by Jim Butcher
“And there’s not much difference between ‘kiss’ and ‘kill.’ If you only look at the letters.” I shrugged. “But here you are, working for Marcone. As a madam.”
“I am a convicted felon, Mister Dresden,” she replied. “I used to handle accounts with a total value in the hundreds of millions of dollars. I was ill suited to work as a waitress in a diner.”
“Nickel in the pen didn’t do much for your résumé, huh?”
“Or references,” she replied. She shook her head. “My reasons for being here are none of your business, Dresden, and have nothing to do with the matter at hand. Ask your questions or get out.”
“After you parted company with the other members of the Ordo tonight,” I said, “did you place a phone call to them?”
“Again,” she said quietly, “we are at an impasse, exactly as we were before. It doesn’t matter what I say, given that you are clearly unwilling to believe me.”
“Did you call them?” I asked.
She stared steadily, her eyes so dull and empty that it made her elegant black outfit look like funerary wear. I couldn’t tell if it would be more suitable for mourners—or for the deceased. Then her eyes narrowed and she nodded. “Ah. You want me to look you in the eyes. The term is overdramatic, but I believe it is referred to as a soulgaze.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I hadn’t realized it was a truth detector.”
“It isn’t,” I said. “But it will tell me what sort of person you are.”
“I know what sort of person I am,” she replied. “I am a functional borderline psychopath. I am heartless, calculating, empty, and can muster very little in the way of empathy for my fellow human beings. But then, you can’t take my word for it, can you?”
I just looked at her for a moment. “No,” I said then, very quietly. “I don’t think I can.”
“I have no intention of proving anything to you. I will submit to no such invasion.”
“Even if it means more of your friends in the Ordo die?”
There was the slightest hesitation before she answered. “I have been unable to protect them thus far. Despite all…” She trailed off and shook her head once. Confidence returned to her features and voice. “Anna will watch over them.”
I stared at her for a second, and she regarded me coolly, focused on a spot a bit over my eyebrows, avoiding direct eye contact.
“Anna’s important to you?” I asked.
“As much as anyone can be, now,” she replied. “She was kind to me when she had no cause to be. Nothing to gain from it. She is a worthy person.”
I watched her closely. I’ve done a lot of work as both a professional wizard and a professional investigator. Wizardry is awfully intriguing and useful, but it doesn’t necessarily teach you very much about other people. It’s better at teaching you about yourself.
The investigating business, though, is all about people. It’s all about talking to them, asking questions, and listening to them lie. Most of the things investigators get hired to handle involve a lot of people lying. I’ve seen liars in every shape and size and style. Big lies, little lies, white lies, stupid lies. The worst lies are almost always silence—or else truth, tainted with just enough deception to rot it to the core.
Helen wasn’t lying to me. She might have been dangerous, might have been willing to practice black magic to seek vengeance in the past, might have been cold and distant—but she had not, for one second, tried to conceal any of it, or denied anything that had happened.
“Oh, God,” I said quietly. “You don’t know.”
She frowned at me for a moment—then her face became drawn and pale. “Oh.” She closed her eyes and said, “Oh, Anna. You poor fool.” She opened them again a moment later. She cleared her throat and asked, “When?”
“A few hours ago. The hotel room. Suicide.”
“The others?”
“Safe. Hidden and under guard.” I took a deep breath. “I have to be sure, Helen. If you really do give a damn about them, you’ll cooperate with me. You’ll help me.”
She nodded once, her eyes distant. Then she said, “For them.” And met my eyes.
The phenomenon referred to as a soulgaze is a fairly mysterious thing. No one’s ever been able to get a really good grasp on exactly how it works. The best descriptions of it have always been more poetical than anything else.
The eyes are the windows of the soul.
