Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  Which was just as well—when you summon a powerful extradimensional being, you’re taking on a lot of responsibility.

  First of all, you’re bringing something powerful and dangerous into the world. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to call down an angel or whistle up one of the Fallen; you’ve got to take that into account. Even benevolent beings, if they’re big enough, can kill you without even realizing it’s happening until it’s too late. Malicious creatures are going to want to kill you as a matter of course. So location is pretty important, so you can maybe have a chance to run for it, first of all. If you can get a location that somehow parallels the nature of the creature you’re summoning, it gives you an edge against them, costs less energy to bring them in.

  Next, containment. In keeping with the theme of part one, you need some way to make sure that the thing you’re calling can’t just get out and do as it pleases. Most things will simply leave, rendering all that travel to the middle of nowhere a waste of time.

  Finally, you need some motivation. Beings from beyond the mortal world don’t generally work for free. After you talk them out of either leaving or murdering you outright, you’ll need something to sweeten the pot.

  I found the perfect spot after I’d hiked all the way in and reached the lakeshore, with the light changing, announcing the approach of dawn without actually getting any brighter. I wound up at the base of a spit of sandy, pebbly beach that met harshly with a stand of thick trees. At the base of the largest tree were the crumbled remains of a clearly illegal tree house someone had built a decade or two in the past. I could still find what was left of slats that had been nailed into the tree trunk to provide an improvised ladder up.

  Perfect.

  I set my bag of things down and began laying them out in a circle I drew in the sandy soil with my staff. At the top of the circle went a storm candle and a magazine featuring an image of the weirdest female pop singer operating at the time—she was wearing an outfit made mostly out of old tires and did not look any too warm. The next candle featured a can of cold Dr Pepper. I popped it open and listened to it hiss out the pressure, then crackle in the quiet of predawn, bubbles bubbling enthusiastically. Beside the next candle, I placed a watermelon Ring Pop in its plastic wrapper. I opened the wrapper, leaving the jewel-like candy atop it, and the smell of its sweetness and the tangy scent of artificial watermelon filled the air.

  The next candle featured a sheet of coarse sandpaper, rough side up. I laid my hand on it and moved my palm slowly over the grit and adhesive, feeling it tear gently at my skin. And beside the fifth and last candle went a jar of Nutella.

  I double-checked the positioning of the ingredients, made sure the circle was closed, and then leaned down and touched it with one finger and an effort of will. The energy whirled about the circle in the sand and sprang up at once in an invisible curtain, enclosing the ground within it, cutting off the circle’s interior from the mortal world behind an insulative firewall.

  Then I closed my eyes, cleared my head, and began whispering a Name.

  “Margaret Katherine Amanda Carpenter,” I chanted rhythmically, “I call you.”

  The candles flickered and danced, though there was no wind. Their colors began to shift and change, seemingly at random, through the spectrum.

  “Margaret Katherine Amanda Carpenter,” I whispered, “I need you.”

  Behind me, the trees exploded with movement, and I flinched and whirled. A flock of vultures, disturbed from their evening rest, burst into the air, wings flapping in miniature thunder. It took them several seconds to clear out, and then they were gone into the darkness of the air, leaving behind jitters and a few falling black feathers.

  I took a deep breath and braced my will. “Margaret Katherine Amanda Carpenter,” I said, louder and firmer. “We need to talk. Come on, Molls.”

  At the third Naming, energy rushed out of me and into the circle. The candles there burst into showers of sparks in a dozen colors, and I had to blink my eyes and look away.

  When I looked back, the youngest Queen of Faerie stood in the circle of power.

  Molly Carpenter was a tall young woman, and when I looked at her, I always thought of swords and knives, these days. She’d gone very lean, living on the streets and fighting the incursions of the Fomor, back when I’d been mostly dead, and though her situation had improved, apparently her diet hadn’t. Her cheekbones looked like something the TSA would be nervous about letting onto a plane, and that leanness extended to her neck, creating shadows that were a little too deep and sharp. Her blue eyes had always been beautiful, but were they a hint more oblique than they had been, or was that just clever makeup?

  The Winter Lady wore a grey business skirt suit with sensible heels and stood with one hip shot out to one side, her fist resting on it. Her silver-white hair was drawn back into a painstakingly neat braid that held it close to her head with no strands escaping. Her expression was nonplussed, and she held a smoldering cell phone in one hand.

  She regarded the phone for a moment, sighed, and dropped the useless wreck onto the ground.

  “Hey, Molls,” I said.

  “Harry,” she said. “I have a phone for exactly this reason.”

  “This is a business call,” I said in a quiet, low voice. “Knight to Lady.”

  Molly inhaled slowly. “I … oh. I see.”

  “Things are getting tense,” I said. “The Wardens have decided I am a threat. I’m being monitored, and they’re doing some kind of cheesy technical weirdness with cell phones now. Couldn’t risk a call without Ramirez getting involved in the conversation.”

  Some ugly flicker went across Molly’s face at the mention of the Wardens. She shook her head, put her hands on her stomach, and said, “Ugh. That’s the strangest feeling, being summoned.”

