by Jim Butcher
I gave myself a second to wish I’d been less tired. Or less in pain. The events of the day and the impending Council meeting this evening hadn’t exactly left my head in world-class negotiating condition. But I knew one thing for certain. If I didn’t get out from under Mab’s bond, I would be dead, or worse than dead, in short order. Better to act and be mistaken than not to act and get casually crushed.
“All right,” I said. “We have a bargain.” When I said the words, a little frisson prickled over the nape of my neck, down the length of my spine. My wounded hand twitched in an aching, painful pang.
Mab closed her eyes, smiling a feline smile with those dark lips, and inclined her head. “Good. Yes.”
You know that look on Wile E. Coyote’s face, when he runs at full steam off the cliff and then realizes what he’s done? He doesn’t look down, but he feels around with one toe, and right then, right before he falls, his face becomes drawn with a primal dread.
That’s what I must have looked like. I know it was pretty much what I felt like. But there was no help for it. Maybe if I didn’t stop to check for the ground underneath my feet, I’d keep going indefinitely. I looked away from Mab and tried to tend to my hand as best I could. It still throbbed, and disinfecting the wound was going to hurt a lot more. I doubted it would need sutures. A small blessing, I guess.
A manila envelope hit my desk. I looked up to see Mab drawing a pair of gloves onto her hands.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“My request,” she replied. “Within are the details of a man’s death. I wish you to vindicate me of it by discovering the identity of his killer and returning what was stolen from him.”
I opened the envelope. Inside was an eight-by-ten glossy black-and-white of a body. An old man lay at the bottom of a flight of stairs, his neck at a sharp angle to his shoulders. He had frizzy white hair, a tweed jacket. Accompanying the picture was an article from the Tribune, headlined LOCAL ARTIST DIES IN MIDNIGHT ACCIDENT.
“Ronald Reuel,” I said, glancing over the article. “I’ve heard of him. Has a studio in Bucktown, I think.”
Mab nodded. “Hailed as a visionary of the American artistic culture. Though I assume they use the term lightly.”
“Creator of worlds of imagination, it says. I guess now that he’s dead, they’ll say all kinds of nice things.” I read over the rest of the article. “The police called it an accident.”
“It was not,” Mab responded.
I looked up at her. “How do you know?”
She smiled.
“And why should you care?” I asked. “It isn’t like the cops are after you.”
“There are powers of judgement other than mortal law. It is enough for you to know that I wish to see justice done,” she said. “Simply that.”
“Uh-huh,” I said, frowning. “You said something was stolen from him. What?”
“You’ll know it.”
I put the picture back in the envelope and left it on my desk. “I’ll think about it.”
Mab assured me, “You will accept this request, Wizard Dresden.”
I scowled at her and set my jaw. “I said I’ll think about it.”
Mab’s cat-eyes glittered, and I saw a few white, white teeth in her smile. She took a pair of dark sunglasses from the pocket of her jacket. “Is it not polite to show a client to the door?”
I glowered. But I got up out of the chair and walked to the door, the Faerie Queen’s heady perfume, the narcotic scent of her enough to make me a little dizzy. I fought it away and tried to keep my scowl in place, opening the door for her with a jerky motion.
“Your hand yet pains you?” she asked.
“What do you think?”
Mab placed her gloved hand on my wounded one, and a sudden spike of sheer, vicious cold shot up through the injury like a frozen scalpel before lancing up my arm, straight toward my heart. It took my breath, and I felt my heart skip a beat, two, before it labored into rhythm again. I gasped and swayed, and only leaning against the door kept me from falling down completely.
“Dammit,” I muttered, trying to keep my voice down. “We had a deal.”
“I agreed not to punish you for refusing me, wizard. I agreed not to punish or harass you by proxy.” Mab smiled. “I did that just for spite.”
I growled. “That isn’t going to make it more likely that I take this case.”
“You will take it, emissary,” Mab said, her voice confident. “Expect to meet your counterpart this evening.”
“What counterpart?”
“As you are Winter’s emissary in this matter, Summer, too, has sought out one to represent her interests.”
