by Jim Butcher
We went up a shallow, curving stairwell and down a long hall. I tried to stick mental landmarks into my memory so that I’d be able to leave in a hurry if I needed to. My vision blurred for a moment, and the high-pitched buzzing in my ears increased in volume. I took a breath and steadied myself against the wall.
“Here,” Lara said. She turned to me and took Thomas. Either she was stronger than me or she was good at acting like it was no big deal. Probably both.
I rolled my aching shoulders in relief. “Thanks. How is he?”
“The bullets aren’t going to kill him,” she said. “He’d have died already. The Hunger may finish him, though.”
I arched an eyebrow at her in question.
“The Hunger,” she repeated. “Our need to feed. The angel of our darker natures. We can draw upon it to give us a kind of strength, but it’s like fire. It can turn on you if you don’t keep it under control. Right now Thomas is so hungry that he can’t think. Can’t move. He’ll be all right once he feeds.”
I felt an itch on the back of my neck and checked over my shoulder. “Your father’s driver is tailing us.”
Lara nodded. “She’ll dispose of the body.”
I blinked. “I thought you said he was going to be all right.”
“He will be,” Lara said, her tone carefully neutral. “Justine won’t.”
“What?”
“He’s too hungry,” Lara said. “He won’t be able to control himself.”
“Fuck that,” I said. “That isn’t going to happen.”
“Then he’ll die,” Lara said tiredly. “This is the door to his suite.”
She stopped at a door, and with my reflexes on automatic pilot I opened it for her. We went into a rather large room dominated by a sunken pit in the floor. The carpet was lush, a dark crimson, pillows were all over, and a smoking brazier rested in the center of the pit. The air was heavy with sweet incense. Quiet jazz drifted through the room from speakers I couldn’t see.
On the opposite side of the room, a curtain twitched and then the girl appeared from what was evidently a room beyond. Justine’s shoulder-length dark hair had been striped with trendy strands of dark blue and deep purple. She wore a white bathrobe several sizes too large for her and looked rumpled from sleep. She blinked dark, sleepy eyes and then gasped and rushed toward us. “Thomas? My God!”
I looked back over my shoulder. The driver stood just outside the doorway, speaking quietly into a cellular phone.
Lara carried Thomas down into the pit and carefully laid him upon the pillows and cushions, Justine at her side. The girl’s face was twisted in anxiety. “Harry? What happened to him?”
Lara glanced up and me and said, “I need to make sure Inari is cared for. If you will excuse me.” I didn’t, but she left the room anyway.
Justine stared up at me, fear and confusion on her face. “I don’t understand.”
“Lara shot him,” I said quietly. “And then some Black Court gorillas jumped us.”
“Lara?”
“Didn’t seem like she liked the idea, but she sure as hell gave it a whirl. Lara said he’d spent his reserves fighting, and that he would die if he didn’t feed.”
Justine’s eyes flicked up to the doorway. She saw the driver standing outside. Justine’s face blanched.
“Oh,” she whispered.
Tears formed in her eyes.
“Oh, no. No, no,” she said. “My poor Thomas.”
I stepped forward. “You don’t have to do this.”
“But he’ll die.”
“Do you think he’d want it to be you instead?”
Her lips trembled and she closed her eyes for a moment. “I don’t know. I’ve seen him. I know there’s a part of him that wants to.”
“And there’s another part that doesn’t,” I said. “That would want you to be alive and happy.”
She settled on her knees beside Thomas, staring down at him. She put her fingers on his cheek, and he moved for the first time since the fight with One-ear. He turned his head and placed a soft kiss on Justine’s hand.
The girl shivered. “He might not take too much. He tries so hard not to take too much. Not to hurt me. He might stop himself.”
“Do you really believe that?”
She was silent for a long moment, and then said, “It doesn’t matter. I can’t stand by and let him die when I can help him.”
“Why not?”
She looked up at me, her eyes steady. “I love him.”
“You’re addicted to him,” I said.
