by Jim Butcher
And yet … by Lara’s standards, that’s exactly what I’d done.
There is plenty of daylight between intentions and results. Intentions are fine things, but they don’t stanch bleeding or remove scars.
Or heal broken brothers.
Man. I hadn’t planned it like that.
Had I?
Maybe I’d been hanging around Mab too much.
“Lara,” I said tiredly, “I’ll grant you, yes, that’s how things stand. We can talk all night about how they got there. But I swear to you, I didn’t do it to try to get a handle on you. Of every person you have had to deal with, which of them has tried harder to avoid even touching your … handles?”
She stared at me with that unreadable expression for a good minute. Then she said, “Empty Night, wizard. Either you’re sincere, in which case”—she shook her head, baffled—“I feel I do not understand you very well at all. Or you’re a person capable of using even your brother’s misfortune and possible death to secure gain for yourself while simultaneously cladding your actions in such moral armor as to make them practically unassailable. In which case, I suppose … I admire your skill in arranging matters.”
“I figure you can look at this two ways,” I said.
She arched an eyebrow.
“You can write this down in your little black book and remember it,” I said, “because I took a cheap shot at you when you needed help, when you earned it, and when you came to ask for it, you deserved getting it. And instead, I leveraged you.”
“That is one way to look at it,” Lara concurred.
“Or,” I said, “you can take it as a bit of circumstance that happened because circumstances are bugnuts, absolutely insane, and you and I do not have reasonable jobs for sane and rational people. Both of us are making it up as we go along, as best we know how. Both of us look for the knives coming at our backs, and both of us take action to prevent them. That includes being suspicious-minded enough to take out a little insurance even when you aren’t consciously thinking about doing so.”
Something like grudging understanding tinged her gaze for a second. She let out a soft snort through her nose.
“So,” she said. “You agree with the old man. And decided to be a very clever frog with this scorpion.”
“I respect what you can do, Lara,” I said quietly. “You’re one of my favorite frenemies. But if we both want to survive, a certain amount of moving past these rough spots is going to be necessary.”
She let out a hard little laugh. “I suppose, then, I shall expect a similar amount of tolerance from you when, one day, I have the upper hand.”
I winced at her tone. It was hard, unforgiving.
I’m pretty sure I could have thought of a number of terrible things I could do to Lara Raith that wouldn’t have made her blink. But making her feel helpless was not on that list.
I definitely did not want to think about Lara gaining the upper hand between us. I didn’t want to think about that for more than a couple of reasons.
“Yeah, that’s fair,” I breathed. “When it’s my turn, I’ll have to take it with grace. But look: You got what you wanted. Our brother is safe. He’s hidden from any tracking spells and he’ll at least not be in any worse shape while he’s a guest here. Yes, you’re going to have to watch my back until we can get him out of there, but since Mab’s got me covering yours anyway, that shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for you—and we’ve got bigger fish to fry right now. Let’s survive the night, and we’ll sort out Thomas tomorrow. Agreed?”
She kept at it with those flat eyes for another minute before she shook her head and pushed her dark hair back out of her eyes. “Fine,” she said. “Yes, all right. Your reasoning is sound. We have larger issues to face. They must take priority. I accept your terms. You have my word.”
“Thank you,” I said.
Lara recovered her knife and turned away from me. “And after that,” she said, starting back for the boat, “my first prerogative shall be balancing any scales between us that seem less than level. Beginning with my bodyguard. You will release her, please.”
I gestured, muttered to the island, and felt Freydis’s tension ease as she escaped the sinkhole I’d put her in. The redheaded Valkyrie melted out of the shadows. She paced over to Lara’s side, checking her client for injury, before giving me the kind of steady, cautious look people normally reserve for dangerous animals.
“Shall we return to the city, then?” Lara asked. Her voice was its normal velvet loveliness again, but I could feel the sharp edges underneath.
Fabulous. This was just what I needed. To provide people like Lara with motivation.
