by Jim Butcher
“Relax. It was off the books. I know a guy.”
Morgan grunted. Then he licked cracked lips and said, “Is there anything to drink?”
I got him some cold water in a sports bottle with a big straw. He knew better than to guzzle. He sipped at it slowly. Then he took a deep breath, grimaced like a man about to intentionally put his hand in a fire, and said, “Thank y—”
“Oh shut up,” I said, shuddering. “Neither of us wants that conversation.”
Maybe I imagined it, but it looked like he relaxed slightly. He nodded and closed his eyes again.
“Don’t go back to sleep yet,” I told him. “I still have to take your temperature. It would be awkward.”
“God’s beard, yes,” Morgan said, opening his eyes. I went and got my thermometer, one of the old-fashioned ones filled with mercury. When I came back, Morgan said, “You didn’t turn me in.”
“Not yet,” I said. “I’m willing to hear you out.”
Morgan nodded, accepted the thermometer, and said, “Aleron LaFortier is dead.”
He stuck the thermometer in his mouth, presumably to attempt to kill me with the suspense. I fought back by thinking through the implications, instead.
LaFortier was a member of the Senior Council—seven of the oldest and most capable wizards on the planet, the ones who ran the White Council and commanded the Wardens. He was—had been—skinny, bald, and a sanctimonious jerk. I’d been wearing a hood at the time, so I couldn’t be certain, but I suspected that his voice had been the first of the Senior Council to vote guilty at my trial, and had argued against clemency for my crimes. He was a hard-line supporter of the Merlin, the head of the Council, who had been dead set against me.
All in all, a swell guy.
But he’d also been one of the best-protected wizards in the world. All the members of the Senior Council were not only dangerous in their own rights, but protected by details of Wardens, to boot. Attempted assassinations had been semiregular events during the war with the vampires, and the Wardens had become very, very good at keeping the Senior Council safe.
I did some math from there.
“It was an inside job,” I said quietly. “Like the one that killed Simon at Archangel.”
Morgan nodded.
“And they blamed you?”
Morgan nodded and took the thermometer out of his mouth. He glanced at it, and then passed to me. I looked. Ninety-nine and change.
I met his eyes and said, “Did you do it?”
“No.”
I grunted. I believed him.
“Why’d they finger you?”
“Because they found me standing over LaFortier’s body with the murder weapon in my hand,” he replied. “They also turned up a newly created account, in my name, with several million dollars in it, and phone records that showed I was in regular contact with a known operative of the Red Court.”
I arched an eyebrow. “Gosh. That was irrational of them, to jump to that conclusion.”
Morgan’s mouth turned up in a small sour smile.
“What’s your story?” I asked him.
“I went to bed two nights ago. I woke up in LaFortier’s private study in Edinburgh, with a lump on the back of my head and a bloody dagger in my hand. Simmons and Thorsen burst into the room maybe fifteen seconds later.”
“You were framed.”
“Thoroughly.”
I exhaled a slow breath. “You got any proof? An alibi? Anything?”
“If I did,” he said, “I wouldn’t have had to escape custody. Once I realized that someone had gone to a lot of effort to set me up to take the blame, I knew that my only chance—” He broke off, coughing.
“Was to find the real killer,” I finished for him. I passed him the drink again, and he choked down a few sips, slowly relaxing.
A few minutes later, he turned exhausted eyes to mine. “Are you going to turn me in?”
I looked at him for a silent minute, and then sighed. “It’d be a lot easier.”
“Yes,” Morgan said.
“You sure you were going down for it?”
Something in his expression became even more remote than usual. He nodded. “I’ve seen it often enough.”
“So I could leave you hanging out to dry.”
“You could.”
“But if I did that, we wouldn’t find the traitor. And since you’d died in his place, he’d be free to continue operating. More people would get killed, and the next person he framed—”
“—might be you,” Morgan finished.
