by Jim Butcher
“Of course,” I said, nodding at the Archive.
“Excellent,” the Archive said. She turned to Kincaid. “I’m soaked. My coat and a change of clothes are in my bag on the train. I’ll need them.”
Kincaid gave me a skeptical glance but, tellingly, he didn’t argue with the Archive. Instead he vanished quickly down the stairs.
The Archive turned to me. “Statistically speaking, the emergency services of this city should begin to arrive in another three minutes, given the weather and the condition of the roads. It would be best for all of us if we were gone by then.”
“Couldn’t agree more,” I said. I grimaced. “Whoever did this is taking awful chances, moving this publically.”
The Archive’s not-quite-human gaze bored into me for a moment. Then she said, “Matters may be quite a bit worse than that. I’m afraid our troubles are just beginning.”
Chapter Twenty-six
Michael stopped in his tracks when he saw the gaping hole Tiny the gruff had left in the east wall of Union Station. “Merciful God,” he breathed. “Harry, what happened?”
“Little problem,” I said.
“You didn’t say anything to me.”
“You looked busy,” I told him, “and you already had a couple of hundred bad guys to handle.” I nodded at the hole. “I only had the one.”
Michael shook his head bemusedly, and I saw Luccio look at the hole with something like mild alarm.
“Did you get it?” Michael asked.
Luccio cocked her head at Michael when he spoke, and then looked sharply at me.
I gave Michael a level look and said, “Obviously.” Then I turned on my heel and whistled sharply. “Mouse!”
My dog, soggy but still enthusiastic, came bounding toward us over the water-coated marble floors. He slid to a stop, throwing up a little wave that splashed over my feet as he did. The Archive peered intently at Mouse as he arrived, and took a step toward him—but was prevented from going farther by Kincaid’s hand, which came to rest on her slender shoulder.
Michael frowned at the girl and then at the dog. “This,” he said, “brings up a problem.”
There was only so much room in the cab of Michael’s truck.
All of us were soaking wet, and there was no time to get dry before the authorities arrived. I didn’t think it completely fair that I got a number of less than friendly looks on the walk to the garage, after I explained that it had been me who set off the sprinkler system, but at least no one could claim that I hadn’t been willing to suffer the consequences right along with them.
The Archive might have been a creepy Billy Mumy–in–The Twilight Zone kind of child, but she was still a child. By general acclamation she was in the cab. Michael had to drive.
“I’m not letting her sit in there alone,” Kincaid stated.
“Oh, come on,” I said. “He’s a Knight of the freaking Cross. He isn’t going to hurt her.”
“Irrelevant,” Kincaid said. “What about when someone starts shooting at her on the way there? Is he going to throw his body in front of her to keep her from harm?”
“I—” Michael began.
“You’re damned right he will,” I growled.
“Harry,” Michael said, his tone placating, “I’d be glad to protect the child. But it would be somewhat problematic to do that and drive at the same time.”
Mouse let out a low, distressed sound, which drew my attention to the fact that the Archive had fallen uncharacteristically silent. She was standing beside Kincaid, shuddering, her eyes rolling back in her head.
“Dammit,” I said. “Get her into the truck. Go, Kincaid, Michael.”
Kincaid scooped her up at once, and he and Michael got into the cab of the truck.
“I-is y-your h-house far from here, Warden?” Luccio asked me.
She didn’t look good. Well, she looked good given the circumstances. But she also looked soaked and half-frozen already, kneeling to hug Mouse, ostensibly rubbing his fur to help dry it and fluff it out. I’d seen Luccio in action, as captain of the Wardens of the White Council, and I had formed my opinion of her accordingly. When I looked at the woman who’d faced Kemmler’s disciples without batting an eye, whom I’d once seen stand in the open under fire from automatic weapons to protect the apprentices under her care, I tended to forget that she was about five-foot-four and might have checked in at a hundred and thirty or forty pounds soaking wet.
Which she was.
In the middle of a blizzard.
