Turn Coat

by Butcher, Jim

  Thomas frowned and nodded. “Where?”

  I began to answer when the tempo of the beat suddenly changed below, and a wave of frenzied cries rolled up, deafening despite any soundproofing. A second after that, an odd frisson crawled across my nerves, and I felt my heart pound a little more quickly, and the earlier demands my body had been making returned in a rush.

  Across from me, Justine shivered and her eyes slid almost completely closed. She took a deep breath, and her nipples tightened against the rubber cat suit. Her hips shifted in a small, unconscious movement, brushing against Thomas’s thigh.

  My brother’s eyes flashed from light grey to cold, hard silver for a second, before he narrowed them and rose, carefully disentangling himself from Justine. He turned to face the dance floor, his shoulders tense.

  I followed his example. “What is it?”

  “Trouble,” he said, and looked over his shoulder at me. “Family’s come to visit.”

  Chapter Nine

  Thomas stared hard at the floor below, and then nodded once, as if in recognition. “Harry,” he said in a steady, quiet voice, “stay out of this.”

  “Stay out of what?” I asked.

  He turned to look at me, his expression inhumanly remote. “It’s family business. It won’t involve you. The House has given orders that wizards are not to be molested without clearance. If you don’t get involved, I won’t have to worry about you.”

  “What?” I said. “Thomas . . .”

  “Just let me handle it,” he said, his voice hard.

  I was going to answer him when the vampire entered the room.

  It was one of those sensations you have trouble remembering afterward—like the last moments of the dream you have just before waking. You know that once you’re outside the dream, you’re going to forget—and you can’t believe you could lose something so significant, so undeniably tangible.

  I turned to look the second she entered—just like everyone else in the room.

  She wore white, of course. A white dress, a simple shift made of some kind of glistening silken fabric, which fell to the top of her thighs. She was at least six feet tall, more so in the partially transparent shoes she wore. Her skin was pale and perfect, her hair dark and shining with highlights that changed color in the beat of the strobe lighting of the club. Her face was perfect beauty that remained unmarred by the obvious arrogance in her expression, and her body could have been used on recruiting posters for wet dreams.

  She descended to the dance floor and crossed to the stairways and catwalks with a predator’s easy motion, each stride making her hips roll and shoulders sway, somehow in time to the music, and far more graceful than the efforts of the sweating dancers, more sensual than the frantic lovers.

  At the foot of the first stairway, she came to a young man in leather pants and the scraps of a shirt that looked like it had been torn to pieces by ardent admirers. Without hesitation, she pushed him up against the railing beside the stairway and pressed her body up against his.

  She twined her arms slowly around his neck and kissed him. A kiss, and that was all—but apparently no one told the young man that. From his reaction, you’d have thought that she’d mounted him then and there. Her lips were sealed to his, their tongues lashing one another, for maybe a minute. Then she turned away with that same precise grace, and began walking up the stairs—slowly, so that every shift and change of muscle in her perfectly formed legs danced in mesmerizing ripples beneath her soft white skin.

  The young man simply melted onto the floor, muscles twitching, his eyes closed. I didn’t think he was actually aware that she had left.

  The woman had every eye in the building and she knew it.

  It wasn’t an enormous event, the way she took the attention of everyone there. It wasn’t a single large simultaneous, significant motion when everyone turned to look. There was no sudden silence, no deepening stillness. That would have been bad enough.

  Her influence was a lot scarier than that.

  It was simply a fact, like gravity, that everyone’s attention should be directed to her. Every person there, men and women alike, glanced up, or tracked her movement obliquely with their eyes, or paused for half a beat in their . . . conversations. For most of them it was an entirely unconscious act. They had no idea that their minds had already been ensnared.

  And as I realized that, I realized that mine was in danger, too.

  It was a real effort to close my eyes and remind myself of where I was. I could feel the succubus’s aura, like the silken brush of cobwebs against my eyelashes, something tingling and delicious and fluttering that swayed up my legs and through my groin on its way to my brain.

