by Jim Butcher
The last thing I noticed, before I dropped off, was that under all the blankets I was entirely undressed.
And I was clean.
Chapter Twenty-seven
“I still don’t see why I can’t go,” Molly said, folding her arms crossly.
“You know how you told me how much you hate it when your parents quote scripture at you to answer your questions?” I asked her.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not gonna do that. Because I don’t know this one well enough to get the quote right.”
She rolled her eyes.
“But it’s something about the best way to defeat temptation is to avoid it.”
“Oh, please,” Molly said.
“Actually, he’s right,” Thomas said, passing over my duster. “Seriously. I know temptation.”
Molly gave my brother a sidelong look and blushed faintly.
“Stop that,” I told him.
Thomas shrugged. “Can’t help it. I’m hungry. I wound up jumping rooftop to rooftop for half an hour, dodging a bunch of three-foot-tall lunatics with bows and arrows.”
“Elves,” I murmured. “Someone on Summer’s team was calling in backup, too. Interesting. I wonder which side tipped the scales first.”
“You’re welcome,” Thomas said.
“Hey,” Molly snapped. “Can we get back on topic? I know how to handle myself, Harry. This is supposed to be a talk, not a fight.”
I sighed, turning to her. We were talking to each other in the Carpenters’ kitchen, while everyone else geared up in the workshop. Thomas had sneaked in the front door of the house to pass my staff and coat back to me, after his evening of decoy work.
“Grasshopper,” I said, “think who we’re going to be talking to.”
“Nicodemus. The head of the Denarians,” she said. “The man who tried to kill my father and my teacher, and did his best to put a demon inside my little brother’s head.”
I blinked. “How did you know about—”
“The usual, eavesdropping on Mom and Dad,” she replied impatiently. “The point being that I’m not going to be tempted to pick up one of his coins, Harry.”
“I’m not talking about you being tempted, kid,” I said. “I’m worried about Nicodemus. Given everything that’s going on, I’d rather not wave a Knight of the Cross’s brushed-with-darkness daughter under his nose. We’re trying to avoid a huge fight, not find new reasons to start one.”
Molly gave me a steady stare.
“Hey,” I said, “how’s that homework I gave you coming?”
She stared some more. She’d learned from Charity, so she was pretty good at it. I’d gotten Charity’s stare plenty, though, so I’d been inoculated. She turned in silence and stalked out of the kitchen.
Thomas snorted quietly.
“What?” I asked him.
“You really think you’re going to avoid a fight?”
“I think I’m not going to hand them any of Michael’s family as hostages,” I said. “Nicodemus has got something up his sleeve.” As I spoke, I made sure the little holdout knife in its leather sheath was still secured up mine. “The only question is who is going to start the music and where.”
“Where’s the meeting?”
I shrugged. “Neither party knows. Kincaid and the Archive are picking a neutral spot. They left my place early this morning. They’re going to call. But I doubt they’ll start it this soon. My money says that Nicodemus will want something in exchange for Marcone. That’s when he’ll make his move.”
“At the exchange?” Thomas asked.
I nodded. “Try to grab the whole tamale.”
“Uh-huh,” Thomas said. “Speaking of, I came by your place after I was done playing tag with assassin midgets last night. Got a whiff of perfume on the doorway and checked through the window on the south side of the house.” He gave me a sly grin. “About fucking time, man.”
I frowned at him. “What?”
The grin faded. “You mean you still didn’t…Oh, empty night, Harry.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw you, talking to a woman who had already taken half her clothes off for you, man.”
“Oh, come on,” I said. “Thomas, it wasn’t like that. She was just getting clean.” I gave him the short version of the previous evening.
Thomas gave me a look of his own. Then he thwapped me gently upside the head.
“Hey!” I said.
“Harry,” he said. “You were sleeping for hours. She had plenty of time to get clean. You think she sat around for all that time because she wasn’t tired just yet? You think she didn’t plan on you seeing her?”
