by Jim Butcher
“It’s not like I made an appointment.”
“It would have been nice if you’d told me,” Lara said. “That’s all I’m saying.”
“I took cold medicine,” I said defensively.
Lara arched an eyebrow. “Seriously?”
“Does everybody know about this disease but me?” I complained. And I swiped at my nose with my forearm, fighting back another itch.
There was a soft thump, and a bundle of towels unrolled from the bottom of the shaft, their ends neatly knotted together.
“Hurry up,” Freydis’s voice hissed from the shaft above. “I only made the illusion a quickie.”
“Help me,” I said to Lara, and together we got the makeshift rope around Thomas.
* * *
Getting my brother back up that narrow shaft wasn’t simple, even with Freydis’s arms pulling him as steadily as any heavy-duty winch. He was too weak to even hold his head up steadily, and he collected some scrapes and bangs on the way up—but we got him there.
After that, we moved quick. Freydis pulled out some cleaning wipes and swept them over Lara’s arms and legs, while Lara got her dress back on and stepped into her shoes. I was wearing the suit and had less exposed skin to clean. I used a wipe to swipe off my face, neck, and hands and flicked a comb through my hair, then dressed at my best speed.
The whole time I got dressed, I did my best to ignore the image in the boxing ring, of Lara and me sort of drowsily kissing and moving together in immediate postcoital languor. My image was breathing hard and gurgling out a self-satisfied chuckle against her throat. Her image’s hair was a mess, and her face and throat were the palest shade of pink imaginable, and it was entirely too damned easy to consider what that must feel like against my image’s lips.
“That’s very sweet, really,” Lara noted. “The personal bits in the afterglow. Perhaps not terribly believable, but a pretty fiction.”
“I should get drunk and write fucking romance,” Freydis agreed. She gave me a narrow-eyed glance. “I give the male leads too much credit. But this one seems less useless than some.”
While smoothing her dress Lara gave me a glance that made me want to swing from the various equipment around the gym while pounding my chest, and I looked away, feeling my face heat up. The problem with high-pressure situations was that they forced a lot of basic, primal things out that you could normally keep buttoned down.
“Can we focus, please?” I said, my voice only a little rough.
There was a sudden snap in the air, like an enormous discharge of static electricity, and the image in the ring burst into a spectrum of color and faded, leaving behind only a blackened, smoking wooden plaque about the size of a small domino.
“A Freydis production,” the Valkyrie noted. “Oh, one of the servers looked in and caught the show. He bought it and left discreetly, so as far as everyone at the peace talks is concerned, you guys are totally a thing as of, oh, an hour after tonight’s business.”
I blinked. “Um, what?”
“Potion,” Lara said, producing a test tube from her tiny handbag. She shook it up, uncorked it, and wrinkled her nose at the muddled, messy liquid inside. Then she closed her eyes, downed a quick swallow, and passed the tube to Freydis.
The Valkyrie looked at it askance. “I don’t normally accept drinks from guys like you, seidrmadr. What if this potion of yours makes me forget I’m protecting Lara?”
“Everyone who drinks it will be on the inside of the … the grey field,” I said. “We’ll be clear to each other. But to everyone else, we’ll seem like bland, unobtrusive background, already identified and not worthy of noticing.”
Freydis looked even more skeptical. “And this stuff actually works?”
“Too well, is the problem,” I said darkly. “Drink.”
She glowered but did. I took the tube and went to Thomas, dripping some into his mouth. He choked and twitched but he swallowed it down. Then it was my turn.
The details of all the contents aren’t terribly important, but magical potions rarely taste like anything you’d feed to an actual human. This one tasted like, and had the texture of, stale and mushy cardboard that might have had a little mold growing on it. I sort of fought it down, wishing the Mission: Impossible plan had included bringing enough water to get the taste out of my mouth afterward.
It took a couple of heartbeats and then the world sort of shifted, changing by subtle degrees, like when clouds gradually cover the sun. Color began to bleed out of the room, until the world was left in all subtle shades of grey—except for the others. I could clearly see my brother, Lara, and Freydis in full color against the monochromatic background. The air turned a little chillier, a little clammier, or maybe we just thought it did. The psychic resonance that the potion set up had some weird blowback effects on the drinker, and I’d experienced them once before, a long time ago.
“Okay,” I said. I hunched down and got one of Thomas’s arms over my shoulder. Lara got his other arm and we hauled him to his feet. “Move smoothly and calmly. If we start running around, we’ll wrinkle the seams at the edges of the glamour and make people take a second look. Once they do that, we’re screwed. So stay cool and we’ll be just fine.”
Freydis traded a look with Lara, smirking, and said, “Kids.”
“I think he’s being very sweet,” Lara said.
Right. Of the three of us in the conversation, I was the youngest by centuries at least. They had both probably faced enough dangerous situations to regard the entirety of my career as a promising rookie year. I felt like a bit of a jackass. When that happens, it’s an excellent idea to shut your mouth.
