by Jim Butcher
Except that he wasn’t dead yet—and thinking like that was too much like giving up on him. I couldn’t do that.
I looked up at the podium, where Whoever would presumably be when someone was there delivering a sermon.
“I know that we don’t talk much,” I said, speaking out loud to the empty room. “And I’m not looking for a pen pal. But I thought You should know that Michael makes You look pretty good. And if after all he’s done, it ends like this for him, I’d think less of You. He deserves better. I think You should make sure he gets it. If You want to bill it to me, I’m fine with that. It’s no problem.”
Nobody said anything back.
“And while we’re on the subject,” I said, “I think the rules You’ve got set up suck. You don’t get involved as much as You used to, apparently. And Your angels aren’t allowed to stick their toes in unless the bad guys do it first. But I’ve been running some figures in my head, and when the Denarians pulled up those huge Signs, they had to have a lot of power to do it. A lot of power. More than I could ever have had, even with Lasciel. Archangel power. And I can only think of one of those guys who would have been helping that crew.”
I stood up and jabbed a finger at the podium, suddenly furious, and screamed, “The Prince of fucking Darkness gets to cheat and unload his power on the earth—twice!—and You just sit there being holy while my friend, who has fought for You his whole life, is dying! What the hell is wrong with You?”
“I guess this is a bad time,” said a voice from behind me.
I turned around and found a little old guy in a dark blue coverall whose stenciled name tag read, JAKE. He was pulling behind him a janitor’s cart with a trash bin and the usual assortment of brooms and mops and cleaning products. He had a round belly and short, curling silver hair that matched his beard, both cropped close to his dark skin. “Sorry. I’ll come back later.”
I felt like an idiot. I shook my head at him. “No, no. I’m not doing anything. I mean, you’re not keeping me from anything. I’ll get out of your way.”
“You ain’t in my way, young man,” said Jake. “Not at all. You ain’t the first one I ever seen upset in a hospital chapel. Won’t be the last, either. You sure you don’t mind?”
“No,” I said. “Come on in.”
He did, hauling the cart with him, and went over to the trash can in the corner. He took out the old liner. “You got a friend here, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, sitting down again.
“It’s okay to be mad at God about it, son. It ain’t His fault, what happened, but He understands.”
“Maybe He does,” I said with a shrug. “But He doesn’t care. I don’t know why everyone thinks He does. Why would He?”
Jake paused and looked at me.
“I mean, this whole universe, right? All those stars and all those worlds,” I continued, maybe sounding more bitter than I had intended. “Probably so many different kinds of people out there that we couldn’t count them all. How could God really care about what’s happening to one little person on one little planet among a practically infinite number of them?”
Jake tied off the trash bag and tossed it in the bin. He replaced the liner with a thoughtful look on his face. “Well,” he said, “I never been to much school, you understand. But seems to me that you assuming something you shouldn’t assume.”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“That God sees the world like you do. One thing at a time. From just one spot. Seems to me that He is supposed to be everywhere, know everything.” He put the lid back on the trash can. “Think about that. He knows what you’re feeling, how you’re hurting. Feels my pain, your pain, like it was His own.” Jake shook his head. “Hell, son. Question isn’t how could God care about just one person. Question is, how could He not.”
I snorted and shook my head.
“More optimism than you want to hear right now,” Jake said. “I hear you, son.” He turned and started pushing the cart out the door. “Oh,” he said. “Can an old man offer you one more thought?”
“Sure,” I said, without turning around.
“You gotta think that maybe there’s a matter of balance, here,” he said. “Maybe one archangel invested his strength in this situation overtly and immediately. Maybe another one was just quieter about it. Thinking long-term. Maybe he already gave you a hand.”
My right hand erupted into pins and needles again.
I sucked in a swift breath and rose, spinning around.
Jake was gone.
The janitor’s cart was still there. A rag hanging off the back was still swinging back and forth slightly. A folded paperback book was shoved between the body of the cart and the handle. I went over to the cart and looked up and down the hall.