  It was only a promise, a whisper to the flesh—but it was a good whisper. I had to make an effort to wall it away from my thoughts, until suddenly reason reasserted itself, and that fluttering haze froze and cracked and blew away under the chill wind of sensible fear.

  When I opened my eyes, the woman was stalking toward us along that last catwalk, slithering nearer in her thin white dress as she mounted the last few stairs. She paused there, letting us look at her, knowing what effect she was having. Even on guard against it, I could feel the subtle sweetness of her presence calling out to me, whispering that I should relax and let my eyes run over her for a while.

  She turned her cornflower blue eyes to me for a moment, and her mouth parted, spreading slowly into a smile that shrunk my pants about three sizes in as many seconds.

  “Cousin Thomas,” she purred. “Still noble and starving, I see.”

  “Madeline,” Thomas replied, a small smile showing white, perfect teeth. “Still undisciplined and blatant, I see.”

  Madeline Raith’s mouth and eyes reacted in completely different ways to my half brother’s remark. Her smile widened into a beauty-pageant expression, wide and immobile, but her eyes narrowed and went completely white, the pale blue vanishing from her irises. She looked from Thomas to Justine.

  “Lara’s little pet mortal,” Madeline said. “I wondered where you were running off to. Now I find you meeting with your old flame and . . .” Her eyes slid to me. “The enemy.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Justine replied. Though her voice was calm, her cheeks were bright pink, her eyes dilated. “I came to go over the books, the way I do every week.”

  “But this time you wore perfume,” Madeline said. “And a rather provocative ensemble, not that you don’t do it justice, darling. I find it”—her tongue touched her upper lip—“interesting.”

  “Madeline,” Thomas said, in a tone of exaggerated patience, “please go away.”

  “I have every right to be here,” she murmured. It didn’t seem right that she should be able to keep her voice so maddeningly soft and sensual over the beat of the club’s music. She turned to me and took a few steps my way, with her full attention on me.

  I suddenly felt like a teenager—a little bit afraid, a whole lot excited, and filled with so many hormones demanding so many inexplicable things that I nearly lost the ability to focus my eyes.

  She stopped just out of the reach of my hand. “Don’t mind my cousin’s horrible manners. The infamous Harry Dresden hardly needs an introduction.” She looked me up and down and twined a finger through a tendril of dark hair. “How could I come to Chicago so many times without meeting you?”

  “But I’ve seen you,” I said. My voice was a little rough, but it worked.

  “Oh?” she asked, the sexy smile widening. “Are you the sort who likes to watch, Harry?”

  “You betcha,” I said. “And that time, I was watching Who Framed Roger Rabbit?”

  Her smile faltered a fraction.

  “You are Jessica Rabbit, right?” I asked. “All slinky and overblown and obvious?”

  The smile vanished.

  “Because I know I’ve seen you somewhere, and gosh, I’ll be embarrassed if it turns out that you were the evil princess from Buck Rogers instead.”

  “What?” she said
. “Buck what?”

  I gave her my best forced smile. “Hey, don’t get me wrong. You do that ensemble justice. But you’re trying too hard.” I leaned a little closer and fake-whispered, “Lara does more for me just sitting in a chair than you did with your whole entrance.”

  Madeline Raith became as still and cold as a statue of a furious goddess, and the air temperature around us dropped several degrees.

  I suddenly sensed Thomas’s presence beside me, and found my brother had leaned back against the railing on his elbows, his hands loose and relaxed. He was standing just a tiny bit closer to Madeline than I was.

  “Madeline,” he said in the precise same tone he’d used a moment before, “go away before I beat you to death with my bare hands.”

  Madeline jerked her head back as if Thomas had slapped her. “What?”

  “You heard me,” he said calmly. “It isn’t quite cricket as family squabbles go, I know, but I’m tired, I don’t give a fuck what you or anyone else in the House thinks of me, and I don’t respect you enough to play games with you, even if I was in the mood.”

