by Jim Butcher
“Cousin Thomas,” she purred. “Still noble and starving, I see.”
“Madeline,” Thomas replied, a small smile showing white, perfect teeth. “Still undisciplined and blatant, I see.”
Madeline Raith’s mouth and eyes reacted in completely different ways to my half brother’s remark. Her smile widened into a beauty-pageant expression, wide and immobile, but her eyes narrowed and went completely white, the pale blue vanishing from her irises. She looked from Thomas to Justine.
“Lara’s little pet mortal,” Madeline said. “I wondered where you were running off to. Now I find you meeting with your old flame and . . .” Her eyes slid to me. “The enemy.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Justine replied. Though her voice was calm, her cheeks were bright pink, her eyes dilated. “I came to go over the books, the way I do every week.”
“But this time you wore perfume,” Madeline said. “And a rather provocative ensemble, not that you don’t do it justice, darling. I find it”—her tongue touched her upper lip—“interesting.”
“Madeline,” Thomas said, in a tone of exaggerated patience, “please go away.”
“I have every right to be here,” she murmured. It didn’t seem right that she should be able to keep her voice so maddeningly soft and sensual over the beat of the club’s music. She turned to me and took a few steps my way, with her full attention on me.
I suddenly felt like a teenager—a little bit afraid, a whole lot excited, and filled with so many hormones demanding so many inexplicable things that I nearly lost the ability to focus my eyes.
She stopped just out of the reach of my hand. “Don’t mind my cousin’s horrible manners. The infamous Harry Dresden hardly needs an introduction.” She looked me up and down and twined a finger through a tendril of dark hair. “How could I come to Chicago so many times without meeting you?”
“But I’ve seen you,” I said. My voice was a little rough, but it worked.
“Oh?” she asked, the sexy smile widening. “Are you the sort who likes to watch, Harry?”
“You betcha,” I said. “And that time, I was watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”
Her smile faltered a fraction.
“You are Jessica Rabbit, right?” I asked. “All slinky and overblown and obvious?”
The smile vanished.
“Because I know I’ve seen you somewhere, and gosh, I’ll be embarrassed if it turns out that you were the evil princess from Buck Rogers instead.”
“What?” she said. “Buck what?”
I gave her my best forced smile. “Hey, don’t get me wrong. You do that ensemble justice. But you’re trying too hard.” I leaned a little closer and fake-whispered, “Lara does more for me just sitting in a chair than you did with your whole entrance.”
Madeline Raith became as still and cold as a statue of a furious goddess, and the air temperature around us dropped several degrees.
I suddenly sensed Thomas’s presence beside me, and found my brother had leaned back against the railing on his elbows, his hands loose and relaxed. He was standing just a tiny bit closer to Madeline than I was.
“Madeline,” he said in the precise same tone he’d used a moment before, “go away before I beat you to death with my bare hands.”
Madeline jerked her head back as if Thomas had slapped her. “What?”
“You heard me,” he said calmly. “It isn’t quite cricket as family squabbles go, I know, but I’m tired, I don’t give a fuck what you or anyone else in the House thinks of me, and I don’t respect you enough to play games with you, even if I was in the mood.”
“How dare you?” Madeline snarled. “How dare you threaten me? Lara will have the skin flayed from your body for this.”
“Oh?” Thomas gave her a wintry smile. “After what you projected at the wizard, he’d be well within his rights to burn you right down to your overpriced shoes.”
“I never—”
“And despite the orders handed down from the King,” Thomas said, shaking his head. “Lara’s getting tired of cleaning up after you, Mad. She’d probably buy me a new set of steak knives if I found a way to make her life a bit less trying.”
Madeline laughed. It reminded me of glass breaking. “And do you think she loves you any better, cousin mine? You refuse to appear with the House at meetings of the Court, and spend your time among the kine, grooming them and bringing shame upon your family. At least tell me you are planning to take the beasts to some sort of auction.”
