.”
She smiled again and her eyes closed all the way. “You’re like family to me, Harry. You always care.”
I bowed my head, embarrassed, and settled Justine’s hands back on the bed, then tugged the thin hospital blankets up over her.
Anastasia watched me with thoughtful eyes as I did.
We walked back to the front of the house, and past the fairly fresh plaster that might have hidden ridiculously lethal booby traps, out over a front porch the size of a tennis court, and down several steps to the circular drive, where the car Lara had lent me was waiting.
I stopped so suddenly that Anastasia nearly walked into my back. She caught her balance with a hiss of discomfort, and then looked up and caught her breath. “Oh, my.”
Nearly two tons of British steel and chrome sat idling in the drive. Its purring engine sounded like a sewing machine. The white Rolls limo was an old model, something right out of a pulp-fiction adventure film, and it was in gorgeous condition. Its panels shone, freshly waxed and without blemish, and the chrome of its grill gleamed sienna in the light of dusk over the Château.
I walked down to peer inside the Rolls. The passenger seating in the back was larger than my freaking apartment. Or at least it looked that way. The interior was all silver-grey and white leather and similarly colored woodwork, polished to a glowing sheen and accented with silver. The carpet on the floor of the Rolls was thicker and more luxurious than a well-kept lawn.
“Wow,” I said quietly.
Anastasia, standing beside me, breathed, “That’s a work of bloody art.”
“Wow,” I said quietly.
“Look at the filigree.”
I nodded. “Wow.”
Anastasia gave me a sidelong look. “And there’s plenty of room in back.”
I blinked and looked at her.
Her expression was innocent and bland. “All I’m saying is that it is rather crowded in your apartment right now. . . .”
“Anastasia,” I said. I felt my face getting a little warm.
The dimples reappeared. She was just teasing me, of course. In her condition it would be some time before she could engage in that kind of activity.
“What model is this?” she asked.
“Um,” I said. “Well, it’s a Rolls-Royce. It’s . . . I think it’s from before World War Two. . . .”
“It’s a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, of course,” said Lara’s voice from behind me. “At this house? What else would it be?”
I looked over my shoulder, to see Lara Raith standing in the shadowy doorway of the house.
“You have special needs, obviously,” she said. “So I provided you with an appropriate vintage. Nineteen thirty-nine.” She folded her arms, rather smugly, I thought, and said, “Bring it back with a full tank.”
I tilted my head at her in a gesture that wasn’t quite an affirmation, and muttered, as I opened the passenger-side door, “The loan officer will have to run a check on my credit first. What’s this thing get, about two gallons per mile?”
Anastasia slid into the car with a brief sound of discomfort. I winced and held out my hands in case she fell back, but she managed it without any other difficulty. I shut the door, and caught a glimpse of Lara taking a sudden step forward.
She focused sharply on Anastasia for a moment—and then upon me.
Lara’s eyes flickered several shades paler as her ripe lips parted in dawning realization. A very slow smile crept over her mouth as she stared at me.
I turned away from her rather hurriedly, got into the Rolls, and got it moving. And I didn’t look back again until the vampires’ house was five miles behind us.
Anastasia let me get most of the way back to town before she looked at me and said, “Harry?”
“Hmmm?” I asked. Driving the Rolls was like driving a tank. It had all kinds of momentum behind it, no power steering, and no power brakes. It was a vehicle that demanded that I pay my respects to the laws of physics and think a little bit further ahead than I otherwise might.
“Is there something you want to tell me?” she asked.
“Dammit,” I muttered.
She watched me with eyes much older than the face around them. “You were hoping I didn’t hear Justine.”
“Yeah.”
“But I did.”
I drove for another minute or two before asking, “Are you sure?”
She considered that for a moment before she said, more gently, “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”
“I have nothing to say to Captain Luccio,” I said. It came out harder than I had anticipated.
She reached out and put her left hand on my right, where it rested on the gearshift. “What about to Anastasia?” she asked.
I felt my jaw tighten. It took me a moment to make them relax and ask, “Do you have any family?”
“Yes,” she said. “Technically.”
“Technically?”
“The men and women I grew up with, who I knew? They’ve been dead for generations. Their descendants are living all over Italy, in Greece, and there are a few in Algeria—but it isn’t as though they invite their great-great-great-great-great-great-grandaunt to their Christmas celebrations. They’re strangers.”
I frowned, thinking that over, and looked at her. “Strangers.”
She nodded. “Most people aren’t willing to accept a radical fact like the life span of our kind, Harry. There are some families who have—Martha Liberty, for example, lives with one of her multiple-great-granddaughters and her children. But mostly, it ends badly when wizards try to stay too close to their kin.” She bowed her head, apparently studying her sling as she spoke. “I look in on them every five or six years, without them knowing. Keep an eye out for any of the children who might develop a talent.”
“But you had a real family once,” I said.
She sighed and looked out the window. “Oh, yes. It was a very long time ago.”
“I remember my father, a little. But I was raised an orphan.”
She winced. “Dio, Harry.” Her fingers squeezed mine. “You never had anyone, did you?”
“And if I did find someone,” I said, feeling my throat constricting as I spoke, “I would do anything necessary to protect him. Anything.”
Anastasia looked out the window, letting out a hiss of what sounded like anger. “Margaret. You selfish bitch.”
I blinked and looked at her, and nearly got us both killed when a pass
ing car cut me off and I almost couldn’t stop the monster Rolls in time. “You . . . you knew my mother?”
“All the Wardens knew her,” Anastasia said quietly.
“She was a Warden?”
Anastasia was silent for a moment before shaking her head. “She was considered a threat to the Laws of Magic.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that she made it a point to dance as close to the edge of breaking the Laws as she possibly could whenever she got the chance,” Anastasia replied. “It took her all of a year after she was admitted to the Council to start agitating for change.”
I had to focus on the road. This was more than I had ever heard from anyone in the Council about the enigmatic figure who had given me life. My hands were sweating and my heart was thudding. “What kind of change?”
“She was furious that ‘the Laws of Magic have nothing to do with right and wrong.’ She pointed out how wizards could use their abilities to bilk people out of their money, to intimidate and manipulate them, to steal wealth and property from others or destroy it outright, and that so long as the Laws were obeyed, the Council would do nothing whatsoever to stop them or discourage others from following their example. She wanted to reform the Council’s laws to embrace concepts of justice as well as limiting the specific use of magic.”
I frowned. “Wow. What a monster.”
She exhaled slowly. “Can you imagine what would happen if she’d had her way?”
“I wouldn’t have been unjustly persecuted by the Wardens for years?”
Anastasia’s lips firmed into a line. “Once a body of laws describing justice was applied to the Council, it would only be a short step to using that body to involve the Council in events happening in the outside world.”
“Gosh, yeah,” I said. “You’re right. A bunch of wizards trying to effect good in the world would be awful.”
“Whose good?” Anastasia asked calmly. “No one is an unjust villain in his own mind, Harry. Even—perhaps even especially—those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call ‘hard but necessary steps’ for the good of their nation. We’re all the hero of our own story.”