by Jim Butcher
“In my experience,” he said, “that is more than mystery enough.”
I was gathering my things to leave and go back home when Ebenezar appeared in the doorway. “Hoss,” he said calmly. “Figured I would walk you home.”
“Appreciated, sir,” I told him. I had already sent Mouse home with Molly, and it was always a good idea to avoid walking the Ways alone. We started walking through the tunnels. I was heartily sick of them. I’m not claustrophobic or anything, but I think you’d need some kind of groundhog gene to enjoy living at White Council HQ.
We hadn’t gone far when I realized that Ebenezar was taking a roundabout route to the Way, through tunnels that were largely unused and unlit. He conjured a dim red light to his staff, just enough to let us see our way, and in the color least likely to be noticed.
“Well,” he said, “we filled LaFortier’s seat on the Senior Council today.”
“Klaus the Toymaker?” I asked.
Ebenezar shook his head slowly. “Klaus didn’t say it, but I suspect the Merlin asked him to decline. Gregori Cristos got the seat.”
I frowned. The seats on the Senior Council were awarded geriocratically. Whoever had the most years of service in the Council was offered the position of leadership, though there was nothing that required a wizard to accept a seat when it was available. “Who the hell is that? He’s not up at the top of the seniority list.”
My mentor grimaced. “Aye. A Greek, and an unpleasant bastard. He’s lived all through southern Asia over the past couple of centuries. Distinguished himself in the battle with that rakshasa raja the Council took on recently.”
“I remember when it happened,” I said. “I heard it was pretty crazy.”
Ebenezar grunted. “He was LaFortier’s protégé.”
I took that in, processing the logic. “I thought that bloc had been appeased.”
“When someone wants power, you can’t buy him off,” Ebenezar said. “He’ll take what you offer and keep on coming. And Cristos as much as told the Merlin that he and his allies would secede from the Council if he didn’t get the seat.”
“Jesus,” I said quietly.
He nodded. “Might as well give the Red Court the keys to all our gates and let them kill us in our sleep. Fewer bystanders would get hurt.”
“So the Merlin made a deal,” I said.
“Didn’t have a lot of choice. Cristos’s people gained a lot of support after they lost so many at the trial. He’d have taken a third of the Council with him.”
“Screw the selection process, huh?”
Ebenezar grimaced. “It’s never been codified by anything but tradition. Oh, the Merlin made a show of adhering to it, but I guarantee you it was arranged behind the scenes, Hoss.” He shook his head. “The Senior Council has issued official positions on LaFortier’s assassination.”
“Let me guess,” I said. “Lone gunman.”
He frowned at that for a moment, and then nodded. “Oh, Kennedy. Yes. It was an act of individuals motivated by profit. There is no evidence to suggest the presence of an organized conspiracy. There is no Black Council.”
I stared blankly at Ebenezar. “That’s . . . stupid.”
“Damn right,” he said. “But they had a majority. The Merlin, Cristos, Mai, Martha Liberty, and the Gatekeeper.”
I shook my head. “What the hell does he think he’s accomplishing?”
Ebenezar shrugged. “He’s never been easy to read. And I’ve known him since I was sixteen years old. Two or three explanations come to mind.”
“Like, maybe he’s Black Council.”
Ebenezar walked for several steps in silence. Then he said, “Aye.”
“Or maybe Peabody got to him harder than we all think,” I said.
“Improbable,” Ebenezar said. “The drugs he slipped the Senior Council let him nudge them . . . us. But we’re all too crusty to bend more than that.”
“What then?”
“Well, Hoss,” he said, “maybe Langtry’s worried about the consequences of officially acknowledging the Black Council.”
I felt a little chill glide over the nape of my neck. “He’s worried that if enough people knew that the Black Council was real, they wouldn’t line up to fight them. They’d join.”
“Everyone loves a winner,” Ebenezar said. “And we haven’t been looking too good lately. People are afraid. Cristos is building his influence on it.”
