by Jim Butcher
“Uh,” he said, “yeah. Still do.”
Justine stepped up on my other side. She looked more sweet than sexy, but only barely. “I’m sure it was just an oversight, sir. Couldn’t you ask your supervisor if we might come to the reception?”
He stared at us for a long moment, clearly hesitant. Then one hand slowly went to the radio at his side and he lifted it to his mouth. A moment later a slight, small man in a silk suit appeared from inside the building. He took a long look at us.
The interest I’d felt from the guard was fairly normal. It had just been a spark, the instinct-level response of any male to a desirable female.
What came off of the new guy was … It was more like a road flare. It burned a thousand times hotter and brighter, and it kept on burning. I’d sensed lust and desire in others before. This went so much deeper and wider than mere lust that I didn’t think there was a word for it. It was a vast and inhuman yearning, blended with a fierce and jealous love, and seasoned with sexual attraction and desire. It was like standing near a tiny sun, and I suddenly understood exactly what Auntie Lea had been trying to tell me.
Fire is hot. Water is wet. And svartalves are suckers for pretty girls. They could no more change their nature than they could the course of the stars.
“Ladies,” the new guy said, smiling at us. It was a charming smile, but there was something distant and disquieting in his face all the same. “Please, wait just a moment for me to alert my other staff. We would be honored if you would join us.”
He turned and went inside.
Justine gave me a sidelong look.
“The Rack can have a powerful influence over the weak-minded,” I said.
“I’d feel better if he hadn’t left on a Darth Vader line,” Andi breathed. “He smelled odd. Was he … ?”
“Yeah,” I whispered back. “One of them.”
The man in the silk suit reappeared, still smiling, and opened the door for us. “Ladies,” he said, “I am Mr. Etri. Please, come inside.”
I had never in my life seen a place more opulent than the inside of the svartalves’ stronghold. Not in magazines, not in the movies. Not even on Cribs.
There were tons of granite and marble. There were sections of wall that had been inlaid with precious and semiprecious stones. Lighting fixtures were crafted of what looked like solid gold, and the light switches looked like they’d been carved from fine ivory. Security guards were stationed every twenty or thirty feet, standing at rigid attention like those guys outside Buckingham Palace, only without the big hats. Light came from everywhere and from nowhere, making all shadows thin and wispy things without becoming too bright for the eyes. Music drifted on the air, some old classical thing that was all strings and no drumbeat.
Etri led us down a couple of hallways to a vast cathedral of a ballroom. It was absolutely palatial in there—in fact, I was pretty sure that the room shouldn’t have fit in the building we’d just entered—and it was filled with expensive-looking people in expensive-looking clothing.
We paused in the entry while Etri stopped to speak to yet another security guy. I took the moment it offered to sweep my gaze over the room. The place wasn’t close to full, but there were a lot of people there. I recognized a couple of celebrities, people you’d know if I told you their names. There were a number of the Sidhe in attendance, their usual awe-inspiring physical perfection muted to mere exotic beauty. I spotted Gentleman Johnnie Marcone, the head of Chicago’s outfit, in attendance, with his gorilla, Hendricks, and his personal attack witch, Gard, floating around near him. There were any number of people who I was sure weren’t people; I could sense the blurring of perception in the air around them as if they were cut off from me by a thin curtain of falling water.
But I didn’t see Thomas.
“Molly,” Justine whispered, barely audible. “Is he … ?”
The tracking spell I’d focused on my lips was still functioning, a faint tingle telling me that Thomas was nearby, deeper into the interior of the building. “He’s alive,” I said. “He’s here.”
Justine shuddered and took a deep breath. She blinked slowly once, her face showing nothing as she did. I felt the surge of simultaneous relief and terror in her presence, though, a sudden blast of emotion that cried out for her to scream or fight or burst into tears. She did none of that, and I turned my eyes away from her in order to give her the illusion that I hadn’t noticed her near meltdown.