  “That seems like it should be true,” I said. “I apologize for the inconvenience.”

  The Winter Lady stared at me for an unnerving second before she said, in Molly’s voice, “Apology accepted.” She looked around the circle at the objects involved in the summoning and promptly pounced on the jar of Nutella. “Aha! Payment. Now we’re square.” She opened the jar, seized the Ring Pop, and put it on her left forefinger. Then she dipped the Ring Pop in, and closed her eyes as she licked the confection off it. “Oh God,” she said. “I haven’t had food in a day and a half.”

  “Hell’s bells, Padawan,” I said. “Nutella and corn syrup is probably not the place to start.”

  “Probably not,” she agreed, and scooped out an even larger dollop. “You going to let me out of the circle or what?”

  “Honestly,” I said, “I’m a little curious to see if you can do it yourself. I mean, you’re still human, too. That circle shouldn’t be able to hold Molly.”

  She lifted her eyebrows. “Harry, you could put me through a wood chipper if you wanted. I’d get better. Immortal now, remember?” She lifted a hand and reached out to touch the plane of the circle. The tip of her finger flattened as if pressed against perfectly transparent glass. “I’m human. But this mantle isn’t like yours. It’s an order of magnitude more complex. It’s not something you put on like a cloak. It’s all through me now. Intermixed.” She shook her head sadly. “I could leave this circle, I think—but not without leaving the largest part of me behind. Whatever was left wouldn’t be … right. Find someone else to experiment with.”

  A cold feeling kind of spread through me, starting right behind my belt buckle.

  Because that circle shouldn’t have been able to hold Molly.

  Which meant that the being talking to me … wasn’t. Not the way I remembered. Molly had taken on the mantle of the Winter Lady and become something that wasn’t quite human anymore. She was dealing with forces that I might literally be unable to comprehend. Those pressures might have changed the shape of her, made her into something else, something dangerous.

  Which, I thought, must be almost precisely what Ramirez is thinking about you.

  Molly h
ad definitely become someone darker and more dangerous.

  But she was still Molly. Still the girl I’d met years ago, still the young woman I’d trained, still the woman who’d fought by my side on too many occasions to easily count. My instincts told me that she was something to be feared. And my instincts were right.

  But people are often more than one thing. Molly was a very pretty, very dangerous monster now. But she was also the Padawan. She was also my friend.

  I leaned down and broke the circle with my hand, releasing its energy back into the universe with a subaudible popping sensation.

  Molly exhaled and calmly stepped out of the circle. She regarded me for a long moment and said, “God, you look tired.”

  I tilted my head at her and suddenly smiled. “You mean ‘old.’ ”

  “Weathered,” she countered. “Like Aragorn.”

  I laughed at that. As a wizard, I could expect three centuries and change. Maybe more. I still had a decade and change to go before my body started settling into what it would look like for most of my life. “Wanna know a secret?”

  “Always.”

  “Only the young think being called old is an insult,” I said, still smiling. “I am what I am, regardless of what anyone calls it. No one can change it, regardless of what anyone calls it. And it mostly means that nothing has managed to kill me yet.”

  Molly gave me a small, bitter smile. “One thing did.”

  “I asked for your help with that,” I said sternly. “You had a hell of a tough choice to make, and you chose loyalty to your friend. I will never forget that, Molly.”

  “Neither will I,” she said quietly.

  I pursed my lips. There is no guilt like wizard guilt, because there is no arrogance like wizard arrogance. We get used to having so much power, so much ability to change things, that we also tend to assume that whatever happens is also our responsibility. Throw in a few shreds of human decency, where you actually worry about the results of your actions upon others, and you wind up with a lot of regrets.

  Because it’s hard, it’s really, really hard, in fact damned near impossible, to exercise power without it having some unexpected consequences. Doesn’t matter what kind of power it is—magic, muscle, political office, electricity, moral authority. Use any of it, and you’re going to find out that as a result, things happen that you didn’t expect.

  When those consequences are a blown light bulb, no big deal.

  But sometimes people get hurt. Sometimes they die. Sometimes innocents. Sometimes friends.

  Molly probably wasn’t going to forgive herself for assisting in what had amounted to a very complicated near suicide. There’d been a lot of fallout, on every conceivable scale. Very little of it had been Molly’s fault, directly or otherwise, but she’d been a mover on that scene, and she probably felt at least as bad as I did about it, and I’d been way more in the middle of things.

  And, being a wizard, I felt guilty as hell for walking her into that. I hadn’t had much choice, if I wanted to save my daughter’s life, but though the cost was worthy, it still had to be paid—and Molly had laid down cold, hard cash.

  So cold and so hard that Mab had wound up choosing her to be the new Winter Lady, in fact.

  Suddenly I wondered if maybe I hadn’t been hard enough on myself. I mean, hell, at least when I’d become the Winter Knight, I’d made a choice. My back had been to a wall and my options had all sucked, but I’d at least sought out my bargain with Mab.

  Molly hadn’t been consulted, and Mab’s policy on dissenting opinion was crystalline: Deal with it or die.

