by Jim Butcher
I got back to my feet and hurled a club of raw force at Peabody, but he defeated it as he had the fireball, leapt through the gate, and ripped at the air, peeling open a passage between this world and the next.
He plunged through it.
“Son of a bitch,” I snarled. None of the young Wardens were moving, not even the wounded girl. If she didn’t get help, she would bleed to death in minutes. “Dammit!” I swore. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I threw myself onto the girl, ripping the belt off of my jeans and praying that the wound was far enough down her leg for a tourniquet to do any good.
Footsteps hammered the floor, and Anastasia Luccio appeared, gun in her good hand, her face white with pain. She slid to a halt next to me, breathing hard, set the weapon on the floor, and said, “I’ve got her. Go!”
On the other side of the security gate, the Way was beginning to close.
I rose and rushed it, diving forward. There was a flash of light, and the stone tunnel around me abruptly became a forest of dead trees that smelled strongly of mildew and stagnant water. Peabody was standing right in front of the Way as he tried to close it, and I hit him in a flying tackle before he could finish the job. He went over backward and we hit the ground hard.
For a stunned half second, neither of us moved, and then Peabody shifted his weight, and I caught the gleam of the bloodied dagger at the edge of my vision.
He thrust the point at my throat, but I got an arm in the way. He opened a vein. I grabbed at his wrist with my other hand, and he rolled, gaining the upper position and gripping the dagger with both hands, leaning against my one arm with all of his weight. Drops of my own blood fell onto my face as he forced the point slowly toward my eye.
I struggled to throw him off me, but he was stronger than he looked, and it was clear that he had more experience in close-quarters fighting than I did. I clubbed at him with my wounded arm, but he shrugged it off.
I felt my triceps giving way and watched the tip of the knife come closer. The breaking point was at hand and he knew it. He threw more effort into his attack, and the dagger’s tip suddenly stung hot against my lower eyelid.
Then there was a huge noise, and Peabody went away. I remained still for a stunned moment, and then looked up.
Morgan lay on the ground just inside the still-open Way, Luccio’s gun smoking in his hand, his wounded leg a mass of wet scarlet.
How he’d managed to run after us given his injury, I had no idea. Even with painkillers, it must have hurt like hell. He stared at Peabody’s body with hard eyes. Then his hand started to shake, and he dropped the gun to the ground.
He followed it down with a groan.
I went to him, breathing hard. “Morgan.” I turned him over and looked at his wound. It was soaked in blood, but it wasn’t bleeding much anymore. His face was white. His lips looked grey.
He opened his eyes calmly. “Got him.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You got him.”
He smiled a little. “That’s twice I pulled your ass out of the fire.”
I choked out a little laugh. “I know.”
“They’ll blame me,” he said quietly. “There’s no confession from Peabody, and I’m a better candidate politically. Let them pin it on me. Don’t fight it. I want it.”
I stared down at him. “Why?”
He shook his head, smiling wearily.
I stared down at him for long seconds, and then I got it. Morgan had been lying to me from the very start. “Because you already knew who killed LaFortier. She was there when you woke up in his chambers. You saw who did it. And you wanted to protect her.”
“Anastasia didn’t do it,” Morgan said, his voice intense and low. “She was a pawn. Asleep on her feet. She never even knew she was being used.” He shuddered. “Should have thought of that. She got put in that younger body, made her mind vulnerable to influence again.”
“What happened?” I asked.
“Woke up, LaFortier was dead, and she had the knife. Took it from her, veiled her, and pushed her out the door,” Morgan said. “Didn’t have time to get both of us out.”
“So you took the blame thinking you’d sort things out in the aftermath. But you realized that the frame was too good for anyone to believe you when you tried to tell them what was up.” I shook my head. Morgan hadn’t given a damn about his own life. He’d escaped when he realized that Anastasia had still been in danger, that he wouldn’t be able to expose the real traitor alone.
“Dresden,” he said quietly.
“Yeah?”
“I didn’t tell anyone about Molly. What she tried to do to Ana. I . . . I didn’t tell.”
I stared at him, unable to speak.
His eyes became cloudy. “Do you know why I didn’t? Why I came to you?”
I shook my head.
“Because I knew,” he whispered. He lifted his right hand, and I gripped it hard. “I knew that you knew how it felt to be an innocent man hounded by the Wardens.”
It was the closest he’d ever come to saying that he’d been wrong about me.
He died less than a minute later.
Chapter Forty-nine
Thorsen kept me from bleeding to death from the cut Peabody had given me. The Swede and his backup squad had been faced with a long run to catch up, a lot of locked gates, and the confusion we’d left in our wake. They reached me about three minutes after Morgan died. They did their best to revive Morgan, but his body had taken enough torment and lost too much blood. They didn’t even bother with Peabody. Morgan had double-tapped the traitor’s head with Luccio’s pistol.
They bundled me off to the infirmary, where Injun Joe and a crew of healers—some of whom had gone to medical school when the efficacy of leeches was still being debated—were caring for those wounded in the attack.
After that, things fell into place without requiring my participation.