“With my luck?” I said glumly. “No might about it.”
The brief sour smile appeared on his face again.
“They’re using tracking spells to follow you,” I said. “I assume you’ve taken some kind of countermeasure, or they’d already be at the door.”
He nodded.
“How long is it going to last?”
“Forty-eight hours. Sixty at the most.”
I nodded slowly, thinking. “You’re running a fever. I’ve got some medical supplies stashed. I’ll get them for you. Hopefully we can keep it from getting any worse.”
He nodded again, and then his sunken eyes closed. He’d run out of gas. I watched him for a minute, then turned and started gathering up my things.
“Keep an eye on him, boy,” I said to Mouse.
The big dog settled down on the floor beside the bed.
Forty-eight hours. I had about two days to find the traitor within the White Council—something no one had been able to do during the past several years. After that, Morgan would be found, tried, and killed—and his accomplice, your friendly neighborhood Harry Dresden, would be next.
Nothing motivates like a deadline.
Especially the literal kind.
Chapter Three
I got in my busted-up old Volkswagen bug, the mighty Blue Beetle, and headed for the cache of medical supplies.
The problem with hunting down the traitor in the White Council was simple: because of the specific information leaks that had occurred, there were a limited number of people who could have possessed the information. The suspect pool was damn small—just about everyone in it was a member of the Senior Council, and everyone there was beyond reproach.
The second someone threw an accusation at one of them, things were going to get busy, and fast. If an innocent was fingered, they would react the same way Morgan had. Knowing full well that the justice of the Council was blind, especially to annoying things like facts, they would have little choice but to resist.
One punky young wizard like me bucking the system was one thing, but when one of the heavyweights on the Senior Council did it, there would be a world of difference. The Senior Council members all had extensive contacts in the Council. They all had centuries of experience and skill to back up enormous amounts of raw strength. If one of them put up a fight, it would mean more than resisting arrest.
It would mean internal strife like the White Council had never seen.
It would mean civil war.
And, under the circumstances, I couldn’t imagine anything more disastrous for the White Council. The balance of power between the supernatural nations was a precarious thing—and we had barely managed to hang on throughout the war with the Vampire Courts. Both sides were getting their wind back now, but the vampires could replace their losses far more quickly than we could. If the Council dissolved into infighting now, it would trigger a feeding frenzy amongst our foes.
Morgan had been right to run. I knew the Merlin well enough to know that he wouldn’t blink twice before sacrificing an innocent man if it meant holding the Council together, much less someone who might actually be guilty.
Meanwhile, the real traitor would be clapping his hands in glee. One of the Senior Council was already down, and if the Council as a whole didn’t implode in the next few days, it would become that much rifer with paranoia and distrust, following the execution of the most capable and highly accomplished combat commander in t
he Wardens. All the traitor would need to do was rinse and repeat, with minor variations, and sooner or later something would crack.
I would only get one shot at this. I had to find the guilty party, and I had to be right and irrefutable the very first time.
Colonel Mustard, in the den, with the lead pipe.
Now all I needed was a clue.
No pressure, Harry.
My half brother lived in an expensive apartment on the very edge of the Gold Coast area, which, in Chicago, is where a whole lot of people with a whole lot of money live. Thomas runs an upscale boutique, specializing in the kind of upper-crust clientele who seem to be willing to pay a couple hundred dollars for a haircut and a blow-dry. He does well for himself, too, as evidenced by his expensive address.
I parked a few blocks west of his apartment, where the rates weren’t quite so Gold Coasty, and then walked in to his place and leaned on his buzzer. No one answered. I checked the clock in the lobby, then folded my arms, leaned against a wall, and waited for him to get home from work.
His car pulled into the building’s lot a few minutes later. He’d replaced the enormous Hummer that we’d managed to trash with a brand-new ridiculously expensive car—a Jaguar, with plenty of flash and gold trim. It was, needless to say, pure white. I kept on lurking, waiting for him to come around to the doors.