There was no one in sight, and nowhere they could have conveniently disappeared to.
I picked up the book. It was a battered old copy of The Two Towers. One page was dog-eared, and a bit of dialogue underlined in pencil.
“‘The burned hand teaches best,’” I read aloud. I made my way back to my seat and shook my head. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Grimalkin mewled from the pew beside me, “That your experience with resisting the shadow of the Fallen One has garnered the respect of the Watchman, my Emissary.”
I twitched violently enough that I came up off my seat an inch or two, and came back down with a grunt. I slid down as far as I could to the end of the pew. It wasn’t far. I bought myself only another inch or three before I turned to face Mab.
She sat calmly, dressed in a casual business suit of dark blue, wearing plenty of elegant little diamonds. Her white hair was bound up into a braided bun, held in place with ivory sticks decorated with lapis. She held Grimalkin on her lap like a favorite pet, though only a lunatic would have mistaken the malk for a domestic cat. It was the first time I’d seen Grimalkin in clear light. He was unusually large and muscular, even for a malk—and they tended to make your average lynx look a little bit scrawny. Grimalkin must have weighed sixty or seventy pounds, all of it muscle and bone. His fur was dark grey, patterned with rippling black fur almost like a subtle watermark. His eyes were yellow-green, very large, and far too intelligent for any animal.
“The Watchman?” I stammered.
Mab’s head moved slightly with the words, but it was Grimalkin’s mewling voice that actually spoke. “The Prince of the Host is all pomp and ceremony, and when he moves it is with the thunder of the wings of an army of seraphim, the crash of drums, and the clamor of horns. The Trumpeter never walks quietly when he can appear in a chorus of light. The Demon Binder takes tasks upon his own shoulders and solves his problems with his own hands. But the Watchman…” Mab smiled. “Of the archangels, I like him the most. He is the quiet one. The subtle one. The one least known. And by far the most dangerous.”
I sorted through what knowledge I had of the archangels. It was meager enough, but I knew that much, at least. “Uriel,” I said quietly.
Mab lifted a finger and continued speaking through the malk. “Caution is called for, Emissary mine. Were I in your position, I would speak his name sparingly, if ever.”
“What has he done to me?” I asked her.
Mab stared at me with iridescent eyes. “That is a question only you can answer. But I can say this much: He has given you the potential to be more of what you are.”
“Huh?”
She smiled, reached to the bench on the other side of her body, and produced my blasting rod. “The return of your property,” the malk said. “The need to keep it from you has passed.”
“Then I was right,” I said, accepting it. “You took it. And you took the memory of it happening.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I deemed it proper,” she replied, as if speaking to a rather slow-witted child. “You would have risked your own life—and my purpose—to protect your precious mortals had I not taken your fire from you. Summer would have tracked and k
illed you two days ago.”
“Not having it could have gotten me killed, too,” I said. “And then you’d have wasted all that time you’ve put in trying to recruit me to be the next Winter Knight.”
“Nonsense,” Mab said. “If you died, I would simply recruit your brother. He would be well motivated to seek revenge upon your killers.”
A little cold feeling shot through me. I hadn’t realized that Mab knew who he was. But I guess it made sense. My godmother, the Leanansidhe, had been tight with my mother, one way or another. If Lea had known, then it might make sense that Mab did, too. “He isn’t a mortal,” I said quietly. “I thought the Knights had to be mortals.”
“He is in love,” Grimalkin mrowled for Mab. “That is more than mortal enough for me.” She tilted her head. “Though I suppose I might make him an offer, while you yet live. He would give much to hold his love again, would he not?”
I fixed her with a hard gaze and said, “You will stay away from him.”
“I will do as I please,” she said. “With him—and with you.”
I scowled at her. “You will not. I do not belong to y—”
The next thing I knew I was on my knees in the center aisle, and Mab was walking away from me, toward the door. “Oh, but you do, mortal. Until you have worked off your debt to me you are mine. You owe one favor more.”