“You aren’t capable of understanding why I do what I do,” Thomas said.
“Who would want to?” she retorted. “You’re as much a degenerate as any of those fools in Skavis and Malvora.”
Thomas’s mouth ticked at the corner, but that was all the reaction he gave her. “Go away, Madeline. Last warning.”
“Two members of the oldest bloodlines in Raith murdering each other?” Madeline said, sneering. “The White King could not tolerate such a divisive act and you know it.” She turned away from Thomas and walked toward Justine. “You’re bluffing,” she said over her shoulder. “Besides. We haven’t heard from our little pink rose yet.”
Her voice sank to a throaty purr, and Justine quivered in place, seemingly unable to move as Madeline approached.
“Pretty Justine.” Madeline put a hand on Justine’s shoulder and slid a single fingertip down the slope of one breast. “I don’t generally enjoy does as much as some, darling, but even I find the thought of taking you delicious.”
“You c-can’t touch me,” Justine stammered. She was breathing faster.
“Not yet,” Madeline said. “But there’s not enough will left in your pretty little head to control yourself for long.” Madeline stepped closer, sliding her hand along Justine’s waist. “Some night, perhaps I’ll come to you with some beautiful young buck and whisper pretty things to you until you’re mad to be taken. And after he has made use of you, little doe, I’ll take you in one big bite.” She licked her lips. “I’ll take you whole and make you scream how much you love it as it happen—”
Thomas broke a chair over Madeline’s head.
It was particularly impressive, given that all the chairs on the balcony were made of metal.
It happened fast, during an eye blink. One instant he was standing beside me, tightening with anger, and the next there were popped rivets zinging everywhere and Madeline had been crushed to the floor of the balcony.
The air went cold. Thomas dropped the ruined chair. Madeline bounced up from the floor and threw a blow at Thomas’s jaw. He hunched and twisted, a boxer’s defense, and took it on the shoulder with a grunt of pain. Then he seized her ankle and slammed her in a half circle, smashing a 36-24-36 dent into the drywall.
Madeline cried out and her limbs went loose. Thomas swung her in another arc that brought her crashing down onto the low coffee table between the couches. She lay there and let out a single choked gasp, her eyes unfocused. Without pausing, my brother snatched both chopsticks from Justine’s hair, letting the white-silver locks tumble down her back.
Then, in two sharp, swift motions, he slammed the chopsticks through Madeline’s wrists and into the table beneath them, pinning her like a butterfly to a card.
“You’re right of course,” he snarled. “Lara couldn’t ignore one member of the family murdering another. It would make the King look weak.” His hand closed over Madeline’s face, and he pulled her head up toward his, making her arms strain at a painful angle. “I was bluffing.”
He shoved her back down against the table. “Of course,” he said, “you’re family. Families don’t murder one another.” He looked up at Justine and said, “They share.”
She met his eyes. A very small, very hard smile graced Justine’s features.
“You wanted to taste her,” Thomas said, his fingers twining with Justine’s rubber-clad ones. “Well, Madeline. Be my guest.”
Justine leaned over and kissed Madeline Raith’s forehead, her silken silver hair falling to
veil them both.
The vampire screamed.
The sound was lost in the pounding rhythm and flashing lights.
Justine lifted her head a few seconds later, and swept her hair slowly down the length of Madeline’s form. The vampire writhed and screamed again, while Thomas held her pinned to the table. Wherever Justine’s hair glided over exposed fleshed, the skin sizzled and burned, blackening in some places, forming blisters and welts in others. She left a trail of ruin down one of Madeline’s legs and then rose together with Thomas, two bodies making one motion.
Madeline Raith’s face was a ruin of burn marks, and the imprint of Justine’s soft mouth was a perfect black brand on pale flesh in the center of her forehead. She lay on the table, still pinned by the chopsticks, and quivered in jerking little motions, gasping and breathless with the pain.
Thomas and Justine walked, hand in hand, to the stairs leading down from our platform. I followed them.
