by Jim Butcher
He glowered at me. Then he said, “When the hell did you get deep?”
“Through experience, wisdom I have earned,” I said in Yoda’s voice. But it tickled my throat weirdly and made me start coughing. I dealt with that for longer than I should have needed to and was straightening up again when Thomas said, his tone suddenly tighter, “Harry.”
I looked up to see a young man approaching us.
Carlos Ramirez was of average height, maybe of a little more than average muscle. He was filling out, getting that solid adult look to him, though for some reason I still expected to see a gangly kid in his early twenties whenever I saw him. He’d grown his dark hair out longer. His skin was bronzed from inclination and the sun. He walked with difficulty, limping and leaning on a thick cane carved with symbols—his wizard’s staff. He wore jeans and a tank top and a light jacket. Ramirez was solid, a proven fighter, a good man to have at your back, and was one of a very few people on the White Council of Wizardry whom I considered a friend.
“Harry,” he said. He nodded warily at Thomas. “Raith.”
My brother nodded back. “Been a while.”
“Since the Deeps,” Ramirez agreed.
“Carlos,” I said. “How’s your back?”
“I know when it’s going to rain now,” he said, flashing me a quick grin. “Won’t be dancing much for a while. But I won’t miss that damned chair.”
He held up a hand. I bumped fists with him. “What brings you out from the coast?”
“Council business,” he said.
Thomas nodded and said, “I’ll go.”
“No need,” Ramirez said. “This is going public this morning. McCoy thought it would be good for someone you knew to tell you, Harry.”
I grunted and unfastened the damned weighted vest. White Council business, typically, gave me a headache. “What is it this time?”
“Peace talks,” Ramirez said.
I arched an eyebrow. “What, seriously? With the Fomor?”
The supernatural world had been kind of topsy-turvy lately. Some lunatic had managed to wipe out the Red Court of Vampires completely, and the resulting vacuum had destabilized balances of power that were centuries old. The biggest result of the chaos was that the Fomor, an undersea power hardly anyone had spoken about during my lifetime, had risen up with a vengeance, taking territory from various powers and wreaking havoc on ordinary humans—mostly the poor, migrants, people without many champions to stand for them.
“A convocation of the Unseelie Accord signatories,” Ramirez confirmed. “Every major power is coming to the meeting. Apparently, the Fomor requested it. They want to resolve our differences. Everyone’s sending representatives.”
I whistled. That would be something. A gathering of influential members of the greatest powers in the supernatural world, in a time where tensions were high and tempers hot. I pitied the poor town where that little dinner party was going to take place. In fact …
I felt my mouth open. “Wait. They’re doing it here? Here? In Chicago?”
Ramirez shrugged. “Yeah, that’s why McCoy sent me to tell you.”
“Whose stupid idea was that?” I asked.
“That’s the other reason McCoy sent me,” Ramirez said, grinning. “The local baron offered his hospitality.”
“Marcone?” I demanded. Gentleman Johnnie Marcone, former robber baron of Chicago’s outfit, was now Baron Marcone, the only vanilla human being to sign the Unseelie Accords. He’d managed that a few years ago, and he’d been building his power base ever since.
“That stunt he pulled with Mab this spring,” I said, scowling.
Ramirez shrugged and spread his hands. “Marcone maneuvered Nicodemus Archleone into a corner and took everything he had, without breaking a single one of the bylaws of the Accords. Say what you will about the man, but he’s competent. It impressed a lot of people.”
“Yeah,” I said darkly. “That was all him. Tell me that the Council doesn’t want me to be our emissary.”
Ramirez blinked. “Wait, what? Oh … oh God, no, Harry. I mean … no. Just no.”
My brother covered up his mouth with one hand and coughed. I chose to ignore the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.
Ramirez cleared his throat before continuing. “But they will expect you to be the Council’s liaison with Winter, if needed, and to provide security for the Senior Council members in attendance. Everyone will be conducting themselves under guest-right, but they’ll all bring their own muscle, too.”
