by Jim Butcher
I chewed on my lip. But not Lara Raith. Not her style at all.
Lara was the slipperiest and cagiest vampire in a basket of psychotic sociopaths. I didn’t really see her as the same kind of hedonistic monster as many other White Court vamps I had met—she was something much more dangerous than that. She was disciplined, rigidly self-restrained, and she didn’t give way to either the demonic parasite that made her a monster or anyone else who would try to force her into doing something she didn’t want to do.
If Lara wanted me dead, it would have happened already. It would have been abrupt, swift, and well executed, and I probably wouldn’t have had much of a chance to respond. I might never realize it had happened. I’d seen Lara fight—and she’d seen me do the same. Neither one of us would be interested in giving the other a chance to fight back.
But I was on the clock here. Wasting time wrangling with Lara over protocol wasn’t going to help my brother. So I set my jaw and kicked off my sneakers.
Lara watched that and her smile turned a shade wicked. “Good boy.”
“Now you’re just being obvious,” I said, and sat down to take off my socks. I rose, left my duster on, and picked up a bo of my own from a simple wooden rack of them to one side of the training floor. I flexed my injured hands and winced in discomfort. The pain was already growing more distant as the Winter mantle flooded distressed nerve endings with the distant sensation of nothing but cold.
I walked around Lara to stand in front of her and took up a ready position, gripping the staff loosely, with most of it extended out in front of me at waist level, like someone holding out a pitchfork of hay.
Lara turned to me and bowed at the waist, smiling. “European.”
Murphy’d shown me plenty of Asian stuff, too, but I didn’t want to let Lara know about that. “I learned in Hog Hollow, Missouri,” I said. “But my first teacher was a Scot.”
“I spent much of the eighteenth century in Japan.” She took up a ready position of her own, staff held vertically with the lower end angled out toward me.
“I thought it was closed to all outsiders then.”
She grinned and moved her hip in a little roll that made me want to stampede. “Have you looked at me?”
“Uh. Right,” I said.
Her smile turned warmer. “What do you want, Harry?”
I snapped my staff at her in a simple thrust. She parried easily and countered with a hard beat that came so fast that it nearly took the weapon out of my hand. I recovered the weapon and my balance, retreating from a strike that hit the mat where my bare foot had been an instant earlier. The blow landed hard enough to send a crack like a home-run hit through the room.
“Hell’s balls, Lara!” I said.
“Pain is the best teacher,” she said. “I don’t pull hits. You shouldn’t, either.”
She came at me in a hard, fast strike at the level of my ankles. I caught it on the end of my staff in the nick and flicked her weapon back. “You heard about Thomas.”
“And your visit to him, and your visit to Justine later, yes,” she said. “What did he tell you?”
I shook my head. “All he said was ‘Justine.’ And he barely said that. They’d busted up his mouth pretty good.”
I launched another exchange from outside Lara’s reach and drove her across the mat. She was tall for a woman, but I’m tall for anybody. I probably had most of a foot of advantage in reach on her, and I started using it. The staves cracked together over and over, and I barely avoided getting my knuckles shattered. She was faster than me, and more skilled in a purely technical sense. But that wasn’t the only thing that decided real fights. This was bear versus mountain lion—if she got caught somewhere I could put my power and endurance to good use, she’d be the one in trouble. I kept pressing her toward the corners of the mat, and she kept slipping to one side without ever leaving it, one step ahead of me.
But there were other ways to slow people down.
“My people are covering Justine,” Lara said. “She’s as safe as I can make her without sequestering her here.”
“She’s pregnant,” I said.
Lara missed a step, and I was ready. I thrust the tip of my bo at her knee. She avoided it, but only by taking the hit in the meat of her calf, through the kimono, and she hissed in pain. She countered with a strike to my head that I ducked, and then she came back up onto one leg, weapon ready to defend or attack, her eyes narrowed.
