The Ultimate Dresden Omnibus, 0-15

by Butcher, Jim

  I inclined my head in agreement. “Then I suppose,” I said, “that we’ll just have to do this old school.”

  I drew the eighteenth-century German dragoon pistol from the open drawer beside my left hand, aimed, and fired. The ancient flintlock snapped forward, ignited the powder in the pan, and roared, a wash of unnatural blue white fire blazing forth from the antique weapon. I almost fancied that I could see the bullet, spinning and tumbling, blazing with its own tiny rune.

  Though Mag’s shadows leapt up to defend him, he had expended enormous energy moving through the building, hurling attack after attack at us. More energy had to be used to overcome the tremendous force of the claymores that had exploded virtual y in his face. Perhaps, at his full strength, at the height of his endurance, his powers would have been enough to turn even the single, potent attack that had been designed to defeat them.

  From the beginning, the plan had been to wear him down.

  The blue bolt of lead and power from the heavy old flintlock pierced Mag’s defenses and body in the same instant and with the same contemptuous energy.

  Mag blinked at me, then lowered his head to goggle at the smoking hole in his chest as wide as my thumb. His mouth moved as he tried to gabble something, but no sound came out.

  “Idiot,” I said coldly. “It will be well worth the weregild to be rid of you.”

  Mag lurched toward me for a moment, intent upon saying something, but the fates spared me from having to endure any more of him. He collapsed to the floor before he could finish speaking.

  I eyed my modern pistol, crusted with rust and residue, and decided not to try it. I kept a spare .45 in the downstairs desk in any case. I took it from another drawer, checked it awkwardly one-handed, and then emptied the weapon into Mag’s head and chest.

  I am the one who taught Hendricks to be thorough.

  I looked up from Mag’s ruined form to find Justine staring at me, frozen in the middle of wrapping a bandage around my second’s head.

  “How is he?” I asked calmly.

  Justine swallowed. She said, “He m-may need stitches for this scalp wound. I think he has a concussion. The other wounds aren’t bad. His armor stopped most of the fragments from going in.”

  “Gard?” I asked without looking over my shoulder. The valkyrie had an incredible ability to resist and recover from injury.

  “Be sore for a while,” she said, the words slurred. “Give me a few minutes.”

  “Justine, perhaps you will set my arm and splint it,” I said. “We will need to abandon this renovation, I’m afraid, Gard. Where’s the thermite?”

  “In your upstairs office closet, right where you left it,” she said in a very slightly aggrieved tone.

  “Be a dear and burn down the building,” I said.

  She appeared beside my desk, looking bruised, exhausted, and functional. She lifted both eyebrows. “Was that a joke?”

  “Apparently,” I said. “Doubtless the result of triumph and adrenaline.”

  “My word,” she said. She looked startled.

  “Get moving,” I told her. “Make the fire look accidental. I need to contact the young lady’s patron so that she can be delivered safely back into her hands.

  Cal Dr. Schulman as well. Tell him that Mr. Hendricks and I will be visiting him shortly.” I pursed my lips. “And steak, I think. I could use a good steak. The Pump Room should do for the three of us, eh? Ask them to stay open an extra half an hour.”

  Gard showed me her teeth in a flash. “Well,” she said, “it’s no mead hall. But it will do.”

  I put my house in order. In the end, it took less than half an hour. The troubleshooters made sure the fomorian creatures were dragged inside, then vanished. Mag’s body had been bagged and transferred, to be returned to his watery kin, along with approximately a quarter of a mil ion dollars in bullion, the price required in the Accords for the weregild of a person of Mag’s stature.

  Justine was ready to meet a car that was coming to pick her up, and Hendricks was already on the way to Schulman’s attentions. He’d seemed fine by the time he left, growling at Gard as she fussed over him.

  I looked around the office and nodded. “We know the defense plan has some merit,” I said. I hefted the dragoon pistol. “I’ll need more of those bullets.”