Lock eyes with a wizard and the essence of who and what you are is laid bare. It is perceived in different ways by every individual. Ramirez had once told me that he heard it as a kind of musical theme that accompanied the person he was gazing upon. Others looked on a soul in a series of frozen images. My interpretation of a soulgaze was, perhaps inevitably, one of the most random and confusing I’d ever heard about. I see the other person in symbol and metaphor, sometimes in panorama and surround sound, sometimes in misty translucence and haunting whispers.
Whoever was gazed upon got a good look back. Whatever universal powers governed that kind of thing evidently decided that the soul’s windows don’t come in an optional issue of one-way mirrored glass. You saw them. They saw you, with the same kind of searing permanence.
For me, meeting someone’s eyes is always risky. Every human being on earth knows what I’m talking about. Try it. Walk up to someone, without speaking, and look them in the eyes. There’s a certain amount of leeway for a second, or two, or three. And then there’s a distinct sensation of sudden contact, of intimacy. That’s when regular folks normally cough and look away. Wizards, though, get the full ride of a soulgaze.
All things considered, I shouldn’t have been surprised that when Helen met my eyes, it got uncomfortably intimate before a second had passed and…
…and I stood in Chicago, in one of the parks on Lake Michigan. Calumet, maybe? I couldn’t see the skyline from where I was standing, so it was hard to be sure.
What I could see was the Beckitt family. Husband, wife, daughter, a little girl maybe ten or eleven years old. She looked like her mother—a woman with smile lines at the corners of her eyes and a white-toothed smile who very little resembled the Helen Beckitt I knew. But all the same, it was her.
They’d been on a family picnic. The sun was setting on a summer evening, golden sunset giving way to twilight as they walked back to the family car. Mother and father swung the little girl between them, each holding one hand.
I didn’t want to see what was about to happen. I didn’t have a choice in the matter.
A parking lot. The sounds of a car roaring up. Muffled curses, tight with fear, and then a car swerved up off the road and gunfire roared from its passenger window. Screams. Some people threw themselves down. Most, including the Beckitts, stared in shock. More loud, hammering sounds, not ten feet away.
I looked over my shoulder to see a very, very young-looking Marcone.
He wasn’t wearing a business suit. He had on jeans and a black leather jacket. His hair was longish, a little mussed, and he also sported a stubble of beard that gave him the kind of rakish look that would attract attention from the girls who fantasized about indulging with a bad boy.
His eyes were still green—but they were the green of a summer hunter’s blind, bright and intelligent and predatory, but touched with more…something. Humor, maybe. More life. And he was skinnier. Not a lot skinnier or anything, but it surprised me how much younger it and the other minor changes made him look.
Marcone crouched next to another young man, a now-dead thug I’d christened Spike years ago. Spike had his pistol out, and was hammering away at the moving car. The barrel of his 1911-model Colt tracked the vehicle—and its course drew its muzzle into line with the Beckitt family.
Marcone snarled something and slapped the barrel of the gun away from the family. Spike’s shot rang out wild and splashed into the lake. There was a last rattle of fire from the moving car, and it roared away. Marcone and Spike piled into their own car and fled the scene. Spike was driv
ing.
Marcone was staring back over his shoulder.
They left the little girl’s broken body, limp and spattered with scarlet, behind them.
Helen saw it first, looking down to the hand that gripped her daughter’s. She let out a cry as she turned to her child.
In the wake of the gunshots, the silence was deafening.
I didn’t want to see what was coming. Again, I had no choice.
The girl wasn’t unconscious. There was a lot of blood. Her father screamed and knelt with Helen, trying to stop the bleeding. He tore off his shirt, pressing it to the child’s midsection. He babbled something to Helen and ran for the nearest phone.
His white shirt soaked through as Helen tried to hold it to the weakly struggling girl.
This was the worst part.
The child was in pain. She cried out with it. I expected her to sound horrible and inhuman, but she didn’t. She sounded like every little kid who had ever suddenly found herself faced with her first experience of real, nontrivial pain.
“Owie,” she said, over and over, her voice rough. “Owie, owie, owie.”
