by Jim Butcher
I told that part of me to shut up and sit its ass down.
“Okay,” I said. “But later. I’m kind of busy.”
I started to brush past her into the room, but she stopped me short by placing a hand against my sternum and shoving me back against the door. It didn’t look like she was trying, but I hit the wood firmly.
“Now’s good,” she said.
In my imagination, I clenched my fists and counted to five in an enraged scream. I was sure Harry had never had to deal with this kind of nonsense. I didn’t have time to lose, but I didn’t want to start something violent with Andi, either. I’d catch all kinds of hell if I threw down. I allowed myself the pleasure of gritting my teeth, took a deep breath, and nodded. “Okay. What’s on your mind, Andi?”
I didn’t add the words you bitch, but I thought them really loud. I should probably be a nicer person.
“This is not your apartment,” Andi said. “You don’t get to roll in and out of here whenever you damned well please, no matter the hour, no matter what’s going on. Have you even stopped to think about what you’re doing to Butters?”
“I’m not doing anything to Butters,” I said. “I’m just borrowing the shower.”
Andi’s voice sharpened. “You came here today covered in blood. I don’t know what happened, but you know what? I don’t care. All I care about is what kind of trouble you might draw down onto other people.”
“There was no trouble,” I said. “Look, I’ll buy you a new razor.”
“This isn’t about property or money—Christ,” Andi said. “This is about respect. Butters is there for you whenever you need help, and you barely do so much as thank him for it. What if you’d been followed here? Do you have any idea how much trouble he could get into for helping you out?”
“I wasn’t followed,” I said.
“Today,” Andi said. “But what about next time? You have power. You can fight. I don’t have what you do, but even I can fight. Butters can’t. Whose shower are you going to use if it’s his blood all over you?”
I folded my arms and looked carefully away from Andi. In some part of my brain I knew that she had a point, but that reasoning was coming in a distant second to my sudden urge to slap her.
“Look, Molly,” she said, her voice becoming gentler. “I know things haven’t been easy for you lately. Ever since Harry died. When his ghost showed up. I know it wasn’t fun.”
I just looked at her without speaking. Not easy or fun. That was one way to describe it.
“There’s something I think you need to hear.”
“What’s that?”
Andi leaned forward slightly and sharpened her words. “Get over it.”
The apartment was very quiet for a moment, and the inside of me wasn’t. That ugly part of me started getting louder and louder. I closed my eyes.
“People die, Molly,” Andi continued. “They leave. And life goes on. Harry may have been the first friend you lost, but he won’t be the last. I get that you’re hurting. I get that you’re trying to step into some really big shoes. But that doesn’t give you the right to abuse people’s better natures. A lot of people are hurting lately, if you didn’t notice.”
If I didn’t notice. God, I would absolutely kill to be able not to notice people’s pain. Not to live it beside them. Not to sense its echoes hours or days later. The ugly part of me, the black part of my heart, wanted to open a psychic channel to Andi and show her the kind of thing I went through on a regular basis. Let her see how she would like my life. And we’d see if she was so righteous afterward. It would be wrong, but …
I took a slow breath. No. Harry told me once that you can always tell when you’re about to rationalize your way to a bad decision. It’s when you start using phrases such as It would be wrong, but … His advice was to leave the conjunction out of the sentence: It would be wrong. Period.
So I didn’t do anything rash. I didn’t let the rising tumult inside me come out. I spoke softly. “What is it you’d like me to do, exactly?”
Andi huffed out a little breath and waved a vague hand. “Just … get your head out of your ass, girl. I am not being unreasonable here, given that my boyfriend gave you a key to his freaking apartment.”
I blinked once at that. Wow. I hadn’t even really considered that aspect of what Butters had done. Romance and romantic conflict hadn’t exactly been high on my list lately. Andi had nothing to worry about on that front, but I guess she didn’t have way too much awareness of people’s emotions to tip her off to that fact. Now I could put a name to some of the worry in her. She wasn’t jealous, exactly, but she was certainly aware of the fact that I was a young woman a lot of men found attractive, and that Waldo was a man.
And she loved him. I could feel that, too.
“Think about him,” Andi said quietly. “Please. Just try to take care of him the way he takes care of you. Call ahead. If you’d just walked in covered with blood next Saturday night, he would have had something very awkward to explain to his parents.”
I most likely would have sensed the unfamiliar presences inside the apartment before I got close enough to touch the door. But there was no point in telling Andi that. It wasn’t her fault that she didn’t really understand the kind of life I lived. Certainly, she didn’t deserve to die for it, no matter what the opinion of my inner Sith.
I had to make my choices with my head. My heart was too broken to be trusted.
“I’ll try,” I said.
“Okay,” Andi said.
For a second, the fingers of my right hand quivered, and I found the ugly part of me about to hurl power at the other woman, blind her, deafen her, drown her in vertigo. Lea had shown me how. But I reeled the urge to attack back under control. “Andi,” I said instead.
“Yes?”
“Don’t hit me again unless you intend to kill me.”
