Brief Cases

by Jim Butcher

  “Indeed. Just as Lara did her brother—except that my agent succeeded where hers failed.”

  “But why? Why send us in there?”

  “The treaty with the Fomor could not be allowed to conclude,” she said. “If one nation agreed to neutrality with them, a dozen more would follow. The Fomor would be able to divide the others and contend with them one by one. The situation was delicate. The presence of active agents was intended to disrupt its equilibrium—to show the Fomor’s true nature in a test of fire.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me that?” I asked.

  “Because you would neither have trusted nor believed me, obviously,” she said.

  I frowned at her. “You should have told me anyway.”

  “Do not be ridiculous, child.” Lea sniffed. “There was no time to humor your doubts and suspicions and theories and endless questions. Better to give you a simple prize upon which to focus: Thomas.”

  “How did you know I would find the bomb?”

  She arched an eyebrow. “Bomb?” She shook her head. “I did not know what was happening in any specific sense. But the Fomor are betrayers. Ever have they been; ever will they be. The only question is what form their treachery will take. The svartalves had to be shown.”

  “How did you know I would discover it?”

  “I did not,” she said. “But I know your mentor. When it comes to meddling, to unearthing awkward truths, he has taught you exceedingly well.” She smiled. “You have also learned his aptitude for taking orderly situations and reducing them to elemental chaos.”

  “Meaning what?” I demanded.

  Her smile was maddeningly smug. “Meaning that I was confident that whatever happened, it would not include the smooth completion of the treaty.”

  “But you could have done everything I did.”

  “No, child,” Lea said. “The svartalves would never have asked me to be their guest at the reception. They love neatness and order. They would have known my purposes were not orderly ones.”

  “And they didn’t know that about me?”

  “They cannot judge others except by their actions,” Lea said. “Hence their treaty with the Fomor, who had not yet crossed their paths. My actions have shown me to be someone who must be treated with caution. You had … a clean record with them. And you are smoking hot. All is well, your city saved, and now a group of wealthy, skilled, and influential beings owes you a favor.” She paused for a moment and then leaned toward me slightly. “Perhaps some expression of gratitude is in order.”

  “From me to you?” I asked. “For that?”

  “I think your evening turned out quite well,” Lea said, her eyebrows raised. “Goodness, but you are a difficult child. How he manages to endure your insolence I will never know. You probably think you have earned some sort of reward from me.” She rose and turned to go.

  “Wait!” I said suddenly.

  She paused.

  I think my heart had stopped beating. I started shaking, everywhere. “You said that you know Harry. Not knew him. Know. Present tense.”

  “Did I?”

  “You said you don’t know how he manages to put up with me. Manages. Present tense.”

  “Did I?”

  “Auntie,” I asked her, and I could barely whisper. “Auntie, is Harry … Is he alive?”

  Lea turned to me very slowly, and her green eyes glinted with wicked knowledge. “I did not say that he was alive, child. And neither should you. Not yet.”

  I bowed my head and started crying. Or laughing. Or both. I couldn’t tell. Lea didn’t wait around for it. Emotional displays made her uncomfortable.

  Harry. Alive.

  I hadn’t killed him.

  Best reward ever.

  “Thank you, Auntie,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

  I really enjoyed writing, in the previous tale, from Molly’s viewpoint at one of the lowest points of her life. I wanted to keep following her personal story after the events of Ghost Story, where she faces an uncertain future but is beginning to rebuild who she is and what she wants out of her life. Molly has always had issues with her mother—and now, as the new Winter Lady of the Unseelie Court, she has found herself faced with one of the more terrifying mother figures imaginable in Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness. I wanted to get a look at that interplay, but I had to write the story to do it.

  I also wanted to get a little bit more into the actual role of the Winter Lady in the circles of power that are the Faerie Courts, and why her role is so important, and why it was so distressing that Maeve had been shirking her duties for such a long time.

  And finally, I wanted to show more of Molly, who has been through so much and learned such bitter lessons—and to demonstrate why it might just be possible that Mab may have bitten off more than she could chew in the inestimable Miss Carpenter.