“Baby,” Helen said. The tears were blocking her vision. “I’m here. I’m here.”
“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy,” the girl said. “Owie, owie, owie.”
The little girl said that.
She said it over and over.
She said it for maybe sixty seconds.
Then she went silent.
“No,” Helen said. “No, no, no.” She leaned down and felt her daughter’s throat, then desperately pressed her ear to the girl’s chest. “No, no, no.”
Their voices, I realized, sounded almost identical. They blazed with the same anguish, the same disbelief.
I watched Helen shatter, rocking back and forth, trying through blinding tears to apply CPR to the silent little form. Everything else became an unimportant blur. Ghostly figures of her husband, cops, paramedics. Dim little echoes of sirens and voices, a church organ.
I’d known that the Beckitts set out to tear Marcone down out of revenge for what the warring gangsters had done to their daughter—but knowing the story was one thing. Seeing the soul-searing agony the little girl’s death had inflicted upon her helpless mother was something else.
And suddenly, everything was bright and new again. Helen and her family were laughing again. In a few moments, they were walking again toward the parking lot, and I could hear the engine of the car whose gunmen would miss Marcone and kill the little girl as it approached.
I tore my eyes away from it, fighting to end the soulgaze.
I could not go through that again, could not remain locked in that horrible moment that had shaped what Helen had become.
I came back to myself standing, turned half away from Helen, leaning heavily on my staff with my head bowed.
There was a long moment of silence before Helen said, “I didn’t call anyone in the Ordo, Dresden.”
She hadn’t. Now I was sure of it.
If Helen hadn’t led the Ordo on a merry chase around town, drawing them out into vulnerability for the Skavis hunting them, someone else had.
Priscilla.
She’d been the one receiving all the calls, reporting all the “conversations” with Helen. That meant that she’d been working with the killer, drawing out Anna and the others on his behalf, isolating one of the women from the safety of the group so that he could take them alone.
And then I jerked my head up, my eyes wide.
Fact ten: In the middle of a Chicago summer, Priscilla, none too pretty a woman, had been wearing nothing but turtlenecks.
Priscilla hadn’t been working with the Skavis.
Priscilla was the Skavis.
And I had left her holed up in safety with Olivia and Abby and all those women and children.
Predators. The White Court were predators. The Skavis had to know that I was closing in, and that it would not be long before I either caught up to Helen and got the real story or else figured it out on my own. Fight-or-flight instincts must have come down on the former.
I’d been sent after Helen on purpose. The Skavis had meant to send me haring off after her, leaving him alone with all those targets.
No. I hadn’t left him alone with the women he’d been tracking. They were no threat to him. The Skavis had decided to fight. He had isolated a target, all right, just as he had while hunting helpless women—one who would present a deadly danger to him, should she ever learn his true identity. One who would be distinctly vulnerable, provided he could approach her while camouflaged.
“Oh, God,” I heard myself say. “Elaine.”
Chapter Thirty
Murphy came out of the building about ten seconds after I did.
“Thomas answered his phone, said he was on the way. He sounded kind of out of it, though. I called both rooms, but the call went straight to the hotel’s voice mail,” she reported, slipping her cell phone away as she approached me.
“Does it do that by itself?”
“No. You have to call the desk and ask for it.”
“Dammit,” I said, and tossed her my keys. “The Skavis thought of that already. Drive.”
Murphy blinked at me, but turned to the Beetle at once. “Why?”
“I’m going to try to reach Elaine my way,” I said. I hurried around my car to the passenger seat and jerked open the door. “Get us there as fast as you can.”
“Magic on the road? Won’t that kill the car?”
“This car? Probably not,” I said. “I hope not.” I threw my staff in the backseat.
“Ow!” shrieked a voice.
Murphy’s gun came out every bit as fast as I raised my blasting rod, its tip glowing with a scarlet incandescence.
“Don’t shoot, don’t shoot!” squeaked the voice, considerably more panicked. There was a flickering, and then Molly appeared in my backseat, legs curled up against her chest, her eyes wide, her face very pale.
