Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  When the dirt settled and the dust and ash cleared, the Lady of Light and Life and Monarch of the Summer Court stood about fifteen feet away from me.

  She was breathtaking. I don’t mean beautiful, because she was that, obviously. But it was the kind of beauty that had so much scope, so much depth, so much power that it made me feel dwindling, insignificant, and very, very temporary. You feel it the first time you see the mountains, the first time you see the sea, the first time you see the vast, bleak majesty of the Grand Canyon—and every single time you look at Titania, the Summer Queen.

  I’d say that the details of her appearance were unimportant, except that they weren’t—particularly for me.

  Titania was dressed for a fight.

  She wore a gown of mail made from some kind of silvery metal, the links so fine that at first it looked like woven cloth. It covered her like a second skin, all the way to the top of her throat. Over that she wore a long robe of silk that shifted in colors from the yellow of sunlight to the green of pine needles in a slow strobelike pattern. Her silver-white hair had been braided into a tail and then fixed in coils at the base of her neck. Upon her head was a crown of what looked like twisted vine with still-living leaves. She carried neither weapon nor shield, but her wide Sidhe eyes stared at me with the absolute certainty of one who knows she is armed well beyond the ability of her enemy to withstand.

  Oh, and if I hadn’t known better, I would have sworn to you that it was Mab standing there. Seriously. They didn’t look like sisters. They looked like clones.

  I started off by bowing to her, deeply. I held it for a beat before rising again.

  She was a statue for a few seconds. She didn’t so much as nod back to me, to any measurable degree, but some microchange in her body language indicated acknowledgment.

  “You who slew my daughter,” Titania said quietly. “You dare summon me?”

  The last word slashed through the air, its fury palpable. It struck the circle surrounding me and broke into a shower of gold and green sparks that vanished almost instantly.

  I’ve had some experience with the Queens of Faerie. When they get angry and start talking to you, you freaking hear them. And then if you survive it, you hope you can make it to the emergency room in time. I just hadn’t seen any scenario in which my talking to Titania wouldn’t make her furious—so I’d drawn the circle as a precaution.

  Sometimes I use my brain.

  “Crazy, right?” I said. “But I needed to speak to you, O Queen.”

  Her eyes narrowed. The curtain-cloud of birds continued their circling around us, though they had fallen eerily silent. The clouds overhead continued to spin. We were as isolated from the rest of the world as if we stood in a private garden. “Speak, then.”

  I thought about my words and picked them carefully. “There are events in motion. Very large events, with serious ramifications for basically the whole world. I mean, I thought the war between the White Council and the Red Court was a big deal—but now it looks to me like it was more or less an opening act for the real band.”

  Her eyes narrowed. She nodded her head a fraction of an inch.

  “Something is going to happen tonight,” I said. “The Well will come under attack. You know what could happen if it is opened. A lot of people would get hurt in the short term. And in the long term… well, I’m not sure I know what would happen, but I’m almost certain it wouldn’t be good.”

  Titania tilted her head slightly to one side. It reminded me of an eagle considering its prey and deciding whether or not it was worth it to swoop down on it out of nowhere.

  “I’m trying to make sure that doesn’t happen,” I said. “And because of the nature of this… problem… I can’t trust any of the information I get out of the people I’m working for.”

  “Ah,” she said. “You wish me to pass judgment upon my sister.”

  “I need someone with knowledge of Mab,” I said. “Someone who knows the events are in motion. Who would know if she had… uh… . Changed.”

  “And what makes you think that I would have the knowledge you seek?”

  “Because I Saw you preparing the battlefield at the stone table, years ago. You’re Mab’s equal. I Saw your power. You don’t get power like that without knowledge.”

  “That is true.”

  “I need to know,” I said. “Is Mab sane? Is she… still Mab?”

  Titania did a statue impersonation for a long moment. Then she turned her head to one side and stared out toward the lake. “I do not know.” She gave me an oblique look. “I have not exchanged words with my sister since before Hastings.”

