by Jim Butcher
The problem was that the only people who would show up to that kind of desperate fight were my friends. And my friends would die. I would literally be using them to shield myself against the crushing power of the Red King and his court, and I had no illusions of what such a struggle would cost. My friends would die. Most of them. Hell, probably all of them, and me with them. Maybe I could get to the kid and get out, while my friends gave their lives to make it possible. But after that, then what? Spend my life running with Maggie? Always looking over my shoulder, never stopping in one place for longer than a few days?
The second thing I could do was to change the confrontation into something else. Find some way to sneak up close enough to grab the girl and vanish, skipping the whole doomed-struggle part of option one. That plan wouldn’t require me to get my friends killed.
Of course, to pull it off, I’d have to find some way to get more clever and sneakier than beings with millennia of practice and experience at just such acts of infiltration and treachery. You didn’t survive for as long as they had among a nation of predators without being awfully smart and careful. I doubted it would be as simple as bopping a couple of guards over the head, then donning their uniforms and sneaking in with my friends the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Woodsman.
(I had cast myself as the Scarecrow in that one. If I only had a brain, I’d be able to come up with a better plan.)
So, the stand-up fight with an all-star team was a bad idea. It probably wouldn’t work.
The sneaky smash-and-grab at the heart of Red Court power was a bad idea. It probably wouldn’t work, either.
And that left option three. Which was unthinkable. Or had been, a few days ago. Before I knew I was a father.
My career as a wizard has been . . . very active. I’ve smacked a lot of awfully powerful things in the kisser. I’ve mostly gotten away with it, though I bear the scars, physical and otherwise, of the times I didn’t. A lot of the major players looked at me and saw potential for one kind of mayhem or another.
Some of them had offered me power.
A lot of power.
I mean, if I went out, right now, and gathered together everything I could—regardless of the price tag attached to it—it would change the game. It would make me more than just a hotshot young wizard. It would give my power an intensity, a depth, a scope I could hardly imagine. It would give me the chance to call upon new allies to fight beside me. It would place an almost unlimited number of new weapons at my disposal, open up options that could never otherwise exist.
But what about after?
I wouldn’t have to go on the run with Maggie to protect her from the monsters.
I’d be one.
Maybe not that day. Maybe not that week. But one day before too long, the things I had taken into me would change me. And I probably wouldn’t mind, even if I bothered to notice it happening. That was the nature of such power. You didn’t feel it changing you.
There is no sensation to warn you when your soul turns black.
Option three shared one commonality with options one and two: I wouldn’t survive it. Not as the man I was. The one who tried to make the world a little brighter or more stable. The one who tried to help, and who sometimes screwed things up. The one who believed in things like family, like responsibility, like love.
But Maggie might survive it. If I did it right—only to be orphaned again, in one way or another.
I felt so tired.
Maybe there isn’t a way, whispered a voice in the back of my head.
I snapped the water off and reached for a towel. “Screw that kind of thinking, Dresden,” I ordered myself. “There’s a way through this. There’s a way. You’ve just got to find it.”
I dried myself off and stared intently at my stark, scarred, unshaven face in the mirror. It didn’t look like the kind of face a child would love. Kid would probably start crying when she got a good look at me.
But it might be the kind of face that belonged to a man who could pull her safely out of a mob of bloodthirsty beasts. It was too early to throw in the towel.
I had no idea what I was going to do.
I just knew that I couldn’t give up.
Chapter Twenty-three
I called Murphy’s cell phone.
“Murphy here.”
“Heya, Murph. How you doing?”
“This line isn’t—”
“I know,” I said. “I know. Mine either. Hello, FBI guys. Don’t you get bored doing this stuff all the time?”
Murphy snorted into the phone. “What’s up?”
“I’m thinking about getting a broken-down doormat to go with my broken-down door and the broken frame around it,” I said. “Thank you, FBI guys.”
“Don’t make demons of the Bureau,” Murphy said. “They aren’t much more inept than anyone else. There’s only so much they can do when they’re given bad intelligence.”
