Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  Gedwig scowled. “This display of your distrust could be considered an insult to svartalf hospitality.”

  “My distrust!?” I blurted. “Are you freaking kidding m—” I cocked an eyebrow, turned to Evanna, and asked, “By any chance, does your people’s tongue not have a word for irony?”

  “Peace, Gedwig,” Evanna said. “Mister Dresden, can you open the door?”

  “It’s easy if you have the key,” I said. I produced the metal door key from my pocket and flipped it around so that she could see the pentacle inscribed on its base. “I think it would be best if I went in alone to talk to Mouse. All right?”

  Evanna nodded once. “So be it.”

  “But, my lady,” Gedwig began.

  She flicked a hand up, palm toward him, and the guard shut his mouth instantly.

  I nodded and touched the key to the doorknob. The energy bound in the key was conducted through the metal into the plane of force beyond it, disrupting its flow and shorting out its field. “Be right back,” I said, and opened the door while watching the two security guys. Gedwig looked like he wanted to push in past me, but he held his position behind Evanna as I entered and shut the door behind me.

  “Dad!” Maggie said. “You’re home! What’s happening?”

  My daughter was sitting on the dinner table, as close to the middle of it as she could get, and her babysitter, Hope Carpenter, sat next to her with an arm protectively around her shoulders. Mouse was pacing steadily around the table, his head down, nose whuffling. He glanced up at me once and shook his ears a little by way of greeting before returning to his rounds.

  “Harry,” Hope said. She was a very serious young woman to whom adolescence had been uncommonly generous. Having become an expert father and all, over the past three or four months, I had new insights into how worried Michael would be about how his lovely dark blond daughter might be treated, especially given that …

  Stars and stones, Maggie wasn’t all that much younger than Hope, really. In a few more years, would I be the one writhing with protective paternal concern? I would. And that thought was fairly terrifying. Or maybe humiliating. Or both.

  Augh. You already have trouble enough on your plate without borrowing more, Dresden.

  “Heya, Hobbit,” I told her, and gave them my most reassuring smile. “Uh. How come you guys are up on the table?”

  “Because they keep trying to come through the floor and get us!” Maggie said, her voice wavery with fright.

  Just then, Mouse whirled his entire body around, his grey mane flying. Maybe three feet to one side of the table, the stone floor suddenly rippled and a svartalf began earthwalking up out of the ground.

  Mouse rushed over to the intruder, rose on his hind legs at the last second, and then plunged down onto his front paws, directly onto the inbound svartalf, letting out a dishes-rattling sound that could only technically have been described as a bark. It was more of an explosive roar, and flickering blue sparks leapt from his mane as he struck, even as a wave of supernatural energy washed through the room like a burst of spectral lightning. There was just enough time to see the svartalf flinch, and then suddenly the floor was the floor again, and Mouse had resumed his protective pacing around the table.

  “Like that,” Maggie said. “We didn’t even break any rules at all. Get ’em, Mouse!”

  “How long has this been going on?” I asked.

  Hope shook her head and said, “T-twenty minutes? Half an hour? One minute we were on the couch and then there were these things trying to grab us. If it hadn’t been for Mouse, they would have.”

  I felt my jaw clench so hard that my teeth squeaked in protest. Then I turned, picked up my staff, and said, “Stay right there. Good job, boy, keep it up. I’m going to try to sort this out.”

  Mouse whuffed an acknowledgment without ceasing his patrol around the girls.

  I turned around and went back out to the hall. I might have looked a little angry, because Gedwig and his companion took one look at me, drew their weapons—a pistol in one hand and a slender wavy-bladed dagger in the other—and backed away from each other so that they were flanking me. They didn’t point the guns directly at me or lunge at me with their knives, but everything about their body language suggested to me that they would shoot without hesitation if they had to.

  Evanna stood her ground, her expression blandly neutral, and looked up at me expectantly.

  I didn’t raise my voice—but I didn’t try to hide the anger in it, either. “Why are your people terrifying two children? What have they done to offend you?”

  “Nothing,” Evanna said. “We only sought to put them in protective custody and escort them out of the building through the escape tunnel.”

  “I thought you said there was no danger of fire.”

  “I did,” Evanna said.

  “I just saw one of your people try to grab them,” I said. “Tell them to knock it off. Right now.”

  Evanna blinked at me once, then turned and snarled something to Gedwig. He clenched his jaw but nodded, holstered his weapon, and sank into the floor.

  “Your anger is misplaced, wizard,” Evanna said, her words clipped. “You are not the one who has been wronged. Blood has been spilled, and those responsible will be made to repay the debt.”

  “What the hell does that have to do with me?” I demanded.

  Evanna stared at me with her huge dark eyes and said, “I will show you, if you wish.”

  “I wish,” I said.

  She gestured for the other security guard to lower his weapon, then turned and started walking. She moved quickly for such a bitty thing, and I hurried to keep pace with her.

  “An assassin entered the stronghold this evening,” she said.

  “What?” I asked. “How did that happen? Your security measures are insane.”

