by Jim Butcher
“How dare you,” the old man whispered.
“I might not be the best parent in the whole world,” I said. “But I’m here. I’m in her life. And there’s no substitute for that. None. There never was. There never will be.”
“You idiot,” Ebenezar said through clenched teeth. “Do you know what these hosts of yours are capable of?”
“Living up to their word,” I spat.
“Boy,” he said, “don’t push me.”
“Why? What are you going to do? Let me vanish into the foster care system? For my own good, of course.”
The old man’s head rocked back as if I’d slapped him.
“Mom died when I was born,” I said in a monotone. “Dad when I was coming up on kindergarten. And you just let me be alone.”
Ebenezar turned from me and hunched his shoulders.
“Maybe you thought you were protecting me,” I continued, without inflection. “But you were also abandoning me. And it hurt. It left scars. I didn’t even know you existed, and I was still angry with you.” I watched the children pursue Mouse. He could run for hours without getting winded. They were all having a ball. “She’s been through enough. I’m not putting her through that, too.”
The back of his neck and his bald pate were both turning red. I heard his knuckles pop as his blunt, strong hands clenched into fists.
“Boy,” he growled. “You aren’t thinking straight. You aren’t thinking this through.”
“One of us isn’t.”
“Your mother is dead,” Ebenezar said. “Your father is dead. The woman who bore your child is dead. And you are the common denominator. Can’t you see that? Can’t you see that it’s necessary to set your own feelings aside?”
I felt a flash of rage and pain so intense that for a second I thought I was about to lose control—and it had nothing to do with the Winter mantle.
“What I see,” I said, “is a little girl who needs her father to love her. I can’t do that if I’m not there.”
“You’re wrong.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But she’s my child. It’s my call.”
He shook his head.
“And since I’ve noticed that my life at times resembles a badly written Mexican soap opera,” I continued, “I want you to know something.”
“What?”
“I think that right now you’re considering protecting her by grabbing her and stashing her somewhere safe. If you go through with it, I’m going to take her back. Over your dead body if necessary, sir.”
The old man turned to stare at me, his face a thundercloud.
I stared back. I didn’t blink.
“Lad,” Ebenezar said. The faint burr of a Scots accent had entered his voice. “You’re walking somewhere you don’t want to go.”
“Not the first time. Not the last.”
The old man thrust out a pugnacious jaw and drew in a breath.
“Gentlemen,” said a new voice, deep and rich. “Gentlemen, excuse me.”
The old man and I both turned our glares on the intruder.
A svartalf stood before us, clad in a suit of dark blue silk. He was taller than Austri, and heavier with muscle. His expression was calm and absolutely resolute. “Gentlemen, you are guests in my home. This display of yours is unseemly at best.”
I blinked and looked around slowly. The play in the garden had stopped. The svartalf children had withdrawn to hide behind their parents. Maggie stood halfway between the other children and her family, poised on one foot as if set to flee, both her hands clutching desperately at Mouse’s mane. The big dog stood between the child and us, giving me a very disapproving look.
I guess we hadn’t kept our voices as quiet as we thought we had.
“Etri,” my grandfather said. He nodded his head once and said, “We’re having a … personal discussion.”
Etri, the head of the svartalf embassy, gave Ebenezar a look devoid of sympathy or understanding. “Have it elsewhere. You are frightening my people’s children. While you are in my house, McCoy, you will conduct yourself with courtesy and decorum.”
The statement was flat, uncompromising, and there was not even the subtle hint that it might entertain the possibility of some other outcome. I raised an eyebrow at the svartalf. I knew he was well respected in the supernatural community, which generally translated to considerable personal power, but only a fool squared off against Ebenezar McCoy.
(Yes. I’m aware of the implications of that statement; I’d been doing it for like ten minutes.)
The old man took a deliberate breath and then looked around. His eyes lingered on Maggie, and suddenly he seemed to deflate slightly. It was like watching him age a decade or two over the course of a few sentences.
And I suddenly really thought about the things I’d said in anger, and I felt ashamed.
“Of course,” the old man said. “I formally apologize that the discussion got out of hand and that I disturbed your people’s children. I offer no excuse and ask you to overlook my discourtesy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Same here. Me, too.”
Etri regarded Ebenezar for a moment and then glanced at me and rolled his eyes a little before nodding. “I believe this visit is over, Wizard McCoy. I will send your effects to the front gate.”
“No, wait,” I said. “Sir, I didn’t mean—”
“Of course you are right, Etri,” Ebenezar said, his voice brusque. He started to turn away.
“Sir,” I said.
“Time to go,” Ebenezar said, his voice weary. “Work to be done.”
And he walked out.
I hadn’t seen Austri enter the garden, but the security guard quietly stepped forward to tail the old man. I made a go-easy gesture at Austri. The svartalf kept his expression stiff for a second, but then something like compassion softened it, and he nodded in reply to me.
Etri watched him go. Then he gave me an unreadable look, shook his head, and walked away. The other svartalves went with him.
Once everyone was gone, Maggie hurried over to me and threw her arms around my waist. I peeled her off and picked her up and held her.