I stopped in my tracks and all but threw up on the cold stone floor.
Ebenezar stopped, putting his hand on my arm, and frowned in concern. “What is it, boy?”
“Sir,” I said, hearing my voice shake. “When Peabody came to the island . . .”
“Yes?”
“He wasn’t alone. Someone else came with him. Someone we never saw.”
We said nothing for a long minute.
“That’s only one explanation, Hoss,” Ebenezar said. “It’s not even a calculated estimate. It’s a flat-out guess.”
There was no conviction in his voice, though. Ebenezar felt the same thing I did. A hard gut feeling that left me certain—not pretty sure, but certain—that I was right. Besides. We were talking in whispers in an out-of-the-way corridor of our own damn stronghold. If that didn’t tell you something was seriously wrong with the White Council, I don’t know what would.
“They’re inside,” I whispered.
My mentor faced me gravely.
“That’s why they whacked LaFortier. To get their own man into position.” I leaned against the wall and shook my head. “They won.”
“They won the round,” he said. “Fight isn’t over.”
“It is for Morgan,” I said.
“But not for you,” he said with harsh intensity. “Morgan thought that saving your life was worth losing his own.” Ebenezar took a deep breath. Then he said, very quietly, “Hoss, it ain’t over. Some of us are going to do something about it.”
I looked at him sharply. “Do something?”
“It’s just a few, for now. Some wizards. Some key allies. People we know we can trust. I’m the only one who knows everyone involved. We’ve got to take this fight to the enemy. Learn more about them. Determine their goals. Shut them down.”
“Fight fire with fire, eh?”
Ebenezar smiled wryly. “In denying the existence of one conspiracy, Langtry has necessitated another.”
“And got himself a twofer with a side order of irony,” I said. “If the Black Council finds out about us, they’re going to jump for joy. They’ll expose us, call us the Black Council, and go on their merry way.”
“ ‘Us’ already, is it?” His eyes gleamed as he nodded. “And given what we’ll be doing, if the White Council finds out, they’re going to call it sedition. They’ll execute us.”
See what I mean? Just like Disneyland.
I thought about it for a minute. “You know that in every objective sense, we’re making a Black Council of our own.”
“Aye.”
“So where does that leave us?”
“With pure hearts and good intentions,” he answered. “Our strength shall be the strength of ten.”
I snorted loudly.
Ebenezar smiled wearily. “Well, Hoss, we’re not going to have much choice other than to be walking down some mighty dark alleys. And doing it in mighty questionable company. Maybe we should think of ourselves as . . . a Grey Council.”
“Grey Council,” I said. We started walking again, and after a few minutes, I asked him, “The world’s gotten darker and nastier, even in just the past few years. Do you think what we do will make a difference?”
“I think the same thing you do,” Ebenezar said. “That the only alternative is to stand around and watch everything go to hell.” His voice hardened. “We’re not going to do that.”
“Damn right we’re not,” I said.
We walked the rest of the way to Chicago together.
Murphy drove me down to get my car out of impound, and I caught her up on most of
what had happened on the way.
“You’re holding out on me,” she said, when I finished.
“Some,” I said. “Sort of necessary.”
She glanced at me as she drove and said, “Okay.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “It is?”
“You are beginning to deal with some scary people, Harry,” she said quietly. “And people are trusting you with secrets. I get that.”
“Thanks, Murph.”
She shook her head. “I don’t know, Harry. It means I’m trusting you to come to me when you’ve got something that intersects with my responsibilities. I’m a cop. If you screw me on something I should know . . .” She shrugged. “I don’t know if we could ever patch something like that up.”
“I hear you,” I said.
She shook her head. “I never really cared for Morgan. But I wish it hadn’t ended that way for him.”
