by Jim Butcher
“Can I help you, sir?”
“Those look like ARs,” I said. I squinted at the guns pointing at me. “But with real big barrels. Beowulfs?”
Riley shrugged. “Can I help you?”
“I’m to see Ms. Raith,” I said.
“The grounds are closed for the night.”
I looked at him and rested my arm on the window, leaning back comfortably in my seat. Lara didn’t hire chumps, so I was dealing with a professional. Most of the time, when something like this happened, I tended to react … adversely. But I was here to talk about a diplomatic solution. I was kind of new to this, but it seemed like me blowing things up and knocking Lara’s people ass over teakettle probably wouldn’t be an auspicious beginning.
And besides. I was willing to bet the other five or six guys I couldn’t see right now would have a rocket launcher or something, and I didn’t need to add getting blown up to my list of problems.
So I smiled at the guard and said, “Look. You and I crossed trails over the Luther case. Didn’t turn out so good for your boss, but you kept it from being a real wreck—and we were both good to our word.”
Riley eyed me and grunted acknowledgment.
“I’m here to help,” I said. “Call the house. You won’t regret it.”
He stared down at me for a second. Then he walked to the guardhouse and got on a phone while several extremely heavy-duty guns, known for their vehicle-stopping capability, pointed steadily at my noggin. His face turned a little paler than it had been, and he waved at the other guards, causing them to lower the weapons and get out of the way. He pointed at me and then at the gate, and the gate buzzed and began to swing open.
Before I could put the car in gear and pull in, a Humvee pulled out of the dark inside the fence. The military-style truck was painted all black and had an actual Ma Deuce machine gun on a pintle mount atop it. The Humvee preceded me, and as my car began to roll, a second truck, mounted with a second machine gun, pulled in behind me. Riley swung up onto the running board of the second vehicle, his rifle held up and ready with one hand as we began to move forward. I was, it seemed, to have an escort up to the house.
We all drove a couple of miles through Sherwood until we emerged from the trees onto the lawn of a grand estate I’d been to a few times before. As we drove, I could feel subtle webs of magic woven throughout the path along the road. We were moving too fast for me to get much out of what I could sense, but the implications were pretty clear—Lara had blanketed her grounds in magical protections of some kind.
Now, where had she gotten someone to do that for her?
Raith Manor was a brooding château, built in the rural French style from some point in the eighteenth century, only with more gargoyles and Gothic features that vaguely called Notre-Dame to mind. You know, before the fire. Our cars parked out front, and Riley came over to open my door for me.
“We’ll secure your car while you’re inside, sir,” he said, and held out his hand for my keys.
Securing my car could mean a lot of things, among them tearing it apart to look for bugs and bombs. I eyed him. “After you’ve acknowledged my guest-right,” I said.
“You are Ms. Raith’s guest and are under her protection,” he confirmed.
I grunted and handed him the keys. Then I walked up the steps for several seconds, Riley moving behind me. I opened the door and went inside like I owned the place.
The big old house was a dark and brooding structure, even on a sunny day. On a dark night, it looked like a set from a Scooby-Doo cartoon. There was little light inside, just a few subtle spots, here and there, on art that was scattered throughout the place. I started to turn to ask Riley where everyone was, but Riley had stopped at the door and shut it carefully, leaving me alone in the dimness.
I wasn’t alone for long. There were the firm clicks of someone approaching in heels over hardwood floors. I didn’t want to assume it was a woman. Raith Manor was that kind of place.
A tall figure in a close-fit black business suit approached me through one of the swaths of dim light. Dark red hair, cropped close to her head, intent sea green eyes—with scar tissue at their corners. She moved like an athlete and looked about thirty—but something about the way she regarded me as she came closer made me wary, and I took note of the fact that her knuckles were swollen with scars.
