by Jim Butcher
"Guests get invited," I said. "You're more like a vacuum cleaner salesman who managed to talk his way inside for a demonstration and just won't leave."
"Touche, my host," she admitted. "Though I would like to think I have been both more helpful and infinitely more courteous than such an individual."
"Granted," I said. "It doesn't change anything about being unwelcome."
"Then rid yourself of me. Take up the coin, and I will rejoin the rest of myself, whole again. You will be well rid of me."
I snorted. "Yeah. Up until Big Sister gets into my head, turns me into her psychotic boy toy, and I wind up a monster like the rest of the Denarians."
Lasciel, the fallen angel whose full being was currently bound in an old Roman denarius in my basement, held up a mollifying hand, "Have I not given you sufficient space? Have I not done as you asked, remained silent and still? When is the last time I have intruded, the last time we spoke, my host?"
I hit a bad chord, grimaced, and muted it out. Then I started over. "New Mexico. And that wasn't by choice."
"Of course it was," she said. "It is always your choice."
I shook my head. "I don't speak ghoul. As far as I know, no one does."
"None of you have ever lived in ancient Sumeria," Lasciel said.
I ignored her. "I had to have answers from the ghoul to get those kids back. There was no time for anything else. You were a last resort."
"And tonight?" she asked. "Am I a last resort tonight?"
The next couple of chords came out hard and loud. "It's Thomas."
She folded her hands in her lap and regarded one of the nearby candles. "Ah, yes," she said, more quietly. "You care for him a great deal."
"He's my blood," I said.
"Allow me to rephrase the observation. You care for him to an irrational degree." She tilted her head and studied me. "Why?"
I spoke in a slower voice. "He's my blood."
"I understand your words, but they don't mean anything."
"They wouldn't," I said. "Not to you."
She frowned at that and looked at me, her expression mildly disturbed. "I see."
"No," I said. "You don't. You can't."
Her expression became remote and blank, her gaze returning to the candle. "Do not be too sure, my host. I, too, had brothers and sisters. Once upon a time."
I stared at her for a second. God, she sounded sincere. She isn't, Harry, I told myself. She's a liar. She's running a con on you to convince you to like her, or at least trust her. From there, it would be a short commute to the recruiter's office of the Legion of Doom.
I reminded myself very firmly that what the fallen angel offered me—knowledge, power, companionship—would come at too high a price. It was foolish of me to keep falling back on her help, even though what she had done for me had undoubtedly saved both my life and that of many others. I reminded myself that too much dependence upon her would be a Very, Very Bad Thing.
But she still looked sad.
I concentrated on my music for a moment. It was hard not to experience the occasional fit of empathy for her. The trick was to make sure that I never forgot her true goal—seduction, corruption, the subversion of my free will. The only way to prevent that was to be sure to guard my decisions and actions with detached reason rather than letting my emotions get the better of me. If that happened, it would be easy to play right into the true Lasciel's hands.
Hell, it'd probably be fun.
I shook off that thought and lumbered through "Every Breath You Take" by the Police and an acoustic version of "I Will Survive" I'd put together myself. After I finished that, I tried to go through a little piece I'd written that was supposed to sound like classic Spanish guitar while giving me a little exercise therapy on the mostly numb fingers of my left hand. I'd played it a thousand times, and while I had improved, it was still something painful to listen to.
Except this time.
This time, I realized halfway in, I was playing flawlessly. I was playing faster than my usual tempo, throwing in a few licks, vibrato, some nifty transitional phrases—and it sounded good. Like, Santana good.
I finished the song and then looked up at Lasciel.
She was watching me steadily.
"Illusion?" I asked her.
She gave a small shake of her head. "I was merely helping. I… can't write original music anymore. I haven't made any music in ages. I just… helped the music you heard in your thoughts get out through your fingers. I circumvented some of the damaged nerves. It was all you, otherwise, my host."
