by Jim Butcher
“Talking to the Miksani,” I said, or tried to say. To my intense surprise, what came out was, “Talking to prospective make-out partners.”
Carlos grimaced. “I’m serious.”
I tried to say, Miksani, but what came out was, “So am I.”
“Fine,” he said, “be that way.”
Why the hell would that be happening to me? Unless . . . it was a part of Winter Law.
The Winter Court of Faerie had an iron-clad code of law laid out by Mab herself. It didn’t work like mortal law did. If you broke it, you didn’t get punished. You didn’t break it. Period. You were physically incapable of doing so. When Mab laid down the law, the beings of her Court followed it, whether they wanted to or not. They actually knew the law, on a subconscious level, but it took a real effort to summon it to your conscious mind. I took a slow breath and realized that any of the Hidden Peoples of the Winter Court were entitled to their privacy and could not be outed to the mortals or anyone else without their prior consent.
I let out a breath through my teeth and said, “It’s not personal. I can’t talk about it.”
He frowned at me for a moment and then said, “What about a trade?”
“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours?” I asked. “I like the way you think.”
“Wow,” he said, and now I was certain his cheeks were flaming. “Wow, Molly. That’s not . . . It isn’t . . . Could you please take this seriously for a minute?”
I smiled at him, and as I did, I realized that a trade changed everything with regard to the law. Bargains had to be balanced in the proper proportions and in similar coin. That, too, was Winter Law. If Carlos told me why he was present, I’d be free to say more about my purpose in kind.
“Deal,” I said.
“We got a report from Elaine Mallory through the Paranet,” Carlos said, watching the door to the Elbow Room. “Vague descriptions of a strange vibe and unusually odd activity here in Unalaska. People going missing, weird behavior, energy out of whack—that kind of thing. Someone had to check it out.”
“Huh,” I said.
“Your turn.”
“Mab sent me,” I said. “I’m here to collect on a debt.”
I felt his eyes on me for a moment, and then he said, “You’re . . . Mab’s bagman?”
“Bagperson,” I said. “Though I think it’s more like a tax collector.”
“They’re just bagmen for the government,” he replied. “What happened? One of the Miksani piss Mab off?”
I lifted my eyebrows at him. “You know of them?”
“Duh. Wizard,” he said. “Jeez, Molly, give me a little credit.”
I found myself smiling at him. “It’s internal Winter Court business.”
He nodded. “It occurs to me that if there is a tribe of Fae here, they probably know a whole lot about strange things happening in their town.”
“That does seem reasonable,” I said.
“It seems like we both might benefit from mutual cooperation,” he said. “If I help you with your job, maybe you could help me with mine.”
Help from a mortal, on my first job? Mab wouldn’t like that.
On the other hand, I was pretty sure that when it came to me filling the role of the Winter Lady, Mab wasn’t going to like a lot of things I did. She might as well get used to it now.
“I think that could work out,” I said. “Provided you help me with my job first.”
“Molly,” he said, and put his hand on his chest. “You wound me. Do you think I’d welch on you?”
“Not if we do my job first,” I said sweetly. “You know Winter well enough by now to know that I’ll do what I say I will.”
“Yes,” he said simply. He offered me his hand and said, “Do we have a deal?”
I reached for his hand, but apparently bargains weren’t closed with handshakes under Winter Law. So I drew him toward me by his hand, leaned over, and placed a soft kiss on his mouth.
Suddenly there was nothing else in the world that mattered. Nothing at all. Just the soft heat of his lips on mine, the way he drew in a sudden, shocked breath, and then an abrupt ardor in returning the kiss. Something shuddered through me, a frisson of pleasure like the deep-toned toll of an enormous bell. The kiss was a symbol. Both parties had to agree to a kiss to make it happen like this one.
After a time, the kiss ended and my lips parted from his, just a little. I sat there panting, my eyes only half-open, focused on nothing. My heart was racing and sending bursts of lust running through my body that began to pool in my hips.
I wasn’t sure what the hell was happening to me exactly, but it felt incredibly . . . right.
That probably should have scared me a little.
Carlos opened his eyes, and they were absolutely aflame with intensity.
“We have a deal, wizard,” I whispered. Then I shivered and rose, stepping away from him before my mouth decided it needed to taste his again. “Let us begin.”
I focused my will, quietly murmured, “Kakusu,” and brought up the best veil I could manage—which is to say, world-class. It was one of the first things I learned to do, and I was good at it. The light around us dimmed very slightly, and we vanished from the view of anyone who wasn’t going to extreme supernatural measures to spot us. The mix of sleet and rain could be problematic, since anyone who looked closely enough would see it bouncing off an empty hole in the air. But nothing is perfect, is it?
I nodded to Carlos, and we padded quietly across the street to circle the Elbow Room. A building that spends half the year mostly buried in snow doesn’t go in for a lot of windows. The only two in the place were side by side, deeply recessed, and high up on the wall, to let in light.
We both reached up and got a grip on the slippery sills, and then quietly pulled ourselves up to peer into the bar.
