by Butcher, Jim
Lea’s warmer, more languid voice came from her lips as she asked, “My queen, to what degree am I permitted to act?”
I thought I saw the fell light gleam on Mab’s teeth as Lea’s lips said, “You may indulge yourself.”
Lea’s mouth spread into a wide, dangerous smile of its own, and she bowed her head and upper body toward the Queen of Winter.
“And now, my Knight,” Mab’s voice said, as her body turned to face me exclusively. “We will see to the strength of your broken body. And I will make you mine.”
I swallowed hard.
Mab lifted a hand, a dismissive gesture, and the Leanansidhe bowed to her.
“I am no longer needed here, child,” Lea murmured. “I will be ready to go with thee whenever thou dost call.”
My throat was almost too dry to get any words out. “I’ll want the things I left with you, as soon as you can get them to me.”
“Of course,” she said. She bowed to me as well, and took several steps back into the mist, until it swallowed her whole.
And I was alone with Queen Mab.
“So,” I said into the silence. “I guess there’s . . . there’s a ceremony of some kind to go through.”
Mab stepped closer to me. She wasn’t an enormous, imposing figure. She was considerably shorter than me. Slender. But she walked with such perfect confidence that the role of predator and prey was clear to both of us. I edged back from her. It was pure instinct, and I could no more stop from doing it than I could have stopped shivering against the cold.
“Going to be hard for us to exchange oaths if you can’t talk, huh,” I said. My voice sounded thin and shaky, even to me. “Um. Maybe it’s paperwork or something.”
Pale hands slipped up from the dark cloak and drew her hood back. She shook her head left and right, and pale, silken tresses, whiter than moonlight or Lloyd Slate’s dead flesh, spilled forth.
My voice stopped working for a second. My bare thighs hit the Stone Table behind me, and I wound up sitting on it.
Mab kept pacing toward me, one slightly swaying step at a time. The cloak slid from her shoulders, down, down, down.
“Y-you, uh,” I said, looking away. “You m-must be cold.”
A throaty little laugh bubbled up out of her frozen-berry lips. Mab’s voice, touched with anger, could cause physical damage to living flesh. Her voice filled with simmering desire . . . did other things.
And the cold was suddenly the least of my concerns.
Her mouth closed on mine, and I gave up even trying to speak. This wasn’t a ceremony so much as a rite, and one as ancient as beasts and birds, earth and sky.
My memory gets shaky after the kiss.
I remember her body gleaming brightly above me, cold, soft, feminine perfection. I don’t have the words to describe it. Inhuman beauty. Elfin grace. Animal sensuality. And when her body was atop mine, our breaths mingled, cold sweetness with human imperfection. I could feel the rhythm of her form, her breath, her heart. I could feel the stone of the table, the ancient hill of the mound, the very earth of the valley around us pulsing in time to Mab’s rhythm. Clouds raced over the sky, and as she moved more quickly she grew brighter, and brighter, until I realized that the eerie luminescence around us all evening had been nothing but a dim, muffled reflection of Mab’s loveliness, veiled for the sake of the mortal mind it could have unmade.
She did not veil it as her breathing mounted. And it burned me, it was so pure.
What we did wasn’t sex, regardless of what it appeared to be. You can’t have sex with a thunderstorm, an earthquake, a furious winter gale. You can’t make love to a mountain, a lake of ice, a freezing wind.
For a few moments, I saw the breadth and depth of Mab’s power—and for a fleeting instant, the barest, tiniest glimpse of her purpose, as well, as our entwined bodies thrashed toward completion. I was screaming. I had been for a while.
Then Mab’s cry joined mine, our voices blending together. Her nails dug into my chest, chips of ice sliding beneath my skin. I saw her body drawn into an arch of pleasure, and then her green cat eyes opened and bored into—
Her mouth opened, and her voice hissed, “MINE.”
