by Jim Butcher
“Dame Murphy,” the gruff said stiffly, “this matter is not one of mortal concern.”
“The hell it isn’t,” Murphy said. “This man lives in Chicago. He pays taxes to the city. He is beholden to its laws.” She glanced aside at me, and her mouth quirked wryly. “If he is to suffer the headaches of citizenry, as he must, then it is fair and lawful that he should enjoy the protections offered to every citizen. He is therefore under my protection, and any quarrel you have with him, you also have with me.”
The gruff stared at her for a moment, eyes narrowed in thought. “Art thou quite certain of thy position, Dame Murphy?”
“Quite certain,” she replied.
“Even knowing that the duty solemnly charged unto me and my kin might require us to kill thee?”
“Master Gruff,” Murphy replied, laying a hand on her gun for the first time, “consider for a moment what a steel-jacketed round would feel like as it entered your flesh.”
The gruff flicked its ears in surprise. A number of napkins were blown from the surface of a nearby table. “Thou wouldst aim such weapons of the bane at a lawful champion of the Seelie Court?”
“In your case, Master Gruff,” Murphy said, “I would hardly need to aim.” Then she picked up the gun and aimed it at the gruff ’s eyes.
I started to panic. Then I saw where I thought Murph was going with this one, and I had to work to keep myself from letting out a cheer.
The gruff ’s knuckles popped again. “This,” it growled, “is neutral ground.”
“Chicago,” she replied, “has never signed any Accords. I will fulfill my duty.”
“Attack me here,” the gruff said, “and I will crush you.”
“Crush me here,” Murphy said, “and you will have broken the Accords while acting on behalf of your Queen. Was that your intention in coming here?”
The gruff ground its teeth, a sound like creaking millstones. “My quarrel is not with you.”
“If you attempt to take the life of a citizen of Chicago, whom I am sworn to protect, you have made it my quarrel, Master Gruff. Does your Queen wish to declare war upon the mortal authorities of Chicago? Would she wish you to decide such a thing?”
The gruff stared at her, evidently pondering.
“Lady has a point, Tiny,” I drawled. “There’s nothing to be gained here but trouble, and nothing to be lost but a little time. Walk away. You’ll find me again soon enough.”
The gruff stared at Murphy, and then at me. If I’d been less intrepid and fearless, I would have held my breath, hoping I’d avoided a fight. As it was, I held my breath mostly to cut down on the smell.
Finally the gruff bowed its head toward Murphy, with more scraping of ceilings and wincing of bartenders. “Courage,” he rumbled, “should be honored. Though thou art less a man than I thought, wizard, hiding behind a mortal, however valiant she may be.”
I let out a long breath as silently as I could and said, “Gosh. Somehow I’ll try to live with myself.”
“It will not o’erburden you long. This I promise.” The gruff nodded once to Murphy, then turned and scuttled out the way he’d squeezed in. He even shut the door behind him.
Murphy let out her breath and put her gun away in its shoulder holster. It took her two or three tries.
I sank into my chair on weak legs. “You,” I said to Murphy, “are so hot right now.”
She gave me a weak smile. “Oh, now you notice.” She glanced at the door. “Is he really gone?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I figure he is. The Summer Court aren’t exactly sweetness and light, but they do have a concept of honor, and if any faerie gives his word, he’s good for it.”
Mac did something I’d rarely seen him do.
He got three black bottles out from beneath the bar and brought them over to the table. He twisted the tops off and put one down in front of me, and another in front of Murphy, then kept the third for himself.
I took up the bottle and sniffed at it. I wasn’t familiar with the brew, but it had a rich, earthy aroma that made my mouth water.
Without a word Mac held up his bottle in a salute to Murphy.
I joined him. Murphy shook her head tiredly and returned the salute.
We drank together, and my tongue decided that any other brew it ever had would probably be a bitter disappointment from this day forward. Too many flavors to count blended together into something I couldn’t describe if I’d had a week to talk about it. I’d never had anything like it. It was God’s beer.