In the center of the ballroom, there was a small, raised platform of stone with a few stairs leading up onto it. Upon the platform was a podium of the same material. Resting on the podium was a thick folio of papers and a neat row of fountain pens. There was something solemn and ceremonial about the way it was set up.
Justine was looking at it, too. “That must be it.”
“The treaty?”
She nodded. “The svartalves are very methodical about business. They’ll conclude the treaty precisely at midnight. They always do.”
Andi tapped a finger thoughtfully on her hip. “What if something happened to their treaty first? I mean, if someone spilled a bunch of wine on it or something. That would be attention getting, I bet—maybe give a couple of us a chance to sneak farther in.”
I shook my head. “No. We’re guests here. Do you understand?”
“Uh. Not really.”
“The svartalves are old-school,” I said. “Really old-school. If we break the peace when they’ve invited us into their territory, we’re violating our guest right and offering them disrespect as our hosts—right out in the open, in front of the entire supernatural community. They’ll react … badly.”
Andi frowned and said, “Then what’s our next move?”
Why do people keep asking me that? Is this what all wizard types go through? I’d probably asked Harry that question a hundred times, but I never realized how hard it was to hear it coming toward you. But Harry always knew what to do next. All I could do was improvise desperately and hope for the best.
“Justine,” I said, “do you know any of the players here?”
As Lara Raith’s personal assistant, Justine came in contact with a lot of people and not-quite-people. Lara had so many fingers in so many pies that I could barely make a joke about it, and Justine saw, heard, and thought a lot more than anyone gave her credit for. The white-haired girl scanned the room, her dark eyes flicking from face to face. “Several.”
“All right. I want you to circulate and see what you can find out,” I said. “Keep an eye out. If you see them sending the brute squad after us, get on the crystal and warn us.”
“Okay,” Justine whispered. “Careful.”
Etri returned and smiled again, though his eyes remained oddly, unsettlingly without expression. He flicked one hand, and a man in a tux floated over to us with a tray of drinks. We helped ourselves, and Etri did, too. He lifted his glass to us and said, “Ladies, be welcome. To beauty.”
We echoed him and we all sipped. I barely let my lips touch the liquid. It was champagne, really good stuff. It fizzed and I could barely taste the alcohol. I wasn’t worried about poison. Etri had quite diffidently allowed us to choose our glasses before taking one of his own.
I was actually more worried about the fact that I’d stopped to consider potential poisoning, and to watch Etri’s actions carefully as he served us. Is it paranoid to worry about things like that? It seemed reasonable to me at the time.
Man, maybe I’m more messed up than I thought I was.
“Please enjoy the reception,” Etri said. “I’m afraid I must insist on a dance with each of you lovely young ladies when time and duty allow. Who shall be first?”
Justine gave him a Rack-infused smile and lifted her hand. If you twisted my arm, I’d tell you that Justine was definitely the prettiest girl in our little trio, and Etri evidently agreed. His eyes turned warm for an instant before he took Justine’s hand and led her out onto the dance floor. They vanished into the moving crowd.
“I couldn’
t do this ballroom stuff, anyway,” Andi said. “Not nearly enough booty bouncing. Next-move time?”
“Next-move time,” I said. “Come on.”
I turned to follow the tingle in my lips and the two of us made our way to the back side of the ballroom, where doors led deeper into the facility. There were no guards on the doors, but as we got closer, Andi’s steps started to slow. She glanced over to one side, where there was a refreshments table, and I saw her begin to turn toward it.
I caught her arm and said, “Hold it. Where are you going?”
“Um,” she said, frowning. “Over there?”
I extended my senses and felt the subtle weaving of magic in the air around the doorway, cobweb fine. It was a kind of veil, designed to direct the attention of anyone approaching it away from the doorway and toward anything else in the room. It made the refreshment table look yummier. If Andi had spotted a guy, he would have looked a lot cuter than he actually was.
