Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  Well, clearly this morning wasn’t going in anyone’s photo album. But it wasn’t going to result in a funeral, either. Take your wins where you can get them, I guess.

  “Thank you,” I said to them both. I held out my hand, and Thomas passed me the chef knife’s handle.

  I put the knife away and cleared my throat at my grandfather.

  He eyed Thomas, the look a threat. Then he abruptly eased his stance and spoke in conversational tones. “Those pancakes I smell?” he asked, setting his staff in the corner by the door.

  I put mine with his. “Yeah. Just making us some breakfast.”

  “Harry,” Thomas said, “I’m going to go.”

  “You don’t have to,” I said.

  He eyed Ebenezar, his lips compressed. “Yeah. I do.”

  “Thomas,” I began.

  My brother held up his hand to forestall me, his face a thundercloud, and stalked out.

  My grandfather watched him go until the door closed behind him. Then he glanced up at me from behind the ridge of his shaggy eyebrows.

  “Thanks for that,” I said.

  “You should thank me,” he said without heat. “Telling you, you don’t know them like you think you do.”

  “The White Court might be bad on average,” I said. “But that one’s okay.”

  “Which is exactly what everyone they’ve ever seduced will tell you about them,” my grandfather said, scowling. But he held up a hand and his tone turned apologetic. “Look, Hoss. Your business is your own. I don’t come riding in here all the time trying to run your life. And I shouldn’t have thrown a wrench in whatever you had going with the vampire. But you’re young, and I got experiences with them and perspective on them that you don’t. I don’t want you to figure it out the hard way, that’s all.”

  I frowned at the old man.

  If he was explaining his reasoning instead of leaving me to do it myself, he was worried.

  “There he is!” Ebenezar said, smiling as Mouse came shambling over to greet him. He ruffled the dog’s ears with brisk fondness. “I don’t have much time, so I’ll come right to it. You’re in trouble.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said. I went back into the kitchen and poured batter onto the griddle. “First time we’ve spoken face-to-face since Chichén Itzá. All business, huh, sir?”

  He took that in for a moment, his eyes narrowing slightly. “We’ve all had our hands full since that night,” he said. “People have been dying. You don’t know what it’s been like out there.”

  “I missed you, too,” I said. “I’m likewise glad to see you alive and in one piece.”

  “There isn’t time for this,” he said.

  “Pancakes?” I asked. “I’m always pretty hungry after my morning constitutional.”

  The old man’s voice hardened. “I’m not kidding, grandson,” he said. “There has been a motion raised before the general Council to strip you of your status as a member of the White Council entirely.”

  I arched an eyebrow sharply. “Huh. First the Council forces me to wear one of those damned grey cloaks whether I want one or not. Now they’re talking about kicking me out? I’m going to get whiplash.”

  “You’re going to get more than that if the motion passes,” he said, heat in his tone. Then he visibly took a moment to forcibly calm himself. “Harry, I want to get caught up, too. I want to talk. Clear the air. And we will. But right now is no moment to let your emotions run your life.”

  I scowled down at the pancake. I’d had all kinds of practice in keeping my emotions in check lately. “All right,” I said. “Truce. For now. What pretext is the Council basing this upon?”

  “An aggregate of various factors,” he replied. “Your nonstandard elevation to full wizard, for example. The number of times you’ve involved yourself in high-profile cases. Your insistence on operating openly as a wizard for over a decade. Not least of which, the conflict of interest they claim now lies upon you due to your service to Queen Mab. A service that has apparently also brought a proven warlock into Mab’s influence beside you.”

  “It’s all true,” I said. “I haven’t lied to anyone about any of it. It’s all on the record. So what’s the problem?”

  “The problem is that trust is getting harder and harder to come by in the White Council,” Ebenezar said. “Your choices have made you an outlier. Suspicion naturally falls upon someone in your position in times of strain.”

  I flipped the pancake. I’d timed it right. It was golden brown.

