Changes df-12

by Jim Butcher

  I peered at him a bit more closely. “Why is half your face painted blue?”

  “Because we’re Winter now, my liege!” Toot said. His eyes darted to the side and down several times. “And . . . say, that doesn’t mean we have to eat the pizza cold, does it?”

  “Of course not,” I said.

  Toot looked relieved. “Oh. Good. Um. What were we talking about?”

  “I have a job for you,” I said, “and for everyone you can get to help.” I nodded at the pizza. “Standard rates.”

  “Very good, my liege,” Toot said, saluting. His eyes slid down again. “Maybe someone ought to check the pizza. You know. For poison and things. It would look real bad if someone poisoned your vassals, you know.”

  I eyed him askance. Then I held up a finger and said, “All right. One piece. And after—Ack!”

  Toot hit the pizza box like a great white shark taking a seal. He slammed into it, one bright sword slashing the top off of the box. Then he seized the largest piece and began devouring with a will.

  Sanya and I both stood there, fascinated. It was like watching a man try to eat a pizza slice the size of a small car. Pieces flew up and were skewered on his blade. Sauce got everywhere, and it gave me a gruesome little flashback to the Stone Table.

  “Harry?” Sanya asked. “Are you all right?”

  “Will be soon,” I said.

  “This creature serves you?” Sanya asked.

  “This one and about a hundred smaller ones. And five times that many part-timers I can call in once in a while.” I thought about it. “It isn’t so much that they serve me as that we have a business arrangement that we all like. They help me out from time to time. I furnish them with regular pizza.”

  “Which they . . . love,” Sanya said.

  Toot spun in a dizzy, delighted circle on one heel, and fell onto his back with perfectly unself-conscious enthusiasm, his tummy sticking out as far as it could. He lay there for a moment, making happy, gurgling sounds.

  “Well,” I said. “Yes.”

  Sanya’s eyes danced, though his face was sober. “You are a drug dealer. To tiny faeries. Shame.”

  I snorted.

  “What was that he said about Winter?” Sanya asked.

  “Harry’s the new Winter Knight!” Toot-toot burbled. “Which is fantastic! The old Winter Knight mostly just sat around getting tortured. He never went on adventures or anything.” He paused and added, “Unless you count going crazy, I guess.”

  “Toot,” I said. “I’m . . . kind of trying to keep the Winter Knight thing low-profile.”

  “Okay,” Toot said. “Why?”

  I glanced from the little faerie to Sanya. “Look, I, uh . . . It’s personal, okay, and—”

  “Because every creature in Faerie got to see the ceremony,” Toot said proudly. “Mab made sure of it! It was reflected in all the streams and ponds and lakes and puddles and every little drop of water!”

  I stared at the engorged faerie, at something of a loss for words. “Um,” I said. “Oh. How . . . very, very disturbing.”

  “Did it hurt when you kissed Mab?” Toot asked. “Because I always thought her lips looked so cold that they would burn. Like streetlamps in winter!” Toot sat up suddenly, his eyes wide. “Ooooooh. Did your tongue get stuck to her, like on that Christmastime show?”

  “Okayyyyy,” I said with forced cheer, clapping my hands. “Way, way too personal. Um. The job. I have a job for you.”

  Toot-toot leapt up to his feet. His stomach was already constricting back toward its normal size. “Yes, my liege!”

  Where the hell did he put it all? I mean . . . it just wasn’t possible for him to eat that much pizza and then . . . I shook my head. Now wasn’t the time.

  I produced my picture of Susan. “This human is somewhere in Chicago. I need your folk to find her. She’s probably accompanied by a human man with blond hair, about the same size she is.”

  Toot took to his wings again and zoomed down to the picture. He picked it up and held it out at arm’s length, studying it, and nodded once. “May I have this, my lord, to show the others?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Be careful with it, though. I want it back.”

  “Yes, my liege!” Toot said. He brandished his sword with a flourish, sheathed it, and zipped straight up into the October sky.

  Sanya stood looking steadily at me.

  I coughed. I waited.

  “So,” he said. “Mab.”

  I grunted vaguely in reply.

