by Butcher, Jim
She let out a shaking sound that was meant to be a laugh, but was filled with awareness of the inherent irony, and drew her hands away. “I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .” Her voice turned wry. “It’s been a while for me.”
I knew what she meant. I took several slow, deep breaths, separating mind from body. Then I said quietly, “Susan. Whatever happens from here . . . we’re done.” I looked up at her. “You know that. You knew it when you chose not to tell me.”
She looked brittle. She nodded slowly, as if something might break off if she moved any more quickly than that. She folded her hands in her lap. “I . . . know that. I knew it when I did it.”
Silence stretched.
“Right,” I said finally. “Now . . .” I took another deep breath, and told myself it would help. “The way I see it, you didn’t fly into Chicago just for a chat with me. You wouldn’t need Martin for that.”
She lifted an eyebrow at me and nodded. “True.”
“Then why?”
She seemed to gather herself, her voice more businesslike. “There’s a Red outpost here. It’s a place to start.”
“Okay,” I said, rising. “Let’s start.”
Chapter Three
“I hope there are no hard feelings,” Martin told me as he pulled out of the little gravel lot next to the house I board in.
Susan had yielded the passenger seat of the rental car to me, in deference to my storklike legs. “Hard feelings?” I asked.
“About our first meeting,” Martin said. He drove the same way he did everything—blandly. Complete stops. Five miles an hour under the limit. Wherever we were headed, it was going to take forever to get there.
“You mean the way you used me to attempt to assassinate old Ortega?” I asked. “Thereby ensuring that the Code Duello was broken, the duel invalidated, and the vamps’ war with the White Council continued?”
Martin glanced at me, and then into the rearview mirror at Susan.
“I told you,” she said to Martin. “He’s only dense in the short term. He sees everything eventually.”
I gave Susan a slight, wry tilt of my head in acknowledgment. “Wasn’t hard to realize what you were doing in retrospect,” I said. “The Red Court’s war with the White Council must have been the best thing to happen to the Fellowship in ages.”
“I’ve only been with them for slightly over one hundred years,” Martin said. “But it was the best thing to happen in that time, yes. The White Council is one of the only organizations on the planet with the resources to seriously threaten them. And every time the Council won a victory—or even survived what should have been a crushing defeat—it meant that the Red Court was tearing itself to shreds internally. Some of them have had millennia to nurse grudges with rivals. They are appropriately epic in scale.”
“Call me wacky,” I said, “but I had to watch a few too many children die in that war you helped guarantee. No hard feelings?” I smiled at him—technically. “Marty, believe me when I say that you don’t want me to get in touch with my feelings right now.”
I felt Martin’s eyes shift to me, and a little tension gather in his body. His shoulder twitched. He was thinking about his gun. He was pretty good with firearms. The night of my duel with the Red Court vampire named Ortega, Martin had put a round from one of those enormous sniper rifles into Ortega about half a second before the vampire would otherwise have killed me. It had been a gross violation of the Code Duello, the set of rules for resolving personal conflicts between individuals of the nations who had signed the Unseelie Accords.
The outcome of a clean duel might have put an early end to the war between the Red Court and the White Council of Wizards, and saved a lot of lives. It didn’t turn out that way.
“Don’t worry, guy,” I told him. “Ortega was already in the middle of breaking the Code Duello anyway. It would have fallen out the way it did regardless of what you had done that night. And your being there meant that he ate a bullet at the last second instead of me. You saved my life. I’m cognizant of that.”
I kept smiling at him. It didn’t feel quite right, so I tried to do it a little harder. “I’m also aware that if you could have gotten what you wanted by putting the bullet in my back instead of his chest, you would have done it without blinking. So don’t go thinking we’re pals.”
Martin looked at me and then relaxed. He said, “It’s ironic that you, the mustang of the White Council, would immediately cling to its self-righteous position of moral authority.”
“Excuse me?” I said quietly.
He spoke dispassionately, but there was a fire somewhere deep down behind the words—the first I’d ever heard in him. “I’ve seen children die, too, Dresden, slaughtered like animals by a threat no one in the wise and mighty Council seemed to give a good goddamn about—because the victims are poor, and far away, and isn’t that a fine reason to let them die. Yes. If putting a bullet in you would have meant that the Council brought its forces to bear against the Red Court, I would have done it twice and paid for the privilege.” He paused at a stop sign, gave me a direct look, and said, “It is good that we cleared the air. Is there anything else you want to say?”
I eyed the man and said, “You went blond. It makes you look sort of gay.”
Martin shrugged, completely unperturbed. “My last assignment was on a cruise ship catering to that particular lifestyle.”
I scowled and glanced at Susan.
She nodded. “It was.”
I folded my arms, glowered out at the night, and said, “I have literally killed people I liked better than you, Martin.” After another few moments, I asked, “Are we there yet?”
Martin stopped the car in front of a building and said, “It’s in here.”
I eyed the building. Nothing special, for Chicago. Twelve stories, a little run-down, all rented commercial space. “The Reds can’t—Look, it can’t be here,” I said. “This building is where my office is.”
