by Jim Butcher
“Are you the kind who takes chances?”
“I like to hedge my bets,” she murmured. “You, for example, Mister Dresden. I have come here today to decide whether or not I shall gamble a great deal upon your abilities.” She paused and then added, “Thus far, you have made less than a sterling impression.”
I rested my elbows on my desk and steepled my fingers. “Yeah. I know that all this probably makes me look like—”
“A desperate man?” she suggested. “Someone who is clearly obsessed with other matters.” She nodded toward the stacks of envelopes on my desk. “One who is shortly to lose his place of business if he does not pay his debts. I think you need the work.” She began to rise. “And if you lack the ability to take care of such minor matters, I doubt you will be of any use to me.”
“Wait,” I said, rising. “Please. At least let me hear you out. If it turns out that I think I can help you—”
She lifted her chin and interrupted me effortlessly. “But that isn’t the question, is it?” she asked. “The question is whether or not I think you can help me. You have shown me nothing to make me think that you could.” She paused, sitting back down again. “And yet . . .”
I sat back down across from her. “Yet?”
“I have heard things, Mister Dresden, about people with your abilities. About the ability to look into their eyes.”
I tilted my head. “I wouldn’t call it an ability. It just happens.”
“Yet you are able to see within them? You call it a soulgaze, do you not?”
I nodded warily and started adding together lots of small bits and pieces. “Yes.”
“Revealing their true nature? Seeing the truth about the person upon whom you look?”
“And they see me back. Yes.”
She smiled, cool and lovely. “Then let us look upon one another, Mister Dresden, you and I. Then I will know if you can be of any use to me. Surely it will cost me nothing.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. It’s the sort of thing that stays with you.” Like an appendectomy scar, or baldness. When you look on someone’s soul, you don’t forget it. Not ever. I didn’t like the direction this was going. “I don’t think it would be a good idea.”
“But why not?” she pressed. “It won’t take long, will it, Mister Dresden?”
“That’s really not the issue.”
Her mouth firmed into a line. “I see. Then, if you will excuse me—”
This time I interrupted her. “Ms. Sommerset, I think you may have made a mistake in your estimations.”
Her eyes glittered, anger showing for a moment, cool and far away. “Oh?”
I nodded. I opened the drawer to my desk and took out a pad of paper. “Yeah. I’ve had a rough time of things lately.”
“You can’t possibly know how little that matters to me.”
I drew out a pen, took off the lid, and set it down beside the pad. “Uh-huh. Then you come in here. Rich, gorgeous—kind of too good to be true.”
“And?” she inquired.
“Too good to be true,” I repeated. I drew the .44-caliber revolver from the desk drawer, leveled it at her, and thumbed back the hammer. “Call me crazy, but lately I’ve been thinking that if something’s too good to be true, then it probably isn’t. Put your hands on the desk, please.”
Her eyebrows arched. Those gorgeous eyes widened enough to show the whites all the way around them. She moved her hands, swallowing as she did, and laid her palms on the desk. “What do you think you are doing?” she demanded.
“I’m testing a theory,” I said. I kept the gun and my eyes on her and opened another drawer. “See, lately, I’ve been getting nasty visitors. So it’s made me do some thinking about what kind of trouble to expect. And I think I’ve got you pegged.”
“I don’t know what you are talking about, Mister Dresden, but I am certain—”
“Save it.” I rummaged in a drawer and found what I needed. A moment later I lifted a plain old nail of simple metal out of the drawer and put it on the desk.
“What’s that?” she all but whispered.
“Litmus test,” I said.
Then I flicked the nail gently with one finger, and sent it rolling across the surface of my desk and toward her perfectly manicured hands.
She didn’t move until a split second before the nail touched her—but then she did, a blur of motion that took her two long strides back from my desk and knocked over the chair she’d been sitting on. The nail rolled off the edge of the desk and fell to the floor with a clink.