I tried to get up, and I couldn’t. My knees just wouldn’t move. My heart beat far too hard, and I hated how frightened I felt.
“Why?” I demanded. “Why did you want the Denarians stopped? Why send the hobs to kill the Archive? Why recruit me to save the Archive and Marcone in the event that the hobs failed?”
Mab paused, turned, casually showing off the gorgeous curves of her calves, and tilted her head at me. “Nicodemus and his ilk were clearly in violation of my Accords, and obviously planning to abuse them to further his ambition. That was reason enough to see his designs disrupted. And among the Fallen was one with much to answer for to me, personally, for its attack upon my home.”
“The Black Council attack on Arctis Tor,” I said. “One of them used Hellfire.”
Mab showed me her snow-white teeth. “The Watchman and I,” Grimalkin mewled for her, “had a common enemy this day. The enemy could not be allowed to gain the power represented by the child Archive.”
I frowned and thought of the silver hand that had batted the fallen angel and his master sorceries around as if he’d been a stuffed practice dummy. “Thorned Namshiel.”
Mab’s eyes flashed with sudden, cold fury and frost literally formed over every surface of the chapel, including upon my own eyelashes.
“There are others yet who will pay for what they have done,” Mab snarled in her own voice. It sounded hideous—not unmelodious, because it was as rich and full and musical as it ever had been. But it was filled with such rage, such fury, such pain and such hate that every vowel clawed at my skin, and every consonant felt like someone taking a staple gun to my ears.
“I am Sidhe,” she hissed. “I am the Queen of Air and Darkness. I am Mab.” Her chin lifted, her eyes wide and white around the rippling colors of her irises—utterly insane. “And I repay my debts, mortal. All of them.”
There was an enormous crack, a sound like thick ice shattering on the surface of a lake, and Mab and her translator were gone.
I knelt there, shaking in the wake of hearing her voice. I realized a minute later that I had a nosebleed. A minute after that, I realized that there was a trickle of blood coming out of my ears, too. My eyes ached with strain, as if I’d been outdoors in bright sunlight for too many hours.
It took me still another minute to get my legs to start moving again. After that I staggered to the nearest bathroom and cleaned up. I spent a little while poking at my memory and trying to see if there were any holes in it that hadn’t been there before. Then I spent a while more wondering if I’d be able to tell if she had taken something else.
“Jesus Christ,” I breathed, shivering.
Because though I hadn’t been in on the original attack on Mab’s tower, and when I did attack it I had been unwittingly serving Mab’s interests, the fact remained that I had indeed offered her the same insult as Thorned Namshiel. The lacerating fury that turned her voice into razor blades could very well be directed at me in the near future.
I hurried out of the chapel and went down to the cafeteria.
Being bullied into eating dinner sounded a lot more pleasant than it had a few minutes ago.
The doctor came into the waiting room at ten seventeen that night.
Charity came to her feet. She’d spent much of the day with her head bowed, praying quietly. She was beyond tears, at least for the moment, and she put a sheltering arm around her daughter, pulling Molly in close to her side.
“He’s in recovery,” the doctor said. “The procedures went…” The doctor sighed. He looked at least as tired as either of the Carpenter women. “As well as could be expected. Better, really. I hesitate to make any claims at this point, but he seems to be stable, and assuming there are no complications in the next hour or two, I think he’ll pull through.”
Charity bit her lip hard. Molly threw her arms around her mother.
“Thank you, Doctor,” Charity whispered.
The doctor smiled wearily. “You should realize that…the injuries were quite extensive. It’s unlikely that he’ll be able to fully recover from them. Brain damage is a possibility—we won’t know until he wakes up. Even if that isn’t an issue, the other trauma was severe. He may need assistance, possibly for the rest of his life.”
Charity nodded calmly. “He’ll have it.”
“That’s right,” Molly said.