Absolute truth made my body vibrate like the plucked string of a guitar, and I jerked into a brief, violent contortion.
Mab’s hands slid down my ribs, and I could suddenly feel the fire of the cracked bones again, until those icy hands tightened as again she said, “MINE.”
Again, my body bowed into a violent bow, every muscle trying to tear its way off of my bones.
Mab hissed in eagerness as her hands slid around my waist, covering the numb spot where my spine had probably been broken. I felt myself screaming and struggling, with no control whatsoever over my body.
Mab’s feline eyes captured my own gaze, trapping my attention within their frozen beauty as again a jolt of terrible, sweet cold flowed out from her fingertips and she whispered, her voice a velvet caress, “. . . mine . . .”
Chapter Thirty-two
I was tied down, but my hands weren’t. I flexed the fingers of my right hand into the mystic position of attack—holding them like a pretend gun—and snapped, “Arctis!”
The spell tore the heat from all around the gun and drew water from the air into an instant, thick coating of ice, heaviest around the weapon’s hammer. The shooter twitched in reaction to the spell and pulled the trigger.
The encrusting ice held the hammer back and prevented it from falling.
The gunman blinked and tried to pull the trigger several more times, to no avail. Forthill hit him around the knees. Both men went down, and the gun came loose from the gunman’s cold-numbed fingers as they hit the floor, and went spinning across the room. It struck a wall, cracked the ice around its hammer, and discharged harmlessly into the wall with another roar.
The gunman kicked Forthill in the face and the old priest fell back with a grunt of pain. Molly threw herself at him in pure rage, knocking him flat again, and began pounding her fists into him with elemental brutality and no technique whatsoever. The gunman threw an elbow that got her in the neck and knocked her back, then rose, his eyes searching the floor, until he spotted his weapon. He started for it.
I killed the light from the amulet. He tripped and fell in the sudden darkness. I heard him scuffling with the dazed Forthill.
Then there was a single bright flash of light that showed me the gunman arching up in pain. Then it was gone and there was the sound of something large falling to the floor. Several people were breathing heavily.
I got my fingers onto my amulet again and brought forth light into the room.
Forthill sat against one wall, holding his jaw, looking pale. Molly was in a crouch, one hand lifted as if she’d been about to do something with her magical talents, the way she should have at the first sound of the shots, if she’d been thinking clearly. The gunman lay on his side, and began to stir again.
Butters wheezed, “Clear,” and touched both ends of the naked wires in his hands to the gunman’s chest.
The wires ran back to the emergency defib unit. When they’d been melted off the paddles, it had left several strands of pure copper naked on the ends of both of them. The current did what current does, and the gunman bucked in agony for a second and sagged into immobility again.
“Jerk,” Butters wheezed. He put a hand on the small of his back and said, “Ow. Ow, ow, ow, OW!”
“Butters!” Molly croaked, and hugged him.
“Urgckh,” Butters said. “Ow.” But he didn’t look displeased at the hug.
“Grasshopper, don’t strain him until we know how bad it is,” I said. “Dammit.” I started fumbling with the straps, getting them clear of my upper body so I could sit up and work on my legs. “Forthill? Are you all right?”
Father Forthill said something unintelligible and let out a groan of pain. Then he heaved himself to his feet and started helping me with the buckles. His jaw was purple and swollen on one side. He’d taken one he
ll of a hit and stayed conscious. Tough old guy, even though he looked so mild.
I got off the backboard, onto my feet, and picked up the gun.
“I’m all right,” Butters said. “I think.” His eyes went wide and he suddenly seemed to panic. “Oh, God, make sure I’m all right!” He started clawing at his shirt. “That maniac freaking shot me!”
He got the scrubs top off and turned around to show Molly his back. He was wearing an undershirt.
And on top of that, he was wearing a Kevlar vest. It was a light, underclothing garment, suitable only for protection against handguns—but the gunman had walked in with a nine- millimeter. He’d put both shots onto the centerline of Butters’s lower back, and the vest had done its job. The rounds were still there, flattened and stuck in the ballistic weave.