“Iron,” I said. “Cold iron. Faeries don’t like it.”
The expression drained from her face. One moment, there had been arrogant conceit, haughty superiority, blithe confidence. But that simply vanished, leaving her features cold and lovely and remote and empty of all emotion, of anything recognizably human.
“The bargain with my godmother has months yet to go,” I said. “A year and a day, she had to leave me alone. That was the deal. If she’s trying to weasel out of it, I’m going to be upset.”
She regarded me in that empty silence for long moments more. It was unsettling to see a face so lovely look so wholly alien, as though something lurked behind those features that had little in common with me and did not care to make the effort to understand. That blank mask made my throat tighten, and I had to work not to let the gun in my hand shake. But then she did something that made her look even more alien, more frightening.
She smiled. A slow smile, cruel as a barbed knife. When she spoke, her voice sounded just as beautiful as it had before. But it was empty, quiet, haunting. She spoke, and it made me want to lean closer to her to hear her more clearly. “Clever,” she murmured. “Yes. Not too distracted to think. Just what I need.”
A cold shiver danced down my spine. “I don’t want any trouble,” I said. “Just go, and we can both pretend nothing happened.”
“But it has,” she murmured. Just the sound of her voice made the room feel colder. “You have seen through this veil. Proven your worth. How did you do it?”
“Static on the doorknob,” I said. “It should have been locked. You shouldn’t have been able to get in here, so you must have gone through it. And you danced around my questions rather than simply answering them.”
Still smiling, she nodded. “Go on.”
“You don’t have a purse. Not many women go out in a three-thousand-dollar suit and no purse.”
“Mmmm,” she said. “Yes. You’ll do perfectly, Mister Dresden.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said. “I’m having nothing more to do with faeries.”
“I don’t like being called that, Mister Dresden.”
“You’ll get over it. Get out of my office.”
“You should know, Mister Dresden, that my kind, from great to small, are bound to speak the truth.”
“That hasn’t slowed your ability to deceive.”
Her eyes glittered, and I saw her pupils change, slipping from round mortal orbs to slow feline lengths. Cat-eyed, she regarded me, unblinking. “Yet have I spoken. I plan to gamble. And I will gamble upon you.”
“Uh. What?”
“I require your service. Something precious has been stolen. I wish you to recover it.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You want me to recover stolen goods for you?”
“Not for me,” she murmured. “For the rightful owners. I wish you to discover and catch the thief and to vindicate me.”
“Do it yourself,” I said.
“In this matter I cannot act wholly alone,” she murmured. “That is why I have chosen you to be my emissary. My agent.”
I laughed at her. That made something else come into those perfect, pale features—anger. Anger, cold and terrible, flashed in her eyes and all but froze the laugh in my throat. “I don’t think so,” I said. “I’m not making any more bargains with your folk. I don’t even know who you are.”
“Dear child,” she murmured, a sl
ow edge to her voice. “The bargain has already been made. You gave your life, your fortune, your future, in exchange for power.”
“Yeah. With my godmother. And that’s still being contested.”
“No longer,” she said. “Even in this world of mortals, the concept of debt passes from one hand to the next. Selling mortgages, yes?”
My belly went cold. “What are you saying?”
Her teeth showed, sharp and white. It wasn’t a smile. “Your mortgage, mortal child, has been sold. I have purchased it. You are mine. And you will assist me in this matter.”
I set the gun down on my desk and opened the top drawer. I took out my letter opener, one of the standard machined jobs with a heavy, flat blade and a screw-grip handle. “You’re wrong,” I said, and the denial in my voice sounded patently obvious, even to me. “My godmother would never do that. For all I know, you’re trying to trick me.”
She smiled, watching me, her eyes bright. “Then by all means, let me reassure you of the truth.”
My left palm slammed down onto the table. I watched, startled, as I gripped the letter opener in my right hand, slasher-movie style. In a panic, I tried to hold back my hand, to drop the opener, but my arms were running on automatic, like they were someone else’s.