I thought about that for a minute and then said, “I don’t know. He went out making a difference. He took out the traitor who had gotten hundreds of wizards killed. He kept him from getting away with God only knows what secrets.” I shrugged. “A lot of Wardens have gone down lately. As exits go, Morgan’s was a good one.” I smiled. “Besides. If he’d been around any longer, he might have had to apologize to me. That would have been a horrible way to go.”
“He had courage,” Murphy admitted. “And he had your back.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Did you go to his funeral?”
“No one did,” I said. “Officially, he was corpus non gratus. But we had a kind of a wake, later, unofficially. Told stories about him and came to the conclusion that he really was a paranoid, intolerant, grade-A asshole.”
Murphy smiled. “I’ve known guys like that. They can still be part of the family. You can still miss them when they’re gone.”
I swallowed. “Yeah.”
“Tell me you aren’t blaming yourself.”
“No,” I said, honestly. “I just wish something I’d done had made more of a difference.”
“You survived,” she said. “Under the circumstances, I think you did all right.”
“Maybe,” I said quietly.
“I went through that phone you sent me.” She meant Madeline’s phone, the one Binder had given me.
“What did you find?” I asked.
“The phone numbers to a lot of missing persons,” she said. “Where’s the owner?”
“With them.”
She pressed her lips together. “There were a lot of calls to a number I traced back to Algeria, and another in Egypt. A couple of restaurants, apparently.” She took an index card out of her pocket and passed it to me. It had the names and addresses of two businesses on it.
“What are they?” she asked.
“No clue,” I said. “Maybe Madeline’s contacts in the Black Council. Maybe nothing.”
“Important?”
“No clue. I guess we’ll file this under ‘wait and see.’ ”
“I hate that file,” she said. “How’s Thomas?”
I shrugged and looked down at my hands. “No clue.”
My apartment was a wreck. I mean, it’s never really a surgical theater—except for right after Morgan had shown up, I guess. But several days of frantic comings and goings, various injuries, and serving as Morgan’s sickbed had left some stains not even my faerie housekeepers could erase. The mattress wasn’t salvageable, much less the bedding, or the rug we’d transported his unconscious body on. It was all soaked in blood and sweat, and the various housekeeping faeries apparently didn’t do dry cleaning.
They’d taken care of the usual stuff, but there was considerable work still to be done, and moving mattresses is never joyful, much less when you’ve been thoroughly banged up by a supernatural heavyweight and then stabbed, just for fun, on top of it.
I set about restoring order, though, and I was hauling the mattress out to tie onto my car so that I could take it to the dump, when Luccio arrived.
She was dressed in grey slacks and a white shirt, and carried a black nylon sports equipment bag, which would hold, I knew, the rather short staff she favored and her Warden’s blade, among other things. The clothes were new. I realized, belatedly, that they’d been the sort that she’d favored when I first met her, wearing another body.
“Hey,” I panted. “Give me a second.”
“I’ll give you a hand,” she replied. She helped me maneuver the mattress onto the top of the Blue Beetle, and then we tied it off with some clothesline. She checked the knots, making sure everything was just so, and then leaned on the car, studying my face.
I looked back at her.
“Rashid said he talked to you,” she said.
I nodded. “Didn’t want to push.”
“I appreciate that. Quite a bit, actually.” She looked off to one side. Mouse, now that the work was done, came out of a shamelessly lazy doze he’d been holding in the doorway and trotted over to Luccio. He sat down and offered her his paw.
She smiled quietly and took it. Then she ruffled the fur behind his ears with her fingers, the way she knew he liked, and stood up. “I, ah . . . I wanted to be sure you were recovering.”
“That’s very responsible of you,” I said.
She winced. “Ah. Dammit to hell, Dresden.” She shook her head. “I spent almost two hundred years not getting close to anyone. For damn good reasons. As can be evidenced by what happened here.”
“Can it?”
She shook her head. “I was . . . distracted, by you. By . . . us, I suppose. Maybe if I hadn’t been, I’d have seen something. Noticed something. I don’t know.”