  “You understand what you must do,” said Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness.

  It wasn’t phrased as a question.

  I gripped the handrail on the side of the yacht and held on as it whumped and thumped through choppy water on the way toward a bleak shore. “I get it,” I told her. “Collect the tribute from the Miksani.”

  Mab stared at me for a long moment, and that made me uncomfortable. It takes a lot to make that happen. I mean, you should see the stares my mother can give—Charity Carpenter is terrifying. And I got to where I could shake those off like nothing.

  “Lady Molly,” Mab said. “Regard me.”

  Not Look at me. Oh no. Not nearly dramatic enough.

  I looked up at her.

  We weren’t around any mortals at the moment, but we were technically moving through the mortal world, among the Aleutians, and Mab was dressed in mortal clothing. The Queen of the Winter Court of the Fae wore white furs and a big, poufy white hat like you might see on a Northern European socialite in an old Bond movie. No mortal alive would have been wearing white heels on the frozen, dripping, bucking deck of the yacht in those seas, in the beginnings of a howling winter storm, but she was Mab. She would take the path of least resistance when practical, but her willingness to tolerate the possible alarm and outrage of the human race extended only so far. She would wear what she felt like wearing. And at the moment, it would seem that she mostly felt like wearing an expression of stern disapproval.

  My own clothing, I knew, disappointed her gravely, but I was used to doing that to mother figures. I was dressed in flannel-lined winter jeans and large, warm boots, with several layers of sweaters, a heavy bomber jacket, and an old hunter’s cap with ear flaps that folded down. Practical, sturdy, and serviceable.

  I didn’t need them any more than Mab needed the furs, but it seemed like it would be simpler to blend in—to a point, anyway.

  “Appearances matter, young lady,” Mab said, her voice hard-edged. “First impressions matter.”

  “You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” I said, rolling my eyes.

  I might have sounded a bit like this guy I know. Maybe a little. Mab stared at me for a long second before she gave me a wintry smile. “Wisdom wrapped in witless defiance.”

  “Witless,” I sputtered.

  “I am offering you advice,” Queen Mab said. “You have been a Queen of Faerie for less than a week. You would be wise to listen.”

  The yacht began to slow and then slewed to one side, throwing a wave of icy spray toward the rocky shore. It handled too well to be a mortal craft, but out here, where few eyes could see, the Sidhe who piloted her were only so willing to be inconvenienced by seas that would have daunted experienced mortal captains and advanced mortal vessels.

  Not mortal, I told myself sternly, in my inner, reasonable voice. Human. Human. Just like me.

  “Thanks for that,” I said to Mab. “Look, I get it. My predecessor hasn’t performed her duties properly for, like, two hundred years. I’ve got a huge backlog. I’ve got a lot of work facing me. I understand already.”

  Mab gave me another long stare before say
ing, “You do not understand.” Then she turned and walked back toward her cabin, the one that was bigger on the inside than it was on the outside. “But you will.”

  I frowned after her for a second, then glanced at the thrashing twenty yards of sea between myself and the land and asked, “How am I supposed to go ashore?”

  Mab moved her eyes in what might have been an impatient glance, if she’d actually moved them all the way to me, and went into her cabin and shut the door behind her without a word.

  I was left standing on the pitching deck. I glanced up at the Sidhe piloting the yacht. They were both male, both tall, both dark of hair and eye. Which was not my type. Even a little, dammit. One noticed me and met my gaze boldly, his mouth curling up into a little smirk, and my heart went pitty-pat. Or something did. I mean, he was a damned attractive man.

  Except he’s not a man. He’s one of the Sidhe. He’s picked a look he knows you like for his glamour, and he’d cheerfully do things with you no human could possibly be flexible enough to manage, but he wouldn’t care.

  My reasonable voice sounded a lot like my mom’s, which was more than a bit spooky.

