by P. N. Elrod
I kept coming. The two men ripped at each other, grappling and snarling like two wild animals. I was five feet away when Pavel head-butted Saiman, jerking his right arm free. A knife flashed; I lunged and saw Pavel slice across Saiman’s distended gut. A bloody clump fell, and I caught it with my left hand purely on instinct.
Magic punched my arm. Pale glow erupted from my fist.
Saiman twisted and stabbed something at Pavel’s right eye. The volkhv stumbled back, a bloody pencil protruding from his eye socket. For a long moment he stood, huge mouth gaping, and then he toppled like a log. Saiman spun about. The muscles of his stomach collapsed, folding, knitting together, turning into a flat washboard wall.
The whole thing took less than three seconds.
I opened my fist. A small gold acorn lay on my palm.
The golden shell cracked. A sliver of green thrust its way up. The acorn rolled off my hand. The green shoot thickened, twisted, surging higher and higher. The air roared like a tornado. Saiman howled, a sound of pure rage. I grabbed him and dragged him with me to the stairs. On the other side, volkhvi ran for the edge of the roof.
The shoot grew, turning dark, sprouting branches, leaves, and bark. Magic roiled.
“It was supposed to be mine,” Saiman snarled. “Mine!”
Light flashed. The roaring ceased.
A colossal oak stood in the middle of the roof, as tall as the building itself, its roots spilling on both sides of the high-rise. Tiny lights fluttered between its branches, each wavy leaf as big as my head. Birds sang in the foliage. A huge metal chain bound the enormous trunk, its links so thick, I could’ve lain down on it. A feeling of complete peace came over me. All my troubles melted into the distance. My pain dissolved. The air tasted sweet, and I drank it in.
At the other side of the roof, the volkhvi knelt.
Metal clinked. A black creature came walking down the bottom loop. As big as a horse, its fur long and black, it walked softly, gripping the links with razor-sharp claws. Its head was that of a lynx. Tall tufts of black fur decorated its ears, and a long black beard stretched from its chin. Its eyes glowed, lit from within.
The cat paused and looked at me. The big maw opened, showing me a forest of white teeth, long and sharp like knives.
“Ask.”
I blinked.
“You were the last to hold the acorn,” Saiman whispered. “You must ask the question or it will kill all of us.”
The cat showed me its teeth again.
For anything I asked, there would be a price.
“Ask,” the cat said, its voice laced with an unearthly snarl.
“Ask, Kate,” Saiman prompted.
“Ask!” one of the volkhvi called out.
I took a deep breath.
The cat leaned forward in anticipation.
“Would you like some milk?”
The cat smiled wider. “Yes.”
Saiman groaned.
“I’ll be right back.”
I dashed down the stairs. Three minutes later, the cat lapped milk from Saiman’s crystal punch bowl.
“You could’ve asked anything,” the creature said between laps.
“But you would’ve taken everything,” I told it. “This way all it cost me is a little bit of milk.”
In the morning Peters came to relieve me. Not that he had a particularly difficult job. After the oak disappeared, the volkhvi decided that since both Pavel and Grigorii were dead, all accounts were settled and it was time to call it quits. As soon as we returned to the apartment, Saiman locked himself in the bedroom and refused to come out. The loss of the acorn hit him pretty hard. Just as well. I handed my fussy client off to Peters, retrieved Peggy, and headed back to the Guild.
All in all I’d done spectacularly well, I decided. I lost the client for at least two minutes, let him get his stomach ripped open, watched him stab his attacker in the eye, which was definitely something he shouldn’t have had to do, and cost him his special acorn and roughly five months of work. The fact that my client turned out to be a scumbag and a sexual deviant really had no bearing on the matter.
Some bodyguard I made. Yay. Whoopee. I got to the Guild, surrendered Peggy, and filled out my paperwork. You win some, you lose some. At least Saiman survived. I wouldn’t get paid, but I didn’t end the job with a dead client on my hands.