“It isn’t far,” I said. Then I went up to the door beside Kincaid and said, “Put the kid on your lap.”
“She wears the seat belt,” Kincaid said. “She’s in danger enough from exposure already.”
“Luccio doesn’t weigh much more than Ivy does,” I said in a flat tone. “She’s in almost as much danger as the kid. So you’re holding Ivy on your lap and letting my captain ride in the cab, like a gentleman.”
Kincaid gave me a level look, his pale eyes cold. “Or what?”
“I’m armed,” I said. “You’re not.”
He looked at me levelly, then at my hands. One of them was in my coat pocket. Then he said, “You think I believe that you’d kill me?”
“If you try to make me choose between you and Luccio,” I said, with a brittle smile, “I’m pretty sure whom I’m going to bid aloha.”
His teeth flashed in a sudden, wolfish smile. And he moved over, drawing the freezing child onto his lap.
By the time I got back to Luccio she was upright only because Mouse sat placidly in the cold, supporting her. She mumbled some kind of protest in a faint, commanding tone, but since she said it in Italian I declared her brain frozen and assumed command of the local Warden detachment, which was handy, since it consisted of only me anyway. I bundled her into the truck’s cab and got her buckled in beside Kincaid. He helped with it—my fingers were too cold and stiff to manage very quickly.
“Harry,” Michael said. He reached back, drew a rolled-up thermal blanket from behind the truck’s front seat, and tossed it to me. I caught it and nodded my thanks with the cold already starting to chew at my belly.
That left me and Mouse in the back of the truck, both of us soaking wet, in the middle of winter, in the middle of a blizzard. The cold moved from my belly to my chest, and I curled up into a ball because I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Magic wasn’t an option. My palm-sized ball of flame wouldn’t get along well with the back of a moving truck, especially given how much I was already shaking. I wanted to get warm, not set myself on fire.
“S-s-s-sometimes ch-ch-ch-chivalry s-s-s-sucks,” I growled to Mouse, teeth chattering.
My dog, whose thick winter coat wasn’t much good after it had gotten a good soaking, leaned against me as hard as I leaned against him, underneath the rough blanket, while the cab of the truck heated up nicely, its windows fogging. I felt like a Dickens character. I thought about explaining that to Mouse, just to occupy my thoughts, but he was suffering enough without being forced to endure Dickens, even by proxy. So we made the trip in miserable, companionable silence. There might have been emergency lights going by us. I was too busy enjoying the involuntary rhythmic contractions of every muscle cell in my freaking body to notice.
Thirty seconds into the trip I was fairly certain that I was going to black out and wake up five hundred years in the future, but as it turned out I had to endure only a miserable twenty minutes or so before Michael pulled up outside my apartment.
Both vehicle doors opened to the weary but authoritative ring of Luccio’s voice. “Get him to the door while he can still let us in through his wards.”
“I’m fine,” I said, rising. Only it came out sounding more like, “Mmmmnnngh,” and when I tried to stand up I all but fell out of the truck. Michael caught me, and Kincaid moved quickly to help him lift me to the ground.
I dimly felt one of Kincaid’s hands enter my jacket pocket and turn it out empty. “Son of a bitch,” he said, grinning. “I kne
w it.”
Luccio emerged from the truck’s cab, carrying the entirely limp form of the Archive draped over one hip. The girl’s arms and legs flopped loosely, her mouth hung open in sleep, and her cheeks were bright pink. “Get up, Dresden,” she stated. Her voice was firm, but though warmed by the trip, she was still nearly as damp as she had been at the station, and I saw her buckle as the cold sank its teeth into her. “Hurry.”
I moved my feet in a vague shuffle, and remembered somewhere that when you walked, you moved them alternately. This improved our progress considerably. We reached a door, and someone said something about dangerous wards.
No kidding, I thought. I’ve got some wards on my place that’ll fry you to greasy spots on the concrete. But you should see the ones Gard can do.