“Trust but verify,” I said. I took off the weighted vest with disgust and tossed it onto the beach. It made an extremely weighty thump when it hit.
Ramirez arched an eyebrow. “Christ, Harry. How much does that thing weigh?”
“Two-twenty,” I replied.
He shook his head. His expression, for a moment, was probing and pensive. I’d learned to recognize the look—that “I wonder if Harry Dresden is still Harry Dresden or if the Queen of Air and Darkness has turned him into her personal monster” look.
I get that one a lot these days. Sometimes in the mirror.
I looked down at my feet again and studied the ground. I could see it better as the sun drew nearer the horizon.
“You sure the Senior Council wants me to be on the security team?” I asked.
Ramirez nodded firmly. “I’m heading it up. They told me I could pick my own team. I’m picking you. I want you there.”
“Where you can more easily keep an eye on him,” Thomas murmured.
Ramirez grinned and inclined his head. “Maybe. Or maybe I just want to see some more buildings burn down.” He nodded to me and said, “Harry. I’ll be in touch.”
I nodded back. “Good to see you, ’Los.”
“Raith,” Ramirez said.
“Warden Ramirez,” my brother answered.
Ramirez shambled off, leaning on his cane, moving without much grace but with considerable energy.
“Well,” Thomas said. He watched Ramirez depart, and his eyes narrowed in thought. “It looks like I’d better get moving. Things are going to get complicated.”
“You don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe it’ll be a nice dinner, and everyone will sing ‘Kumbaya’ together.”
He eyed me.
I looked down at my feet again and said, “Yeah. Maybe not.”
He snorted, clapped my arm, and started walking back to the car without saying anything further. I knew he’d wait for me.
Once he was gone, I stepped out of the depression in the sand and picked up my weighted vest. Then I turned and studied it as the sun began to come up in earnest and I could finally see clearly.
I’d been standing in a humanoid footprint.
It was well over three feet long.
Once I looked, I saw that there was a line of them, with several yards stretching between each one and the next. The line led toward the water. The rising lakeshore breeze was already beginning to blur the footprints’ outlines.
Maybe their appearance was a complete coincidence.
Yeah. Maybe not.
I slung the weighted vest over my shoulder and started trudging back to the car. I had that sinking feeling that things were about to get hectic again.
Chapter
Two
Thomas came with me back to my place for a post-exercise breakfast.
Well. Technically, it was Molly’s place. But she wasn’t around much, and I was living there.
The svartalf embassy in Chicago was a neat little building in the business district, with a lawn that was an absolute gaping expanse when you considered the cost of real estate in town. It looked like the kind of building that should be full of people in severely sober business attire, doing things with money and numbers that were too complicated, fussy, and god-awful boring to be widely understood.
As it happened, that was pretty close to the truth.
There was a little guardhouse on the drive in, a fairly recent feature, and a bland-looking man in a bland and
expensive fitted suit and dark sunglasses looked up from his book. We stopped at the window and I said, “The purple mustang flies tonight.”
The guard stared at me.
“ Uh … hang on,” I said, and racked my brain. “Sad Tuesdays present no problem to the local authorities?”
He kept staring at me. “State your names, please.”
“Oh come on, Austri,” I said. “Do we have to do this dance every single morning? You know who I am. Hell, we watched the kids play together for an hour last night.”
“I wasn’t on duty then,” Austri said, his tone entirely neutral, his eyes flat. “State your names, please.”
“Once,” I said. “Just once, would it kill you to let security protocol slide?”
He gave me more of that blank stare, a slow blink, and said, “Potentially. Which is why we have security protocols.”
I gave him my most wizardly glower, to no avail. Then I grumbled under my breath, making mostly Yosemite Sam noises, and started fumbling around in my gym bag. “My name is Harry Dresden, Winter Knight, vassal to Molly Carpenter, Lady Winter of the Sidhe Court, and under the protection of her guest-right. This is Thomas Raith, also her guest, friend to Lady Evanna.”
