by Jim Butcher
The girl’s body language was definitely protective. She had the kind of beauty that looked natural and … true. Her features and her bearing both spoke of gentleness and kindness.
I felt an immediate instinct to protect and comfort her.
I quashed it thoroughly.
I am not made of stone, but I have found it is generally best to behave as if I am.
I looked across the desk at her and said, “My people tell me you have asked for sanctuary under the terms of the Unseelie Accords, but that you have not identified yourself.”
“I apologize, sir,” she answered. “I was already being indiscreet enough just by coming here.”
“Indeed,” I said calmly. “I make it a point not to advertise the location of my business headquarters.”
“I didn’t want to add names to the issue,” she said, casting her eyes down in a gesture of submission that did not entirely convince me. “I wasn’t sure how many of your people were permitted access to this sort of information.”
I glanced past the young woman to Gard, who gave me a slow, cautious nod. Had the girl or the child been other than they appeared, Gard would have indicated in the negative. Gard costs me a fortune and is worth every penny.
Even so, I didn’t signal either her or Hendricks to stand down. Both of them watched the girl, ready to kill her if she made an aggressive move. Trust, but verify—that the person being trusted will be dead if she attempts betrayal.
“That was most considerate of you, Justine.”
The girl blinked at me several times. “Y-you know me.”
“You are a sometimes associate of Harry Dresden,” I said. “Given his proclivities about those he considers to be held under his aegis, it is sensible to identify as many of them as possible. For the sake of my insurance rates, if nothing else. Gard.”
“Justine, no last name you’ll admit to,” Gard said calmly. “Currently employed as Lara Raith’s secretary and personal aide. You are the sometimes lover of Thomas Raith, a frequent ally of Dresden’s.”
I spread my hands slightly. “I assume the J notation at the bottom of Ms. Raith’s typed correspondence refers to you.”
“Yes,” Justine said. She had regained her composure quickly—not something I would have expected of the servitor of a vampire of the White Court. Many of the … people, I suppose, I’d seen there had made lotus-eaters look self-motivated. “Yes, exactly.”
I nodded. “Given your patron, one is curious as to why you have come to me, seeking protection.”
“Time, sir,” she replied quietly. “I lacked any other alternative.”
Someone screamed at the front of the building.
My headquarters shifts position irregularly, as I acquire new buildings. Much of my considerable wealth is invested in real estate. I own more of the town than any other single investor. In Chicago, there is always money to be had by purchasing and renovating aging buildings. I do much of my day-to-day work out of one of my most recent renovation projects, once they have been modified to be suitable places to welcome guests. Then renovation of the building begins, and the place is generally crowded with contractors who have proven their ability to see and hear nothing.
Gard’s head snapped up. She shook it as if to rid herself of a buzzing fly and said, “A presence. A strong one.” Her blue eyes snapped to Justine. “Who?”
The young woman shuddered and wrapped the towel more tightly about herself. “Mag. A cantrev lord of the Fomor.”
Gard spat something in a Scandinavian tongue that was probably a curse.
“Precis, please,” I said.
“The Fomor are an ancient folk,” she said. “Water dwellers, cousins of the jotuns. Extremely formidable. Sorcerers, shape changers, seers.”
“And signatories,” I noted.
“Yes,” she said. She crossed to the other side of the room, opened a closet, and withdrew an athletic bag. She produced a simple, rather crude-looking broadsword from it and tossed it toward Hendricks. The big man caught it by the handle and took his gun into his left hand. Gard took a broad-bladed axe out of the bag and shouldered the weapon. “But rarely involved in mortal affairs.”
“Ms. Raith sent me to the Fomor king with documents,” Justine said, her voice coming out quietly and rapidly. Her shivering had increased. “Mag made me his prisoner. I escaped with the child. There wasn’t time to reach one of my lady’s strongholds. I came to you, sir. I beg your protection, as a favor to Ms. Raith.”