“What about your place?” I asked.
“They came, they searched, they left. Rawlins and Stallings and a dozen other guys from SI were here assisting. The Bureau dusted and took out my trash after they were done.”
I barked out a laugh. “The boys at SI got away with that?”
Murphy sounded decidedly smug. “They were there at the request of the new agent in charge.”
“Tilly?”
“You met him, huh?”
“Did, and glad to. Spoke well of you.”
“He’s an aikidoka,” Murphy said. “I’ve been to his dojo a few times to teach some practical application classes. He’s come out to Dough Joe’s to teach forms and some formal weapons classes.”
“Oh, right. He’s the guy who taught you staff fighting?”
“That’s him. We started off in the same class, many moons ago.”
I grunted. “Shame to meet him this way.”
“The Bureau generally aren’t a bad bunch. This is all about Rudolph. Or whoever is giving Rudolph his marching orders.”
A thought struck me, and I went silent for a moment.
“Harry? You still there?”
“Yeah, sorry. Was just about to head out for a steak sandwich. Interested?”
“Sure. Twenty?”
“Twenty.”
Murphy hung up and I said, to the still-open line, “Hey, if you’ve got someone watching my place, could you call the cops if anyone tries to steal my Star Wars poster? It’s an original.” Then I vindictively hung up on the FBI. It made my inner child happy.
Twenty minutes later, I walked into McAnally’s.
It was too early for it to be properly crowded, and Murphy and I sat down at a corner table, the one farthest from the windows, and therefore from laser microphones, in case our federal pursuers had doubled up on their paranoia meds.
I began without preamble. “Who said Rudolph was getting his orders from his direct superiors? Or from anyone in Chicago at all?”
She frowned and thought about it for a moment. I waited it out patiently. “You don’t really think that,” she said. “Do you?”
“I think it’s worth looking at. He looked shaky when I saw him.”
“Yeah,” Murphy said thoughtfully. “At my place, too.”
I filled her in on the details of what she’d missed, at my apartment and the FBI building, and by the time I was done she was nodding confidently. “Go on.”
“We both know that ladder climbers like Rudolph don’t usually get nervous, rushed, and pressured when they’re operating with official sanction. They have too much fun swaggering around beating people over the head with their authority club.”
“Don’t know if all of them do that,” she said, “but I know damned well that Rudolph does.”
“Yeah. But this time, he was edgy, impatient. Desperate.” I told her about his behavior in general, and specifically at my place and in the interrogation room downtown. “Tilly said that Rudolph had lied his ass off to point the FBI at me.”
“And you believe that?” Murphy asked.
&nbs
p; “Don’t you?”
She shrugged. “Point. But that doesn’t mean he’s being used as some kind of agent.”
“I think it does,” I said. “He’s not operating with the full authority of his superiors. Someone else has got to be pushing him—someone who scared him enough to make him nervous and hasty.”
“Maybe that works,” Murphy said. “Why would he do it?”
“Someone wanted to make sure I wasn’t involved in the search for Maggie. So, maybe they sent Rudolph after me. Then, when Tilly turns me loose, they take things to the next level and try to whack me outside the FBI building.”
Murphy’s blue eyes were cold at the mention of the assassination attempt. “Could they have gotten someone into position that fast?”
I tried to work it through in my head. “After Tilly sent Rudolph out of the room, it didn’t take long for me to get out. Ten minutes, fifteen at the most. Time enough to call in his failure, and for his handler to send in a hit, you think?”
Murphy thought about it herself and then shook her head slowly. “Only if they were very, very close, and moved like greased lightning. But . . . Harry, that hit was too calm, too smooth for something thrown together at the last possible moment.”
I frowned, and we both clammed up as Mac came over to our table and put a pair of brown bottles down. He was a spare man, bald, and had been ever since I knew him, dressed in dark clothes and a spotless white apron. We both murmured thanks, and he withdrew again.