  “I was unconscious for three weeks after scribing the rune for that one,” Gard replied. “To say nothing of the fact that the bullets themselves are rare.

  That one killed a man named Nelson at Trafalgar.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I took it out of him,” she said. “Men of his caliber are few and far between. I’ll see what I can do.” She glanced at Justine. “Sir?”

  “Not just yet,” I said. “I will speak with her alone for a moment, please.”

  She nodded, giving Justine a look that was equal parts curiosity and warning. Then she departed.

  I got up and walked over to the girl. She was holding the child against her again. The little girl had dropped into an exhausted sleep.

  “So,” I said quietly. “Lara Raith sent you to Mag’s people. He happened to abduct you. You happened to escape from him—despite the fact that he seemed to be holding other prisoners perfectly adequately—and you left carrying the child. And, upon emerging from Lake Michigan, you happened to be nearby, so you came straight here.”

  “Yes,” Justine said quietly.

  “Coincidences, coincidences,” I said. “Put the child down.”

  Her eyes widened in alarm.

  I stared at her until she obeyed.

  My right arm was splinted and in a sling. With my left hand, I reached out and flipped open her suit jacket, over her left hip, where she’d been clutching the child all evening.

  There was an envelope in a plastic bag protruding from the jacket’s interior pocket. I took it.

  She made a small sound of protest and aborted it partway.

  I opened the bag and the envelope and scanned over the paper inside.

  “These are account numbers,” I said quietly. “Security passwords. Stolen from Mag’s home, I suppose?”

  She looked up at me with very wide eyes.

  “Dear child,” I said, “I am a criminal. One very good way to cover up one crime is to commit another, more obvious one.” I glanced down at the sleeping child again. “Using a child to cover your part of the scheme. Quite cold-blooded, Justine.”

  “I freed all of Mag’s prisoners to cover up the theft of his records at my lady’s bidding,” she said quietly. “The child was … not part of the plan.”

  “Children frequently aren’t,” I said.

  “I took her out on my own,” she said. “She’s free of that place. She will stay that way.”

  “To be raised among the vampires?” I asked. “Such a lovely child will surely go far.”

  Justine grimaced and looked away. “She was too small to swim out on her own. I couldn’t leave her.”

  I stared at the young woman for a long moment. Then I said, “You might consider speaking to Father Forthill at St. Mary of the Angels. The Church appears to have some sort of program to place those endangered by the supernatural into hiding. I do not recommend you mention my name as a reference, but perhaps he could be convinced to help the child.”

  She blinked at me, several times. Then she said quietly, “You, sir, are not very much like I thought you were.”

  “Nor are you. Agent Justine.” I took a deep breath and regarded the child again. “At least we accomplished something today.” I smiled at Justine. “Your ride should be here by now. You may go.”

  She opened her mouth and reached for the envelope.

  I slipped it into my pocket. “Do give Lara my regards. And tell her that the next time she sends you out to steal honey, she should find someone else to kill the bees.” I gave her a faint smile. “That will be all.”

  Justine looked at me. Then her lips quivered up into a tiny, amused smile. She bowed her head to me, collected the c
hild, and walked out, her steps light.

  I debated putting a bullet in her head but decided against it. She had information about my defenses that could leave them vulnerable—and more to the point, she knew that they were effective. If she should speak of today’s events to Dresden …

  Well. The wizard would immediately recognize that the claymores, the running water, and the magic-defense-piercing bullet had not been put into place to counter Mag or his odd folk at all.

  They were there to kill Harry Dresden.

  And they worked. Mag had proven that. An eventual confrontation with Dresden was inevitable—but murdering Justine would guarantee it happened immediately, and I wasn’t ready for that, not until I had rebuilt the defenses in the new location.

  Besides, the young woman had rules of her own. I could respect that.

  I would test myself against Dresden in earnest one day—or he against me. Until then, I had to gather as many resources to myself as possible. And when the day of reckoning came, I had to make sure it happened in a place where, despite his powers, he would no longer have the upper hand.