If this had been for real, the fight would be over in moments. Or at least, the foreplay would. We’d both be shifting toward using supernatural abilities, and God only knew how that kind of chaos would play out. I drew back, grounded the end of my bo, and bent at the waist in a slight bow.
Lara regarded me warily and then mirrored me as best she could on one leg, which was excellently. “You’re sure?” Lara demanded a moment later, rolling the ankle on that leg several times.
“Thomas was,” I said.
“And they didn’t tell m …” Lara pressed her lips together. Then she shifted her grip to a more aggressive stance, something like mine, and I came onto guard to match her. We thrust and parried for a moment, circling. “Have you told his grandfather about him?” she asked.
I faltered at that, and Lara sent a thrust at me that hit me square in the belt buckle and shoved me off my feet and onto my ass.
I sat on the floor for a moment, eyeing Lara, who grounded her staff and bowed exactly as I had and regarded me calmly.
She knew about Thomas and me. I mean, I’d been aware of that, but she’d put together enough to work out who Ebenezar was, too. The White Court had a reputation for being insidious subversives. Connections to them, regardless of their source, were regarded with what most of the supernatural world considered healthy suspicion. If Ebenezar’s connection (and mine) to the White Court became public knowledge, the ramifications for our current situation were … sticky.
And Ebenezar didn’t just have issues with vampires: He had volumes and ongoing subscriptions. It had the potential for a real humdinger of a mess.
“I’ve known from the beginning,” she said impatiently, as if she’d been reading my thoughts. “I was here when my father was so obsessed with your mother. He made me play nanny to Thomas. I often heard them talk, because apparently no one in my family understands what a deadly weapon the ability to listen can be, and she left Thomas in my care once when she visited McCoy. And after she died, I helped Father hang her portrait in his psychotic little egomaniac’s gallery.”
I nodded. “But you never brought it up. Never used it for leverage.”
“No,” she said. “Because I’m also the one who changed Thomas’s diapers, after his mother escaped our father. Dressed him. Fed him his meals. Taught him to read.” She shook her head, her eyes focused on one of the banners. “I’m more ruthless than most, Dresden. But even for me, there are limits. Most of those limits involve family.”
“That’s why you didn’t use it against him,” I said. “How come you didn’t use it against me?”
“You never gave me a good reason to fight quite that dirty,” she replied. “And I couldn’t have used it against you without exposing my brother to trouble as well.”
“Then you know why I want to help him,” I said.
“We both do.”
“Then get him out,” I said. “You can do that, right? Work something out with Etri and his people?”
Her features shifted subtly, changed. Somehow they became paler, more like marble, less like something that belonged to a living human person. “Impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible,” I said.
She held up one slim white hand. “As the situation stands, yes, it is. I’ve been shown the preliminary evidence. Thomas entered their embassy under false pretenses, less than ten minutes after the beginning of the armistice for the peace talks, and attempted to murder their king. On camera. If I do anything but deny and disavow his actions, Etri will have little choice but to assume that I sent Thomas
to kill him.”
“Etri’s people look all stuffy, but they have Viking sensibilities,” I said quietly.
“Yes,” Lara replied. “If they believe I’ve tried to harm Etri, they will begin a war I am not at all certain I care to fight.” She let out a laugh that had something of a hysterical edge on it. “Thomas couldn’t have screwed this up any harder if he’d had a year to plan it.”
“There’s got to be something you can do,” I said. “What about a weregild?”
Lara grimaced. “The svartalf who died—”
“Austri,” I said. “His name was Austri.”
She regarded me for a moment, her expression troubled. “Austri, then. He died defending a head of state. This is an offense against the svartalves as a nation, not just an individual. Weregild is what leaders use when they both want to avoid conflict. Etri doesn’t.” She shook her head again. “Our brother is beyond my political reach.”
I scowled. “Well, what have you got all these Marines for, then?”