“A known factor, for Red Court business holdings purchased it almost eight years ago,” Martin said, putting the car in park and setting the emergency brake. “I should imagine that was when you saw that sudden rise in the rent.”
I blinked a couple of times. “I’ve . . . been paying rent to the Red Court?”
“Increased rent,” Martin said, with the faintest emphasis. “Duchess Arianna apparently has an odd sense of humor. If it’s any consolation, the people working there have no idea who they’re really working for. They think they’re a firm that provides secure data backups to a multinational import-export corporation.”
“But this is . . . my building.” I frowned and shook my head. “And we’re going to do what, exactly?”
Martin got out of the car and opened the trunk. Susan joined him. I got out of the car on general principles.
“We,” said Martin, definitely not including me, “are going to burgle the office and retrieve files that we hope will contain information that might point the way toward Arianna’s locations and intentions. You are going to remain with the car.”
“The hell I will,” I said.
“Harry,” Susan said, her tone brisk and reasonable, “it’s computers.”
I grunted as if Susan had nudged me with her elbow. Wizards and computers get along about as well as flamethrowers and libraries. All technology tends to behave unreliably in the presence of a mortal wizard, and the newer it is, the wonkier it seems to become. If I went along with them, well . . . you don’t take your cat with you when you go bird shopping. Not because the cat isn’t polite, but because he’s a cat. “Oh,” I said. “Then . . . I guess I’ll stay with the car.”
“Even odds we’ve been spotted or followed,” Martin said to Susan. “We had to leave Guatemala in a hurry. It wasn’t as smooth an exit as it could have been.”
“We didn’t have days to spare,” Susan said, her voice carrying a tone of wearily familiar annoyance. It was like listening to a husband and wife having an often-repeated quarrel. She
opened a case in the trunk and slipped several objects into her pockets. “Allowances have to be made.”
Martin watched her for a moment, selected a single tool from the case, and then slid the straps of a backpack with a hard-sided frame over his shoulders. Presumably it had computer things in it. I stayed on the far side of the car from it and tried to think nonhostile thoughts.
“Just watch for trouble, Harry,” Susan said. “We’ll be back out in twenty minutes or less.”
“Or we won’t,” Martin said. “In which case we’ll know our sloppy exit technique caught up to us.”
Susan made a quiet, disgusted sound, and the pair of them strode toward the building, got to the locked front doors, paused for maybe three seconds, and then vanished inside.
“And I’m just standing here,” I muttered. “Like I’m Clifford the Big Red Dog. Too big and dumb to go inside with Emily Elizabeth. And it’s my building.” I shook my head. “Hell’s bells, I am off my game. Or out of my mind. I mean, here I am talking to myself.”
I knew why I was talking to myself—if I shut up, I would have nothing to think about but a small person, terrified and alone in a den of monsters. And that would make me think about how I had been shut out of her life. And that would make me think about the beast in my chest that was still clawing to get out.
When the local Red Court badass, the late Bianca, had stolen Susan away and begun her transformation into a full- fledged vampire of the Red Court, it had been the vampire’s intention to take my girlfriend away from me. One way or another she had succeeded. Susan as she had been—always joking, always laughing, always touching or kissing or otherwise enjoying life in general and life with me in particular—was gone.
Now she was somewhere between Emma Peel and the She-Hulk. And we had loved each other once. And a child had been born because of it. And Susan had lied to—
Before I could begin circling the block a few more times on that vicious cycle, a cold feeling went slithering down my spine.
I didn’t even look around. Several years of tense missions with Wardens not old enough to buy their own beer had taught me to trust my instincts when they went insane in a darkened city at two in the morning. Without even thinking about it, I crouched, reached into the air surrounding me, and drew a veil around myself.
Veils are subtle, tricky magic, using one of several basic theories to render objects or people less visible than they would be otherwise. I used to suck so badly at veils that I wouldn’t even try them—but I’d had to bone up on them enough to be able to teach my apprentice, Molly Carpenter, how to use them. Molly had a real gift and had learned quickly, but I’d been forcing her to stretch her talents—and it had taken a lot of personal practice time for me to be able to fake it well enough to have credibility in front of the grasshopper.
Long story short—fast, simple veils were no longer beyond my grasp.
The street darkened slightly around me as I borrowed shadow and bent light. Being under a veil always reduced your own ability to see what was happening around you, and was a calculated risk. I figured it was probably worth it. If someone had a gun pointed my way, I had a long damned run before I could get around the corner of a nice thick building. It would be better to be unseen.
I crouched next to the car, not quite invisible but pretty close. The ability to be calm and still was critical to actually using a veil. It is hard to do when you think danger is close and someone might be planning to part you from your thoughts in a purely physical fashion. But I arrested the adrenaline surge and regulated my breathing. Easy does it, Harry.
Chapter Four
My blasting rod was hanging from its tie on the inside of my coat, a stick of oak about eighteen inches long and a bit thicker than my thumb. The ridges of the runes and sigils carved into it felt comfortably familiar under the fingers of my right hand as I drew it out.