  Besides, I didn’t need him to care. I just needed him to look pretty while I tore his clothes off and …

  I shook my head and looked away, out at the ocean. Being the Winter Lady brought a host of challenges with it. One of the most annoying was what had happened to my libido, which had never exactly lacked for health. These days, I was like an adolescent boy bunny rabbit. Everything had sex in it, no matter how much it didn’t or how hard I tried not to notice it. It was annoying, because I had a job to do.

  The two extremely sexy Sidhe stared at me, being all smoldery and distracting, but not doing a damned thing to help me get ashore or prove myself on my first mission for the Queen of Air and Darkness. And since the last Winter Lady who had failed Mab wound up with a bullet in her skull, I figured I’d better not screw it up.

  Which is what she’d meant about first impressions. It had been a polite threat, and, as I realized that, my legs felt a little wobbly.

  Fine, then.

  I called upon Winter. Big-time. I let the endlessly empty cold fill me, subsume me, and winds rose around me as the power of Winter flowed in. I let it freeze everything—my concerns of what would happen if I failed Mab, my curiosity about what was coming next, the lust inspired by the pilots (whom I suddenly realized had probably been placed where they had precisely to test my focus and resolve).

  And then I let it out.

  All my life, magically speaking, I had been used to being a spinner of cobwebs of illusion and mental magic. I’d always had enormous finesse, and always lacked the kind of power I had seen my mentor wield. I’d forced myself to adjust to the idea that I would always have to be subtle, indirect, manipulative—that only indirect power was mine to command.

  That was no longer true.

  There was a thunder crack that thrummed from the surface of the sea as Winter’s ice froze the ocean ten feet down for half a mile in every direction. The yacht suddenly locked into place, no longer pitching and rolling.

  I’d have to do the math to be sure, but I thought that little trick had taken as much energy to accomplish as fairly large military-grade munitions. The two pilots just stared at me, suddenly uncertain about what they were attempting to play with.

  That’s right, pretty boys. Mess with me, I’ll hit you so hard, your children will be born bruised.

  I gave them a sunny little smile, vaulted the side rail, and walked to shore through howling winds before the ice started breaking up again.

  THEY ACTUALLY NAMED the town Unalaska, Alaska. Despite the appeal of an innately oxymoronic name, Unalaska struck me as something closer to a colony on an alien world than as a mortal village. It’s a collection of homes and businesses around Dutch Harbor, famous for being the central port for the fishing boats on that show about how dangerous it is to catch crabs.

  (Actual crabs. Literal ones, like, in the water. Sheesh, this Winter mantle thing is so childish sometimes, because it’s definitely not me.)

  The buildings are all squat, sturdy, and on the small side—the better to resist massive winds and snows and rains and frozen ocean spray that turns to coatings of ice when whipped up by a storm. The town was surrounded by looming, steep, formidable mountains devoid of human markings, and clung to the limited flat spaces at their feet like some kind of lichen stubbornly hanging on in the shade of a large stone. The icy sea filled whatever vision was not occupied by the sky or the mountains, cold and uncaring and implacable. The sky overhead was a neutral grey, promising neither sunlight nor storms yet ready to deliver both with an impartial hand and little warning.

  It wasn’t a place that was inviting, kind, or merciful to mere humanity, and yet there they were.

  We were. There we were.

  I trudged through freezing winds and half an inch of sleet that had hardened into something between ice and snow and didn’t shiver.

  Harry Dresden once warned me about lying to myself.

  I tried not to think about that too hard as I walked through the endless twilight of an Aleutian autumn and into town. I threw a glamour, nothing fancy, over myself as I went. I muddled my features from stark-boned beauty down to something much plainer. I darkened my hair, my skin, both of which were paler than usual these days. I added on a few pounds, because I’d never really recovered the weight I’d lost when I was playing grim-dark superhero on the streets of Chicago, when Harry had been mostly dead. Everything about the look said unremarkable, and I added on the barest hint of an aura that I was an awfully boring person. It would be easier to move around that way.

  Then I opened my senses to try to track down the elusive Fae who lived among the human population in Unalaska.