  Like everything else.

  Location, location, location.

  BOMBSHELLS

  I miss my boss.

  It’s been most of a year since I helped him die, and ever since then I’ve been the only professional wizard in the city of Chicago.

  Well, okay. I’m not, like, officially a wizard. I’m still sort of an apprentice. And no one really pays me, unless you count the wallets and valuables I lift from bodies sometimes, so I guess I’m more amateur than professional. And I don’t have a PI license like my boss did, or an ad in the phone book.

  But I’m all there is. I’m not as strong as he was, and I’m not as good as he was. I’m just going to have to be enough.

  So anyway, there I was, washing the blood off in Waldo Butters’ shower.

  I did a lot of living outdoors these days, which didn’t seem nearly as horrible during the summer and early autumn as it had during the arctic chill of the previous superwinter. It was like sleeping on a tropical beach by comparison. Still, I missed things like regular access to plumbing, and Waldo let me clean up whenever I needed to. I had the shower heat turned all the way up, and it was heaven. It was kind of a scourgey, scoury heaven, but heaven nonetheless.

  The floor of the shower turned red for a few seconds, then faded to pink for a while as I sluiced the blood off. It wasn’t mine. A gang of Fomor servitors had been carrying a fifteen-year-old boy down an alley toward Lake Michigan. If they’d gotten him there, he’d have been facing a fate worse than death. I intervened, but that bastard Listen cut his throat rather than give him up. I tried to save him while Listen and his buddies ran. I failed. And I’d been right there with him, feeling everything he did, feeling his confusion and pain and terror as he died.

  Harry wouldn’t have felt that. Harry would have saved the day. He would have smashed the Fomor goons around like bowling pins, picked the kid up like some kind of serial-movie action hero, and taken him to safety.

  I missed my boss.

  I used a lot of soap. I probably cried. I had begun ignoring tears months ago, and at times I honestly didn’t know when they were falling. Once I was clean—physically, anyway—I just stood there soaking up the heat, letting the water course all over me. The scar on my leg where I’d been shot was still wrinkled, but the color had changed from purple and red to angry pink. Butters said it would be gone in a couple of years. I was walking normally again, unless I pushed myself too hard. But yikes, my legs and various pieces needed to get reacquainted with a razor, even with medium-blond hair.

  I was going to ignore them, but … grooming is important for keeping one’s spirits up. A well-kept body for a well-kept mind and all that. I wasn’t a fool. I knew I wasn’t exactly flying level lately. My morale needed all the boost it could get. I leaned out of the shower and swiped Andi’s pink plastic razor. I’d pay Waldo’s werewolf girlfriend back for it later.

  I wrapped up about the same time as the hot water ran out, got out of the shower, and toweled off. My things were in a pile by the door—some garage-sale Birkenstocks, an old nylon hiker’s backpack, and my bloodied clothes. Another set gone. And the sandals had left partial tracks in blood at the scene, so I’d have to get rid of them, too. I was going to have to hit another thrift store at this rate. Normally, that would have cheered me up, but shopping just wasn’t what it used to be.

  I was carefully going over the tub and floor for fallen hairs and so on when someone knocked. I didn’t stop scanning the floor. In my line of work, people can and will do awful things to you with discarded bits of your body. Not cleaning up after yourself is like asking for someone to boil your blood from twenty blocks away. No, thank you.

  “Yes?” I called.

  “Hey, Molly,” Waldo said. “There’s, uh … there’s someone here to talk to you.”

  We’d prearranged a lot of things. If he’d used the word “feeling” at any point in his sentence, I would have known there was trouble outside the door. Not using it meant that there wasn’t—or that he couldn’t see it. I slipped on my bracelets and my ring and set both of my wands down where I could snatch them up instantly. Only then did I start putting clothes on.

  “Who?” I called.

  He was working hard not to sound nervous around me. I appreciated the effort. It was sweet. “Says her name is Justine. Says you know her.”