“Good evening, Mister Dresden,” she said, smiling slightly. “If you will follow me, I’ll take you to Ms. Raith.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, and we started walking deeper into the manor. The place looked like it had been furnished by the Louvre. I’d lived in apartments that cost less to build than a few square feet of the château.
It took me maybe twenty seconds to be pretty sure of my guess. “What, did Vadderung throw some kind of bargain-basement sale on renting out his Valkyries?”
“Monoc Securities provides consultants in many places, sir,” the redhead said. She gave me a smile with maybe four teeth too many in it, and her voice turned into a purr. “Though I’d be interested to hear what you mean by bargain-basement.”
Valkyries were superhumanly strong, swift, and tough and had the kind of experience that comes with agelessness. And they didn’t just like fighting—they lusted for it. I’d seen a Valkyrie in action before. I didn’t particularly want to take one on for funsies, and this Valkyrie walked with a kind of steady, inevitable confidence that said that walls would be well advised to stay out of her way.
“It wasn’t an insult for you personally,” I said. “I’m playing.”
“Don’t I look playful to you?” she asked.
“You look like you play rough,” I said.
The woman let out a laugh that came up straight from her belly. “You’ve got eyes and you use them, seidrmadr.” She regarded me speculatively. “Most men don’t know to show some respect.”
“You have much trouble correcting them?”
“No, I don’t,” she said calmly. “My sister says you’re all right in a bad spot.”
“Sister?” I asked. “Oh, Sigrun Gard?”
“Obviously,” she said. She offered me her hand. “Freydis Gard.”
“Harry.” I took her hand. She had a grip like a pneumatic clamp, and my bandaged hands were sensitive. “Ouch, be gentle with me.”
She laughed again. “I’ve heard some about you, but you must be something special. Lara doesn’t let anyone interrupt this part of her day.”
“It’s probably easier than replacing the landscaping,” I said.
“That must be it,” Freydis said. She came to a door, stopped, and gave me an utterly incongruous Vanna White kind of gesture toward it. “And here we are.”
So I opened the door and went through it, into the Raith Dojo.
I mean, when you’ve got five gazillion rooms in the house, one of them obviously needs to be a dojo. Sure.
The room was brightly lit, a stark contrast to the rest of the place. The walls were white and had a number of white silk banners hanging from them, marked with black kanji that had been painted on. I knew enough to recognize the lettering but not enough to read it. The practice floor was smooth wood with tatami matting over much of it.
A woman wearing a white kimono was in the middle of the practice floor, with one of the smooth round staves called a bo in her hands. She was flowing through a practice routine that had the weapon whirling in an arcing blur around her and before her. The sound of the weapon cutting the air, faster than a vanilla human could have moved it, was a steady hiss.
She turned and faced me, still striking, spinning, thrusting at the empty air. Lara Raith had cheekbones that could split atoms, bright grey-silver eyes capable of boring through plate steel, and a smile that could turn crueler than a hook-tipped knife. Her blue-black hair was long and would have fallen to the small of her back if it hadn’t been bound up into a messy bun. She froze in the midst of her routine, body coming to an utter halt, transforming her from a dervish into a mannequin. The demonstration of perfect
control was more than a little impressive. And interesting.
But that was Lara. I had never been in her presence without feeling an intense attraction for her, and I wasn’t at all sure it was because she was a vampire of the White Court, and the closest thing to a succubus that you could find this side of Hell. It had more to do with her. Lara was as beautiful and dangerous as a hungry tigress, and very, very smart.
She met my eyes for a second and then gave me an edged smile. “You want to talk to me right now, Harry,” she said, “take off your shoes and pick up a bo.”
“Oh, come on,” I said.
She arched an eyebrow. “I don’t give anyone my practice time,” she said. “This is my house. You came to me. Take my terms or leave them, Dresden.”
I exhaled.