  “How dare you?” Madeline snarled. “How dare you threaten me? Lara will have the skin flayed from your body for this.”

  “Oh?” Thomas gave her a wintry smile. “After what you projected at the wizard, he’d be well within his rights to burn you right down to your overpriced shoes.”

  “I never—”

  “And despite the orders handed down from the King,” Thomas said, shaking his head. “Lara’s getting tired of cleaning up after you, Mad. She’d probably buy me a new set of steak knives if I found a way to make her life a bit less trying.”

  Madeline laughed. It reminded me of glass breaking. “And do you think she loves you any better, cousin mine? You refuse to appear with the House at meetings of the Court, and spend your time among the kine, grooming them and bringing shame upon your family. At least tell me you are planning to take the beasts to some sort of auction.”

  “You aren’t capable of understanding why I do what I do,” Thomas said.

  “Who would want to?” she retorted. “You’re as much a degenerate as any of those fools in Skavis and Malvora.”

  Thomas’s mouth ticked at the corner, but that was all the reaction he gave her. “Go away, Madeline. Last warning.”

  “Two members of the oldest bloodlines in Raith murdering each other?” Madeline said, sneering. “The White King could not tolerate such a divisive act and you know it.” She turned away from Thomas and walked toward Justine. “You’re bluffing,” she said over her shoulder. “Besides. We haven’t heard from our little pink rose yet.”

  Her voice sank to a throaty purr, and Justine quivered in place, seemingly unable to move as Madeline approached.

  “Pretty Justine.” Madeline put a hand on Justine’s shoulder and slid a single fingertip down the slope of one breast. “I don’t generally enjoy does as much as some, darling, but even I find the thought of taking you delicious.”

  “You c-can’t touch me,” Justine stammered. She was breathing faster.

  “Not yet,” Madeline said. “But there’s not enough will left in your pretty little head to control yourself for long.” Madeline stepped closer, sliding her hand along Justine’s waist. “Some night, perhaps I’ll come to you with some beautiful young buck and whisper pretty things to you until you’re mad to be taken. And after he has made use of you, little doe, I’ll take you in one big bite.” She licked her lips. “I’ll take you whole and make you scream how much you love it as it happen—”

  Thomas broke a chair over Madeline’s head.

  It was particularly impressive, given that all the chairs on the balcony were made of metal.

  It happened fast, during an eye blink. One instant he was standing beside me, tightening with anger, and the next there were popped rivets zinging everywhere and Madeline had been crushed to the floor of the balcony.

  The air went cold. Thomas dropped the ruined chair. Madeline bounced up from the floor and threw a blow at Thomas’s jaw. He hunched and twisted, a boxer’s defense, and took it on the shoulder with a grunt of pain. Then he seized her ankle and slammed her in a half circle, smashing a 36-24-36 dent into the drywall.

  Madeline cried out and her limbs went loose. Thomas swung her in another arc that brought her crashing down onto the low coffee table between the couches. She lay there and let out a single choked gasp, her eyes unfocused. Without pausing, my brother snatched both chopsticks from Justine’s hair, letting the white-silver locks tumble down her back.

  Then, in two sharp, swift motions, he slammed the chopsticks through Madeline’s wrists and into the table beneath them, pinning her like a butterfly to a card.

  “You’re right of course,” he snarled. “Lara couldn’t ignore one member of the family murdering another. It would make the King look weak.” His hand closed over Madeline’s face, and he pulled her head up toward his, making her arms strain at a painful angle. “I was bluffing.”

  He shoved her back down against the table. “Of course,” he said, “you’re family. Families don’t murder one another.” He looked up at Justine and said, “They share.”

  She met his eyes. A very small, very hard smile graced Justine’s features.

  “You wanted to taste her,” Thomas said, his fingers twining with Justine’s rubber-clad ones. “Well, Madeline. Be my guest.”

  Justine leaned over and kissed Madeline Raith’s forehead, her silken silver hair falling to veil them both.