I went up to the building as silently as I could, let myself in with my key, and dropped the veil only after I was inside. It wasn’t going to do anything to hide me from a vampire that got close—they’d be able to smell me and hear my heartbeat anyway. The veil would only hamper my own vision, which was going to be taxed enough.
I didn’t take the elevator. It wheezed and rattled and would alert everyone in the building to where I was. I checked the index board in the lobby. Datasafe, Inc., resided on the ninth floor, five stories above my office. That was probably where Martin and Susan were. It would be where the vampires were heading.
I hit the stairs and took a risk. Spells to dull sound and keep conversations private were basic fare for wizards of my abilities, and it wasn’t much harder to make sure that sound didn’t leave the immediate area around me. Of course, that meant that I was effectively putting myself in a sonic bubble—I wouldn’t hear anything coming toward me, either. But for the moment, at least, I knew the vampires were here while they presumably were unaware of me. I wanted to keep it that way.
Besides, in quarters this close, by the time I reacted to a noise from a vampire I hadn’t seen, I was as good as dead anyway.
So I murmured the words to a reliable bit of phonoturgy and went up the stairs clad in perfect silence. Which was a good thing. I run on a regular basis, but running down a sidewalk or a sandy beach isn’t the same thing as running up stairs. By the time I got to the ninth floor, my legs were burning, I was breathing hard, and my left knee was killing me. What the hell? When had my knees become something I had to worry about?
Cheered by that thought, I paused at the door to the ninth-floor hallway, opened it beneath the protection of my cloak of silence, and then dropped the spell so that I could listen.
Hissing, gurgling speech in a language I couldn’t understand came from the hallway before me, maybe right around the corner I could see ahead. I literally held my breath. Vampires have superhuman senses, but they are as vulnerable to distraction as anyone. If they were talking, they might not hear me, and regular human traffic in this building would probably hide my scent from them.
And why, exactly, a voice somewhere within the storm in my chest whispered, should I be hiding from these murdering scum in the first place? Red Court vampires were killers, one and all. A half-turned vampire didn’t go all the way over until they’d killed another human being and fed upon their life’s blood. Granted, an unwilling soul taken into the Red Court found themselves at the mercy of new and nearly irresistible hungers—but that didn’t change the fact that if they were a card-carrying member of the Red Court, they had killed someone to be there.
Monsters. Monsters who dragged people into the darkness and inflicted unspeakable torments upon them for pleasure—and I should know. They’d done it to me once. Monsters whose existence was a plague upon millions.
Monsters who had taken my child.
The man once wrote: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. Tolkien had that one mostly right.
I stepped forward, let the door bang closed, and snarled, “Fuck subtle.”
The gurgle-hissing from around the corner ahead stopped at a confused intersection of speech that needed no translation: Huh?
Chapter Five
We got a cab. We got out of the area before the cops had cordoned off a perimeter. It wasn’t all that hard. Chicago has a first- rate police department, but nobody can establish that big a cordon around a large area with a lot of people in the dead of night quickly or easily. They’d have to call and get people out of bed and onto the job, and pure confusion would slow everything down.
By morning, I knew, word of the explosion would be all over the news. There would be reporters and theories and eyewitness interviews with people who had sort of heard something happen and seen a cloud of dust. This hadn’t been a fire, like we’d seen a few times before. This had been an explosion, a deliberate act of destruction. They would be able to find out that much in the aftermath.
There would be search and rescue on the scene.
I closed my eyes and lean
ed my head on the window. Odds were good that there was no one else in the building. All the tenants were businesses. None of them was prone to operating late at night. But all of them had keys to get in when they needed to, just like I did. There could have been janitors or maintenance people there—employees of the Red Court, sure, but they didn’t know that. You don’t explain to the janitorial staff how your company is a part of a sinister organization with goals of global infiltration and control. You just tell them to clean the floor.
There could very well be dead people in that building who wouldn’t have been there except for the fact that my office was on the fourth floor.
Jesus.
I felt Susan’s eyes on me. None of us had spoken in front of the cabbie. Nobody spoke now, until Martin said, “Here. Pull over here.”
I looked up. The cab was pulling up to a cheap motel.
“We should stay together,” Susan said.
“We can go over the disk here,” Martin said. “We can’t do that at his place. I need your help. He doesn’t.”
“Go on,” I said. “People”—by which I meant the police—“are going to be at my place soon anyway. Easier if they only have one person to talk to.”
Susan exhaled firmly through her nose. Then nodded. The two of them got out of the cab. Martin doled out some cash to the driver and gave him my home address.
I rode home in silence. The cabbie was listening to the news on the radio. I was pretty beat, having tossed around a bunch of magic at the building. Magic can be awfully cool, but it’s exhausting. What was left buzzing around me wasn’t enough to screw up the radio, which was already alive with talk of the explosion. The cabbie, who looked like he was vaguely Middle Eastern in extraction, looked unhappy.
I felt that.
We stopped at my apartment. Martin had already paid him too much for the ride, but I duked him another twenty on top of that and gave him a serious look. “Your name is Ahmahd?”