by Jim Butcher
She gave me a brief annoyed glare. “You’re obviously doing this, no matter how stupid it is. I can’t help you get away with it if I’m too busy being a starfish.”
I clenched my fist against my nose and said, “There are times when I could choke you, too.”
“Try it and I’ll break your wrist,” she said grimly.
I took a step toward her.
“No, don’t come help me, you lummox. I can do it myself.”
“Karrin,” I said.
I might have sounded a little terrified.
She hesitated.
“Karrin,” I said, more gently. “Murph. You can’t keep doing this to yourself. You’re hurt. You need time to heal. Please.”
She looked away from me, into the middle distance, her lips tight. “This is probably as healed as I’m going to get, for all practical purposes,” she said. Her voice was very thin.
“I can still use your help,” I said. “Just coordinating communications with our friends—”
She shook her head several times. “No. No, Harry. I’m not changing how I live my life. This is my choice. And you’ve got no stones to throw when it comes to stupid plans. So either back me up or get out of the way.”
Frustration flashed through me. Karrin might have been damned near superhuman, but she wasn’t supernatural. She’d fought. She’d been beaten. She’d been hurt. She was in no condition to get involved in another one of my problems, and there was a very real chance that it could get her killed. She didn’t have the protection of her badge anymore, and she no longer had the full use of a body that had spent a lifetime dealing with predators of one kind or another.
But she did have the enemies to show for it.
Granted, what made Karrin Murphy dangerous had never been her arms and legs. It had been the mind that directed them. But even there, I had doubts. She’d always had a lot to prove, to herself and to other people—and she had never been okay with showing weakness. Was that affecting her judgment now?
Or maybe it was something simpler than that.
Maybe she was just afraid for the man she loved.
I swallowed.
For a second, I debated killing the little saw. A simple hex would render it useless. And then I realized the manifest idiocy of that idea. Karrin would not readily forgive me that—and she’d just find another way to get the damned cast off when I wasn’t looking anyhow. She probably had a second saw waiting in a box in the garage marked REPLACEMENTS FOR THINGS HARRY SCREWED UP. She believed in being prepared.
I couldn’t stop her. It would be the same as telling her that she was weak and needed to stay home. That she wasn’t strong enough to help me. It would break her.
And besides.
You can’t go around making people’s choices for them. Not if you love them.
So I stepped back over the line between the hardwood floor of the living room and the tiles of the kitchen.
“Thank you,” Karrin said calmly.
“Murph,” I said.
She paused with the saw resting against her cast and looked at me. “What’s happening now … you’ve got no standing at all in it. No protection from the Accords. No badge.”
She watched my face, her expression serious.
“This is the jungle,” I said. “And none of the players in this are going to have a problem burying inconveniences if it means holding the Accords together.”
“You mean me,” she said.
“I mean you,” I said.
“You could have hexed the saw already,” she said.
“No,” I said. “I couldn’t have.”
“Well. You’re not all dumb,” she said, smiling faintly.
“Remains to be seen,” I said. “I know you well enough to know there’s no point trying to stop you. But I … I gotta know that you’re walking into this with your eyes open, Murph.”
She looked down for a long moment. Then she looked back up at me and said, “I have to do this.”
I stared at her bandaged, broken body for a long moment.
Then I clenched my jaw and nodded once.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll help.”
Murphy’s eyes softened for a moment.
Then she took the oscillating saw to the cast and started slicing away at it.
It didn’t take her long to get the cuts made, though she hissed in discomfort a couple of times as she went.
“Don’t cut yourself,” I said. “If you bleed out it will take a week to clean up.”
“They’re burns,” she said, annoyed. “The saw won’t cut flesh, but it heats up the cast. I’m just too impatient.”
“No kidding,” I said lightly.
“Okay,” she said. “Come help me pull it off.”
I did.
Look, when you’ve been in as much cast as Karrin had for as long as she had, the results are kind of gross. There was a buildup of dead skin, flakes of it white and hard like scales where her skin had been. There’s no dressing that up.
“Engh,” Karrin said, wrinkling her nose as her arm came free. “It’s the smell that bugs me.”
“Junior high gym lockers were that bad,” I said.
“Ew, boys,” she said. She lifted her wounded arm a little, moving it slowly, wincing.
“Leg next,” I said.
That one was worse. She hissed as the cast came free, and put a hand against her back. “Oh my God,” she muttered. “My hips forgot how to be at this angle.” She looked up at me, her face still pained. “I’ve got braces. We should put them o—”
She broke off when I simply picked her up, as carefully as I could. She got her good arm around my neck and helped as much as she was able.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.
“Taking you to a hot bath,” I said. “Don’t try to move. Just … let me do it. Okay?”
Her blue eyes went very soft for a moment, and she looked down.
“For a minute,” she said.
I took her to the bathroom, moved aside the assistance equipment that was there, and set her down gently on the commode. It took me only a moment to get the bath going and then to help her out of her clothes and lower her carefully into the water.