So I just started walking, leaving Lara to keep up, which she did, without effort, her blue eyes bright. We had to support maybe ninety percent of Thomas’s weight, and we stayed as close together as we could. Freydis paced along behind us, also keeping very near. Even in the realm of the supernatural, there are laws and limitations. Only so much power could go into the potion’s glamour. The less physical space the glamour would have to cover, the denser and more effective it would be. Spread it out too much, and we’d be better off shouting for the world to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
It was an incredibly subtle working of magic—one that would have been far beyond my skill without the skull’s tutelage, back in the day. It had hidden me so effectively that even screaming at people in an attempt to warn them they were about to die had gone unnoticed.
But those people hadn’t been the most skillful, potent masters of the supernatural world and its various Arts. This would be a much, much tougher room. And I was about to pit the wiliness of Bob the Skull against the wariness and suspicion of some of the most powerful beings of the supernatural world—with utter disaster looming, should anything go amiss. We reached the doors back to the great hall, and I paused there, taking a breath and fighting down a slow shudder that tried to run up my spine.
“You’re sure,” Lara said, very quietly, “that the people here won’t see through this … disguise?”
“It’s the best I’ve got,” I said.
“That wasn’t exactly an answer.”
“Yeah,” I said, and put my hand on the door to open it. “But it’s the best I’ve got.”
Chapter
Twenty-eight
My father, Malcolm, died when I was young. I don’t have very many memories of him, even though I realized, maybe around the age of ten, that I would lose even those if I didn’t keep them. So when I was young, I would lie awake quietly at night, thinking of him—of his face, his voice, the things he had said, and the things he had done.
Once, on the way to one of his gigs, we picked up two hitchhiking couples and drove them three hundred miles. Dad bought them a meal and replaced two of their pairs of shoes, even though we barely had enough to get by. He once found a sick and puny kitten in an alley outside a club he’d been playing, somewhere in Ohio, and spent the next three weeks carrying the little creature around
with us so that he could nurse it back to health and find it a stable home. And he never passed a used bookstore. He loved books.
He took me to see Star Wars movies.
Him and me.
But it was always him and me. Until he was gone.
The brightest and best memories I had of him were getting lessons from him on magic. Not the Art—Dad was a performing illusionist.
“Everyone who comes to the show knows I’m going to try to trick them,” my father said one night. We were sitting in an all-night diner when he said it, getting dinner on the way to a show he was playing in Colorado. He was a lean, dark-haired man, with serious eyes and a quick smile. He wore a denim jacket and a Cubs baseball cap. “I know that they know. And that’s how you play the game.”
“What game?” I asked him.
He picked up a coin and held it in his palm where I could see it.
“When someone is suspicious, they’re looking for things to notice,” he said. “Sometimes the best way to trick them is to give them something to notice. Once they’re focused on that, you know where they’re looking.”
There was a loud crash and I jumped. The chair next to Dad had fallen backwards onto the floor.
When I looked back, his hand was still there, but the coin was gone.
“This example is pretty crude, but it works well enough. Once you know where they’re looking, you also know where they aren’t looking. That’s when you have room to make the illusion happen. It’s called misdirection. If I do it right, it looks like magic, and everyone is happy.”
“What if you do it wrong?”
He smiled and reached for my ear. I caught his wrist. I might have been little, but I knew some of his moves by then. He had the quarter tucked into the fold of skin on the back of his hand, between his thumb and forefinger.
I grinned at him, took the coin, and pocketed it. That was the deal. If I ever was smart enough to catch him in the act, the coin was my reward, and I could put them in any video game I wanted.
“If I do it wrong, then it looks to the audience like I’m incompetent, like I’m stupid, and like I think they’re stupid to be fooled by such a simple trick.” He gave me a wry grin. “People don’t react well to that.”
Tough room, I thought to myself. Not sure you ever played to a crowd that could react with as much … manifest enthusiasm as this one, Dad.
I needed to stop talking to ghosts.
Showtime.
I pushed open the door behind the buffet table and surveyed the room. It seemed simple enough. Cristos was on the little speaking stage now, and all the illustrious bigwigs were watching him.
“… and I’m very pleased to announce that we have been contacted by King Corb of the Fomor, who will be arriving shortly. Matters of state required his immediate attention, but they have been resolved, and His Majesty will arrive within moments.”
There was a round of polite applause, which Cristos acknowledged with a beaming smile. “Recent events among the supernatural nations may have caused a great deal of confusion and turmoil—but they could also be an opportunity to forge even stronger bonds between the various nations. It is my hope that, should we reach a successful treaty, our neighbors the Fomor will work hand in hand with the rest of the Accorded nations… .”
It got dull after that, even for a black-and-white feature, despite Cristos’s excellent speaking presence, and if all the supernatural grown-ups found him as cloying as I did, they hid it a hell of a lot better than I would have. Granted, the misdirection hadn’t been specifically timed to interrupt Cristos and his speech.
That was merely a happy accident.
I took a second ampule, identical to the one I’d crushed on Ramirez, out of my suit’s inner pocket and crushed it in the same hand I had the first. I’d been careful not to clean that spot on my palm, and the potion in the fresh ampule mixed with the residue from the one I’d slapped on Ramirez.
My hand quivered, clenched spasmodically once, and suddenly felt heavy, as if a large, slightly damp beach towel had been draped across it.
