by Butcher, Jim
“True,” she said gravely. “But I have no clothes.”
I counted to ten mentally. “I’ll . . . find something for you. Until then, no desocketing. Just wear the armor. Fair enough?”
Lacuna bowed slightly at the waist. “I understand, my lord.”
“Good.” I sighed. I flicked a comb through my wet hair, for all the good it would do, and said, “How do I look?”
“Mostly human,” she said.
“That’s what I was going for.”
“You have a visitor, my lord.”
I frowned. “What?”
“That is why I came in here. You have a visitor waiting for you.”
I stood up, exasperated. “Why didn’t you say so?”
Lacuna looked confused. “I did. Just now. You were there.” She frowned thoughtfully. “Perhaps you have brain damage.”
“It would not shock me in the least,” I said.
“Would you like me to cut open your skull and check, my lord?” she asked.
Someone that short should not be that disturbing. “I . . . No. No, but thank you for the offer.”
“It is my duty to serve,” Lacuna intoned.
My life, Hell’s bells. I beckoned Lacuna to follow me, mostly so I would know where the hell she was, and went back out into the main room.
Sarissa was there.
She sat at the kitchen table, her small hands clutched around one of Molly’s mugs, and she looked like hell. There was a dark red mouse on her left cheekbone, one that was swelling and beginning to purple nicely. Her hands and forearms were scraped and bruised—defensive injuries. She wore a pale blue T-shirt and dark blue cotton pajama pants. Both were soaked from the rain and clinging in a fashion that made me want to stare. Her dark hair was askew, and her eyes were absolutely haunted. They darted nervously toward me when I appeared, and her shoulders hunched slightly.
Molly said something quiet to her and rose from the table, crossing the room to me.
“She said you knew her,” Molly said.
“I do. She all right?”
“She’s a mess,” Molly said. “Showed up and begged security to call me before they called the cops. And it isn’t the first time this has happened to her. She’s terrified to be here—terrified of you personally, I think.”
I frowned at my apprentice.
Molly shrugged. “Her emotions are really loud. I’m not even trying to pick anything up.”
“Okay,” I said.
“Is she on the level?”
I thought about it for a second before I answered. “She’s Mab’s BFF.”
“So that would be a no, then,” Molly said.
“Probably so,” I said. “There’s bound to be an angle here, even if she doesn’t know that there is one. She’s a pawn in Winter. Somebody has got to be moving her.”
Molly winced.
“She’s also a lifelong survivor in Winter, so don’t let your guard down. The last creature who did wound up as frozen kibble.” I jerked my head toward the exit. “Heard anything from the scouts yet?”
She shook her head.
“Okay. We’ll talk to her. Stay close. I might need to pick your brain about something later.”
“Right,” Molly said, blinking a little. Then she followed me back over to Sarissa.
She gave me a nervous smile, and her fingers resettled on the mug a couple of times. “Harry.”
“I didn’t realize you made house calls all the way to Chicago,” I said.
“I wish it were that,” she said.
I nodded. “How did you know where to find me?”
“I was given directions,” she said.
“By who?”
She swallowed and looked down at the tabletop. “The Redcap.”
I sat back slowly in my seat. “Maybe you’d better tell me what happened.”
“He came for me,” she said quietly, without meeting my eyes. “He came this morning. I was hooded, bound, and taken somewhere. I don’t know where. I was there for several hours. Then he came back, took my hood off, and sent me here. With this.”
She reached down to her lap and put a plain white envelope on the table. She pushed it toward me.
I took it. It wasn’t sealed. I opened it, frowned, and then turned it upside down over the table.
Several tufts of hair bound with small bits of string fell out, along with a small metal object.
Molly drew in a sharp breath.
“He said to tell you that he’s taken your friends,” Sarissa said quietly.
I picked up the tufts of hair one at a time. Wiry black, slightly crinkled hairs, sprinkled with silver ones. Butters. Red hairs, luscious and curly. Andi. And a long, soft, slightly wavy lock of pure white hair. I lifted it to my nose and sniffed. Strawberries. I let out a soft curse.
“Who?” Molly asked, her voice worried.
“Justine,” I said.
“Oh, God.”
I picked up the metal object. It was a plain bottle cap, slightly dented where it had been removed.
“And Mac,” I said quietly. “He had someone following me everywhere I went. He took someone from each place.”
“He told me to tell you,” Sarissa said, “that he’ll trade them all for you, if you surrender to him before sundown.”
“And if I don’t?” I asked.
“He’ll give their bones to the rawhead,” she whispered.
Chapter
Thirty-six
Silence fell.
“Okay,” I said into it. “I’ve just about had enough of that clown.”
Molly looked up at me, her eyes worried. “You sure?”
“Guy gets his jollies dipping his hat in people’s blood,” I said.
“You can bargain with the Sidhe sometimes,” Molly said.
“But not this time,” I said, my voice hard. “If we do, he’ll keep the letter of his word and he’ll make sure they don’t make it out anyway. The only way we’re getting our friends back is to take them away from him.”
Molly grimaced, but after a moment, she nodded.
I picked up the clumps of hair and put them in a neat row on the table. “Molly.”
