Turn Coat

by Butcher, Jim

  “Well, I’m sick of him,” spat Madeline. “Did you find out where he’s got Morgan hidden?”

  “Maybe you didn’t hear, love, but I spent my day chained to a chair getting popped in the mouth.”

  Madeline laughed, a cold, mocking sound. “There are places you’d have to pay for that.”

  “Not bloody likely.”

  “Did you find Morgan?”

  Binder growled. “Dresden had him stashed in rental storage for a bit, but he hared off before the cops could pick him up. Probably took him into the Nevernever. They could be anywhere.”

  “Not if Dresden is back in Chicago,” Madeline said. “He’d never let himself be too far from Morgan.”

  “So check his bloody apartment,” Binder said.

  “Don’t be an idiot,” Madeline said. “That’s the first place anyone would look. He’s not a total moron.”

  Yeah. I wasn’t. Ahem.

  Binder snickered. “You’re money, Raith. Money never really gets it.”

  Madeline’s voice turned waspish. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “That not everyone has a bloody string of mansions around the world that they live in or extra cars that they never really drive or cash enough to not think twice about dropping two hundred bloody dollars on a bottle of forty-dollar room service champagne.”

  “So?”

  “So, Dresden’s a bloody kid by Council standards. Lives in that crappy little hole. And pays for an office for his business, to boot. He ain’t had a century or two of compounded interest to shore up his accounts, now, has he? And when he set himself up an emergency retreat, did he buy himself a furnished condo in another town? No. He rents out a cruddy little storage unit and stacks some camping gear inside.”

  “All right,” Madeline said, her tone impatient. “Suppose you’re right. Suppose he’s got Morgan at his apartment. He won’t have left him unprotected.”

  “Naturally not,” Binder replied. “He’ll have a bloody minefield of wards around the place. Might have some conjured guardians or some such as well.”

  “Could you get through them?”

  “Give me enough time and enough of my lads, and yeah,” he said. “But it wouldn’t be quick, quiet, or clean. There’s a simpler way.”

  “Which is?”

  “Burn the bloody place down,” Binder said promptly. “The apartment’s got one door. If Morgan comes scurrying out, we bag him. If not, we collect his bones after the ashes cool. Identify him with dental records or something and claim the reward.”

  I felt a little bit sick to my stomach. Binder was way too perceptive for my comfort level. The guy might not be overly smart, but he was more than a little cunning. His plan was pretty much exactly the best way to attack my apartment, defensive magicks notwithstanding. What’s more, I knew he was capable of actually doing it. It would kill my elderly neighbors, the other residents of the building, but that wouldn’t slow someone like Binder down for half of a second.

  “No,” Madeline said after a tense moment of silence. “I have my instructions. If we can’t take him ourselves, we at least see to it that the Wardens find him.”

  “The Wardens have found him,” Binder complained. “Dresden’s a bloody Warden. Your boss should have paid up already.”

  There was a quiet, deadly silence, and then Madeline purred, “You’ve been modestly helpful to him in the past, Binder. But don’t start thinking that you would survive telling him what he should or should not do. The moment you become more annoying than useful, you are a dead man.”

  “No sin to want money,” Binder said sullenly. “I did my part to get it.”

  “No,” Madeline said. “You lost a fight to one overgrown Boy Scout and one pint-sized mortal woman, got yourself locked up by the police, of all the ridiculous things, and missed your chance to earn the reward.” Sheets rustled, and soft footsteps whispered on the carpet. A moment later, a lighter flicked—Madeline smoked.

  Binder spoke again, in a tone of voice that indicated he was changing the topic of conversation. “You going to clean that up?”

  “That’s exactly why it’s there,” Madeline said. She took a drag and said, “Cleaning up. It’s too bad you didn’t get here five minutes sooner.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Because I probably would have waited to make the call.”

  I felt myself leaning forward slightly and holding my breath.

  “What call?” Binder said.