  The next-best thing to a millennium’s worth of estrangement. Dysfunction on an epic scale. This was exactly the kind of family tension into which sane people do not inject themselves.

  “I’m going to inject myself into your family business,” I said. “Because I’m scared to death of what could happen if I don’t, and because it needs to be done. I understand that you’re Mab’s enemy. I understand that if she says black, you say white, and that’s the way it is. But we’re all in a southbound handbasket together here. And I need your help.”

  Titania tilted her head the other way and took a step toward me. I almost flinched back out of the circle. I didn’t want to do that. I didn’t think it would keep me safe for long if she decided she wanted to come at me, but as long as it was there, it meant that she would have to spend at least a little time bringing it down—time in which I could attack her. It also meant that if I took the first swing, I’d be sacrificing the circle’s protection, and my only current advantage. She looked down at my feet and then back up at me expectantly.

  “Uh,” I said. “Will you please help me?”

  Something flickered over her face when I said that, an emotion that I couldn’t place. Maybe it wasn’t a human one. She turned abruptly away and seemed to consider her surroundings for the first time. “We shall see,” she said. She turned back to me, her eyes intent. “Why did you come here for the summoning?”

  “It’s a bird sanctuary,” I said. “A natural place, intended to preserve life and beauty. And birds seem kind of Summery to me. Following summer to the south over the winter and then returning. I thought that it might be close to some of Summer’s lands in Faerie. That you’d have an easier time hearing me.”

  She turned her head slowly, as if listening. There was no sound but the constant, muffled white noise of thousands of wings beating. “But this place is more than that. It is a location for… unapproved liaisons.”

  I shrugged. “It’s just you and me. I figured if you wanted to kill me, you could do it here without hurting anybody else.”

  Titania nodded, her expression turning thoughtful. “What think you of the men who come here to meet with one another?”

  “Uh,” I said, feeling somewhat off balance. “What do I think of gay guys?”

  “Yes.”

  “Boink and let boink, more or less.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning it doesn’t have a lot to do with me,” I said. “It’s none of my business what they do. I don’t go over in their living room and get my freak on with women. They don’t come over and do whatever they do with other guys at my house.”

  “You don’t feel that they are morally wrong to do so?”

  “I have no idea if it’s right or wrong,” I said. “To me, it mostly doesn’t matter.”

  “And why not?”

  “Because even if they are doing something immoral, I’d be an idiot to start criticizing them for it if I wasn’t perfect myself. Smoking is self-destructive. Drinking is self-destructive. Losing your temper and yelling at people is wrong. Lying is wrong. Cheating is wrong. Stealing is wrong. But people do that stuff all the time. Soon as I figure out how to be a perfect human being, then I’m qualified to go lecture other people about how they live their lives.”

  “An odd sentiment. Are you not ‘only human’? Will you not always be imperfect?”

&nbs
p; “Now you’re catching on,” I said.

  “You do not see it as a sin?”

  I shrugged. “I think it’s a cruel world. I think it’s hard to find love. I think we should all be happy when someone manages to do it.”

  “Love,” Titania said. She had keyed on the word. “Is that what happens here?”

  “The guys who come here for anonymous sex?” I sighed. “Not so much. I think that part’s a little sad. I mean, anytime sex becomes something so… damned impersonal, it’s a shame. And I don’t think it’s good for them. But it’s not me they’re hurting.”

  “Why should that matter?”

  I just looked at Titania for a second. Then I said, “Because people should be free. And as long as something they want to do isn’t harming others, they should be free to do it. Obviously.”

  “Is it?” Titania asked. “It would not seem to be, judging from the state of the mortal world.”

  “Yeah. A lot of people don’t get that,” I said. “They get caught up in right and wrong. Or right and left. But none of that stuff matters if people aren’t free.”