Doing what she asked was an acceptable way for her to get around the traditional protections of my guest-right. After all, if we were in the dojo, training, and something bad happened to me, it could be a regrettable accident. Combat training is dangerous in its own right, after all. Or, I supposed, she could claim I had attempted to assassinate her, just as Thomas had tried to take out Etri. In fact, I could see a sort of hare-brained logic in Lara attempting to muddy the waters around Thomas’s situation by creating a similar one with me, and then casting blame at a wider conspiracy. Cockamamie nonsense, but someone desperate enough to help family might reason themselves into it.
I chewed on my lip. But not Lara Raith. Not her style at all.
Lara was the slipperiest and cagiest vampire in a basket of psychotic sociopaths. I didn’t really see her as the same kind of hedonistic monster as many other White Court vamps I had met—she was something much more dangerous than that. She was disciplined, rigidly self-restrained, and she didn’t give way to either the demonic parasite that made her a monster or anyone else who would try to force her into doing something she didn’t want to do.
If Lara wanted me dead, it would have happened already. It would have been abrupt, swift, and well executed, and I probably wouldn’t have had much of a chance to respond. I might never realize it had happened. I’d seen Lara fight—and she’d seen me do the same. Neither one of us would be interested in giving the other a chance to fight back.
But I was on the clock here. Wasting time wrangling with Lara over protocol wasn’t going to help my brother. So I set my jaw and kicked off my sneakers.
Lara watched that and her smile turned a shade wicked. “Good boy.”
“Now you’re just being obvious,” I said, and sat down to take off my socks. I rose, left my duster on, and picked up a bo of my own from a simple wooden rack of them to one side of the training floor. I flexed my injured hands and winced in discomfort. The pain was already growing more distant as the Winter mantle flooded distressed nerve endings with the distant sensation of nothing but cold.
I walked around Lara to stand in front of her and took up a ready position, gripping the staff loosely, with most of it extended out in front of me at waist level, like someone holding out a pitchfork of hay.
Lara turned to me and bowed at the waist, smiling. “European.”
Murphy’d shown me plenty of Asian stuff, too, but I didn’t want to let Lara know about that. “I learned in Hog Hollow, Missouri,” I said. “But my first teacher was a Scot.”
“I spent much of the eighteenth century in Japan.” She took up a ready position of her own, staff held vertically with the lower end angled out toward me.
“I thought it was closed to all outsiders then.”
She grinned and moved her hip in a little roll that made me want to stampede. “Have you looked at me?”
“Uh. Right,” I said.
Her smile turned warmer. “What do you want, Harry?”
I snapped my staff at her in a simple thrust. She parried easily and countered with a hard beat that came so fast that it nearly took the weapon out of my hand. I recovered the weapon and my balance, retreating from a strike that hit the mat where my bare foot had been an instant earlier. The blow landed hard enough to send a crack like a home-run hit through the room.
“Hell’s balls, Lara!” I said.
“Pain is the best teacher,” she said. “I don’t pull hits. You shouldn’t, either.”
She came at me in a hard, fast strike at the level of my ankles. I caught it on the end of my staff in the nick and flicked her weapon back. “You heard about Thomas.”
“And your visit to him, and your visit to Justine later, yes,” she said. “What did he tell you?”
I shook my head. “All he said was ‘Justine.’ And he barely said that. They’d busted up his mouth pretty good.”
I launched another exchange from outside Lara’s reach and drove her across the mat. She was tall for a woman, but I’m tall for anybody. I probably had most of a foot of advantage in reach on her, and I started using it. The staves cracked together over and over, and I barely avoided getting my knuckles shattered. She was faster than me, and more skilled in a purely technical sense. But that wasn’t the only thing that decided real fights. This was bear versus mountain lion—if she got caught somewhere I could put my power and endurance to good use, she’d be the one in trouble. I kept pressing her toward the corners of the mat, and she kept slipping to one side without ever leaving it, one step ahead of me.
But there were other ways to slow people down.
“My people are covering Justine,” Lara said. “She’s as safe as I can make her without sequestering her here.”