“Go ahead and board,” I said. “I need to grab a couple things. We’ll leave in five minutes.”
Lara nodded stiffly and turned to walk back to the ship. She was limping slightly and had been thoroughly muddied. I watched her go.
“SHALL I PREPARE ANOTHER CELL FOR THAT ONE?”
I turned to find the island’s spirit looming over my shoulder—and I hadn’t sensed Alfred’s approach.
Which … bothered me. I mean, my intellectus of the island was essentially without limit. With a minor effort of concentration, I could have known how many ants were on the island, how many birds, how many fish in the waters off its shores. But I couldn’t find out more about the inhabitants of the cells without dragging my brain through their psychic rap sheets, experiencing to some degree everything they were and had done. And I couldn’t sense Alfred or his movements. I mean, the spirit had come every time I’d called.
And I’d been assuming this whole time that it had to.
But Alfred was apparently able to hide things from me. The spirit could hide its presence from my intellectus of the island, for example. And it could hide the innate terror of the island’s inmates, preventing it from taking a toll on my psyche.
So I kind of had to wonder—what else could Demonreach be hiding from me?
“That won’t be necessary,” I muttered back to the spirit. “Alfred, how big a being can the cells contain?”
“PHYSICAL SIZE IS NOT A FACTOR,” the spirit replied. “METAPHYSICAL MASS IS A DIFFERENT CONSIDERATION.” The creature’s green eyes suddenly flashed fiercely. “THE LAST TITAN IS ON THE MOVE.”
“Yes,” I said simply. “Can you hold her?”
“IF YOU CAN PERFORM THE BINDING, I CAN HOLD HER,” Alfred said.
“From how far out?” I asked.
“I AM A JAILER, NOT A BOUNTY HUNTER,” Alfred replied. “PERHAPS TO THE SHORES OF THE LAKE—IF YOU USED THE ATHAME FROM THE ARMORY.”
An athame is a magical tool—think magic wand, but in the form of a knife. They’re powerful tools for ritual magic.
I had one locked up in the island’s armory. I’d stolen it from the God of the Underworld, from the same shelf as the Shroud and the Crown of Thorns. If it truly was what I was pretty sure it was, then using it was going to put me in a long-term pickle.
But if the storm coming for Chicago was as bad as I thought it was going to be, not using it would be unthinkable.
“To the shore, eh?” I said. “All right. Get me the knife. And a binding crystal. And the placard.”
“YOU WISH TWO OF THE WEAPONS?”
Alfred sounded … slightly intimidated.
That’s the kind of power level we were talking about.
“Sure,” I said in the most cavalier fashion I could. “After all, that’s only half the arsenal. And as soon as I leave, I want the full defensive measures of the island activated. Nothing gets in or out. Understood?”
“UNDERSTOOD, WARDEN,” the entity said with a bow.
“Great,” I sighed. “Now, run and get me my toys, Alfred. I’ve got a long night coming up.”
Chapter
Thirty-six
When I got back to the boat, Karrin was up on top of the boathouse, seated on the stool there. Her P90, a personal defense weapon that was the bastard child of an assault rifle and a box of Belgian chocol
ates, was resting on the safety railing, its barrel aimed in the same general direction as where I had been standing and negotiating moments before.
I checked. She had a good line of sight to where I’d been standing with Lara, as well as to where Freydis had come out of the water.
“Had them both lined up, huh?” I asked.
She shrugged. “I know who my friends are.”
“But you didn’t shoot.”
She folded her arms as if cold. “I know who my enemies are, too.” She glanced down, toward where Lara and Freydis were belowdecks, washing off mud and changing into some spare clothing. Some of it was Thomas’s and would sort of fit. “Lara’s tired and scared and running on instinct,” Karrin continued. “She’d have never come at you the way she did, here, otherwise.”
I regarded Karrin for a second. Then I said, surprised, “You like her.”
