by Jim Butcher
Cold.
I came back to myself. No more New Mexico. Dark. Cold, so cold that it burned. Chest tight.
I was in the water.
My chest hurt. I managed to look up.
Sun shone down on fractured ice about eight inches thick. It came back to me. The battle aboard the Water Beetle. The ghouls. The lake. The ice had broken and I had fallen through.
I couldn’t see far, and when the ghoul came through the water, swimming like a crocodile, its arms flat against its sides, it was close enough to touch. It spotted me at the same time, and turned away.
Never again.
I reached out and grabbed on to the back of the jeans the ghoul still wore. It panicked, swimming fast, and dived down into the cold and dark, trying to scare me into letting go.
I was aware that I had to breathe, and that I was already beginning to black out. I dismissed it as unimportant. This ghoul was never going to hurt anyone else, ever again, if I had to die to make sure of it. Everything started going dark.
And then there was another pale shape in the water. Thomas, this time, shirtless, holding that crooked knife in his teeth. He closed on the ghoul, which writhed and twisted with such fear and desperation that it tore my weakening fingers lose from their grip.
I drifted. Felt something cold wrap my right wrist. Felt light coming closer, painfully bright.
And then my face was out of the frozen water, and I sucked in a weak gasp of air. I felt a slender arm slip under my chin, and then I was being pulled through the water. Elaine. I’d recognize the touch of her skin to mine anywhere.
We broke the surface, and she let out a gasp, then started pulling me toward the dock. With the help of Olivia and the other women, Elaine managed to get me up out of the lake. I fell to my side and lay there shivering violently, gasping down all the air I could. The world slowly began to return to its usual shape, but I was too tired to do anything about it.
I don’t know how much time went by, but the sirens were close by the time Thomas appeared and hauled himself out of the water.
“Go,” Thomas said. “Can he walk? Is he shot?”
“No,” Elaine said. “It might be shock; I don’t know. I think he hit his head on something.”
“We can’t stay here,” Thomas said. I felt him pick me up and sling me over a shoulder. He did it as gently as such a thing can be done.
“Right,” Elaine said. “Come on. Everyone, keep up and don’t get separated.”
I felt motion. My head hurt. A lot.
“I gotcha,” Thomas said to me, as he started walking. “It’s cool, Harry,” he murmured. “They’re safe. We got everyone clear. I gotcha.”
My brother’s word was good enough for me.
I closed my eyes and stopped trying to keep track of things.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The touch of very warm, very gentle fingers woke me.
My head hurt, even more than it had after Cowl had finished ringing my bells the night before, if such a thing was possible. I didn’t want to regain consciousness, if it meant rising into that.
But those soft, warm fingers touched me, steady and exquisitely feminine, and the pain began to fade. That had the effect it always did. When the pain was gone, its simple lack was a nearly narcotic pleasure of its own.
It was more than that, too. There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares.
It seemed that, lately, I had barely been touched at all.
“Dammit, Lash,” I mumbled. “I told you to stop doing that.”
The fingers stiffened for a second, and Elaine said, “What was that, Harry?”
I blinked and opened my eyes.
I was lying on a bed in dim hotel room. The ceiling tiles were old and water stained. The furniture was similarly simple, cheap, battered by long and careless use and little maintenance.
Elaine sat at the head of the bed with her legs crossed. My head lay comfortably upon her calves, as it had so many times before. My legs hung off the end of the bed, also as they had often done before, a long time ago, in a house I barely remembered except in dreams.
“Am I hurting you, Harry?” Elaine pressed. I couldn’t see her expression without craning my neck, and that seemed a bad idea, but she sounded concerned.
“No,” I said. “No, just waking up groggy. Sorry.”
“Ah,” she said. “Who is Lash?”
“No one I especially want to discuss.”
“All right,” she said. There was nothing but gentle assent in her tone. “Then just lie back for a few moments more and let me finish. Your friend the vampire said that they’d be watching the hospitals.”