“Wait!” I shouted.
She regarded me, cold and distant and interested.
I slammed the letter opener down onto the back of my own hand, hard. My desk is a cheap one. The steel bit cleanly through the meat between my thumb and forefinger and sank into the desk, pinning me there. Pain washed up my arm even as blood started oozing out of the wound. I tried to fight it down, but I was panicked, in no condition to exert a lot of control. A whimper slipped out of me. I tried to pull the steel away, to get it out of my hand, but my arm simply twisted, wrenching the letter opener counterclockwise.
The pain flattened me. I wasn’t even able to get enough breath to scream.
The woman, the faerie, reached down and took my fingers away from the letter opener. She withdrew it with a sharp, decisive gesture and laid it flat on the desk, my blood gleaming all over it. “Wizard, you know as well as I. Were you not bound to me, I would have no such power over you.”
At that moment, most of what I knew was that my hand hurt, but some dim part of me realized she was telling the truth. Faeries don’t just get to ride in and play puppet master. You have to let them in. I’d let my godmother, Lea, in years before, when I was younger, dumber. I’d given her the slip last year, forced an abeyance of her claim that should have protected me for a year and a day.
But now she’d passed the reins to someone else. Someone who hadn’t been in on the second bargain.
I looked up at her, pain and sudden anger making my voice into a low, harsh growl. “Who are you?”
The woman ran an opalescent fingernail through the blood on my desk. She lifted it to her lips and idly touched it to her tongue. She smiled, slower, more sensual, and every bit as alien. “I have many names,” she murmured. “But you may call me Mab. Queen of Air and Darkness. Monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe.”
Chapter Three
The bottom fell out of my stomach.
A Faerie Queen. A Faerie Queen was standing in my office. I was looking at a Faerie Queen. Talking to a Faerie Queen.
And she had me by the short hairs.
Boy, and I’d thought my life was on the critical list already.
Fear can literally feel like ice water. It can be a cold feeling that you swallow, that rolls down your throat and spreads into your chest. It steals your breath and makes your heart labor when it shouldn’t, before expanding into your belly and hips, leaving quivers behind. Then it heads for the thighs, the knees (occasionally with an embarrassing stop on the way), stealing the strength from the long muscles that think you should be using them to run the hell away.
I swallowed a mouthful of fear, my eyes on the poisonously lovely faerie standing on the other side of my desk.
It made Mab smile.
“Yes,” she murmured. “Wise enough to be afraid. To understand, at least in part. How does it feel, to know what you know, child?”
My voice came out unsteady, and more quiet than I would have liked. “Sort of like Tokyo when Godzilla comes up on the beach.”
Mab tilted her head, watching me with that same smile. Maybe she didn’t get the reference. Or maybe she didn’t like being compared to a thirty-story lizard. Or maybe she did like it. I mean, how should I know? I have enough trouble figuring out human women.
I didn’t meet Mab’s eyes. I wasn’t worried about a soulgaze any longer. Both parties had to have a soul for that to happen. But plenty of things can get to you if you make eye contact too long. It carries all sorts of emotions and metaphors. I stared at Mab’s chin, my hand burning with pain, and said nothing because I was afraid.
I hate being afraid. I hate it more than anything in the whole world. I hate being made to feel helpless. I hate being bullied, too, and Mab might as well have been ramming her fist down my throat and demanding my lunch money.
The Faerie Queens were bad news. Big bad news. Short of calling up some hoary old god or squaring off against the White Council itself, I wasn’t likely to run into anything else with as much raw power as Mab. I could have thrown a magical sucker punch at her, could have tried to take her out, but even if we’d been on even footing I doubt I would have ruffled her hair. And she had a bond on me, a magical conduit. She could send just about anything right past my defenses, and there wouldn’t be anything I could do about it.
Bullies make me mad—and I’ve been known to do some foolish things when I’m angry.