The Senior Council managed to contain and banish the mordite-infused mistfiend, a rare and dangerous gaseous being from the far reaches of the Nevernever, before it had killed more than forty or fifty wizards. All things considered, it could have been a lot worse, but the fact that it had been the gathering of LaFortier’s former political allies who had been subject to the attack occasioned an enormous outcry of suspicion, with the offended parties claiming that the Merlin had disregarded their safety, been negligent in his security precautions, etc., etc. The fact that the attack had occurred while unmasking LaFortier’s true killer was brushed aside. There was political capital to be had.
Basically the entire supernatural world had heard about LaFortier’s death, the ensuing manhunt for Morgan, and the dustup during his trial, though most of the details were kept quiet. Though there was never any sort of official statement made, word got out that Morgan had been conspiring with Peabody, and that both of them had been killed during their escape attempt.
It was a brutal and callous way for the Council to save face. The Merlin decided that it was ultimately less dangerous for the wizards of the world if everyone knew that the Council responded to LaFortier’s murder with a statement of deadly strength and power—i.e., the immediate capture and execution of those responsible.
But I knew that whoever Peabody had been in bed with, the people who had really been responsible knew that the Council had killed an innocent man, and one of their largest military assets, at that, to get the job done.
Maybe the Merlin was right. Maybe it’s better to look stupid but strong than it is to look smart but weak. I don’t know. I’m not sure I want to believe that the world stage bears that strong a resemblance to high school.
The Council’s investigators worked more slowly than Lara’s had, but they got to the same information by following the money, eventually. The Council confronted the White Court with the information.
Lara sent them the heads of the persons responsible. Literally. Leave it to Lara to find a way to get one last bit of mileage out of Madeline and the business manager’s corpses. She told the Council to keep
the money, too, by way of apology. The next best thing to six million in cash buys a lot of oil to pour on troubled waters.
He might have wound up with his brains splattered all over a desolate little hellhole in the Nevernever, but Peabody had inflicted one hell of a lot of damage before he was through. A new age of White Council paranoia had begun.
The Merlin, the Gatekeeper, and Injun Joe investigated the extent of Peabody’s psychic infiltration. In some ways, the worst of what he’d done was the easiest to handle. Damn near every Warden under the age of fifty had been programmed with that go-to-sleep trance command, and it had been done so smoothly and subtly that it was difficult to detect even when the master wizards were looking and knew where to find it.
Ebenezar told me later that some of the young Wardens had been loaded up with a lot more in the way of hostile psychic software, though it was impossible for one wizard to know exactly what another had done. Several of them, apparently, had been intended to become the supernatural equivalent of suicide bombers—the way Luccio had been. Repairing that kind of damage was difficult, unpredictable, and often painful to the victim. It was a long summer and autumn for a lot of the Wardens, and a mandatory psychic self-defense regimen was instituted within weeks.
It was tougher for the members of the Senior Council, in my opinion, all of whom had almost certainly been influenced in subtle ways. They had to go back over their decisions for the past several years, and wonder if they had been pushed into making a choice, if it had been their own action, or if the ambiguity of any given decision had been natural to the environment. The touch had been so light that it hadn’t left any lasting tracks. For anyone with half a conscience, it would be a living nightmare, especially given the fact that they had been leading the Council in time of war.
I tried to imagine second-guessing myself on everything I’d done for the past eight years.
I wouldn’t be one of those guys for the world.
I was in the infirmary for a week. I got visits from McCoy, Ramirez, and Molly. Mouse stayed at my bedside, and no one tried to move him. Listens-to-Wind was a regular presence, since he was pretty much my doctor. Several of the young Wardens I had helped train stopped by to have a word, though all of them were looking nervous.
Anastasia never visited, though Listens-to-Wind said she had come by and asked after me when I was asleep.
The Gatekeeper came to see me in the middle of the night. When I woke up, he had already created a kind of sonic shield around us that made sure we were speaking in privacy. It made our voices sound like our heads were covered with large tin pails.
“How are you feeling?” he asked quietly.
I gestured at my face, which was no longer bandaged. As Listens-to-Wind had promised, my eye was fine. I had two beautiful scars, though, one running down through my right eyebrow, skipping my eye, and continuing for an inch or so on my cheekbone, and another one that went squarely through the middle of my lower lip and on a slight angle down over my chin. “Like Herr Harrison von Ford,” I said. “Dueling scars and beauty marks. The girls will be lining up now.”
The quip didn’t make him smile. He looked down at his hands, his expression serious. “I’ve been working with the Wardens and administrative staff whose minds Peabody invaded.”
“I heard.”
“It appears,” he said, choosing his words carefully, “that the psychic disruption to Anastasia Luccio was particularly severe. I was wondering if you might have any theories that might explain it.”
I stared across the darkened room quietly for a moment, then asked, “Did the Merlin send you?”
“I am the only one who knows,” he said seriously. “Or who will know.”
I thought about it for a moment before I said, “Would my theory make any difference in how she gets treated?”
“Potentially. If it seems sound, it might give me the insight I need to heal her more quickly and safely.”
“Give me your word,” I said. I wasn’t asking.