  The vampire screamed.

  The sound was lost in the pounding rhythm and flashing lights.

  Justine lifted her head a few seconds later, and swept her hair slowly down the length of Madeline’s form. The vampire writhed and screamed again, while Thomas held her pinned to the table. Wherever Justine’s hair glided over exposed fleshed, the skin sizzled and burned, blackening in some places, forming blisters and welts in others. She left a trail of ruin down one of Madeline’s legs and then rose together with Thomas, two bodies making one motion.

  Madeline Raith’s face was a ruin of burn marks, and the imprint of Justine’s soft mouth was a perfect black brand on pale flesh in the center of her forehead. She lay on the table, still pinned by the chopsticks, and quivered in jerking little motions, gasping and breathless with the pain.

  Thomas and Justine walked, hand in hand, to the stairs leading down from our platform. I followed them.

  They passed beneath an air-conditioning outlet, and a few strands of Justine’s hair blew against Thomas’s naked arm and chest. Small bright lines of scarlet appeared. Thomas didn’t flinch.

  I walked over to them and passed Justine a pair of pencils, taken from my coat pocket. She took them with a nod of thanks, and quickly bound up her hair again. I looked over my shoulder as she did.

  Madeline Raith lay helpless and gasping—but her white eyes burned with hate.

  Thomas took his T-shirt from where he’d stowed it on a belt loop, and put it back on. Then he slid his arms around Justine again and pulled her against his chest, holding her close.

  “Will you be all right?” he asked.

  Justine nodded, her eyes closed. “I’ll call the House. Lara will send someone for her.”

  “You leave her there and it’s going to make trouble,” I told him.

  He shrugged. “I couldn’t get away with killing her. But our House has rather stern views on poaching.” Something hard and hot entered his eyes. “Justine is mine. Madeline had to be shown that. She deserved it.”

  Justine clung a little bit tighter to him. He returned the gesture.

  We all started down the stairs together, and I was glad to be leaving Zero.

  “Still,” I said. “Seeing her like that, I feel like maybe somebody went too far. I feel a little bit bad for her.”

  Thomas arched an eyebrow and glanced back at me. “You do?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I pursed my lips thoughtfully. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that Jessica Rabbit thing.”


  Chapter Ten

  The hot summer night outside Zero felt ten degrees cooler and a million times cleaner than what we’d left behind us. Thomas turned sharply to the right and walked until he’d found a spot of shadow between streetlights, and leaned one shoulder against the wall of the building. He bowed his head, and stayed that way for a minute, then two.

  I waited. I didn’t need to ask my brother what was wrong. The display of strength and power he’d used on Madeline had cost him energy—energy that other vampires gained by feeding on victims, as Madeline had done to that poor sap inside. He wasn’t upset by what had happened in Zero. He was hungry.

  Thomas’s struggle against his own hunger was complicated, difficult, and maybe impossible to sustain. That never stopped him from trying, though. The rest of the Raith family thought he was insane.

  But I got it.

  He walked back over to me a minute later, his cool features distant and untouchable as Antarctic mountains.

  He fell into pace beside me as we began walking down the street toward the lot where he’d parked his car.

  “Ask you a question?” I said.

  He nodded.

  “The White Court only get burned when they try to feed on someone touched by true love, right?”

  “It isn’t as simple as that,” Thomas said quietly. “It’s got to do with how much control the hunger has over you when you touch.”

  I grunted. “But when they feed, the hunger’s in control.”

  Thomas nodded slowly.

  “So why’d Madeline try to feed on Justine? She had to know it would hurt her.”

  “Same reason I do,” Thomas said. “She can’t help it. It’s reflex.”

  I frowned. “I don’t get it.”

  He was quiet long enough to make me think he wasn’t going to say anything, before he finally spoke. “Justine and I were together for years. And she . . . means a lot to me. When I’m near her, I can’t think about anything else but her. And when I touch her, everything in me wants to be nearer to her.”

  “Including your hunger,” I said quietly.