  “To the Wardens, naturally,” Madeline said. “I told them that Morgan was in town and that Dresden was sheltering him. They should be here within the hour.”

  I felt my mouth drop open and my stomach did a cartwheeling back-flip with an integrated quadruple axle.

  Oh, crap.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Murphy looked at the Rolls and said, “You’re kidding.” We’d driven down to the Sax separately, and she hadn’t seen the wheels I was using. I was parked closer to the hotel, so we were about to get into the Silver Wraith together.

  “It’s a loaner,” I said. “Get in.”

  “I am not a material girl,” she said, running a hand over the Rolls’s fender. “But . . . damn.”

  “Can we focus, here?” I said. “The world’s coming to an end.”

  Murphy shook her head and then got in the car with me. “Well. At least you’re going out in style.”

  I got the Rolls moving. It got plenty of looks, even in the dead of night, and the other motorists out so late gave it a generous amount of room, as if intimidated by the Wraith’s sheer artistry.

  “Actually,” I said, “I’m kind of finding the Rolls to be irrationally comforting.”

  Murphy glanced aside at me. “Why’s that?”

  “I know how I’m going to die, you know? One of these days, maybe real soon, I’m going to find out I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.” I swallowed. “I mean, I just can’t keep from sticking my nose in places people don’t want it. And I always figured it would be the Council who punched my ticket, regardless of who believed what about me. Because there’s a bunch of assholes there, and I just can’t let them wallow in their own bull and pretend it’s an air of nobility.”

  Murphy’s expression became more sober. She listened in silence.

  “Now the Council’s coming. And they’ve got good reason to take me out. Or it looks like it to them, which is the same thing.” I swallowed again. My mouth felt dry. “But . . . I somehow just have the feeling that when I go out . . . it isn’t going to be in style.” I gestured at the Rolls with a vague sweep of one hand. “This just isn’t the car I drive to my death. You know?”

  Murph’s mouth tucked up at one corner, though most of the smile was in her eyes. She took my hand between hers and held it. Her hands felt very warm. Maybe mine were just cold. “You’re right, of course, Harry.”

  “You think?”

  “Definitely,” she said. “This car just isn’t you. You’ll die in some badly painted, hideously recycled piece of junk that seems to keep on running despite the laws of physics that say it should be melted scrap by now.”

  “Whew,” I said. “I thought I might be the only one who thought that.”

  Her fingers tightened on mine for a moment, and I clung back.

  The Council was coming.

  And there wasn’t anything I could do to fight them.

  Oh sure, maybe I could poke someone in the nose and run. But they would catch up to me sooner or later. There would be more of them than me, some of them every bit as strong as I was, and all of them dangerous. It might take a day or a week or a couple of weeks, but I had to sleep sooner or later. They’d wear me down.

  And that pissed me off. My sheer helplessness in the face of this whole stupid mess was infuriating.

  It wasn’t as if I didn’t have options. . . . Mab still held a job offer open to me, for example. And it was more than possible that Lara Raith might have the resources to shield me, or broker me a better deal than the C
ouncil was going to offer. When I thought of how unfair the whole thing was, I had more than a passing desire to grab whatever slender threads I could reach, until I could sort things out, later.

  Put that way, it almost sounded reasonable. Noble, even. I would, after all, be protecting other wrongly persecuted victims of the Council who littered the theoretical landscape of the future. It didn’t sound nearly so much like entering bargains that went against everything I believed so that I could forcibly impose my will over those who were against me.

  I knew the truth. But just because it was true didn’t make it any less tempting.

  What the hell was I going to do? I had a hidey-hole planned out, but it had already been compromised. There was nowhere even a little bit safe I could take Morgan but my apartment, and the Wardens were going to find him there. And on top of all that, I still had no freaking clue as to the identity of our mysterious puppet master.

  Maybe it was time to admit it.

  This one was too big for me. It had been from the very start.