  “You hit that,” Sanya said.

  I did not look at him. My face felt red.

  “You”—he scrunched up his nose, digging in his memory—“tapped that ass. Presumably, it was phat.”

  “Sanya!”

  He let out a low, rolling laugh and shook his head. “I saw her once. Mab. Beautiful beyond words.”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “And dangerous.”

  “Yes,” I said, with emphasis.

  “And you are now her champion,” he said.

  “Everybody’s gotta be something, right?”

  He nodded. “Joking about it. Good. You will need that sense of humor.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because she is cold, Dresden. She knows wicked secrets Time himself has forgotten. And if she chose you to be her Knight, she has a plan for you.” He nodded slowly. “Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka.”

  “That some kind of Russian saying?” I asked.

  “Have you seen traditional folk dances?” Sanya asked. “Imagine them being done by someone with a bottle of vodka in them. Laughter abounds, and you survive another day.” He shrugged. “Or break your neck. Either way, it is pain management.”

  His voice sounded almost merry, though the subject matter was grim as hell. If not more so.

  I had expected him to try to talk me out of it. Or at least to berate me for being an idiot. He didn’t do either. There was a calm acceptance of terrible things that was part and parcel of Sanya’s personality. No matter how bad things got, I didn’t think anything would ever truly faze him. He simply accepted the bad things that happened and soldiered on as best he could.

  There was probably a lesson for me in there, somewhere.

  I was quiet for a while before I decided to trust him. “I get to save my girl first,” I said. “That was the deal.”

  “Ah,” he said. He seemed to mull it over and nodded. “That is reasonable.”

  “You really think that?”

  He lifted both eyebrows. “The child is your blood, is she not?”

  I nodded and said quietly, “She is.”

  He spread his hands, as if it were a self-evident fact that needed no further exploration. “As horrible fates go, that is a good one,” he said. “Worthwhile. Save your little girl.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “If you turn into a hideous monster and I am sent to slay you, I will remember this and make it as painless as I can, out of respect for you.”

  I knew he was joking. I just couldn’t tell which part of it he was joking about. “Uh,” I said. “Thanks.”

  “It is nothing,” he said. We stood around quietly for another five minutes before he frowned, looking at the other pizza boxes, and asked, “Is there some purpose for the rest of th—”

  A scene out of The Birds descended upon the alley. There was a rush of wing-beaten wind, and hundreds of tiny figures flashed down onto the pizza. Here and there I would spot one of the Pizza Lord’s Guard, recognizable thanks to the orange plastic cases of the box knives they had strapped to their backs. The others went by in twinkles and flashes of color, muted by the daylight but beautiful all the same. There were a lot of the Little Folk involved. If I’d been doing this at night, it might have induced a seizure or something.

  The Little Folk love pizza. They love it with a passion so intense that it beggars the imagination. Watching a pizza being devoured was sort of like watching a plane coming apart in mida
ir on those old WWII gun camera reels. Bits would fleck off here and there, and then suddenly in a rush, bits would go flying everywhere, each borne away by the individual fairy who had seized it.

  It was over in less than three minutes.

  Seriously. Where do they put it?

  Toot came to hover before me and popped a little fistful of pizza into his mouth. He gulped it down and saluted.

  “Well, Major General?” I asked.

  “Found her, my liege,” Toot reported. “She is a captive and in danger.”

  Sanya and I traded a look.

  “Where?” I asked him.

  Toot firmly held up the picture, still in one piece, and two strands of dark hair, each curled into its own coil of rope in his tiny hands. “Two hairs from her head, my liege. Or if it is your pleasure, I will guide you there.”

  Sanya drew his head back a little, impressed. “They found her? That quickly?”

  “People underestimate the hell out of the Little Folk,” I said calmly. “Within their limits, they’re as good as or better than anything else I know for getting information—and there are a lot of them around Chicago who are willing to help me out occasionally.”

  “Hail the Pizza Lord!” Toot-toot shrilled.

  “Hail the Pizza Lord!” answered a score of piping voices that came from no apparent source. The Little Folk can be all but invisible when they want to be.

