by Jim Butcher
“Gard?” I asked, without looking over my shoulder. The valkyrie had an incredible ability to resist and recover from injury.
“Be sore for a while,” she said, the words slurred. “Give me a few minutes.”
“Justine, perhaps you will set my arm and splint it,” I said. “We will need to abandon this renovation, I’m afraid, Gard. Where’s the thermite?”
“In your upstairs office closet, right where you left it,” she said, in a very slightly aggrieved tone.
“Be a dear and burn down the building,” I said.
She appeared beside my desk, looking bruised, exhausted, and functional. She lifted both eyebrows. “Was that a joke?”
“Apparently,” I said. “Doubtless the result of triumph and adrenaline.”
“My word,” she said. She looked startled.
“Get moving,” I told her. “Make the fire look accidental. I need to contact the young lady’s patron so that she can be delivered safely back into her hands. Call Doctor Schulman as well. Tell him that Mr. Hendricks and I will be visiting him shortly.” I pursed my lips. “And steak, I think. I could use a good steak. The Pump Room should do for the three of us, eh? Ask them to stay open an extra half an hour.”
Gard showed me her teeth in a flash. “Well,” she said. “It’s no mead hall. But it will do.”
~
I put my house in order. In the end, it took less than half an hour. The troubleshooters made sure the formorian creatures were dragged inside, then vanished. Mag’s body had been bagged and transferred, to be returned to his watery kin, along with approximately a quarter of a million dollars in bullion, the price required in the Accords for the weregild of a person of Mag’s stature.
Justine was ready to meet a car that was coming to pick her up, and Hendricks was already on the way to Schulman’s attentions. He’d seemed fine by the time he left, growling at Gard as she fussed over him.
I looked around the office and nodded. “We know the defense plan has some merit,” I said. I hefted the dragoon pistol. “I’ll need more of those bullets.”
“I was unconscious for three weeks after scribing the rune for that one,” Gard replied.
“To say nothing of the fact that the bullets themselves are rare. That one killed a man named Nelson at Trafalgar.”
“How do you know?”
“I took it out of him,” she said. “Men of his caliber are few and far between. I’ll see what I can do.” She glanced at Justine. “Sir?”
“Not just yet,” I said. “I will speak with her alone for a moment, please.”
She nodded, giving Justine a look that was equal parts curiosity and warning. Then she departed.
I got up and walked over to the girl. She was holding the child against her against her again. The little girl had dropped into an exhausted sleep.
“So,” I said quietly. “Lara Raith sent you to Mag’s people. He happened to abduct you. You happened to escape from him—despite the fact that he seemed to be holding other prisoners perfectly adequately—and you left carrying the child. And, upon emerging from Lake Michigan, you happened to be nearby, so you came straight here.”
“Yes,” Justine said quietly.
“Coincidences, coincidences,” I said. “Put the child down.”
Her eyes widened in alarm.
I stared at her until she obeyed.
My right arm was splinted and in a sling. With my left hand, I reached out and flipped open her suit jacket, over her left hip, where she’d been clutching the child all evening.
There was an envelope in a plastic baggie protruding from the jacket’s interior pocket. I took it.
She made a small sound of protest, and aborted it partway.
I opened the baggie and the envelope and scanned over the paper inside.
“These are account numbers,” I said quietly. “Security passwords. Stolen from Mag’s home, I suppose?”
She looked up at me with very wide eyes.
“Dear child,” I said. “I am a criminal. One very good way to cover up one crime is to commit another, more obvious one.” I glanced down at the sleeping child again. “Using a child to cover your part of the scheme. Quite cold-blooded, Justine.”
“I freed all of Mag’s prisoners to cover up the theft of his records at my lady’s bidding,” she said quietly. “The child was… not part of the plan.”
“Children frequently aren’t,” I said.
“I took her out on my own,” she said. “She’s free of that place. She will stay that way.”
“To be raised among the vampires?” I asked. “Such a lovely child will surely go far.”