Mac drained the bottle in a single pull, with his eyes closed. When he lowered it, he looked at Murphy and said, “Bravely done.”
Murphy’s face was flushed with relief and with a reaction to her beer that was at least as favorable as mine. I doubt Mac could have seen it, but I’d known Murph long enough to see that she started blushing, too.
Mac went back to the bar, leaving Murphy and me to finish our bottled ambrosia.
“Okay,” Murphy said in a weak voice. “Where were we?”
“You were about to tell me how you thought I was wrong and that the Chicago PD needed to intervene.”
“Oh,” Murph said. “Right.” She stared after the departed gruff for a moment. “You said that that thing was from the nicer of the two groups causing us grief?”
“Yep,” I said.
“We’ve gone up against the supernatural three times,” she said quietly. “It’s ended badly twice.”
We meaning the cops, of course. I nodded. One of those occasions had killed her partner, Ron Carmichael. He hadn’t been an angel or anything, but he had been a good man and a solid cop.
“All right,” she said quietly. “I’m willing to hold off for now. On one condition.”
“Name it.”
“I’m in from here on out. You obviously need someone to protect you from the big, bad billy goats.”
I snorted. “Yeah, obviously.”
She held up the last of her beer. I held up mine.
We clinked them, finished them, and went back out into the winter cold together.
Chapter Eighteen
“All right,” I said. “I hearby call this war council to order.”
We were all sitting around my tiny living room, eating Burger King. Thomas and Molly had voted for McDonald’s, but since I was paying, I sternly informed them that this was not a democracy, and Burger King it was.
Hail to the King, baby.
Murphy rolled her eyes over the whole thing.
“War council?” Molly asked, wide-eyed. “Are we going to start another war?”
“I sort of meant it as a metaphor,” I said, as I made sure the ketchup-mustard ratio on my burger was within acceptable parameters. “I need to decide on my next step, and I’ve been hit in the head a few times lately. Figured my brain could use a little help.”
“Just now worked that out, did you?” Thomas murmured.
“Quiet, you,” I growled. “The idea is to generate useful thoughts here.”
“Not funny ones,” Molly said, suppressing a laugh.
I eyed her. She ate a french fry.
Murphy sipped at her Diet Coke. “Well,” she said, “I don’t know how much advice I can give you until I know what you’re up against.”
“I told you in the car,” I said. “The Knights of the Blackened Denarius.”
“Fallen angels, old tarnished coins, psychotic killers, got it,” Murphy said. “But that doesn’t tell me what their capabilities are.”
“She’s got a point,” Thomas said quietly. “You haven’t said much about these guys.”
I blew out a breath and took a big bite of hamburger to give me a moment to think while I chewed. “There’s a lot that these things can do,” I said afterward. “Mostly, the coins seem to allow their users to alter their physical form into something better suited for a fight than a regular human body.”
“Battle shapeshifting,” Molly said. “Cool.”
“It isn’t cool,” I told her. Then I pause
d and admitted, “Okay, maybe a little. It makes them harder to hurt. It makes them faster. It arms them with various forms of weaponry. Claws, fangs, that kind of thing. Cassius looked like he might have had a poisonous bite, for example. Ursiel’s wielder could shift into this huge bear thing with claws and fangs and horns. Another one turned her hair into about a million strips of living titanium blade, and they were whipping all over the place and shooting through walls. Stretched out like twenty or thirty feet.”
“I have some customers like that,” Thomas quipped.
Murphy blinked and glanced at him.
I cleared my throat and gave Thomas another glare. “Another one of them, Nicodemus, didn’t seem to do any shapeshifting, but his freaking shadow could leap off the wall and strangle you. Creepy as hell.”
“They don’t all have, like, a uniform or something?” Molly asked.
