by Jim Butcher
“What is love,” LeBlanc said, “if not a series of electrochemical signals in the brain? Signals that can be duplicated, like any other sensation.”
“Love is more than that,” I said.
“Do you love this woman?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But that isn’t anything new.”
LeBlanc showed her teeth. “But your current feelings of longing and desire are new, are they not? New and entirely indistinguishable from your genuine emotions? Wouldn’t you say, Sergeant Murphy?”
Murphy swallowed but didn’t look at the vampire. LeBlanc’s uncomplicated mental attack might be simple for a wizard to defeat, but any normal human being would probably be gone before they realized their minds were under attack. Instead of answering, she asked a question of her own. “Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why do this? Why experiment with making people fall in love?”
LeBlanc arched an eyebrow. “Isn’t it obvious?”
I sucked in a short breath, realizing what was happening. “The White Court,” I said.
The Whites were a different breed of vampire from the Reds, feeding on the life essence of their victims, generally through seduction. Genuine love and genuine tokens of love were their kryptonite, their holy water. The love of another human being in an intimate relationship sort of rubbed off on you, making the very touch of your skin an anathema to the White Court.
LeBlanc smiled at me. “Granted, there are some aberrant effects from time to time. But so far, that’s been a very small percentage of the test pool. And the survivors are, as you yourself have experienced, perfectly happy. They have a love that most of your kind seldom find and even more infrequently keep. There are no victims here, Wizard.”
“Oh,” I said. “Right. Except for the victims.”
LeBlanc exhaled. “Mortals are like mayflies, Wizard. They live a brief time, and then they are gone. And those who have died because of my work at least died after days or weeks of perfect bliss. There are many who ended a much longer life with less. What I’m doing here has the potential to protect mortalkind from the White Court forever.”
“It isn’t genuine love if it’s forced upon someone,” Murphy said, her tone harsh.
“No,” LeBlanc said. “But I believe the real thing will very easily grow from such a foundation of companionship and happiness.”
“Gosh, you’re noble,” I said.
LeBlanc’s eyes sparkled with something ugly.
“You’re doing this to get rid of competition,” I said. “And, hell, maybe to try to increase the world’s population. Make more food.”
The vampire regarded me levelly. “There are multiple motivations behind the work,” she said. “Many of my Court agreed to the logic you cite when they would never have supported the idea of strengthening and defending mortals.”
“Ohhhhh,” I said, drawing the word out. “You’re the vampire with a heart of gold. Florence Nightingale with fangs. I guess that makes it okay, then.”
LeBlanc stared at me. Then her eyes flicked to Murphy and back. She smiled thinly. “There is a special cage reserved for you at the Red Court, Dresden. Its bars are lined with blades and spikes, so that if you fall asleep, they will cut and gouge you awake.”
“Shut up,” Murphy said.
LeBlanc continued in a calmly amused tone. “The bottom is a closed bowl nearly a foot deep, so that you will stand in your own waste. And there are three spears with needle-sized tips waiting in a rack beneath the cage, so that any who pass you can pause and take a few moments to participate in your punishment.”
“Shut up,” Murphy growled.
“Eventually,” LeBlanc purred, “your guts will be torn out and left in a pile at your feet. And when you are dead, your skin will be flayed from your body, tanned, and made into upholstery for one of the chairs in the Red Temple.”
“Shut up!” snarled Murphy, and her voice was savage. Her gun whipped over to cover LeBlanc. “Shut your mouth, bitch!”
I realized the danger an instant too late. It was exactly the reaction LeBlanc had intended to provoke. “Murph! No!”
Once Murphy’s Sig was pointing elsewhere, Maroon produced a gun from beneath his desk and raised it. He was pulling the trigger even before he could level it for a shot, blazing away as fast as he could move his finger. He wasn’t quite fifteen feet away from Murphy, but the first five shots missed her as I spun and brought the invisible power of my shield bracelet down between the two of them. Bullets hit the shield with flashes of light and sent little concentric blue rings rippling through the air from the point of impact.