  “If they boot me,” I said, thinking through it aloud, “it means that I will no longer have the protection of the Council. I won’t be an official wizard.”

  “You’ve made a great many enemies over the years,” Ebenezar said. “So have I. If you were outcast from the Council, your enemies—and mine—would see you occupying a weakened position. They’ll do something about it. How much protection can Mab provide you?”

  “Mab,” I said, “is not all that into safety. She mostly provides the opposite of that, actually. The way she figures it, the only way she could make me perfectly safe would be to cut my throat and entomb me in amber.”

  The quip did not draw a smile from the old man. He stared at me with craggy non-amusement.

  I sighed. “It isn’t Mab’s job to protect her Knight. It’s supposed to be the other way around. If something comes along and kills me, I clearly wasn’t strong enough to be her Knight in the first place.”

  “You aren’t taking this seriously,” he said.

  I flipped the pancake onto the pile and poured out batter for the next. “If it gets bad, I can always fall back to Demonreach.”

  “God, if they knew the whole truth about that place,” Ebenezar muttered. “And then what? Stay trapped on your island for the rest of your life, afraid to step off it?”

  “So don’t let the motion go to a general vote,” I said. “You’re on the Senior Council. Pull rank. Assume control of it.”

  “I can’t,” Ebenezar said. “Without a quorum, it’s got to be a general vote, and four of the Senior Council are going to be at the peace talks when the vote takes place.”

  My stomach twisted a little. “Which four?”

  “Me, Cristos, Listens-to-Wind, and Martha Liberty.”

  “Oh,” I said quietly. My grandfather was a cagey old fox, with a thick network of alliances throughout the White Council—and almost as many enemies. The Merlin himself couldn’t stand Ebenezar, and of the three Senior Council members who would preside over the next Council meeting, only the Gatekeeper had ever shown me any kind of fondness. Even if the vote could go to the Senior Council, I’d lose two to one.

  Of course, I wasn’t sure about how I would fare among the general population of the White Council, either. Wizards live a long time, and they don’t do it by taking unnecessary risks. If you look up unnecessary risk in the White Council’s dictionary, my picture is there. And my address. And all my personal contact information. And my permanent record from middle school.

  “You need to talk to some of them face-to-face,” Ebenezar said. “Shake some hands. Make sure they know who you are. Reassure them. You only have a few days, but if you move fast, I think you can gather enough support to defeat the motion.”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t. Not without neglecting my duties as a Warden and the Winter Knight both.”

  “What?” he asked.

  I told him about my meeting with Ramirez that morning. “I’ve been assigned to look out for you at the summit and to liaise with Winter.”

  The old man spat a curse.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  Most of my support in the Senior Council was getting sent away at exactly the same time I was given a high-profile assignment providing security for the peace summit. Meanwhile, of the wizards who actually did know me, Ramirez and his bunch were the ones who would probably speak on my behalf—and they’d been sent to the summit, too.

  “I’m being set up.”

  “Hngh,” Ebenezar agreed.<
br />
  “Was it the Merlin?” I asked. “Kind of feels like his style.”

  “Maybe,” my grandfather said. “On the other hand, Cristos is throwing around a lot of orders these days, too. Hard to say where it comes from.”

  I flipped the pancake. If I hadn’t spent years with the old man, I wouldn’t have noticed anything in his tone, but there was a peculiar shade of emphasis to his phrasing that made me glance up at him. He’d said Cristos, but what he meant was …

  “The Black Council,” I said.

  He grimaced at me and then at the walls.

  The Black Council was secret stuff. Some unknown folks in the wizarding community had been causing a great deal of mischief in my life over the past decade and more. Their goals were no clearer than their identities, but it was obvious that they were damned dangerous. Wizard Cristos had ascended to the Senior Council under odd circumstances—circumstances that seemed to indicate that the Black Council was exercising power within the Council itself. A White Council that was bumbling and fussy and not interested in anything but its own politics was a fairly terrible but normal thing—but a White Council that was being directed by the kind of people I’d run into over the years was a nightmare that barely bore thinking upon.

