by Jim Butcher
Between the new case, the outfit hitter, and Duke Ortega’s challenge, I wanted to make damn sure that I wasn’t going to get caught with my eldritch britches down again.
I took the Beetle home, to my apartment. I rent the basement apartment of a huge, creaking old boardinghouse. By the time I got back, it was after midnight and the late-February air was speckled with occasional flakes of wet snow that wouldn’t last once they hit the ground. The adrenaline rush of The Larry Fowler Show and then the hired-goon attack had faded, and left me aching, tired, and worried. I got out of the car, determined to head for bed, then get up early and start to work on Vincent’s case.
A sudden sensation of cold, rippling energy and a pair of muffled thumps from the stairs leading down to my apartment changed my mind.
I drew out my blasting rod and readied the shield bracelet on my left wrist, but before I could step over to the stairs, a pair of figures flew up them and landed heavily on the half-frozen ground beside the gravel parking lot. They struggled, rolling, until one of the shadowy figures got a leg underneath the form on top of it, and pushed.
The second figure flew twenty feet through the air, landed on the gravel with a thump and a cough of expelled air, then got up and sprinted away.
Shield readied, I stepped forward before the remaining intruder could rise. I forced an effort of will through the blasting rod, setting the runes along its length alight with scarlet. Fire coalesced at the tip of the rod, bright as a road flare, but I held the strike as I stepped forward, shoving the tip of the blasting rod down at the intruder. “Make a move and I’ll fry you.”
Red light fell over a woman.
She was dressed in jeans, a black leather jacket, a white T-shirt, and gloves. She had her long, midnight hair tied back in a tail. Dark, oblique eyes smoldered up at me from beneath long lashes. Her beautiful face held an expression of wary amusement.
My heart thudded in sudden pain and excitement.
“Well,” Susan said, looking from the sizzling blasting rod up to my face. “I’ve heard of running into an old flame, but this is ridiculous.”
Chapter
Four
Susan.
My brain locked up for a good ten seconds as I stared down at my former lover. I could smell the scent of her hair, the subtle perfume she wore, mixing with the new-leather scent of her jacket and another, new smell—new soap, maybe. Her dark eyes regarded me, uncertain and nervous. She had a small cut on the side of her mouth, beading with drops of blood that looked black in the red light of the blasting rod’s fire.
“Harry,” Susan said, her voice quiet and steady. “Harry. You’re scaring me.”
I shook myself out of my surprise and lowered the blasting rod, stepping over to her. “Stars and stones, Susan. Are you all right?”
I offered her my hand and she took it, rising easily to her feet. Her fingers were feverishly warm, and wisps of winter steam curled from her skin. “Bruises,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Who was that?”
Susan glanced the way her attacker had run and shook her head. “Red Court. I couldn’t see his face.”
I blinked at her. “You ran off a vampire? By yourself?”
She flashed me a smile that mixed weariness with a sense of pleasure. She still hadn’t taken her hand from mine. “I’ve been working out.”
I looked around a bit more, and tried to reach out with my senses, to detect any trace of the unsettling energy that hovered around the Reds. Nothing. “Gone now,” I reported. “But we shouldn’t hang around out here.”
“Inside then?”
I started to agree, and then paused. A horrible suspicion hit me. I let go of her hand and took a step back.
A line appeared between her eyebrows. “Harry?”
“It’s been a rough year,” I said. “I want to talk, but I’m not inviting you in.”
Susan’s expression flickered with comprehension and pain. She folded her arms over her stomach and nodded. “No. I understand. And you’re right to be careful.”
I took another step back and started walking toward my reinforced-steel door. She walked a few feet away, and at my side, where I could see her. I went down the stairs and unlocked the door. Then I pushed out an effort of will to temporarily disable the protective spells laid over my house that amounted to the magical equivalent of a land mine and burglar alarm all in one.
I went in, glanced at the candleholder on the wall by the door, and muttered, “Flickum bicus.” I felt a tiny surge of energy flowing out of me, and the candle danced to life, lighting my apartment in dim, soft orange.
My place is basically a cave with two chambers. The larger one was my living area. Bookshelves lined most of the walls, and where they didn’t I had hung a couple of tapestries and an original Star Wars movie poster. I’d scattered rugs all over my floor. I had laid down everything from handmade Navajo rugs to a black area rug with Elvis’s face, fully two feet across, dominating the piece. Like the Beetle, I figured some people would call my ragtag assembly of floor coverings eclectic. I just thought of them as something to walk on besides freezing-cold stone floor.
My furniture is much the same. I got most of it secondhand. None of it matches, but it’s all comfortable to sprawl on, and my lights are dim enough to let me ignore it. A small alcove held a sink, an icebox, and a pantry for food. A fireplace rested against one wall, the wood all burned down to black and grey, but I knew it would still be glowing under the ash. A door led to my tiny bedroom and the apartment’s three-quarters bath. The whole place may have been ragged, but it was very tidy and clean.
I turned to face Susan, and didn’t put down my blasting rod. Supernatural creatures cannot lightly step across the threshold of a home unless one of the rightful residents invites them in. Plenty of nasties can put on a false face, and it wasn’t inconceivable that one of them had decided to try to get close to me by pretending to be Susan.
