by Jim Butcher
“Padawan,” I said, “I’m doubling your pay.”
“You don’t pay me, Harry.”
“Tripling it, then.”
She gave me a broad smile. “And I’ll be happy to get you all set up just as soon as you promise to tell me everything that happened. That you can, I mean. Oh, and Sergeant Murphy called. She wanted to know as soon as you were awake.”
“Give her a ring,” I said. “And of course I’ll tell you about it. Is there any water?”
She went and got me some, but I needed her help to sit up enough to drink it. That was embarrassing as hell. I got more embarrassed when she took my shirt off with a clinical detachment, and then winced at all the bruises. She fed me the muscle relaxants and set to with the Tiger Balm, and it hurt like hell. For about ten minutes. Then the stuff started working, and the not-pain was a drug of its own.
After a nice cup of tea—which tasted horrible, but which made it possible to move my neck within ten or twenty minutes of drinking it—I was able to get myself into the shower and get cleaned up and into fresh clothes. It was heavenly. Nothing like a nightmarish near-death experience to make you appreciate the little things in life, like cleanliness. And not being dead.
I spent a minute giving Mister some attention, though apparently he’d slept with Molly, because he accepted maybe a whole thirty seconds of stroking and then dismissed me as unnecessary once he was sure I was in one piece. Normally, he needs some time spread across someone’s lap to be himself. I ruffled Mouse for a while instead, which he enjoyed dutifully, and then got myself some food and sat down in the chair across from Molly on the couch.
“Sergeant Murphy’s on the way,” Molly reported.
“Good,” I told her quietly.
“So tell me about it.”
“You first.”
She gave me a semiexasperated look, and started talking. “I sat in the car being invisible for…maybe an hour? Mouse kept me company. Nothing much happened. Then bells started ringing and men started shouting and shooting and the lights went out. A few minutes later, there was a great big explosion—it moved the rearview mirror out of position. Then Mouse started making noise like you said he would, and we drove to the gate and he jumped out of the car and came back with you.”
I blinked at her for a minute. “That sounds really boring.”
“But scary,” Molly said. “Very tense.” She took a deep breath and said, “I had to throw up twice, just sitting there, I was so nervous. I don’t know if…if I’m going to be cut out for this kind of thing, Harry.”
“Thank God,” I said. “You’re sane.” I took a few more bites of food and then said, “But I need to know how much you want to know.”
Molly blinked and leaned toward me a little. “What?”
“There’s a lot I can tell you,” I said. “Some of it is just business. Some of it is going to be dangerous for you to know about. It might even obligate you in ways you wouldn’t like very much.”
“So you won’t tell me that part?” she asked.
“Didn’t say that,” I said. “I’m willing. But some of this stuff you’d be safer and happier not knowing. I don’t want to endanger you or trap you into feeling you have to act without giving you a choice about it.”
Molly stared at me for a minute while I gobbled cereal. Then she frowned, looked down at her hands for a minute, and said, “Maybe just tell me what you think is best. For now.”
“Good answer,” I said quietly.
And I told her about the White Court, about the challenge and the duel, about Vittorio’s betrayal and how he gated in the ghouls and how I’d had my own backup standing by in the Nevernever.
“What?” Molly said. “How did you do that?”
“Thomas,” I said. “He’s a vampire, and they have the ability to cross into the Nevernever at certain places.”
“What kind of places?” Molly asked.
“Places that are, ah,” I said, “important to them. Relevant to them in a particular way.”
“Places of lust, you mean,” Molly said.
I coughed and ate more cereal. “Yeah. And places where significant things have happened to them. In Thomas’s case, he was nearly sacrificed by a cult of porn-star sorceresses in those caves a few years a—”
“I’m sorry,” Molly said, interrupting. “But it sounded like you said ‘cult of porn-star sorceresses.’”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Oh,” she said, giving me a skeptical look. “Sorry, then. Keep going.”
