Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  “Piping down, O mighty one,” Bob replied.

  When I turned back to Andi, she looked horrified. “Oh, God, Harry. Your back.”

  I grunted, twisted a bit, and got a look at myself in the reflection in the window. My jacket was in tatters and stained with blots of blood. It hurt, but not horribly, maybe as much as a bad sunburn.

  “I’m sorry,” Andi said.

  “I’ll live,” I said. I walked over to her, leaned down, and kissed the top of her head. “I’m sorry about your ribs. And the computers. I’ll make up the damages to you guys.”

  She shook her head. “Don’t worry about it. Whatever, you know. Whatever we can do to help.”

  I sighed and said, “Yeah, about that. Um. I’m sorry about this, too.”

  She frowned and looked up at me. “About what?”

  I was going to deck her, clip her on the chin and put her down for a few moments while I left. That would do two things. First, it would prevent her from getting all heroic and following me. Second, if I was currently being observed, it would sell the notion that I had stolen Bob from her. It was a logical, if ruthless move that would give her an extra layer of protection, however thin.

  But when I told my hand to move, it wouldn’t.

  Winter Knight, Mab’s assassin, whatever. I don’t hit girls.

  I sighed. “I’m sorry I can’t deck you right now.”

  She lifted both eyebrows. “Oh. You think you’d be protecting me, I take it?”

  “As screwed up as it is to think that—yeah, I would be.”

  “I’ve been protecting myself just fine for a year, Harry,” Andi said. “Even without you around.”

  Ouch. I winced.

  Andi looked down. “I didn’t… Sorry.”

  “No worries,” I said. “Better call the police after I’m gone. Report an intruder. It’s what you’d do if a burglar had broken in.”

  She nodded. “Is it all right if I talk to Butters about it?”

  This whole thing would have been a lot simpler if I could have kept anyone from getting involved. That had been the point of the burglary. But now… Well. Andi knew, and I owed her more than to ask her to keep secrets from Butters, whom I owed even more. “Carefully,” I said. “Behind your threshold. And… maybe not anyone else just yet. Okay?”

  “Okay,” she said quietly.

  “Thanks.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I added another “I’m sorry.”

  Then I took the skull and hurried back out into the night.

  Chapter

  Eleven

  Once I was in the hearse again, I started driving. I had a silent and nearly invisible squadron of the Za Lord’s Guard flying in a loose formation around the car, except for Toot, who perched on the back of the passenger seat. Bob’s skull sat in the seat proper, its glowing eye sockets turned toward me.

  “So, boss,” Bob said brightly, “where we headed?”

  “Nowhere yet,” I said. “But I’m operating on the theory that a moving target is harder to hit.”

  “That’s a little more paranoid than usual,” Bob said. “I approve. But why?”

  I grimaced. “Mab wants me to kill Maeve.”

  “What?” Bob squeaked.

  Toot fell off the back of the passenger seat in a fit of shock.

  “You heard me,” I said. “You okay, Toot?”

  “Just… checking for assassins, my lord,” Toot said gamely. “All clear back here.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Bob said. “Tell me everything.”

  So I did.

  “And then she told me to kill Maeve,” I finished, “and I decided to come looking for you.”

  “Wait, wait, wait,” Bob said. “Let me get this straight. Mab gave you a whole girl, all to yourself, and you didn’t even get to first base?”

  I scowled. “Bob, can you focus, please? This isn’t about the girl.”

  Bob snorted. “Making this the first time it hasn’t been about the girl, I guess.”

  “Maeve, Bob,” I said. “What I need to know is why Mab would want her dead.”

  “Maybe she’s trying to flunk you intentionally,” Bob said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because you can’t kill Maeve, Harry.”

  “I don’t want to do it,” I said. “I’m not even sure if I’m going to.”

  “You’re too busy wrestling with your stupid conscience to listen to me, boss,” Bob said. “You can’t kill her. Not might, not shouldn’t. Can’t.”

  I blinked several times. “Uh. Why not?”