“Forget it,” I said, my voice hot. “No deal. Get it over with and blast me. Lock the door on your way out.”
My response didn’t seem to ruffle her. She folded her arms and murmured, “Such anger. Such fire. Yes. I watched you stalemate your godmother the Leanansidhe autumn last. Few mortals ever have done as much. Bold. Impertinent. I admire that kind of strength, wizard. I need that kind of strength.”
I fumbled around on my desk until I found the tissue dispenser and started packing the wound with the flimsy fabric. “I don’t really care what you need,” I told her. “I’m not going to be your emissary or anything else unless you want to force me, and I doubt I’d be much good to you then. So do whatever you’re going to do or get out of my office.”
“You should care, Mister Dresden,” Mab told me. “It concerns you explicitly. I purchased your debt in order to make you an offer. To give you the chance to win free of your obligations.”
“Yeah, right. Save it. I’m not interested.”
“You may serve, wizard, or you may be served. As a meal. Do you not wish to be free?”
I looked up at her, warily, visions of barbecued me on a table with an apple in my mouth dancing in my head. “What do you mean by ‘free’?”
“Free,” she said, wrapping those frozen-berry lips around the word so that I couldn’t help but notice. “Free of Sidhe influence, of the bonds of your obligation first to the Leanansidhe and now to me.”
“The whole thing a wash? We go our separate ways?”
“Precisely.”
I looked down at my hurting hand and scowled. “I didn’t think you were much into freedom as a concept, Mab.”
“You should not presume, wizard. I adore freedom. Anyone who doesn’t have it wants it.”
I took a deep breath and tried to get my heart rate under control. I couldn’t let either fear or anger do my thinking for me. My instincts screamed at me to go for the gun again and give it a shot, but I had to think. It was the only thing that could get you clear of the fae.
Mab was on the level about her offer. I could feel that, sense it in a way so primal, so visceral, that there was no room left for doubt. She would cut me loose if I agreed to her bargain. Of course, her price might be too high. She hadn’t gotten to that yet. And the fae have a way of making sure that further bargains only get you in
deeper, instead of into the clear. Just like credit card companies, or those student loan people. Now there’s evil for you.
I could feel Mab watching me, Sylvester to my Tweetie Bird. That thought kind of cheered me up. Generally speaking, Tweetie kicks Sylvester’s ass in the end.
“Okay,” I told her. “I’m listening.”
“Three tasks,” Mab murmured, holding up three fingers by way of visual aid. “From time to time, I will make a request of you. When you have fulfilled three requests, your obligation to me ceases.”
Silence lay on the room for a moment, and I blinked. “What. That’s it?”
Mab nodded.
“Any three tasks? Any three requests?”
Mab nodded.
“Just as simple as that? I mean, you say it like that, and I could pass you the salt three times and that would be that.”
Her eyes, green-blue like glacial ice, remained on my face, unblinking. “Do you accept?”
I rubbed at my mouth slowly, mulling it over in my head. It was a simple bargain, as these things went. They could get really complicated, with contracts and everything. Mab had offered me a great package, sweet, neat, and tidy as a Halloween candy.
Which meant that I’d be an idiot not to check for razor blades and cyanide.
“I decide which requests I fulfill and which I don’t?”
“Even so.”
“And if I refuse a request, there will be no reprisals or punishments from you.”
She tilted her head and blinked her eyes, slowly. “Agreed. You, not I, will choose which requests you fulfill.”
There was one land mine I’d found, at least. “And no more selling my mortgage, either. Or whistling up the lackeys to chastise or harass me by proxy. This remains between the two of us.”
She laughed, and it sounded as merry, clear, and lovely as bells—if someone pressed them against my teeth while they were still ringing. “As your godmother did. Fool me twice, shame on me, wizard? Agreed.”
I licked my lips, thinking hard. Had I left her any openings? Could she get to me any other way?
“Well, wizard?” Mab asked. “Have we a bargain?”