Cold Days

by Jim Butcher

  I looked away from her. Something in my chest hurt. I didn’t say anything.

  “Do you understand that?” she asked me, her voice even more quiet. “Do you understand how treacherous the ground you’re standing on has become?”

  “Perfectly,” I said.

  She nodded a few times. Then she said, “I suppose that’s something.”

  “That all?” I asked her. “I mean . . . is that the only reason you came in here?”

  “Not quite,” she said.

  “You don’t trust me,” I said.

  Her eyes didn’t meet mine, and didn’t avoid them either. “That will depend largely on the next few minutes.”

  I inhaled through my nose and out again, trying to stay calm, clear, even. “Okay,” I said. “What do you want me to do?”

  “The skull,” she said. “I know what it is. So does Butters. And . . . it’s too powerful to be left in the wrong hands.”

  “Meaning mine?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you what I know. I know you broke into his house when he was at work and took it. I know you left Andi with cuts and bruises. And I know you wrecked the place a bit along the way.”

  “You think that means I’ve gone bad?”

  She tilted her head slightly to one side, as if considering. “I think you were probably operating under some kind of harebrained lone-hero rationale. Let’s say . . . that I’m concerned that you have enough things to juggle already.”

  I thought about snapping at her but . . . she had a point. Bob was a resource far too powerful to be allowed to fall into the hands of anyone who wouldn’t use him responsibly. And I’d been doing the Winter Knight gig full speed for about twelve hours, and I’d already had some disturbing realizations about myself. Twelve hours.

  What would I be like after twelve days? Twelve months? What if Karrin was right, and Mab got to me slow? Or worse: What if I was just human? She was right about that, too. Power corrupts—and the people being corrupted never seem to be aware that it’s happening. I’d just told Butters that I wasn’t magically bulletproof. What kind of arrogant ass would I be if I assumed I was morally infallible? That I would be wise and smart and savvy enough to avoid the pitfalls of power, traps that had turned better people than me into something horrible?

  I didn’t want her to be right. I didn’t like the idea at all.

  But denial is for children. I had to be a grown-up.

  “Okay,” I said, my throat tight. “Bob’s in that satchel out in the living room. Give him back to Butters.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “I found where you left the swords.”

  She meant the two Swords of the Cross, two of three holy blades meant to fill the hands of the righteous in the battle against true evil. I’d wound up babysitting them, being their custodian. Mostly they’d sat around in my place gathering dust. “Yeah?” I said.

  “I know how powerful they are,” she said. “And I know how vulnerable they are in the wrong hands. I’m not telling you where they are. I’m not giving them back to you. I’m not negotiating.”

  I exhaled slowly. A slow, hard anger rolled into a knot in my guts. “Those . . . were my responsibility,” I said.

  “They were,” she said. There was something absolutely rigid in her blue eyes. “Not anymore.”

  The room suddenly felt too hot. “Suppose I disagree.”

  “Suppose you do,” she said. “What would you do if you were in my position?”

  I don’t remember moving. I just remember slamming the heel of my hand into the door six inches from the side of Karrin’s head. It sounded like a gunshot, and left me standing over her, breathing harder, and the difference in our sizes was damned near comical. If I wanted to, I could wrap my fingers almost all the way around her throat. Her neck would break if I squeezed.

  She didn’t flinch. She didn’t move. She looked up at me and waited.

  It hit me, what I was thinking, what my instincts were screaming at me to do, and I suddenly sagged, bowing my head. My breath came out in uneven jerks. I closed my eyes, tried to get it under control.

  And then she touched me.

  She rested her hand lightly on my battered forearm. Moving carefully, as if I were made of glass, her fingers slid down my arm to my hand. She took it gently and lowered it, not trying to force anything. Then she took my right hand in her left. We stood that way for a moment, our hands clasped, our heads bowed. She seemed to understand what I was going through. She didn’t push me. She just held my hands and waited until my breathing had steadied again.

  “Harry,” she said quietly then. “Do you want my trust?”

