Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  I glanced down at my hands, suddenly embarrassed. She was thinking more clearly than I was. “I didn’t even think … Yeah. I’m sorry, Ana.”

  She inclined her head. “It’s nothing.”

  “It was unnecessary.” I scratched at my head. “You think you can sandbag the Merlin?”

  She lifted both eyebrows.

  “Hell’s bells, I’m shocked he didn’t rip off his hood and start screaming at me. Maybe challenge me, right there. No way he’s going to sit on his ass when he can stick it to me inste—” I broke off speaking as I noticed that Molly’s eyes had gone very wide. I turned to look behind me.

  A painting on the wall had just finished sliding to one side, revealing a doorway hidden behind it. The door swung open soundlessly, and a wizard who was the solemn, movie- poster version of old Merlin himself came into the Worry Room.

  Arthur Langtry was one of the oldest and the single most powerful wizard on the White Council. His hair and beard were long, all snowy white with threads of silver, and perfectly groomed. His eyes were winter sky blue and alert, his features long, solemn, and noble.

  The Merlin of the White Council was dressed in simple white robes. What I could think of only as a gunslinger’s belt of white leather hung at his hips. It looked like it had been designed after tactical gear made for Special Forces operators, but in an insignificant flash of insight I realized that, if anything, the opposite was likely to be true. Multiple vials, probably potions, rode in individual leather cases. The leather-wrapped handle of an anemic rod or a stubby wand poked out of a holster. Several pouches were fastened closed, and looked as though they would contain bits and pieces of the standard wizarding gear I habitually carried with me when I was working. He also bore a long, white staff, a simple wooden pole made of an unfamiliar wood.

  I stared at him for a moment. Then I said, “The peace talks are over?”

  “Of course not,” the Merlin said. “Goodness, Dresden. We aren’t going to allow the entire Senior Council to stand on a stage within reach of a vampire’s claws. Are you mad?”

  I blinked at him.

  “Wizard McCoy was the only actual Senior Council member on the stage,” he said, and then grimaced. “Aside from Cristos, of course, who is unaware of the security measure. The envoy might well be an assassin.”

  I worked my jaw a few times and said, “So. You left him up there by himself while you played it safe.”

  The Merlin shrugged. “One of us had to be there to handle any questions. It was McCoy’s idea, Dresden. He is an irritating, arrogant, and formidable man.”

  I scowled and mentally flogged my brain for slacking, forcing myself to see past my emotionally driven hostile response. “You don’t trust the vampires,” I said slowly. “You aren’t drinking the Kool- Aid on this peace conference.”

  Langtry looked at me patiently. Then he looked at Luccio.

  “Jonestown,” she provided. “The mass suicide last century.”

  He frowned at that and then nodded. “Ah, I see the metaphor. No, Dresden, we are not willing to simply accept them at their word—but a great many people on the Council do not concur. Cristos has garnered an enormous number of supporters who very much want to embrace the terms of peace.”

  “If you don’t want to call off the war,” I said, “then why the hell did you stop me, Captain Luccio? I could have fixed it for you right there.”

  “You wouldn’t have,” Langtry said calmly. “You would have been knocked senseless and thrown in a hole.” A faint smile touched his lips as he spoke the words. “Granted, a pleasant notion, but not a practical one.”

  Next to me, Molly put her elbows on the table and propped up her chin in her hands, staring at the Merlin thoughtfully.

  My brain kept chugging. I think I can, I think I can. When it got to the top of the hill, my eyes widened. “You aren’t planning to smoke the peace pipe. You’re expecting an attack.”

  He looked at me blandly, and rested one hand on the hilt of his combat wand as if by pure coincidence. “Egad. What gave it away, Dresden?”

  I started to say something hot in reply, Merlin or no Merlin, but Anastasia put a hand on my wrist. “Our sources,” she said, overriding my incipient insult, “have reported a great deal of activity in the Red Court camp. They’re mobilizing.”

