Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  “I hope you don’t think you can convince me to rehire you, Mr. Graver,” she said, eventually, without looking up. “What is it that you think is so important?”

  Ah. Vince had quit already. He didn’t let much grass grow under his feet, did he?

  This woman was evidently used to being taken very seriously. I debated several answers and decided to start things off by annoying her.

  I know. Me. Shocking, right?

  I stood there treating her the same way she had treated me, saying nothing, until Evelyn Derek exhaled impatiently through her nose and turned a cool and disapproving stare toward me.

  “Hi, cuddles,” I said.

  I’ll give the lady this much—she had a great poker face. The disapproval turned into a neutral mask. She straightened slightly in her chair, though she looked more attentive than nervous, and put her palms flat on the desktop.

  “You’re going to leave smudges,” I said.

  She stared at me for a few more seconds before she said, “Get out of my office.”

  “I don’t see any Windex in here,” I mused, looking around.

  “Did you hear me?” she said, her voice growing harder. “Get. Out.”

  I scratched my chin. “Maybe it’s in your secretary’s desk. You want me to get it for you?”

  Spots of color appeared on her cheeks. She reached for the phone on her desk.

  I pointed a finger at it, sent out an effort of will, and hissed, “Hexus.”

  Fouling up technology is a fairly simple thing for a wizard to do. But it isn’t surgical in its precision. Sparks erupted from the phone, from her computer, from the overhead lights, and from something inside her coat pocket, accompanied by several sharp popping sounds.

  Ms. Derek let out a small shriek and tried to flinch in three directions at once. Her chair rolled backward without her, and she wound up sprawled on the floor behind her glass-topped desk in a most undignified manner. Her delicate-looking glasses hung from one ear, and her deep green eyes were wide, the whites showing all around them.

  Purely for effect, I walked a couple of steps closer and stood looking down at her in silence for a long moment. There was not a sound in that room, and it was a lot darker in there without the lights.

  I spoke very, very quietly. “There are two shut doors between you and the rest of this office—which is mostly empty anyway. You’ve got great carpets, solid-oak paneling, and a burbling water feature out in the hallway.” I smiled slightly. “Nobody heard what just happened. Or they would have come running by now.”

  She swallowed, and didn’t move.

  “I want you to tell me who had you hire a detective to snoop on me.”

  She made a visible effort to gather herself together. “I-I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  I shook my head, lifted my hand, and made a beckoning gesture at the liquor cabinet as I murmured, “Forzare,” and made a gentle effort of will. The door to the cabinet swung open. I picked a bottle of what looked like bourbon and repeated the gesture, causing it to flit from the opened cabinet across the room to my hand. I unscrewed the cap and took a swig. It tasted rich and burned my throat pleasantly on the way down.

  Evelyn Derek stared at me in pure shock, her mouth open, her face whiter than rural Maine.

  I looked at her steadily. “Are you sure?”

  “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  “Evelyn,” I said in a chiding voice. “Focus. You hired Vince Graver to follow me around and report on my movements. Someone told you to do that. Who was it?”

  “M-my clients,” she stammered. “Confidential.”

  I felt bad scaring the poor woman. Her reaction to the use of magic had been typical of a straight who had never encountered the supernatural before—which meant that she probably had no idea of the nature of whoever she was protecting. She was terrified. I mean, I knew I wasn’t going to hurt her.

  But I was the only one in the room who did.

  The thing about playing a bluff is that you have to play it all the way out, even when it gets uncomfortable.

  “I really didn’t want this to get ugly,” I said sadly.

  I took a step closer and put the bottle down on the desk. Then I slowly, dramatically, raised my left hand. It had been badly burned several years before, and while my ability to recover from such things was more intense than other human beings, at least in the long term, my hand still wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t quite horror-movie special effects anymore, but the molten scars covering my fingers, wrist, and most of my palm were still startling and unpleasant, if you hadn’t ever seen them before.