  I nodded tightly, not trusting myself to speak.

  “Then you’re going to have to give me some. I’m on your side. I’m trying to help you. Let it go.”

  I shuddered.

  “Okay,” I said.

  Her hands felt small and warm in mine.

  “I . . . we’ve been friends a long time,” I said. “Since that troll on the bridge.”

  “Yes.”

  My eyes blurred up, stupid things, and I closed them. “I know I’ve screwed up,” I said. “I’m going to have to live with that. But I don’t want to lose you.”

  In answer, Murphy lifted my right hand and pressed it against her cheek. I didn’t open my eyes. I couldn’t hear it in her voice or her breathing, but I felt a slight dampness touch my hand.

  “I don’t want to lose you, either,” she said. “That scares me.”

  I didn’t trust myself to speak for a long time.

  She lowered my hands slowly, and very gently let me go. Then she turned to the door.

  “Karrin,” I said. “What if you’re right? What if I change? I mean . . . go really bad.”

  She looked back enough for me to see her profile, and a quiet, sad smile.

  “I work with a lot of monsters these days.”

  Chapter

  Twenty-eight

  Ipicked up another jacket hanging in the closet, an old surplus military garment with an eighties-style camouflage pattern—not because I thought I would get cold as much as because I figured maybe the extra pockets would be handy if I found anything for which they would be needed. I didn’t have any money or ID. I didn’t have a credit card. Hell, I didn’t have a business card.

  What would it say? “Harry Dresden, Winter Knight, Targets Slain, No Barbecues, Waterslides, or Fireworks Displays.”

  I could joke around with myself all I wanted, but I would be doing it only because I didn’t want to face a larger question, a really hard one: How the hell did I put my life back together?

  Assuming I could do it at all.

  Fortunately, I had dire evil to fight at the moment, which meant that I could think about the life thing later. Thank God for imminent doomsday. I’d hate to have to face up to the really tough stuff so soon after getting back into the game.

  I heard the front door of the apartment open and close, and some quiet talk. I came out of the bedroom to find that Molly had returned. Toot-toot was riding along on one of her shoulders, hanging on to the top rim of her ear to keep his balance. He looked none the worse for wear.

  “Harry,” Molly said, smiling. “You look better. How do you feel?”

  “I’ll do,” I said. “Major General, I see you’re back on your feet. The last time I saw you, I figured you’d be down for weeks.”

  Toot stiffened to attention and threw me a salute. “No, my lord! The Little Folk don’t have enough time to waste weeks and weeks healing like you big people.”

  That probably shouldn’t have surprised me. I’d seen Toot literally eat half his weight in pizza. And his wings were powerful enough to lift him off the ground into flight. Anything that can put food away that quickly and produce such a prodigious amount of physical power relative to its size must have a ridiculously high-burning metabolism. And with the day I’d been having, it did my heart good to see him upright again.

  “Where are we on our scouts?” I asked Molly.r />
  “They’re in a food coma,” she said. “I ordered twenty pizzas. Must have been five hundred of them in the parking lot. They’ll be ready to go as soon as you tell me where you want them to look.”

  “I need a map,” I said.

  Molly reached into her back pocket and produced a folded map. “Way ahead of you, boss.”

  “Soon as they’re done, lay it out on the table,” I said.

  “Got it.”

  “Major General, I’m glad you’re here,” I said. “I need you to stay close.”

  Toot saluted again, and his wings blurred into motion, lifting him up off Molly’s shoulder. “Yes, my lord! What is the mission?”

  “To prevent a prisoner from attempting escape,” I said. “I captured Captain Hook.”

  “Sort of,” Karrin chimed in, her voice amused. She’d returned to her seat by the fireplace.

  I gave her a look. “We have him; he’s captured; that’s the main thing.”

  Toot put his hand on his sword. “Shall I dispatch him for you, my lord?” he asked eagerly. “Because I totally can.”