  Of course, for inveterate dissenters like myself, it created a pretty simple counterpolicy for when I was tired of Mab’s crap: Deal with it or kill me. Mab was a lot of things, but irrational wasn’t one of them, and as long as it was easier to put up with me than replace me, we had attained a state of balance. I imagined that Molly had come to similar arrangements.

  I put my hand on her shoulder, squeezed slightly, and gave her another smile. “Hey. It was hard, for everyone. But we came through it. And with all these scars, we have to have learned a lesson somewhere, right?”

  “I’m not sure how well that logic holds up,” she said, giving me a wry smile.

  “I think of it as the idiot’s version of optimism,” I said. I eyed the lightening sky. “How up are you on current events?”

  She glanced that way as well. “I’ve been working in eastern Russia for two weeks,” she said. “I’m busy as hell.”

  “Okay,” I said, and I caught her up on recent events. Everything. Except for Butters and Andi and Marci because Butters had asked me and because I wasn’t quite sure what to think about that myself.

  “Before we go any further and just to be clear,” she asked, “did my apartment actually burn down?”

  “No.”

  She nodded and exhaled. “ So … let’s see …” She closed her eyes and thought for a moment about what I had told her. “Oh God, you’re going to go get Thomas, aren’t you?”

  “I’m exhausting all possibilities for a diplomatic solution first,” I said.

  She gave me a wary look.

  “I like the svartalves,” I explained. “They’re good people. And they’ve got kids. I’m not going to wade into them, guns blazing.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “And you think I can get something done?”

  “The svartalves like you,” I said. “As far as I can tell, you’re an honorary svartalf. And every single one of them is a sucker for pretty girls, and that’s you also.”

  A flicker of her hand acknowledged fact without preening. “I think you’re overestimating my influence in the face of events like this,” she said. “Etri and his people are old-school. Blood has been spilled. There’s going to be an accounting, period, and they are not going to be interested in mercy.”

  “You underestimate how much faith I have in your creativity, intelligence, and resourcefulness, Molly.”

  She grimaced. “You understand that if it comes to that, I can’t directly help you get him out. If a Faerie Queen violated the Accords so blatantly, they would collapse. It would mean worldwide havoc.”

  “I figured,” I said.

  Her expression turned into a lopsided smile. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

  “This can’t possibly be more difficult to handle than moving back into your parents’ place after you got all the piercings and tattoos.”

  She bobbed her head to one side to acknowledge the point. “That seemed pretty impossible at the time, I suppose.”

  “Help me,” I said. I helpfully bent down and picked up the can of Dr Pepper, offering it to her. “I got you Nutella and everything.”

  “All that did was give me an excuse not to bitch-slap you for daring to summon me,” she said frankly. “Honestly, I do have a job, you know. It’s kind of important. I really can’t afford to encourage people to interrupt me all the time.”

  She took the soda and sipped.

  “It’s Thomas,” I said.

  “It’s Thomas,” she agreed. She exhaled. “You understand that you’ve asked for my help. You know what that means, right?”

  “Obligation,” I said.

  “Yes. You’ll owe me. And those scales will have to be balanced. It’s … like an itch I can’t scratch until they are.”

  “You’re still you, grasshopper.”

  She regarded me for a moment, her maybe-not-quite-as-human eyes huge, luminous, and unsettlingly, unnervingly beautiful in her gaunt face. Her voice came out in a whisper I had last heard in a greenly lit root-lined cavern on the island. “Not always.”

  I felt a little chill slide around inside me.

  She shook her head and was abruptly the grasshopper again. “I’m willing to do whatever I can to help you. Are you willing to balance whatever I offer up?”

  “He’s my brother,” I said. “Duh.”

  She nodded. “What is it you want?”

  I told her.

  She was
quiet for a long time. Then she said, “Tricky. Difficult.”

  “If I could do it myself, I wouldn’t be asking you, grasshopper. Can you do it?”

  She sipped more of the drink, her eyes sparkling as they narrowed. “Are you questioning my phenomenal cosmic powers?”

  “Well, you’ve been so busy globet-rotting doing Winter Lady stuff,” I drawled. “Let’s just say I’m curious if you’ve kept your wizard muscles in shape.”

  “Hah!” she said, grinning. Then her expression sobered. “I’ve done some work like it lately. The skills aren’t the issue.” She leaned toward me a little, her eyes intent. “Harry. I need you to be absolutely sure. Once a bargain is done, there’s no going back. And I will hold you to it.” Her expression flickered, for just a second suddenly looking much less sure. “I don’t get a choice about that.”

  “He’s my brother,” I said. “I’m sure.”

  The Winter Lady nodded, her eyes suddenly luminous, suddenly something a man could drown in. Then she stepped over to me, stood on tiptoe, reached up, and drew my mouth down to hers. She gave me a soft kiss on the mouth that was about ninety-nine percent sisterly, and murmured, “Done.”

  There was a sensation of something setting firmly into place, somewhere inside me, as if I’d been made of Legos, one of them had come loose, and Molly had just pressed it solidly back into position. It sent a little frisson through me, and I shivered as the bargain was forged.

  And, Hell’s bells, did Molly have soft, lovely lips, which did not bear thinking on.