I opened my mouth to answer and left it that way.
“For that matter, she could have settled down behind the couch, where you couldn’t have seen her if you did wake up,” Thomas continued. “Not right by the fire, where she made what I thought was quite a nice little picture for you.”
“I…I didn’t think she…”
He stared at me. “You didn’t make a move.”
“She’s…Luccio is my commanding officer, man. We…we work together.”
Thomas rolled his eyes. “That’s a twenty-first-century attitude, man. She’s a nineteenth-century girl. She doesn’t draw the lines the same way you and I do.”
“But I never thought—”
“I can’t believe this,” Thomas said. “Tell me you aren’t that stupid.”
“Stupid?” I demanded.
“Yeah,” he said bluntly. “Stupid. If she offered and you turned her down because you had a reason you didn’t want to, that’s one thing. Never realizing what she was talking about, though—that’s just pathetic.”
“She never said—”
My brother threw up his hands. “What does a woman need to do, Harry? Rip her clothes off, throw herself on top of you, and shimmy while screaming, ‘Do me, baby!’?” He shook his head. “Sometimes you’re a frigging idiot.”
“I…” I spread my hands. “She just went to sleep, man.”
“Because she was being thoughtful of you, you knob. She didn’t want to come on too strong and make you uncomfortable, especially given that she’s older and more experienced than you are, and your commanding officer to boot. She didn’t want to make you feel pressured. So she left you plenty of room to turn her down gracefully.” He rolled his eyes. “Read between the lines once in a while, man.”
“I…” I sighed. “I’ve never been hit on by a woman a hundred and fifty years older than me,” I said lamely.
“Try to use your brain around women once in a while, instead of just your juju stick.” Thomas tossed me my staff.
I caught it. “Everyone’s a critic.”
My brother purloined an apple from the basket on the island in the kitchen on his way to the door, glanced over his shoulder, and said, “Moron. Thank God Nicodemus is a man.”
He left, and I stood there for a second being annoyed at him. I mean, sure, he was probably right—but that only made it more annoying, not less.
Something else he was right about: Anastasia had looked simply amazing in front of that fire.
Huh.
I hadn’t really thought of her in terms of her first name before. Just as “Luccio” or “the captain” or “Captain Luccio.” Come to think of it, she’d been out of the dating game for even longer than I had. Could be that she hadn’t exactly been brimming with self-confidence last night, either.
The situation bore thinking upon.
Later.
For now, there was intrigue and inevitable betrayal afoot, and I had to focus.
I headed out to the workshop. The day was brighter than the one before, but the cloud cover still hadn’t gone. It had stopped snowing, though the wind kicked up enough powder to make it hard to tell. A check of the mirror had revealed that the tip of my nose, the tops of my ears, and the highest parts of my cheeks were rough and ruddy from exposure to cold and my brush with hypothermia. They looked like they’d su
ffered from a heavy sunburn. Added to my raccoon eyes, I thought them quite charming.
No wonder Luccio had thrown herself at me with such wanton abandon.
Dammit, Harry, focus, focus. Danger is afoot.
I opened the door to the workshop just as Michael folded his arms and said, “I still don’t see why I can’t go.”
“Because we’re trying to avoid a fight,” Luccio said calmly, “and an atmosphere of nervous fear is not going to foster a good environment for a peaceful exchange.”
“I’m not afraid of them,” Michael said.
“No,” Luccio said, smiling faintly. “But they’re afraid of you.”
“In any case,” Gard said, “neither the Church nor the Knights are signatories of the Accords. Not to put it too bluntly, Sir Michael, but this is quite literally none of your business.”
“You don’t know these people,” Michael said quietly. “Not the way I do.”
“I do,” I said quietly. “At least in some ways.”
Michael turned to give me a steady, searching look. “Maybe,” he said quietly. “Do you think I should stay away?”