“I don’t grant favors,” I said calmly.
Mag entered in the manner so many of these self-absorbed supernatural cretins seem to adore. He blasted the door into a cloud of flying splinters with what I presumed was magic.
For God’s sake.
At least the vampires would call for an appointment.
The blast amounted to little debris. After a few visits from Dresden and his ilk, I had invested in cheap, light doors at dramatic (as opposed to tactical) entry points.
The Fomor was a pale, repellent humanoid. Seven feet tall, give or take, and distinctly froglike in appearance. He had a bloated belly, legs several inches too long to be proportionately human, and huge feet and hands. He wore a tunic of something that resembled seaweed beneath a long, flapping blue robe covered in the most intricate embroidery I had ever seen. A coronet of coral was bound about his head. His right hand was extended dramatically. He carried a twisted length of wood in his left.
His eyes bulged, jaundice yellow around septic green, and his teeth were rotted and filthy. “You cannot run from me,” he said. His wide mouth made the words seem somehow slurred. “You are mine.”
Justine looked up at me, evidently too frightened to turn her head, her eyes wide with fear. A sharper contrast would have been hard to manage. “Sir. Please.”
I touched a button on the undersurface of my desk, a motion of less than two inches, and then made a steeple of my hands again as I eyed Mag and said, “Excuse me, sir. This is a private office.”
Mag surged forward half a step, his eyes focused on the girl. “Hold your tongue, mortal, if you would keep it.”
I narrowed my eyes.
Is it so much to ask for civility?
“Justine,” I said calmly, “if you would stand aside, please.”
Justine quickly, silently, moved out from between us.
I focused on Mag and said, “They are under my protection.”
Mag gave me a contemptuous look and raised the staff. Darkness lashed at me, as if he had simply reached into the floorboards and cracks in the wall and drawn it into a sizzling sphere the size of a bowling ball.
It flickered away to nothingness about a foot in front of my steepled hands.
I lifted a finger and Hendricks shot Mag in the back. Repeatedly.
The Fomor went down with a sound like a bubbling teakettle, whipped onto his back as if the bullets had been a minor inconvenience, and raised the stick to point at Hendricks.
Gard’s axe smashed it out of his grip, swooped back up to guard, and began to descend again.
“Stop,” I said.
Gard’s muscles froze just before she would have brought down the axe onto Mag’s head. Mag had one hand uplifted, surrounded in a kind of negative haze, his long fingers crooked at odd angles—presumably some kind of mystic defense.
“As a freeholding lord of the Unseelie Accords,” I said, “it would be considered an act of war if I killed you out of hand, despite your militant intrusion into my territory.” I narrowed my eyes. “However, your behavior gives me ample latitude to invoke the defense-of-property-and-self clause. I will leave the decision to you. Continue this asinine behavior, and I will kill you and offer a weregild to your lord, King Corb, in accordance with the conflict resolution guidelines of section two, paragraph four.”
As I told you, my lawyers send me endless letters. I speak their language.
Mag seemed to take that in for a moment. He looked at me, then Gard. His eyes narrowed. They tracked back to Hendricks
, his head hardly moving, and he seemed to freeze when he saw the sword in Hendricks’s hand.
His eyes flicked to Justine and the child and burned for a moment—not with adoration or even simple lust. There was a pure and possessive hunger there, coupled with a need to destroy that which he desired. I have spent my entire life around hard men. I know that form of madness when I see it.
“So,” Mag said. His eyes traveled back to me and were suddenly heavy-lidded and calculating. “You are the new mortal lord. We half believed that you must be imaginary. That no one could be as foolish as that.”
“You are incorrect,” I said. “Moreover, you can’t have them. Get out.”
Mag stood up. The movement was slow, liquid. His limbs didn’t seem to bend the proper way. “Lord Marcone,” he said, “this affair is no concern of yours. I only wish to take the slaves.”
“You can’t have them. Get out.”