I grabbed my crap and headed for the doors.
“Kate,” the clerk called from the counter.
I turned. Nobody remembered the clerk’s name. He was just “the clerk.”
He waved an envelope at me. “Money.”
I turned on my foot. “Money?”
“For the job. Client called. He says he’d like to work exclusively with you from now on. What did the two of you do all night?”
“We argued philosophy.” I swiped the envelope and counted the bills. Three grand. What do you know?
I stepped out the doors into an overcast morning. I had been awake for over thirty-six hours. I just wanted to find a quiet spot, curl up, and shut out the world.
A tall, lean man strode to me, tossing waist-long black hair out of the way. He walked like a dancer, and his face would stop traffic. I looked into his blue eyes and saw a familiar smugness in their depths. “Hello, Saiman.”
“How did you know?”
I shrugged and headed on my way.
“Perhaps we can work out a deal,” he said, matching my steps. “I have no intentions of losing that bet. I will find a form you can’t resist.”
“Good luck.”
“I’m guessing you’ll try to avoid me, which would make my victory a bit difficult.”
“Bingo.”
“That’s why I decided to give you an incentive you can’t refuse. I’m giving you a sixty percent discount on my services. It’s an unbelievable deal.”
I laughed. If he thought I’d pay him twenty-six dollars a minute for his time, he was out of luck.
“Laugh now.” Saiman smiled. “But sooner or later you’ll require my expertise.”
He stopped. I kept on walking, into the dreary sunrise. I had three thousand dollars and some chocolate to buy.
“Ilona Andrews” is the pseudonym for a husband-and-wife writing team. Ilona is a native-born Russian and Gordon is a former communications sergeant in the U.S. Army. Contrary to popular belief, Gordon was never an intelligence officer with a license to kill, and Ilona was never the mysterious Russian spy who seduced him. They met in college, in English Composition 101, where Ilona got a better grade. (Gordon is still sore about that.)
Gordon and Ilona currently reside in Georgia with their two children and three dogs.
The have coauthored two series, the bestselling urban fantasy of Kate Daniels, and romantic urban fantasy of The Edge, and are working on the next volumes for both.
Visit them on the Web at www.ilona-andrews.com.
EVEN HAND
by JIM BUTCHER
A successful murder is like a successful restaurant: ninety percent of it is about location, location, location.
Three men in black hoods knelt on the waterfront warehouse floor, their wrists and ankles trussed with heavy plastic quick-ties. There were few lights. They knelt over a large, faded stain on the concrete floor, left behind by the hypocritically named White Council of Wizards during their last execution.
I nodded to Hendricks, who took the hood off the first man, then stood clear. The man was young and good-looking. He wore an expensive yet ill-fitting suit and even more expensive yet tasteless jewelry.
“Where are you from?” I asked him.
He sneered at me. “What’s it to y—”
I shot him in the head as soon as I heard the bravado in his voice. The body fell heavily to the floor.
The other two jumped and cursed, their voices angry and terrified.
I took the hood off the second man. His suit was a close cousin of the dead man’s, and I thought I recognized its cut. “Boston?” I asked him.
“You can’t do this to us,”
he said, more angry than frightened. “Do you know who we are?”
Once I heard the nasal quality of the word “are,” I shot him.
I took off the third man’s hood. He screamed and fell away from me. “Boston,” I said, nodding, and put the barrel of my .45 against the third man’s forehead. He stared at me, showing the whites of his eyes. “You know who I am. I run drugs in Chicago. I run the numbers, the books. I run the whores. It’s my town. Do you understand?”
His body jittered in what might have been a nod. His lips formed the word “yes,” though no sound came out.
“I’m glad you can answer a simple question,” I told him, and lowered the gun. “I want you to tell Mr. Morelli that I won’t be this lenient the next time his people try to clip the edges of my territory.” I looked at Hendricks. “Put the three of them in a sealed trailer and rail-freight them back to Boston, care of Mr. Morelli.”