Which was just about the coolest thing Lasciel'd ever done for me. Don't get me wrong; the survival-oriented things were super—but this was playing guitar. She had helped me to create something of beauty, and it satisfied an urge in me so deep-set and vital that I had never really realized what it was. Somehow, I knew without a hint of a doubt that I would never be able to play that well on my own. Ever again.
Could evil, true capital-E Evil, do such a thing? Help create something whole and lovely and precious?
Careful, Harry. Careful.
"This isn't helping either of us," I said quietly. "Thank you, but I'm learning it myself. I'll get there on my own." I set the guitar down on its little stand. "Besides, there's work to be done."
She nodded once. "Very well. This is regarding Thomas's apartment and its contents?"
"Yes," I said. "Can you show them to me?"
Lasciel lifted a hand, and the wall opposite the fireplace changed.
Technically, it hadn't actually changed, but Lasciel, who existed only as an entity of thought hanging around in my head, was able to create illusions of startling, even daunting clarity, even if I was the only one who could perceive them. She could sense the physical world through me—and she carried aeons of knowledge and experience. Her memory and eye for detail were almost entirely flawless.
So she created the illusion of the wall of Thomas's war room and put it over my own wall. It was even lit the same way as in my brother's apartment, every detail, I knew, entirely faithful to what had seen earlier that night.
I padded over to the wall and started checking it out more thoroughly. My brother's handwriting was all but unreadable, which made the notes he'd scribbled of dubious value in terms of actually enlightening me as to what was going on.
"My host—" Lasciel began.
I held up a hand for silence. "Not yet. Let me look at it unprejudiced first. Then you tell me what you think."
"As you wish."
I went over the stuff there for an hour or so, frowning. I had to go check a calendar a couple of times. I got out a notebook and scribbled things down as I worked them out. "All right," I said quietly, settling back down on the sofa. "Thomas was following several people. The dead women and at least a dozen more, in different parts of the city. He had a running surveillance on them. I think he probably hired a private detective or two to cover some of the observation—keeping tabs on where people were going, figuring out the recurring events in their schedules." I held up the notebook. "These are the names of the folks he was"—I shrugged—"stalking, I suppose. My guess is that the other people on this list are among the missing folk the ladies of the Ordo Lebes told us about."
"Think you Thomas preyed upon them?" Lasciel asked.
I started to deny it, instantly and firmly, but stopped.
Reason. Judgment. Rational thought.
"He could have," I said quietly. "But my instincts say it isn't him."
"Why would it not be?" Lasciel asked me. "Upon what do you base your reasoning?"
"Upon Thomas," I said. "It isn't him. To engage in wholesaled murder and abduction? No way. Maybe he fell off the incubus wagon, sure, but he wouldn't inflict any more harm than he had to. it isn't his way."
"Not his way by choice," Lasciel said. "Though I feel I must point out that—"
I cut her off, waving a hand. "I know. His sister could have gotten involved. She already ate Lord Raith's free will. She could hav
e monkeyed around with Thomas's mind, too. And if not Lara, then there are plenty of others who might have done it. Thomas could be doing these things against his will. Hell, he might not even remember he's doing them."
"Or he might be acting of his own volition. He has another point of weakness," Lasciel said.
"Eh?"
"Lara Raith holds Justine."
A point I hadn't yet considered. Justine was my brother's… well, I don't know if there's a word for what she was to him. But he loved her, and she him. It wasn't their fault that she was slightly insane and he was a life force-devouring creature of the night.
They'd been willing to give up their lives for each other in the midst of a crisis, and the love confirmed by doing so had rendered Justine deadly to my brother, poisonous to him. Love is like that to the White Court, an intolerable agony to them, the way holy water is to other breeds. Someone touched by pure and honest love cannot be fed upon—which had more or less put an end to Thomas's ability to be near Justine.
It was probably just as well. That last time they'd been together had all but killed Justine. The last time I'd seen her, she'd been a wasted, frail, white-haired thing barely capable of stringing sentences together. It had torn my brother apart to see what he had done to her. To my knowledge he hadn't even tried to be a part of her life again. I couldn't blame him.