They passed beneath an air-conditioning outlet, and a few strands of Justine’s hair blew against Thomas’s naked arm and chest. Small bright lines of scarlet appeared. Thomas didn’t flinch.
I walked over to them and passed Justine a pair of pencils, taken from my coat pocket. She took them with a nod of thanks, and quickly bound up her hair again. I looked over my shoulder as she did.
Madeline Raith lay helpless and gasping—but her white eyes burned with hate.
Thomas took his T-shirt from where he’d stowed it on a belt loop, and put it back on. Then he slid his arms around Justine again and pulled her against his chest, holding her close.
“Will you be all right?” he asked.
Justine nodded, her eyes closed. “I’ll call the House. Lara will send someone for her.”
“You leave her there and it’s going to make trouble,” I told him.
He shrugged. “I couldn’t get away with killing her. But our House has rather stern views on poaching.” Something hard and hot entered his eyes. “Justine is mine. Madeline had to be shown that. She deserved it.”
Justine clung a little bit tighter to him. He returned the gesture.
We all started down the stairs together, and I was glad to be leaving Zero.
“Still,” I said. “Seeing her like that, I feel like maybe somebody went too far. I feel a little bit bad for her.”
Thomas arched an eyebrow and glanced back at me. “You do?”
“Yeah,” I said. I pursed my lips thoughtfully. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that Jessica Rabbit thing.”
Chapter Ten
The hot summer night outside Zero felt ten degrees cooler and a million times cleaner than what we’d left behind us. Thomas turned sharply to the right and walked until he’d found a spot of shadow between streetlights, and leaned one shoulder against the wall of the building. He bowed his head, and stayed that way for a minute, then two.
I waited. I didn’t need to ask my brother what was wrong. The display of strength and power he’d used on Madeline had cost him energy—energy that other vampires gained by feeding on victims, as Madeline had done to that poor sap inside. He wasn’t upset by what had happened in Zero. He was hungry.
Thomas’s struggle against his own hunger was complicated, difficult, and maybe impossible to sustain. That never stopped him from trying, though. The rest of the Raith family thought he was insane.
But I got it.
He walked back over to me a minute later, his cool features distant and untouchable as Antarctic mountains.
He fell into pace beside me as we began walking down the street toward the lot where he’d parked his car.
“Ask you a question?” I said.
He nodded.
“The White Court only get burned when they try to feed on someone touched by true love, right?”
“It isn’t as simple as that,” Thomas said quietly. “It’s got to do with how much control the hunger has over you when you touch.”
I grunted. “But when they feed, the hunger’s in control.”
Thomas nodded slowly.
“So why’d Madeline try to feed on Justine? She had to know it would hurt her.”
“Same reason I do,” Thomas said. “She can’t help it. It’s reflex.”
I frowned. “I don’t get it.”
He was quiet long enough to make me think he wasn’t going to say anything, before he finally spoke. “Justine and I were together for years. And she . . . means a lot to me. When I’m near her, I can’t think about anything else but her. And when I touch her, everything in me wants to be nearer to her.”
“Including your hunger,” I said quietly.
He nodded. “We agree on that point, my demon and I. So I can’t touch Justine without it being . . . close to the surface, I suppose you could call it.”
“And it gets burned,” I said.
He nodded. “Madeline is the other end of the spectrum. She thinks she should get to feed on anyone she wants, anywhere, anytime. She doesn’t see other people. She just sees food. Her hunger controls her completely.” He smiled a bitter little smile. “So for her it’s reflex, just like for me.”
“You’re different. For her it’s everyone,” I said, “not only Justine.”
He shrugged. “I don’t care about everyone. I care about Justine.”
“You’re different,” I said.
Thomas turned to face me, his expression rigid and cold. “Shut up, Harry.”
“But—”
His voice dropped to a low snarl. “Shut. Up.”
It was a little scary.
He stared hard at me for a while longer, then shook his head and exhaled slowly. “I’ll get the car. Wait here.”
