by Jim Butcher
“I don’t take it personally,” I assured her. “Don’t worry.”
“It was about me,” she said quietly. “Wasn’t it? It’s about something I don’t know.”
“Um,” I said.
It was just possible that maybe I’d made a bad call when I decided to meddle between River and his kid. It wasn’t my place to shake the pillars of Irwin’s life. Or Connie’s, for that matter. It was going to be hard enough on her to find out about her supernatural heritage. She didn’t need to have the news broken to her by a stranger, on top of that. You’d think that, after years as a professional, I’d know enough to just take River’s money, help out his kid, and call it a night.
“Maybe we should walk?” I suggested.
“Sure.”
We left and started walking the streets of downtown Norman. The place was alive and growing, like a lot of college towns: plenty of old buildings, some railroad tracks, lots of cracks in the asphalt and the sidewalks. The shops and restaurants had that improvised look that a business district gets when it outlives its original intended purpose and subsequent generations of enterprise take over the space.
We walked in silence for several moments, until Connie finally said, “He’s not an angry person. He’s usually so calm. But when something finally gets to him…”
“It’s hard for him,” I said. “He’s huge and he’s very strong and he knows it. If he loses control of himself, someone could get hurt. He doesn’t like the thought of that. So when he starts feeling angry, it makes him tense. Afraid. He’s more upset about the fact that he feels so angry than about anything I said or did.”
Connie looked up at me pensively for a long moment. Then she said, “Most people wouldn’t realize that.”
I shrugged.
“What don’t I know?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I’m not sure it’s my place to tell you.”
“But it’s about me.”
“Yeah.”
She smiled faintly. “Then shouldn’t I be the one who gets to decide?”
I thought about that one for a moment. “Connie … you’re mostly right. But … some things, once said, can’t be unsaid. Let me think about it.”
She didn’t answer.
The silence made me uncomfortable. I tried to chat my way clear of it. “How’d you meet Irwin?”
The question, or maybe the subject matter, seemed to relax her a little. “In a closet at a party. Someone spiked the punch. Neither of us had ever been drunk before, and…” Her cheeks turned a little pink. “And he’s just so damned sexy.”
“Lot of people wouldn’t think so,” I noted.
She waved a hand. “He’s not pretty. I know that. It’s not about that. There’s … this energy in him. It’s chemical. Assurance. Power. Not just muscles—it’s who he is.” Her cheeks turned a little pink. “It wasn’t exactly love at first sight, I guess. But once the hangover cleared up, that happened, too.”
“So you love him?” I asked.
Her smile widened, and her eyes shone the way a young woman’s eyes ought to shine. She spoke with calm, simple certainty. “He’s the one.”
About twenty things to say leapt to my mind. I was going to say something about how she was too young to make that kind of decision. I thought about how she hadn’t been out on her own for very long, and how she had no idea where her relationship with Irwin was going to lead. I was going to tell her that only time could tell her if she and Irwin were good for one another and ready to be together, to make that kind of decision. I could have said something about how she needed to stop and think, not make blanket statements about her emotions and the future.
That was when I realized that everything I would have said was something I would have said to a young woman in love—not to a vampire. Not only that, but I heard something in her voice or saw something in her face that told me that my aged wisdom was, at least in this case, dead wrong. My instincts were telling me something that my rational brain had missed.
The kids had something real. I mean, maybe it hadn’t gotten off on the most pure and virtuous foot, but that wasn’t anything lethal in a relationship. The way they related to one another now? There was a connection there. You could imagine saying their names as a unit, and it fit: ConnieandIrwin. Maybe they had some growing to do, but what they had was real.
Not that it mattered. Being in love didn’t change the facts. First, that Connie was a vampire. Second, that vampires had to feed. Third, they fed upon their lovers.
* * *
“Hold on,” Dean said. “You missed something.”
“Eh?”
“Girl’s a vampire, right?”
“Yeah.
“So,” Dean said. “She met the kid in a closet at a party. They already got it on. She done had her first time.”
I frowned. “Yeah.”
“So how come Kid Bigfoot wasn’t dead?”
I nodded. “Exactly. It bothered me, too.”
* * *
The girl was in love with Irwin, and it meant she was dangerous to him. Hell, she was dangerous to almost everyone. She wasn’t even entirely human. How could I possibly spring something that big on her?
At the same time, how could I not?
“I should have taken the gold,” I muttered to myself.
“What?” she asked.
That was when the Town Car pulled up to the curb a few feet ahead of us. Two men got out of the front seat. They wore expensive suits and had thick necks. One of them hadn’t had his suit fitted properly—I could see the slight bulge of a sidearm in a shoulder holster. That one stood on the sidewalk and stared at me, his hands clasped in front of him. The driver went around to the rear passenger door and opened it.
“Oh,” Connie said. “Marvelous. This is all I need.”
“Who is that?” I asked.
“My father.”
The man who got out of the back of the limo wore a pearl gray suit that made his thugs’ outfits look like secondhand clothing. He was slim, a bit over six feet tall, and his haircut probably cost him more than I made in a week. His hair was dark, with a single swath of silver at each temple, and his skin was weathered and deeply tanned. He wore rings on most of his manicured fingers, all of them sporting large stones.