  A few of us had gotten together to see if we could stop it from happening. Because secret societies within the White Council were seen as evidence of plotting to overthrow it, we had to be really, really careful about our little cabal. Especially since we were kind of plotting against the White Council, even if we were doing it for its own good.

  “I sweep it three times a day and have the Little Folk on the lookout for any possible eavesdropping,” I said. “No one is listening in on us.”

  “Good,” Ebenezar said. “Yes. Whether Cristos is an open servant of the Black Council or just their puppet, I think it’s safe to say that they want you gone.”

  “So what else is new?” I asked.

  “Don’t be cute,” Ebenezar said. “They’ve been running operations and sometimes you’ve interfered—but they’ve never come at you directly.”

  “Guess I was a headache one time too many.”

  “My point is,” he said, “whatever’s happening here … your removal has become a priority to them.”

  I flipped another pancake. I bobbled it. Some of the batter splattered and smeared. I wasn’t scared, exactly … but the Black Council had done some scary stuff.

  “What do you think?” I asked him.

  “I think that these people aren’t going to announce themselves,” he said. “They aren’t going to come at you directly, they aren’t going to be obvious, and they aren’t going to give up.” He squinted at me and said, “This vote that’s going—that’s just the storm they’re brewing up to distract you.”

  “So we ignore it?”

  “Storm can still kill you, whether you pay attention to it or not,” he said. “We still have to deal with it. That’s what makes it an excellent distraction.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  “Don’t get too focused on the situation that’s being set up. They want you locked in on that so that you never see the real problem coming.”

  I finished another pancake and brought the plate of them over to the table. I divided them out, and my grandfather and I ate in quiet.

  “Good,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  We wrapped up breakfast and my mentor shook his head. “I’ll see what I can do about this vote. Meanwhile, you do whatever you need to.”

  “To do what?” I asked.

  “To survive,” he said. He squinted at nothing in particular and said, “You’ve had it easy so far, in some ways.”

  “Easy?” I asked.

  “You’ve had troubles,” he said. “But you’ve gotten to play Lancelot at all of them. You’ve ridden forth to do open battle and you’ve won the day.”

  “Not all of them.”

  “More than most would have,” he said. “I was like that once. Like you, now.”

  Silence stretched and I didn’t try to fill it.

  “You’re getting into deeper weeds now, boy. The stakes are getting higher.”

  “Meaning what?”

  “The past few years have shown them that you aren’t someone who is easily removed the direct way. They’re going to start trying alternate methods.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “The old way,” he said, his voice weary. “The way it always happens. I think someone you don’t expect is going to stab you in the back, Hoss.”

  Chapter

  Four

  There was a very soft sound from the back of the apartment and the old man came to his feet with the speed of an alley cat. Before he’d even gotten there, he’d hissed a word, and his staff flew across the room and into his hand.

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” I said, rising, my hands spread. “Would you relax, please?”

  “Who is that?” he demanded. He shot me a hard look. “Who?”

  “I just fed you pancakes,” I muttered. How tense were things in the old man’s world that he would react like that? “Stars and stones.”

  “Don’t say that,” he said, his tone slipping into a more familiar, grouchier cadence. “You don’t even know what it means.”

  “The guy I learned it from wouldn’t teach me,” I said back. “Would you relax for five seconds, please? Please?”

  He glowered at me. He lowered the staff only slightly. “Why should I?”

  “Because I’d rather my daughter didn’t have her great-grandad scare her to death on their first meeting,” I said.

  At that, the old man blinked. Twice. He lowered his staff abruptly. “What? She’s here? She was here? This whole time?”