  “Maeve’s an immortal, Harry. One of the least of the immortals, maybe, but immortal all the same. Chop her up if you want to. Burn her. Scatter her ashes to the winds. But it won’t kill her. She’ll be back. Maybe in months, maybe years, but you can’t just kill her. She’s the Winter Lady.”

  I frowned. “Huh? I killed the Summer Lady just fine.”

  Bob made a frustrated sound. “Yeah, but that was because you were in the right place to do it.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Mab and Titania created that place specifically to be a killing ground for immortals, a place where balances of power are supposed to change. They’ve got to have a location like that for the important fights—otherwise nothing really gets decided. It’s a waste of everyone’s time and cannon fodder.”

  I’d seen part of that place being created—with my Sight, no less—and it was burned indelibly into my memory. I saw the surging energy the two Queens of Faerie were pouring out, power on a level that defied description. And of course I had, in some sense, been in that place when I murdered Lloyd Slate and took his job as Mab’s triggerman.

  Memory. The ancient stone table, stained with blood. Stars wheeling above me, dizzying in their speed and clarity. Writhing, cold mist reaching up over the edges of the table, clutching at my bare skin, while Mab bestrode me, her naked beauty strangling me, raking my thoughts out through my eyes. Power surging through me, into me, from the blood in the swirling grooves of the table, from Mab’s hungry will.

  I shuddered and forced the memory away. My hands clenched the wheel.

  “So I can’t kill her,” I said quietly.

  “No,” Bob said.

  I glowered out at the road. “What is the point of telling me to do something she knows is impossible?” I wondered aloud. “You’re sure about this, Bob? There’s no way at all, without the stone table?”

  “Not really,” Bob said, his eyes flicking around the car. “And not in most of the Nevernever, either.”

  “Hey,” I said. “What’s with the shifty eyes?”

  “What shifty eyes?” Bob asked.

  “When you said ‘Not really,’ your eyes got all shifty.”

  “Uh, no, they didn’t.”

  “Bob.”

  The skull sighed. “Do I have to tell you?”

  “Dude,” I said. “Since when has it been like that between us?”

  “Since you started working for her,” Bob said, and somehow managed to shudder.

  I tilted my head, thinking as hard as I could. “Wait. This has to do with your feud with Mab?”

  “Not a feud,” Bob says. “In a feud, both sides fight. This is more like me screaming and running away before she rips me apart.”

  I shook my head. “Man, Bob. I know you can be an annoying git when you want to be one—but what did you do to make Mab mad at you?”

  “It isn’t what I do, Harry,” Bob said in a very small voice. “It’s what I know.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. It took a lot to make the skull flinch. “And what is that, exactly?”

  The lights in the eye sockets dwindled to tiny pinpoints, and his voice came out in a whisper. “I know how to kill an immortal.”

  “Like Maeve?” I asked him.

  “Maeve,” Bob said. “Mab. Mother Winter. Any of them.”

  Holy crap.

  Now, that was a piece of information worth killing for.

  If the skull kn
ew how to subtract the im from immortal, then he could be a source of danger to beings of power throughout the universe. Hell, he was lucky that gods and demons and supernatural powers everywhere hadn’t formed up in a safari and come gunning for him. And it meant that maybe I wasn’t looking at an impossible mission after all.

  “I’d like you to tell me,” I said.

  “No way,” Bob said. “No way. The only reason I’ve been around this long is that I’ve kept my mouth shut. If I start shooting it off now, Mab and every other immortal with an interest in this stupid planet are going to smash my skull to powder and leave me out to fry in the sun.” The eyelights bobbed toward the rear compartment. “And there are too many ears around here.”

  “Toot,” I said, “get everybody out of the car. I need privacy. Make sure no one gets close enough to eavesdrop.”

  “Aw,” Toot complained from the rear compartment. “Not even me?”

  “You’re the only one I can trust to keep those other mugs from doing it, Major General. No one overhears. Got it?”

  I could practically hear the pride bursting out of his voice: “Got it!” he piped. “Will do, my lord!”