  “Major General Minimus, keep this up and I’m making you a full general,” I said.

  Toot froze. “Why? Is that bad? What did I do?”

  “It’s good, Toot. That’s higher than a major general.”

  His eyes widened. “There’s higher?”

  “Oh, yeah, definitely. And you’re on the fast track for the very top.” I took the hairs from him and said, “We’ll get the car. Lead us to her, Toot.”

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Good,” Sanya said, grinning. “Now we know where to go and have someone to rescue. This part I know how to do.”

  Chapter 34

  “Admittedly,” Sanya said a few minutes later, “normally I do not storm headquarters buildings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And in broad daylight, too.”

  We were parked down the block from the FBI’s Chicago office, where Toot had guided us, crouched on the dashboard and demanding to know why Sanya hadn’t rented one of the cars that could fly instead of the poky old landbound minivan he had instead. Toot hadn’t taken the answer that “cars like that are imaginary” seriously, either. He had muttered a few things in Russian that only made Sanya’s smile wider.

  “Damn,” I said, staring at the building. “Toot? Was Martin with her?”

  “The yellow-hair?” Toot sat on the dashboard facing us, waving his feet. “No, my liege.”

  I grunted. “I don’t like that, either. Why wouldn’t they have been taken together? Which floor is she on, Toot?”

  “There,” Toot said, pointing. I leaned over and hunkered down behind him so that I could look down the length of his little arm to the window he was pointing at.

  “Fourth,” I said. “That was where Tilly was talking to me.”

  Sanya reached down to produce a semiautomatic he’d hidden beneath the seat of the minivan and cycled a round into the chamber, his eyes glued to the outside mirror. “Company.”

  A bald, slightly overweight bum in a shabby overcoat and cast-off clothing shambled down the sidewalk with vacant eyes—but he was moving a little too purposefully toward us to be genuine. I was watching his hands with my shield bracelet ready to go, expecting him to pull a weapon out from beneath the big coat, and it wasn’t until he was a few steps away that I realized it was Martin.

  He stopped on the sidewalk next to the passenger window of the van and wobbled in place. He rapped on the glass and held out his hand as if begging a handout. I rolled down the window and asked him, “What happened?”

  “The FBI did its legwork,” he said. “They tracked our rental car back to my cover ID, got my picture, put it on TV. One of the detectives we shook down confirmed my presence and told them I’d been seen at your place, and they were waiting there when we came back to get you. Susan created a distraction so that I could get away.”

  “And you left her behind, huh?”

  He shrugged. “Her identity is genuine, and while they know she arrived with me and was seen with me, they can’t prove that she’s done anything. I’ve been operating long enough that the Red Court has seen to it that I’m on multiple international lists of wanted terrorists. If I were caught, both of us would have been taken.”

  I grunted. “What did you find out?”

  “The last of the Red King’s inner circle arrived this morning. They’ll do the ceremony tonight,” he said. “Midnight, or a little after, if our astronomer’s assessment is solid.”

  “Crap.”

  Martin nodded. “How fast can you get us there?”

  I touched a fingertip to my mother’s gem and double-checked the way there. “This one doesn’t have a direct route. Three hops, a couple of walks, one of them in bad terrain. Should take us ninety minutes, gets us to within five miles of Chichén Itzá.”

  Martin looked at me for a long moment. Then he said, “I can’t help but find it somewhat convenient that you are suddenly able to provide that kind of fast transport to exactly the places we need to go.”

  “The Red Court had their goodies stashed near a confluence of ley lines,” I said, “a point of ample magical power. Chichén Itzá is at another such confluence, only a lot bigger. Chicago is a crossroads, both physically and metaphysically. There are dozens of confluences either in the town or within twenty-five miles. The routes I know through the Nevernever mostly run from confluence to confluence, so Chicago’s got a direct route to a lot of places.”

  Sanya made an interested sound. “Like the airports in Dallas or Atlanta. Or here. Travel nexuses.”

  “Exactly.”

  Martin nodded, though he didn’t look like he particularly believed or disbelieved me. “That gives us a little more than nine hours,” he said.