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
“Reiki,” she replied.
“Laying on of hands?” I said. “That stuff works?”
“The principles are sound,” she said, and I felt something silky brush over my forehead. Her hair. I recognized it by touch and smell. She had bowed her head in concentration. Her voice became distracted. “I was able to combine them with some basic principles for moving energy. I haven’t found a way to handle critical trauma or to manage infections, but it’s surprisingly effective in handling bruises, sprains, and bumps on the head.”
No kidding. The headache was already gone completely. The tightness in my head and neck was fading as well, as were the twinges in my upper back and shoulders.
And a beautiful woman was touching me.
Elaine was touching me.
I wouldn’t have done anything to stop her if I’d had a thousand paper cuts and she’d soaked her hands in lemon juice.
We simply stayed like that for a time. Once in while, she moved her hands, palms running down lightly over my cheeks, neck, chest. Her hands would move in slow, repetitive stroking motions, barely touching my skin. I’d lost my shirt at some point. All of those aches and pains of exertion and combat faded away, leaving only a happy cloud of endorphins behind. Her hands were warm, slow, infinitely patient and infinitely confident.
It felt amazing.
I drifted on the sensations, utterly content.
“All right,” she said quietly, an unknown amount of time later. “How does that feel?”
“Incredible,” I said.
I could hear the smile in her voice. “You always say that when I’m done touching you.”
“Not my fault if it’s always true,” I replied.
“Flatterer,” she said, and her fingers gently slapped one of my shoulders. “Let me up, ape.”
“What if I don’t want to?” I drawled.
“Men. I pay you the least bit of attention, and you go completely Paleolithic on me.”
“Ugh,” I replied, and slowly sat up, expecting a surge of discomfort and nausea as the blood rushed around my head. There wasn’t any.
I frowned and ran my fingers lightly over my scalp. There was a lump on the side of my skull that should have felt like hell. Instead, it was only a little tender. I’ve been thumped on the melon before. I know the residue of a hard blow. This felt like a bad one, only after I’d had about a week to recover. “How long have I been down?”
“Eight hours, maybe?” Elaine asked. She rose from the bed and stretched. It was every bit as intriguing and pleasant to watch as I remembered. “I sort of lose track when I’m focused on something.”
“I remember,” I murmured.
Elaine froze in place, and her green eyes glittered in the dimness as she met my gaze in a kind of relaxed, insolent silence. Then a little smile touched her lips. “I suppose you would.”
My heart lurched and sped up, and I started getting ideas.
None of which could be properly pursued at the moment.
I saw Elaine reach the same conclusion at about the same time I did. She lowered her arms, smiled again and said, “Excuse me. I�
��ve been sitting there a while.” Then she paced into the bathroom.
I went to the hotel’s window and opened the cheap blinds a tiny bit. We were somewhere on the south side. Dusk was on the city, the streetlights already flickering into life one by one, as the shadows crept out from beneath the buildings and oozed slowly up the light poles. I checked around but saw no shark fins circling, no vultures wheeling overhead, and no obvious ghouls or vampires lurking nearby, just waiting to pounce. That didn’t mean they weren’t there, though.
I went to the door and touched it lightly with my left hand. Elaine had spun another ward over the door, a subtle, solid crafting that would release enough kinetic energy to throw anyone who tried to open it a good ten or twelve feet away. It was perfect for a quick exit, if you were expecting trouble and ready for it when it arrived. Just wait for the bad guy to get bitch-slapped into the parking lot, then dash out the door and run off before he regained his feet.
I heard Elaine come out of the bathroom behind me. “What happened?” I asked.
“What do you remember?”
“Madrigal opened up with that assault rifle. Flash of light. Then I was in the water.”
Elaine came to stand next to me and also glanced out. Her hand brushed mine when she lowered it from the blinds, and without even thinking about it, I twined my fingers in hers. It was an achingly familiar sensation, and another pang of half-remembered days long gone made my chest ache for a second.
