by Jim Butcher
Maeve’s lips tightened. “And those would be?”
“One. I’m not handing over a child to you. Not mine, not anyone’s, not now, and not ever. If you had a brain in your head, you’d have known that.”
Maeve’s already pale face blanched even more, and she sat bolt upright on her throne. “Youdare —”
“Shut up,” I snarled, and it came out loud enough to ring off the walls of the ballroom. “I’m not finished.”
Maeve jerked as though I’d slapped her. Her mouth dropped open, and she blinked at me.
“I came here under your invitation and protection. I am yourguest . But in spite of that you’ve thrown glamour at me anyway.” I stood up, my hands spread on the table, leaning toward her for emphasis. “I don’t have time for this crap. You don’t scare me, lady,” I said. “I only came here for answers—but if you keep pushing me, I’m going to push back. Hard.”
Maeve’s evident anger evaporated. She leaned back on her throne, lips pursed, her expression placid and enigmatic. “Well, well, well. Not so easily captured, it would seem.”
A new voice, a relaxed, masculine drawl, slid into the silence. “I told you, Maeve. You should have been polite. Anyone who declares war on the Red Court isn’t going to be the sort to take kindly to pressure.” The speaker stepped into the ballroom through the double doors and walked casually to the banquet tables and toward Maeve’s throne.
It was a man, maybe in his early thirties, medium build, maybe half an inch shy of six feet tall. He wore dark jeans, a white tee, and a leather jacket. Droplets of dark reddish brown stained the shirt and one side of his face. His scalp was bald but for a stubble of dark hair.
As he approached, I picked out more details. He had a brand on his throat. A snowflake made of white scar tissue stood out sharply against his skin. The skin on one side of his face was red and a little swollen, and he was missing half of the eyebrow and a crescent of the stubble on his scalp on that side—he’d been burned, and recently. He reached the throne and dropped to one knee before it, somehow conveying a certain relaxed insolence with the gesture, and extended the box to Maeve.
“It is done?” Maeve asked, an almost childlike eagerness in her voice. “What took you so long?”
“It wasn’t as easy as you said it would be. But I did it.”
The Winter Lady all but snatched the carved box from his hands, avarice lighting her eyes. “Wizard, this is my Knight, Lloyd of the family Slate.”
Slate nodded to me. “How are you?”
“Impatient,” I responded, but I nodded back to him warily. “You’re the Winter Knight?”
“So far, yeah. I guess you’re the Winter Emissary. Asking questions and investigating and so on.”
“Yep. Did you kill Ronald Reuel?”
Slate burst out laughing. “Christ, Dresden. You don’t waste time, do you?”
“I’ve filled my insincere courtesy quota for the day,” I said. “Did you kill him?”
Slate shrugged and said, “No. To be honest with you, I’m not sure Icould have killed him. He’s been at this a lot longer than me.”
“He was an old man,” I said.
“So are a lot of wizards,” Slate pointed out. “I could have bench-pressed him, sure. Killing him is something else altogether.”
Maeve let out a sudden hiss of anger, the sound eerily loud. She lifted her foot and kicked Slate in the shoulder. Something popped when she did, and the force of the kick drove the Winter Knight down a tier, into the table and the Sidhe seated there. The table toppled, and Sidhe, chairs, and Knight went sprawling.
Maeve rose to her feet, sending the green-toothed Jen scooting away from her. She drew what looked like a military-issue combat knife from the carved box. It was crusted with some kind of black gelatinous substance, like burned barbecue sauce. “You stupid animal,” she snarled. “Useless. This is useless to me.”
She hurled the knife at Slate. The handle hit him in the biceps of his left arm just as he sat up again. His face twisted in sudden fury. He took up the knife, rose to his feet, and stalked toward Maeve with murder in his eye.
Maeve drew herself up, her face shining with a sudden terrible beauty. She lifted her right hand, ring finger and thumb both bent, and murmured something in a liquid, alien tongue. Sudden blue light gathered around her fingers, and the temperature in the room dropped by about forty degrees. She spoke again, and flicked her wrist, sending glowing motes of azure flickering toward Slate.