  “The Church is trying to get us information about local security at Chichén Itzá. Meet me at St. Mary of the Angels.” I handed him the change scrounged from my pockets. “Tell them Harry Dresden said you were no Stevie D. We’ll leave from there.”

  “You . . .” He shook his head a little. “You got the Church to help you?”

  “Hell, man. I got a Knight of the Cross driving me around.”

  Sanya snorted.

  Martin studied Sanya with eyes that were a little wide. “I . . . see.” A certain energy seemed to enter him as he nodded, and I knew exactly what he was feeling—the positive upswing in his emotions, an electricity that came with the sudden understanding that not only was death not certain, but that victory might actually be possible.

  Hope is a force of nature. Don’t let anyone tell you different.

  Martin nodded. “What about Susan?”

  “I’ll get her out,” I said.

  Martin ducked his head in another nod. Then he took a deep breath and said simply, “Thank you.” He turned and shambled away drunkenly, clutching his coins.

  “Seems a decent fellow,” Sanya said. His nostrils flared a little. “Half-vampire, you say? Fellowship of St. Giles?”

  “Yeah. Like Susan.” I watched Martin vanish into Chicago’s lunchtime foot traffic and said, “I’m not sure I trust him.”

  “I would say the feeling is mutual,” Sanya said. “When a man lives a life like Martin’s, he learns not to trust anyone.”

  I grunted sourly. “Stop being reasonable. I enjoy disliking him.”

  Sanya chuckled and said, “So. What now?”

  I took the guns out of my duster pockets and stowed them beneath the minivan’s passenger seat. “You go back to St. Mary’s. I go in and get Susan and meet you there.”

  Sanya lifted his eyebrows. “You get her from in there?”

  “Sure.”

  He purse
d his lips thoughtfully, then shrugged. “Okay. I suppose it is your funeral, da?”

  I nodded firmly. “Da.”

  I walked into the building and through the metal detectors. They went beep. I stopped and dropped all the rings and the shield bracelet into a plastic tub, then tried again. They didn’t fuss at me the second time. I got my stuff back and walked up to a station in the center of the floor that looked like an information desk. I produced one of my cards, the ones that called me a private investigator. I had only half a dozen of them left. The rest had been in my desk drawer at the office. “I need to speak to Agent Tilly about his current investigation.”

  The woman behind the desk nodded matter-of-factly, called Tilly’s office, and asked if he’d see me. She nodded once and said, “Yes, sir,” and smiled at me. “You’ll need a visitor’s badge. Here. Please make sure it is displayed at all times.”

  I took the badge and clipped it to my duster. “Thanks. I know the drill.”

  “Fourth floor,” she said, and nodded at the person in line behind me.

  I walked down to the elevators, rode them up to four, and walked to Tilly’s office, which turned out to be right across the hall from the interrogation room. Tilly, small, dapper, and quick-looking, stood in the doorway, looking at a file in a manila folder. He let me see that there was a picture of Susan paper-clipped to the inside cover before he closed the file and tucked it under his arm.

  “So,” he said. “It’s Mr. Known Associate. Just as well. I needed to talk to you again anyway.”

  “I’m a popular guy this week,” I said.

  “You’re telling me,” Tilly said. He folded his arms, frowning. “So. We got a car rented by a mystery man using a bogus identity, right outside a building that blows up. We got sworn testimony from two local snoops that this leggy looker named Susan Rodriguez was seen in his company. We got a pancaked Volkswagen Bug, belonging to Harry Dresden, and seventy thousand dollars’ worth of property damage near the house of a local crooked IA cop who lied his ass off to point me at you. We got a file that says that Susan Rodriguez was at one point your girlfriend. Eyewitnesses that place both her and the mystery man at your apartment—which seemed to be a little too clean of anything that could implicate you. But before we could go back and take a real hard close look at it for trace evidence, it burns to the ground. Fire chief is still working on the investigation, but his first impression is arson.” Tilly scratched his chin thoughtfully. “I don’t know if you’re current on investigative technique, but when there are this many connections between a relatively small number of people and events, it can sometimes be an indicator that they might be up to something nefarious.”