A supernatural being would have a hell of a time getting over a threshold without being invited in. If that was some kind of shapeshifter rather than Susan or, God help me, if Susan had gone all the way over to the vampires, she wouldn’t be able to enter. If it was the real Susan, she’d be fine. Or at least, the threshold wouldn’t hurt her. Getting paranoid suspicion from her ex-boyfriend might do its own kind of damage.
On the other hand, there was a war on, and Susan probably wouldn’t be happy to hear I’d gotten myself killed. Better safe than exsanguinated.
Susan didn’t pause at the door. She stepped inside, turned around to close and lock it, and asked, “Good enough?”
It was. Relief, coupled with a sudden explosion of naked emotion, roared through me. It was like waking up after days of anguish to find that the pain was gone. Where there had been only hurt, there was suddenly nothing, and other feelings rushed in to fill the sudden void. Excitement, for one, that quivering teenage nervousness that accompanies expectation. A surge of warm emotion, joy and happiness rolled together with a chittering glee.
And in the shadows of those, a few things darker but no less vibrant. Sheer, sensual pleasure in the scent of her, in looking at her face, her dark hair again. I needed to feel her skin under my hands, to feel her pressed to me.
It was more than mere need—it was hunger. Now that she was standing there in front of me, I needed her, all of her, as much as I needed food or water or air, and possibly more. I wanted to tell her, to let her know what it meant to me that she was there. But I’d never been very good at expressing myself verbally.
By the time Susan turned around again, I was already pressed up against her. She let out a quiet gasp of surprise, but I leaned gently into her, pressing her shoulders to the door.
I lowered my mouth to hers, and her lips were soft, sweet, fever-hot. She went rigid for a second, then let out a low sound and wound her arms around my neck and shoulders, kissing me back. I could feel her, the slender, too-warm strength and softness of her body. My hunger deepened, and so did the kiss
, my tongue touching hers, lightly teasing. She responded as ardently as I did, her lips almost desperate, low whimpers vibrating through her mouth and into mine. I started to feel a little dizzy and disoriented, and though some part of me warned against it, I only pressed harder against her.
I slid one hand over her hip, beneath the jacket, and slipped up under the T-shirt she wore to curl around the naked sweetness of her waist. I pulled her hard against me, and she responded, her breath hot and quick, lifting one leg to press against mine, winding around my calf a little, pulling me nearer. I lowered my mouth to her throat, tongue tasting her skin, and she arched against me, baring more of her skin. I drew a line of kisses up to her ear, gently biting, sending quivering shock waves through her as she shook against me, her throat letting out quiet sounds of deepening need. I found her eager lips again, and her fingers tightened in my hair, drawing me hard against her.
My dizziness grew. Some kind of coherent thought did a quick flyby of my forebrain. I struggled to take notice of it, but the kiss made it impossible. Lust and need murdered my reason.
A sudden, shrieking hiss startled me, and I jerked back from Susan, looking wildly around.
Mister, my bobtailed, battle-scarred tomcat, had leapt up onto the stones before the fireplace, his luminous green eyes wide and fixed on Susan. Mister weighs about thirty pounds, and thirty pounds of cat can make an absolutely impossible amount of noise.
Susan shuddered and pressed her palm against my chest, turning her face away from me. She pushed, something gentle rather than insistent. My lips burned to touch hers again, but I closed my eyes and took slow, shuddering breaths. Then I backed away from her. I had meant to go stir up the fire—not that fire, the literal one—but the room tilted wildly and it was all I could do to stumble into an easy chair.
Mister leapt up into my lap, more daintily than he had any right to be able to do, and rubbed his face against my chest, rumbling out a purr. I fumbled up one hand to pet him, and after a couple of minutes the room stopped spinning.
“What the hell just happened?” I muttered.
Susan emerged from the shadows and crossed the candlelit room to take up the fireplace poker. She stirred through the ashes until she found some glowing orange-red, and then began adding wood to the fire from the old iron hod beside the fireplace. “I could feel you,” she said, after a minute. “I could feel you going under. It…” She shivered. “It felt nice.”
Boy, did it. And I bet it would feel even nicer if all those clothes hadn’t been in the way. Aloud, all I said was, “Under?”
She looked over her shoulder at me, her expression hard to read. “The venom,” she said quietly. “They call it their Kiss.”
“I guess I can’t blame them. It sounds a lot more romantic than ‘narcotic drool.’” Some parts of me lobbied for a cessation of meaningless chat and an immediate resumption of any line of thought that would lead to discarded clothing upon the floor. I ignored them. “I remember. When…when we kissed before you left. I thought I’d imagined it.”
Susan shook her head, and sat down on the stones before the fireplace, her back straight, her hands folded sedately in her lap. The fire began to grow, catching onto the new wood, and though the light of it curled around her with golden fingers, it left her face veiled in shadow. “No. What Bianca did to me has changed me already, in some ways. Physically. I’m stronger now. My senses are sharper. And there’s…” She faltered.
“The Kiss,” I mumbled. My lips didn’t find the word to their liking. They liked the real thing a lot better. I ignored them, too.