I’d been having a powerful faerie sorceress throwing veils and glamours at me for almost a year, building up my mental defenses, and a few months ago I’d gone twelve rounds in the psychic boxing ring with a heavyweight-champion necromancer. I hadn’t even noticed the gentle magical weaving hitting my mental shields.
“It’s an enchantment,” I told her. “Don’t let it sway you.”
“What?” she asked. “I don’t feel anything. I’m just hungry.”
“You wouldn’t feel it,” I said. “That’s how it works. Take my hand and close your eyes. Trust me.”
“If I had a nickel for every time a bad evening started with a line like that,” she muttered. But she put her hand in mine and closed her eyes.
I walked her toward the doorway and felt her growing tenser as we went, but then we passed through it and she let out her breath explosively, blinking her eyes open. “Wow. That felt … like nothing at all.”
“It’s how you recognize quality enchantment,” I said. “If you don’t know it’s got you, you can’t fight it off.” The hallway we stood in looked much like any in any office building. I tried the nearest door and found it locked. So were the next couple, but the last was an empty conference room, and I slipped inside.
I fumbled the crystal out of my little clutch and said, “Bosley, can you hear me?”
“Loud and clear, Angels,” came Waldo’s voice. Neither of us used real names. The crystals were probably secure, but a year with Lea’s nasty trickery as a daily feature of life had taught me not to make many assumptions.
“Were you able to come up with those floor plans?”
“About ninety seconds ago. The building’s owners filed everything with the city in triplicate, including electronic copies, which I am now looking at, courtesy of the hivemind.”
“Advantage, nerds,” I said. “Tell them they did good, Boz.”
“Will do,” Waldo said. “These people you’re visiting are thorough, Angels. Be careful.”
“When am I not careful?” I said.
Andi had taken up a guard position against the wall next to the door, where she could grab anyone who opened it. “Seriously?”
I couldn’t help but smile a little. “I think our lost lamb is in the wing of the building to the west of the reception hall. What’s there?”
“Um … offices, it looks like. Second floor, more offices. Third floor, more offi—Hello there.”
“What’d you find?”
“A vault,” Waldo said. “Reinforced steel. Huge.”
“Ha,” I said. “A reinforced-steel vault? Twenty bucks says it’s a dungeon. We start there.”
“Whatever it is, it’s in the basement. There should be a stairway leading down to it at the end of the hallway leading out of the reception hall.”
“Bingo,” I said. “Stay tuned, Bosley.”
“Will do. Your chariot awaits.”
I put the crystal away and began putting on my rings. I got them all together, then began to pick up my wands, and realized that I couldn’t carry them in each hand while also carrying the little clutch. “I knew I should have gone for a messenger bag,” I muttered.
“With that dress?” Andi asked. “Are you kidding?”
“True.” I took the crystal out and tucked it into my décolletage, palmed one of the little wands in each hand, and nodded to Andi. “If it’s a vault or a dungeon, there will be guards. I’m going to make it hard for them to see us, but we might have to move fast.”
Andi looked down at her shoes and sighed mournfully. Then she stepped out of them and peeled the little black dress off. She hadn’t been wearing anything underneath. She closed her eyes for a second and then her form just seemed to blur and melt. Werewolves don’t do dramatic, painful transformations except right at first, I’ve been told. This looked as natural as a living being turning in a circle and sitting down. One moment Andi was there, and the next there was a great, russet-furred wolf sitting where she’d been.
It was highly cool magic. I was going to have to figure out how that was done one of these days.
“Don’t draw blood unless it’s absolutely necessary,” I said, stepping out of my own torturous shoes. “I’m going to try to make this quick and painless. If there’s any rough stuff, not killing anyone will go a long way with the svartalves.”
Andi yawned at me.
“Ready?” I asked.