“Was it my fault?” she asked me, her voice quavering. “I wanted … wanted to talk to Grandpa, but I couldn’t make the words happen. I didn’t mean to make him mad and go away.”
My throat grew tight and I closed my eyes before any tears escaped. “Not your fault, punkin. That was so not your fault. You did fine.”
She clung to my neck, hard enough to be uncomfortable. “But why was he mad?”
“Sometimes grown-ups disagree with each other,” I said. “Sometimes they get angry and say things that hurt when they don’t mean to. But it will pass. You’ll see.”
“Oh,” she said.
Mouse came up to me and leaned against my legs in silent support.
“Will Grandpa come for Christmas?” she asked.
“Maybe he will.”
“Okay,” she said. “Are you mad at me?”
“No,” I said, and kissed the side of her head. “You’re my punkin.”
“Good,” she said. “I still want pancakes.”
“Let’s go make them,” I said.
Mouse’s tail thumped hopefully against my leg.
But first, we all stood there for a moment, the three of us, taking comfort in one another’s proximity.
Chapter
Five
Of course it went badly,” Karrin said. “It was a fight with someone in your family. Believe me, family fights are the worst.”
“The family hasn’t even been assembled yet and there’s fights,” I complained.
“Looks pretty assembled to me, from what I’ve seen,” she said, her tone dry.
“Yeah, well. I’ve never had much opportunity to fight with family,” I said.
“I have,” she said. “Everyone cares about everyone else, so when you get mad and say something horrible, it hurts that much more. And too many things go unsaid. That’s the worst, I think. Everyone thinks the
y know one another better than they probably do, so you fill in the silences with things the other person never actually said. Or thought. Or thought about saying.”
I scowled and said, “Is that your professional opinion, Doctor Murphy?”
She snorted, fell silent, and squeezed my hand with hers. Her grip was small and strong and warm. We held hands a lot these days.
I’d come over to cook her some dinner. My cooking skills are modest but serviceable, and we’d both had our fill of oven-roasted chicken and potatoes and a fresh salad. Karrin was having a hard time moving around in the kitchen, between her knee, her shoulder, and all the braces she had to wear to keep them more or less immobilized. And she’d gotten sick of the available delivery food after only a few weeks of being laid up. I came over a couple of nights a week and cooked for her, when the Carpenter kids were available to babysit Maggie.
“Speaking of doctors,” I said, all smooth, “what did the doctor say today?”
“Round one of surgery went okay,” she said. She exhaled and laid her head against my arm. We were sitting on the couch in her living room, with her injured leg propped up on an ottoman I’d gotten for her. She was a bitty thing, five and not much, if a very muscular five and not much. Blond hair, clean but bedraggled. Hard to keep it styled when you’ve got to do everything with one hand. No makeup.
And she looked tired. Karrin Murphy found the lack of work during her recovery exhausting.
She’d collected the injuries on my behalf. They weren’t my fault, or that’s what I kept telling myself, but at the end of the day she’d put herself in a place to get hurt because I’d asked her to be there. You could argue free will and causality and personal choice all you wanted, but the fact was that if I hadn’t gotten her involved, she’d probably have been in one of her martial arts classes at this time of evening.
“Round two can start next week,” she continued, speaking in her professional voice, the detached one that didn’t have any emotion in it, used mostly when something really, really upset her. “Then it’s just three more months of casts and stupid braces and then I can start six months of therapy while they wean me off the painkillers, and after all of that is done, if it goes very, very well, he thinks I might be able to walk without a cane. As long as I don’t have to do it very fast.”
I frowned. “What about your training?”
“There was damage,” she said, her voice becoming not so much quiet as … dead. “In the knee, shoulder, elbow. They’re hoping to get me back to fifty percent. Of basic function. Not athletic activity.”
I remembered her scream when Nicodemus had kicked in her knee. The ugly, wet crunching sound when he’d calmly forced her arm out of its socket, tearing apart her rotator and hyperextending her elbow at the same time. He’d done it deliberately, inflicted as much damage, as much pain, as he could.
“I don’t get to be me anymore,” she whispered.
She’d been injured before, and she’d come back from it.
But everyone has limits. She was only human.
We sat in the silence while her old grandfather clock ticked steadily.
“Is there anything that …” she began.
I shook my head. “When it comes to healing, magic isn’t much ahead of medicine at this point. Our people go to study from yours. Unless you want to get Faustian.”
“No,” she said firmly.
I nodded. There wasn’t much else I could say. “I’m sorry,” I said finally.
She gave her head a tiny shake. “Don’t,” she said. “I cried about it earlier. And I’ll do it again later. But right now I don’t want to think about it. Talk about something else.”
I tried to think of something. I came up empty. So instead, I kissed her.
“You are the last of the red-hot raconteurs, Dresden,” she murmured against my mouth. But then she closed her eyes and leaned into the kiss, and everything else started going away.