Lara watched over Justine now, though she could not feed upon the girl any more than Thomas could.
But Lara could cut her throat, if it came to that.
My brother might very well be capable of some unpleasant things in the interests of protecting Justine. Strike that. He was capable of anything where the girl was concerned.
Means. Motive. Opportunity. The equation of murder was balanced.
I looked back at the illusory wall, where the pictures, maps, and notes grouped together in a broad band near the top, then descended into fewer notes on the next strip down, and so on, forming a vague V-shape. At the top of the V rested a single, square yellow sticky note.
That note read, in a heavy hand, Ordo Lebes? Find them.
"Dammit, Thomas," I murmured quietly. I addressed Lasciel. "Get rid of it."
Lasciel nodded and the illusion disappeared. "There is something else you should know, my host."
I eyed her. "What's that?"
"It may concern your safety and the course of your investigation. May I show you?"
The word no came strongly to mind, but I was already in for a penny, so to speak. Lasciel's wealth of intelligence and experience made her an extremely capable adviser. "Briefly."
She nodded, rose, and suddenly I was standing in Anna Ash's apartment, as I had been that afternoon.
"My host," Lasciel said, "Remember you how many women you observed entering the building?"
I frowned. "Sure. As many as half a dozen had the right look, though anyone who arrived before Murphy and I got there could have already been inside."
"Precisely," Lasciel said. "Here."
She waved a hand, and an image of me appeared in the apartment's entry, Murphy at my side.
"Anna Ash," Lasciel said. She nodded toward me, and Anna's image appeared, facing me. "Can you describe the others in attendance?"
"Helen Beckitt," I said. "Looking leaner and more weathered than the last time I saw her."
Beckitt's image appeared where she had been standing by the window.
I pointed at the wooden rocking chair. "Abby and Toto were there." The plump blond woman and her dog appeared. I rubbed at my forehead. "Uh, two on the sofa and one on the love seat."
Three shadowy forms appeared in the named places.
I pointed at the sofa. "The pretty one, in the dance leotard, the one worried about time." She appeared. I pointed at the shadowed figure next to her. "Bitter, suspicious Priscilla who was not being polite." The shadowy figure became Priscilla's image.
"And there you go," I said.
Lasciel shook her head, waved her hand, and the people images all vanished.
All except the shadowy figure sitting on the love seat.
I blinked.
"What can you remember about this one?" Lasciel asked me.
I racked my brain. It's usually good for this kind of thing. "Nothing," I said after a moment. "Not one damned detail. Nothing." I added two and two together and got trouble. "Someone was under a veil. Someone good enough to make it subtle. Hard to tell it was there at all. Not invisible so much as extremely boring and unremarkable."
"In your favor," Lasciel said, "I should point out that you had crossed the threshold uninvited, and thus were deprived of much of your power. In such a circumstance it would be most difficult for you to sense a veil at all, much less to pierce it."
I nodded, frowning at the shadowy figure. "It was deliberate," I said. "Anna goaded me into walking over the threshold on purpose. She was hiding Miss Mystery from me."
"Entirely possible," Lasciel concurred. "Or…"
"Or they didn't know someone was there, either," I said. "And if that's the case…" I tossed the notebook aside with a growl and rose.
"What are you doing?" she asked.
I got my staff and coat, and got Mouse ready to go. "If the mystery guest was news to the Ordo, she's right in among them and they could be in danger. If the Ordo knew about her, then they played me and lied to me." I ripped open the door with more than my usual effort. "Either way, I'm going over there to straighten some things out."
Chapter Ten
I swept the Beetle for bombs again and got the impression that I was going to get heartily sick of the chore, fast. It was clean, and off we went.
I parked illegally on a street about a block from Anna Ash's apartment, and walked the rest of the way in. I rang buzzers more or less at random until someone buzzed me in, and headed back up the stairs to Anna's apartment.