Murphy, meanwhile, had opened up on LeBlanc. Murph fired almost as quickly as Maroon, but she had the training and discipline necessary for combat. Her bullets smacked into the vampire’s torso, tearing through pale flesh and drawing gouts of red-black blood. LeBlanc staggered to one side—she wouldn’t be dead, but the shots had probably rung her bell for a second or two.
I lowered the shield as Maroon’s gun clicked on empty, lifted my right fist, and triggered the braided energy ring on my index finger with a short, uplifting motion. The ring saved back a little energy every time I moved my arm, storing it so that I could unleash it at need. Unseen force flew out from the ring, plucked Maroon out of his chair, and slammed him into the ceiling. He dropped back down, hit his back on the edge of the desk, and fell into a senseless sprawl on the floor. The gun flew from his fingers.
“I’m out!” Murphy screamed.
I whirled back to find LeBlanc pushing herself off the wall, regaining her balance. She gave Murphy a look of flat hatred, and her eyes flushed pure black, iris and sclera alike. She opened her mouth in an inhuman scream, and then the vampire hiding beneath LeBlanc’s seemingly human form exploded outward like a racehorse emerging from its gate, leaving shreds of pale, bloodless skin in its wake.
It was a hideous thing—black and flabby and slimy looking, with a flaccid belly, a batlike face, and long, spindly limbs. LeBlanc’s eyes bulged hideously as she flew toward me.
I brought my shield up in time to intercept her, and she rebounded from it, to fall back to the section of floor already stained with her blood.
“Down!” Murphy shouted.
I dropped down onto my heels and lowered the shield.
LeBlanc rose up again, even as I heard Murphy take a deep breath, exhale halfway, and hold it. Her gun barked once.
The vampire lost about a fifth of her head as the bullet tore into her skull. She staggered back against the wall, limbs thrashing, but she still wasn’t dead. She began to claw her way to her feet again.
Murphy squeezed off six more shots, methodically. None of them missed. LeBlanc fell to the floor. Murphy took a step closer, aimed, and put another ten or twelve rounds into the fallen vampire’s head. By the time she was done, the vampire’s skull looked like a smashed gourd.
A few seconds later, LeBlanc stopped moving.
Murphy reloaded again and kept the gun trained on the corpse.
“Nice shootin’, Tex,” I said. I checked out Maroon. He was still breathing.
“So,” Murphy said, “problem solved?”
“Not really,” I said. “LeBlanc was no practitioner. She can’t be the one who was working the whammy.”
Murphy frowned and eyed Maroon for a second.
I went over to the downed man and touched my fingers lightly to his brow. There was no telltale energy signature of a practitioner. “Nope.”
“Who, then?”
I shook my head. “This is delicate, difficult magic. There might not be three people on the entire White Council who could pull it off. So . . . it’s most likely a focus artifact of some kind.”
“A what?”
“An item that has a routine built into it,” I said. “You pour energy in one end, and you get results on the other.”
Murphy scrunched up her nose. “Like those wolf belts the FBI had?”
“Yeah, just like that.” I blinked and snapped
my fingers. “Just like that!”
I hurried out of the little complex and up the ladder. I went to the tunnel car and took the old leather seat belt out of it. I turned it over and found the back inscribed with nearly invisible sigils and signs. Now that I was looking for it, I could feel the tingle of energy moving within it. “Hah,” I said. “Got it.”
Murphy frowned back at the entry to the Tunnel of Terror. “What do we do about Billy the Kid?”
“Not much we can do,” I said. “You want to try to explain what happened here to the Springfield cops?”
She shook her head.
“Me, either,” I said. “The kid was LeBlanc’s thrall. I doubt he’s a danger to anyone without a vampire to push him into it.” Besides, the Reds would probably kill him on general principles, anyway, once they found out about LeBlanc’s death.