  He rolled down a window and buzzed out. I rolled it back up and took a look around the hearse with both normal and supernatural senses, to be sure we were alone. Then I turned back to the skull.

  “Bob, it’s just you and me talking here. Think about this. Mab sends me off to kill Maeve, something that would be impossible for me to do on my own—and she knew that you know how to do it. She knew the first thing I would do is come back here as the first step in the job. I think she meant for me to come to you. I think she meant for you to tell me.”

  The skull considered that for a moment. “It’s indirect and manipulative, so you’re probably onto something. Let me think.” A long minute went by. Then he spoke very quietly. “If I tell you,” he said, “you’ve got to do something for me.”

  “Like what?”

  “A new vessel,” he said. “You’ve got to make me a new house. Somewhere I can get to it. Then if they come after this one, I’ve got somewhere else to go.”

  “Tall order for me,” I said soberly. “You’ve basically got your own little pocket dimension in there. I’ve never tried anything that complicated before. Not even Little Chicago.”

  “Promise me,” Bob said. “Promise me on your power.”

  Swearing by one’s power is how a wizard makes a verbal contract. If you break your word, your ability with magic starts to fray, and if you keep doing it, sooner or later it’ll just wither up and die. A broken promise, sworn by my power, could set me back years and years in terms of my ability to use magic. I held up my hand. “I swear, on my power, to construct a new vessel for you if you tell me, Bob, assuming I survive the next few days. Just… don’t expect a deluxe place like you have now.”

  The flickering eyelights flared up to their normal size again. “Don’t worry, boss,” Bob said with compassion. “I won’t.”

  “Wiseass.”

  “Right, then!” Bob said. “The only way to kill an immortal is at certain specific places.”

  “And you know one? Where?”

  “Hah, already you’re making a human assumption. There are more than three dimensions, Harry. Not all places are in space. Some of them are places in time. They’re called conjunctions.”

  “I know about conjunctions, Bob,” I said, annoyed. “When the stars and planets align. You can use them to support heavy-duty magic sometimes.”

  “That’s one way to measure a conjunction,” said the skull. “But stars and planets are ultimately just measuring stakes used to describe a position in time. And that’s one way to use a conjunction, but they do other things, too.”

  I nodded thoughtfully. “And there’s a conjunction when immortals are vulnerable?”

  “Give the man a cookie; he’s got the idea. Every year.”

  “When is it?”

  “On Halloween night, of course.”

  I slammed on the brakes and pulled the car to the side of the road. “Say that again?”

  “Halloween,” Bob said, his voice turning sober. “It’s when the world of the dead is closest to the mortal world. Everyone—everything—standing in this world is mortal on Halloween.”

  I let out a low, slow whistle.

  “I doubt there are more than a couple of people alive who know that, Harry,” Bob said. “And the immortals will keep it that way.”

  “Why are they so worried?” I asked. “I mean, why not just not show up on Halloween night?”

  “Because it’s when they…” He made a frustrated noise. “It’s hard to explain, because you don’t have the right conceptual models. You can barely count to four dimensions.”

  “I think the math guys can go into the teens. Skip the insults and try.”

  “Halloween is when they feed,” Bob said. “Or… or refuel. Or run free. It’s all sort of the same thing, and I’m only conveying a small part of it. Halloween night is when the locked stasis of immortality becomes malleable. They take in energy—and it’s when they can add new power to their mantle. Mostly they steal tiny bits of it from other immortals.”

  “Those Kemmlerite freaks and their Darkhallow,” I breathed. “That was Halloween night.”

  “Exactly!” Bob said. “That ritual was supposed to turn one of them into an immortal. And the same rule applies—that’s the only night of the year it actually can happen. I doubt all of them knew that it had to be that night. But I betcha Cowl did. Guy is seriously scary.”

  “Seriously in need of a body cast and a therapist, more like.” I raked at my too-long, too-messy hair with my fingers, thinking. “So on Halloween, they’re here? All of them?”