“She’s pregnant,” I said.
Lara missed a step, and I was ready. I thrust the tip of my bo at her knee. She avoided it, but only by taking the hit in the meat of her calf, through the kimono, and she hissed in pain. She countered with a strike to my head that I ducked, and then she came back up onto one leg, weapon ready to defend or attack, her eyes narrowed.
If this had been for real, the fight would be over in moments. Or at least, the foreplay would. We’d both be shifting toward using supernatural abilities, and God only knew how that kind of chaos would play out. I drew back, grounded the end of my bo, and bent at the waist in a slight bow.
Lara regarded me warily and then mirrored me as best she could on one leg, which was excellently. “You’re sure?” Lara demanded a moment later, rolling the ankle on that leg several times.
“Thomas was,” I said.
“And they didn’t tell m …” Lara pressed her lips together. Then she shifted her grip to a more aggressive stance, something like mine, and I came onto guard to match her. We thrust and parried for a moment, circling. “Have you told his grandfather about him?” she asked.
I faltered at that, and Lara sent a thrust at me that hit me square in the belt buckle and shoved me off my feet and onto my ass.
I sat on the floor for a moment, eyeing Lara, who grounded her staff and bowed exactly as I had and regarded me calmly.
She knew about Thomas and me. I mean, I’d been aware of that, but she’d put together enough to work out who Ebenezar was, too. The White Court had a reputation for being insidious subversives. Connections to them, regardless of their source, were regarded with what most of the supernatural world considered healthy suspicion. If Ebenezar’s connection (and mine) to the White Court became public knowledge, the ramifications for our current situation were … sticky.
And Ebenezar didn’t just have issues with vampires: He had volumes and ongoing subscriptions. It had the potential for a real humdinger of a mess.
“I’ve known from the beginning,” she said impatiently, as if she’d been reading my thoughts. “I was here when my father was so obsessed with your mother. He made me play nanny to Thomas. I often heard them talk, because apparently no one in my family understands what a deadly weapon the ability to listen can be, and she left Thomas in my care once when she visited McCoy. And after she died, I helped Father hang her portrait in his psychotic little egomaniac’s gallery.”
I nodded. “But you never brought it up. Never used it for leverage.”
“No,” she said. “Because I’m also the one who changed Thomas’s diapers, after his mother escaped our father. Dressed him. Fed him his meals. Taught him to read.” She shook her head, her eyes focused on one of the banners. “I’m more ruthless than most, Dresden. But even for me, there are limits. Most of those limits involve family.”
“That’s why you didn’t use it against him,” I said. “How come you didn’t use it against me?”
“You never gave me a good reason to fight quite that dirty,” she replied. “And I couldn’t have used it against you without exposing my brother to trouble as well.”
“Then you know why I want to help him,” I said.
“We both do.”
“Then get him out,” I said. “You can do that, right? Work something out with Etri and his people?”
Her features shifted subtly, changed. Somehow they became paler, more like marble, less like something that belonged to a living human person. “Impossible.”
“Nothing’s impossible,” I said.
She held up one slim white hand. “As the situation stands, yes, it is. I’ve been shown the preliminary evidence. Thomas entered their embassy under false pretenses, less than ten minutes after the beginning of the armistice for the peace talks, and attempted to murder their king. On camera. If I do anything but deny and disavow his actions, Etri will have little choice but to assume that I sent Thomas to kill him.”
“Etri’s people look all stuffy, but they have Viking sensibilities,” I said quietly.
“Yes,” Lara replied. “If they believe I’ve tried to harm Etri, they will begin a war I am not at all certain I care to fight.” She let out a laugh that had something of a hysterical edge on it. “Thomas couldn’t have screwed this up any harder if he’d had a year to plan it.”
“There’s got to be something you can do,” I said. “What about a weregild?”
Lara grimaced. “The svartalf who died—”
“Austri,” I said. “His name was Austri.”