The snowflake brand flared into sudden light, and Slate’s advance halted, his body going rigid. The skin around the brand turned blue, then purple, then black, spreading like a stop-motion enhanced film of gangrene. A quiet snarl slipped from Slate’s lips, and I could see his body trembling with the effort to continue toward Maeve. He shuddered and took another step forward.
Maeve lifted her other hand, her index finger extended while the others curled, and a sudden wind whipped past me, cold enough that it stole the breath from my lungs. The wind whipped madly around Slate, making his leather coat flap. Bits of white frost started forming on his eyelashes and eyebrows. His expression, now anguished as well as full of rage, faltered, and his advance halted again.
“Calm him,” Maeve murmured.
Jen slipped behind Slate, wrapping her arms around his neck, leaning her mouth down close to his ear. Slate’s eyes flickered with hot, violent hate for a moment, and then began to grow heavier. Jen ran her hand slowly down the sleeve of his jacket, fingers caressing his wrist. His arm lowered as I watched. A moment later, Jen slid the jacket from his shoulders. The tee was sleeveless, and Slate’s arms were hard with muscle—and tracked with needle marks. Jen held out a hand, and another darting pixie handed her a hypodermic needle. Jen slipped it into the bend of his arm, still whispering to him, sliding the plunger slowly down.
Slate’s eyes rolled back in his head, and he sank to his knees. Jen went down with him, wrapped around him like kelp on a swimmer, her mouth next to his ear.
Maeve lowered her hands, and the wind and the cold died away. She lifted a shaking hand to her face and stepped back to the throne, settling stiffly onto it, narrowed eyes locked on Slate’s increasingly malleable form. Her cheekbones stood out more sharply than before, her eyes looked more sunken. She gripped the arms of the throne, her fingers twitching.
“What the hell was that?” Billy whispered.
“Probably what passes for a polite disagreement,” I muttered. “Get up. We’re leaving.”
I stood up. Maeve’s eyes darted to me. Her voice came out dry, harsh. “Our bargain is not complete, wizard.”
“This talk is.”
“But I have not answered your question.”
“Keep your answer. I don’t need it anymore.”
“You don’t?” Maeve asked.
“We don’t?” Billy said.
I nodded toward Slate and Jen. “You had to push yourself to make him stand still. Look at you. You’re just about out of gas right now from going up against your own Knight.” I started down the tiers, Billy coming with me. “Besides that, you’re sloppy, sweetheart. Reckless. A clean killing like Reuel’s takes a plan, and that isn’t you.”
I could feel her eyes pressing against my back like frozen thorns. I ignored her.
“I did not give you leave to go, wizard,” she said, her voice chilly.
“I didn’t ask.”
“I won’t forget this insolence.”
“I probably will,” I said. “It’s nothing special. Come on, Billy.”
I walked to the double doors and out. As soon as we were both outside, the doors swung shut with a huge, hollow boom that made me jump. Darkness fell, sudden and complete, and I fumbled for my amulet as my heart lurched in panic.
The spectral light from my amulet showed me Billy’s strained face first, and then the area immediately around us. The double doors were gone. Only a blank stone wall remained where they had been.
“Gulp,” Billy said. He shook his head f
or a moment, dazed. “Where did they go?”
I rested my fingers against the stone wall, reaching out for it with my wizard’s senses. Nothing. It was rock, not illusion. “Beats the hell out of me. The doors here must have been a way to some other location.”
“Like some kind of teleport?”
“More like a temporary entrance into the Nevernever,” I said. “Or a shortcut through the Nevernever to another place on Earth.”
“Kind of intense in there. When she made it get all cold. I’ve never seen anything like that before.”
“Sloppy,” I said. “She was laying a binding on Slate. Her power was sloshing over into changing the temperature. A child could do better.”
Billy let out a short, quiet laugh. “After what we just saw, anyone else would still be shaking. You’re giving her the rating from the Russian judge.”
