by Jim Butcher
“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 suffered 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
P eople 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.
We’re ostriches and the whole world is sand.
Newbies who are just learning about the world of wizards and the unpleasant side of the supernatural always think there’s this huge conspiracy to hide it from everyone. There isn’t. There’s no need for one, beyond preventing actual parades down Main Street. Hell’s bells, from where I’m standing, it’s a miracle anyone ever notices.
Which is why I was fairly sure that our parley with the Archive and the Denarians in the Shedd Aquarium was going to go unremarked. Oh, sure, it was right in the middle of town, within a stone’s throw of the Field Museum and within sight of Soldier Field, but given the weather there wasn’t going to be a lot of foot traffic-and the Aquarium was in its off-season. There might be a handful of people there caring for the animals, but I felt confident that Kincaid would find a way to convince them to be somewhere else.
Murphy had rented a car, since hers was so busted-up. The past few days of snow had seen a load of accidents, and there weren’t any compact cars left, so she’d wound up with a silver Caddy the size of a yacht, and I’d called shotgun. Hendricks and Gard rode in the backseat. Gard had gotten to the car under her own power, though she had been moving carefully. Luccio sat beside Gard with her slender staff and her silver rapier resting on the floorboards between her feet, though my own staff was a lot longer and had to slant back between the front seats and past Gard’s head, up into the rear window well.
City work crews were still laboring to clear roads and access to critical facilities. An off-season tourist attraction was not high on anyone’s priority list. For that matter, the Field Museum had been closed due to the weather, which meant that there really weren’t any functioning public buildings for several hundred yards in any direction.
That could be a problem. Michael’s white truck wasn’t going to be able to get anywhere close without being spotted, which meant that he and Sanya were going to be two, maybe three minutes away from helping, provided they could be signaled at all. That was practically the other side of the world, where a violent confrontation is concerned. On the other hand, it also meant that the bad guys weren’t going to be able to bring in any help without being spotted, either.
Provided they were driving cars, of course.
Glass half-full, Harry, glass half-full. There was no profit to be had in a fight-not yet, anyway. Whatever Nicodemus was after, he’d have to make his demands before he had a chance to double-cross us out of whatever he wanted us to bring him. Besides, given what I’d seen of the Archive in action, he’d be freaking insane to try anything where she was officiating. She didn’t brook slights to her authority lightly.
The nearest street had been cleared by city trucks, but none of the parking lots had been done, and the excess snow from the streets formed small mountains on either side of the road.
“Looks like we’re going to have to walk in,” Murphy said quietly.
“Keep circling. They keep the animals here year-round,” I said quietly. “And they’ve got to be fed every day. The staff will have broken a trail in somewhere.”
“Perhaps they let the exhibits go hungry during the storm,” Gard suggested. “Few would venture into this for the sake of their paychecks.”
“You don’t do oceanography for the money,” I said. “And you sure as hel
l don’t take up working with dolphins and whales for the vast paycheck and the company car.” I shook my head. “They love them. Someone’s gone in every day. They’ll at least have broken a foot trail.”
“There,” Murphy said, pointing. Sure enough, someone had hacked a narrow opening into the mounded snow at the side of the road and dug out a footpath on the other side. Murph had to park at the side of the road, with the doors of the rental car just an inch from the snow walls. If someone came along going too fast, given the condition the streets were in, the Caddy was going to get smashed, but it wasn’t like she had a lot of choice.
We all piled out of the driver’s side of the car into the wan light of early afternoon. Luccio and I both paused to put on our grey Warden’s cloaks. Cloaks look cool and everything, but they don’t go well with cars. Luccio buckled on a finely tooled leather belt that held a sword on her left hip and a Colt on her right.
My.44 was back in my duster pocket, and the weight of both the coat and the gun felt greatly comforting. The wind caught my coat and the cloak both, and almost knocked me over until I got them gathered in close to my body again and under control. Hendricks, stolid and huge in his dark, sensible London Fog winter coat, went by me with a small smile on his face.
Hendricks took point, and the rest of us followed him through what could only generously be called a trail. Instead of the snow being up to our chests, on the trail we sank only to our knees. It was a long, cold slog up to the Aquarium, and then around the entire building, where the snow had piled up to truly impressive depths in the lee of the wind on the south side of the structure. Wind hustling in over the frozen lake felt like it had come straight from outer space, and everyone but Gard hunched up miserably against it. The trail led us to an employee’s door in the side of the building, which proved to have had the lock housing on its frame covered in duct tape, leaving it open.
Hendricks opened the door, and I stuck my head in and took a quick look around. The building was dark beneath its smothering blanket of snow, except for a few dim night-lights set low on the walls. I didn’t see anyone, but I took an extra moment or two to extend my senses into the building, searching for any lurking presences or hostile magicks.