  I looked back and forth between them. “You figure they’re trying a Trojan horse?”

  “Or some variant thereof,” Langtry replied.

  “So we’re getting ready for it,” Anastasia said. “As well as preparing the heaviest counterattack we’ve thrown at them yet.”

  “Um,” Molly said, “what if they’re serious about making peace?”

  Everyone looked at her, and my apprentice visibly wilted beneath the Merlin’s gaze.

  “It might happen,” she said.

  Langtry smiled faintly. “The leopard cannot change his spots, Miss Carpenter. Sheep can befriend a hungry wolf only briefly. The Red Court is all savagery and crocodile tears. If they make peace, it is only because they need the time to replenish themselves before fighting anew.”

  “Really old things get set in their ways,” I confirmed to Molly, my tone including Langtry as a matter of course. “Always hope for the best and prepare for the worst.”

  Molly chewed her lip thoughtfully and nodded.

  Langtry eyed me and said, “Need I explain why I have explained, Dresden?”

  “Maybe you’d better,” I said. “I mean, you didn’t use illustrations or anything, Professor.”

  Langtry inhaled, briefly closed his eyes, and then looked away from me.

  “Um?” Molly said, frowning.

  “We want the Red Court to attack, if that is their intention,” I told her. “We want the Red Court to think their trick is working. We want them to be overconfident. Then when they hit us, we hit them back so hard and fast that they don’t know it’s coming until it’s over.”

  “No,” Langtry said. “So they never knew it was coming. Period. We will no longer wage a war with that filth, cold, hot, or otherwise. We’re going to destroy them, root and branch.” He lifted his chin slightly as his voice turned to frost. “We’re going to exterminate them.”

  Silence followed. The fire crackled cheerfully.

  I felt my hands clench into fists. “But you need them to expose themselves first. And that,” I whispered, “is why you’re going to ask me to lay off Duchess Arianna.”

  “Don’t be absurd,” Langtry said in a calm, quiet voice. “I am not asking you. I am ordering you to desist, Warden Dresden.”

  “And let the child die,” I said.

  “In all probability the child is already dead, or else turned,” Langtry said. “And even if she still survives, we must face a cold truth: Uncounted billions now living and yet to be born will be saved if we stop the Red Court from feeding on humanity ever again.” His voice became even colder. “No one life, innocent or not, is worth more than that.”

  I said nothing for several long, silent seconds.

  Then I stood up. I faced the Merlin for a moment. I could feel the obdurate, adamant will that drove the man, and made his power the greatest well of mortal magic on the face of the earth.

  “You’ve got it backward, you know,” I told him quietly. “No life is worth more than that? No, Merlin. No life is worth less.”

  His expression never changed. But his fingers tightened slightly on his staff. His cold blue eyes touched lightly upon Molly, and then returned to me.

  The threat was plain to see.

  I leaned over close to his ear and whispered, “Go ahead, Arthur. Try it.” Then I straightened slowly away, letting every emotion and every thought drain out of my expression. The tension in the air was thick. No one moved. I could see Molly trembling where she sat.

  I nodded slowly at the Merlin.

  Then I said in a quiet, clear voice, “Grasshopper.”

  Molly stood up immediately.

  I kept myself between the girl and Langtry as we
walked to the door. He didn’t offer any challenge, but his eyes were arctic and absolute. Behind him, Luccio gave me a single, tiny, conspiratorial nod.

  Hell’s bells. She’d known who she would be working against all along.

  Molly and I left Edinburgh behind and headed back home to Chicago.

  Chapter

  Nine

  I watched out for trouble all the way back to Chicago, but it didn’t show up.

  The trip from Edinburgh would be a difficult one if limited by strictly physical means of transport. Wizards and jet planes go together like tornados and trailer parks, and with similarly disastrous results. Boats are probably the surest means of modern transport available to us, but it’s a bit of a ride from Scotland to Chicago.

  So we do what a good wizard always does when the odds are stacked up against us: We cheat.