Elaine shivered a little and closed her eyes. Her fingers tightened, very slightly, on mine. “We thought he’d killed you,” she said. “You started to crouch down, and there were bullets shattering the ice all around you. You went into the water, and the vampire…Madrigal, did you say his name was? He ordered the ghouls in after you. I sent Olivia and the others to the shore, and Thomas and I went into the water to find you.”
“Who hit me in the head?” I asked.
Elaine shrugged. “Either a bullet hit your coat after you crouched down, and then bounced off your thick skull without penetrating, or you slammed it against some of the shattered ice as you went under.”
A bullet might have bounced off my head, thanks to the intervening fabric of my spell-covered coat. That was a sobering sort of thing to hear, even for me. “Thank you,” I said. “For getting me out.”
Elaine arched an eyebrow, then gave me a little roll of her eyes and said, “I was bored and didn’t have anything better to do.”
“I figured,” I said. “Thomas?”
“He’s all right. He had a car near the docks. I drove that clown car of yours, and we shoehorned everyone into them and got away clean. With any luck, Madrigal had a tougher time avoiding the cops than we did.”
“Nah,” I said, with total conviction. “Too easy. He got away. Where’s Thomas?”
“Standing watch outside, he said.” Elaine frowned. “He looked…very pale. He refused to stay in the room with his refugees. Or me, for that matter.”
I grunted. Thomas had really put on his Supervamp cape back at the harbor. Under ordinary circumstances, he was surprisingly strong for a man of his size and build. But even unusually strong men don’t go toe-to-toe with ghouls armed with nothing but a big stick and come away clean. Thomas could make himself stronger—a lot stronger—but not forever. The demon knit to my brother’s soul could make him into a virtual godling, but it also increased his hunger for the life force of mortals, burning away whatever he had stored up in exchange for the improved performance.
After that fight, Thomas had to be hungry. So hungry that he didn’t trust himself in a room with anyone he considered, well, edible. Which, in our escape party, had been everyone but me and the kids.
He must have been hurting.
“What about the Ordo?” I asked her quietly.
“I didn’t want to go until I could be certain that I wouldn’t lead anyone back to them. I called them every couple of hours to make sure they were all right. I should check in with them again.”
She turned to the phone before she finished the sentence and dialed a number. I waited. She was silent. After a moment, she hung up the phone again.
“No answer,” I said quietly.
“No,” she said. She turned to the dresser, gathered up her length of chain, and threaded it through the loops of her jeans like a belt, fastening it with a slightly curved piece of dark wood bound with several bands of colored leather, which she slipped through two links.
I opened the door and stuck my head out into the twilight, looking around. I didn’t see Thomas anywhere, so I let out a sharp, loud whistle, waved an arm around a little, and ducked back inside, closing the door again.
It didn’t take long for Thomas’s footsteps to reach the door.
“Harry,” Elaine said, mildly alarmed. “The ward.”
I held up a forefinger in a one-second kind of gesture, then folded my arms, stared at the door, and waited. The doorknob twitched; there was a heavy thud, a gasp of surprise, and a loud clatter of empty trash cans.
I opened the door and found my brother flat on his back in the parking lot, amidst a moderate amount of spilled garbage. He stared up at the sky for a moment, let out a long-suffering sigh, and then sat up, scowling at me.
“Oh, sorry about that,” I said, with all the sincerity of a three-year-old claiming he didn’t steal that cookie all over his face. “Maybe I should have told you about a potentially dangerous situation, huh? I mean, that would have been polite of me to warn you, right? And sensible. And intelligent. And respectful. And—”
“I get it, I get it,” he growled. He got up and made a doomed effort to brush various bits of unsavory matter off his clothes. “Jesus Christ, Harry. There are days when you can be a total prick.”