“I’m hit, aren’t I?” Butters stuttered. “I’m in shock. I can’t feel it because I’m in shock. Right? Was it in the liver? Is the blood black? Call emergency services!”
“Butters,” I said. “Look at me.”
He did, his eyes wide.
“Polka,” I said, “will never die.”
He blinked at me. Then he nodded and started forcing himself to take slower, deeper breaths. “I’m all right?”
“The magic underwear worked,” I said. “You’re fine.”
“Then why does my back hurt so much?”
“Somebody just hit it twice with a hammer moving about twelve hundred feet per second,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. He turned to look at Molly, who nodded at him and gave him an encouraging smile. Then he shuddered and closed his eyes in relief. “I don’t think I’m temperamentally suited for the action thing.”
“Yeah. Since when are you the guy in the bulletproof vest?” I asked him.
Butters nodded at Molly. “I put it on about ten seconds after she called me and said you needed help,” he said. He fumbled a small case from his pocket and opened it. “See? I got chalk, and holy water, and garlic, too.”
I smiled at him, but felt a little bit sick. The gunman had put Butters down for the simple reason that he had been blocking the shooter’s line of sight to the room. If he’d been trying for Butters, the two shots to clear his sight line would have included a third shot to the back of Butters’s head. Of course, if Butters hadn’t been in the way, my head wouldn’t have fared any better than his.
We’re all so damned fragile.
Footsteps sounded outside the door, and I raised the gun to cover it, taking a grip with both hands, my feet centered. I was lining up the little green targeting dots when Sanya came through the door carrying a platter of sandwiches. He stopped abruptly and lifted both eyebrows, then beamed broadly. “Dresden! You are all right.” He looked around the room for a moment, frowning, and said, “Did I miss something? Who is that?”
“I don’t think there’s anything broken,” Butters told Forthill, “but you’d better get an X-ray, just to be sure. Mandibular fracture isn’t anything to play around with.”
The old priest nodded from his chair in the living quarters of the church’s residents, and wrote something down on a little pad of paper. He showed it to Butters.
The little guy grinned. “You’re welcome, Father.”
Molly frowned and asked, “Should we take him to the emergency room?”
Forthill shook his head and wrote on his notepad: Things to tell you first.
Now I had a pair of guns I’d swiped from bad guys: the security guard’s .40-caliber and the gunman’s nine- millimeter. I was inspecting them both on the coffee table, familiarizing myself with their function, and wondering if I should be planning to file off the serial numbers or something. Mouse sat next to me, his flank against my leg and his serious brown eyes watching me handle the weapons.
“You found out something?” I asked Forthill.
In a way, he wrote back. There are major movements afoot throughout South and Central America. The Red Court’s upper echelon uses human servitors to interface with mortals. Many of these individuals have been sighted at airports in the past three days. All of them are bound for Mexico. Does Chichén Itzá have any significance to you?
Chapter Thirty-three
“Give me the details,” I said quietly.
“She said you’d be here. Gave me twenty thousand up front, twenty more held in escrow until delivery was confirmed.”
Mouse made a soft, uncomfortable noise that never quite became a whine. He sat watching my face intently.
“When?” I asked.
“Last night.”
I stared at him for a moment. Then I tossed Stevie’s wallet back onto the folding card table and said, “Cut him loose. Walk him to the door.”
Sanya let out what seemed like a disappointed sigh. Then he produced a knife and began cutting Stevie free.
I walked down the hall, back toward the living area with my head bowed, thinking furiously.
Susan had hired a gunman to kill me. Why?
I stopped walking and leaned against a wall. Why would she hire someone to kill me? Or, hell, more to the point—why would she hire a gunman to kill me? Why not someone who stood a greater chance of success?