Justine grimaced and looked away. “She was too small to swim out on her own. I couldn’t leave her.”
I stared at the young woman for a long moment. Then I said, “You might consider speaking to Father Forthill at St. Mary of the Angels. The Church appears to have some sort of program to place those endangered by the supernatural into hiding. I do not recommend you mention my name as a reference, but perhaps he could be convinced to help the child.”
She blinked at me, several times. Then she said, quietly, “You, sir, are not very much like I thought you were.”
“Nor are you. Agent Justine.” I took a deep breath and regarded the child again. “At least we accomplished something today.” I smiled at Justine. “Your ride should be here by now. You may go.”
She opened her mouth and reached for the envelope.
I slipped it into my pocket. “Do give Lara my regards. And tell her that the next time she sends you out to steal honey, she should find someone else to kill the bees.” I gave her a faint smile. “That will be all.”
Justine looked at me. Then her lips quivered up into a tiny, amused smile. She bowed her head to me, collected the child, and walked out, her steps light.
I debated putting a bullet in her head, but decided against it. She had information about my defenses which could leave them vulnerable—and more to the point, she knew that they were effective. If she should speak of today’s events to Dresden…
Well. The wizard would immediately recognize that the claymores, the running water and the magic-defense-piercing bullet had not been put into place to counter Mag or his odd folk at all.
They were there to kill Harry Dresden.
And they worked. Mag had proven that. An eventual confrontation with Dresden was inevitable—but murdering Justine would guarantee it happened immediately, and I wasn’t ready for that, not until I had rebuilt the defenses in the new location.
Besides. The young woman had rules of her own. I could respect that.
I would test myself against Dresden in earnest, one day—or he against me. Until then, I had to gather as many resources to myself as possible. And when the day of reckoning came, I had to make sure it happened in a place where, despite his powers, he would no longer have the upper hand.
Like everything else.
Location, location, location.
DEATH WARMED OVER
~
by Rachel Caine
I hate raising the dead on a work night.
My boss Sam Twist knows that, and so it was a surprise when I got the email on a Monday, telling me he would need a full resurrection on Thursday.
“Short turnaround, genius,” I muttered. It took days to brew the necessary potions, and I’d have to set aside the entire Thursday from dusk until dawn for the resurrection itself. Not good, because I knew I couldn’t exactly blow off Friday. I had meetings at the day job.
Sam, who ran the local booking service for witches, was usually somewhat sympathetic to my day job/night job balancing act, mostly because I was the best resurrection witch he had—not that being the best in the business exactly pays the bills. It was a little like being the best piccolo player in the orchestra—it took skill, and specialty, and not a lot of people could do it, but it didn’t exactly present a lot of major money-making opportunities.
Then again, at least resurrections wer
e a fairly steady business. Some of the other types of witches—and we were all very specialized—got a whole lot less. It was a funny thing, but so far as I could tell, there had never been witches who could do what the folklore claimed; those of us who were real worked with potions, not words. We couldn’t sling spells and lightning. Our jobs—whatever our particular focus—took time and patience, not to mention a high tolerance for nasty ingredients.
I contemplated Sam’s message. If I’d wanted to, I could have turned down the job—I wasn’t hurting for money at the moment. Still. There was something in the terse way he’d phrased it that made me wonder.
So was I taking the job, or not? If I said yes, prep needed to start immediately after work. Part of my mind ran through the things I was going to need, and matched it against the mental stock list I always kept in my brain. The bowls were clean and ready, I’d put them through the dishwasher and a good ritual scrub with sacred herbs just a week ago. I’d need to put a fresh blessing on the athame. I had most of the other things—rock salt, sulphur, attar of roses, ambergris, and a whole bunch of slimier ingredients. I might be running low on bottled semen, but the truth was, you could always get more of that.
I fidgeted in my chair as I stared at the message. Sam wasn’t telling me much—just timing and a dollar amount, which while considerable wasn’t enough to pay my mortgage. On their own, my fingers typed my reply. I might be interested. Who’s the client?