  I did know Justine. She was a thrall of the vampires of the White Court. Or at least a personal assistant to one and the girlfriend of another. Harry always thought well of her, though he was a big goofy idiot when it came to women who might show the potential to become damsels in distress.

  “But if he was here,” I muttered to myself, “he’d help her.”

  I didn’t wipe the steam off the mirror before I left the bathroom. I didn’t want to look at anything in there.

  Justine was a handful of years older than me, but her hair had turned pure white. She was a knockout, one of those girls all the boys assume are too pretty to approach. She had on jeans and a button-down shirt several sizes too large for her. The shirt was Thomas’s, I was certain. Her body language was poised, very neutral. Justine was as good at hiding her emotions as anyone I’d ever seen, but I could sense leashed tension and quiet fear beneath the calm surface.

  I’m a wizard, or damned close to it, and I work with the mind. People don’t really get to hide things from me.

  If Justine was afraid, it was because she feared for Thomas. If she’d come to me for help, it was because she couldn’t get help from the White Court. We could have had a polite conversation that led up to that revelation, but I had less and less patience for the amenities lately, so I cut to the chase.

  “Hello, Justine. Why should I help you with Thomas when his own family won’t?”

  Justine’s eyes bugged out. So did Waldo’s.

  I was getting used to that reaction.

  “How did you know?” Justine asked quietly.

  When you’re into magic, people always assume anything you do must be connected to it. Harry always thought that was funny. To him, magic was just one more set of tools that the mind could use to solve problems. The mind was the more important part of that pairing. “Does that matter?”

  She frowned and looked away from me. She shook her head. “He’s missing. I know he left on some kind of errand for Lara, but she says she doesn’t know anything about it. She’s lying.”

  “She’s a vampire. And you didn’t answer my first question.” The words came out a little harsher and harder than they’d sounded in my head. I tried to relax a little. I folded my arms and leaned against a wall. “Why should I help you?”

  It’s not like I wasn’t planning to help her. But I knew a secret about Harry and Thomas few others did. I had to know if Justine knew the secret, too, or if I’d have to keep it hidden around her.

  Justine met my eyes with hers for a moment. The look was penetrating.
“If you can’t go to family for help,” she said, “who can you turn to?”

  I averted my eyes before it could turn into an actual soulgaze, but her words and the cumulative impression of her posture, her presence, her self, answered the question for me.

  She knew.

  Thomas and Harry were half brothers. She’d have gone to Harry for help if he was alive. I was the only thing vaguely like an heir to his power around these parts, and she hoped I would be willing to step into his shoes. His huge, stompy, terrifying shoes.

  “You go to friends,” I said quietly. “I’ll need something of Thomas’s. Hair or fingernail clippings would be …”

  She produced a zip-closed plastic bag from the breast pocket of the shirt and offered it to me without a word. I went over and picked it up. It had a number of dark hairs in it.

  “You’re sure they’re his?”

  Justine gestured toward her own snow-white mane. “It’s not like they’re easy to confuse.”

  I looked up to find Butters watching me silently from the other side of the room. He was a beaky little guy, wiry and quick. His hair had been electrocuted and then frozen that way. His eyes were steady and worried. He cut up corpses for the government, professionally, but he was one of the more savvy people in town when it came to the supernatural.

  “What?” I asked him.

  He considered his words before he spoke—less because he was afraid of me than because he cared about not hurting my feelings. That was the reverse of most people these days. “Is this something you should get involved in, Molly?”

  What he really wanted to ask me was if I was sane. If I was going to help or just make things a lot worse.

  “I don’t know,” I said honestly. I looked at Justine and said, “Wait here.”

  Then I got my stuff, took the hairs, and left.

  The first thing Harry Dresden ever taught me about magic was a tracking spell.

  “It’s a simple principle, kid,” he told me. “We’re creating a link between two similar things out of energy. Then we make the energy give us an indicator of some kind, so that we can tell which way it’s flowing.”