“Sure,” I said.
He walked away on silent feet, his hands in his pockets, his head bowed. Every woman he passed, and some of the men, turned their heads to watch him go by. He ignored them.
I got a lot of looks, too, but that was because I was standing on a sidewalk near a lot of Chicago’s night spots on a hot summer night wearing a long leather coat and carrying a quarterstaff carved with mystic runes. Thomas’s looks had all been subtitled: Yum. My looks all said: Weirdo.
Tough to believe I was coming out ahead on that one.
While I waited, my instincts nagged me again, a hairs-on-the-back-of-my-neck certainty that someone was focused on me. My instincts had been on a streak, so I paid attention to them, quietly preparing my shield bracelet as I turned my head in a slow, casual look up and down the street. I didn’t spot anybody, but my vision sort of flickered as it passed over an alley across the street. I focused on that point intently for a moment, concentrating, and was able to make out a vaguely human shape there.
Then the flicker was abruptly replaced with the form of Anastasia Luccio, who raised a hand and beckoned me.
Yikes.
I jaywalked over to her, timing my crossing in between the occasional passing car, and we took several steps back into the alley.
“Evening, Stacy,” I said.
She turned to me and, in a single motion, drew a curved saber from a sheath at her hip and produced a gun in her other hand. The tip of the blade menaced my face, and I had to jerk my head back, which put me off balance, and I wound up with my shoulders pressed up against a wall.
Anastasia arched an eyebrow, her soft mouth set in a hard line. “I hope for your sake that you are the true Harry Dresden, only using that abomination of a nickname to make sure that I was the true Anastasia”—she emphasized the word slightly—“Luccio.”
“Well, yes, Anastasia,” I said, being careful not to move. “And by your reaction, I can tell that it really is you.”
She dropped the sword’s point and lowered the gun. The tension faded from her body, and she put her hardware away. “Well, of course it’s me. Who else would it be?”
I shook my head. “I’ve had a bad shapeshifter night.”
She arched an eyebrow. Anastasia Luccio was the captain of the Wardens of the White Council. She had a couple of centurie
s of experience.
“I’ve had those,” she said, and put a hand on my arm. “Are you all right?”
We stepped into each other and hugged. I hadn’t realized how stiffly I’d been holding myself until I exhaled and relaxed a little. She felt slender and warm and strong in my arms. “So far I’m not dead,” I said. “I take it you used a tracking spell to run me down—since you don’t seem to be worried about whether or not I’m me.”
She lifted her face to mine and planted a soft kiss on my mouth. “Honestly, Harry,” she said, smiling. “Who would pretend to be you?”
“Someone who wanted to be kissed in dark alleys by seductive older women, apparently.”
Her smile widened for a second, and then faded. “I thought I was going to have to break down the door and come in after you. What were you doing in that White Court cesspit?”
I didn’t think I’d done anything to cause it, but we stepped out of each other’s arms. “Looking for information,” I said quietly. “Something’s up. And someone’s cut me out of the loop.”
Anastasia pressed her lips together and looked away. Her expression was closed, touched with anger. “Yes. Orders.”
“Orders,” I said. “From the Merlin, I guess.”
“From Ebenezar McCoy, actually.”
I grunted in surprise. McCoy had been my mentor when I was young. I respected him.
“I get it,” I said. “He was afraid that if I heard Morgan was on the run, I’d hat up and dish out some payback.”
She glanced up at me, and then across the street at Zero. She shrugged, without quite looking me in the face. “God knows you have enough cause to do so.”
“You agreed with him,” I said.
She looked up at me, her eyes a little wider. “If I did, then why am I standing here?”
I frowned at her and scratched my head. “Okay. You’ve got me on that one.”
“Besides,” she said. “I was worried about you.”
“Worried?”
She nodded. “Morgan’s done something that is hiding him from even the Senior Council’s abilities. I was afraid that he might come here.”