I rarely asked, because most of the time that fell under need-to-know, and I didn’t. So long as the client paid Sam, and Sam paid me, we were all good. But this time—this time I felt like it was worth the question.
I went back to my regular work—tonight, that meant straightening out a worksheet the experts in accounting had completely trashed—and was a little surprised when Sam’s emailed reply came so quickly. Then again, it was a short answer.
P.D. Police Department.
My hackles went way up. The police didn’t part with their money willingly for resurrections. The testimony of the resurrected had been thrown out as inadmissible five years ago, and the land-office rush for witches to bring back the dead had dried up just as fast. Some of the richer cities still managed one or two resurrections a year for particularly cold cases, just to generate leads, but I hadn’t seen one in Austin for a while.
So if the Thin Blue Line was knocking, something was up, and it was big. Very big.
Why? I wrote back, and hit SEND.
It didn’t take long to get my answer. Four minutes, to be exact, give or take a few seconds, until my cheery little you have mail chime dinged.
They need a disposable, he wrote, and this time, I sat all the way back in my chair. And rolled my chair back from the computer. Tried to talk them out of it. Told them you wouldn’t want in. You can pass on it, H.
In technical terms, a disposable is a long-term resurrection—counterintuitive, but that’s police parlance for you. Most resurrections last no more than a few minutes, maybe an hour—you really don’t need that much time to do whatever needs to be done. It’s mainly finding out the name of their killer, or where they stashed the family silver, or where the bodies are buried if your deceased soul is the one who buried them in the first place. Holding them longer is brutally hard, and gets harder the longer it goes on. When a police department requests a long-term resurrection, it’s almost always specific—there’s a situation that requires a particular person to resolve, or a particular skill. When the cops ask for a disposable resurrection, well, you know it’s going to be bad.
I knew it better than anyone.
I typed my reply back in words as terse as Sam’s had been to me. Bet your ass I’m passing.
I hit send, feeling only a little wistful twinge of regret at all that virtual money disappearing from my future, and began to shut my computer down.
I’d just picked up my purse when my cell phone rang, and I wasn’t too surprised when the screen’s display told me it was Sam.
“Hey,” I said, shouldered my bag, and headed for the elevators. “Don’t try to talk me out of it. I don’t do disposables. Not anymore.”
“I know that,” Sam said. He had a deep, smoky voice, the kind that implied a cigarette-and-whiskey lifestyle. I didn’t know that for sure; for all I knew, Sam might have lived prim as a preacher. Sam and I didn’t exactly hang out; he kept himself to himself, mostly. “Not trying to talk you out of it, H., believe me. I’m glad you turned it down.”
“Shut up,” said a third voice, male, grim, and completely unfamiliar.
“Who the hell is that?” I blurted. “Sam—”
“Detective Daniel Prieto.”
“Sam, you conferenced me?” He’d never put me on the spot before.
“Hey, they’re the cops. I got no choice!”
“Hear me out.” Prieto’s voice rode right over Sam’s. “I’m told you’re the best there is, and I need the best. Besides, you have a prior relationship with the—subject.”
My mouth dried up, and I stopped in mid-stride to lean against the wall. A few coworkers passed me and gave me curious looks; I couldn’t imagine what was on my face, but it must have been both alarming and offputting. Nobody stopped. I tried to speak, but nothing was coming out of my mouth.
“Holly? You there?” That was Sam. I could still hear Prieto breathing.
“Yeah,” I finally managed to say. “Who?” Not that there was really much of a question. I only had a relationship with one dead man. He was the only disposable I’d ever brought back.
And Prieto, right on cure, said, “Andrew Toland.”
I felt hot and sick, and I needed to sit down. Never a chair around when you need one. I continued walking, slowly, one shoulder gliding against the wall for balance. “Sam, you can’t agree to this. You can’t let them do it again. Not to him.”