“That too,” she agreed. “But it doesn’t change anything. I love him.”
“Even if it kills you?” I asked.
She bowed her head, gently stroking Thomas’s cheek. “Of course.”
I started to refute her, but just then the rush of energy from the silver belt buckle petered out. I started trembling violently. The pain of my injuries rushed back over me. Fatigue settled onto me like a backpack full of lead. My thoughts turned to exhausted sludge.
I vaguely remember Justine cajoling me to my feet and guiding me back through one of the curtains to a lavish bedroom. She helped me onto the bed and said, “You’ll tell him for me, won’t you?” She was crying through a small smile. “You’ll tell him what I said? That I love him?”
The room was spinning, but I promised her that I would.
She kissed my forehead and gave me a sad smile. “Thank you, Harry. You’ve always helped us.”
My vision narrowed to a grey tunnel. I tried to get back up again, but I could barely manage to turn my head.
So all I could do was watch Justine slide out of the bathrobe and leave the room to go to Thomas.
And to her death.
Chapter Twenty
Sometimes you wake up and there’s a little voice inside your head that tells you that today is a special day. For a lot of kids, it sometimes happens on their birthdays and always on Christmas morning. I remember exactly one of those Christmases, when I was little and my dad was still alive. I felt it again eight or nine years later, the morning that Justin DuMorne came to pick me up from the orphanage. I felt it one more time, the morning Justin brought Elaine home from whatever orphanage she had been in.
And now the little voice was telling me to wake up. That it was a special day.
My little voice is some kind of psycho.
I opened my eyes and found myself on a bed the size of a small aircraft carrier. There was light coming into the room from beneath a curtain, but it wasn’t enough to see more than vague outlines. I ached from almost a dozen minor cuts and abrasions. My throat burned with thirst, and my belly with hunger. My clothes were spattered in blood (and worse), my face was rough with the shadow of a beard, my hair was so mussed that it was approaching trendy, and I can’t even imagine what I would have smelled like to anyone walking in. I needed a shower.
I slipped out into the entrance room, around the passion pit and its pillows. There wasn’t a corpse lying in the pit or anything, but then that’s what the driver had been for. The pale light of predawn colored the sky deep blue through a nearby window. I’d been down for only a few hours. Time to get into the car and get gone.
I opened the door to leave Thomas’s chambers, but it was locked. I checked, but it was using at least a pair of key-only padlocks and maybe some kind of emergency bolt as well. There was no way I could open it.
“Fine. We do this Hulk style.” I took a few steps back, focused on the wall I thought closest to the outside, and began to draw in my will. I took it slow, concentrating, so that I would have the best chance of keeping the spell under control. “Mister McGee, don’t make me angry,” I muttered at the wall. “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”
I was about to huff and puff and blow the wall down when the door rattled, clicked, and opened. Thomas entered, looking as he always did, though this time he wore khakis and a white cotton turtleneck. He had a long coat of brown leather draped over his shoulders, and a gym bag in his h
and. He froze when he saw me. His expression showed something I didn’t think I’d ever seen in him before—shame. He looked down, avoiding my eyes.
“Harry,” he said quietly. “Sorry about the door. Had to make sure you got left alone until you woke up.”
I didn’t say anything. But I remembered my last sight of Justine. Fury, pure and simple, flooded through me.
“I brought you some clothes, some towels.” Thomas tossed the gym bag underhand. It landed on my foot. “There’s a guest room two doors down on your left. You can use the shower in there.”
“How’s Justine?” I asked. My voice was flat and hard.
He stood there without lifting his eyes.
I felt my hands clench into angry fists. I realized that I was barely a breath away from attacking Thomas with my bare hands. “That’s what I thought,” I said. I walked past him to the door. “I’ll clean up at home.”
“Harry.”
I stopped. His voice was raw with emotion, and sounded like he was trying to speak through a throat full of bitter mud. “I wanted you to know. Justine . . . I tried to stop in time. I didn’t want to hurt her. Never.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You had good intentions. That makes it all right.”