“So sue me.” I shrugged. “She’s strong. Strong isn’t everything.”
Billy glanced up at me. “Could you do what she did?”
“I’d probably use fire.”
His eyebrows went up, his expression impressed. “Do you really think Maeve’s not the killer?”
“I do,” I said. “This murder was clean enough to look like an accident. Maeve’s obviously got impulse-control issues. Doesn’t make for much of a methodical murderer.”
“What about Slate?”
I shook my head, my brow tightening. “Not sure about him. He’s mortal. There’s nothing that says he couldn’t lie to us. But I got what I was looking for, and I found out a couple of things on top of that.”
“So why are you frowning?”
“Because all I got was more questions. Everyone’s been telling me to hurry. Faeries don’t do that. They’re practically immortal and they’re not in a rush. But Mab and Grimalkin both have tried to rush me now. Maeve went for the high-pressure sales tactic too, like she didn’t have time for anything more subtle.”
“Why would they do that?”
I sighed. “Something’s in motion. If I don’t run down the killer, the Courts could go to war with one another.”
“That would explain the whole World War Two dress motif back there.”
“Yeah, but not why time would be so pressing.” I shook my head. “If we could have stayed longer, I might have been able to work out more, but it was getting too nervous in there.”
“Discretion, valor,” Billy said by way of agreement. “We leave now, right?”
“Elidee?” I asked. I felt a stirring in my hair, and then the tiny pixie popped out to hover in the air in front of me. “Can you lead us back to my car?”
The pixie flashed in the affirmative and zipped away. I lifted my amulet and followed.
Billy and I didn’t speak until our guide had led us out of the underground complex not far from where I’d parked the Blue Beetle. We cut through an alley.
About halfway down it, Billy grabbed my arm and jerked me bodily behind him, snapping, “Harry, get back!”
In the same motion he swung out one foot and kicked a metal trash can. It went flying, crashing into something I hadn’t seen behind it. Someone let out a short, harsh gasp of pain. Billy stepped forward and picked up the metal lid that had fallen to the ground. He swung it down at the shape. It struck with a noisy crash.
I took a couple of steps back to make sure I was clear of the action, and reached for my amulet again. “Billy,” I said, “what the hell?”
I felt the sudden presence at my back half a second too late to get out of the way. A hand the size of a dinner plate closed on the back of my neck like a vice and lifted. I felt my heels rise until my toes were just barely touching the ground.
A voice, a feminine contralto, growled, “Let go of the amulet and call him off, wizard. Call him off before I break your neck.”
Chapter Sixteen
Being held up by your neck hurts. Trust me on this one. I lifted my hands by way of attempting to convey compliance and said, “Billy, get off him.”
Billy took a step back from the pale-haired young man he’d knocked down. Fix whimpered and scuttled away on his hands and butt. His borrowed brown suit was soiled and torn, and his yellow polyester tie hung from his collar by only one of its clips. He put his back against the alley wall, eyes wide beneath his shock of white dandelion hair.
Billy’s eyes flicked from my assailant to Fix and back. He squinted at her for a moment, then set his jaw in an expression of casual determination. “Harry? You want me to take her?”
“Wait a minute,” I managed to say. “Okay, he’s off. Put me down.”
The grip on the back of my neck relaxed, and as I touched ground again I took a step toward Billy, turning to face the woman who had held me.
As I expected, it was the tall, muscular young woman from the funeral home, her muddy green hair hanging lankly over her eyes and one cheek. She folded her arms and shifted her weight from one foot to the other. “Fix? Are you okay?”
The smaller man panted, “My lip is cut. It isn’t bad.”
The woman nodded and faced me again.
“All right,” I said. “Who the hell are you?”
“My name’s Meryl,” she said. Her voice was surprisingly quiet, contrasting with her size. “I wanted to apologize to you, Mr. Dresden. For hitting you and throwing you into the Dumpster.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Are you sure you got the right guy, Meryl? No one ever apologizes to me for anything.”