He did, a minute later. He was maybe a hair or three under six feet tall, dressed in midnight blue leather pants and a white silk shirt with big blousy sleeves. His hair was midnight black, presumably to complement the pants, and fell in rippling waves to just below his shoulders. He had grey eyes, teeth whiter than the Ku Klux Klan, and a face that had been made for fashion magazines. He had the build to go with it, too. Thomas made all those Spartans in that movie look like slackers, and he didn’t even use an airbrush.
He raised his dark brows as he saw me. “ ’Arry,” he said in the hideously accurate French accent he used in public. “Good evening, mon ami.”
I nodded to him. “Hey. We need to talk.”
His smile faded as he took in my expression and body language, and he nodded. “But of course.”
We went on up to his apartment. It was immaculate, as always, the furnishings expensive, modern, and oh so trendy, with a lot of brushed nickel finish in evidence. I went in, leaned my quarterstaff against the frame of the front door, and slouched down onto one of the couches. I looked at it for a minute.
“How much did you pay for this?” I asked him.
He dropped the accent. “About what you did for the Beetle.”
I shook my head, and tried to find a comfortable way to sit. “That much money, you’d think they could afford more cushions. I’ve sat on fences more comfy than this.”
“That’s because it isn’t really meant to be sat upon,” Thomas replied. “It’s meant to show people how very wealthy and fashionable one is.”
“I got one of my couches for thirty bucks at a garage sale. It’s orange and green plaid, and it’s tough not to fall asleep in it when you sit down.”
“It’s very you,” Thomas said, smiling as he crossed to the kitchen. “Whereas this is very much me. Or very much my persona, anyway. Beer?”
“Long as it’s cold.”
He returned with a couple of dark brown bottles coated in frost, and passed me one. We took the tops off, clinked, and then he sat down on the chair across from the couch as we drank.
“Okay,” he said. “What’s up?”
“Trouble,” I replied. I told him about Morgan.
Thomas scowled. “Empty night, Harry. Morgan? Morgan!? What’s wrong with your head?”
I shrugged. “I don’t think he did it.”
“Who cares? Morgan wouldn’t cross the street to piss on you if you were on fire,” Thomas growled. “He’s finally getting his comeuppance. Why should you lift a finger?”
“Because I don’t think he did it,” I said. “Besides. You haven’t thought it through.”
Thomas slouched back in the chair and regarded me with narrowed eyes as he sipped at his beer. I joined him, and let him mull it over in silence. There was nothing wrong with Thomas’s brain.
“Okay,” he said, grudgingly. “I can think of a couple of reasons you’d want to cover his homicidal ass.”
“I need the medical stuff I left with you.”
He rose and went to the hall closet—which was packed to groaning with all manner of household articles that build up when you stay in one place for a while. He removed a white toolbox with a red cross painted on the side of it, and calmly caught a softball that rolled off the top shelf before it hit his head. He shut everything in again, got a cooler out of his fridge, and put it and the medical kit on the floor next to me.
“Please don’t tell me that this is all I can do,” he said.
“No. There’s something else.”
He spread his hands. “Well?”
“I’d like you to find out what the Vampire Courts know about the manhunt. And I need you to stay under the radar while you do it.”
He stared at me for a moment, and then exhaled slowly. “Why?”
I shrugged. “I’ve got to know more about what’s going on. I can’t ask my people. And if a bunch of people know you’re asking around, someone is going to connect some dots and take a harder look at Chicago.”
My brother the vampire went completely still for a moment. It isn’t something human beings can do. All of him, even the sense of his presence in the room, just . . . stopped. I felt like I was staring at a wax figure.
“You’re asking me to bring Justine into this,” he said.
Justine was the girl who had been willing to give her life for my brother. And who he’d nearly killed himself to protect. “Love” didn’t begin to cover what they had. Neither did “broken.”