“Not even close,” I replied. “Each of the Fallen seems to have its own particular preferences. And I suspect that those preferences adapt themselves differently to different holders of the coins. Quintus Cassius’s Fallen had this whole serpent motif going, and Cassius’s magic was pretty snake-intensive, too. But he was totally different from Ursiel, who was totally different from Mantis Girl from this morning, who was different from the other Denarians I’ve seen.”
Murphy nodded. “Anything else?”
“Goons,” I said. “More like a cult, really. Nicodemus had a number of followers whose tongues had been removed. They were fanatics, heavily armed, and crazy enough to commit suicide rather than be captured by his enemies.”
She winced. “The airport?”
“Yeah.”
“That it?”
“No,” I said. “Nicodemus also had these…call them guard dogs, I guess. Except that they weren’t dogs. I don’t know what they were, but they were ugly and ran fast and had big teeth. But all of that isn’t what makes them dangerous.”
“No?” Thomas said. “Then what is?”
“The Fallen,” I replied.
The room fell silent.
“They’re beings older than time who have spent two thousand years learning the ins and outs of the mortal world and the mortal mind,” I said quietly. “They understand things we literally could not begin to grasp. They’ve seen every trick, learned every move, and they’re riding shotgun for each coin holder—if they aren’t in the driver’s seat already. Every one of them has a perfect memory, a library of information at his immediate disposal, and a schemer that makes Cardinal Richelieu look like Mother Teresa hanging around in his brain as an adviser.”
Thomas stared at me very hard for a moment, frowning. I tried to ignore him.
Murphy shook her head. “Let’s sum up: an unknown number of enemies with unknown capabilities, supported by a gang of madmen, packs of attack animals, and superhumanly intelligent pocket change.” She gave me a look. “It’s sort of tough to plan for that, given how much we don’t know.”
“Well, then that’s what we do next, isn’t it?” Molly asked tentatively. “Find out more about them?”
Thomas flicked a glance at Molly and nodded once.
“To do that we’d have to find them,” I said.
“A tracking spell?” Molly suggested.
“I don’t have any samples to work with,” I replied. “And even if I did, somebody on their team was able to obscure Mab’s divining spells. I’m nowhere close to Mab’s league. My spells wouldn’t have a prayer.”
“If they’ve got that much of an entourage, they’re going to stick out anywhere even vaguely public,” Murphy mused. “A gang of toughs with no tongues? If the Denarians are in town, that should make them relatively easy to locate.”
“Last time they were holed up in Undertown,” I said. “Believe me, there’s plenty of room for badness down there.”
“What about the spirit world?” Thomas asked quietly. “Surely there’s an entity or two who could tell us something.”
“Possibly,” I said. “I’m on speaking terms with one or two of the loa. But that kind of information is either expensive or unreliable. Sometimes both. And remember who we’re talking about. The Fallen are heavyweights in the spirit world. No one wants to cross them.”
Molly made a frustrated sound. “If we can’t track them with magic, and we can’t find them physically, then how are we supposed to learn more about them?”
“Exactly, kid,” I said. “Hence the whole ‘war council’ concept.”
We ate in silence for a few minutes. Then Murphy said, “We’re coming at this from the wrong angle.”
“Eh?” I said wittily.
“We’re thinking like the good guys. We should be thinking like the bad guys. Figuring out what they had to face and get around.”
I leaned forward a little and nodded at her to go on.
“I don’t know as much about the supernatural aspects of this situation,” she said. “I don’t know much of anything about these Denarians. But I do know some things about Marcone. For example, I know that even if he has some underlings who want to take over the franchise, he’s got more who are personally loyal or who will figure that bailing him out will reap them some major profits.”
“Yeah,” I said, tilting my head at her. “So?”
“So wherever they took him, it has to be somewhere Marcone’s network can’t reach. We can be virtually certain that they aren’t hiding in plain sight.”
I grunted. “Hell’s bells, yeah. Not only that, but Marcone plans ahead. He had that panic room ready to go. In fact…” My eyes widened. “The location of your secret hidey-hole ought to be awfully secret, don’t you think?”
“Sure,” Molly said. “What good is a hiding place if everyone knows where it is?”