“On me,” I whispered. “Here we go.”
And then I spread my fingers out as if guiding a marionette, started wiggling them, and Lara and I started hauling Thomas out, Freydis close behind us.
The potion I’d slipped onto Ramirez’s cloak had been half of the brew. The stuff currently on my hand was the other half. The two were magically linked by a drop of my blood, the most powerful agent for magical bindings known to reality. With that bond formed, it was a simple enough trick to send a pulse of energy from my hand over to poor Carlos’s cloak.
The grey cloth abruptly flared, whipped wildly around as if in a hurricane wind, and promptly dragged the young Warden off his feet and across the floor—toward the back of the hall, in the opposite direction of the front door.
People and not-people let out noises of distress. Several dozen security teams bolted for their primaries. A lot of folks got tackled to the floor by their own retainers. I caught a glimpse of Molly being surrounded by a group of Sidhe and hustled to one side of the room—and I recognized one of them, the goddamned Redcap. The murderous Sidhe assassin had traded in his baseball cap for a scarlet headband of a leather whose origins I shuddered to consider.
We moved through the chaos as Carlos struggled with his cloak. He managed to unfasten it, and the damned thing promptly began flapping around like an enormous bat.
And it worked. The room stayed black-and-white. Everyone’s paranoia was so focused on the potential threat that they didn’t have enough cognitive cycles left to be paranoid about us.
The potion hadn’t been a very potent one—I’d spent most of my effort on the actual blending potion to keep us concealed—and it wouldn’t last long. The cloak’s batteries already looked like they were getting weaker, its movements less frantic. We might not have time enough to make it to the door, in fact. I hurried my pace a little, as much as I dared.
And, halfway to the door, two figures abruptly flared into full color and looked right at us.
I froze as the dragon Ferrovax, still sitting in his chair, smoke dribbling from his nostrils, stared right at me—and gave me a slow, toothy smile.
Oh, Hell’s bells.
If he raised the alarm, we were done.
Ferrovax inhaled in preparation to call out.
And, over the sounds of the room, I heard three sharp, quick raps of wood on stone.
I whipped my head in the other direction to see Vadderung, also in full color, still seated, still faced off against Ferrovax. His black eye patch lent him a particularly sinister aspect. He held a stylish cane of silvery hardwood in his right hand. Some trick of the light cast a shadow three times the length of the cane on the wall behind him. Vadderung stared at Ferrovax without blinking. A tiny smile touched the corner of his mouth.
Holy crap. The last time a dragon had been slain out here in the tangible, mortal world, it had been in a region called Tunguska. If Ferrovax decided to throw down in the middle of a city as large and as crowded as Chicago, the death toll could be the most catastrophic, concentrated loss of human life in history.
And it would kind of be my fault.
My heart began to pound. I looked back at the disguised dragon with wide eyes.
Ferrovax didn’t look at me. I probably wasn’t worth noticing, by his standards. My only noticeable feature, as far as he was concerned, was my ability to set myself on full smartass before conversing with dragons. He regarded Vadderung for a moment with hooded eyes. Then his partly open mouth twitched into a smirk and closed. He exhaled the breath he’d been going to use to call me out through his nose, along with two heavy plumes of acrid-smelling smoke.
I looked back at Vadderung. He didn’t take his gaze from the dragon. He just twitched one of his knees toward the exit.
I gave him a tight nod and a wolfish grin, and we pressed on.
We made it out of the great hall and into the passage beyond just as the energy animating
Ramirez’s cape began to run out. From the entry antechamber, Childs appeared with his dog, and they both hurried toward us, and they both remained monochromatic as they passed us.
I picked up the pace even more. We hurried out the front, and I hoped to God that Murphy had remembered to drink her portion of the blending potion as well.
She had. She’d rented a car for the occasion, and Lara’s people had provided false plates. The lights of the luxury sedan came up and she pulled smoothly into the street, coming to a halt nearby.
We hurried to the car. Murphy leaned out the window, and something in her eyes became easier when she saw me. “How’d it go?”
I winked at her. “I think we’ll get away with it if we run fast enough,” I said.
Lara got into the backseat first, and I pushed Thomas after her. Between the two of us, we got him wrestled in. Freydis followed him, and I circled toward the passenger-side door.
I had just opened it when a large truck rushed up toward us from the other direction, engine roaring, and I had a horrible flash of realization—the blending potion’s real problem was that it was just too damned strong. It was entirely possible that the driver of the vehicle hadn’t really noticed us or our car. The potion’s magic might have influenced their subconscious to tell them that we were a large cardboard box or something, just aching to be run over.
But the truck swerved at the last minute, coming up onto the sidewalk with a couple of wheels, and screeched to a halt outside the Brighter Future Society.
The external valets and staff stood around confused by this turn of events, except for one security guard who was fumbling for both his weapon and his radio, shouting into it in a high-pitched, terrified voice.
He got a couple of words out before the doors to the truck rolled up and something that sounded like a broken piece of pneumatic machinery tore his torso to ribbons and sent a scarlet fan of blood onto the wall behind him. What hit the ground wasn’t a person for much longer.