  “No, wait,” Evelyn squeaked. She backed across the floor on her buttocks, pressed her back to the wall and lifted her hands. “Don’t.”

  “You helped your client try to kill people, Evelyn,” I said in a calm voice. “Tell me who.”

  Her eyes widened even more. “What? No. No, I didn’t know anyone would get hurt.”

  I stepped closer and snarled, “Talk.”

  “All right, all right!” she stammered. “She—”

  She stopped speaking as suddenly as if someone had begun strangling her.

  I eased up on the intimidation throttle. “Tell me,” I said, more quietly.

  Evelyn Derek shook her head at me, fear and confusion stripping away the reserve I’d seen in her only moments before. She started shaking. I saw her open her mouth several times, but only small choked sounds emerged. Her eyes lost focus and started flicking randomly around the room like a trapped animal looking for an escape.

  That wasn’t normal. Not even a little. Someone like Evelyn Derek might panic, might be cowed, might be backed into a corner—but she would never be at a loss for words.

  “Oh,” I said, mostly to myself. “I hate this crap.”

  I sighed, and walked around the desk to stand over the cowering lawyer. “Hell, if I’d known that someone had …” I shook my head. She wasn’t really listening very hard to me, and she’d started crying.

  It was one of about a thousand possible reactions when someone’s free will has been directly abrogated by some kind of psychic interdiction. I’d just created a situation in which every part of her logical, rational mind had been completely in favor of telling me who had hired her. Her emotions had been lined up right behind her reasoned thoughts, too.

  Only I was betting that someone had gotten into her head. Someone had left something inside her that refused to let Ms. Derek speak about her employer. Hell, she might not even have a conscious memory of who hired her—despite the fact that she wouldn’t just hire some detective to spy on somebody for no reason.

  Everyone always thinks that such obvious logical inconsistencies wouldn’t hold up, that the mind would somehow tear free of the bonds placed upon it using those flaws. But the fact is that the human mind isn’t a terribly logical or consistent place. Most people, given the choice to face a hideous or terrifying truth or to conveniently avoid it, choose the convenience and peace of normality. That doesn’t make them strong or weak people, or good or bad people. It just makes them people.

  It’s our nature. There’s plenty to distract us from the nastier truths of our lives, if we want to avoid them.

  “Evelyn Derek,” I said in a firm, authoritative voice. “Look at me.”

  She flinched closer to the wall, shaking her head.

  I knelt in front of her. Then I reached out to touch her chin, and gently lifted her face to mine. “Evelyn Derek,” I said in a gentler voice. “Look at me.”

  The woman lifted her dark green eyes to mine and I held her gaze for the space of a long breath before the soulgaze began.

  If the eyes are the windows to the soul, then wizards are the souls’ voyeurs. When a wizard looks into another person’s eyes, we get to see something of that person, a vision of the very core of their being. We each go through the experience a little differently, but it amounts to the same thing—a look into another person’s eyes gives you an insight into the most vital
portions of their character.

  Evelyn Derek’s deep green eyes almost seemed to expand around me, and then I found myself staring at a room that was, if anything, almost identical to the woman’s office. The furniture was beautiful and minimalistic. Ms. Derek, it seemed, was not the kind of person to overly burden her soul with the care and mementos most people collect over the course of a lifetime. She had devoted her life to her mind, to the order and discipline of her thoughts, and she had never left herself much room for personal entanglements.

  But as I stared at the room, I saw Ms. Derek herself. I would have expected her in her business clothing, or perhaps in student’s attire. Instead, she was wearing …

  Well. She was wearing very expensive, very minimalistic black lingerie. Stockings, garters, panties, and bra, all black. She wore them, ahem, very well. She was kneeling on the floor, her knees apart, her hands held behind the small of her back. She faced me with her lips parted, her breath coming in quickened pants. I was able to change my viewpoint slightly, as if walking around her, and those green eyes followed me, pupils wide with desire, her hips shifting in little yearning rolls with every tiny correction of her balance.