“Okay,” she said, and took a pull from the bottle. “Maybe Rudolph’s handler had already put the assassin in place as a contingency measure, in case you got loose despite Rudolph’s efforts.”
I shook my head. “It makes more sense if the assassin was already there, positioned to remove Rudolph, once he had served his purpose. Whoever his handler was, they would need a safety measure in place, a link they could cut out of the chain so that nothing would lead back to them. Only once Rudy calls them and tells them he isn’t able to keep me locked up, they have the shooter switch targets.”
Which meant . . . I had taken three bullets meant for Rudolph.
“Harry?” Murphy asked. “Why are you laughing?”
“I heard a joke yesterday,” I said. “I just got it.”
She frowned at me. “You need some rest. You look like hell. And you’re obviously tired enough to have gotten the giggles.”
“Wizards don’t giggle,” I said, hardly able to speak. “This is cackling.”
She eyed me askance and sipped her beer. She waited until I had laughed myself out before speaking again. “You find out about Maggie yet?”
“Sort of,” I said, abruptly sobered. “I think I know where she will be in the next few days.” I gave her what we had learned about the duchess’s intentions, leaving out the parts where I committed a bunch of crimes like theft, trespassing, and vandalism. “So right now,” I concluded, “everyone’s checking their contacts in Mexico while I’m talking to you.”
“Susan?” she asked.
“And Father Forthill,” I said. “Between them, they should be able to find out what’s going on at Chichén Itzá.”
Murphy nodded and asked, casually, “How’s she holding up?”
I took another pull from the bottle and said, “She thinks Molly has the hots for me.”
Murphy snorted. “Wow. She must have used her vampire superpowers to have worked that one out.”
I blinked at Murphy.
She stared at me for a second and then rolled her eyes. “Oh, come on, Harry. Really? Are you really that clueless?”
“Uh,” I said, still blinking. “Apparently.”
Murphy smirked down at her beer and said, “It’s always staggering to run into one of your blind spots. You don’t have many of them, but when you do they’re a mile wide.” She shook her head. “You didn’t really answer my question, you know.”
I nodded. “Susan’s a wreck. Maybe more so because of the whole vampire thing.”
“I don’t know, Harry. From what you’ve said, I don’t think you’d need to look any further than the whole mommy thing.”
“Could be,” I said. “Either way, she’s sort of fraying at the edges.”
“Like you,” Murphy said.
I scowled at her. “What?”
She lifted an eyebrow and looked frankly at me.
I started to get angry with her, but stopped to force myself to think. “Am I?”
She nodded slowly. “Did you notice that you’ve been tapping your left toe on the ground for the past five minutes?”
I frowned at her, and then down at my foot, which was tapping rapidly, to the point that my calf muscles were growing tired. “I . . . No.”
“I’m your friend, Harry,” she said quietly. “And I’m telling you that you aren’t too stable yourself right now.”
“Monsters are going to murder my child sometime soon, Murph. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow night. Soon. I don’t have time for sanity.”
Murphy nodded slowly, then sighed like someone setting down an unpleasant burden. “So. Chichén Itzá.”
“Looks like.”
“Cool. When do we hit them?”
I shook my head. “We can’t go all Wild Bunch on these people. They’ll flatten us.”
She frowned. “But the White Council . . .”
“Won’t be joining us,” I said. I couldn’t keep a bit of the snarl out of my voice. “And to answer your question . . . we’re not sure when the ritual is supposed to take place. I’ve got to come up with more information.”
“Rudolph,” Murphy said thoughtfully.
“Rudolph. Someone who is a part of this, probably someone from the Red Court, is leaning on him. I plan on finding that someone and then poking him in the nose until he coughs up something I can use.”
“I think I’d like to talk to Rudolph, too. We’ll start from our ends and work toward the middle again, then?”
“Sounds like a plan.” I waved at Mac and pantomimed holding a sandwich in front of me and taking a bite. He nodded, and glanced at Murphy. “You want a steak sandwich, too?”