“Anyway. He nearly died there, so I knew he could find it again. He led Marcone and Murphy there, and they were camped out, waiting for me to open a gate.”
“I see,” Molly said. “And you all ganged up on this Vittorio guy and killed him?”
“Not quite,” I said, and told her what happened, leaving out any mention of Lasciel or Cowl.
Molly blinked as I finished. “Well. That explains it, then.”
“Explains what?”
“There were all kinds of little lights going by the windows all night. They didn’t upset Mouse. I thought maybe it was some kind of sending, and figured the wards would keep it out.” She shook her head. “It must have been all the little faeries.”
“They hang around all the time anyway,” I said. “It just takes a lot of them before it’s obvious enough to notice.” I chewed Cheerios thoughtfully. “More mouths to feed. Guess I’d better call Pizza ’Spress and step up my standing order, or we’ll have some kind of teeny faerie clan war over pizza rights on our hands.”
I finished breakfast, found my back stiffening again, after sitting still, and was stretching out a little when Murphy arrived. She was still in her party clothes from the night before, complete with a loaded backpack.
After kneeling down to give Mouse his hug, she surprised me. I got one, too. I surprised myself with how hard I hugged back.
Molly occasionally displayed wisdom beyond her years. She did now, taking my car keys, showing them to me, and departing without a word, firmly shutting the door behind her.
“Glad you’re okay,” I told Murphy.
“Yeah,” she said. Her voice shook a little, even on that one word, and she took a deep breath and spoke more clearly. “That was fairly awful. Even by your usual standards. You made it out all right?”
“Nothing I won’t get over,” I told her. “You had any breakfast?”
“Don’t think my stomach is up for much, after all that,” she said.
“I have Cheerios,” I said, as if I’d been saying “dark chocolate caramel almond fudge custard.”
“Oh, God.” Murphy sighed. “How can I resist.”
We sat down on the couch, with Murphy’s heavy bag on the coffee table. Murphy snacked on dry Cheerios from a bowl with her fingers. “Okay,” I told her. “First things first. Where is my gun?”
Murphy snorted and nodded at her bag. I got in and opened it. My .44 was inside. So was Murphy’s boxy little submachine gun. I picked it up and eyed it, then lifted it experimentally to my shoulder. “What the hell kind of gun is this?”
“It’s a P90,” Murphy said.
“See-through plastic?” I asked.
“That’s the magazine,” she said. “You can always see how many rounds you have left.”
I grunted. “It’s tiny.”
“On a hyperthyroid stork like you, sure,” Murphy said.
I frowned and said, “Full automatic. Ah. Is this weapon precisely legal? Even for you?”
She snorted. “No.”
“Where’d you get it?” I asked.
“Kincaid,” she said. “Last year. Gave it to me in a box of Belgian chocolate.”
I took the weapon down from my shoulder, flipped it over, and eyed a little engraved plate on the butt. “‘We’ll always have Hawaii,’” I read aloud. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Murphy’s cheeks turned pink. She took the gun from me, put it in the bag, and zipped it firmly closed. “Did we ever dec
ide who blew up my car?”
“Probably Madrigal,” I said. “You stood him up for that cup of coffee, remember?”
“Because he was busy kidnapping you and attempting to sell you on eBay,” Murphy said.
I shrugged. “Vindictive doesn’t equal rational.”
Murphy frowned, the suspicious-cop look on her face something I was long used to seeing. “Maybe. But it doesn’t feel right. He liked his vengeance personal.”
“Who then?” I asked. “Vittorio wasn’t interested in drawing out the cops. Neither was Lord Skavis’s agent. Lara Raith and Marcone don’t do bombs.”
“Exactly,” Murphy said. “If not Madrigal, then who?”
“Life is a mystery?” I suggested. “It was probably Madrigal. Maybe one of the others had a reason for it that we don’t know. Maybe we’ll never know.”