We didn’t speak. I moved slowly, sluicing warm water over dried-out skin where necessary, and let her soak in the warm water for a while. There was some gentle soap on hand, and after a time, I used that, with just my hands, being as careful as I could to get the area clean without stripping up layers of skin down to the raw new stuff at the bottom in the process.
Karrin watched me at first. After a while, she closed her eyes and just sort of sank back into the tub, her limbs loose. Her hair spread out a little in the water. She looked drawn, gaunt, in the face and neck—and peaceful.
“I love you,” I said.
She opened her eyes and blinked a couple of times. Then she lifted one ear out of the water and said, “What did you say?”
I smiled at her. Then I went back to running my hands gently down her arm, encouraging some of the dead stuff to come off. It would take a few days for her to get back to normal.
“Oh,” she said, studying my face.
Then she sat up in the water, twisted a little toward me, and slid both of her arms around my neck. She pulled my mouth down to hers with a strength that no longer surprised me.
But the sudden, sweet, almost desperate softness of the kiss that followed nearly knocked me into the tub.
And in the middle of it, she breathed, “I love you, too.”
Chapter
Twenty-three
We were about halfway to Château Raith when Murphy asked, “You seeing this?”
“The Crown Vic behind us?” I asked. “Yeah.”
“Yeah, them,” Murphy said impatiently. “And also the other two cars.”
I frowned. I was driving the Munstermobile, which Murphy hated riding in because the custom-sized seat wasn’t adjustable, and her feet couldn’t reach my pedals. By almost a foot. T
he old car wasn’t exactly built with the driver’s lines of sight in mind, but I scanned the early-morning traffic, frowning.
It took me a good minute of looking to spot what Murphy had already alerted me to—a dark blue Crown Vic was following about three cars back. Probably Rudolph and Bradley, in one of Internal Affairs’ vehicles. Behind them, maybe three more cars back, was a battered old Jeep that looked like it would have been happier and more comfortable in the Rocky Mountains somewhere. And then there was a third car, a silver minivan, following along a ways behind the Jeep.
“You’re a little popular,” Murphy said.
“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. “Is it a whole surveillance team?”
“They’d be the worst one in the world,” Murphy said. “If they had three of them working together, there’s no reason for all of them to keep us in sight the entire time.”
“Huh,” I said, and watched the cars for a few minutes more. “They aren’t working together. Three different parties tailing us?”
“Rudolph and Bradley are here for me,” Murphy said. “Who are the other two?”
I chewed on the inside of my cheek for a second, thinking. “Um. Well, I suppose I could start driving like a lunatic and find out.”
“In this old death trap?” she asked, and shuddered. “No, thank you. Should we let them follow us?”
“Tough to know that if we don’t know who is back there,” I said. “Rudolph I don’t much care about, but I’d rather not have Bradley stick his head into a noose. He’s just trying to do his job right.”
“Well, you aren’t going to lose a Crown Vic in this boat.”
“True,” I said. “So maybe we do this the other way.”
“Magic?” she asked. “I don’t really feel like walking the rest of the way, either.”
I shook my head. “This old death trap was manufactured damned near a century ago,” I said. “The whole point of driving it is because it can endure exposure to active magical forces and keep going vroom-vroom.” I squinted at the road. “You know. For a while.”
Murphy sighed. “What’s your plan, Harry?”
“We’re going to get out of sight for a second, and then I’m dropping a veil over us,” I said. I thought about it for a second. “We’ll have to stay on the highway. If we pull off to the side, there’s no way I can veil the dust and debris we’d kick up driving on the shoulder.”
“But other cars won’t be able to see us,” Murphy said.
“And we won’t be able to see them very well, either,” I said. “Be like driving in heavy rain.”
She grimaced, clearly unhappy at the entire situation. “And we’re riding in a brick with no handling.”
“A brick that’s heavier than a lot of the trucks on this highway right now,” I said, “and made from all steel. Might not handle or accelerate like a modern car, but it’s not made of drywall and cardboard, either.”
Murphy gave me an impatient look. “Harry, do you even understand that modern engineering means that the lighter cars are actually considerably safer than cars like this one?”
“Not when they hit cars like this one,” I noted.
“Yes, they’re not meant to take dinosaurs into consideration,” she growled.
“Exit coming up,” I said. “Here we go.”
I cut into the right-hand lane and accelerated smoothly and without noticeable effort from the old car. Between my old mechanic Mike and the tinker elves Mab had on call for maintenance and repairs, the Munstermobile purred like a three-thousand-pound kitten.
I went up the ramp with the accelerator mashed flat to the floor, and the cars following me had little choice but to emulate me. I’d timed my exit well, though. I gathered my will as I watched a couple of legitimate vehicles get in the way of my pursuers, and I reached the top of the ramp just in time for the green light. I went right through the intersection, back onto the entry ramp, and back down toward the highway, and as I went, I waved my hand in a gesture reminiscent of drawing a hood up over one’s head, and murmured, “Obscurata.”
There was an odd sensation, like a fine cold mist drifting down over me, and the interior of the car dimmed, as though heavy clouds had suddenly obscured the light, to the point where you’d have trouble telling what time it was by looking at the position of the sun.