Lara eyed me as if I’d been a child missing the slowest, easiest pitches she could throw at me. “If I tried to have him forcibly taken from svartalf territory, not only would it represent a major military effort to face the dragon in its den; it would mean violating their sovereign territory as defined in the Accords. Mab wouldn’t remain neutral then—she’d be obligated to help them. She might even send her hatchetman after me.” She shook her head. “I might be willing and able to go up against Etri and his people for my idiot brother, if there’s no other way. But I cannot and will not lead my people into a mass suicide by svartalves and Mab and the rest of the Accorded nations.” She looked away, at one of the banners and its kanji, and seemed, for a moment, ashamed. “Even within my own Court, my authority has limits. If I tried such an irrational thing, they’d depose me.”
I exhaled slowly.
She said nothing for a moment.
“Why?” I asked her. “Why did he do it?”
She shook her head. “I had hoped that you would know something I didn’t, wizard. It wasn’t my doing, and he didn’t give me the least indication that it was going to happen—presumably to provide me with enough deniability to avoid a war. Which I suppose indicates that somewhere within the idiocy, he meant well.”
“Fighting is out,” I said.
“Yes.”
“And talking is out.”
“So it would seem.”
“But we’ve got to do something.”
Lara’s expression became entirely opaque. “Obviously. I am open to ideas.”
“We have to create more options,” I said.
She nodded, her expression pensive. “I’ll be working the room at the fete tomorrow night. Perhaps some leverage might be obtainable there.”
“Possible? Perhaps?” I shook my head as I rose. “Our brother is going to die if we don’t do something. If you can’t be bothered to—”
Lara came at me in a black-and-white-and-silver-eyed blur that covered twenty feet in less time than it took me to blink. She caught the front of my duster in her pale hands and whirled me into the mat with enough force to make me see stars. By the time I’d brushed a few of them out of my field of view, Lara was astride me, one hand twisted into my duster, one hand lifted knifelike and rigid, ready to sweep down at my throat.
“Do not,” she hissed, leaning closer toward me, “presume to tell me what my family is worth to me. Or what I am willing to do for them.”
I didn’t have a whole lot to say to that. Both of us panted. I found myself staring at her mouth.
Lara’s eyes brightened, glittered like mirrors. She stared at me for a second, breathing heavily herself with the exertion of moving so swiftly.
I was intensely aware of the sensation of her weight on me. So was my … body. But then my body is always overly enthusiastic.
More to the point, the Winter mantle was going berserk. The mantle didn’t just come with access to nifty Fae power sources and greater physical speed and strength. Winter was the spiritual home of all things primal and primitive. They were hunters, raiders, takers. Don’t search the Winter Court of the Sidhe for a hug. You won’t find one anywhere that doesn’t collapse your ribs into your spine—but if you want savage, animalistic sex, yeah. You’ve come to the right place. I mean, you might get torn to pieces in the process, but in Winter, them’s the breaks.
The mantle thought that Lara was a fantastic idea. That she needed someone to tear those clothes off her and spend several hours with her in heavy physical exertion, and it thought that someone ought to be me. My body was backing up that concept. It backed it up so strongly that I felt the slow, sensual tension slide into my muscles, pressing my body against her a little more firmly wherever we were in contact.
“Oh,” Lara breathed quietly. Her eyes shone like mirrors.
I looked down and away from them, lest things get even more complicated. It was little improvement. It meant I could see one of her legs, positioned out to one side, and it had come clear of the folds of the kimono. Her skin was flawless and pale over absolutely glorious musculature. Even her feet were pretty.
She leaned closer and inhaled through her nose. The proximity made me feel dizzy—among other things.
I focused through the … well, not pain, but the need was rapidly building in that direction. I pushed my body’s stupid ideas away and spoke in a calm, level voice. “Lara,” I said quietly.
“Yes?” she breathed.
“Is it involuntary,” I asked her, “or are you using the come-hither on me on purpose?”