Luccio snapped something to me about the wards, and I thought she looked cold. I had a fire at my place, which she could probably use. I opened the door for her, the way you’re supposed to for a lady, but the damned thing was stuck until Michael shoved it open with his shoulder and muttered something disparaging about amateur work.
Then everything got sort of muddled, and my arms and legs hurt a lot.
I ended up thinking: Man, my couch feels nice.
Mouse snuffled at my face and then all but squashed me as he laid his head and most of his upper body across mine. I thought about chewing him out for it, but opted for sleep on my wonderful couch instead.
Blackness ensued.
I woke up to a room illuminated only by the light from my fireplace. I was toasty, though my fingers and toes throbbed uncomfortably. There was a gentle weight pressing down on me that proved to be virtually every blanket I owned. The deep, slow, steady sound of my dog’s breathing whispered from the rug in front of the couch, and one of my hands was lying on the rough, warm, dry fur of Mouse’s back.
Water trickled nearby.
Luccio sat on a footstool in front of the fire, facing the flames. My teapot hung on its latch over the fire. A basin of steaming water sat upon the hearth. As I watched, she dipped a cloth in the hot water and slid it over her shoulder and down the length of one arm, her face in profile to me. Her eyes were closed in an expression of simple pleasure. The light of the fire made lovely, exquisitely feminine shadows along the slender lines of her naked back, down to the waist of her jeans as she moved, muscles shifting beneath soft skin that shimmered golden like the firelight for a second after the warm cloth glided over it, leaving little wisps of vapor in its wake.
Something else had never really occurred to me before, either.
Luccio was beautiful.
Oh, she wasn’t cover-girl pretty, though I suspected that with the right preparation she’d be damned close. Her features were appealing, particularly around her little Cupid’s bow of a mouth, framed by its dimples, contrasted with a rather squared-off chin that stopped half an eyelash shy of masculinity. She had dark eyes that flashed when she was angry or amused, and her medium-brown hair was long, curling, and lustrous. She obviously took really good care of it—but there was too much strength in that face for her to be conventionally pretty.
Beauty runs deeper than that.
There was an inexpressible quality of femininity about her that appealed to me tremendously—some critical mixture of gentle curves, quiet grace, and supple strength that I had only that second realized happened to reside in the same place as the head of the Wardens. Maybe more important, I knew the quality of the person under the skin. I’d known Luccio for years, been in more than one tight spot with her, and found her to be one of the only veteran Wardens whom I both liked and respected.
She shook her hair to the other side of her back and washed the other shoulder and arm just as slowly, and just as evidently taking pleasure in doing so.
It had been a while since I’d seen a woman’s naked back and shoulders. It had been considerably rarer than my views of the various nightmares my job kept exposing me to. I guess even among all the nightmares, sooner or later you’ll get lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a beautiful dream. And despite the trouble I was in, for just that moment there, under all those blankets, I looked at something beautiful. It made me wish I had the talent to capture the sight with charcoal or inks or oils—but that had never been my gift. All I could do was soak up that simple sight: beautiful woman bathing in firelight.
I didn’t actually notice when Luccio paused and turned her head to face me. I just noticed, suddenly, that she was returning my gaze, her dark eyes steady. I swallowed. I wasn’t sure what I had been expecting. Sudden outrage, maybe, or a biting remark, or at least a blush. Luccio didn’t do any of that. She just returned my stare, calm and poised and lovely as you please, one arm folded across her breasts while the other dipped the cloth into the steaming basin again.
“Sorry,” I said finally, lowering my eyes. I was probably blushing. Dammit. Maybe I could pass it off as mild frostbite, heroically suffered on her behalf.
She let out a quiet little murmur of sound that was too relaxed to be a chuckle. “Did it displease you?”
“No,” I said, at once. “God, no, nothing like that.”
“Then why apologize?” she said.
“I, uh…” I coughed. “I just figured that a girl who came of age during the reign of Queen Victoria would be a little more conservative.”
Luccio let out a wicked little laugh that time. “Victoria was British,” she said. “I’m Italian.”
“Bit of a difference, then?” I asked.