The fishermen were standing facing the bar in two neat lines. Their scrawny leader in the captain hat was staring at the bartender, who stood behind the bar, gripping a cloth like some kind of useless talisman. Her face had gone pale and was covered in beads of sweat. She trembled so violently that it threatened her balance, and she just kept repeating the same phrase, loudly enough to be heard through the window, over the sleet: “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
Captain Fisherman took a step forward, toward her, and the strain on her face immediately increased, along with the volume and desperation of her voice. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know!”
“Psychic interrogation,” I noted. Invading a human being’s mind was a monstrous act. It inflicted untold amounts of horrible damage, not to their brain but to their mind. The sensations it could cause were technically known as pain, but the word really doesn’t do them justice. If someone went digging in your head long enough, they’d leave you a mindless vegetable, or hopelessly insane.
I knew, because I’d done it. I’d had the noblest intentions in the world, but I’d been younger, dumber, and a lot surer of myself, and people had been hurt.
Carlos let out a growl beneath his breath. “And we have a Third Law violation. And there’s no way that’s an accident or even badly misguided benevolence.”
“Assuming he’s mortal,” I whispered. “If he isn’t, then the laws don’t apply to him.”
“Either way, his head is coming off.”
“Cool,” I said. “Who is he?”
“Who cares?”
“What’s he doing here?”
“Breaking the laws.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “I wonder how many friends he has.”
In my peripheral vision, I could see the muscles along Carlos’s jaw contract and then relax again. I glanced aside and saw him visibly force down his anger and shake his head a little. “I’m taking him down. Just as soon as I find out exactly who he is, how many b
uddies he has, and what designs he has on this town.”
“Oh,” I said innocently. “Is that not what you meant the first time?”
He started to mutter an answer when his fingers slipped on the slickened windowsill and he fell.
He didn’t make much noise. A little scrape on the wall and a thump as he hit the ground—but the captain’s head whipped around in a turn at least forty-five degrees too great to take place on a human neck, his eyes narrowed. He paused for about two seconds, and then spun on a heel and started walking for the door.
“Company,” I hissed to Carlos. I dropped down quietly from the window. My feet did not slip on the ice, because, hey, Queen of Winter over here. I moved quickly and crouched over him, putting my hands lightly on his chest. “Stay flat and stay still. I’ll keep you covered.”
He looked down at my hands and gave me a quick look, then his expression went focused and stoic and he lay back on the sleet-covered ground.
I did everything I could to shore up the veil covering us both. The captain stepped out of the Elbow Room and looked around, and I got a close look at the man for the first time.
There was visibly something wrong with him. At a casual glance, it might have looked like he’d simply been exposed to a little too much cold and ultraviolet radiation and freezing salt water. But the cracks in his skin were a little too sharp edged, the reddened portions a little too brightly colored for that. I got the slow and horrible impression that his skin was trying to contain too much mass, like an overstuffed sausage. There were what looked like the beginnings of cataracts in his eyes—only their edges quivered and wobbled, like living things.
That was pretty weird, even by my standards.
It got absolutely hentai-level weird when the man opened his mouth and then opened it a little wider, and then opened it until his jaw visibly unhinged and a writhing tangle of purplish red tentacles emerged and thrashed wildly at the air, as if grasping for scents.
I felt my mouth stretch into a widening grin. A sleet storm was a terrible place for scent-hunting. I couldn’t tell you how I knew that, but I knew it as certainly as I knew that he hadn’t noticed the flaws in my veil. This was not the territory of this creature, whatever it was. It was mine.
The tentacles withdrew with a whipping motion, like a frog recovering its tongue. The captain swayed from foot to foot, looking around the night for a moment, and then turned and paced back into the bar. A moment later, the whole weirdly silent column of fisherman freaks, including Clint, marched out of the bar and back down the hill toward the harbor. Clint was walking on his broken knee as if it didn’t particularly bother him that it was bent inward like that.
“What the hell?” Carlos breathed as they walked away. “What was that?”
“Right?” I asked him. An absolutely mad giggle came wriggling up out of my belly. “That was the most messed-up thing I have ever seen from that close.” I looked down at him, put my hand up to my mouth, and made gargling sounds while wiggling my fingers like tentacles.
And suddenly I realized that I was straddling Carlos Ramirez. And that he was staring at me with dark eyes that I felt like I could look at for a good, long while.
“Do you know what I want to do?” I asked him.
He licked his lips and then glanced at the retreating group. “Follow them?”
“Yes, all right,” I said, and swallowed. “Follow them. We can also do that.” I rose and helped him up.
“Wait—what?”
“I’m flirting with you, dummy,” I said, and smiled at him. “What, you can’t work and banter at the same time? After all your big talk?”
He lifted a hand, closed his eyes, and pinched the bridge of his nose for a moment. “Dios. This . . . is very much not what I was expecting for this evening. And hang on.” He ducked back around the corner of the Elbow Room, and a moment later emerged with a small bundle of gear. In a few seconds, he was donning the gray cloak of the Wardens of the White Council and buckling on a weapons belt that bore a sword on one side and a large pistol on the other.