I didn’t answer him immediately. Gard watched me from where she sat on the edge of her cot, now dressed and upright, if not precisely healthy-looking. Hendricks sat at the workbench again, although he was sharpening a knife this time. Weapons nuts are always fiddling with their gear. Murphy, seated down the bench from Hendricks, was cleaning her gun. She wasn’t moving her wounded arm much, though she apparently had full use of that hand. Sanya loomed in a corner near the workbench, patiently working some kind of leather polish into Esperacchius’s scabbard.
“I don’t think this is where they’ll try to stick in the knife,” I said quietly. I turned my eyes to Luccio. “I also don’t think it would be stupid to have a couple of Knights on standby, in case I’m wrong.”
Luccio’s head rocked back a little.
“No reason not to hedge our bets,” I told her quietly. “These people don’t play nice like the Unseelie fae, or the Red Court. I’ve seen them in action, Captain.”
She pursed her lips, and her eyes never wavered from my face. “All right, Warden,” she said, finally. “It’s your city.”
“I did not agree to this,” Gard said, rising, her expression dark.
“Oh, deal with it, blondie,” I told her. “Beggars and choosers. The White Council is backing you up on this one, but don’t start thinking it’s because we work for you. Or your boss.”
“I’m going to be there too,” Murphy said quietly, without looking up from her gun. “Not just somewhere nearby. There. In the room.”
Pretty much everyone there said, “No,” or some variant of it at that point, except for Hendricks, who didn’t talk a lot, and me, who knew better.
Murphy put her gun back together during the protests and loaded it in the silence afterward.
“If you people want to have your plots and your shadowy wars in private,” she said, “you should take them to Antarctica or somewhere. Or you could do this in New York, or Boise, and this isn’t any of my business. But you aren’t in any of those places. You’re in Chicago. And when things get out of hand, it’s the people I’m sworn to protect who are endangered.” She rose, and though she was the shortest person in the room, she wasn’t looking up at anyone. “I’m going to be there as a moderating influence with your cooperation. Or we can do it the other way. Your choice, but I know a lot of cops who are sick and tired of this supernatural bullshit sneaking up on us.”
She directed a level gaze around the room. She hadn’t put the gun away.
I smiled at her. Just a little.
Gard looked at me and said, “Dresden.”
I shrugged and shook my head sadly. “What? Once we gave them the vote, it went totally out of control.”
“You’re a pig, Harry,” Murphy growled.
“But a pig smart enough to bow to the inevitable,” I said. I looked at Gard and said, “Far as I’m concerned, she’s got a legitimate interest. I’ll back it.”
“Warden,” Luccio said in a warning tone, “may I speak to you?”
I walked over to her.
“She can’t possibly know,” Luccio said quietly, “the kind of grief she could be letting herself in for.”
“She can,” I replied as quietly. “She’s been through more than most Wardens, Captain. And she’s sure as hell covered my back enough times to have earned the right to make up her own mind.”
Luccio frowned at me for a moment, and then turned to face Murphy. “Sergeant,” she said quietly. “This could expose you to a…considerable degree of risk. Are you sure?”
“If it were your town,” Murphy said, “your job, your duty? Could you stand around with your fingers in your ears?”
Luccio nodded slowly and then inclined her head.
“Besides,” Murphy said, half smiling as she put her gun in her shoulder holster, “it’s not as if I’m leaving you people much choice.”
“I like her,” Sanya rumbled in his deep, half-swallowed accent. “She is so tiny and fierce. I don’t suppose she knows how to—”
“Sanya,” Michael said, his voice very firm. “We have talked about this.”
The dark-skinned Russian sighed and shrugged. “It could not hurt to ask.”
“Sanya.”
He lifted both hands in a gesture of surrender, grinning, and fell silent.
The door to the house banged shut, and running footsteps crunched through the snow. Molly opened the door to the workshop and said, “Harry, Kincaid’s on the phone. He’s got the location for the meeting.”
“Kincaid?” Murphy said in a rather sharp voice.
“Yeah, didn’t I mention that?” I asked her, my tone perfectly innocent as I headed for the door. “He showed up last night.”