I didn’t mean it as a threat, exactly. It was just that I tended to react with my instincts when things started getting violent. The psychic turbulence of that kind of conflict didn’t make me fall over screaming in pain anymore, but it did make it really hard to think clearly over the furious roaring of ugly me. If Andi hit me like that again … well. I wasn’t completely sure how I would react.
I’m not Mad Hatter insane. I’m pretty sure. But studying survival under someone like Auntie Lea leaves you ready to protect yourself, not to play well with others.
Threat or not, Andi had seen her share of conflict, and she didn’t back down. “If I don’t think you need a good smack in the face, I won’t give you one.”
Waldo and Justine had gone out to pick up some dinner, and got back about ten minutes later. We all sat down to eat while I reported on the situation.
“Svartalfheim,” Justine breathed. “That’s … that’s not good.”
“Those are the Norse guys, right?” Butters asked.
I filled them in between bites of orange chicken, relaying what I had learned from the Leanansidhe. There was a little silence after I did.
“So,” Andi said after a moment. “The plan is to … boink him free?”
I gave her a look.
“I’m just asking,” Andi said in a mild voice.
“They’d never sell,” Justine said, her voice low, tight. “Not tonight.”
I eyed her. “Why not?”
“They concluded an alliance today,” she said. “There’s a celebration tonight. Lara was invited.”
“What alliance?” I asked.
“A nonaggression pact,” Justine said, “with the Fomor.”
I felt my eyes widen.
The Fomor situation just kept getting worse and worse. Chicago was far from the most preyed-upon city in the world, and they had still made the streets a nightmare for those of even modest magical talent. I didn’t have access to the kind of information I had when I was working with Harry and the White Council, but I’d heard things through the Paranet and other sources. The Fomor were kind of an all-star team of bad guys, the survivors
and outcasts and villains of a dozen different pantheons that had gone down a long time ago. They’d banded together under the banner of a group of beings known as the Fomor, and had been laying quiet for a long time—for thousands of years, in fact.
Now they were on the move—and even powerful interests like Svartalfheim, the nation of the svartalves, were getting out of the way.
Wow, I was so not wizard enough to deal with this.
“Lara must have sent Thomas in for something,” Justine said. “To steal information, to disrupt the alliance somehow. Something. Trespassing would be bad enough. If he was captured spying on them …”
“They’ll have a demonstration,” I said quietly. “They’ll make an example.”
“Couldn’t the White Court get him out?” Waldo asked.
“If the White Court seeks the return of one of their own, it would be like admitting they sent an agent in to screw around with Svartalfheim,” I said. “Lara can’t do that without serious repercussions. She’ll deny that Thomas’s intrusion had anything to do with her.”
Justine rose and paced the room, her body tight. “We have to go. We have to do something. I’ll pay the price; I’ll pay it ten times. We have to do something!”
I took a few more bites of orange chicken, frowning and thinking.
“Molly!” Justine said.
I looked at the chicken. I liked the way the orange sauce contrasted with the deep green of the broccoli and the soft white contours of the rice. The three colors made a pleasant complement. It was … beautiful, really.
“They covet beauty like a dragon covets gold,” I murmured.
Butters seemed to clue in to the fact that I was onto something. He leaned back in his chair and ate steadily from a box of noodles, his chopsticks precise. He didn’t need to look to use them.
Andi picked up on it a second later and tilted her head to one side. “Molly?” she asked.
“They’re having a party tonight,” I said. “Right, Justine?”
“Yes.”
Andi nodded impatiently. “What are we going to do?”
“We,” I said, “are going shopping.”
I’m kind of a tomboy. Not because I don’t like being a girl or anything, because for the most part I think it’s pretty sweet. But I like the outdoors and physical activities, and learning stuff and reading things and building things. I’ve never really gotten very deep into the girly parts of being a girl. Andi was a little bit better at it than me. The fact that her mother hadn’t brought her up the way mine had probably accounted for it. In my house, makeup was for going to church and for women with easy morals.
I know, I know. The mind boggles at the contradiction. I had issues way before I got involved with magic, believe me.
I wasn’t sure how to accomplish what we needed in time to get to the party, but once I explained what we needed, I found out that when it came to being a girly girl, Justine had her shit wired tight.
Within minutes a town car picked us up and whisked us away to a private salon in the Loop, where Justine produced a completely unmarked, plain white credit card. About twenty staff members—wardrobe advisors, hairdressers, makeup artists, tailors, and accessory technicians—leapt into action and got us kitted out for the mission in a little more than an hour.
I couldn’t really get away from the mirror this time. I tried to look at the young woman in it objectively, as if she were someone else, and not the one who had helped kill the man she loved and who had then failed him again by being unable to prevent even his ghost from being destroyed in its determination to protect others. That bitch deserved to be run over by a train or something.
The girl in the mirror was tall and had naturally blond hair that had been rapidly swirled up off of her neck and suspended with gleaming black chopsticks. She looked lean, probably too much so, but had a little too much muscle tone to be a meth addict. The little black dress she wore would turn heads. She looked a little tired, even with the expertly applied makeup. She was pretty—if you didn’t know her, and if you didn’t look too hard at what was going on in her blue eyes.
A white stretch limo pulled up to get us, and I managed to dodder out to it without falling all over myself.