“Swords and guns,” I said. “Hot.” I picked up a corner of the cloak and wrinkled my nose. “This, though . . . Not.”
“Wardens do a lot of good,” he said quietly. “It isn’t always pretty, what we do, but it needs to be done.” He nodded toward the retreating backs of the captain and his crew. “Like those . . . things. Someone has to do something.” He smiled faintly as he started walking in their wake. “You and Dresden can’t be everywhere.”
I watched him for a moment, taking in details. “You’re limping,” I noted. It was a weakness, and it stood out to me. It might not have before.
“Should have seen me a month ago,” he said. “Could barely get out of my chair. Chupacabra kicked me in the back. Come on.”
I could see the pain in his movements now, and cataloged them on pure reflex. His back was too rigid, much more so than it had been before. The fall from the window had aggravated injuries that hadn’t healed properly. That could be used against him.
I wish thoughts like that didn’t come to me so naturally, but after months fighting the Fomor on Chicago’s streets, months under the instruction of the Leanansidhe, they were second nature.
I folded my arms against a little chill that had nothing to do with the weather and hurried after the handsome young Warden.
The weather continued worsening as we reached the waterfront. It wasn’t far from the Elbow Room, but far was a relative term when a viciously cold wind was driving sleet and icy spray up the slope and into our faces. To me, it was brisk but actually a little bit pleasant. But for the sake of camaraderie, and definitely not because I wanted to conceal my increasing levels of weirdness from Carlos, I emulated him. I bowed my head against the wind and hunched my shoulders while hugging my own stomach.
“Who would live in this?” Carlos growled, shuddering.
“People smart enough to stay indoors during this kind of weather?” I suggested. “Tentacular parasites? Obstinate wizards? You come to Alaska but you don’t plan for the cold?”
He couldn’t really roll his eyes very well when his lashes were becoming steadily encased in ice, but he came close. “Maybe you’d like it back in your cell, Your Highness.”
I flashed him a quick grin, and then we kept on following the captain and his crew. They wasted no time in marching back to a waterfront pier and boarding a ship with the name Betsy Lee painted across her stern. They filed up the gangplank, neat as you please, and went belowdecks, all without hesitating or looking back—and all in total silence.
We watched for a moment more, and then Carlos nodded and said, “I’m thinking freak fuel explosion. Boat burns to the water in moments, takes them with it.”
“Wow,” I said.
“Not yet,” he said. “Not until I’m sure it’s only them. Just thinking of the shape of things to come.”
I looked up and down the waterfront, what I could see of it through the weather, and said, “Well, we’re not sitting out here all night and babysitting the boat.” And we weren’t going to be moving quietly around the Betsy Lee, either, not with all that ice on the deck.
But I could.
“I’m going to take a peek around,” I said. “Right back.”
“Whoa,” Carlos said. “What? Molly . . .”
I ignored him and ran lightly over the short distance to the dock and down it, and then leapt lightly out onto the deck of the ship. My feet didn’t slip, and a continuous series of rippling shivers ran up and down my spine. I was putting myself in danger, treading into the territory of what was clearly a dangerous predator, and it felt really, really good.
Is that what happened to Maeve? Had she gotten a little too fond of the feeling of danger? I mean, she’d spent years defying freaking Mab. Could it get more dangerous than that?
I shook my head and started scouting the sh
ip, relying on my instincts. Harry’d always been a good source of advice about problems. He dealt with them on a continuous basis, after all, and in his studied opinion, if you had one problem, you had a problem. But if you had multiple problems, you might also have an opportunity. One problem, he swore, could often be used to solve another, and he had stories about a zombie tyrannosaurus to prove it.
The Miksani had several centuries’ worth of a spotless record in paying tribute to Mab. They’d stopped only a few years ago. As diverse and fickle as the beings of Faerie could be, they rarely did things for no reason. And, lo and behold, in this same little town in the middle of more nowhere than any other little town I had ever seen, tentacular weirdo critters were conducting a quiet reign of terror.
Chances that these two facts were unrelated? Probably close to zero.
I didn’t want to take my chances in the confined spaces belowdecks—that was a losing proposition for me, if it came to a confrontation. So I conducted a quick survey of the deck, the bridge, and the fishing paraphernalia stored on it, keeping my steps as light and silent as I could. I spotted it just before deciding to leave again: a single dark feather gleaming with opalescence, pinned between two metal frames of what I presumed to be crab cages, stored and ready to drop into the sea.
I felt a little surge of triumph, took it, and leapt lightly back to the deck. I rejoined Carlos a moment later. He was sliding his gun into its holster. He’d been ready to start shooting if I got into trouble. And they say there are no gentlemen anymore.
“What’d you find?”
I held it up, grinning.
“Feather?”
“Not just a feather,” I said. “A cormorant feather.”
He peered at me. “How do you know that?”
I didn’t want to say something like I Googled it under Winter Law, but the mantle of power I’d inherited from Maeve knew all about Mab’s subjects, and the knowledge it contained flowed through me as certainly as lessons learned in childhood. “How do you think?” I asked instead.
He struck his head lightly with the heel of his hand and said, “Durr. The Miksani.”