  “Murph,” I said quietly. “I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this.”

  Silence filled the beautiful old car.

  “When’s the last time you slept?” Murphy asked.

  I had to take my hand back from hers to work the clutch. I gestured at my bandaged head. “I can barely remember what day of the week it is. This morning, a couple hours, I think?”

  She nodded judiciously. “You know what your problem is?”

  I eyed her and then started laughing. Or at least making an amused, wheezing sound. I couldn’t help it.

  “Problem, singular,” I choked out, finally. “No, what?”

  “You like to come off like you’re the unpredictable chaos factor in any given situation, but at the end of the day you obsess about having everything ordered the way you want it.”

  “Have you seen my lab?”

  “Again with the inappropriately timed come-ons,” Murphy said. “I’m serious, Harry.”

  “I know some people who would really disagree with you. Like what’s-his-face, Peabody.”

  “He’s Council?”

  “Yeah. Says I have no place in his bastion of order.”

  She smirked. “The problem is that your bastion of order is sort of tough to coexist with.”

  “I have no bastions. I am bastionless.”

  “Hah,” Murphy said. “You like the same car, the same apartment, the same restaurant. You like not needing to answer to anyone, and doing the jobs your conscience dictates you should do, without worrying about the broader issues they involve. You hang out, fairly happy without much in the way of material wealth and follow your instincts, and be damned to anyone who tells you otherwise. That’s your order.”

  I eyed her. “Is there some other way it should be?”

  She rolled her eyes. “I rest my case.”

  “And how is this my problem?”

  “You’ve never really compromised your order for someone else’s, which is why you drive the Wardens nuts. They have procedures, they have forms, they have reports—and you ignore them unless someone twists your arm to make you do it. Am I right?”

  “Still don’t see how that’s a problem.”

  She rolled down the passenger-side window and let one hand hang out. “It’s a problem because you never learned how to adjust inside someone else’s order,” she said. “If you had, you’d realize what an incredible force you have working on your side.”

  “The A-Team?”

  “Bureaucracy,” Murphy said.

  “I would rather have the A-Team.”

  “Listen and learn, maverick,” Murphy said. “The Wardens are an organization, right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Lots of members.”

  “Almost three hundred and growing,” I said.

  “Lots of members who all have many obligations, who live in different areas, who speak different languages, but who have to communicate and work together somehow?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Behold,” Murphy said. “Bureaucracy. Organization to combat the entropy that naturally inhibits that kind of cooperative effort.”

  “Is there going to be a quiz later, or . . . ?”

  She ignored me. “Bureaucracies share common traits—and I think you’ve got more time to move in than you realize. If you weren’t tired and hurting and an obnoxious fly in the ointment to anyone’s order but your own, you’d see that.”

  I frowned. “How so?”

  “Do you think Madeline Raith called up the White Council on her home phone, identified herself, and just told them you were helping Morgan?” Murphy shook her head. “ ‘Hello, I’m the enemy. Let me help you for no good reason.’ ”

  I sucked thoughtfully on my lower lip. “The Wardens would probably assume that she was trying to divert their resources during a manpower-critical situation.”

  Murphy nodded. “And while they will look into it, they’ll never really believe it, and it will go straight to the bottom of their priority list.”

  “So she calls in an anonymous tip instead. So?”

  “So how many tips do you think the Wardens have gotten?” Murphy asked. “Cops go through the same thing. Some big flashy crime goes down and we have a dozen nuts claiming credit or convinced their neighbor did it, another dozen jerks who want to get their neighbor in trouble, and three times that many well-meaning people who have no clue whatsoever and think they’re helping.”

  I chewed on that thought for a moment. Murphy wasn’t far off the mark. There were plenty of organizations and Lord only knew how many individuals who would want to stay on the Wardens’ good side, or who would want to impress them, or who would simply want to have a real reason to interact with them. Murph was probably right. There probably were tips flooding in from all over the world.