Her eyes narrowed. “We’ll talk.”
“Tiny,” Sanya rumbled to Michael, clenching a demonstrative fist. “But fierce.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
People think that nothing can possibly happen in the middle of a big city—say, Chicago—without lots of witnesses seeing everything that happened. What most people don’t really understand is that there are two reasons why that just ain’t so—the first being that humans in general make lousy witnesses.
Take something fairly innocuous, like a minor traffic accident at a busy pedestrian intersection. Beep-beep, crunch, followed by a lot of shouting and arm waving. Line up everyone at that intersection and ask them what happened. Every single one of them will give you a slightly different story. Some of them will have seen the whole thing start to finish. Some of them will have seen only the aftermath. Some of them will have seen only one of the cars. Some of them will tell you, with perfect assurance, that they saw both cars from start to finish, including such details as the expressions on the drivers’ faces and changes in vehicle acceleration, despite the fact that they would have to be performing simultaneous feats of bilocation, levitation, and telepathy to have done so.
Most people will be honest. And incorrect. Honest incorrectness isn’t the same thing as lying, but it amounts to the same thing when you’re talking about witnesses to a specific event. A relative minority will limit themselves to reporting what they actually saw, not things that they have filled in by assumption, or memories contaminated by too much exposure to other points of view. Of that relative minority, even fewer will be the kind of person who, by natural inclination or possibly training, has the capacity for noticing and retaining a large amount of detail in a limited amount of time.
The point being that once events pass into memory, they already have a tendency to begin to become muddled and cloudy. It can be more of an art form than a science to gain an accurate picture of what transpired based upon eyewitness descriptions—and that’s for a matter of relative unimportance, purely a matter of fallible intellect, with no deep personal or emotional issues involved.
Throw emotions into the mix, and mild confusion turns into utter havoc.
Take that same fender-bender, make it an accident between a carload of neoskinhead types and some gangbangers at a busy crosswalk in a South Side neighborhood, and you’ve got the kind of situation that kicks off riots. No matter what happens, you probably aren’t going to be able to get a straight story out of anyone afterward. In fact, you might be hard-pressed to get any story out of anyone.
Once human emotions get tossed into the mix, everything is up for grabs.
The second reason things can go unnoticed in the middle of the big city is pretty simple: walls. Walls block line of sight.
Let me rephrase that: Walls block line of involvement.
The human animal is oriented around a sense of sight. Things aren’t real until we see them: Seeing is believing, right? Which is also why there are illusionists—they can make us see things that aren’t real, and it seems amazing.
If a human being actually sees something bad happening, there’s a better chance that he or she will act and get involved than if the sense of sight isn’t involved. History illustrates it. Oh, sure, Allied governments heard reports of Nazi death camps in World War II, but that was a far cry from when the first troops actually saw the imprisoned Jews as they liberated the camps. Hearst had known it before that: You furnish the pictures, and I’ll furnish the war. And according to some, he did.
Conversely, if you don’t see something happening, it isn’t as real. You can hear reports of tragedies, but they don’t hit you the way they would if you were standing there in the ruins.
Nowhere has as many walls as big cities do, and walls keep you from seeing things. They help make things less real. Sure, maybe you hear loud, sharp noises outside some nights. But it’s easy to tell yourself that those aren’t gunshots, that there’s no need to call the police, no need to even worry. It’s probably just a car backfiring. Sure. Or a kid with fireworks. There might be loud wailing or screams coming from the apartment upstairs, but you don’t know that the drunken neighbor is beating his wife with a rolling pin again. It’s not really any of your business, and they’re always fighting, and the man is scary, besides. Yeah, you know that there are cars coming and going at all hours from your neighbor’s place, and that the crowd there isn’t exactly the most upright-looking bunch, but you haven’t seen him dealing drugs. Not even to the kids you see going over there sometimes. It’s easier and safer to shut the door, be quiet, and turn up the TV.