  The Nevernever, the spirit world, exists alongside our own, sort of like an alternate dimension, but it isn’t shaped the same way as the mortal world. The Nevernever touches upon places in the mortal world that have something in common with it, a resonance of energies. So, if point A is a dark and spooky place in the Nevernever, it touches upon a dark and spooky place in the real world—let’s say, the stacks at the University of Chicago. But the space five feet away from point A in the Nevernever, point B, is only dark and sad, not really scary. Maybe point B attaches to a cemetery in Seattle.

  If you’re a wizard, you could then start at the stacks at UC, open a doorway into the Nevernever, walk five feet, open another doorway back to the real world, and emerge into the cemetery in Seattle. Total linear distance walked, five or six feet. Total distance traveled, better than seventeen hundred miles.

  Neat, huh?

  Granted, it’s almost never as little as five feet you walk in the Nevernever, and that stroll just might introduce you to some gargantuan, tentacular horror so hideous that it drives you insane just by looking at it. The Nevernever is a scary place. You don’t want to go exploring without a whole lot of planning and backup, but if you know the safe paths—the Ways—then you can get a lot of traveling done nice and quick, and with a minimum incidence of spontaneous insanity.

  Once upon a time, I would have refused even to enter the Nevernever except in the direst of emergencies. Now, the idea wasn’t much more stressful to me than the thought of hitting a bus station. Things change.

  We were back in Chicago before lunchtime, emerging from the Nevernever into an alley behind a big old building that used to be a slaughterhouse. I’d parked the Blue Beetle, my beat-up old Volkswagen Bug, nearby. We went back to my apartment.

  Susan and Martin were waiting. About two minutes after we got back, there was a knock at the door, and I opened it to find both half vampires standing on my doorstep. Martin carried a leather valise on a sling over his shoulder.

  “Who is the girl?” Martin asked, his eyes calm and focused past me, on Molly.

  “It’s nice to see you again, too, man,” I said. “And don’t mention it. I save people’s lives all the time.”

  Susan smiled at me, giving Molly the Female Once-Over—a process by which one woman creates a detailed profile of another woman based upon about a million subtle details of clothing, jewelry, makeup, and body type, and then decides how much of a social threat she might be. Men have a parallel process, but it’s binary: Does he have beer? If yes, will he share with me?

  “Harry,” Susan said, kissing me on the cheek. I felt like a pine tree in cougar country. I’d just have to hope territorial scoring of my bark wasn’t next. “Who is this?”

  “My apprentice, Molly Carpenter,” I said. “Grasshopper, this is Susan Rodriguez. That’s Marvin someone-or-other.”

  “Martin,” he corrected me, unruffled, as he entered. “Can she be trusted?”

  “Every bit as much as you trust me,” I said.

  “Well.” Martin’s voice couldn’t have been any drier, but he tried. “Thank goodness for that.”

  “I know who they are, Harry,” Molly said quietly. “They’re from the Fellowship of St. Giles, right? Vampire hunters?”

  “Close enough,” Susan said, standing right next to me, well inside my personal space perimeter. It was an intimate distance. She touched my arm for a moment with fever-hot fingers, but never looked away from Molly. “An apprentice wizard? Really? What’s it like?”

  Molly shrugged, averting her eyes, frowning slightly. “A lot of reading, a lot of boring practice, with occasional flashes of pure terror.”

  Susan looked from Molly to me and seemed to come to some sort of conclusion. She drifted out of my personal space again. “Did you speak to the Council?”

  “A bit,” I said. “The duchess was at headquarters. Spoke to her, too.”

  Susan drew in a sharp breath. “What? She hasn’t left Mexico in more than a hundred and eighty years.”

  “Call Guinness. She broke her streak.”

  “Good God,” she said. “What was she doing there?”

  “Being compassionate and understanding and forgiving me for challenging her to a duel in front of about a thousand fellow wizards.”

  Martin made a choking sound. Susan’s eyes looked a little wide.