“I got plans tonight,” I growled. “And I haven’t taken the case.”
Mab tilted her dark glasses down, cat eyes on mine. “Wizard. Do you know the story of the Fox and Scorpion?”
I shook my head, looking away.
“Fox and Scorpion came to a brook,” Mab murmured, her voice low, sweet. “Wide was the water. Scorpion asked Fox for a ride on his back. Fox said, ‘Scorpion, will you not sting me?’ Scorpion said, ‘If I did, it would mean the death of us both.’ Fox agreed, and Scorpion climbed onto his back. Fox swam, but halfway over, Scorpion struck with his deadly sting. Fox gasped, ‘Fool, you have doomed us both. Why?’ ‘I am a scorpion,’ said Scorpion. ‘It is my nature.” ’
“That’s the story?” I said. “Don’t quit your day job.”
Mab laughed, velvet ice, and it sent another shiver through me. “You will accept this case, wizard. It is what you are. It is your nature.” Then she turned and walked down the hall, aloof, reserved, cold. I glowered after her for a minute before I shut the door.
Maybe I’d been shut away in my lab too long, but Spenser never mentions that the Faerie Queen has a great ass.
So I notice these things. So sue me.
Chapter Four
I leaned against my door with my eyes closed, trying to think. I was scared. Not in that half-pleasant adrenaline-charged way, but quietly scared. Wait-on-the-results-of-medical-tests scared. It’s a rational sort of fear that puts a lawn chair down in the front of your thoughts and brings a cooler of drinks along with it.
I was working for the queen of wicked faeries—well, Queen of Winter, of the Unseelie faeries, at any rate. The Unseelie weren’t universally vicious and evil, any more than the Seelie, the Summer fae, were all kind and wise. They were much like the season for which they had been named—cold, beautiful, pitiless, and entirely without remorse. Only a fool would willingly associate with them.
Not that Mab had given me much of a choice, but technically speaking there had been one. I could have turned her down flat and accepted whatever came.
I chewed on my lip. Given the kind of business I was in, I hadn’t felt the need to spend too much time hunting for a good retirement plan. Wizards can live a long, long time, but most of the ones that do tend to be the kind that stick at home in their study. Not many tossed their gauntlets into as many faces as I had.
I’d been clever a couple of times, lucky a couple of times, and I’d come out ahead of the game so far—but sooner or later the dice were going to come up snake eyes. It was as simple as that, and I knew it.
Fear. Maybe that was why I’d agreed to Mab’s bargain. Susan’s life had been twisted horribly, and that was my fault. I wanted to help her before I went down swinging.
But some little voice in the back of my head told me that I was being awfully noble for someone who had flinched when push had come to shove. The little voice told me that I was making excuses. Some part of me that doesn’t trust much and believes in even less whispered that I had simply been afraid to say no to a being who could probably make me long for death if I denied her.
Either way, it was too late for questions now. I’d made the bargain, for better or worse. If I didn’t want it to end badly, I’d better start figuring out how to get out of it without getting swallowed up in faerie politics. I wouldn’t do that by taking t
he case of Ronald Reuel, I was pretty damn sure. Mab wouldn’t have offered it if she hadn’t thought it would get me further entangled than I already was. Maybe she had me in a metaphysical armlock, but that didn’t mean I was going to jump every time she said “frog.” I could figure out something else. And besides, I had other problems on my mind.
There wasn’t much time to spare before the Council meeting that evening, so I got my things together and got ready to leave. I paused at the door, with that nagging feeling I get when I’m forgetting something. My eyes settled on my stack of unpaid bills and I remembered.
Money. I’d come here to get a case. To make some cash. To pay my bills. Now I was hip-deep in trouble and heading straight out to sea, and I hadn’t gotten a retainer or made one red cent.
I swore at myself and pulled the door shut behind me.
You’d think as long as I was gambling with my soul, I would have thought to get Mab to throw in fifty bucks an hour plus expenses.