“What can I say? I’m just the dispatcher, H. You don’t want to take it on, that’s just fine.” The words sounded apologetic, but Sam didn’t do empathy. None of us did. It didn’t serve us well, in this line of work.
Cops had the same problem. “I have to tell you, if you don’t agree, we’re still bringing him back. It’ll just be somebody else running him. You said this Carlotta is next on the list, right, Mr. Twist? She’s the one who recommended this particular guy be brought back, right?”
“Lottie?” I blurted it out before I could stop myself. No. Oh, no. Carlotta Flores and I went back a long time, and not one minute of it was pleasant. In resurrections, we prided ourselves on detachment, but Lottie took pleasure in the pain that her resurrected souls felt; she enjoyed keeping them chained into their flesh. I’d reported her dozens of times to the review board, but there was never any real evidence. Only my own word for what I’d seen.
The dead can’t testify.
It was her fondest wish to run a disposable, and it was the very last thing she should ever do. God, no. The idea of letting her handle Andrew’s resurrection was more than I could take.
Detective Prieto somehow knew that, but then again, I supposed he’d done his homework. He’d probably gotten it from Sam, the chatty bastard.
“That a yes, Miss Caldwell?” Prieto asked. Sam was distinctly silent.
“Yes,” I gritted out. “Dammit to hell.”
“Right. Let’s get to business. City morgue, Thursday at dusk, you know the drill. Come loaded, H.” Sam was back to brisk and rough again, his brief moment of empathy blown away like feathers in a hurricane.
“Send me the details.” I sounded resigned. I didn’t feel resigned. I felt manipulated, defeated, and enraged.
“Will do,” Sam said. I heard a click. Detective Prieto had signed off without bothering to say goodbye. “Better you than Lottie, I guess. Though look, if you just don’t show up, what’re they going to do? Arrest you?”
“They’ll let Lottie do it instead. You know I can’t let that happen, Sam.”
“Kind of guessed, yeah.”
“Why him? God, Sam—”
“Do
n’t know. Lottie had some kind of chat with Prieto, next thing I know, he’s telling me it’s Toland he needs. Maybe Lottie told him about how tough the son of a bitch was. Is.”
Maybe Lottie just wanted to yank my chain. Equally possible.
“Holly? Sorry about—”
“Yeah. Whatever. See you.” I folded up the phone. I couldn’t take any more of Sam’s vaguely false apology. He knew my agreement was final. You don’t become a witch making false promises. The stakes are far too high.
I must have punched the elevator buttons properly, because next thing I knew I was in the lobby, walking toward the parking garage. I couldn’t feel my feet, and wherever my head was, it wasn’t a good place. I went to the car on autopilot, got inside, and bent over to rest my aching, sweating forehead on the steering wheel.
My name is Holly Anne Caldwell, and I’m a licensed seventh-generation witch, with a specialty in raising the dead.
And I wished, right at this moment, that I was one of them.
~
I buried myself deep in prep work. It took up most of my nights, and I sleepwalked through my day job until Thursday.
Late Thursday afternoon, I went to raise the dead.
I knew the way to the morgue all too well. I had a parking pass, and the guard at the door knew me by sight. He still checked me against the list and opened up my heavy case to check the contents. All above board, along with my certification papers from the State of Texas. I’d dressed professionally—a nice dark suit, very funeral home-friendly, with sensibly heeled shoes. Moderate makeup. Light perfume.
It helps, because I do run into the odd person who still believes witches come with green faces, cackling, and cauldrons.
The guard hooked me up with a temporary ID badge and escorted me back to the—excuse the phrase—guts of the morgue, which always reminded me of a large-scale industrial kitchen, with all the chrome work surfaces and sharp instruments neatly arrayed on racks. Once there, he checked with the coroner’s assistant, then backtracked me to a room that was normally used for family viewings. Nobody had bothered to dress it out for this occasion, so it had a certain creepy sterility to it that unsettled me.