Visibility dropped suddenly and dramatically. Magic is awesome, but you don’t get anything for free—mess around with how much light is going to bounce off your body, and you’re also futzing about with how much light makes it to your eyeballs, and for that matter how much light is available to do things like keep you warm. Going unseen isn’t a super complicated operation—doing it without blinding and freezing yourself is the hard part. I had settled on developing a veiling spell that would split the difference between visibility and comfort—by choice, obviously, and not because it was totally not my area of natural talent—and as a result, looking out of my veil was only a little easier than seeing into it. The world went dim, and just as it did, Murphy sat up straight, her eyes bright.
“Hey,” she said. “Does this spell stop radar?”
“Uh,” I said. I was already holding on to a veil and driving faster than was strictly safe, and my attention can only split so many ways. “Not mine. Molly’s will stop almost everything, but I only bother with visible light becau—”
Murphy reached over while I was still talking and pushed down on my right knee, hard, pressing the accelerator flat again. “Faster.”
I gave her an annoyed look and then did it. The old engine gave a game growl and we gathered speed going down the on-ramp, rapidly reaching speeds that would preclude any chance of getting off with a warning.
I checked the rearview mirror in time to see our entourage come barreling onto the entry ramp behind us—
—just as my more-or-less-invisible car passed a pair of highway patrol vehicles poised on the side of the ramp, watching for speeders to come sailing under the bridge.
I had a chance to see both highway patrol officers come to attention behind the wheel, their eyes on their radar-gun readouts, then switching to the apparently empty road—and both men locked eyes on our pursuers, the only apparent visible source of the readings on their instruments.
I flashed by them and just had time to see their bubs coming on before they vanished into the obscurement generated by my veil.
“Oh,” I said to Murphy in admiration. “That’s just mean.”
“Right?” she asked me, smiling. She patted my leg and said, “Good job following directions.”
Which was another way to say, Thank you for trusting me.
I chewed on my lip. If I drove in the right lane, I’d have to go slow to avoid problems, and I’d have to dodge anyone trying to make it over for the exits. If I drove in the far left, I’d run the risk of idiots just slamming into me from behind. I liked my chances better in a lower-speed accident, so I got behind a truck in the right-hand lane, crept up close enough that he couldn’t have seen me in his mirrors, and stayed there.
“Aren’t you worried about people flipping out when you appear all of a sudden?” she asked.
“Ah,” I said. “Not so much. People work really hard not to notice unusual things, generally speaking. You know the drill by now.” I shrugged. “Most people have encountered something that looks damned peculiar, that just doesn’t fit. And mostly they explain it away, no matter how thin the explanation sounds, or they just don’t think about it. Everyone says they want magic, but no one really wants to feel confused and frightened, or stay awake at night worried about dark forces they can do nothing about.”
“And magic is that,” she said.
“That’s some of what magic is,” I said. “It’s also a lot of good stuff. Like all power. It depends on what you do with it.”
“And yet, like all power,” Murphy said, “it tends to corrupt.”
Well.
Tough to argue with that.
The number of people capable of wielding Pow
er, or power, responsibly was never exactly going to threaten the world food supply.
Out of the mist of my veil’s obscurement, the Jeep that had been following us appeared. It pulled up directly behind me and then flashed its headlights in three quick signals.
“I handled the other two,” Murphy said. “This one is yours.”
“Yeah,” I said, peering at the rearview mirror. Then I dropped the veil abruptly, hit my right blinker, and took the next exit ramp. Murphy arched an eyebrow but looked at me. I pulled off to the side of the road, and the Jeep pulled up behind me.
“Is that who I think it is?” Murphy asked.
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Contracted him to help out.”
Murphy eyed me and said, “Huh. Maybe you do learn. Eventually.”
“Amazing, right?” I leaned back and way over and unlocked the rear passenger-side door.
Goodman Grey got into the backseat and slouched down wearily. He was perhaps one of the most forgettable people I’d ever seen. He was unremarkable in every way, a man of medium height and build, blandly not-bad-looking, and if you looked real close you could see Native American background in him somewhere. He was also one of the most dangerous shapeshifters in the world, he worked for one dollar per case, and he had saved me from meeting a truly ugly end in Tartarus.
“What the hell, man?” I asked as he settled in. “You’re supposed to be watching Justine.”
“Me and everyone else,” he complained. “You should have asked me about my group rates. Hey, Ms. Murphy.”
“Goodman,” Murphy replied. “Still working for these unsavory characters, I see.”
“Risk of the trade, ma’am,” Grey replied.
“Hold on, now,” I said. “Who else is watching Justine?”
“Who isn’t?” Grey asked. “White Court, cops, Feds, some wackadoo who is either a perv or a nutcase, doing it all by hacking into surveillance cameras online—”
“That sounds like it’s probably Paranoid Gary,” I said. “ He … has issues.”
Murphy frowned and said, “Wait. How in the world did you find out all of this?”
Grey shrugged.
Murphy arched an eyebrow at him. “How sure are you about your information?”