He folded his arms over his stomach, as if nauseous, and bowed his head. His long hair veiled his face. “I never pretended I wasn’t . . . a predator, Harry. I never claimed she was anything but what she was. Food. You knew it. She knew it. I didn’t lie to anyone.”
I had a bunch of vicious answers I could have used, but I went with, “Before she went to you last night, Justine asked me to tell you that she loved you.”
Short of shoving a running chain saw into Thomas’s guts, I don’t think I could have hurt him any more. He didn’t look up when I spoke, and he started trembling with rapid breaths. “Don’t go yet. I need to talk to you. Please. There are things happening that—”
I started walking out, and heard myself put every bit of caustic contempt I could into the words: “Make an appointment at my office.”
He took a step after me. “Dresden, Mavra knows about this house. For your own sake, at least wait for sunrise.”
He had a point. Dammit. Sunrise would send the Black Court back to their hidey holes, and if they had any mortal accomplices, it would at least mean that I would only be up against run of the mill weapons and tactics. Arturo probably wouldn’t be awake at the moment, and Murphy would just now be getting dressed and heading for the gym. Bob would stay out until the last minute he possibly could, so I’d have to wait for sunrise to talk to him anyway. I had a little time to kill.
“All right,” I said.
“Do you mind if tell you a few things?”
“Yes,” I said. “I mind.”
His voice broke. “Dammit, do you think I wanted this?”
“I think you hurt and used someone who loved you. A woman. As far as I’m concerned, you don’t exist. You look like a person, but you aren’t. I should have remembered that from the beginning.”
“Harry—”
Anger flared up in me like a wall of red flame behind my eyes. I shot a look at Thomas over my shoulder that made him flinch. “Be satisfied with nonexistence, Thomas,” I said. “You’re lucky you have it. It’s the only thing keeping you alive.”
I slammed the door behind me as I left his chambers. I slammed open the door to the guest room he’d mentioned. And then slammed it behind me, which was starting to seem a little childish, even through a haze of bitter anger. I tried to take deep breaths and got the shower going.
Hot water. Ye gods. There are no words to describe how good a hot shower feels after several years of living with no water heater of your own. I broiled myself for a while, and found soap, shampoo, shaving cream, and a razor waiting on a shelf inside the shower. I availed myself of them and began to calm down. I figured that once I got some coffee I might be almost stable again.
I guess if Lord Raith could afford a house that size, he could afford a water heater to match it, because I ran the shower as hot as I could stand for almost half an hour and it never got cold. When I got out, the bathroom mirror was steamed up and the air was thick and wet enough to suffocate me. I slapped my towel over all the wet bits, tied it to my waist, and left the bathroom for the guest bedroom. The air was cooler and drier and it made it a pleasure to simply inhale.
I opened the sports bag Thomas had thrown me. It held a pair of blue jeans that looked more or less my size and a pair of plain grey athletic socks. Then I found what I thought at first was a circus tent, but it turned out to be an enormous Hawaiian shirt with lots of blue and orange in its flowered pattern.
I looked at the thing skeptically while I put on the jeans. They fit pretty well. Thomas hadn’t included any clean underwear, which was likely just as well. I’d rather go commando than wear undies that may have outlived their previous owner. I zipped up the jeans with considerable caution. A nearby dresser had a mirror on it, and I went to it to comb my hair while working up the nerve to put on the shirt.
Inari’s image stood in the mirror, staring at my back. My heart flew up into my throat, then past it into my brain and out the top of my skull. “Holy crap!” I sputtered.
I turned to face her. She was wearing a cute little pink sleep shirt with prints of Winnie the Pooh all over it. The shirt would have fallen to midthigh on a shorter or younger girl, but on Inari it barely managed to escape indecency. Her right arm was wrapped to the elbow in a black plaster cast. Her left was cradled against her body, and she held the notch-eared puppy in it. He looked restless and unhappy.