“I kind of thought that you were distracted by the mind mage who had you twisted in knots.”
She grimaced. “They’re separate things. And I know that. But at the same time, I don’t know that. And here I’m talking like some flustered teenager.” She put her hands on her hips, her mouth set in annoyance. “I’m not good at this. Help.”
“Well,” I said. “I take it that you came here to let me know that you weren’t going to keep pursuing . . . whatever it is we had.”
“It’s not because of you,” she said.
“I know,” I said. “Never was, was it?”
She exhaled through her nose, a slow sigh. Her eyes lingered on me. “I’ve always liked you, Dresden. For a long time, I thought you were dangerous. Then I saw you in action against the Heirs of Kemmler, and I respected you.” She smiled slightly. “You’re funny. I like that.”
“But?” I asked.
“But someone pushed me toward you,” she said. “And that pisses me off. And . . .” She started weeping, though her posture and her voice didn’t waver. “And I thought that maybe I had broken through some kind of . . . scar. Or old wound. Or something. That I had grown closer to you, and maybe would keep growing closer to you, and it made me feel . . .” She shook her head as her voice finally broke. “Young. It made everything feel new.”
I walked around the car to stand in front of her. I reached a hand toward her shoulder, but she raised hers in a gesture of denial. “But it was a lie. I’m not young, Harry. I’m not new. I’ve seen and done things that . . . that you can’t understand. That I pray to God you’ll never need to understand.” She took a deep breath. “This is ridiculous. I should be better at handling this.”
“What’s wrong?” I asked quietly. “I mean, other than the obvious.”
“I got to have sex again,” she snarled. “And I liked it. I really liked it. I had forgotten exactly how mind-numbingly incredible sex is. And right now I’m having trouble forming complete sentences because I want to rip your shirt off and bite your shoulder while you’re still sweating while you—” She broke off abruptly, her cheeks turning bright red. “You’re not even forty.”
I leaned against the car, looking at her, and started laughing quietly.
She shook her head, scowling ferociously at me, her dark eyes bright. “How am I supposed to give you orders, now?” s
he asked. “When you and I have . . . done all the things we’ve done.”
“Well. What if I promise not to put the pictures on the Internet.”
She blinked at me. “Pictures . . . you are joking, Dresden? Aren’t you?”
I nodded.
“Because I had quite enough of that during my first young adult-hood,” she said. “Italy may not have had an Internet back then, but you’d be shocked how quickly pictures can circulate even when they’re painted on canvas.”
“Ana,” I said quietly.
She bit her lip and looked at me.
I reached out and took her hands. I squeezed them. Then I lifted them to my lips and kissed them each once, gently. “Whatever the reason, I’m happy to remember the time we had.”
She blinked her eyes several times, looking up at me.
“I get it,” I said. “Things have changed. And maybe that time is over. But you’ll be okay. And I’ll be okay. You don’t have to feel guilty about that.”
She lifted my hands to her lips and kissed them, once each, just as I had. A tear fell on my knuckle. “I’m sorry,” she said.
“It’ll be okay,” I said. “It’s okay.”
She nodded and looked up at me. I could see the calm, collected strength of the Captain of the Wardens, ready to assume its guiding role. I could see the uncertainty of Anastasia, who hadn’t been close to anyone in a long time. And maybe I could see something lonely and sad that was a part of who she had been when she was a young woman, well over a century before I was born.
“Goodbye, Harry,” she whispered.
“Goodbye, Ana,” I said.
She squeezed my hands and turned to walk away. She stopped after half a dozen paces and looked back.
“Dresden?”
I looked at her.
“Rashid doesn’t talk much about the night Morgan died. I barely remember anything myself, after Peabody said what he said.”
I knew what she was after. “He wasn’t alone,” I said. “I was with him. And he knew that he’d found the traitor. He was content.”