“Yeah,” she said. “I hate that.” She shook her head. “Harry, wouldn’t a decent human being be inquiring after his wounded friends and allies about now?”
“I assumed if there was bad news, you’d have told me already,” I said.
She gave me a steady look. “That,” she said, “is so archetypically male.”
I grinned. “How is everyone?”
“Ramirez is in the hospital. Same floor as Elaine, actually, and we’re watching them both. Unofficially, of course.”
We meaning the cops. Murphy. Good people. “How is he?”
“Still had some surgery to go, when I left, but the doctor said his prognosis was excellent, as long as they can avoid infection. He got his guts opened up by that knife. That can always be tricky.”
I grunted, and had my suspicions about where Molly had gone when she borrowed my car. “He’ll make it. What about that poor no-neck you abused?”
“Mister Hendricks is there with two of those mercenaries. Marcone has some of his people guarding them, too.”
“Cops and robbers,” I said. “One big, happy family.”
“One wonders,” Murphy said, “why Marcone agreed to help.”
I settled back on the couch and rubbed at the back of my neck with one hand, closing my eyes. “I bribed him.”
“With what?” Murphy asked.
“A seat at the table,” I said quietly.
“Huh?”
“I offered Marcone a chance to sign on to the Unseelie Accords as a freeholding lord.”
Murphy was quiet for a moment, and then she said, “He wants to keep expanding his power.” She thought about it a minute more and said, “Or he thinks his power might be threatened from someone on that end.”
“Someone like the vampires,” I said. “The Red Court had de facto control of prostitution in Chicago until Bianca’s place burned down. And an agent of the White Court has just shown up and killed one of his prostitutes.”
“Are we sure it was Madrigal?”
“I am,” I said. “No way to prove it, but he was the Raith involved in this mess.”
“That was more or less an accident,” Murphy said. “Taking out one of Marcone’s people, I mean.”
“She’s just as dead,” I replied. “And Marcone won’t stand by when someone—anyone—kills one of his own.”
“How does becoming a…what was it? And how does it help?”
“Freeholding lord,” I said. “It means he’s entitled to rights under the Accords—like rights of challenge when someone kills his employees. It means that if a supernatural power tries to move in on him, he’ll have an opportunity to fight it and actually win.”
“Are there many of these lords?”
“Nope,” I said. “I had Bob look into it. Maybe twenty on the whole planet. Two dragons, Drakul—the original, not baby Vlad—the Archive, the CEO of Monoc Securities, some kind of semi-immortal shapeshifter guru in the Ukraine, people like that. The Accords let them sign on as individuals. They have the same rights and obligations. Most people who consider the idea aren’t willing to agree to be a good, traditional host for, let’s say, a group of Black Court vampires, and don’t want to get caught up as a mediator in a dispute between the major powers. They don’t want to make themselves the targets of possible challenges, either, so not many of them even try it.” I rubbed at my jaw. “And no one who is just a vanilla human being has tried it. Marcone is breaking new ground.”
Murphy shook her head. “And you were able to set him up for it?”
“You have to have three current members of the Accords vouch for you to sign on,” I said. “I told him I’d be one of them.”
“You can speak for the Council in this?”
“When it comes to defending and protecting my area of responsibility as a Warden, I damned well can. If the Council doesn’t like it, they shouldn’t have dragooned me into the job.”
Murphy chewed on some Cheerios, scrunched up her nose in thought, and then gave me a shrewd look. “You’re using Marcone.”
I nodded. “It’s only a matter of time before someone like Lara Raith tries to push for more power in Chicago. Sooner or later they’ll swamp me in numbers, and we both know SI will always have their hands tied by red tape and politics. If Marcone signs the Accords, he’ll have a strong motivation to oppose any incursion—and the means to do so.”
“But he’s going to use his new means to secure his position here even more firmly,” Murphy said quietly. “Make new allies, probably. Gain new resources.”