  “If it needs to be done,” I said soberly, “I’ll make sure it’s your hand that does it. But we’ll give him a chance to talk first.”

  “You are a man of mercy and grace, my lord,” Toot-toot said, clearly disappointed.

  “You bet your ass,” I said. “Make sure you’re in a good spot to stop our guest from leaving.”

  “Aye!” Toot said, saluting, and darted across the apartment.

  Molly shook her head. “You’re always so careful to make him feel involved.”

  “He is involved,” I said, and started back toward Butters’s makeshift examination table.

  “Of course it hurts,” Thomas was saying. Butters was stitching up a small, puckered hole in his lower abdomen. “But not as much as it did before you got the bullet out.”

  “And you’re sure you can handle care this crude?” Butters asked. “Because if you were a regular human being, I could pretty much guarantee you that this thing would go septic in a couple of days and kill you.”

  “Microorganisms aren’t a problem to my kind,” Thomas said. “As long as I don’t bleed out, I’ll be fine.”

  My brother’s tone was calm, but the color of his eyes had changed, growing lighter, a shade of fine grey with almost no blue at all in it. A vampire of the White Court had superhuman strength and speed and resilience, but not an infinite supply. Thomas’s eyes changed as his personal demon, his Hunger, gained more influence over his actions. At some point, he would need to feed to replenish himself.

  “You about done?” I asked him. “I need the table.”

  “What is it with you people?” Butters groused. “For God’s sake, these are real injuries here.”

  “There will be more of them than a thousand reluctant physicians could patch up if we don’t get moving,” I said. “Today’s serious business, man.”

  “How serious?”

  “Can’t think when it’s been grimmer,” I said. “Freaking waste-of-space vampires, lying around on tables you need to use.”

  “Useless wizards,” Thomas said, “jumping on enemy guns and accidentally shooting their allies with them.”

  “Oh,” I said. “That was when I jumped Ace?”

  He snorted. “Yeah.”

  I winced. “Ah. Sorry about that.”

  “One of these days, Dresden,” Thomas drawled, “pow, right in the kisser.”

  “Talk is cheap,” I said. “Table, table, table.”

  Butters finished patching Thomas up, wrapping a long strip of gauze bandage around his middle. Thomas leaned back on his elbows as the doctor worked. The pose made his muscles stand out sharply beneath pale skin—but then, most poses seemed to do that with Thomas. His pale eyes lingered on Molly for a long moment, and my apprentice abruptly turned away with spots of color high up in her cheeks.

  “I, uh,” Molly said. “Wow.”

  “Thomas,” I said.

  “Sorry,” he said. He didn’t sound sincere. He got up off the table with lazy grace. “Say, Harry, do you have any more shirts back there? I bled, nobly and sacrificially, all over mine.”

  “They’re Molly’s,” I said.

  He looked at my apprentice. “Oh? What do I have to do to get one?”

  “Go ahead,” Molly said. Her voice was not quite a squeak. “Take one.”

  “Appreciate it,” Thomas said, and sauntered into the spare bedroom.

  Murphy watched him walk by, openly, then gave me a rather challenging look. “What?” she asked. “He’s pretty.”

  “I heard that,” Thomas said from the other room.

  “Map,” I said, and Molly hurried over to the table. Butters got his stuff off of it in rapid order. He’d evidently pulled the slug out of Thomas’s guts without making a horrible bloody mess of things. The bullet had to have been close to the surface. Ace’s gun must have been fairly lightweight, a .25 or a .22. Maybe he’d been using cheap ammo and the round had been short on powder. Or maybe Thomas’s super-abs had stopped the bullet before it could sink in.

  After the table was clean, Molly spread the map out on it. It was a map of Lake Michigan and the shores around it, including Chicago and Milwaukee and on up to Green Bay. Molly passed me a pen, and I leaned over and started making marks on the map with my swollen fingers. It hurt but I ignored it. Karrin got up and came over to watch. Thomas joined us a moment later, freshly attired in a plain white T-shirt, which looked like it had been made to fit him. He’s a jerk like that.