  Titania studied me intently.

  “Why are you asking me about that, of all things?” I asked.

  “Because it felt appropriate. Because my instincts told me that your answers would tell me something about you that I needed to know.” Titania took a deep breath. “What think you of my sister?”

  I debated for a second: polite answer or honest one?

  Honest. It’s almost always best to go with honest. It means you never have to worry about getting your story straight. “I thought Mab’s wrath was pretty bad until I found out what her affection was like.”

  At that, I think Titania almost smiled. “Oh?”

  “She nursed me out of bed by trying to kill me every day for eleven weeks. She scares the hell out of me.”

  “You do not love her?”

  “Not by any definition of the word I’ve ever heard,” I said.

  “And why do you serve her?”

  “Needed her help,” I said. “That was her price. Sure as hell wasn’t because I like the decor in Arctis Tor.”

  Titania nodded. She said, “You are unlike the other monsters she has shaped for herself over the centuries.”

  “Uh. Thank you?”

  She shook her head. “I have done nothing for you, Harry Dresden.” She pursed her lips. “In many ways, she and I are alike. In many more ways, we are entirely different. Do you know what my sister believes in?”

  “Flashy entrances,” I said.

  Titania’s lips actually twitched. “In reason.”

  “Reason?”

  “Reason. Logic. Calculation. The cold numbers. The supremacy of the mind.” Titania’s eyes became distant. “It is another place where we differ. I prefer to follow the wisdom of the heart.”

  “Meaning what?” I asked.

  Titania lifted her hand and spoke a single word, and the air rang with power. The ground buckled, ripping my circle apart and flinging me from my feet onto my back.

  “Meaning,” she said, her voice hot and furious, “that you murdered my daughter.”

  Birds flew shrieking in every direction as if released from a centrifuge. Titania raised a hand, and a bolt of lightning fell from the tornadic sky and blew a smoking crater the size of my head in the ground a yard away.

  “You dare to come here! To ask for me to interfere in my sister’s business! You who gave my Aurora an iron death!”

  I tried to get up, only to have Titania grab the front of my jacket and lift me off the ground. With one hand. She held me straight up, over her head, so that her fist was pressed against my chest.

  “I could kill you in a thousand ways,” she snarled, her opalescent eyes whirling with colors. “I could scatter your bones to the far corners of the earth. I could feed you to my garden and make you scream the entire while. I could visit torments on you that would make Lloyd Slate’s fate seem kind by comparison. I want to eat your heart.”

  I hung there over the furious Queen of Summer and knew, knew for certain, that there was not a damned thing I could do to save my own life. I can do things, sure—remarkable things. But Titania had no more to fear from me than a polar bear does a field mouse. My heartbeat became something close to a solid tone, and it was all I could do not to wet my freaking pants.

  And then something really unsettling happened.

  Tears filled her eyes. They came forth and spilled over her cheeks. Titania seemed to sag. She lowered me to the ground and released me.

  “I could do these things. But none of them,” she whispered, “would give me my daughter back. None of them would fill the emptiness within me. It took time, but Elder Gruff’s wise counsel helped me to see that truth.”

  Hell’s bells. Elder Gruff had spoken on my behalf? I owed that guy a beer.

  “I am not a fool, wizard. I know what she had become. I know what had to be done.” More tears fell, shining like diamonds. “But she was mine. I cannot forget that you took her from me. I cannot forgive you for that. Take your life and leave this place.”

  I sounded a little unsteady to my own ears when I spoke. “If the Well is ruptured, your realm stands to lose as much as the mortal one does.”

  “The wisdom of my heart tells me to hate you, mortal,” Titania said, “whatever my reason might say. I will not help you.”

  “No? What does your heart tell you is going to happen if those things in the Well are set free? They’re immortals. The fire in the fail-safe might keep them down for a while, but they’ll be back.”