  “The way such things generally happen,” she said. “Through treachery. The assassin reached my brother’s business chambers. There were explosions, which started the fire. Several guards were wounded. One threw himself between Etri and harm and paid with his life for his loyalty.”

  I leaned my head back and felt the anger evaporating, rapidly transmuting to pure anxiety. Someone had tried to knock off what amounted to a head of state and had gotten close. Etri was no insignificant figure in the supernatural world—he was the heaviest hitter I knew of among his people, and they in turn were the most skilled and serious smiths and crafters and designers on the planet. Hell, I’d bought materials I had needed for magical components from them myself, on a regular basis. They were expensive and worth every penny, even back when I hadn’t had an athletic sock filled with diamonds tucked under my mattress for a rainy day.

  “I didn’t know,” I said in a much quieter voice. “Who did you lose?”

  “Austri,” Evanna said, “who has served our family faithfully for seven hundred years.”

  That hit me like a punch in the gut. Austri had been weird, but he’d been a decent guy, and a man who loved his children very much.

  “Hell’s bells,” I said. “I … I’m sorry for your loss.”

  Evanna nodded at me once.

  She led me down a hall I’d never been down, and into what could only have been a war room.

  It was a huge chamber with twenty-foot ceilings broken into specific organized areas. In one corner was an armory that bristled with weapons—not only modern ones, not only archaic ones, but weapons that I could not so much as identify. Across from it was a medical triage, biologically isolated behind transparent plastic curtains. Svartalves in very normal-looking medical scrubs were moving about busily on the other side.

  One gurney sat silently, ignored. There was a small figure on it, completely covered with a bloodstained sheet. Austri.

  I turned my eyes past that to a small vehicle park, containing a number of cars, what looked like a chariot, a Viking longboat that appeared to be made out of some kind of glimmering silver, and a number of objects that, again, defied definition. At the far en
d of the room was what must have been a command-and-control area, with a number of tables in circled ranks around a central work area, glowing with the light of dozens of sheets of thin crystal that the svartalves were using like monitor screens.

  While I was goggling, Etri approached, wearing the usual outfit for a male svartalf who wasn’t pretending to be human—a brief loincloth. He looked awful. There was a swelling bruise on one of his cheekbones and what had to have been an incredibly painful burn on one bare shoulder. His huge dark eyes were not calm. There was an anger in them so deep that I could all but feel the earth trembling beneath his feet.

  He held up his right hand. Evanna lifted her left, rested her hand against his for a moment, and said, “My lord brother.”

  “Sister,” Etri replied. He looked at me. “What did you learn?”

  “He seems ignorant of events,” she said.

  Etri actually scowled for a second. Then he said, “You are sure?”

  “As sure as I may be,” Evanna said.

  “I am ignorant,” I said. “For crying out loud, do you think I’d try to kill you, or help kill you while my own daughter was right here in your stronghold?”

  Etri looked at me and made a growling sound. Then a svartalf called out in their native tongue, and Etri looked over his shoulder toward the command center. “I must go. Sister, please excuse me.” He turned to walk away and said, over his shoulder, “Transparency is our policy with allies. Show him.”

  “Show me what?” I asked.

  “This way,” Evanna said, and walked deeper into the war room, to the last section—a series of cubes about five feet square, made of thick, heavy bars of some kind of dark metal I couldn’t identify, walled off behind a couple of layers of similar bars—a detention area.

  We had to pass through a couple of gates to get inside, and they locked behind us with heavy, very final-sounding thumps of metal on metal. Only one of the cells within was occupied, and it was surrounded by a number of very alert-looking, very heavily equipped svartalves, each carrying some kind of organic-looking, swirly implement made of something like silver and wearing body armor.

  “The assassin,” Evanna said without emotion. “A creature well-known to be your frequent ally.”

  My heart suddenly fell out of my chest.

  The shirtless man curled on the floor of the cage had been beaten savagely. He was shuddering with pain, and maybe shock. There was hardly an inch of skin showing that wasn’t covered in bruises and cuts and drying blood. One of his feet had been … I don’t know what. It looked as if he’d gotten it caught in some kind of industrial machine. It was twisted at an impossible angle and seemed to be given shape only by the shoe containing it.

  I recognized the shoe.

  I’d seen it on the beach that morning.

  The assassin lifted his head toward us. He was missing teeth from a mouth caked with blood. His face was grotesquely swollen, one eye completely shut.

  It was my brother.

  It was Thomas.

  Chapter

  Eight

  My brother stared back at me. His face twitched in the beginning of a sad, helpless little smile, but the gesture made him wince in pain even as he formed it. His head sank down again and he lay shuddering, too weak to look up.

  I stood there staring in shock for a really long, silent moment. I could feel the pressure of Evanna’s attention on me.

  “I know he visited here sometimes,” I said. My brother lived his life terrified that he was slowly killing Justine, feeding on her life force. So he would find other willing partners, sometimes. Which was, in his situation, maybe the most moral thing he could have done.

  When you’re an incubus, life is weird like that.

  “He visited me, specifically,” Evanna said, “as well as some of the other women of the Court, from time to time. My people have always been enamored of beauty, above all.” She took a step closer to the cage and said, to Thomas, “And this wondrous creature did not make love so much as he made art. Blindingly beautiful, passionate art.” Her voice turned harder. “Blinding, indeed. Such a waste.”

