SMALL FAVOR tdf-10

by Jim Butcher

  I spocked an eyebrow and gave him a look. Sanya gave him one very nearly as dubious as mine.

  Michael glanced at me and then back out at the water. “I asked.”

  “Uh-huh,” I said quietly.

  Sanya smiled faintly and shook his head.

  I glanced at him. “Still agnostic, huh?”

  “Some things I am willing to take on faith,” Sanya said with a shrug.

  “Luccio took down two,” I told Michael. “What’s the count?” I didn’t need to be any more specific than that.

  Sanya’s grin broadened. “That is the good news.”

  I turned to face Sanya. “Those assholes just carried off a child that they plan to torture into accepting a Fallen angel,” I said quietly. “There isn’t any good news.”

  The big Russian’s expression sobered. “Good is where you find it,” he seriously.

  “Eleven,” Michael said quietly.

  I blinked at him. “What?”

  “Eleven,” he repeated. “Eleven of them fell here today. Judging from the wounds, Kincaid killed five of them. Captain Luccio killed two more. Sanya and I caught a pair on the way out. One of them was carrying a bag with the coins of those who had already fallen.”

  “We found the coin of Urumviel, which we knew to be in possession of a victim,” Sanya said, “but we were short by one body.”

  “That one was mine,” I said. “He’s tiny pieces of soot and ash now. And that only brings us to ten.”

  “One more drowned when that tank collapsed,” Michael said. “They’re floating down there. Eleven of them, Harry.” He shook his head. “Eleven. Do you realize what this means?”

  “That if we whack one more, we get the complimentary steak knives?”

  He turned to me, his eyes intent and bright. “Tessa escaped with only four other members of her retinue, and Nicodemus was nowhere to be found. We have recovered thirteen coins already-and eleven more today, assuming we can find them all.”

  “Only six coins remain free to do harm,” Sanya said. “Only six. Those six are the last. And they are all here in Chicago. Together.”

  “The Fallen in the coins have been waging a war for the minds and lives of mankind for two thousand years, Harry,” Michael said. “And we have fought them. That war could end. It could all be over.” He turned back to the pool and shook his head, his expression that of a man baffled. “I could go to Alicia’s softball games. Teach little Harry to ride a bicycle. I could build houses, Harry.”

  The longing in his voice was so thick, I could practically feel it brushing against my face.

  “Let’s round up the coins and get out of here before the flashing lights show up,” I said quietly. “Michael, open up the bundle.”

  He frowned at me but did, revealing disks of tarnished silver. I drew the pair of coins I’d found from my pocket with my gloved hand and added them to the pile. “Thanks,” I said. “Let’s get moving.”

  I turned and walked away as Michael folded the cloth closed around the coins again, his eyes distant, presumably focused on some dream of shoving those coins down a deep, dark hole and living a boring, simple, normal life with his wife and kids.

  I let him have it while he could.

  I was going to have to take that dream away from him, dammit.

  Whether he wanted to go along with the idea or not.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  I slept in the cab of Michael’s truck all the way back to his place, leaning against the passenger-side window. Sanya had the middle seat. I was dimly aware that they were speaking quietly to each other on the way home, but their voices were just low rumbles, especially Sanya’s, and I tuned them out until the truck crunched to a halt.

  “It doesn’t matter,” Michael was saying in a patient voice. “Sanya, we don’t recruit members. We’re not a chapter of the Masons. It’s got to be a calling.”

  “We act in the interests of God on a daily basis,” Sanya said in a reasonable voice. “If He is being slow to call a new wielder for Fidelacchius, perhaps it is a subtle hint that He wishes us to take on the responsibility for ourselves.”

  “Don’t you keep assuring me you are undecided on whether or not God exists?” Michael asked.

  “I am speaking to you in your idiom, to make you comfortable,” Sanya said. “She would make a good Knight.”