“Oh, my God,” Andi said when we got in. The redhead stuck her feet out and wiggled them. “I love these shoes! If I have to wolf out and eat somebody’s face, I am going to cry to leave these behind.”
Justine smiled at her but then looked out the window, her lovely face distant, worried. “They’re just shoes.”
“Shoes that make my legs and my butt look awesome!” Andi said.
“Shoes that hurt,” I said. My wounded leg might have healed up, but moving around in these spiky torture devices was a new motion, and a steady ache was spreading up through my leg toward my hip. The last thing I needed was for my leg to cramp up and drop me to the ground, the way it had kept doing when I first started walking on it again. Any shoes with heels that high should come with their own safety net. Or a parachute.
We’d gone with similar outfits: stylish little black dresses, black chokers, and black pumps that proclaimed us hopeful that we wouldn’t spend much time on our feet. Each of us had a little Italian leather clutch, too. I’d put most of my magical gear in mine. All of us had our hair up in styles that varied only slightly. There were forged Renaissance paintings that had not had as much artist’s attention as our faces.
“It just takes practice wearing them,” Justine said. “Are you sure this is going to work?”
“Of course it is,” I said calmly. “You’ve been to clubs, Justine. The three of us together would skip the line to any place in town. We’re a matched set of hotness.”
“Like the Robert Palmer girls,” Andi said drily.
“I was going to go with Charlie’s Angels,” I said. “Oh, speaking of”—I opened the clutch and drew out a quartz crystal the size of my thumb—“Bosley, can you hear me?”
A second later, the crystal vibrated in my fingers and we heard Waldo’s faint voice coming from it. “Loud and clear, Angels. You think these will work once you get inside?”
“Depends on how paranoid they are,” I said. “If they’re paranoid, they’ll have defenses in place to cut off any magical communications. If they’re murderously paranoid, they’ll have defenses in place that let us talk so that they can listen in, and then they’ll kill us.”
“Fun,” Butters said. “Okay, I’ve got the Paranet chat room up. For what it’s worth, the hivemind is online.”
“What have you found out?” Andi asked.
“They’ll look human,” Waldo replied. “Their real forms are … Well, there’s some discussion, but the basic consensus is that they look like aliens.”
“Ripley or Roswell?” I asked.
“Roswell. More or less. They can wear flesh forms, though, kind of like the Red Court vampires did. So be aware that they’ll be disguised.”
“Got it,” I said. “Anything else?”
“Not much,” he said. “There’s just too much lore floating around to pick out anything for sure. They might be allergic to salt. They might be supernaturally OCD and flip out if you wear your clothes inside out. They might turn to stone in sunlight.”
I growled. “It was worth a shot. Okay. Keep the discussion going, and I’ll get back to you if I can.”
“Got it,” he said. “Marci just got here. I’ll bring the laptop with me and we’ll be waiting for you on the east side of the building when you’re ready to go. How do you look, Andi-licious?”
“Fabulous,” Andi said confidently. “The hemlines on these dresses stop about an inch short of Slutty Nymphomaniac.”
“Someone take a picture,” he said cheerfully, but I could hear the worry in his voice. “I’ll see you soon.”
“Don’t take any chances,” I said. “See you soon.”
I put the crystal away and tried to ignore the butterflies in my stomach.
“This isn’t going to work,” Justine murmured
.
“It is going to work,” I told her, keeping my tone confident. “We’ll breeze right in. The Rack will be with us.”
Justine glanced at me with an arched eyebrow. “The Rack?”
“The Rack is more than just boobs, Justine,” I told her soberly. “It’s an energy field created by all living boobs. It surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the galaxy together.”
Andi started giggling. “You’re insane.”
“But functionally so,” I said, and adjusted myself to round out a little better. “Just let go your conscious self and act on instinct.”
Justine stared blankly at me for a second. Then her face lightened and she let out a little laugh. “The Rack will be with us?”
I couldn’t stop myself from cracking a smile. “Always.”
The limo joined a line of similar vehicles dropping people off at the entrance to the svartalf stronghold. A valet opened our door, and I swung my legs out and tried to leave the car without flashing everyone in sight. Andi and Justine followed me out, and I started walking confidently toward the entrance with the other two flanking me. Our heels clicked in near unison, and I suddenly felt every eye in sight swivel toward us. A cloud of thought and emotion rolled out in response to our presence—pleasure, mostly, along with a mixed slurry of desire, outright lust, jealousy, anxiety, and surprise. It hurt to feel all of that scraping against the inside of my head, but it was necessary. I didn’t sense any outright hostility or imminent violence, and the instant of warning I might get between sensing an attacker’s intention and the moment of attack might save our lives.
A security guard at the door watched us intently as we approached, and I could feel the uncomplicated sexual attraction churning through him. He kept it off his face and out of his voice and body, though. “Good evening, ladies,” he said. “May I see your invitations?”
I arched an eyebrow at him, gave him what I hoped was a seductive smile, and tried to arch my back a little more. Deploying the Rack had worked before. “You don’t need to see our invitation.”
“Um,” he said. “Miss, I kind of do.”