  I looked down, closed my eyes, and pictured the cells, then the war room, then the swiftest un-burnt route out of the svartalf embassy. I tried to add in everything I knew about where the security forces were, because depending on the answer to my next question, I might be about to take them all on.

  That’s the thing about living behind all that security: If it can keep threats out, it can just as easily keep you in.

  “What will happen to him?” I asked.

  “Justice,” Evanna replied, a distinct note of contempt in the word. “He began his attack seven minutes after the official treaty period for the peace summit went into effect. By the law of the Accords, that makes his offense one that must be judged by the guidelines outlined within. A neutral emissary will be appointed to investigate and serve as arbiter of his fate.”

  I focused my eyes hard on my toes and relaxed a little. If this was a matter to be handled by the Accords, it meant that there was time. An emissary would have to be chosen, consented to by both the svartalves and the White Court, and the following inquiry would take time. Which meant I didn’t have to go out in a blaze of glory, or at least gory, that very moment.

  Evanna walked closer to the cage and lowered herself to sit on her ankles, facing Thomas. “Austri was a dear friend. Were it up to me alone, I would entomb you in stone with just enough air to give you time to feel yourself gasping to death, Thomas Raith. You will die for this. Or there will be a war such as this world has not seen in a millennium.”

  And then she spat on him.

  My hands clenched hard on the solid oak of my staff, and I took half a step forward.

  Instantly, the four guards trained their weapons on me. And considering I didn’t even know what the hell they were or what they were supposed to do, it might have been just a little bit dicey to try to defend myself against them.

  And besides. The Accords were in play. While they were, I was basically a one-man nation, with my actions reflecting upon the White Council as a whole—and upon the Winter Court, to boot. For Pete’s sake. I was two one-man nations: not for purposes of power, only for potential disaster.

  Hell’s bells.

  Evanna never looked away from Thomas and paid so little attention to me that I had to figure that she was confident her people could obliterate me before I could work any mischief. Given who the svartalves were—people even the Norse gods hadn’t cared to make angry—I was inclined to take her seriously.

  “Well, Raith?” she said in a quiet voice. “Have you anything to say?”

  It looked like neither her anger, nor her contempt, nor her question had really registered with him. My brother stayed silent and still, except for involuntary spasms of muscles and shudders of pain.

  “I thought better of you, Thomas,” Evanna said. “If you had a problem with my people, you could have come to us as a friend.” Then she rose and walked away, her back rigid. She didn’t seem to care if I followed her or not, and I felt a little nervous that I might wind up locked inside the detention area if I didn’t leave when I had the opportunity—so I followed her.

  As we were leaving, a voice croaked, “Ha’ay.”

  The sound of it hurt. I steeled myself to look calm and confident, and turned back to face my brother.

  A tear was cutting a slow pale scarlet trail across the dried blood on his cheek. “Junghg. S’Jnngh.”

  He couldn’t say Justine.

  “It’s okay,” I said gently. “I know. I’ll look after her.”

  At my words, something in him broke. He started to contract with racking sobs. The sounds he made were those of an animal dying in a bewildering amount of pain.

  I closed my eyes and breathed, willing away tears before they could fall. Then I turned my back on him and left him in the grip of the people who had hurt him so badly and who had every intention of taking his life.

  What choice did
I have?

  My brother, my only brother, had just given the gathering of the oldest and most powerful supernatural beings on the planet a surpassingly excellent reason to kill him. In an hour, he had managed to put himself into a position where he was going to get more attention and more trouble from more excessively dangerous people than I’d ever managed to do in my life.

  Trust me. I do it for my day job. I know what I’m talking about.

  Stars and stones, Thomas, you idiot. What have you done?

  Chapter

  Nine

  What’s wrong, Dad?” Maggie asked me.

  We were back in the apartment, and when I asked her to, she had dutifully retrieved her bugout bag from the closet.

  Yeah, I know, it sounds a little paranoid to teach a child to keep a bag full of spare clothes, snacks, basic medical and survival supplies, and water, just in case she needs to suddenly go on the run. But then, most kids didn’t have to contend with the possibility of enemies coming up through the floor and grabbing them, either.

  I’m raising my daughter to survive the kind of thing she might occasionally be adjacent to because of who her father is, and for the time being her best survival strategy was almost always to be ready to run away.

  “I can’t explain it right now,” I said. I slid past her into her room and snagged the bowling bag that held Bonea’s wooden skull, then secured the rest of my own limited gear, along with a bugout bag of my own. “We’re going to drive Hobbit home, and you can stay with the Carpenters for a few days. How does that sound?”

  Maggie looked at me with very serious young eyes for a moment. “Are you in trouble?”

  “I don’t get in trouble,” I said, and winked at her. “I get bad guys in trouble.”

  “It’ll be fine, munchkin,” Hope said, and slid a sisterly arm around my daughter’s shoulders. “I totally know this drill. You can sleep in my room. I’ve got a laptop. We can Netflix some fun stuff until as late as we want.”