“When can I see him?” Charity asked.
“We’ll bring him up in an hour or two,” the doctor said.
I cleared my throat. “Excuse me, Doc. Is he going to be on a respirator?”
“For the time being,” the doctor said. “Yes.”
I nodded. “Thank you.”
The doctor nodded to us, and Charity thanked him again. He left.
“Okay, grasshopper,” I said. “Time for us to clear out.”
“But they’re going to bring hi— Oh,” Molly said, crestfallen. “The respirator.”
“Better not to take any chances, huh?” I asked her.
“It’s all right, baby,” Charity said quietly. “I’ll call home as soon as he wakes up.”
They hugged tightly. Molly and I started walking out.
“Oh,” Molly said, her voice very tired. “I did that homework.”
I felt pretty tired, too. “Yeah?”
She nodded and smiled wearily up at me. “Charlemagne.”
I called Thomas, and he gave me and Molly a ride to Murphy’s place.
The night was clear. The cloud cover had blown off, and the moon and the stars got together with the snow to turn Chicago into a winter wonderland months ahead of schedule. The snow had stopped falling, though. I suppose that meant Mab had turned her attention elsewhere. Thomas dropped me off a short distance away, and then left to drive the grasshopper back to her home. I covered the last hundred yards or so on foot.
Murphy lives in a teeny little house that belonged to her grandmother. It was just a single story, with two bedrooms, a living room, and a little kitchen. It was meant for one person to live in, or possibly a couple with a single child. It was certainly overloaded by the mob of Wardens who had descended on the place. Luccio’s reinforcements had arrived.
There were four Wardens in the little living room, all of them grizzled veterans, two young members in the kitchen, and I was sure that there were at least two more outside, standing watch behind veils. I was challenged for a password in an amused tone by one of the young Wardens when I came in the kitchen door. I told him to do something impolite, please, and asked him where Luccio might be.
“That’s anatomically unlikely,” the young man replied in a British accent. He poured a second cup of steaming tea and
said, “Drink up. I’ll let her know you’re here.”
“Thanks.”
I was sipping tea and sitting at Murphy’s table when Luccio came in a few minutes later. “Give us the room, please, Chandler, Kostikos.”
The younger men cleared out to the living room—a polite illusion, really. The house was too small to provide much in the way of privacy.
Luccio poured herself a cup of tea and sat down across from me.
I felt my shoulders tense up a little. I forced myself to remain quiet, and sipped more tea.
“I’m concerned,” Luccio said quietly, “about the Archive.”
“Her name is Ivy,” I said.
She frowned. “That’s…part of my concern, Harry. Your personal closeness with her. It’s dangerous.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Dangerous? I’m in danger because I’m treating her like a real person?”
Luccio grimaced as if tasting something bitter. “Frankly? Yes.”
I thought about being diplomatic and polite. Honest, I really did. But while I was thinking about it, I accidentally bumped the button that puts my mouth on autopilot, because it said, “That’s a load of crap, Captain, and you know it.”
Her expression went still as the whole of her attention focused on me. “Is it?”
“Yes. She’s a kid. She’s alone. She’s not some computer database, and it’s inhuman to treat her like one.”
“Yes,” Luccio said bluntly. “It is. And it’s also the safest way to deal with her.”
“Safest for who?” I demanded.
Luccio took a sip of tea. “For everyone.”
I frowned down at my cup. “Tell me.”
She nodded. “The Archive…has been around for a long time. Always passed down in a family line, mother to daughter. Usually the Archive is inherited by a woman when she’s in her early to mid-thirties, when her mother dies, and after she’s given birth to her own daughter. Accidents are rare. Part of the Archive’s nature is a drive to protect itself, a need to avoid exposing the person hosting it to risk. And given the extensive knowledge available to it, the Archive is very good at avoiding risky situations in the first place. And, should they arise, the power available to the Archive generally ensures its survival. It is extremely rare for the host of an Archive to die young.”