“I warn you,” Mag said. There was an ugly tone in his voice. “If you make me return for her—for them—you will not enjoy what follows.”
“I do not require enjoyment to thrive. Leave my domain. I won’t ask again.”
Hendricks shuffled his feet a little, setting his balance.
Mag gathered himself up slowly. He extended his hand, and the twisted stick leapt from the floor and into his fingers. He gave Gard a slow and well-practiced sneer and said, “Anon, mortal lordling. It is time you learned the truth of the world. It will please me to be your instructor.” Then he turned, slow and haughty, and walked out, his shoulders hunching in an odd, unsettling motion as he moved.
“Make sure he leaves,” I said quietly.
Gard and Hendricks followed Mag from the room.
I turned my eyes to Justine and the child.
“Mag,” I said, “is not the sort of man who is used to disappointment.”
Justine looked after the vanished Fomor and then back at me, confusion in her eyes. “That was sorcery. How did you … ?”
I stood up from behind my desk and stepped out of the copper circle set into the floor around my chair. It was powered by the sorcerous equivalent of a nine-volt battery, connected to the control on the underside of my desk. Basic magical defense, Gard said. It had seemed like nonsense to me. It clearly was not.
I took my gun from its holster and set it on my desk.
Justine took note of my reply.
Of course, I wouldn’t give the personal aide of the most dangerous woman in Chicago information about my magical defenses.
There was something hard and not at all submissive in her eyes. “Thank you, sir, for …”
“For what?” I said very calmly. “You understand, do you not, what you have done by asking for my help under the Accords?”
“Sir?”
“The Accords govern relations between supernatural powers,” I said. “The signatories of the Accords and their named vassals are granted certain rights and obligations—such as offering a warning to a signatory who has trespassed upon another’s territory unwittingly before killing him.”
“I know, sir,” Justine said.
“Then you should also know that you are most definitely not a signatory of the Accords. At best, you qualify in the category of servitors and chattel. At worst, you are considered to be a food animal.”
She drew in a sharp breath, her eyes widening—not in any sense of outrage or offense, but in realization. Good. She grasped the realities of the situation.
“In either case,” I continued, “you are property. You have no rights in the current situation, in the eyes of the Accords—and, more to the point, I have no right to withhold another’s rightful property. Mag’s behavior provided me with an excuse to kill him if he did not depart. He will not give me such an opening a second time.”
Justine swallowed and stared at me for a moment. Then she glanced down at the child in her arms. The child clung harder to her and seemed to lean somewhat away from me.
One must admire such acute instincts.
“You have drawn me into a conflict that has nothing to do with me,” I said quietly. “I suggest candor. Otherwise, I will have Mr. Hendricks and Ms. Gard show you to the door.”
“You can’t …,” she began, but her voice trailed off.
“I can,” I said. “I am not a humanitarian. When I offer charity it is for tax purposes.”
The room became silent. I was content with that. The child began to whimper quietly.
“I was delivering documents to the court of King Corb on behalf of my lady,” Justine said. She stroked the child’s hair absently. “It’s in the sea. There’s a gate there in Lake Michigan, not far from here.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “You swam?”
“I was under the protection of their courier, going there,” Justine said. “It’s like walking in a bubble of air.” She hitched the child up a little higher on her hip. “Mag saw me. He drove the courier away as I was leaving and took me to his home. There were many other prisoners there.”
“Including the child,” I guessed. Though it probably didn’t sound that way.
Justine nodded. “I … arranged for several prisoners to flee Mag’s home. I took the child when I left. I swam out.”
“So you are, in effect, stolen property in possession of stolen property,” I said. “Novel.”
Gard and Hendricks came back into the office.
I looked at Hendricks. “My people?”
“Tulane’s got a broken arm,” he said. “Standing in that asshole’s way. He’s on his way to the doc.”
“Thank you. Ms. Gard?”
“Mag is off the property,” she said. “He didn’t go far. He’s summoning support now.”