“Yeah. He’s using me, too.” I shook my head. “It isn’t a perfect solution.”
“No,” Murphy said. “It isn’t.”
“But he’s the devil we know.”
Neither of us said anything for several minutes.
“Yes,” Murphy admitted. “He is.”
Murphy dropped me off at the hospital and I headed straight for Elaine’s room.
I found her inside, dressing. She was just pulling a pair of jeans up over strong, slender legs that looked just as good as I remembered. When I opened the door, she spun, thorn-wand in hand.
I put my hands up and said, “Easy there, gunslinger. I’m not looking for any trouble.”
Elaine gave me a gentle glare and slipped the wand into a small leather case that clipped to the jeans. She did not look well, but she looked a lot weller than she had the last time I’d seen her. Her face was still quite pale and her eyes were sunken and bruised, but she moved with brisk purpose for all of that. “You shouldn’t sneak up on people like that,” she said.
“If I’d knocked, I might have woken you up.”
“If you’d knocked, you’d have missed out on an outside chance of seeing me getting dressed,” she shot back.
“Touché.” I glanced around and spotted her bag, all packed. My stomach twisted a little in disappointment. “Shouldn’t you be in bed?”
She shook her head. “Have you ever tried to watch daytime television? I was glad when the set finally blew. I’d lose my mind just lying here.”
“How you feeling?”
“A lot better,” Elaine said. “Stronger. Which is another reason to leave. I don’t want to have a nightmare and have my powers kill some poor grampa’s respirator.”
I nodded. “So it’s back to California?”
“Yes. I’ve done enough damage for one trip.”
I folded my arms and leaned against the door, watching her brush back her hair enough to get it into a tail. She didn’t look at me when she asked, “Did you get them?”
“Yeah,” I said.
She closed her eyes, shivered, and exhaled. “Okay.” She shook her head. “That shouldn’t make me feel better. It won’t help Anna.”
“It will help a lot of other people in the long run,” I said.
She abruptly slammed the brush against the rail of the bed, snapping it. “I wasn’t here trying to help a lot of other people, dammit.” She glanced down at the brush’s handle and seemed to deflate for a moment. She tossed it listlessly into a corner.
I went over to her and put a hand on her shoulder. “This just in. Elaine isn’t perfect. New
s at eleven.”
She leaned her cheek on my hand.
“You should know,” I said. “I got reparations out of the White Court. A weregild for their dependents.”
She blinked at me. “How?”
“My boyish charm. Can you get me contact information for the victims’ families? I’ll get somebody to get the money to them.”
“Yes,” she said. “Some of them didn’t have any dependents. Like Anna.”
I grunted and nodded. “I thought we might use that money to build something.”
Elaine frowned at me. “Oh?”
I nodded. “We use the money. We expand the Ordo, build a network of contacts. A hotline for middle-class practitioners. We contact groups like the Ordo in cities all around the country. We put the word out that if people are in some kind of supernatural fix, they can get word of it onto the network. Maybe if something like this starts happening again, we can hear about it early and stomp on the fire before it grows. We teach self-defense classes. We help people coordinate, cooperate, support one another. We act.”
Elaine chewed on her lip and looked up at me uncertainly. “We?”
“You said you wanted to help people,” I said. “This might. What do you think?”
She stood up, leaned up onto her toes, and kissed me gently on the lips before staring into my eyes, her own very wide and bright. “I think,” she said quietly, “that Anna would have liked that.”
Ramirez woke up late that evening, swathed in bandages, his injured leg in traction, and I was sitting next to his bed when he did. It was a nice switch for me. Usually I was the one waking up into disorientation, confusion, and pain.
I gave him a few minutes to get his bearings before I leaned forward and said, “Hey, there, man.”
“Harry,” he rasped. “Thirsty.”
Before he was finished saying it, I picked up the little sports bottle of ice water they’d left next to his bed. I put the straw between his lips and said, “Can you hold it, or should I do it for you?”