  “Any who are… The only word I can come close with is ‘awake.’ Immortals aren’t always moving through the time stream at the same rate as the universe. From where you stand, it looks like they’re dormant. They aren’t. You just can’t perceive the true state of their existence properly.”

  “They’re here,” I said slowly. “Feeding and swindling one another for little bits of power.”

  “Right.”

  “They’re trick-or-treating?”

  “Duh,” Bob said. “Where do you think that comes from?”

  “Ugh, this whole time? That is creepy beyond belief,” I said.

  “I think it was the second or third Merlin of the White Council who engineered the whole Halloween custom. That’s the real reason people started wearing masks on that night, back in the day. It was so that any hungry immortal who came by might—might—think twice before gobbling someone up. After all, they could never be sure the person behind the mask wasn’t another immortal, setting them up.”

  “Halloween is tomorrow night,” I said. A bank sign I was passing told me it was a bit after two a.m. “Or tonight, I guess, technically.”

  “What a coincidence,” Bob said. “Happy birthday, by the way. I didn’t get you anything.”

  Except maybe my life. “’S okay. I’m kinda birthdayed out already.” I rubbed at my jaw. “So… if I can get to Maeve on Halloween night, I can kill her.”

  “Well,” Bob hedged. “You can try, anyway. It’s technically possible. It doesn’t mean you’re strong enough to do it.”

  “How big a window do I have? When does Halloween night end?” I asked.

  “At the first natural morning birdsong,” Bob replied promptly. “Songbirds, rooster, whatever. They start to sing, the night ends.”

  “Oh, good. A deadline.” I narrowed my eyes, thinking. “Gives me a bit more than twenty-four hours, then,” I muttered. “And all I have to do is find her, when she can be anywhere in the world or the Nevernever, then get her here, then beat her down, all without her escaping or killing me first. Simple.”

  “Yep. Almost impossible, but simple. And at least you know the when and the how,” Bob said.

  “But I’m no closer to why.”

  “Can’t help you there, boss,” the
skull said. “I’m a spirit of intellect, and the premise we’re dealing with makes no sense.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because there’s no reason for it,” Bob said, his tone unhappy. “I mean, when Maeve dies, there will just be another Maeve.”

  I frowned. “What do you mean?”

  Bob sighed. “You keep thinking of the Faerie Queens as specific individuals, Harry,” Bob said. “But they aren’t individuals. They’re mantles of power, roles, positions. The person in them is basically an interchangeable part.”

  “What, like being the Winter Knight is?”

  “Exactly like that,” Bob said. “When you killed Slate, the power, the mantle, just transferred over to you. It’s the same for the Queens of Faerie. Maeve wears the mantle of the Winter Lady. Kill her, and you’ll just get a new Winter Lady.”

  “Maybe that’s what Mab wants,” I said.

  “Doesn’t track,” Bob said.

  “Why not?” I asked.

  “Because the mantle changes whoever wears it.”

  My guts felt suddenly cold.

  (I’m not Lloyd Slate.)

  (Neither was he. Not at first.)

  “Doesn’t matter who it is,” Bob prattled on. “Over time, it changes them. Somewhere down the line, you wouldn’t be able to find much difference between Maeve and her successor. Meet the new Maeve. Same as the old Maeve.”

  I swallowed. “So… so Lily, who took the Summer Lady’s mantle after I killed Aurora…”

  “It’s been what? Ten years or so? She’s gone by now, or getting there,” Bob said. “Give it another decade or two, tops, and she might as well be Aurora.”

  I was quiet for a moment. Then I asked, “Is that going to happen to me, too?”

  Bob hedged. “You’ve… probably felt it starting. Um, strong impulses. Intense emotions. That kind of thing. It builds. And it doesn’t stop.” He managed to give the impression of a wince. “Sorry, boss.”

  I stared at my knuckles for a moment. “So,” I said, “even if I frag this Maeve, another one steps up. Maybe not for decades, but she does.”

  “Immortals don’t really care about decades, boss,” Bob said. “To them, it’s like a few weeks are to you.”