My brother was a vampire of the White Court. For him, love hurt. Thomas and Justine couldn’t ever be together.
“She’s the personal aide of the leader of the White Court,” I said. “If anyone’s in a good position to find out, she is.”
He rose, the motion a little too quick to be wholly human, and paced back and forth in agitation. “She’s already taking enough risks, feeding information on the White Court’s activities back to you when it’s safe for her to do it. I don’t want her taking more chances.”
“I get that,” I said. “But situations like this are the whole reason she went undercover in the first place. This is exactly the kind of thing she wanted to do when she went in.”
Thomas mutely shook his head.
I sighed. “Look, I’m not asking her to deactivate the tractor beam, rescue the princess, and escape to the fourth moon of Yavin. I just need to know what she’s heard and what she can find out without blowing her cover.”
He paced for another half a minute or so before he stopped and stared at me hard. “Promise me something, first.”
“What?”
“Promise me that you won’t put her in any more danger than she already is. Promise me that you won’t act on any information they could trace back to her.”
“Dammit, Thomas,” I said wearily. “That just isn’t possible. There’s no way to know exactly which information will be safe to use, and no way to know for certain which bits of data might be misinformation.”
“Promise me,” he said, emphasizing both words.
I shook my head. “I promise that I’ll do absolutely everything in my power to keep Justine safe.”
His jaws clenched a few times. The promise didn’t satisfy him—though it was probably more accurate to say that the situation didn’t satisfy him. He knew I couldn’t guarantee her complete safety and he knew that I’d given him everything I could.
He took a deep, slow breath.
Then he nodded.
“Okay,” he said.
Chapter Four
About five minutes after I left Thomas’s place, I found myself instinctively checking the rearview mirror every couple of seconds and recognized the
quiet tension that had begun to flow through me. My gut was telling me that I’d picked up a tail.
Granted, it was only an intuition, but hey. Wizard, over here. My instincts had earned enough credibility to make me pay attention to them. If they told me someone was following me, it was time to start watching my back.
If someone was following me, it wasn’t necessarily connected to the current situation with Morgan. I mean, it didn’t absolutely have to be, right? But I hadn’t survived a ton of ugly furballs by being thick all of the time. Generally, maybe, but not all the time, and I’d be an idiot to assume that my sudden company was unconnected to Morgan.
I took a few turns purely for fun, but I couldn’t spot any vehicles following mine. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. A good surveillance team, working together, could follow a target all but invisibly, especially at night, when every car on the road looked pretty much like the same pair of headlights. Just because I couldn’t see them didn’t mean that they weren’t there.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I felt my shoulders ratcheting tighter with each passing streetlight.
What if my pursuer wasn’t in a car?
My imagination promptly treated me to visions of numerous winged horrors, soaring silently on batlike wings just above the level of the ambient light of the city, preparing to dive down upon the Blue Beetle and tear it into strips of sheet metal. The streets were busy, as they almost always were in this part of town. It was one hell of a public location for a hit, but that didn’t automatically preclude the possibility. It had happened to me before.
I chewed on my lower lip and thought. I couldn’t go back to my apartment until I was sure that I had shaken the tail. To do that, I’d have to spot him.
I wasn’t going to get through the next two days without taking some chances. I figured I might as well get started.
I drew in a deep breath, focused my thoughts, and blinked slowly, once. When I opened my eyes again, I brought my Sight along with them.
A wizard’s Sight, his ability to perceive the world around him in a vastly broadened spectrum of interacting forces, is a dangerous gift. Whether it’s called spirit vision, or inner sight, or the Third Eye, it lets you perceive things you’d otherwise never be able to interact with. It shows you the world the way it really is, matter all intertwined with a universe of energy, of magic. The Sight can show you beauty that would make angels weep humble tears, and terrors that the Black-Goat-with-a-Thousand-Young wouldn’t dare use for its kids’ bedtime stories.