  Her wrists were bound behind her back with a long, slender ribbon of white silk.

  I caught a motion in the corner of my eye, and I snapped my gaze up, to see a slender, feminine form vanish into the corridors of Evelyn Derek’s memory, showing me nothing more than a flash of pale skin—

  —and a gleam of silver eyes.

  Son of a bitch.

  Someone had bound up Ms. Derek’s thoughts, all right, and woven those restraints together with her natural sexual desire, to give them permanence and strength. The method and the glimpses I’d seen of the perpetrator, flashes of memory that had managed to remain in her thoughts, perhaps, gave strong indicators as to who was responsible.

  A vampire of the White Court.

  And then there was a wrenching sensation and I was kneeling over Evelyn Derek. Her eyes were wide, her expression a mixture of terror and awe as she stared up at me.

  Oh, yeah. That was the thing about a soulgaze. Whoever you look at gets a look back at you. They get to see you in just as much detail as you see them. I’ve never had anyone soulgaze me who didn’t seem … disconcerted by the experience.

  Evelyn Derek stared at me and whispered, “Who are you?”

  I said, “Harry Dresden.”

  She blinked slowly and said, her voice dazed, “She ran from you.” Tears started forming in her eyes. “What is happening to me?”

  Magic that invades the thoughts of another human being is just about as black as it gets, a direct violation of the Laws of Magic that the Wardens uphold. But there are grey areas, like in any set of laws, and there are accepted customs as to what was or was not allowed in practice.

  There wasn’t much I could do for Evelyn. It would take a hand lighter and more skilled than mine to undo the harm that had been done to her mind, if it could be undone at all. But there was one thing I could do for her, a bit of grey magic that even the White Council acknowledged as an aid and a mercy, especially for those who had suffered the kind of psychic trauma Evelyn had.

  I called up my will as gently as I could, and reached out with my right hand. I passed my fingertips gently over her eyes, causing her to close them, and as I passed my palm from her forehead down to her chin, I released that will with as much care as I possibly could, murmuring, “Dorme, dormius, Evelyn. Dorme, dormius.”

  She let out a little whimpering sound of relief, and her body sagged to the floor in sudden and complete relaxation. She breathed in deeply once, exhaled, and then passed into simple and dreamless slumber.

  I made her as comfortable as I could. With luck, when she woke, she would pass most of our confrontation off as a bad dream. Then I turned and left the law office behind me, quiet anger growing inside me with every step. I went by the security guard at the door as the anger started nudging over into fury. I slapped the receipt down on his desk, and with a gesture and a muttered word caused my staff to leap from where it leaned against the wall and into my hand.

  The guard fell out of his chair, and I left without looking back.

  The White Court was involved. They were trying to get Morgan killed—and me with him—and what’s more, they were preying on people in my town, ripping into their psyches and inflicting harm that could blossom into madness given the right circumstances. There was a broad difference between their usual predation and what had been done to Evelyn Derek.

  Someone was going to answer for it.

  Chapter

  Twenty-three

  I got back to my apartment, shouldered open my door, and found a bizarre tableau.

  Again.

  Morgan lay on the floor about five feet from the bedroom door. He’d apparently seized my walking cane from the old popcorn tin by the door, where I keep things like Ozark folk art carved quarter staves, blasting rods, umbrellas, and so on. The cane is an old Victorian-style sword-cane. You twist the handle and pull, and you can draw a slender thirty-inch spring steel blade from the wooden cane. Morgan had. He lay on his side on the floor, his arm extended up at about a forty-five-degree angle, holding the sword.

  Its tip rested against Molly’s carotid artery, just under her left ear.

  Molly, for her part, leaned back against one of my bookcases, her knees bent a little, her arms spread out to either side, as if she’d stumbled over something and flung out her hands to brace herself against the bookcase as she fell back.

  To the left of the door, Mouse crouched with his fangs bared and resting lightly against Anastasia Luccio’s throat. She lay on her back, and her gun lay on the rug-covered floor about two feet beyond the reach of her hand. She appeared to be quite relaxed, though I couldn’t see much of her face from where I stood.