  THE WIND WAS kicking up, with more rain and sleet on the way, and apparently the inhabitants of Unalaska knew it. No one was on the streets, and a few cars moved about furtively, like mice getting out of the way of a predator. I sensed a trickle of quivery energy coming from one low building, a place called the Elbow Room, and I went on in.

  I was immediately subsumed in the energy of a crowded, raucous little dive. Music and the scent of beer, seared meat, and smoke flooded into my face, but worse were the sudden emotions that filled my head. There was drunken elation and drunken dread and drunken sullen anger and drunken lust; mainly, though, there were sober versions of all of those emotions as well. Threads of frustration and tension wove through the other emotions—servers, I imagined, overworked and cautious. Wariness rode steadily through the room from one corner, doubtless the bouncer, and cheerful greed hummed tunelessly under the rest, doubtless from the dive’s owner.

  I’m a wizard and I specialize in delicate magicks. I’m awfully sensitive to people’s emotions, and running into this batch was like walking into a wall of none-too-clean water. It took me a moment to get my balance back, adjust, and walk inside.

  “Close the door!” someone shouted. I took note of a young man, his face reddened and chapped by frigid wind. “Christ, I been cold enough to freeze my balls off for days!”

  “That explains a whole hell of a lot, Clint!” shouted another man from the far side of the bar, to a round of general, rough laughter.

  I closed the door behind me and tried to ignore the sullen, swelling anger radiating off Clint. There was something very off about his vibe. When it comes to emotions, people and monsters have a lot in common. It takes a very, very alien mind to feel emotions that are significantly different from those you’d find in human beings—and there’s a vast range of them, too. Throw in mind-altering substances, like hormones and drugs, and it’s absolutely unreal the variety available.

  But I recognized an angry sexual predator when I sensed one.

  I faked a few shivers against the cold as I wedged myself in at the bar and nodded to the bartender, a woman who looked as if she might wrestle Kodiaks for fun on her days off, if she ever took a day off. I put down some cash,
secured a beer, and felt an ugly presence crawling up my spine.

  I took a sip of the beer, some kind of Russian monstrosity that tasted as if it had been brewed from Stalin’s sweat and escaped a Soviet gulag, and turned casually to find Clint standing behind me, about three inches too close, and breathing a little too hard.

  “I don’t know you,” he said.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “What?”

  “That’s got to be the best opening line in history,” I said, and swigged some more beer. Hairs probably didn’t start popping out on my chest, making little bing noises as they did, but I can’t swear to it. “Did you want something?”

  “I don’t know you,” he repeated. His breath was coming faster, and there was a kind of glossy film on his eyes I didn’t like much. “Everyone knows everyone here. You’re new.”

  “But not interested,” I said, and turned away.

  He clamped a hand down on my shoulder, painfully hard, and spun me back around. “I’m talking to you.”

  Once upon a time, that sudden physicality would have made my adrenaline spike and my heart pound with apprehension. Now my whole head suddenly went icy-hot with anger instead. I felt my lips pull back from my teeth. “Oh, pumpkin,” I said. “You should walk away. You aren’t going to like how this one plays out.”

  “You need to come with me,” Clint said. He started to pull at me. He was strong. Wobbly on his feet, but strong.

  “Take your hand off me before I lose my temper,” I said, my voice very sharp, and pitched to carry to everyone in the room, even over the noise and music.

  And I got almost no reaction from the room at all.

  Now, that was interesting enough to notice. Places like this were full of your usual blue-collar crowd. You wouldn’t find many philosophers or intellectuals here, but there would be plenty of basically decent people who wouldn’t think twice about taking a swing at an aggressor.

  Except no one was even looking at me. Not one eye in the entire room. Everyone was staring at a tiny TV screen on a wall, playing a sports broadcast so grainy and blurred that I couldn’t even tell which game it was. Or they were focused on their drinks. Or at random spots on the wall. And the whole place filled with the sudden, sour psychic stench of fear. I turned my eyes to the two men at the bar next to me, and they only traded a look with the bartender, one that practically screamed out the words, Oh no, not this again.