“The Denarians knew exactly where he was going,” I said. “The spell they set up to tear down that building’s defenses was no spur-of-the-moment magic—it was too complex. It had been planned out ahead of time.”
“Son of a bitch,” Thomas swore. “Someone inside Marcone’s organization ratted him out.”
“So if we find the rat…” Murphy said, catching on.
“We might find a trail that leads back to the Nickelheads,” I finished with a fierce grin. “Was this war council concept a brilliant idea or what?”
Molly tittered. “Nickelheads.”
“I have a gift,” I said modestly. Then I added in a low voice, “And stop giggling. Wizards don’t giggle. Bad for the image.”
Molly buried her giggle in another mouthful of fries.
I slurped on my Coke and turned to Murphy. “So, what we need to do is figure out who’s going to backstab Marcone. Someone highly placed enough to know the location of the safehouse, and who will profit by Marcone’s absence.”
“You’re assuming the informant was complicit,” Murphy said. “That wouldn’t necessarily be true. Someone could have inadvertently given information away, or been compelled to cooperate.”
I paused to think about that. “True. So we’ll have to start by looking at who could have given away the safe house.”
Murphy raked her fingers through her dark-golden hair, frowning in thought. “To be honest, SI doesn’t cross trails with the outfit all that often. I’d have to make some calls to find out.”
Thomas drummed his fingers on the arm of his chair. “The FBI would have more, wouldn’t they?”
“And you know that guy Rick, right?” Molly said. “The one who was helping that jerk interrogate me?”
Murphy’s eyes narrowed. She made a noise that wasn’t quite an agreement, but wasn’t quite a denial, either. Murphy has issues with her ex-husband.
It took Molly about half a second to figure out the expression on Murphy’s face. She looked around the room somewhat desperately for a moment. “Uh, so, Harry, what’s with Mister? He’s been sleeping like a log the whole time we’ve been here.”
“Which brings us to the second part of the problem,” I said. “The hitters from the Summer Court. I think odds are
good that they’ve got my place under surveillance.”
Thomas arched an eyebrow. “I didn’t sense anything coming in.”
“You didn’t sense anything walking through the front door of the pub, either,” Murphy said archly.
“I was circling the block,” Thomas said crossly. “Middle of a damned blizzard and you still can’t find a parking spot. I hate this town.”
“I’ve got warning spells spread out all around this place,” I said. “Anything gets within a block and I’ll probably know about it. And you’ve got to get up early in the morning to sneak past Mouse.”
Mouse, who was sitting in front of Molly making soulful eyes at her chicken sandwich, glanced at me and wagged his tail.
“If they were very close, I’d know it. They’re probably spread out in a loose ring, watching who comes and goes,” I said. “The gruffs don’t really want to kick my apartment door down—not yet, at any rate. They’d rather fight where there won’t be collateral damage. But I’ve got a feeling that they aren’t at their best in all this snow.”
Molly frowned. “You think Mab is influencing the weather for you?”
“Maybe the ongoing record snowfall is a coincidence,” I said. “But if so, it’s awfully convenient.”
“Nothing’s ever convenient with you, Dresden,” Murphy said.
“Exactly my point.” I rubbed at my jaw. I needed to shave, but my throbbing nose was bad enough without adding a couple of razor nicks to the mess. I didn’t trust my hands to be steady. There were too many scary things moving around, and if I stopped long enough to think about how far in over my head I was getting, I might just crawl into a hole and pull it in after me.
Don’t think, Harry. You know too much about what you’re up against.
Analyze, decide, and act.
“Okay. We can assume that the Summer crew saw us come in. As long as we don’t leave, they’ll assume that we’re still here.”
Molly said, “Aha. I wondered why you asked me along.”
I winked at her. “Know thyself, grasshopper. Yeah. When we leave, I want you to make sure that the gruffs and their crew don’t notice. Hopefully that will buy us some more time while they play patient hunter and wait for me to expose myself again.”