“He is one of Evanna’s lovers,” Austri corrected me meticulously. He nodded at Thomas.
“ ’Sup, Austri,” my brother said.
“Duty,” Austri said seriously, and opened a folder, flipping through a number of profile pages with photographs in the top corner. He stopped on my page, carefully compared the image to me, and then another to Thomas, and nodded. “Passphrase, please.”
“Yeah, one second.” I finally found the folded-up piece of paper with the weekly passphrases on it in the depths of the gym bag. I unfolded it, shook sand off it, consulted it, and read, “ ‘All of my base are belong to me.’ What does that even mean?”
Austri stared at me in frustration for a moment and sighed. Then he looked at Thomas. “And yours?”
“ ‘The itsy-bitsy spider went up the waterspout,’ ” Thomas said promptly, without referencing a cheat card. Because he has nothing better to do with his time than memorize random passphrases.
Austri nodded approvingly, flipped the folder closed, and put it away. “Please wait,” he said. He hit a button and muttered a nearly silent word, which I knew would disarm about two thousand lethal magical wards between me and the front door. Then he nodded at me and said, “You may enter.”
“Thank you,” I said.
He leaned back in his chair a bit, relaxing, and the illusion of unremarkable humanity that covered the svartalf went liquid and translucent. Austri had grey skin with a gymnast’s muscles beneath, a head a little too big for the rest of him, and absolutely enormous black eyes, like that alien in the autopsy video. Beneath the surface illusion, his expression was relaxed and pleasant. “My Ingri would like another playdate with Maggie and Sir Mouse.”
“Maggie would enjoy that as well. I’ll contact Mrs. Austri?”
He nodded. “That is her designated area of responsibility. Cards again tonight?”
“I’d like to, but I can’t commit to it,” I said.
He frowned slightly. “I prefer being able to plan my evening activities.”
“Duty,” I explained.
His frown vanished, and he picked up his book again. “That is different, of course. Please let me know when your duties permit you to spare the time.”
I gave him a nod and went forward.
Austri was the svartalves in a nutshell. Anal-retentive, a ferocious stickler, inhumanly disciplined, inflexibly dedicated to his concepts of honor and duty—but good people once you got to know him. It takes all kinds, you know?
We passed through two more security checkpoints, one in the building’s lobby and another at the elevator that led down to the embassy’s large subterranean complex. One of the other svartalves peered at my driver’s license, then at me, and insisted on measuring my height and taking my fingerprints to further verify that it was actually me and not an impostor wearing a Harry suit.
I guess I shouldn’t have minded it so much. Adding more checks did mean more security, even if it was occasionally applied somewhat maliciously by guys like Gedwig here. Still, the svartalves’ particular blend of paranoia and punctiliousness meant that my daughter would be that much safer under their roof. But some days it chafed, and this was one of them.
We slipped into the apartment and found it still dim and dark and cool. I stopped for a moment to marvel at the miracle of air-conditioning in the summer. Magic and technology don’t get along, and the aura of energy around a wizard like me plays merry hell with pretty much anything developed after the Second World War. I’d never lived in a place whose AC survived more than a few days, but the svartalves had constructed this apartment especially for Molly. It had lights that worked, and a radio that worked, and hot water that worked, and an AC that worked, and I had no idea how the clever folk had managed that. The svartalves were famous craftsmen. Word was, if you wanted something made, they could make it.
Maybe I should get Molly to ask for a TV. Or an Internet … thing. Device. One of those Internet thingies. I figure everyone is so insane about the Internet, there must be something cool there.
Anyway, when we finally came all the way into the living room, Mister, my big grey tomcat, appeared as he always did and flung himself at my shins in a welcome-home shoulder block. I leaned down to rub the base of his ears the way he liked, which he received with great magnanimity, before dismissing me to continue my day. He walked by Thomas, rubbing his cheek against my brother’s leg once and once only to mark him as Mister’s property; then he walked off in regal disinterest. Mister wasn’t as young as he used to be, but he still knew who ruled the apartment.