  Michael sighed. “Perhaps the reason no new wielder has been called is because our task is nearly complete. Perhaps one isn’t needed.”

  Sanya’s voice turned dry. “Yes. Perhaps all evil, everywhere, is about to be destroyed forever and there will be no more need for the strength to protect those who cannot protect themselves.” He sighed. “Or perhaps…” he began, glancing at me. He saw me blinking my eyes open and hurriedly said, “Dresden. How are you feeling?”

  “Nothing a few days in a hospital, a new set of lungs, a keg of Mac’s dark, and a pair of feisty redheads couldn’t cure,” I mumbled. I tried for cavalier, but it came out a little flatter and darker than I’d meant it to. “I’ll live.”

  Michael nodded and parked the truck. “When do we go after them?”

  “We don’t,” I said quietly. “They’ve developed some kind of stealth defense against being found or scried upon magically.”

  Michael frowned. “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure it’s really hard to defeat someone you can’t find, Michael.” I rubbed at my eyes and all but slapped my own hand away, it hurt so much. Ow. Stupid broken nose. Stupid Tessa tweaking it.

  “You need to get some sleep, Harry,” Michael said quietly.

  “And perhaps a shower,” Sanya suggested.

  “You smell like dolphin water too, big guy,” I shot back.

  “But not nearly so much,” he said. “And I didn’t throw up on myself.”

  I glowered at him for a second. “Isn’t Sanya a girl’s name?”

  Michael snorted. “Get some sleep first, Harry.”

  “After,” I said. “First things first. War council in the kitchen. And if someone doesn’t make me a cup of coffee, I’m going to shimmy dry all over everything, like Mouse.”

  “Mouse is too polite to do that in my house,” Michael said.

  “Like somebody else’s dog then,” I said. “Crap, I forgot my staff.”

  Michael swung out of the truck, reached into the bed of the pickup, and lifted my staff out of it. I got out, and he tossed it to me across the back of the truck. I caught it in my left hand and nodded to him. “Bless you. It’s a real pain to make one of these. Way harder to carve out than, uh…” I shook my head as my thoughts wandered off-track. “Sorry. Long day.”

  “Get inside before you take a chill,” Michael said quietly.

  “Good idea.”

  We trooped in. The others arrived over the next twenty minutes or so. Gard had insisted on taking Kincaid by one of Marcone’s buildings-probably someplace where he kept medical supplies for those times when he didn’t want the police wondering why his employees came in with gunshot or knife wounds. To my amusement, Murphy had insisted on accompanying Kincaid-which meant that the cops were about to learn the location of another of Marcone’s secret stashes, maybe even the name of whatever doctor he had on his payroll. And since it was Murphy’s car, and Murphy was with me, and Gard needed my help, there wasn’t diddly Gard could do about it.

  That’s my Murphy, manufacturing her own damned silver lining when the clouds didn’t cough one up.

  Mouse was delighted to see me, and greeted me with much fond twitching and bumping against my legs and tail wagging. He, at least, thought I merely smelled interesting. Molly greeted us with only slightly less enthusiasm, and immediately set about making food for everyone. It turns out that Molly wasn’t her mother’s daughter in that respect. Charity was like the MacGyver of the kitchen. She could whip up a five-course meal for twelve from an egg, two spaghetti noodles, some household chemicals, and a stick of chewing gum. Molly…

  Molly once burned my egg. My boiled egg. I don
’t know how.

  She could, however, make a mean cup of coffee.

  Once Kincaid had been settled down on the guest bed in Charity’s sewing room, everyone else gathered in the kitchen. Murphy looked strained. I poured her a cup of joe, and she came to stand next to me. I offered Luccio one as well. She accepted with a small, grateful nod.

  “How is he?” she asked Murphy.

  “Sleeping,” Murphy said. “Gard got him some painkillers.”

  I guzzled coffee, fighting off a round of chills. “Okay, people. Here’s the situation. We are bent over, greased up, and Nicodemus and his crew are about to drive one of those Japanese bullet trains right up our collective ass.”