  “They’ll check the tip out,” Murphy said. “But I’m willing to bet you real money that, depending on their manpower issues, it won’t happen until several hours after the tip actually makes it into the hands of the folks running the show—and with any luck, given the Council’s issues with technology and communication, that will take a while as well.”

  I mulled that one over for a minute. “What are you saying?”

  She put her hand on my arm and squeezed once. “I’m saying don’t give up yet. There’s still a little time.”

  I turned my head and studied Murphy’s profile for a moment.

  “Really?” I asked her quietly.

  She nodded. “Yeah.”

  Like “love,” “hope” is one of those ridiculously disproportional words that by all rights should be a lot longer.

  I resettled my grip on the Rolls’s steering wheel. “Murph?”

  “Mmm?”

  “You’re one hell of a dame.”

  “Sexist pig,” she said. She smiled out the windshield. “Don’t make me hurt you.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It wouldn’t be ladylike.”

  She shook her head as we neared my apartment. “If you like,” she said, “take him to my place. You can hide out there.”

  I didn’t actually smile, but her words made me feel like doing it. “Not this time. The Wardens know where you live, remember? If they start looking hard at me . . .”

  “. . . they’ll check me out, too,” Murphy said. “But you can’t keep him at your place.”

  “I know that. I also know that I can’t drag anyone else into the middle of this clust—this mess.”

  “There’s got to be somewhere,” she said. “Someplace quiet. And not well-known. And away from crowds.” She paused. “And where you can protect him from tracking magic. And where you’d have the advantage, if it did come to a fight.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Okay,” Murphy said. “I guess maybe there aren’t any places like that around here.”

  I snapped my head up straight.

  “Hell’s bells!” I breathed. I felt a grin stretch my mouth. “I think maybe ther
e is!”

  Chapter Thirty-four

  I came through my apartment door, took one look around the candlelit place, and half shouted, “Hell’s bells! What is wrong with you people!?”

  Morgan sat slumped against the wall with the fireplace, and fresh spots of blood showed through his bandages. His eyes were only partly open. His hand lay on the floor beside him, limp, the fingers half curled. A tiny little semiautomatic pistol lay on the floor beneath his hand. It wasn’t mine. I have no idea where he’d been hiding it.

  Molly was on the floor in front of the sofa, with Mouse literally sitting on her back. She was heaving breaths in and out, making the big dog rise and settle slightly as she did.

  Luccio lay where I’d left her on the couch, flat on her back, her eyes closed, obviously still unconscious. Mouse had one of his paws resting lightly on her sternum. Given the nature of her recent injury, it seemed obvious that he would need to exert minimal pressure on her to immobilize her with pain, should she awaken.

  The air smelled of cordite. Mouse’s fur, all down his left foreleg, was matted and caked with blood.

  When I saw that, I rounded on Morgan in a fury, and if Murphy hadn’t stepped forward and grabbed my arm with both hands, I would have started kicking his head flat against my wall. I settled for kicking the gun away instead. If I got a couple of his fingers, too, it didn’t bother me much at the time.

  Morgan watched me with dull, hardly conscious eyes.

  “I swear,” I snarled. “I swear to God, Morgan, if you don’t explain yourself I’m going to strangle you dead with my own hands and drag your corpse back to Edinburgh by the balls.”

  “Harry!” Murphy shouted, and I realized that she had positioned her entire body between me and Morgan and she was leaning against me like a soldier struggling to raise a flag.

  Morgan bared his teeth, more rictus than smile. “Your warlock,” he said, his voice dry and leathery, “was trying to enter Captain Luccio’s mind against her will.”

  I surged forward, and Murphy pushed me back again. I weighed twice what she did, but she had good leverage and focus. “And so you shot my dog?” I screamed.

  “He interposed himself,” Morgan said. He coughed, weakly, and closed his eyes, his face turning greyer. “Never meant . . . to hit . . .”