Granted, a gunman could kill even a wizard if he were taken by surprise. But pistols had to be fired at dangerously short ranges to be reliable, and Stevie D had a reputation as a brazen sidearm specialist. It meant that the wizard would have more time to see something bad coming, as opposed to being warned only when a high-powered rifle round hit his chest, and would have an easier time responding with hasty defensive magic. It was hardly an ideal approach.
If Susan wanted me dead, she wouldn’t really need to contract it out. A pretext to get me alone and another one to put us very close to each other would just about do it. And I’d never see that one coming.
Something about this just wasn’t right. I’d have called Stevie a liar, but I didn’t think he was one. I was sure he believed what he was saying.
So. Either Stevie was lying and I was just too dim to pick up on it, or he was telling the truth. If he was lying, given what kind of hot water I could get him into, he was also an idiot. I didn’t think he was one of those. If he was telling the truth, it meant . . .
It meant that either Susan really had hired someone to kill me, or else someone who could look like Susan had done business with Stevie D. If Susan had hired someone to kill me, why this guy, in particular? Why hire someone who didn’t have better than even chances of pulling it off? That was more the kind of thing Esteban and Esmerelda would come up with.
That worked a lot better. Esmerelda’s blue and green eyes could have made Stevie remember being hired by Mister Snuffleupagus, if that was what she wanted. But how would she have known where to find me? Had they somehow managed to tail Sanya back to the church from my apartment without being noticed by Mouse?
And just where the hell were Susan and Martin? They’d had more than enough time to get here. So why weren’t they?
Someone was running a game on me. If I didn’t start getting some answers to these questions, I had a bad feeling that it was going to turn around and bite me on the ass at the worst moment imaginable.
Right, then.
I guessed that meant it was time to go get some answers.
Paranoia is a survival trait when you run in my circles. It gives you something to do in your spare time, coming up with solutions to ridiculous problems that aren’t ever going to happen. Except when one of them does, at which point you feel way too vindicated.
For instance, I had spent more than a couple of off hours trying to figure out how I might track someone through Chicago if I didn’t have some kind of object or possession of theirs to use as a focus. Basic tracking magic is completely dependent upon having a sample of whoever it is you want to follow. Hair, blood, and nail clippings are the usual thing. But let’s say you don’t have any of those, and you still want to find someone. If you have a sample of something in their possession, a piece snipped from their clothing, th
e tag just torn out of their underwear, whatever, you can get them that way, too.
But let’s say things are hectic and crazy and someone has just burned down your house and your lab and you still need to follow somebody.
That’s when you need a good, clear photograph. And minions. Lots of minions. Preferably ones who don’t demand exorbitant wages.
There’s a Pizza ’Spress less than two blocks from St. Mary’s. Sanya and I went straight there. I ordered.
“I do not see how this helps us,” Sanya said, as I walked out from the little shop with four boxes of pizza.
“You’re used to solving all your problems the simple way,” I said. “Kick down the door, chop up everybody who looks fiendish, save everyone who looks like they might need it. Yeah?”
“It is not always that simple,” Sanya said, rather stiffly. “And sometimes I use a gun.”
“Which I applaud you for, very progressive,” I said. “But the point is, you do your work directly. You pretty much know where you’re going, or get shown the way, and after that it’s just up to you to take care of business.”
“Da,” Sanya said as we walked. “I suppose.”
“My work is sort of the same,” I said. “Except that nobody ever points the way for me.”
“You need to know where to go,” Sanya said.
“Yes.”
“And you are going to consult four large pizzas for guidance.”
“Yes,” I said.
The big man frowned for a moment. Then he said, “There is, I think, humor here which does not translate well from English into sanity.”
“That’s pretty rich coming from the agnostic Knight of the Cross with a holy Sword who takes his orders from an archangel,” I said.
“Gabriel could be an alien being of some kind,” Sanya said placidly. “It does not change the value of what I do—not to me and not to those whom I protect.”