“Whereas you can apparently be a complete moron for weeks at a time!”
Elaine stepped up beside me and said, “I love to see a good testosterone-laden alpha-male dominance struggle as much as the next woman—but don’t you think it would be smarter to do it where half of the city can’t see us?”
I scowled at Elaine, but she had a point. I stepped out the door and offered Thomas my hand.
He glowered at me, then deliberately ran his hand through some of the muck and held it out to me without wiping it off. I rolled my eyes and pulled him to his feet, and then the three of us went back into the room.
Thomas leaned his back against the door, folded his arms, and kept his eyes on the floor while I went to the sink and washed off my hands. My coat hung on one of the wire hangers on the bar beside it, as did my shirt. My staff rested in a corner by the light switch, and my other gear was on the counter. I dried off my hands and started suiting up. “Okay, Thomas,” I said. “Seriously. What’s up with the secrecy? You should have contacted me.”
“I couldn’t,” he said.
“Why not?”
“I promised someone I wouldn’t.”
I frowned at that, tugging the still-damp black leather glove onto my disfigured left hand, and tried to think. Thomas and I were brothers. He took that every bit as seriously as I did—but he took his promises seriously, too. If he’d made the promise, he had a good reason to do so.
“How much can you tell me?”
Elaine gave me a sharp glance.
“I’ve already said more than I should have,” Thomas said.
“Don’t be an idiot. We’ve obviously got a common enemy here.”
Thomas grimaced, gave me a hesitant glance, and then said, “We’ve got several.”
I traded a glance with Elaine, who glanced at Thomas, shrugged, and suggested, “Bruises fade?”
“No,” I said. “If he isn’t talking he has a good reason for it. Beating him up won’t change that.”
“Then we should stop wasting time here,” Elaine said quietly.
Thomas looked back and forth between us. “What’s wrong?”
“We’ve lost contact with the women Elaine is protecting,” I said.
“Dammit.” Thomas pushed
his hand back through his hair. “That means…”
I fastened the clasp on the new shield bracelet. “What?”
“Look. You already know Madrigal is around,” Thomas said.
“And that he’s always sucking up to House Malvora,” I said. I frowned. “For the love of God, he’s the Passenger.” He’s the one working with Grey Cloak the Malvora.”
“I didn’t say that,” Thomas said quickly.
“You didn’t have to,” I growled. “He didn’t just happen to show up for some payback while this other stuff was going on. And it all fits. Passenger was talking to Grey Cloak about having the resources to take me out. He obviously decided to take a whack at it with a bunch of ghouls and a machine gun.”
“Sounds reasonable,” Thomas said. “You already know that there’s a Skavis around.”
“Yes.”
“Time to do some math then, Harry.”
“Madrigal and Grey Cloak the Malvora,” I murmured. “The genocidal odd couple. Neither of which is a Skavis.”
Elaine drew in a sharp breath and said, at the same time I was thinking it, “It means that we aren’t talking about one killer.”
I completed the thought. “We’re talking about three of them. Grey Cloak Malvora, Passenger Madrigal, and Serial Killer Skavis.” I frowned at Thomas. “Wait. Are you saying that—”
My brother’s expression became strained. “I’m not saying anything,” he replied. “Those are all things you already know.”
Elaine frowned. “You’re trying to maintain deniability,” she said. “Why?”
“So I can deny telling you anything, obviously,” Thomas snarled, his eyes suddenly flickering several shades of grey lighter as he stared at Elaine.
Elaine drew in a sharp breath. Then she narrowed her eyes a little, unfastened the clasp on her chain, and said, “Stop it, vampire. Now.”
Thomas’s lips pulled back from his teeth, but he jerked his face away from her and closed his eyes.
I stepped between them as I shrugged into my leather duster. “Elaine, back off. The enemy of my enemy. Okay?”
“I don’t like it,” Elaine said. “You know what he is, Harry. How do you know you can trust him?”