  Mouse’s deep brown eyes were focused steadily on Morgan. Morgan’s steely gaze was locked on Mouse’s jaws.

  I stared at them aghast for a minute. No one moved. Except Mouse. When I looked at him, his tail wagged hopefully once or twice.

  I blew out a heavy breath, set my staff aside, and plodded to the icebox, stepping over Anastasia’s leg on the way. I opened it, considered the contents for a moment, and then pulled out a cold Coke. I opened it and took a long drink. Then I picked up a dry kitchen towel, went to the couch, and sat down.

  “I would ask what the hell happened,” I said to the room at large. “Except that the only one with any sense who witnessed it can’t actually talk.” I eyed the dog and said, “This had better be good.”

  Mouse wagged his tail tentatively again.

  “Okay,” I said. “Let her go.”

  Mouse opened his jaws and sat up and away from Anastasia at once. He immediately padded over to me, and leaned against me as his gaze flicked from Anastasia to Morgan and back.

  “Morgan,” I said. “Ease off the psycho throttle a little and put down the sword.”

  “No,” Morgan said in a voice half strangled with fury. “Not until this little witch is bound and wearing a gag and a blindfold.”

  “Molly’s already done duty as a beer-calendar model today,” I said. “We’re not dressing her up for a BDSM shoot next.” I put the Coke down and thought about it for a second. Threats weren’t going to have any effect on Morgan, except to make him more determined. It was one of the charming side effects of having such a rigid old-school personality.

  “Morgan,” I said quietly. “You are a guest in my home.”

  He flashed me a quick, guilty glance.

  “You came to me for help and I’m doing my best. Hell, the kid has put herself into harm’s way, trying to protect you. I’ve done everything for you that I would have for blood family, because you are my guest. There are monsters from whom I would expect better behavior, once they had accepted my hospitality. What’s more, they’d give it to me.”

  Morgan let out a pained sound. Then he turned his head sharply away from Molly and dropped the sword at th
e same time. The steel of the blade chimed as it bounced off the thin rug.

  Morgan settled into a limp heap on the floor, and Molly sagged, lifting her hand and covering the vulnerable skin of her throat for a moment.

  I waited until Anastasia sat up to toss her the towel I’d brought from the kitchen. She caught it, her expression neutral, and lifted it to begin drying her neck. Mouse is a great dog, but he has to work hard to control his slobber issues.

  “So I take it things almost devolved into violence again,” I said to them. “And Mouse had to get involved.”

  “She just came walking in here,” Molly protested. “She saw him.”

  I blinked and looked at her. “And you did … what, exactly?”

  “She blinded me,” Anastasia said calmly. “And then she hit me.” She lifted the towel and wiped at her nose. Some blood came away, though most of it stayed crusted and brown below one nostril. So they hadn’t been in the standoff for long. Anastasia gave Molly a steady gaze and said, “She hit me like a girl. For goodness’ sake, child, have you had no combat training at all?”

  “There’s been a lot of material to cover,” I growled. “Blinded you?”

  “Not permanently,” Molly said, more sullenly now. She rubbed at the knuckles of her right hand with her left. “I just … kind of veiled everything that wasn’t her.”

  “An unnecessarily complicated way to go about it,” Anastasia said primly.

  “For you, maybe,” Molly said defensively. “Besides, who was the one on the ground getting pounded?”

  “Yes. You’re forty pounds heavier than me,” Anastasia said calmly.

  “Bitch, I know you didn’t say just say that,” Molly bristled, stepping forward with her hands clenched.

  Mouse sighed and heaved himself back to his feet.

  Molly stopped, eyeing the big dog warily.

  “Good dog,” I said, and scratched Mouse’s ears.

  He wagged his tail without taking his serious brown eyes from Molly.

  “I had to stop her,” Molly said. “She was going to report Morgan to the Wardens.”