“I find her terrifying,” she replied calmly. “But I will acknowledge a certain amount of respect. When we worked together in the BFS, she always held up her end and always kept her word. That’s not nothing.”
“No, it isn’t,” I said. I opened up the boat so that the roar of the engine would prevent Lara from overhearing our conversation. Vampires and their hearing. “So, I made an enemy of her.”
Karrin snorted. “Maybe. But I saw the whole thing. You beat her, but you didn’t show her any disrespect. She’s not as petty as most of the rest of the supernatural types I’ve met. Maybe she’ll decide to overlook it.” She shrugged. “And if she wants a fight, we fight her.”
“Tonight was high-stress and special. I’m pretty sure any fight Lara starts in the future is going to be set up so that we don’t get a turn,” I said.
Karrin turned bright blue eyes up to me. “So? You want to kill her right here, drop her in the lake?”
“Course not,” I said, annoyed.
“Then stop borrowing trouble,” she said. “Either throw down right now, or accept the fact that by not doing so, you’re giving her the upper hand. Either way, complaining isn’t going to help you.”
“If the Council gives me the boot,” I said, “there’s nothing stopping her from coming at me however she wants.”
Karrin snorted. “Merely Mab.”
I pursed my lips. True, that. Honestly, my long-term prognosis was for death by Mab, one way or another, but until I fell trying to do something for her, I had a certain advantage in my role as the official Thug of Winter. I was high-profile. Anyone who wanted to come at me outside of the various shadow games would have to run a table of serious risks to make the attempt—and even then, if they didn’t pull it off perfectly, so that they could vanish the body and avoid my death curse, it would be bound to catch up to them sooner or later in the person of the Winter Queen.
Nobody particularly cared to cross anyone from Winter—much less the Sidhe who ruled over the other predatory fae by dint of sheer wickedness and power. Mab’s reputation and force of personality had created the Unseelie Accords from whole cloth.
Mab was not a kind or gentle boss, but she’d never betrayed me, either.
When she made a promise, she meant it, and everyone knew it. Everyone but Ethniu, apparently.
I found myself turning the binding crystal over and over in my hand. It was about six inches long and between an inch and two inches thick, and glowed with a very, very faint luminescence that one could see only indirectly.
“That like the one you used on Thomas?” Murph asked.
“Yeah.”
“You think you can get a Titan inside one of those?”
“Sure,” I lied.
She spat casually over the side of the boat and gave me a look.
I grimaced. “Bindings are difficult work. You pit your will against whatever you’re trying to bind. If your will is stronger, it gets bound. If not …”
“Whatever you tried to bind comes to kill you?”
“She was doing that anyway,” I pointed out.
Karrin bobbed her head to one side in a little gesture of acceptance. “So your head is harder than Thomas’s?”
“He wasn’t in much shape to fight,” I said. I chewed on my lip thoughtfully. “He’d had a long, long day.”
Karrin nodded. “You hurt him putting him in there. Didn’t you.”
“Maybe more than he’s ever been hurt,” I said. “Didn’t have many options.”
“Mother of God.” She looked up at me and then out at the dark. “I’m sorry that you had to do that to him.”
“Didn’t hurt me.”
“Sure. What happens to Thomas if you don’t make it through the fight?”
“He stays there,” I said. “Probably for good.”
“Harry, I need your honesty here. Can he be healed? Or are you just buying him time?”
I shrugged a shoulder and shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“You don’t?”
“Hey, I’m making this up as I go along.” I thought of my brother, trapped in a crystal prison for the next foreseeable eternity. And Justine and his kid, alone. “But I have to try.”
She exhaled through her teeth and nodded. “You do.”
The boat chugged steadily through the water back toward town. We both stood, staring toward it, silent tension rising.
I felt her hand slip into mine.
There were lights shining in the city now, though we couldn’t see them until we got within sight of shore—candles in windows. Larger fires, maybe in trash cans.
The city was silent and dim in the darkness, unnaturally still.
Waiting.