Andi bobbed her lupine head in a sharp, decisive nod. I drew the concealing magic of my top-of-the-line veil around us, and the light suddenly went dim, the colors leaching out of the world. We would be almost impossible to see. And anyone who came within fifty or sixty feet of us would develop a sudden desire for a bit of introspection, questioning their path in life so deeply that there was practically no chance we’d be detected as long as we were quiet.
With Andi walking right beside me, we stole out into the hallway. We found the stairwell Waldo had told us about, and I opened the door to it slowly. I didn’t go first. You can’t do much better than having a werewolf as your guide, and I’d worked with Andi and her friends often enough in the past year to make our movements routine.
Andi went through first, moving in total silence, her ears perked, her nose twitching. Wolves have incredible senses of smell. Hearing, too. If anyone was around, Andi would sense them. After a tense quarter of a minute, she gave me the signal that it was all clear by sitting down. I eased up next to her and extended my senses, feeling for any more magical defenses or enchantments. There were half a dozen on the first section of the stairwell—simple things, the sorcerous equivalent of trip wires.
Fortunately, Auntie Lea had shown me how to circumvent enchantments such as these. I made an effort of will and modified our veil, and then I nodded to Andi and we started slowly down the stairs. We slipped through the invisible fields of magic without disturbing them and crept down to the basement.
I checked the door at the bottom of the stairs and found it unlocked.
“This seems way too easy,” I muttered. “If it’s a prison, shouldn’t this be locked?”
Andi let out a low growl, and I could sense her agreement and suspicion.
My mouth still tingled, much more strongly now. Thomas was close. “Guess there’s not a lot of choice here.” I opened the door, slowly and quietly.
The door didn’t open onto some kind of dungeon. It didn’t open up to show us a vault, either. Instead, Andi and I found ourselves staring at a long hallway every bit as opulent as those above, with large and ornate doors spaced generously along it. Each door had a simple number on it, wrought in what looked like pure silver. Very subdued lighting was spaced strategically along its length, leaving it comfortably dim without being dark.
Andi’s low growl turned into a confused little sound and she tilted her head to one side.
“Yeah,” I said, perplexed. “It looks like … a hotel. There’s even a sign showing fire-escape routes on the wall.”
Andi gave her head a little shake, and I sensed enough of her emotions to understand her meani
ng. What the hell?
“I know,” I said. “Is this … living quarters for the svartalves? Guest accommodations?”
Andi glanced up at me and flicked her ears. Why are you asking me? I can’t even talk.
“I know you can’t. Just thinking out loud.”
Andi blinked, her ears snapping toward me, and she gave me a sidelong glance. You heard me?
“I didn’t so much hear you as just … understand you.”
She leaned very slightly away from me. Just when I thought you couldn’t get any more weird and disturbing.
I gave her a maliciously wide smile and the crazy eyes I used to use to scare my kid brothers and sisters.
Andi snorted and then began testing the air with her nose. I watched her closely. Her hackles rose and I saw her crouch down. There are things here. Too many scents to sort out. Something familiar, and not in a good way.
“Thomas is close. Come on.” We started forward, and I kept my face turned directly toward the tingling signature of my tracking spell. It began to bear to the right, and as we got to the door to room 6, the tingle suddenly swung to the very corner of my mouth, until I turned to face the doorway directly. “Here, in six.”
Andi looked up and down the hall, her eyes restless, her ears trying to swivel in every direction. I don’t like this.
“Too easy,” I whispered. “This is way too easy.” I reached out toward the doorknob and stopped. My head told me this situation was all wrong. So did my instincts. If Thomas was a prisoner being held by Svartalfheim, then where were the cages, the chains, the locks, the bars, the guards? And if he wasn’t being held against his will, what was he doing here?
When you find yourself in a situation that doesn’t make any sense, it’s usually for one reason: You have bad information. You can get bad information in several ways. Sometimes you’re just plain wrong about what you learn. More often, and more dangerously, your information is bad because you made a faulty assumption.
Worst of all is when someone deliberately feeds it to you—and, like a sucker, you trust her and take it without hesitation.