“Hello,” Inari said. Her voice was very soft and her eyes were distant and unfocused. Alarm bells started going off in my head. “Your pet got out into the manor last night,” she went on. “Father asked me to find him and bring him back to you.”
“Oh,” I said. “Uh. Thank you, I guess. Don’t let me keep you waiting. Just put him on the bed.”
Instead of doing so, she stared at me—specifically, at my chest. “You have more muscle than I would have thought. And scars.” Her eyes flicked down to the puppy. When she looked back at me, they had turned a pale shade of grey, and over the next several seconds that color gained a metallic sheen. “I came to thank you. You saved my life last night.”
“Welcome,” I said. “Puppy on the bed, please?”
She slid forward and lowered the little dog to the bed. He looked tired, but he started a quiet little warning growl, his eyes on Inari. After she put the dog down, she kept taking slow, sinuous steps toward me. “I don’t know what it is about you. You’re fascinating. I’ve been wanting the chance to speak with you all night.”
I did my best not to notice the almost serpentine grace of her movements. If I noticed them too hard, I’d start ignoring everything else.
“I’ve never felt this before,” Inari continued, almost to herself. Her eyes stayed locked on my bare chest. “About anyone.”
She got close enough that I could smell her perfume, a scent that made my knees wobble for a second. Her eyes had become a shade of brightest silver, inhumanly intense, and I shivered as a spasm of raw physical need shot through me—different from when Lara had hit me with the come-hither, but just as potent. I had a flash image of pressing Inari down onto the bed and tearing the sweet little nightshirt off of her, and I closed my eyes to shove it away.
It must have taken longer than it seemed, because the next thing I knew, Inari pressed herself to me. She shivered and ran her tongue over my collarbone. I nearly jumped out of my borrowed jeans. I blinked my eyes open, lifted a hand, and opened my mouth to protest, but Inari pressed her mouth to mine and guided my hand down to brush against something naked and smooth and delicious. There was a panicked second in which some part of me realized that my caution hadn’t been enough—that I’d been compromised and taken. But that part quickly shut up, because Inari’s mouth on mine was the sweetest thing I’d ever tasted. The puppy continued growling his little warning, but
it didn’t matter, either.
We’d gotten to some seriously heavy breathing when Inari tore her lips from my mouth, panting, her mouth swollen with the heated kisses. Her eyes flashed pure and empty white, and her skin began to grow luminous and pearlescent. I tried to fumble some words out of my mouth, to tell her to stop. They didn’t get past my tingling lips. She hooked one long leg behind one of mine and pressed in with a sudden and inhuman strength to slather a line of licking, wet kisses across my throat. Cold started spreading through me—delicious, sweet cold that stole warmth and strength even as the pleasure began.
And then the damnedest thing happened.
Inari let out a panicked shriek and staggered back from me. She fell to the floor on the other side of the guest room, gasping. She lifted her head a moment later to look at me, her eyes hazed with confusion and their original color again.
Her mouth had been burned. I saw blisters rising around her lips. “What?” she stammered. “What happened? Harry? What are you doing here?”
“Leaving,” I said. I still felt short of breath, as if I’d been sprinting rather than doing energetic kissing. I turned from her, stuffed the dirty clothes in my pack, and pulled my duster on. I plopped the puppy down in his usual pocket and said, “I’ve got to get out of here.”
Just then Thomas slammed the door open, his eyes wild. He looked from Inari to me and back, and exhaled, evidently trying to relax. “Thank God. Are you both all right?”
“My mouth,” Inari said, her tone still sleepy and bewildered. “It hurts. Thomas? What happened to me?” She started hyperventilating. “What’s happening? Those things last night, and you were hurt, and your eyes were white, Thomas. I . . . what . . . ?”
Ow. It was painful to watch her. I’d seen people who had suddenly been shocked out of their innocence to the existence of the supernatural before, but it had rarely been something this sudden and terrifying. I mean, my God. The girl’s family wasn’t what she thought they were. They were also a part of this nightmarish new reality, and they had done nothing to prepare her for it.