“On it,” she said, collecting them.
“What are you doing?” Sarissa asked, her eyes wide.
“The jerk was kind enough to give me some fresh cuttings from my friends,” I said. “I’m going to use them to track him down and thwart him.”
“Thwart?” Sarissa asked.
“Thwart,” I said. “To prevent someone from accomplishing something by means of visiting gratuitous violence upon his smarmy person.”
“I’m pretty sure that isn’t the definition,” Sarissa said.
“It is today.” I raised my voice. “Cat Sith. I need your assistance, please.”
Sarissa went completely still when I spoke, like a rabbit who has sensed a nearby predator. Her eyes widened, then flicked around the room, seeking escape.
“It’s okay,” I told her. “I’m getting along with him.”
“You’re a wizard and the Winter Knight,” Sarissa hissed. “You have no idea how vicious that creature is, and I don’t have the Queen’s aegis protecting me.”
“You have mine,” I said. I raised my voice, annoyed. “Cat Sith! Kittykittykittykitty!”
“Are you insane?” Sarissa hissed.
“He might not be able to get through, Harry,” Molly said. “It’s not just a threshold here. The svartalves have wards over the building as well.”
“Makes sense,” I said. “Be right back.”
I went out and looked around, but Sith didn’t appear. I called his name a third time, which as we all know is the charm. With beings of the Nevernever it’s a literal truth. I mean, it’s not an irresistible force, like gravity—it’s more like a kind of obsessive-compulsive disorder that happens to be present, to varying degrees, in most of them. They respond, strongly, to things that happen in threes, be they requests, insults, or commands. So in a way, three really is a m
agic number.
Hell. Just ask ménage-à-Thomas. Jerk.
I waited for a while, even going so far as to turn about and take a few steps backward before turning forward again, just to give Sith some really rich opportunities to appear abruptly and startle me.
Except he didn’t.
I got a slow, squirmy feeling in the pit of my stomach. The rain was still falling in spits and showers, but the clouds had begun to gain the tint of a slow autumn sundown. Sith had always appeared almost instantly before.
Had Mab been setting me up? Had she given me the eldest malk’s assistance so that she could pull the rug out from under me when I needed Sith the most? Had she gotten the Nemesis brainmold?
I hadn’t seen Sith since the confrontation at the gardens. Had the enemy Sidhe brought him down?
Or worse, the adversary?
I felt actively sick to my stomach. If Cat Sith had been turned, there was no telling how much damage he might cause. Especially to me.
I felt a little stupid about the kittykittykitty thing. Hopefully, he hadn’t been listening.
I went back into the apartment, pensive.
Molly gave me an inquiring look.
I shook my head.
Molly frowned at that; I could see the gears whirling in her brain.
“Okay,” I said. “Plan B. Lacuna, come here, if you please.”
After a moment, a little voice said from the direction of my room, “What if I don’t please?”
“You come here anyway,” I stated. “It’s a human thing.”
She made a disgusted noise and came zipping out of the room on her blurring wings. “What do you want me to do?”
“You can read,” I said. “Can you read a map? Write?”
“Yes.”
“You’re on house duty, then,” I said. “If any of the Little Folk come back with a location where a rite is taking place, I want you to write down their descriptions and mark the location on the map. Can you do that?”
Lacuna looked dubiously at the maps spread out on the table. “I think so. Probably. Maybe.”
“And no fighting or duels.”
“What about when I’m done writing things?”
“No.”
Lacuna folded her little arms and scowled at me. “You aren’t fun at all.”
“Your breath smells like celery,” I replied. “Molly, how are those spells coming along?”
“I think there’s some kind of counterspell hiding them,” she said. “It’s tricky, so stop bumping my elbow. I’m concentrating over here.”
I let out an impatient breath and fought against a surge of anger. She was the apprentice and I was the wizard. There were wizards who would have beaten unconscious any apprentice who spoke to them like that. I’d always been kind to her—maybe too kind—and this disrespect was what I got in return? I should educate her to respect her betters.
I made a low growling sound in my chest and clenched my fists. That impulse wasn’t mine. It was Winter’s. Molly and I had a relationship built on structure, trust, and respect—not fear. We had always bantered back and forth like that.
But something in me wanted to . . . I don’t know. Put her in her place. Take out my frustrations on her. Show her which of us was the strongest. And it had a really primitive idea of how to make that happen.
But that was unthinkable. That was the mantle talking. Loudly.
Hell’s bells. As if I didn’t have enough trouble thinking my way past the influence of my own glands already.
I heard a slight sound behind me and turned in time to see Sarissa vanish into the bathroom, moving in absolute silence. The rabbit had given up the statue routine and bolted.
Sarissa had good instincts when it came to predators.
I turned back to Molly to find her looking at me, her eyes wide. Molly was a psychic sensitive. She could feel emotions the way most of us can feel the temperature of a room. Sometimes she could even pluck someone’s thoughts out of the air.
She knew exactly what I was feeling. She had all along.
And she hadn’t run.
“Are you okay?” she asked quietly.
“It’s nothing,” I said. I forced myself to think my way past the mantle’s influence. “Find a steel needle to use as the focus,” I said. “Should give you an edge against whatever magic the Sidhe are using.”