Hendricks was a large, trustworthy man, his red hair cropped in a crew cut. He twitched his chin in the slight motion that he used for a nod when he disapproved of my actions but intended to obey me anyway.
Hendricks and the cleaners on my staff would handle the matter from here.
I passed him the gun and the gloves on my hands. Both would see the bottom of Lake Michigan before I was halfway home, along with the two slugs the cleaners would remove from the site. When they were done, there would be nothing left of the two dead men but a slight variation on the outline of the stain in the old warehouse floor, where no one would look twice in any case.
Location, location, location.
Obviously, I am not Harry Dresden. My name is something I rarely trouble to remember, but for most of my adult life, I have been called John Marcone.
I am a professional monster.
It sounds pretentious. After all, I’m not a flesh-devouring ghoul, hiding behind a human mask until it is time to gorge. I’m no vampire, to drain the blood or soul from my victim, no ogre, no demon, no cursed beast from the spirit world dwelling amid the unsuspecting sheep of humanity. I’m not even possessed of the mystic abilities of a mortal wizard.
But they will never be what I am. One and all, those beings were born to be what they are.
I made a choice.
I walked outside of the warehouse and was met by my consultant, Gard—a tall blond woman without makeup whose eyes continually swept her surroundings. She fell into step beside me as we walked to the car. “Two?”
“They couldn’t be bothered to answer a question in a civil manner.”
She opened the back door for me and I got in. I picked up my personal weapon and slipped it into the holster beneath my left arm while she settled down behind the wheel. She started driving and then said, “No. That wasn’t it.”
“It was business.”
“And the fact that one of them was pushing heroin to thirteen-year-old girls and the other was pimping them out had nothing to do with it,” Gard said.
“It was business,” I said, enunciating. “Morelli can find pushers and pimps anywhere. A decent accountant is invaluable. I sent his bookkeeper back as a gesture of respect.”
“You don’t respect Morelli.”
I almost smiled. “Perhaps not.”
“Then why?”
I did not answer. She didn’t push the issue, and we rode in silence back to the office. As she put the car in park, I said, “They were in my territory. They broke my rule.”
“No children,” she said.
“No children,” I said. “I do not tolerate challenges, Ms. Gard. They’re bad for business.”
She looked at me in the mirror, her blue eyes oddly intent, and nodded.
There was a knock at my office door, and Gard thrust her head in, her phone’s earpiece conspicuous. “There’s a problem.”
Hendricks frowned from his seat at a nearby desk. He was hunched over a laptop that looked too small for him, plugging away at his thesis. “What kind of problem?”
“An Accords matter,” Gard said.
Hendricks sat up straight and looked at me.
I didn’t look up from one of my lawyer’s letters, which I receive too frequently to let slide. “Well,” I said, “we knew it would happen eventually. Bring the car.”
“I don’t have to,” Gard said. “The situation came to us.”
I set aside the finished letter and looked up, resting my fingertips together. “Interesting.”
Gard brought the problem in. The problem was young and attractive. In my experience, the latter two frequently lead to the former. In this particular case, it was a young woman holding a child. She was remarkable—thick, rich, silver white hair, dark eyes, pale skin. She had very little makeup, which was fortunate in her case, since she looked as if she had recently been drenched. She wore what was left of a gray business skirt-suit, had a towel from one of my health clubs wrapped around her shoulders, and was shivering.
The child she held was too young to be in school and was also appealing, with rosy features, white blond hair, and blue eyes. Male or female, it hardly mattered at that age. They’re all beautiful. The child clung to the girl as if it would not be separated, and was also wrapped in a towel.
The girl’s body language was definitely protective. She had the kind of beauty that looked natural and . . . true. Her features and her bearing both spoke of gentleness and kindness.
I felt an immediate instinct to protect and comfort her.
I quashed it thoroughly.
I am not made of stone, but I have found it is generally best to behave as if I am.