  The room went quiet.

  “They took Ivy,” I said. “That’s bad.”

  “Harry,” Murphy said, “I know I’m the new kid, but you’re going to have to explain this thing with the little girl to me again.”

  “Ivy is the Archive,” I said quietly. “A long time ago-we don’t know when-somebody-we don’t know who-created the Archive. A kind of intellectual construct.”

  “What?” Sanya asked.

  “A kind of entity composed of pure information. Think of it as software for the brain,” Luccio said. “Like a very advanced database management system.”

  “Ah,” Sanya said, nodding.

  I arched an eyebrow at Luccio in surprise.

  She shrugged, smiling a little. “I like computers. I read all about them. It’s…my hobby, really. I understand the theory behind them.”

  “Right,” I said. “Ahem. Okay. The Archive is passed from one generation to the next, mother to daughter-all the memories of the previous bearers of the Archive, and all the facts they have gathered.

  “All that knowledge makes the Archive powerful-and it was created as a repository of learning, a safeguard against the possibility of a cataclysm of civilization, a loss of all knowledge, the destruction of all learning. It was bound to neutrality, to the preservation and gathering of knowledge.”

  “Gathering?” Murphy said. “So…the Archive reads a lot?”

  “It goes deeper than that,” I said. “The Archive is a magic so complex that it’s practically alive-and it just knows. Anything that gets printed or written down, the Archive knows.”

  Hendricks said a bad word.

  “Sideways,” I agreed. “That’s what Nicky and the Nickelheads have taken.”

  “With that kind of information at their disposal,” Murphy said, “they could…My God, they could blackmail officials. Control governments.”

  “Launch nuclear warheads,” I said. “Stop thinking so small.” I nodded at Michael. “Remember, you told me that Nicodemus was playing Armageddon lotto. He makes big plans, but he plots them out so that he can make an incremental profit along the way. This was just one more scheme.”

  Michael frowned. “He was after the Archive all along? He deliberately came here and provoked a confrontation to get you to call her in to arbitrate?”

  “That isn’t much of a plan,” Luccio said. “You could have chosen any one of a dozen neutral arbiters.”

  Murphy snorted. “But it’s Dresden. He’s lived in the same apartment since I first met him. Drives the same car. Drinks at that same little pub. Favorite restaurant is Burger King. He gets the same damned meal every time he goes there, too.”

  “You can’t improve on perfection,” I said. “That’s why it’s called perfection. And what’s your point?”

  “You’re a creature of habit, Harry. You don’t like change.”

  There wasn’t much use denying that. “Even if I hadn’t called Ivy, Nicodemus still could realize some gains. Maybe recruit Marcone. Maybe kill off Michael or Sanya. Maybe ditch some deadwood within his own organization. Who knows? The point is, I did call Ivy in, he did get the opportunity to take her down, and it paid off.”

  “But the Archive was created neutral,” Sanya said. “Constrained. You said so yourself.”

  “The Archive was,” I said. “But Ivy wasn’t, and Ivy controls the Archive. She’s still a child. That child can be hurt. Frightened. Coerced. Tempted.” I rubbed at the spot between my eyes. “They want to make her one of them. Probably hoping to gobble up Marcone along the way.”

  “God help us if they’re taken,” Murphy said quietly.

  “God help them if they’re taken,” Michael murmured. “We have to find them, Harry.”

  “Not even Mab could locate the Denarians with magic,” I said. “Gard. Could your firm do any better?”

  She shook her head.

  I glanced at Michael. “I don’t suppose anyone’s drawn a big flashing arrow in the sky for you two to see?”

  Michael shook his head, his expression sober. “I looked.”

  “Okay, then. Barring divine intervention we have no way of finding them.” I took a deep breath. “So. We’re going to make them find us.”

  “That would be a good trick if we could do it,” Sanya said. “What did you have in mind?”