“Should have thought of that,” Molly chided herself.
“That’s why they pay me the big bucks.” I turned and walked away from my apprentice to let her work without the distraction of my tangle of Winter’s urges blaring into her skull like an airhorn.
I rummaged around in her fridge and made a sandwich from a bagel I split down the middle and a small mountain of two different-colored deli meats. I wolfed it down. Less than five minutes later, Molly tied a needle onto a piece of wood with one of each of the human hairs. She then placed it gently into a bowl of water, and performed the tracking spell without a hitch.
The needle slowly swung around to point east, directly toward my abducted friends. Probably. There were ways to futz about with tracking spells, but it appeared that the addition of steel to our own spell had overcome whatever the Redcap had cooked up. I extended my senses and checked the tracking spell. It was as solid as one of my own.
“Good work,” I said. Then I walked over to the bathroom door and knocked gently. “Sarissa,” I said. “Can you hear me?”
“Yes,” she answered.
“We’re going out,” I said. “I hope we won’t be gone long. You should be safe here, but you’re free to leave if you want to do so. I think you might be followed if you do, but you aren’t a prisoner or anything. Okay?”
There was a hesitant moment of silence and then she said, “I understand.”
“There’s food in the fridge,” Molly called. “And you can sleep in my room if you’re tired. The door has a lock.”
There was no answer.
“Let’s get moving,” I said to Molly. “I want to make a stop before we track them down.”
* * *
The svartalves’ security guy stopped us before we could leave and informed us that my car had been repaired and delivered, and that they would bring it around for me. Molly and I traded a glance.
“Um. How sure are you that the vehicle is secure?” Molly asked.
“Mr. Etri personally requested a security sweep,” the guard said. “It’s already been screened for weapons, explosives, toxins, and any kind of enchantment, Miss Carpenter. Right now, they’re running it under a waterfall to wash away any tracking spells that might be on it. It’s the same procedure Mr. Etri uses to secure his own cars, miss.”
“Who brought it?” Molly asked.
The guard took a small notebook from his pocket and checked it. “A local mechanic named Mike Atagi. Think there’s a picture . . .” He thumbed through the pages, and then held up a color printout that had been folded into the notebook. “This is him.”
I leaned forward to peer at the photo. Well, son of a gun. It was my old mechanic, Mike. Mike had been a miracle worker when it came to repairing the Blue Beetle, working with a talent that was the next-best thing to sorcery to bring the car back from the dead over and over again.
“Did he say who delivered it to him?” I asked.
The guard checked his notes. “Here. That it was waiting at his shop when he got there, along with a deposit and a rush order, reading, ‘Repair this for Harry Dresden and return it to the following address or suffer, mortal smith.’”
“Cat Sith,” I said. “Well, at least he was on the job while we were out at the island.”
There was a low growling sound and the Munstermobile came gliding up out of the parking garage, dripping water from its gleaming surface like some lantern-eyed leviathan rising from the depths. There were still a few dents and dings in it, but the broken glass had all been replaced, and the engine sounded fine.
Okay, I’m not like a car fanatic or anything—but the guitar riff from “Ba
d to the Bone” started playing in my head.
“Wheels,” I said. “Excellent.”
The Munstermobile came gliding up to us and stopped, still dripping water, and another security guy got out of it, left the driver door open, and came around to open the passenger door for Molly.
I touched Molly’s shoulder to stop her from moving to get in immediately, and spoke to her very quietly. “How much do you trust your friend Mr. Etri?”
“Etri might oppose you,” Molly said. “He might break your bones. He might cut your throat in your sleep or make the ground swallow you up. But he will never, ever lie about his intentions. He’s not a friend, Harry. But he is my ally. He’s good at it.”
I wanted to say something smart-ass about not trusting anyone who lived anywhere near the Faerie realms, but I held back. For one thing, svartalves take paranoia to an art form, and I had no doubt they would be listening to everything everyone said on their own property while not in private quarters. It would have been stupid to insult them. For another thing, they had an absolutely ironclad reputation for integrity and neutrality. No one crossed a svartalf lightly—but on the other hand, the svartalves rarely gave anyone a good reason to cross them, either. That garnered them a boatload of respect.
They also had a reputation for rigid adherence to promises, to bargains, and to the law, or at least to the letters it consisted of. “What are the terms of your alliance?” I asked, walking around the car toward the driver side.
“I get the apartment,” Molly said. “I mean, it’s mine. I own it. They handle any maintenance for the next fifty years, and as long as I’m on their property, they consider me to be a citizen of their nation, with all the rights and privileges that entails.”
I whistled as we got in and shut the doors. “And what did you give them for that?”
“Their honor. And there might have been this bomb problem I handled for them.”
“Hell’s bells,” I said. “Look at you, all grown-up.”
“You have been,” Molly said. “All day.”
I tried not to give her a guilty glance as we pulled out. “Um.”
“I feel it, you know,” she said. “The pressure inside you.”
“I’ve got it buttoned down,” I said, and started driving. “Don’t worry. I’m not going to let it make me . . . take anything away from you.”