  Titania didn’t turn to face me. Her voice was weary. “My heart tells me that all things end.” She paused. “But this thing I will tell a Winter Knight who believes in freedom: You must learn greater discretion. The power you have come to know and fear has a name. One should know the proper names of things.”

  She turned and walked toward me. My body told me to run like hell, but I told it to shut up, that my legs were shaking too hard anyway. Titania leaned up onto her toes and whispered, very close to my ear.

  “Nemesis,” she breathed. “Speak it carefully—or it may hear you.”

  I blinked. “It… it what?”

  With that she turned and began walking away. “Fare thee well, wizard. You say that people should be free. I agree. I will not shackle you with my wisdom. Make your choices. Choose what the world is to be. I care not. There is little light left in it for me, thanks to you.”

  A relatively small flock of birds, only a few hundred, blurred by between me and Titania. When they had passed, she was gone.

  I stood there, letting my heart rate slow down, along with the spinning clouds. I felt like crap. When I’d killed Aurora, there hadn’t been much in the way of a choice—but I’d still taken someone’s little girl away from her forever. I felt like a man in a rowboat with only one oar. No matter how hard I worked, I wasn’t really getting anywhere.

  But at least I had a name now, for the force the Ladies had told me about.

  Nemesis.

  And it was aware.

  The rain that had been held back abruptly began to come down in a torrent, and I sourly suspected that Titania had made sure I was going to get drenched. She hadn’t killed me, at least not yet. But I knew she sure as hell didn’t like me.

  Night was coming on fast, and when it got here, all hell was going to break loose. And that was a best-case scenario.

  I bowed my head, hunched my shoulders against the rain, and started out of the Magic Hedge.

  Chapter

  Thirty-one

  I whistled down a cab and went to my next destination: Graceland Cemetery.

  The place was actually kind of busy, it being Halloween and all. Graceland is one of the great cemeteries of the nation, the Atlantic City of graveyards. It’s filled with monuments to men and women who evidently had too much money to throw around while they were still alive. There are statues and mausoleums everywhere, made from granite and ornate marble, some of
them in the style of ancient Greece, some obviously more influenced by ancient Egypt. There’s one that’s practically a full-size temple. The actual style of the various monuments ranges from incredible beauty to absolutely outrageous extravagance, with artists and tycoons and architects and inventors all lying silently together now.

  Walk in Graceland and you can find yourself lost in a maze of memories, a cloud of names that no one living could attach to a face anymore. I wondered, passing some of the older monuments, whether anyone ever visited them now. If you’d died in 1876, it would mean that your great-great- or even great-great-great-grandchildren were the ones living now. Did people visit the graves of those who had been gone that long?

  No. Not for any personal reason. But that was all right. Graves aren’t for the dead. They’re for the loved ones the dead leave behind them. Once those loved ones have gone, once all the lives that have touched the occupant of any given grave had ended, then the grave’s purpose was fulfilled and ended.

  I suppose if you looked at it that way, one might as well decorate one’s grave with an enormous statue or a giant temple. It gave people something to talk about, at least. Although, following that logic, I would need to have a roller coaster, or maybe a Tilt-A-Whirl constructed over my own grave when I died. Then even after my loved ones had moved on, people could keep having fun for years and years.

  Of course, I’d need a slightly larger plot.

  My grave was still open, a six-foot pit in the ground. An old enemy had bought it for me as a form of murderous foreplay. That one hadn’t fallen out the way she had expected it would. But apparently whatever mechanism she used to secure the grave and to have it (illegally) left open was apparently still in place, because when I got there, I found it just as gaping and threatening as it had always been. A chill rolled up my spine as I read my headstone.

  It was a pretty thing, white marble with gold-inlaid letters and a gold-inlaid pentacle:

  HERE LIES HARRY DRESDEN.

  HE DIED DOING THE RIGHT THING.

  “Well,” I muttered, “once, sure. But I guess I’ll have to go best two out of three.”