We were silent for a moment, then stepped in close to each other and hugged gently. Murphy shivered.
“You okay?” I asked quietly.
She leaned her head against my chest. “How do we help all the people she screwed with?”
“Burn the belt,” I said, and stroked her hair with one hand. “That should purify everyone it’s linked to.”
“Everyone,” she said slowly.
I blinked twice. “Yeah.”
“So once you do it . . . we’ll see what a bad idea this is. And remember that we both have very good reasons to not get together.”
“Yeah.”
“And . . . we won’t be feeling this anymore. This . . . happy. This complete.”
“No. We won’t.”
Her voice cracked. “Dammit.”
I hugged her tight. “Yeah.”
“I want to tell you to wait awhile,” she said. “I want us to be all noble and virtuous for keeping it intact. I want to tell you that if we destroy the belt, we’ll be destroying the happiness of God knows how many people.”
“Junkies are happy when they’re high,” I said quietly, “but they don’t need to be happy. They need to be free.”
I put the belt back into the car, turned my right hand palm up, and murmured a word. A sphere of white-hot fire gathered over my fingers. I flicked a hand, and the sphere arched gently down into the car and began charring the belt to ashes. I felt sick.
I didn’t watch. I turned to Karrin and kissed her again, hot and urgent, and she returned the kiss frantically. It was as though we thought we might keep something from escaping our mouths if they were sealed together in a kiss.
I felt it when it went away.
We both stiffened slightly. We both remembered that we had decided the two of us couldn’t work out. We both remembered that Murphy was already involved with someone else and that it wasn’t in her nature to stray.
She stepped back from me, her arms folded across her stomach.
“Ready?” I asked her quietly.
She nodded, and we started walking. Neither of us said anything until we reached the Blue Beetle.
“You know what, Harry?” she said quietly from the other side of the car.
“I know,” I told her. “Like you said, love hurts.”
We got into the Beetle and headed back to Chicago.
AFTERMATH
—original novella
Takes place an hour or two after the end of Changes
To quote a great man: ’Nuff said.
I can’t believe he’s dead.
Harry Dresden, Professional Wizard. It sounds like a bad joke. Like most people, at first I figured it was just his schtick, his approach to marketing himself as a unique commodity in private investigation, a job market that isn’t ever exactly teeming with business.
Well, that’s not entirely true. I knew better. I’d seen something that the rules of the normal world just couldn’t explain, and he was right in the middle of it. But I did what everyone does when they run into the supernatural: I told myself that it was dark, and that I didn’t really know what I had seen. No one else had witnessed anything to support me. They would call me crazy if I tried to tell anyone about it. By the time a week had passed, I had half convinced myself that I hallucinated the whole thing. A year later, I was almost certain it had been some kind of trick, an illusion pulled off by a smarmy but savvy con.
But he was for real.
Believe me, I know. Several years and several hundred nightmares later, I know.
He was the real thing.
God. I was already thinking about him in the past tense.
“Sergeant Murphy,” said one of the lab guys. Dresden was almost one of our own, in Special Investigations. We’d pulled every string we had to get a forensics team on the site. “Excuse me, Sergeant Murphy.”
I turned to face the forensic tech. He was cute, in a not-quite-grown, puppyish kind of way. The ID clipped to his lapel said his name was Jarvis. He looked nervous.
“I’m Murphy,” I said.
“Um, right.” He swallowed and looked around. “I don’t know how to tell you this, but . . . my boss said I shouldn’t be talking to you. He said you were on suspension.”
I looked at him calmly. He wasn’t more than average height, but that put his head about eight and a half inches over mine. He still had that whippet thinness that some twentysomethings hang on to for a while after their teenage years. I smiled at him and tried to put him at ease. “I get it,” I said. “I won’t tell anyone if you won’t.”
He licked his lips nervously.