I headed out to start taking care of business. Traffic in Chicago can be the usual nightmare of traffic in any large American city, but that afternoon’s was particularly bad. Stuck behind a wreck up ahead, the Beetle turned into an oven, and I spent a while sweating and wishing that I wasn’t too much of a wizard for a decent modern air conditioner to survive. That was one of the hazards of magical talent. Technology doesn’t get along so well when there is a lot of magic flying around. Anything manufactured after World War II or so seemed prone to failure whenever a wizard was nearby. Stuff with microcircuits and electrical components and that kind of paraphernelia seemed to have the most trouble, but even simpler things, like the Beetle’s air conditioner, usually couldn’t last long.
Running late, I dropped by my apartment and waded through the wreckage looking for my gear for the meeting. I couldn’t find everything, and I didn’t have time to get a shower. The refrigerator was empty, and all I could find to eat was a half-wrapped candy bar I’d started and never finished. I stuffed it into my pocket, then headed for the meeting of the White Council of Wizardry.
Where I was sure to cut a devastating swath with my couth, hygiene, and natural grace.
I pulled into the parking lot across the street from McCormick Place Complex, one of the largest convention centers in the world. The White Council had rented one of the smaller buildings for the meeting. The sun hung low in the sky, growing larger and redder as it dropped toward the horizon.
I parked the Beetle in the relative cool of the lowest level of the parking garage, got out of the car, and walked around to the front to open the trunk. I was shrugging into my robe when I heard a car coming in, engine rumbling and rattling. A black ’37 Ford pickup, complete with rounded fenders and wooden-slat sides on the bed, pulled into the empty space next to mine. There wasn’t any rust on the old machine, and it gleamed with fresh wax. A weathered shotgun rode on top of a wooden rack against the rear wall of the passenger compartment, and in the slot beneath it sat a worn old wizard’s staff. The Ford crunched to a halt with a kind of dinosaur solidity, and a moment later the engine died.
The driver, a short, stocky man in a white T-shirt and blue denim overalls, opened the door and hopped down from the truck with the brisk motions of a busy man. His head was bald except for a fringe of downy white tufts, and a bristling white beard covered his mouth and jowls. He slammed the door shut with thoughtless strength, grinned, and boomed, “Hoss! Good to see you again.”
“Ebenezar,” I responded, if without the same earringing volume. I felt myself answer his grin with my own, and stepped over to him to shake his offered hand. I squeezed hard, purely out of self-defense. He had a grip that could crush a can of spinach. “You’d better take the shotgun down. Chicago PD is picky about people with guns.”
Ebenezar snorted and said, “I’m too old to go worrying about every fool thing.”
“What are you doing out of Missouri, sir? I didn’t think you came to Council meetings.”
He let out a barking laugh. “The last time I didn’t, they saddled me with this useless teenage apprentice. Now I don’t hardly dare miss one. They might make him move in again.”
I laughed. “I wasn’t that bad, was I?”
He snorted. “You burned down my barn, Hoss. And I never did see that cat again. He just lit out and didn’t come back after what you did with the laundry.”
I grinned. Way back when, I’d been a stupid sixteen-year-old orphan who had killed his former teacher in what amounted to a magical duel. I’d gotten lucky, or it would have been me that had been burned to a briquette instead of old Justin. The Council has Seven Laws of Magic, and the first one is Thou Shalt Not Kill. When you break it, they execute you, no questions asked.
But some of the other wizards had thought I deserved lenience, and there was a precedent for using lethal magic in self-defense against the black arts. I’d been put on a kind of horrible probation instead, with any further infraction against the Laws punishable by immediate summary judgement. But I’d also been sixteen, and legally a minor, which meant I had to go someplace—preferably where the Council could keep an eye on me and where I could learn better control of my powers.
Ebenezar McCoy had lived in Hog Hollow, Missouri, for as long as anyone could remember—a couple of centuries at least. After my trial, the Council packed me off to his farm and put him in charge of the remainder of my education. Education, to Ebenezar, meant a lot of hard work on the farm during the day, studying in the evening, and getting a good night’s sleep.