And somewhere inside it, my daughter would be asleep right now, with Mouse somewhere under her feet.
I thought of the hideous scarlet light of the Eye, tearing through Marcone’s little fortress.
“ This …” I breathed. “This is too big.”
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“It’s too big,” I said. “This isn’t a war-torn nation where it can be explained away. Or an odd-duck private investigator with a quirky shtick. It’s Chicago. Ethniu and King Corb aren’t even trying to keep this quiet. The kind of blood that’s going to be spilled … It will cry out.”
“People will be terrified,” Murphy said.
“And they’ll set out to destroy what frightens them,” I said. “It’ll make the Spanish Inquisition look like a bouncy castle.”
Murphy shuddered. “If Ethniu and Corb pull this off, they’ll set the mortal world and the supernatural world at war.”
I stared ahead at the dim skyline of my city, ghostly in the darkness.
“Yeah,” I growled. “If.”
And I gave the old boat all it had.
Christmas Eve
Harry
‘Twas the night before Christmas, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring except me and Mouse.
I sat in the middle of a lopsided circle of parts that spread out before me in a 180 degree arc, glowering at an instruction manual. “Why do they bother putting the assembly instructions in twenty different languages,” I all but screamed, “and then just have a drawing with numbers and letters and arrows!?!”
“Woof,” Mouse said, commiserating. He was over two hundred pounds of patient grey floof, and was better with people than I was.
I went back to trying to assemble the stupid bicycle. Maggie needed to learn to ride a bike. A lot of little girls would have wanted the pink and purple bike. But Maggie’s favorite color was red. She insisted that the red ones go faster.
“You need a degree and a NASCAR pit crew to do this!” I muttered darkly.
Mouse sighed. Then he nudged my hand with his nose until I dropped the part I was trying to assemble. Then he picked up a different part in his huge, patient jaws, and handed it to me.
“What am I supposed to do with this?” I demanded. “Other than wipe your drool off, you moose.”
Mouse chuffed, and nudged my other hand with his nose.
“I know you want to help,” I sai
d. “But these two parts don’t—”
The parts clicked together and locked, easily.
Mouse’s tail went thump, thump, against the floor.
“Nobody likes a wiseass,” I said darkly.
Mouse’s tail went thumpthumpthumpthump and he grinned a doggy grin at me.
“Are you laughing at me?” I demanded.
Mouse sneezed.
I sighed, and ruffled his ears. “Fine. If you can’t beat them, join them.” I held up the paper so Mouse could peer at it. “Which one is next?”
Mouse selected the next part, and I started bumbling around with it until I got it right. Then we did the next one. The fire in the fireplace crackled and popped. It was the only light.
There were quiet footsteps and then Michael Carpenter appeared, a large man in his fifties with a thick, powerful build. He wore a comfortable robe belted over his pajamas, and carried a coffee mug in his hand. He paused in the doorway to his own living room and regarded me struggling, smiling quietly.
“Maggie and Hank crashed about an hour ago,” he said. “So you have the rest of the night to get it done.”
“Just say it,” I muttered.
“I wouldn’t dream,” he replied. He took a sip of eggnog from his mug. His wife Charity made wicked potent nog. “It just wouldn’t be fair.”
“You must have done a million of these things,” I said.
“Or two,” he said, nodding.
I spread my hands over the parts in exasperation. “Well?”
“Oh,” he said, his voice serious—but his eyes were twinkling. “Harry, I wouldn’t dream of taking this joy away from you. This is what being a father is all about.”
“Staying up all night cutting myself while I try to figure out this stupid thing?” I demanded.
“Don’t forget being woken at the crack of dawn by excited children,” he said.
I groaned.
Michael smiled faintly. “Don’t moan about it, Harry. I got pretty used to my Molly showing up at my bedside at 5AM with a cup of burnt coffee she made herself.” Something sad and tired touched the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes. “It’s the most annoying thing you’ll ever miss once it’s gone.”