I tried for a calm, bright, conversational tone. It came out a hell of a lot lower and quieter and huskier than I meant. Because at the moment, the only thing I could really think very much about was how much I wanted to toss her onto a bed and start ripping off clothing. There wasn’t any thought or emotion behind that drive—just the primal, physical need of a body screaming for satisfaction.
I wondered if she was feeling something similar.
Her pale eyes stared steadily at my face, and she looked like she was thinking about something else. It took her a moment to lick her lips and answer. “It’s … some of both. I can use it whenever I wish to. But I can’t always choose when not to use it.”
I swallowed. “Then get off me.” At least I’d gotten the words in the right order. “This is a business trip. I came here to try to find a way to help Thomas. Not to get frisky with an apex sexual predator.”
Lara blinked at me, and her eyes darkened by several shades. Her mouth turned up into a slow, genuine smile. “What did you call me?” she asked.
“You heard me,” I said.
Some of the tension eased out of her. A moment later, she flowed to her feet and withdrew a few steps from me. I had to force myself to leave my hands down, rather than grabbing at her clothes as she drew back. “Well,” she said. “You aren’t wrong.”
I exhaled slowly and clubbed the Winter mantle and its stupid primal drives back into the backseat. I wasn’t sure I was exactly relieved that Lara had withdrawn, but it was probably simpler that she had.
She turned away and said, “The more power one has, the less flexible it is, wizard.” She shook her head. “The White Court is mine. But I cannot lead it to its destruction over actions this reckless. Not even for my idiot brother.” She shook her head. “Unless things change, I will have no choice but to disavow him.”
“Without your support,” I said very quietly, “he has no chance at all.”
She closed her eyes and exhaled. Then she turned to me, her gaze intense, her eyes now a grey so deep that they were nearly blue, and said, “No, Harry. He still has one.”
I swallowed and said, “Oh.”
Me.
Chapter
Fifteen
The Munstermobile wasn’t exactly designed for speed. It didn’t have power steering or power brakes—just power—and it got about two gallons to the mile.
I settled in for the drive back. Riley and the Machi
negun Hummer Revue escorted me back to the front gates. I turned out of the estate and onto an unlit country road that would take me back to the highway. We’d reached the witching hour, and the summer night was overcast, pregnant with heat and rain that hadn’t fallen. The windows started steaming over as vampire Graceland receded behind me, and I cranked them down laboriously.
My brother was in trouble and Lara wasn’t going to be any help.
I thought furiously about how to get him out. The White Council wasn’t going to be of any use unless Lara went to them with a formal request—an action that would have to happen openly, and which Etri’s people would be sure to regard as a tacit admission of guilt regarding Thomas. Mab wouldn’t help Thomas. His only use to her was as a replacement Knight should anything happen to me, and she could have been deceiving me about that. She didn’t do things for the sake of kindness. If I was unable to show her the profit to Winter in saving my brother, she would care no more about him than about the floor she walked on.
My only two sources of diplomatic muscle weren’t going to be any help, and I was pretty sure that I couldn’t get into a fully on-alert svartalf stronghold and drag him out all by myself. That would be a suicide mission, just as Thomas’s had been. If I went in and took along friends for support, would it count as a murder-suicide?
God, I felt sick. And tired. Stupid cornerhounds. Stupid allergy meds.
What was I going to do?
My stomach rumbled. I debated hitting an all-night hamburger franchise when I got to the highway. On the one hand, my body definitely needed the fuel. On the other hand, my stomach felt like it would probably object to adding much of anything to it. I was fumbling in my pockets for a coin to flip when grey shapes loomed up in the road in front of me. I stood on the brakes and left broad swaths of rubber on the road behind me as I fought the big old car to a halt.
I wound up with the nose of the car pointing into the weeds and the headlights casting a harsh cone of white light, partly over the road and partly over the thick trees that hemmed it in.