  “She has trouble with new people,” I said quietly. “It’s hard on her.” I looked down at Mouse and jerked my chin at the door to the bedroom. The big dog got up obediently and padded over to the door to be a reassuring presence for the girl.

  “You let the vampire around her?” my grandfather whispered, his expression shocked.

  “Maggie?” I called quietly. “Please come out. There’s someone I guess you should meet.”

  The door opened only a little. I could see a sliver of her face and one brown eye peering out warily.

  “I want you to come meet your great-grandfather,” I said quietly. “I hadn’t actually pictured it quite like this,” I said, with a glance at the old man. “But I guess we’ve got what we’ve got. Come on, punkin.”

  The door opened a little more. She reached out and felt around with one hand until her fingers found Mouse’s fur. She curled them into his mane and then, very slowly, opened the door. She faced Ebenezar without moving or speaking.

  “Maggie,” he said quietly. His voice sounded rough. “Hello, young lady.”

  She nodded at him a little.

  Ebenezar nodded back. Then he turned to me, and an anger I had never seen before smoldered in his eyes. He opened his mouth to speak.

  Before he could, I gave him a warning glance and said, “How about we go up to the garden, and Mouse can stretch his legs?”

  “Okay,” Maggie said.

  The old man glared daggers at me. Then schooled his expression and turned back to my daughter with a gentle smile. “That sounds nice,” he said.

  I stood with Ebenezar and watched Maggie and Mouse play with svartalf children.

  The garden was gorgeous, centered on a couple of trees that grew in the courtyard in the middle of the svartalf embassy. Grass and flowers had been planted in tasteful balance, leaving enough room for the children to run about and play hide-and-seek. Svartalf children are odd-looking little creatures, with their parents’ grey skin and absolutely enormous eyes—adorable, really. There were half a dozen kids in residence at the embassy of an age to play with Maggie, and all of them loved Mouse, who was engaging them all in a game of tag, lightly springing away from them and twisting and dodging despite all his mass of muscle.

  Several
svartalves were in the garden. They kept a polite physical and psychological distance from us, clearly savvy to the tension that currently existed between me and the old man.

  “Are you insane?” Ebenezar asked me.

  “I’m making a choice,” I said.

  “You might as well get her a shirt with a series of bull’s-eyes on it,” he said. He kept his voice pitched too low for the children to hear him. “You raise that child near you, and you’re making her a target. My God, the vampires already know about her.”

  “She was in a safe house far away from me for a long time,” I said. “It didn’t work out so well.”

  “What was wrong with the Carpenters’ house?” he said. “Short of headquarters in Edinburgh, you couldn’t find a better-protected place. Why not leave her there?”

  “Because her father doesn’t live there,” I said.

  The old man looked up at the sky as though imploring the Almighty to give him patience. “You’re a damned fool.”

  I ground my teeth. “You have a better idea?”

  “She needs to be somewhere safe. Somewhere away from you. At least until such time as she shows potential talent of her own, so that she can learn to protect herself.”

  “Assuming she ever does.”

  “If she doesn’t, our world will get her killed.”

  At that, I felt my own temper rising. “I guess you’d do it differently,” I said.

  “I did do it differently,” he snapped. “I made sure your mother grew up far away from the dangers of my life.”

  “How’d that work out?” I asked him. “Let’s ask Mom. Oh, wait. We can’t. She’s dead.”

  There was a sudden silence. I’m not sure if the sunlight literally dimmed for a few seconds or not. But the svartalves suddenly drifted even farther away from us.

  The old man’s voice was a quiet rumble.

  “What did you say to me, boy?”

  “She’s dead,” I said, enunciating. “Your daughter, who you stashed somewhere safe for her protection, is dead now. You have no stones to throw at me.”

  The old man looked like something carven from old ivory. He said nothing.

  “The monsters already did try to kill Maggie. And I stopped them,” I said. “And if they try again, I’ll stop them again. She doesn’t need somewhere safe. But she does need her dad.”