“I thought you didn’t have time to be sane.”
“I don’t,” I said. “I don’t have time to be hungry, either.”
Chapter Twenty-four
“How does a police detective afford a place like this?” Molly asked.
We were sitting in the Blue Beetle on a quiet residential street in Crestwood. It was late afternoon, with a heavy overcast. The houses on the street were large ones. Rudolph’s place, whose address I’d gotten from Murphy, was the smallest house on the block—but it was on the block. It backed right up to the Cook County Forest Preserve, too, and between the old forest and the mature trees it gave the whole area a sheltered, pastoral quality.
“He doesn’t,” I said quietly.
“You mean he’s dirty?” Molly asked.
“Maybe,” I said. “Or maybe his family has money. Or maybe he managed to mortgage himself to the eyeballs. People get real stupid when it comes to buying homes. Pay an extra quarter of a million dollars for a place because it’s in the right neighborhood. Buy houses they damned well know they can’t afford to make the payments on.” I shook my head. “They should make you take some kind of iota-of-common-sense quiz before you make an offer.”
“Maybe it isn’t stupid,” Molly said. “Everybody wants home to mean something. Maybe the extra money they pay creates that additional meaning for them.”
I grimaced. “I’d rather have my extra meaning come from the ancient burial ground under the swimming pool or from knowing that I built it with my own hands or something.”
“Not everyone puts as low a value on the material as you do, boss,” Molly said. “For them, maybe the extra material value represented by a higher price tag is significant.”
I grunted. “It’s still stupid.”
“From your perspective,” Molly said. “It’s really all about perspective, isn’t it.”
“An
d from the perspective of those in need, that extra quarter of a million bucks your material person spent on the prestige addition for his house looks like an awful lot of lifesaving food and medicine that could have existed if the jerk with the big house in the suburbs hadn’t blown it all to artificially inflate his sociogeographic penis.”
“Heh,” Molly said. “And their house is much nicer than your house.”
“And that,” I said.
Mouse grumbled quietly in his sleep from the backseat, and I turned to reach back and rub his ears until he settled down again.
Molly sat quietly for almost a minute before she said, “What else do we do?”
“Other than sit tight and watch?” I asked. “This is a stakeout, Molly. It’s what you do on a stakeout.”
“Stakeouts suck,” Molly said, puffing out a breath that blew a few strands of hair out of her eyes. “How come Murphy isn’t doing this part? How come we aren’t doing magic stuff?”
“Murphy is keeping track of Rudolph at work,” I said. “I’m watching his home. If his handler wanted him dead, this would be a logical place to bushwhack him.”
“And we’re not doing magic because . . . ?”
“What do you suggest we do?”
“Tracking spells for Rudolph and Maggie,” she said promptly.
“You got any of Rudolph’s blood? Hair? Fingernail clippings?”
“No,” she said.
“So, no tracking spell for him,” I said.
“But what about Maggie?” she said. “I know you don’t have any hair or anything from her, but you pulled a tracking spell for me using my mother’s blood, right? Couldn’t you use your blood for that?”
I kept my breathing steady, and prevented the flash of frustration I felt from coming out in my voice. “First thing I tried. Right after I got off the phone with Susan when this all started.”
Molly frowned. “Why didn’t it work?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe it’s because there’s something more than simple blood relation involved. Maybe there has to be a bond, a sense of family between the parent and child, that the tracking spell uses to amplify its effects. Maybe the Red Court is using some kind of magic that conceals or jams tracking spells—God knows, they would have been forced to come up with some kind of countermeasure during the war.” I shook my head wearily. “Or maybe it was simple distance. I’ve never tracked anything more than a couple of hundred linear miles away. I’ve heard of tracking spells that worked over a couple of thousand miles, but not from anyone who had actually done it. Gimme some credit, grasshopper. Of course I tried that. I wouldn’t have spent half a day summoning my contacts if I hadn’t.”