“Molly!” I shouted. “Dammit, what do you think you’re doing?”
“I came to help. I was good enough to track down your car, wasn’t I?”
“I told you to stay home!”
“Because of the stupid bracelet?” she demanded. “That has got to be the lamest scam ever. Yoda never gave anybody a bracelet that—”
I whirled in pure frustration and snarled, “Fuego!”
My raw anxiety and rage lashed from the tip of my blasting rod in a lance of blinding scarlet fire. It blasted into a metal trash can in front of Marcone’s building and…well, it would be bragging to say that it vaporized the trash can. Even I would have trouble with that. It did, however, slag the thing into a shower of molten metal as it gouged a two-foot-deep, coffin-length furrow in the concrete of the sidewalk behind it. Chunks of heated concrete and globs of molten metal hit the building’s exterior, cracking several thick panes of glass, pocking stone walls, and leaving several wooden planters on fire. The concussion rattled every window within a hundred yards, and shattered the casing of the nearest streetlight, so that it cast out fractured illumination. Half a dozen car alarms went off.
I turned back to Molly and found her staring at me with her mouth open until my shadow, cast by the rising fires and crippled streetlight, fell across her. My voice came out in a growl. “I. Am not. Yoda.”
I stripped the glove off my left hand and held it up, my fingers spread. It didn’t look as horrific as it used to, but it was plenty ugly enough to make an impression on a nineteen-year-old girl. “This isn’t a goddamn movie, Molly. Screw up here and you don’t vanish and leave an empty cloak. You don’t get frozen in carbonite. And you should damned well know that by now.”
She looked shocked. I’ll curse from time to time, but I don’t generally indulge in blasphemy—at least, not around Michael or his family. I don’t think God is terribly threatened by my occasional slip of the tongue, but I owe enough to Michael to respect his wishes regarding that particular shade of profanity. Mostly.
Hell, the who
le practice of invective was developed to add extra emphasis when the mere meaning of words alone just wasn’t enough. And I was feeling plenty emphatic.
Snarling, I cupped my left hand, focused my ongoing anger, and a sudden sphere of light and heat blossomed to life. It wasn’t big—about the diameter of a dime. But it was as bright as a tiny sun.
“Harry,” Murphy said. Her voice was a little shaky. “We don’t have time for this.”
“You think you’re ready?” I told Molly. “Show me.”
I blew on the sphere and it wafted out of my hand and glided smoothly into the open door of the Beetle and toward Molly’s face.
“Wh-what?” she said.
“Stop it,” I said, my voice cold. “If you can.”
She swallowed and raised a hand. I saw her try to control her breathing and focus her will, her lips blurring over the steps I’d taught her.
The sphere drifted closer.
“Better hurry,” I added. I did nothing to hide the anger or the taint of derision in my voice.
Beads of sweat broke out on her skin. The sphere slowed, but it had not stopped.
“It’s about twelve hundred degrees,” I added. “It’ll melt sand into glass. It doesn’t do much for skin, either.”
Molly lifted her left hand and stammered out a word, but her will fluttered and failed, amounting to nothing more than a handful of sparks.
“Bad guys don’t give you this much time,” I spat.
Molly hissed—give the kid credit, she didn’t let herself scream—and pressed herself as far as she could from the fire. She threw up an arm to shield her eyes.
For a second, I felt a mad impulse to let the fire continue for just a second more. Nothing teaches like a burned hand, whispered a darker part of my self. I should know.
But I closed my fingers, willed the ending of the spell, and the sphere vanished.
Murphy, standing across the car, just stared at me.
Molly lowered her hand, her arm moving in frightened little jerks. She sat there shivering and staring. Her tongue piercing rattled against her teeth.
I looked at both of them and then shook my head. I got control of my rampaging temper. Then I leaned down and stuck my head in the car, looking Molly in the eyes.