I didn’t learn much magic from him, but I’d gotten some more important stuff. I’d learned more about patience. About creating something, making something worthwhile out of my labor. And I’d found as much peace as a teenager could expect. It had been a good place for me then, and he’d given me the kind of respect and distance I’d needed. I would always be grateful.
Ebenezar frowned past me, squinting at the Beetle. I followed his gaze and realized that my car looked like it had been pounded with bloody hailstones. The toad blood had dried to dark caramel brown, except where my windshield wipers had swept it away. Ebenezar looked back at me, lifting his eyebrows.
“Rain of toads,” I explained.
“Ah.” He rubbed his jaw and squinted at me and then at the cloth wrapped around my hand. “And that?”
“Accident in the office. It’s been a long day.”
“Uh-huh. You know, you don’t look so good, Hoss.” He looked up at me, his eyes steady, frowning. I didn’t meet the look. We’d traded a soulgaze, years ago, so I wasn’t afraid of it happening again. I just didn’t want to look at the old man and see disappointment there. “I hear you been getting into some trouble up here.”
“Some,” I admitted.
“You all right?”
“I’ll make it.”
“Uh-huh. I’m told the senior Council is pretty upset,” he said. “Could mean trouble for you, Hoss.”
“Yeah. I figured.”
He sighed and shook his head, looking me up and down, nose wrinkling. “You don’t exactly look like a shining example of young wizardry. And you’re not going to make much of an impression wearing that.”
I scowled, defensive, and draped the stole of rich blue silk over my head. “Hey, I’m supposed to wear a robe. We all are.”
Ebenezar gave me a wry look and turned to the pickup. He dragged a suit carrier out of the back and pulled out a robe of opulent dark fabric, folding it over one arm. “Somehow I don’t think a plaid flannel bathrobe is what they had in mind.”
I tied the belt of my old bathrobe and tried to make the stole look like it should go with it. “My cat used my good robe as a litter box. Like I said, it’s been a long day, sir.”
He grunted and took his stumpy old wizard’s staff off the gun rack. Then he drew out his scarlet stole and draped it over the robe. “Too hot to wear this damn thing out here. I’ll put it on inside.” He looked up, pale blue eyes glittering as he swept his gaze around the parking garage.
I frowned at him and tilted my head. “We’re late. Shouldn’t we be getting to the meeting?”
“In a minute. Some people want to talk before we close the circle.” He glanced aside at me and said more quietly, “Senior Council.”
I drew in a sharp breath. “Why do they want to talk to us?”
“Not us. You. Because I asked them to, boy. People are scared. If the Senior Council allows things to come to an open vote of the entire Council, it could go badly for you. So I wanted some of them to get a chance to meet you for themselves before they started making choices that could get you hurt.”
Ebenezar leaned back against his truck and folded his arms across his belly, bowing his head with his eyes squinted almost completely shut. He said nothing more. Nothing about him betrayed any tension, from the set of his bull neck and solid shoulders to the stillness of his gnarled, work-hardened hands. But I felt it in him, somewhere.
I said quietly, “You’re going out on a limb for me, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “Some, maybe.”
I felt the anger run hot in my belly, and I tightened the muscles of my jaw. But I made an effort to keep my voice even. Ebenezar had been more than my teacher. He’d been my mentor at a time when I hadn’t had anything else left to me. He’d helped me when a lot of other people wanted to kick me while I was down—or, more accurately, decapitate me while I was down. I owed him my life in more than one sense.
It would be wrong for me to lose my temper, no matter how tired or hurt I was. Besides, the old man could probably kick my ass. So I managed to tone my answer down to, “What the hell do you think you’re doing, sir? I am not your apprentice anymore. I can look out for myself.”
He didn’t miss the anger. Guess I’m not much of a poker player. He looked up at me and said, “I’m trying to help you, boy.”
“I’ve got all the help I can stand already,” I told him. “I’ve got vampires breathing down my neck, toads falling from the sky, I’m about to get evicted from everywhere, I’m late to the Council meeting, and I am not going to stand around out here and suck up to members of the Senior Council to lobby their vote.”