by Jim Butcher
She nodded and took a moment to gather her thoughts. Then she said, “You don’t know what it’s like down there. Central America, all the way down to Brazil. There’s a reason so many of those nations limp along in a state of near-anarchy.”
“The Red Court,” I said. “I know.”
“You know in the abstract. But no one in the White Council has spent time there. Lived there. Seen what happens to the people the Reds rule.” She shivered and folded her arms over her stomach. “It’s a nightmare. And there’s no one but the Fellowship and a few underfunded operatives of the Church to stand up to them.”
The Fellowship of St. Giles was a collection of the supernatural world’s outcasts and strays, many of them half vampires like Susan. They hated the Red Court with a holy passion, and did everything in their power to confound the vampires at every opportunity. They operated in cells, choosing targets, training recruits, planting bombs, and funding their operations through a hundred shady business activities. Terrorists, basically—smart, quick, and tough because they had to be.
“It hasn’t been Disneyland in the rest of the world, either,” I said quietly. “I saw my fair share of nightmares during the war. And then some.”
“I’m not trying to belittle anything that the Council has done,” she said. “I’m just trying to explain to you what I was facing at the time. Teams from the Fellowship rarely sleep in the same bed twice. We’re always on the move. Always planning something or running from something. There’s no place for a child in that.”
“If only there had been someone with his own home and a regular income where she could have stayed,” I said.
Susan’s eyes hardened. “How many people have gotten killed around you, Harry? How many hurt?” She raked her fingers through her hair. “For God’s sake. You said yourself that your apartment has been under attack. Would that have gone any better if you’d had a toddler to watch over?”
“Guess we’ll never know,” I said.
“I know,” she said, her voice suddenly seething with intensity. “God, do you think I didn’t want to be a part of her life? I cry myself to sleep at night—when I can sleep. But in the end, I couldn’t offer her anything but a life on the run. And you couldn’t offer her anything but a life under siege.”
I stared at her.
But I didn’t say anything.
“So I did the only thing I could do,” she said. “I found a place for her. Far away from the fighting. Where she could have a stable life. A loving home.”
“And never told me,” I said.
“If the Red Court had ever learned about my child, they would have used her against me. Period. As a means of leverage, or simple revenge. The fewer people who knew about her, the safer she was going to be. I didn’t tell you, even though I knew it was wrong. Even though I knew that it would make you furious because of your own childhood.” She leaned forward, her eyes almost feverish from the heat in her words. “And I would do a thousand times worse than that, if it meant that she’d be better protected.”
I sipped some more Coke. “So,” I said. “You kept her from me so that she would be safer. And you sent her away to be raised by strangers so that she would be safer.” The storm in me pushed up higher, tingeing my voice with the echo of its furious howl. “How’s that working out?”
Susan’s eyes blazed. Red, swirling tribal marks began to appear on her skin, like tattoos done in disappearing ink, only backward—the Fellowship’s version of a mood ring. They covered the side of her face, and her throat.
“The Fellowship has been compromised,” she said, her words crisp. “Duchess Arianna of the Red Court found out about her, somehow, and had her taken. Do you know who she is?”
“Yeah,” I said. I tried to ignore the way my blood had run cold at the mention of the name. “Duke Ortega’s widow. She’s sworn revenge upon me—and she once tried to buy me on eBay.”
Susan blinked. “How did . . . No, never mind. Our sources in the Red Court say that she’s planning something special for Maggie. We have to get her back.”
I took another slow breath and closed my eyes for a moment.
“Maggie, huh?”
“For your mother,” Susan whispered. “Margaret Angelica.” I heard her fumble at her pockets. Then she said, “Here.”
I opened my eyes and looked at a little wallet-sized portrait of a dark-eyed child, maybe five years old. She wore a pink dress and had purple ribbons in her dark hair, and she was smiling a wide and infectious smile. Some calm, detached part of me filed the face away, in case I needed to recognize her later. The rest of me cringed away from looking any closer, from thinking about the image as anything but a bit of paper and ink.
“It’s from a couple of years ago,” Susan said quietly. “But it’s my most recent picture.” She bit her lip and offered it to me.
“Keep it,” I told her quietly. She put it away. The red marks were fading from her skin, gone the way they had come. I rubbed at my eyes. “For now,” I said slowly, “we’re going to forget about your decision to edit me out of her life. Because chewing over it won’t help her right now, and because her best chance is for us to work together. Agreed?”
Susan nodded.
I spoke the next words through my teeth. “But I haven’t forgotten. Will never forget it. There will be a reckoning on that account later. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” she whispered. She looked up at me with large, shining dark eyes. “I never wanted to hurt you. Or her. I was just . . .”
“No,” I said. “Too late for that now. It’s just wasting time we can’t afford to lose.”
Susan turned her face sharply away from me, to the fire, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her expression was under control. “All right,” she said. “For our next step, we’ve got some options.”
“Like?”
“Diplomacy,” she said. “I hear stories about you. Half of them probably aren’t true, but I know you’ve got some markers you could call in. If enough of the Accord members raise a voice, we might get her back without incident.”
I snorted. “Or?”
“Offer reparations to the Red King in exchange for the child’s life. He doesn’t have a personal interest in this matter, and he outranks Arianna. Give him a bribe big enough and she’ll have to let Maggie go.”
“Right off the top of a building, probably,” I growled.
Susan watched me steadily. “What do you think we should do?”
I felt my lips do something that probably didn’t look like a smile. The storm had settled somewhere around my heart, and heady tendrils of its fury were curling up into my throat. It was a good ten seconds before I could speak, and even then it came out in a snarl.
“Do?” I said. “The Reds stole our little girl. We sure as hell aren’t going to pay them for that.”
A hot and terrible hunger flared up in Susan’s eyes in response to my voice.
“We find Maggie,” I said. “We take her back. And we kill anyone who gets in the way.”
Susan shuddered and her eyes overflowed. She bowed her head and made a small sound. Then she leaned over and gently touched my left hand, the one still covered in slowly fading burn scars. She looked at my hand and winced, beginning to draw away.
I caught her fingers and squeezed hard. She settled her fingers against mine and did the same. We held hands for a silent moment.
“Thank you,” she whispered. Her hand was shaking in mine. “Thank you, Harry.”
I nodded. I was going to say something to stiff-arm her and keep the distance, but the warmth of her hand in mine was suddenly something I couldn’t ignore. I was furious with Susan, furious with an intensity you can feel only when someone you care deeply about hurts you. But the corollary of that was unavoidable—I still cared, or I wouldn’t be angry.
“We’ll find her,” I said. “And I will do everything in my power to bring her back safe.”
Susan looked up at me, tears streaking her face, and n
odded. Then she lifted a hand and traced her fingers lightly over the scar on my cheek. It was a newer one, still angry and colorful. I thought it made me look like some old-school German character from Golden Age Hollywood with a dueling scar on his cheek. Her fingertips were gentle and warm.
“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she said. “There was no one willing to stand up to them. There was no one.”
Our eyes met, and suddenly the old heat was there between us, quivering out from our joined hands, from her fingertips against my face. Her eyes widened a little, and my heart started pounding along rapidly. I was furious with Susan. But apparently my body just read that as “excited” and didn’t bother examining the fine print. I met her eyes for a long moment and then said, through a dry throat, “Isn’t this how we got into this mess?”
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 3
“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?”µMartin 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.