“How much of a threat is he?” I asked. The question was legitimate. Gard and Hendricks had blindsided the inhuman while he was focused on Justine and the child and while he wasted his leading magical strike against my protective circle. A head-on confrontation against a prepared foe could be a totally different proposition.
Gard tested the edge of her axe with her thumb and drew a smooth stone from her pocket. “Mag is a Fomor sorcerer lord of the first rank. He’s deadly—and connected. The Fomor could crush you without a serious loss of resources. Confrontation would be unwise.”
The stone made a steely, slithery sound as it glided over the axe’s blade.
“There seems little profit to be had, then,” I said. “It’s nothing personal, Justine. Merely business. I am obliged to return stolen property to signatory members of the Accords.”
Hendricks looked at me sharply. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I already knew the tone of whatever he would say. Are there no prisons? perhaps. Or, No man is an island, entire of itself. It tolls for thee. On and on.
Hendricks has no head for business.
Gard watched me, waiting.
“Sir,” Justine said, her tone measured and oddly formal. “May I speak?”
I nodded.
“She isn’t property,” Justine said, and her voice was low and intense, her eyes direct. “She was trapped in a den of living nightmares, and there was no one to come save her. She would have died there. And I am not letting anyone take her back to that hellhole. I will die first.” The young woman set her jaw. “She is not property, Mr. Marcone. She’s a child.”
I met Justine’s eyes for a long moment.
I glanced aside at Hendricks. He waited for my decision.
Gard watched me. As ever, Gard watched me.
I looked down at my hands, my fingertips resting together with my elbows propped on the desk.
Business came first. Always.
But I have rules.
I looked up at Justine.
“She’s a child,” I said quietly.
The air in the room snapped tight with tension.
“Ms. Gard,” I said, “please dismiss the contractors for the day, at pay. Then raise the defenses.”
She pocketed the whetstone and strode quickly out, her teeth showing, a bounce
in her step.
“Mr. Hendricks, please scramble our troubleshooters. They’re to take positions across the street. Suppressed weapons only. I don’t need patrolmen stumbling around in this. Then ready the panic room.”
Hendricks nodded and got out his cell phone as he left. His huge, stubby fingers flew over its touchscreen as he sent the activation text message. Looking at him, one would not think him capable of such a thing. But that is Hendricks, generally.
I looked at Justine as I rose and walked to my closet. “You will go with the child into the panic room. It is, with the possible exception of Dresden’s home, the most secure location in the city.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly.
I took off my coat and hung it up in the closet. I took off my tie and slipped it over the same hanger. I put my cuff links in my coat pocket, rolled up my sleeves, and skinned out of my gun’s holster. Then I slipped on the armored vest made of heavy scales of composite materials joined to sleeves of quite old-fashioned mail. I pulled an old field jacket, olive drab, over the armor, belted it, holstered my sidearm at my side, opposite a combat knife, and took a military-grade assault shotgun—a weapon every bit as illegal as my pistol in the city of Chicago—from its rack.
“I am not doing it for you, young lady,” I said. “Nor am I doing it for the child.”
“Then why are you doing it?” she asked.
“Because I have rules,” I said.
She shook her head gently. “But you’re a criminal. Criminals don’t have rules. They break them.”
I stopped and looked at her.
Justine blanched and slid a step farther away from me, along the wall. The child made a soft, distressed sound. I beckoned curtly for her to follow me as I walked past her. It took her a moment to do so.
Honestly.
Someone in the service of a vampire ought to have a bit more fortitude.
This panic room looked like every other one I’ve had built: fluorescent lights, plain tile floor, plain drywall. Two double bunks occupied one end of the room. A business desk and several chairs took up the rest. A miniature kitchen nestled into one corner, opposite the miniature medical station in another. There was a door to a half bath and a bank of security monitors on the wall between them. I flicked one switch that activated the entire bank, displaying a dozen views from hidden security cameras.