“Yes,” she said. “Not like one of them can do. Less. But still there.”
I mopped at my face with my hand. “You know what I need?” Either a naked, writhing, eager Susan or else a liquid-nitrogen shower. “A beer. You want one?”
“Pass,” she said. “I don’t think lowering my inhibitions would be healthy right now.”
I nodded, got up, and went to my icebox. It’s an actual icebox, the kind that runs on honest-to-goodness ice rather than Freon. I got out a dark brown bottle of Mac’s home-brewed ale and opened it, taking a long drink. Mac would be horrified that I drank his beer cold, since he prided himself on an old-world brew, but I always kept a couple in there, for when I wanted it cold. What can I say. I’m an unlettered, barbaric American wizard. I drank off maybe half of it and put the cold bottle against my forehead afterward.
“Well,” I said. “I guess you didn’t come over to, uh….”
“Tear your clothes off and use you shamelessly?” Susan suggested. Her voice sounded calm again, but I could sense the underlying tone of her own hunger. I wasn’t sure whether I should be unsettled by it or encouraged. “No, Harry. It isn’t…that isn’t something I can afford to do with you. No matter how much either of us wants it.”
“Why not?” I asked. I knew why not already, but the words jumped from my brain to my mouth before I could stop them. I peered suspiciously at the beer.
“I don’t want to lose control,” Susan said. “Not ever. Not with anyone. But especially not with you.” There was a silence in which only the fire made any noise. “Harry, it would kill me to hurt you.”
More to the point, I thought, it would probably kill me too. Think about her instead of yourself, Harry. Get a grip. It’s just a kiss. Let it go.
I drank the rest of my beer, which wasn’t anywhere near as nice as other things I’d done with my mouth that night. I checked the fridge and asked Susan, “Coke?”
She nodded, looking around. Her gaze hesitated on the fireplace mantel, where I kept the card and three postcards I’d received from her, along with the little grey jewelry box that held the dinky little ring she’d turned down. “Is someone else living here now?”
“No.” I got out a couple of cans, and took one over to her. She took it from me without touching my fingers. “Why do you ask?”
“The place looks so nice,” she said. “And your clothes smell like fabric softener. You’ve never used fabric softener in your life.”
“Oh. That.” You can’t tell people about it when faeries are doing your housework, or they get ticked off and leave. “I sort of have a cleaning service.”
“I hear you’ve been too busy to clean up,” Susan said.
“Just making a living.”
Susan smiled. “I heard you saved the world from some kind of doom. Is it true?”
I fiddled with my drink. “Sort of.”
Susan laughed. “How do you sort of save the world?”
“I only saved it in a Greenpeace kind of way. If I’d blown it, there might have been a historically bad storm, but I don’t think anyone would have noticed the real damage for thirty or forty years—climate change takes time.”
“Sounds scary,” Susan said.
I shrugged. “Mostly I was just trying to save my own ass. The world was a twofer. Maybe I’m getting cynical. I suspect the only thing I accomplished was to keep the faeries from screwing up the place so that we could screw it up ourselves.”
I sat down on the chair again, and we opened the Cokes and drank in silence for a bit. My heart eventually stopped pounding quite so loudly.
“I miss you,” I said finally. “So does your editor. She called me a couple of weeks ago. Said your articles had quit coming in.”
Susan nodded. “That’s one reason I’m here. I owe her more than a letter or a phone call.”
“You’re quitting?” I asked.
She nodded.
“You find something else?”
“Sort of,” she said. She brushed her hair back from her face with one hand. “I can’t tell you everything right now.”
I frowned. For as long as I’d known her, Susan had been driven by a passion for discovering the truth and sharing it with other people. Her work at the Arcane had arisen from her stubborn refusal to deny things she saw as the truth, even if they had seemed insane. She was one of the rare people who stopped and thought about things, even weird and supernat
ural things, instead of dismissing them out of hand. That’s how she’d begun work at the Arcane. That was how she had originally met me.
“Are you all right?” I asked. “Are you in trouble?”
“Relatively speaking, no,” she said. “But you are. That’s why I’m here, Harry.”
“What do you mean?”
“I came to warn you. The Red Court—”
“Sent Paolo Ortega to call me out. I know.”
She sighed. “But you don’t know what you’re getting into. Harry, Ortega is one of the most dangerous nobles of their Court. He’s a warlord. He’s killed half a dozen of the White Council’s Wardens in South America since the war started, and he’s the one who planned and executed the attack on Archangel last year.”
I sat straight up at that, the blood draining from my face. “How do you know about that?”
“I’m an investigative reporter, Harry. I investigated.”
I toyed with the Coke can, frowning down at it. “All the same. He came here asking for a duel. A fair fight. If he’s serious, I’ll take him on.”
“There’s more that you need to know,” Susan said.
“Like what?”
“Ortega’s opinion on the war is not the popular one within the Red Court. A few of the upper crust of the vampires support his way of thinking. But most of them like the idea of a lot of constant bloodshed. They also like the idea of a war to wipe out the White Council. They figure that if they get rid of the wizards once and for all, they won’t have to worry about keeping a low profile in the future.”