  “What I’m doing here,” I said, “is marking out all the nodes I remember.”

  “Nodes?” Butters asked.

  My clumsy fingers made it a little hard to put the marks exactly where I wanted them. “The meeting points of one or more ley lines,” I said. “I got to know all about them a few years ago.”

  “Those are like magical power cables, right?” Karrin asked.

  “More or less,” I said. “Sources of power that you can draw on to make major magic. And there are a lot of them in the Great Lakes region. I’m drawing from memory, but I’m pretty sure these are right.”

  “They are,” Molly confirmed quietly. “Auntie Lea taught them to me a few months ago.”

  I looked up at her, eyed my battered fingers, and said, “Then why am I doing this?”

  Molly rolled her eyes and took the pen. She started marking nodes rapidly and precisely on the map, including the Well on Demonreach (though the island didn’t appear on the map).

  “Whoever is going to attempt the spell on Demonreach has to do it from somewhere near the shore of the lake,” I said. “They’re almost certainly going to be at one of these nodes—the closer to the edge of the lake, the better.” I pointed out several nodes near the shore. “So we need to send the guard out to check these six locations near the edge of the lake first. After that, they go after the next nearest and so on.”

  “Some of those are a good way off,” Karrin noted. “How fast can these little guys move?”

  “Fast,” I said. “Faster than anyone gives them credit. They can fly and they can take shortcuts through the Nevernever. They can get to the sites and back before sundown.”

  Sundown. Which was when the big, bad immortals would come out to play.

  “Any questions so far?” I asked, looking at Murphy.

  She jerked her chin toward my brother and said, “Thomas filled me in.”

  “Good,” I said. “Exposition gets repetitive fast. A spell like this takes time to set up, and they won’t really be able to hide it if we can get eyes on the site. Once we know which of the sites shows signs of use, we can get to it and thwart whatever lunatic is using it.”

  “Do we know who it is yet?” Murphy asked.

  “Answer unclear,” I said.

  “It’s got to be those Outsiders, right?” Thomas asked.

  “Stands to reason. But the real question is, who is helping them?”

  I got a bunch of looks at
that.

  “Outsiders can’t just show up in our reality,” I said. “That’s why they’re called Outsiders in the first place. Someone has to open the door and let them in.” I took a deep breath. “Which brings me to the next twist. I talked to Lily and Maeve, and they tell me that Mab is the one planning to tinker with the island.”

  Silence followed that.

  “That’s . . . a lie, right?” Butters asked.

  “They can’t lie,” I said. “They physically can’t. And, yes, I got them to speak directly about it. There’s no confusion of signals, no room for obfuscation.”

  Thomas whistled quietly.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “Uh,” Molly said. “We’re up against Mab? Your boss?”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “Lily and Maeve may not be lying but they could still be wrong. Lily has never been a cerebral titan. And Maeve is . . . maybe ‘insane’ is the only word that really describes it, but she’s definitely firing on an odd number of cylinders. It’s possible that they’ve been deceived.”

  “Or,” Thomas said, “maybe they haven’t.”

  “Or maybe they haven’t,” I said, nodding.

  “What would that mean?” Molly asked.

  “It would mean,” Karrin said quietly, “that Mab sent Harry to kill Maeve because either she wanted Maeve out of the way or she wanted Harry out of the way. Which is good, because it means that she’s worried that there’s someone who could stop her.”

  “Right,” I said. “Or maybe . . .” I frowned, studying a new thought.

  “What?” Thomas asked.

  I looked slowly around the room. If Mab had been taken by the contagion, which really needed a better name, that certainly meant that Lea had been taken as well—and Lea had been tutoring Molly. If it had spread into the White Court, my brother could have been exposed. Murphy was maybe the most vulnerable—she was isolated, and her behavior had changed radically over the past couple of years. Hell, Butters was the person in the room least likely to have been exposed or turned or whatever—which made him the most ideal candidate for being turned.