I looked across the desk at her and said, “My people tell me you have asked for sanctuary under the terms of the Unseelie Accords, but that you have not identified yourself.”
“I apologize, sir,” she answered. “I was already being indiscreet enough just by coming here.”
“Indeed,” I said calmly. “I make it a point not to advertise the location of my business headquarters.”
“I didn’t want to add names to the issue,” she said, casting her eyes down in a gesture of submission that did not entirely convince me. “I wasn’t sure how many of your people were permitted access to this sort of information.”
I glanced past the young woman to Gard, who gave me a slow, cautious nod. Had the girl or the child been other than they appeared, Gard would have indicated in the negative. Gard costs me a fortune and is worth every penny.
Even so, I didn’t signal either her or Hendricks to stand down. Both of them watched the girl, ready to kill her if she made an aggressive move. Trust, but verify—that the person being trusted will be dead if she attempts betrayal.
“That was most considerate of you, Justine.”
The girl blinked at me several times. “Y-you know me.”
“You are a sometimes associate of Harry Dresden,” I said. “Given his proclivities about those he considers to be held under his aegis, it is sensible to identify as many of them as possible. For the sake of my insurance rates, if nothing else. Gard.”
“Justine, no last name you’ll admit to,” Gard said calmly, “currently employed as Lara Raith’s secretary and personal aide. You are the sometimes lover of Thomas Raith, a frequent ally of Dresden’s.”
I spread my hands slightly. “I assume the ‘j’ notation at the bottom of Ms. Raith’s typed correspondence refers to you.”
“Yes,” Justine said. She had regained her composure quickly—not something I would have expected of the servitor of a vampire of the White Court. Many of the . . . people, I suppose, I’d seen there had made lotus-eaters look self-motivated. “Yes, exactly.”
I nodded. “Given your patron, one is curious as to why you have come to me seeking protection.”
“Time, sir,” she replied quietly. “I lacked any other alternative.”
Someone screamed at the front of the building.
My headquarters shifts position irregularly, as I acquire new buildings. Much of my considerable wealth is invested in real estate. I own more of
the town than any other single investor. In Chicago, there is always money to be had by purchasing and renovating aging buildings. I do much of my day-to-day work out of one of my most recent renovation projects, once they have been modified to be suitable places to welcome guests. Then, renovation of the building begins, and the place is generally crowded with contractors who have proven their ability to see and hear nothing.
Gard’s head snapped up. She shook it as if to rid herself of a buzzing fly and said, “A presence. A strong one.” Her blue eyes snapped to Justine. “Who?”
The young woman shuddered and wrapped the towel more tightly about herself. “Mag. A cantrev lord of the fomor.”
Gard spat something in a Scandinavian tongue that was probably a curse.
“Precis, please,” I said.
“The fomor are an ancient folk,” she said. “Water dwellers, cousins of the jotuns. Extremely formidable. Sorcerers, shape changers, seers.”
“And signatories,” I noted.
“Yes,” she said. She crossed to the other side of the room, opened a closet, and withdrew an athletic bag. She produced a simple, rather crude-looking broadsword from it and tossed it toward Hendricks. The big man caught it by the handle and took his gun into his left hand. Gard took a broad-bladed axe out of the bag and shouldered the weapon. “But rarely involved in mortal affairs.”
“Ms. Raith sent me to the fomor king with documents,” Justine said, her voice coming out quietly and rapidly. Her shivering had increased. “Mag made me his prisoner. I escaped with the child. There wasn’t time to reach one of my lady’s strongholds. I came to you, sir. I beg your protection, as a favor to Ms. Raith.”
“I don’t grant favors,” I said calmly.
Mag entered in the manner so many of these self-absorbed supernatural cretins seem to adore. He blasted the door into a cloud of flying splinters with what I presumed was magic.
For God’s sake.
At least the vampires would call for an appointment.
The blast amounted to little debris. After a few visits from Dresden and his ilk, I had invested in cheap, light doors at dramatic (as opposed to tactical) entry points.