She pushed at her hair with one hand. It fell right back over her face. “I’m sorry. I was scared earlier, and I acted without thinking.”
I traded a glance with Billy. “Uh, okay. I’m pretty sure lurking in a dark alley to mug me with your apology isn’t the usual way to go about saying you’re sorry. But I didn’t read that Mars-Venus book, so who knows.”
Her mouth twitched, and she relaxed her stance by a tiny degree. “I didn’t know how else to find you, so I was just waiting near your car.”
“Okay,” I said. My neck still throbbed where her fingers had clamped on. Five to one I would have wonderful stripy bruises the next day. I nodded and turned away. “Apology accepted. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have things I need to do.”
A note of panic crept into her voice. “Wait. Please.”
I stopped and looked back at her.
“I need to talk to you. Just for a minute.” She took a deep breath. “I need your help.”
Of course she did.
“It’s very important.”
Of course it was.
The headache started coming back. “Look, Meryl, I’ve got a lot on my plate already.”
“I know,” she said. “Investigating Ron’s death. I think I can help you.”
I pursed my lips. “You were close to Reuel?”
She nodded. “Me. Fix. Ace. And Lily.”
I flashed back on the photo of Reuel and the four young people. “Green-haired girl? Very cute?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s Ace?”
“He had to go to work right after the funeral. But Lily’s why I need to talk to you. She’s missing. I think she’s in trouble.”
I started filling in context on the conversation I’d overheard between them. “Who are you?”
“I told you. My name is Meryl.”
“Okay, fine.What are you, Meryl?”
She flinched at the question. “Oh. I’m sorry, I didn’t know what you meant.” She raked at her hair again. “I’m a changeling. We all are.”
“A what?” Billy asked.
I nodded, getting it. “Changeling,” I said to Billy. “She’s half mortal and half fae.”
“Aha,” Billy said. “Which means what?”
I shrugged. “It means that she has to choose whether to remain a mortal or become wholly fae.”
“Yes,” she said. “And until then I’m under the rule of the Court of my fae father. Winter. The others too. That’s why the four of us stuck together. It was safer.”
Billy nodded. “Oh.
”
“Meryl,” I said, “what makes you think your friend is in trouble?”
“She’s not very independent, Mister Dresden. We share an apartment. She doesn’t have a very good idea of how to take care of herself, and she gets nervous if she’s out of the apartment for too long.”
“And what do you think happened to her?”
“The Winter Knight.”
Billy frowned. “Why would he hurt people in his own Court?”
Meryl let out a brief, hard laugh. “Because he can. He had a thing for Lily. He would hurt her, frighten her. He got off on it. He was furious when Maeve told him to back off. And once Ron was gone . . .” Her voice trailed off and she turned her head to one side.
“How does Reuel fit into this?” I asked.
“He was protecting us. Maeve had been torturing us for fun, and we didn’t know where to turn. Ron took us in. He put us under his protection, and no one in Winter was willing to cross him.”
“What about your fae dad?” Billy asked. “Didn’t he do anything to look out for you?”
Meryl gave Billy a flat look. “My mother was raped by a troll. Even if he’d been strong enough to do anything about Maeve hurting us, he wouldn’t have. He thinks he’s already done enough by not devouring my mom on the spot.”
“Oh,” Billy said. “Sorry.”
I frowned. “And with the Summer Knight gone, you think Slate grabbed the girl.”
Meryl said, “Someone broke into the apartment. It looked like there had been a struggle.”
I let out a sigh. “Have you contacted the police?”
She eyed me. “Oh, yeah, of course. I called them and told them that a mortal champion of the fae came and spirited away a half-mortal, half-nixie professional nude model to Faerieland. They were all over it.”
I had to admire the well-placed sarcasm. “It doesn’t take a supernatural studmuffin to cause something very bad to happen to a cute girl in this town. Your plain old mortal kidnappers and murderers can manage just fine.”
She shook her head. “Either way, she’s still in trouble.”
I lifted a hand. “What do you want from me?”