Kissing was something I had to be cautious about. After about twenty seconds of feeling her breath mingling with mine, the Winter mantle started going berserk with naked lust. The damned aura of power Mab had given me let me do some incredible things, but the constant drumbeat of sex and violence it kept playing at my thoughts and emotions never went away. So at twenty seconds, I started breathing faster, and at thirty my head was besieged by impulses of Things to Do with Karrin, and by the time a minute had gone by I was forcing myself to remember that I was stronger than I realized and to be careful not to clench my hands on her and haul her bodily against me.
Though, to be fair, she was reacting in almost exactly the same way and she didn’t have an aura of wicked Faerie power to blame it on.
So maybe it wasn’t the mantle at all. Maybe it was just me, which was scary.
Or maybe it was just … us.
Which was actually kind of an amazing thought.
Her fingers twined in my hair and gripped hard and she gasped, “Okay. You are a genius of conversation. This is exactly what I need.”
“Are you su—” I began to ask.
“God, stop talking, Harry,” she growled, and her hand got more intimate, sliding under my shirt. “I’m tired of waiting. You’re tired of waiting. We’re tired of waiting.”
I made a vague sound of agreement that sort of turned into a growl. Then her mouth found mine again and muffled the sound and my heart rate accelerated to the level of frantic teenager. So did hers. Our breaths were coming out faster, synced, and then my hand slid over her hip and she let out a sound of need that robbed me of the ability to think about anything at all.
“Now,” she gasped. Then she made a bunch of sounds that sort of had a consonant and a vowel as clothes got removed, or at least rearranged. I helped her a little with mine, because after all, she only had one hand to work with. She kept urging me to hurry, though without words. And then I was kneeling on the floor and she was spread beneath me on the couch, our hips aligning, and I leaned down to find her mouth again and—
—and I felt her stiffen with sudden pain, felt the catch in her breath as it hit her. Her shoulder or her leg, I couldn’t tell, but, dammit, she was supposed to be recovering, not … being athletic.
Her eyes opened all the way. She blinked at me a few times and asked, “What?”
“I …” I mumbled. “I don’t know if …”
She seized my shirt in her good hand and dragged me toward her, eyes lambent. “I am not made of glass. Harry, I want this. For once in your life, would you please shut your mouth, stop thinking, and just do me.”
I looked down and said, “Um.”
Karrin looked down, and then up at me. She rolled her eyes to the ceiling for a second, and I swear to you, she must have had an even better sexual frustration face than I did. Then she sort of deflated, which made two of us, and let out her breath in a slow sigh.
“Dresden,” she said, “this chivalrous self-identity thing you have going is often endearing. But right now, I want to kick it in the nuts.”
“I can’t hurt you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
She rolled her eyes again and pulled me down so that she could put an arm around my neck, while I carefully kept any weight off her. She kissed my temple and said, very gently, “I know. You dear idiot.”
I put my arms around her carefully and hugged her back. And that was when someone knocked briskly at the front door.
I jumped up, en déshabillé, and tried to rearrange my clothes. Murphy sort of flopped about, trying to do the same with one hand and two largely immobile limbs. We both stopped to notice, and then to notice the other noticing, and then burst out into absurd laughter while we continued trying to dress.
“The door,” Murphy tittered, dragging a quilted throw across her bare legs. I managed to stagger to it, glanced out the peephole and recognized the caller, and opened the door slightly while using it to hide the fact that my pants had fallen back to my knees.
The fuzz stood on the porch.
Two men were waiting
there politely, with polite, neutral cop faces. I recognized one of them, though it had been a while since I’d seen him. He was on the tall side of medium height, good-looking, with a regulation high-and-tight for his dark hair, although he’d added a thick mustache to his look that, admittedly, set off his blue eyes very well. He wore a suit too expensive for his pay grade and had a thick manila envelope tucked under one arm.
“Detective Rudolph,” I said as I finished pulling my pants on. In a tone of voice generally reserved for phrases like Crucify him or I’m going to cut your throat, I continued, “How nice to see you again.”
“Dresden,” Rudolph said, smirking for a moment. “Great. Two birds with one stone. Is Ms. Murphy home?”
He put a little emphasis on the title, just to remind everyone that she wasn’t a cop anymore. I wanted to smack him. I restrained myself in a manly fashion and said, “It isn’t a good time. She’s still recuperating from her injuries.”
“The ones from last winter,” Rudolph noted.
I arched a brow. Murphy’s injuries from our little outing with a pack of psychotic killers and sociopathic malcontents hadn’t involved gunshot wounds, and they hadn’t happened at a crime scene. The medical establishment hadn’t needed to report them to the police—which meant that the cops had gone sniffing around to find out about them. That wasn’t good.
Murphy had been helping me with a smash-and-grab operation. We’d robbed Hell. Or at least, a hell. The target hadn’t been anything inside Chicago PD’s jurisdiction, but we’d kind of had to get there through the basement of a bank, and it had gotten pretty thoroughly wrecked as a result. Plus there’d been the guards. And the police who had surrounded the bank. And the cops we’d gone through on the way out. We’d worked hard to make sure no one would be killed, but one of our associates had slaughtered a guard anyway.
That made us accomplices to murder at least, as far as the law was concerned. And they weren’t wrong.
“Yeah, those injuries,” I told him. “So buzz off.”
“Or what?” Rudolph asked mildly.