“Jarvis,” I said, “please.” I gestured at the bloodstain on the exterior of the cabin of a dumpy little secondhand boat, the lettering on which proclaimed it the Water Beetle. “He is my friend.”
I didn’t say was—not out loud. You don’t ever do that until you’ve found the remains. It’s professional.
Jarvis exhaled and looked around. I thought he looked as if he might throw up.
“The blood spatter suggests that whoever was struck there took a hit somewhere in his upper torso. It’s impossible to be sure, but”—he swallowed—“it was a heavy spray. Maybe an arterial hit.”
“Or maybe not,” I said.
He was too young to notice the way I was grasping at straws. “Or maybe not,” he agreed. “There’s not enough blood on the site to call it a murder, but we think most of it . . . We didn’t find the round. It went through the victim, and both walls of the, uh, boat there. It’s probably in the lake.”
I grunted. It’s something I picked up over a fifteen-year career in law enforcement. Men have managed to create a complex and utterly impenetrable secret language consisting of monosyllabic sounds and partial words—and they are apparently too thick to realize it exists. Maybe they really are from Mars. I’d been able to learn a few Martian phrases over time, and one of the useful ones was the grunt that meant I acknowledge that I’ve heard what you said; please continue.
“Smears on the deck and the guardrail suggest that the victim went over the side and into the water,” Jarvis continued, his tone subdued. “There’s a dive team on the way, but . . .”
I used the Martian phrase for You needn’t continue; I know what you’re talking about. It sounded a lot like the first grunt to anyone without a Y chromosome, but I really did get it.
Lake Michigan is jealous and protective of her dead. The water’s depth and the year-round cold temperatures that go with it mean that corpses don’t tend to produce many gasses as they decompose. As a result, they often don’t bob to the surface, like you see in all those cop shows on cable. They just lie on the bottom. No one knows how many poor souls’ earthly remains rest in the quiet cold of Michigan’s depths.
“It hasn’t been long,” I said. “Even if he fell off the back, into the open water, he can’t have gone far.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jarvis said. “Um. If you’ll excuse me.”
I nodded at him and shoved my hands into the pockets of my coat. Night was coming on, but it wouldn’t make a lot of difference—the lake wasn’t exactly crystal clear on the best days. The divers would ha
ve to use flashlights, day or night, even though we weren’t more than fifty yards from shore, on the docks of the marina the Water Beetle called home. That would limit the area of water they could search at any given moment. The cold would impose limits on their dive time. Sonar might or might not be useful. This close to Chicago, the lake floor was cluttered with all kinds of things. They’d have to get lucky to get a good radar hit and find him.
If he was in there, he’d been there for several hours, and the wind had been rising the whole time, stirring the surface of the lake. Harry’s corpse would have had plenty of time to fall to the bottom and begin to drift.
The dive team probably wasn’t going to find him. They’d try, but . . .
Dammit.
I stared hard at the lengthening shadows and tried to make my tears evaporate through sheer will.
“I’m . . . very sorry, Sergeant,” Jarvis said.
I replied with the Martian for Thank you for your concern, but at the moment I need some space. That one’s easy. I just stared forward without saying anything, and after a moment, Jarvis nodded and toddled off to continue working.
A while later, Stallings was standing next to me, wearing his badge prominently out on his coat. After I’d been busted back to sergeant, Stallings had replaced me as the head of Special Investigations, Chicago’s unofficial monster squad. We dealt with the weird stuff no one would accept, and then lied about what we’d been doing so that everything fit neatly into a report.
Stallings was a big, rawboned man, comfortably solid with age, his hair thinning on top. He had a mustache like Magnum’s. I’d been his boss for nearly seven years. We got along well with each other. He never treated me like his most junior subordinate—more like an adviser who had been made available to the new commander.
The forensics boys were sealing the doors of the little boat with crime scene tape, having taken enough samples and photographs to choke a rhinoceros, before anyone spoke.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey.”
He exhaled through his nose and said, “Hospital checks have come up with zip.”