“Hi, Daddy,” Connie said, smiling. She sounded pleasant enough, but she’d turned herself very slightly away from the man as she spoke. A rule of thumb for reading body language is that almost no one can totally hide physical reflections of their state of mind. They can only minimize the signs of it in their posture and movements. If you mentally exaggerate and magnify their body language, it tells you something about what they’re thinking.
Connie clearly didn’t want to talk to this man. She was ready to flee from her own father should it become necessary. It told me something about the guy. I was almost sure I wasn’t going to like him.
He approached the girl, smiling, and after a microhesitation, they exchanged a brief hug. It didn’t look like something they’d practiced much.
“Connie,” the man said, smiling. He had the same mild drawl his daughter did. He tilted his head to one side and regarded her thoughtfully. “You went blond. It’s … charming.”
“Thank you, Daddy,” Connie said. She was smiling, too. Neither one of them looked sincere to me. “I didn’t know you were in town. If you’d called, we could have made an evening of it.”
“Spur-of-the-moment thing,” he said easily. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“No, of course not.”
Both of them were lying. Parental issues indeed.
“How’s that boy you’d taken up with? Irving.”
“Irwin,” Connie said in a poisonously pleasant tone. “He’s great. Maybe even better than that.”
He frowned at that, and said, “I see. But he’s not here?”
“He had homework tonight,” Connie lied.
That drew a small, sly smile out of the man. “I see. Who’s your friend?” he asked pl
easantly, without actually looking at me.
“Oh,” Connie said. “Harry, this is my father, Charles Barrowill. Daddy, this is Harry Dresden.”
“Hi,” I said brightly.
Barrowill’s eyes narrowed to sudden slits, and he took a short, hard breath as he looked at me. He then flicked his eyes left and right around him, as if looking for a good place to dive or maybe a hostage to seize.
“What a pleasure, Mr. Dresden,” he said, his voice suddenly tight. “What brings you out to Oklahoma?”
“I heard it was a nice place for perambulating,” I said. Behind Barrowill, his guards had picked up on the tension. Both of them had become very still. Barrowill was quiet for a moment, as if trying to parse some kind of meaning from my words. Heavy seconds ticked by, like the quiet before a shootout in an old Western.
A tumbleweed went rolling by in the street. I’m not even kidding. An actual, literal tumbleweed. Man, Oklahoma.
Then Barrowill took a slow breath and said to Connie, “Darling, I’d like to speak to you for a few moments, if you have time.”
“Actually…” Connie began.
“Now, please,” Barrowill said. There was something ugly under the surface of his pleasant tone. “The car. I’ll give you a ride back to the dorms.”
Connie folded her arms and scowled. “I’m entertaining someone from out of town, Daddy. I can’t just leave him here.”
One of the guard’s hands twitched.
“Don’t be difficult, Connie,” Barrowill said. “I don’t want to make a scene.”
His eyes never left me as he spoke, and I got his message loud and clear. He was taking the girl with him, and he was willing to make things get messy if I tried to stop him.
“It’s okay, Connie,” I said. “I’ve been to Norman before. I can find my way to a hotel easily enough.”
“You’re sure?” Connie asked.
“Definitely.”
“Herman,” Barrowill said.
The driver opened the passenger door again and stood next to it attentively. He kept his eyes on me, and one hand dangled, clearly ready to go for his gun.
Connie looked back and forth between me and her father for a moment, then sighed audibly and walked over to the car. She slid in, and Herman closed the door behind her.
“I recognize you,” I said pleasantly to Barrowill. “You were at the Raith Deeps when Skavis and Malvora tried to pull off their coup. Front row, all the way on one end in the Raith cheering section.”
“You have an excellent memory,” Barrowill said.
“Got out in one piece, did you?”
The vampire smiled without humor. “What are you doing with my daughter?”
“Taking a walk,” I said. “Talking.”
“You have nothing to say to her. In the interests of peace between the Court and the Council, I’m willing to ignore this intrusion into my territory. Go in peace. Right now.”
“You never told her, did you?” I asked. “Never told her what she was.”
One of his jaw muscles twitched. “It is not our way.”
“Nah,” I said. “You wait until the first time they get twitterpated, experiment with sex, and kill whoever it is they’re with. Little harsh on the kids, isn’t it?”
“Connie is not some mortal cow. She is a vampire. The initiation builds character she will need to survive and prosper.”
“If it was good enough for you, it’s good enough for her?”
“Mortal,” Barrowill said, “you simply cannot understand. I am her father. It is my obligation to prepare her for her life. The initiation is something she needs.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Holy … that’s what happened, isn’t it? You sent her off to school to boink some poor kid to death. Hell, I’d bet you had the punch spiked at that party. Except the kid didn’t die—so now you’re in town to figure out what the hell went wrong.”
Barrowill’s eyes darkened, and he shook his head. “This is no business of yours. Leave.”
“See, that’s the thing,” I said. “It is my business. My client is worried about his kid.”
Barrowill narrowed his eyes again. “Irving.”
“Irwin,” I corrected him.