My daughter was still sleeping on the couch, covered by a heavy blanket. Next to her lay a shaggy grey behemoth about the size of a Budweiser horse, my Temple dog, Mouse. He didn’t even lift his head or open his eyes when we came in. He just yawned and wriggled into a slightly more comfortable position before huffing out a breath and going back to sleep. Maggie’s breathing caught in a little hitch; then she put out her hand and sank it into the dog’s fur. They both sighed in their sleep and went motionless again.
I stood there for a moment, just looking down at them.
Thomas usually busied himself with coffee in the kitchen at moments like this. But today, he stepped up beside me and stood there, looking at the girl and the dog.
“Damn,” he said.
I nodded. “Big responsibility.”
“Yeah.”
“You can do it.”
I turned to look at him. There was some expression I couldn’t define on his face, some mix of longing and gentle, exquisite pain.
“I don’t think so, Harry,” he said.
“Don’t be a dope,” I said. “You love her. You’ll love the kid. Of course you can.”
A faint sad smile mixed in with the other expressions on his face.
We both turned back to the sleeping child.
There was a quality to the stillness that I had never experienced before I’d started taking care of Maggie. A sense of … intense satisfaction like nothing I’d ever known. There she was, sleeping, happy, healthy—safe.
I took a deep stabilizing breath. Weariness fled, not from my body, but from somewhere deeper and infinitely more important. My brother exhaled at the same time and thumped his fist on my shoulder. Then he turned for the kitchen and I headed for the shower.
I broiled myself for as long as seemed appropriate, and as I was getting dressed I heard voices from the kitchen.
“Milk doesn’t have feelings,” Maggie was saying.
“Why not?” piped a voice even younger.
“Because milk is inanimate,” Maggie said cheerfully.
“Oh.” There was a pause. “But it is moving.”
“I moved it,” Maggie said. “And then it sloshes around for a while.”
“Why?”
“Because of gravity, I think,” Maggie said. “Or maybe memontum.”
“Do you mean momentum?” the littler voice asked.
“I might,” Maggie said seriously.
“How do you know, then?”
“When you’re ten, you’ll know things, too,” Maggie said.
“Why?”
I walked into the apartment’s little kitchen to find Maggie, in her pajamas, making a mess with the attentive help of Mouse and a skull carved from wood. Little green dots of light glowed in the skull’s eye sockets, like the embers of some bizarre fire. Half the contents of the apartment’s little pantry were crowded onto the kitchen counter.
I eyed Thomas, who was sitting at the kitchen table with a mug of coffee. He’d already poured mine. I walked over to him and took my cup, murmuring, “You didn’t think to step in here?”
“You got in the shower so long ago, I forget exactly what I was thinking back in those days,” he shot back.
I lowered my voice a little. “How’d she do?” I asked him.
He spoke in kind. “Pretty good. We exchanged good-mornings, made eye contact, and she seemed happy to do it,” he said. “She asked me if I wanted pancakes.”
“And you said yes?”
“Harry,” Thomas said, “be real. Everyone wants someone to make us pancakes; we’re all just too grown-up to say it.”
I sipped coffee, because it was impossible to argue with logic like that.
He sipped, too. “You going to stop her?”
I savored the perfection that is coffee and enjoyed that first swallow before responding. “Think I’d better scout it out.”
I took my cup into the kitchen and heard Thomas get up to tag along. When I came into its line of sight, the little wooden skull’s eyes swiveled to me, and her voice proclaimed proudly, “Pancakes are inanimate!”
“Correct,” I said, speaking to the spirit inside the skull. Better inside that wooden one than mine, let me tell you. Ever since the new-formed spirit of intellect had coalesced inside my mind, it had grown until it was too big for the space, which admittedly had not taken her very long. We’d managed to successfully get her out of my head, and she’d taken up residence in the carved wooden skull prepared for her. Ever since, we’d been teaching her and answering a river of endless questions. “Good morning, Bonea.”