This time, though, I went in armed for bear. As I rode up in the elevator, I got out my jar of unguent, a dark brown concoction that stained the skin for a couple of days. I dabbed a finger in it and smeared it lightly onto my eyelids and at the base of my eyes. It was an ointment originally intended to counter faerie glamour, allowing those who had it to see through illusion to reality. It wasn't quite right for seeing through a veil wrought with mortal magic, but it should be strong enough to show me something of whatever the veil was hiding. I should be able to glimpse any motion, and that would at least give me an idea of which way to face if things got dicey.
I brought Mouse for a reason, too. Besides being a small moun tain of loyal muscle and ferocious fangs, Mouse could sense bad guys and dark magic when they were nearby. I had yet to encounter the creature that could sneak by Mouse unobserved, but just in case today was the day, I had the unguent as a backup plan.
I got off the elevator, and the hairs on the back of my neck immediately rose up. Mouse lifted his head sharply, looking back and forth down the hall. He'd felt what I had.
A fine cloud of magic hung over the entire floor.
I touched it carefully and found a suggestion of sleep—one of the classics, really. This one wasn't heavy, as such things go. I'd seen one sleep spell that flattened an entire ward of Cook County Hospital. I'd used another to protect Murphy's sanity, and it had kept her out for nearly two days.
This one wasn't like that. It was light, barely noticeable, and not at all threatening. It was delicate and fine enough to filter into homes even through their thresholds—most of which were weak enough: Apartments never seemed to have as much defense as a real, discrete home. If those other spells had been sleeping medication, this one would have been a glass of warm milk. Someone wanted the residents of the floor to be insensible enough not to notice something, but not so out as to be endangered should there be an emergency, like the building catching fire and burning down.
Don't look at me like that. It's a lot likelier than you'd think.
Anyway, the suggestion was another finely crafted spell: delicate, precise, subtle, much like the earlier veil Lasciel had
spotted. Whoever or whatever was crafting these workings was a pro.
I made sure my shield bracelet was ready to go, and marched up to Anna's door. I could sense the ward there, still active, so I thumped my staff on the floor immediately in front of the door. "Ms. Ash?" I called. It wasn't like I was going to wake anyone up. "It's Harry Dresden. We need to talk."
There was silence. I repeated myself. I heard a sound, that of someone striving to move silently, a scuff or a creak so faint that I wasn't sure it had been real. I checked Mouse. His ears were pricked up, swiveled forward. He'd heard it too.
Someone flushed a toilet on the floor above us. I heard a door open and close, a faint sound, also on another floor. There was no further sound from Anna Ash's apartment.
I didn't like where this was going at all.
"Stand back, buddy," I told Mouse. He did, backing away in that clumsy reverse waddle-walk dogs do.
I turned to the ward. It was like the little pig's straw house. It wouldn't last more than a second or two against a big bad wolf. "And I'll huff and I'll puff," I muttered. I drew up my will, took the staff in both hands, and pressed one end slowly toward the door. "Solvos," I murmured. "Solvos. Solvos."
As the staff touched the door, I sent a gentle surge of will coursing down through its length. It passed through the wood visibly, the carved runes in it briefly illuminated from within by pale blue light. My will hit Anna's door and scattered out in a cloud of pinprick?; sparkles of white light as my power unbound the patterns of the ward and reduced them to mere anarchy.
"Anna?" I called again. "Ms. Ash?"
No answer.
I tried the doorknob. It was unlocked.
"That can't be good," I told Mouse. "Here we go." I quietly opened the door, giving it a gentle push so that it would swing wide and let me see inside the darkened apartment.
At which point the trap sprang.
For traps to work, though, they need to catch their target off guard. I had my new and improved shield bracelet ready when greenish light flashed in the dark apartment and rushed swiftly toward me. I lifted my left hand. Bound around my wrist was a chain made of braided strands of several metals, silver predominant. The metal shields that hung from the bracelet had, in its previous incarnation, been solid silver as well. They had been replaced with shields of silver, iron, copper, nickel, and brass.