“Just a little,” she replied. “When I was young, I posed for a number of painters and sculptors, you know.” She tilted her head back and washed her throat as she spoke. “Mmm. Though that was in my original body, of course.”
Right. The one that had been stolen by an insane necromancer, leaving Luccio’s mind permanently trapped in a loaner. A really young, fit, lovely loaner. “I don’t see how the one you’re in now could possibly come up short by comparison.”
She opened her eyes and flashed me a smile that was entirely too pleased and girlish. “Thank you. But I would not have you misunderstanding me. I’d avail myself of your shower, after being soaked in that foul soup, but the Archive is on your bed, and Kincaid has closed the door. He’s resting too, and I’d rather not have him go for my throat before he wakes. And you were asleep, so…” She gave a little shrug of her shoulders.
It did really interesting things to the shadows the fire cast upon her skin, and I was suddenly glad of all the blankets piled on me.
“Are you feeling all right?” Luccio asked me.
“I’ll live,” I said.
“It was gallant of you to face down Kincaid like that.”
“No problem. He’s an ass.”
“A very dangerous one,” Luccio said. “I wouldn’t have traveled with him if I had not seen him pass through the security checkpoint in Boston.” She rose, dropped the washcloth in the basin, and pulled her shirt on, giving me a rather intriguing view of her back and waist silhouetted against the firelight.
I sighed. Moment over. Back to business.
“What were you doing traveling with them?” I asked.
“Bringing them here for the parley,” she replied.
“Parley?”
“The Archive contacted Nicodemus Archleone regarding our accusations. He agreed to meet with us here, in Chicago, to discuss the matter. You are the initiating party in this instance, and I am here to serve as your second.”
I blinked at her. “You? My second?”
She turned to face me as she finished buttoning her shirt and smiled faintly. “Duty before ego. Relatively few of the Wardens with sufficient seasoning for the role were willing. I thought it might be best if you worked with me instead of Morgan.”
“That’s why they pay you the big bucks, Cap. That keen interpersonal insight.”
“That and because I’m quite good at killing things,” Luccio said, nodding. She turned to the fireplace and took Gard’s little wooden box off the mantel. “Dresden�
�”
“Hell’s bells,” I breathed, sitting up. “Captain, that thing is dangerous. Put it down.” I snapped out that last in a tone of pure authority, one I’d gotten used to when working with Molly and various folks I’d met through the Paranet.
She froze in her tracks and arched an eyebrow at me, but only for a split second. Then she smoothly replaced the box and stepped away from it. “I see. You were holding it when we dragged you in here. You wouldn’t let it go, in fact.”
“Well,” I said, “no.”
“Which, I take it, explains what you were doing at the station.”
“Well,” I said, “yes.”
“Quite a coincidence,” she said.
I shook my head. “In my experience, when there’s a Knight of the Cross around, there’s no such thing as coincidence.”
She frowned at that. “It’s been a very long time since I’ve been to confession. Nearly a century, in fact. I’m not aware that the Almighty owes me any favors.”
“Mysterious ways,” I said smugly.
She laughed. “I take it they’ve used that line on you before?”
“Constantly,” I said.
“A good man,” she said. “You’re lucky to have him as a friend.”
I frowned and said quietly, “Yeah. I am.” I shook my head. “When’s the parley?”
“Noon, tomorrow.” She nodded at the mantel. “Can you tell me what’s in there?”
“Options,” I said. “If the parley fails.”
“Out with it, Dresden,” she said.
I shook my head.
She put a fist on one hip. “Why not?”
“Gave my word.”
She considered that for a moment. Then she nodded once and said, “As you wish. Get some more rest. You’ll need it.” Then she prowled over to my love seat, sank wearily down into it, and, without another word, curled up under a blanket. She was apparently asleep seconds later.
I thought about getting up and checking out Gard’s case, maybe calling Michael and Murphy, but the weariness that suddenly settled on my limbs made all of that sound impossibly difficult. So I settled in a little more comfortably and found sleep coming swiftly to me as well.