“You have it.”
“Before he died,” I said, “Morgan told me that when he woke up in LaFortier’s room, Luccio was holding the murder weapon.” I described the rest of what Morgan had told me of that night.
The Gatekeeper stared across the bed at the far wall, his face impassive. “He was trying to protect her.”
“I guess he figured the Council might do some wacky thing like sentencing an innocent person to death.”
He closed his eyes for a moment, and then touched the fingertips of his right hand to his heart, his mouth, and his forehead. “It explains some things.”
“Like what?”
He held up his hand. “In a moment. I told you that the damage to Anastasia was quite extensive. Not because she had been persuaded to do violence—that much came easily to her. I believe her emotional attitudes had been forcibly altered.”
“Emotional attitudes,” I said quietly. “You mean . . . her and me?”
“Yes.”
“Because she always believed in keeping her distance,” I said quietly. “Until recently.”
“Yes,” he said.
“She . . . never cared about me.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “There had to have been some kind of foundation upon which to build. It’s entirely possible that she genuinely felt fond of you, and that something might have grown from it. But it was forced into place instead.”
“Who would do that?” I shook my head. “No, that’s obvious. Why would he do that?”
“To keep tabs on you, perhaps,” the Gatekeeper replied. “Perhaps to have an asset in position to remove you, if it became necessary. You were, after all, virtually the only younger Warden who never gave Peabody an opportunity to exploit you, since you never came to headquarters. You’re also probably the most talented and powerful of your generation. The other young Wardens like to associate with you, generally, so there was every chance you might notice something amiss. Taken as a whole, you were a threat to him.”
I felt a little sick. “That’s why she showed up in Chicago when she should have been back at headquarters helping with the manhunt.”
“Almost certainly,” he said. “To give Peabody forewarning if you should get closer to his trail, and to locate Morgan so that Peabody could make him disappear. Morgan dead at the hands of White Council justice is one thing. Had Peabody succeeded, killed Morgan, and gotten rid of the body, then as far as we knew the traitor would be at large in the world, and uncatchable. It would have been a continuous stone around our necks.”
“And a perfect cover for Peabody,” I said. “He could off whoever he wanted, and given the slightest excuse, everyone would assume that it had been Morgan.”
“Not only Peabody,” the Gatekeeper said. “Any of our enemies might have taken advantage of it the same way.”
“And it also explains why he came to Chicago after I dropped that challenge on the Council. He probably thought that the fake informant was Anastasia. He had to go there to find out if his brainlock was holding.” I shook my head. “I mean, he never needed to come through that Way since he already knew one out to Demonreach. Christ, I got lucky.”
“Also true,” the Gatekeeper said. “Though I would suggest that your forethought allowed you to make your own luck.” He shook his head. “If Morgan had not acted so quickly, things might have been even worse. Luccio would have stood accused as well, and neither of them would have had any idea what had happened. Accusing Morgan was bad enough—the Wardens would not have stood for both the Captain and her second to be placed under arrest. It might have begun a civil war all on its own.”
“Morgan . . . he loved Luccio,” I said.
The Gatekeeper nodded. “He wore his heart on his sleeve for quite a while when he was younger. But she never let anyone close. In retrospect, it was a personality shift that should have been noted, though she kept her relationship with you discreet.”
I snorted quietly. “Easy to expect tampering when someone turns into a
foaming maniac,” I said. “When someone changes by becoming happy, it’s sort of hard not to be happy for them.”
He smiled, a brief flash of warmth. “Very true.”
“So she’s . . . I mean, when you help her start fixing the damage . . .”
“It’s already begun. Her subconscious has been struggling against the bindings placed in her mind for some time. Even if she’d felt something before, the fact that it was forced upon her will cause a backlash.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Things got sort of tense between us, I guess, after this whole situation got going. I mean, I sort of figured we’d already broken up, but . . .”
But this wasn’t a case of having loved and lost. She had never loved me. Madeline’s kiss, when she’d buried me in an avalanche of bliss while she took a bite from my life force, had proved that. Anastasia hadn’t ever been in love. Maybe she hadn’t ever really liked me. Or maybe she had. Or maybe it was all of the above.
Whatever it had been, it was over now, before it could grow into anything else, and neither of us had been given much of a choice in the matter.
I hadn’t expected it to hurt quite as much as it did.
Rashid put his hand on my shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you deserved to know.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice rough. “Thank you. I guess.” I found myself letting out a bitter little laugh.
The Gatekeeper tilted his head.
“I’ve been trying to work out why no one used magic on anyone at LaFortier’s murder.”
“What is your conclusion?”
“You can’t do anything with magic that you don’t really, truly believe in,” I said. “Some part of Luccio had to recognize that killing LaFortier was wrong. So she used a knife. Morgan could no more have unleashed magic upon a lawfully serving Senior Council member or onto his commanding officer than he could have apologized for how he’s treated me. And LaFortier never saw it coming from Anastasia. He probably died confused, never had a chance to use a spell.” I looked up at the Gatekeeper. “It wasn’t some big arcane, mysterious reason. It was because everyone was human.”