  “I wanted a piece of her right there,” I said, “but she was operating under a pledge of safe conduct. Council intelligence says there’s all kinds of vampire activity starting up. I’ve got feelers out for any other word, but it will take a little time.”

  “We already knew about the mobilization,” Susan said. “The Fellowship warned the Council three days ago.”

  “Nice of the Council to inform everybody, I guess. But I’ll get whatever else the Council knows in the next few hours,” I said. “You guys turn up anything?”

  “Sort of,” Susan said. “Come on.”

  We went to the seating around the coffee table, and Martin plopped the valise down onto its surface. He drew out a manila folder and passed it to me.

  “Out of nearly a petabyte of information—” he began.

  “Petawhat?” I asked.

  “One quadrillion bytes,” he clarified. Helpfully.

  Susan rolled her eyes and said, “Several libraries’ worth of information.”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Martin cleared his throat and continued as if he hadn’t been interrupted. “We retrieved fewer than three hundred files. Most of them were inventory records.”

  I opened the folder and found several sheets of printer paper covered with lists, and several more that consisted of photographs of any number of objects accompanied by identification numbers.

  “The objects in this file,” Susan said, “were all categorized as met a-capacitors.”

  I grunted, paging through the photos more slowly. A stone knife. An ancient, notched sword. A soot-stained brick. An urn covered in odd, vaguely unsettling abstract designs. “Yeah. Can’t be sure without physically examining it, but this stuff looks like ritual gear.”

  I frowned and started cross-referencing numbers on the lists. “And according to this, they were all checked out of a secure holding facility in Nevada and shipped as a lot… .” I glanced up at Susan. “When was Maggie taken, exactly?”

  “A little less than twenty-four hours before I called you.”

  I frowned at the timing. “They shipped it the same day Maggie was taken.”

  “Yes,” she said. “About three hours after the kidnapping.”

  “Shipped where?”

  “That’s the question,” she said. “Assuming it’s connected with Maggie at all.”

  “Odds are that it isn’t,” Martin said.

  “Yeah. Your time would be better employed running down all those other leads we have, Marvin.” I spared him a glower, and went back to studying the pages. “If I can figure out what this gear is used for, maybe I can rule it out. For all I know it’s meant for a rain dance.” I tapped the pages on my knee thoughtfully. “I’ll do that first. While I do, Molly, I want you to go talk with Father Forthill, personally—we have to ass
ume the phones aren’t safe. Forthill has some contacts down south. Tell him I’d like to know if any of them have reported anything unusual. Take Mouse to watch your back.”

  “I can look after myself, Harry. It’s still daylight.”

  “Your weapons, grasshopper,” I said in my Yoda voice. “You will not need them.”

  She frowned at me in annoyance and said, “You know, I believe it is possible to reference something other than Star Wars, boss.”

  I narrowed my eyes in Muppetly wisdom. “That is why you fail.”

  “That doesn’t even … Augh. It’s easier just to do it.” She stood up and held out her hand. I tossed her the keys to the Blue Beetle. “Come on, Mouse.”

  Mouse rose from his position in the kitchen and shambled to Molly’s side.

  “Hold up a second, kid. Susan,” I said. “Something about this is making the back of my neck itch. The bad guys knew where to find us last night. They must have some kind of tail on one of us, and we don’t need to walk around with a target painted on our backs. Maybe you and Martin could go see if you can catch our shadow.”

  “They’ll see us and pull a fade as soon as we leave the apartment,” Martin said.

  “Oh!” Molly said abruptly, her eyes brightening. “Right!”

  I went out to get the mail and walk the dog around the little backyard while Molly, Susan, and Martin, under cover of one of Molly’s first-class veils, slipped out of the apartment. I gave Mouse five minutes, then called him and went back down into the apartment.

  Molly had beaten me back inside, after walking Susan and Martin out of the view of any observers who had a line of sight to my apartment’s door. “How was that?” she asked. She tried for casual, but by now I knew her well enough to spot when my answer mattered.