“Go back to Chicago, wizard,” he said. “You’re in my territory now.”
“This isn’t a smart move for you,” I said. “The kid’s connected. If anything bad happens to him, you’re in for trouble.”
“Is that a threat?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Chuck, I’ve got no objection to working things out peaceably. And I’ve got no objection to doing it the other way. If you know my reputation, then you know what a sincere guy I am.”
“Perhaps I should kill you now.”
“Here, in public?” I asked. “All these witnesses? You aren’t going to do that.”
“No?”
“No. Even if you win, you lose. You’re just hoping to scare me off.” I nodded toward his goons. “Ghouls, right? It’s going to take more than two, Chuck. Hell, I like fighting ghouls. No matter what I do to them, I never feel bad about it afterward.”
Barrowill missed the reference, like the monsters usually do. He looked at me, then at his Rolex. “I’ll give you until midnight to leave the state. After that, you’re gone. One way or another.”
“Hang on,” I said, “I’m terrified. Let me catch my breath.”
Barrowill’s eyes shifted color slightly, from a deep green to a much paler, angrier shade of green-gold. “I react poorly to those who threaten my family’s well-being, Dresden.”
“Yeah. You’re a regular Ozzie Nelson. John Walton. Ben Cartwright.”
“Excuse me?”
“Mr. Drummond? Charles … in Charge? No?”
“What are you blabbering about?”
“Hell’s bells, man. Don’t any of you White Court bozos ever watch television? I’m giving you pop reference gold, here. Gold.”
Barrowill stared at me with opaque, reptilian eyes. Then he said, simply, “Midnight.” He took two steps back before he turned his back on me and got into his car. His goons both gave me hard looks before they, too, got into the car and pulled away.
I watched the car roll out. Despite the attitude I’d given Barrowill, I knew better than to take him lightly. Any vampire is a dangerous foe—and one of them with holdings and resources and his own personal brute squad was more so. Not only that but … from his point of view, I was messing around with his little girl’s best interests. The vampires of the White Court were, to a degree, as dangerous as they were because they were partly human. They had human emotions, human motivations, human reactions. Barrowill could be as irrationally protective of his family as anyone else.
Except that they were also inhuman. All of those human drives were intertwined with a parasitic spirit they called a Hunger, where all the power and hunger of their vampire parts came from.
Take one part human faults and insecurities and add it to one part inhuman power and motivation. What do you get?
Trouble.
* * *
“Barrowill?” Officer Dean asked me. “The oil guy? He keeps a stable. Of congressmen.”
“Yeah, probably the same guy,” I said. “All vampires like having money and status. It makes their lives easier.”
Dean snorted. “Every vampire. And every nonvampire.”
“Heh,” I said. “Point.”
“You were in a fix,” he said. “Tell the girl, you might wreck her. Don’t tell her, and you might wreck her and Kid Bigfoot both. Either way, somebody’s dad has a bone to pick with you.”
“Pretty much.”
“Seems to me a smart guy would have washed his hands of the whole mess and left town.”
I shrugged. “Yeah. But I was the only guy there.”
* * *
Forest isn’t exactly the dominant terrain in Norman, but there are a few trees, here and there. The point where I’d agreed to meet with River Shoulders was in the center of the Oliver Wildlife Preserve, whi
ch was a stand of woods that had been donated to the university for research purposes. As I hiked out into the little wood, it occurred to me that meeting River Shoulders there was like rendezvousing with Jaws in a kiddy wading pool—but he’d picked the spot, so whatever floated the big guy’s boat.
It was dark out, and I drew my silver pentacle amulet off my neck to use for light. A whisper of will and a muttered word, and the little symbol glowed with a dim blue light that would let me walk without bumping into a tree. It took me maybe five minutes to get to approximately the right area, and River Shoulders’s soft murmur of greeting came to me out of the dark.
We sat down together on a fallen tree, and I told him what I’d learned.
He sat in silence for maybe two minutes after I finished. Then he said, “My son has joined himself to a parasite.”
I felt a flash of mild outrage. “You could think of it that way,” I said.
“What other way is there?”
“That he’s joined himself to a girl. The parasite just came along for the ride.”
River Shoulders exhaled a huge breath. It sounded like those pneumatic machines they use to elevate cars at the repair shop. “I see. In your view, the girl is not dangerous. She is innocent.”
“She’s both,” I said. “She can’t help being born what she is, any more than you or I.”
River Shoulders grunted.
“Have your people encountered the White Court before?”
He grunted again.
“Because the last time I helped Irwin out … I remember being struck by the power of his aura when he was only fourteen. A long-term draining spell that should have killed him only left him sleepy.” I eyed him. “But I don’t feel anything around you. Stands to reason, your aura would be an order of magnitude greater than your kid’s. That’s why you’ve been careful never to touch me. You’re keeping your power hidden from me, aren’t you?”
“Maybe.”
I snorted. “Just the kind of answer I’d expect from a wizard.”
“It is not something we care for outsiders to know,” he said. “And we are not wizards. We see things differently than mortals. You people are dangerous.”
“Heh,” I said, and glanced up at his massive form beside mine. “Between the two of us, I’m the dangerous one.”