  Hendricks lifted his head suddenly. “Coins.”

  Everyone turned to stare at him.

  Hendricks counted on his fingers for a second. “They only got six. And six people. So how they gonna get the creepy little girl a coin? Or one for the boss?”

  “Good thinking, Cujo,” I said. “It’ll only hurt for a minute. But we’ve got to move fast to make it work. Nicodemus can’t afford to throw away any more manpower, but his conscience won’t hesitate for one itty-bitty second to kill one of his own people for their coin, if it comes to that. So we’re going to offer him a trade. Eleven old nickels in exchange for the girl.”

  Michael and Sanya both came to their feet in an instant, speaking loudly and in two different languages. It was hard to make out individual words, but the gestalt of their protest amounted to, Are you out of your mind?

  “Dammit all, Michael!” I said, swinging around to face him, thrusting out my jaw. “If Nicodemus manages to take the Archive, it won’t matter how many of the damned coins you have locked away.”

  Silence. The clock in the entry hall ticked very loudly.

  I didn’t back down. “Right now six demons are torturing an eleven-year-old girl. The same way they tortured me. The same way they tortured Shiro.”

  Michael flinched.

  “Look me in the eye,” I told him, “and tell me you think that we should let that child suffer when we have the means to save her.”

  Tick, tock.

  Tick, tock.

  Michael shook his head.

  Sanya subsided, sinking back to lean against a cabinet again, his expression pensive and solemn.

  “Nicodemus will never accept that trade,” Michael said quietly.

  Luccio smiled, showing a lot of teeth. “Of course he will. Why sacrifice a useful retainer when he can show up for the exchange, double-cross us, steal the coins, and keep the Archive?”

  “Bingo,” I said. “And we’ll be ready for him. Captain, do you know how to contact him through the channels outlined in the Accords?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Harry,” Michael said gently, “we’re taking a terrible risk.”

  He and Luccio exchanged a glance pregnant with silence, swayed by deep undercurrents.

  “At this point,” Luccio said, “the only riskier thing we can do is…” She shrugged and spread her hands. “Nothing.”

  Michael grimaced and crossed himself. “God be with us.”

  “Amen,” Sanya said, winking over Michael’s shoulder at me.

  “Call Nicodemus,” I said. “Tell him I want to make a deal.”

  Chapter Thirty-six

  I t takes time to go through channels.

  The last thing I wanted to do was get wet again, but I was still freezing, and shaky, and as it turns out, there are a number of other inconvenient and unpleasant side effects to accidentally gulping down gallons of salt water. It’s the little things that get to you the most.

  It took me a couple of hours to get my s
ystem straightened out, get showered, and get horizontal, and by the time I finally did it I was so tired that I could barely focus my eyes. Molly was committing dinner by that time, aided and abetted by Sanya, who seemed to take some kind of grim Russian delight in watching train wrecks in progress. I fell down on the couch to debate whether or not I wanted to risk putting anything else in the pipes, and Rip van Winkled my way right through the danger.

  I didn’t want to wake up. I was having a dream where I wasn’t hurt, and no one was kicking me around. The walls were white and smooth and clean, lit only by frosty moonlight, and someone with a gentle voice was speaking quietly to me. But my right hand had broken into fierce tingling, all pins and needles, and sleep began to retreat. I started to wake slowly. Voices murmured in the room.

  “…can she possibly be sure?” Murphy demanded in a heated whisper.

  “It isn’t my area of knowledge,” Michael rumbled back. “Ma’am?”

  Luccio’s tone was cautious. “It is a delicate area of the art,” she said. “But the girl does have a gift.”

  “Then we need to say something.”

  “You can’t,” Molly said, her tone quiet and sad. “It wouldn’t help. It might make things worse.”

  “And you know that?” Murphy demanded. “You know that for a fact?”

  I was so tired, I’d probably missed a sentence or three in there. I blinked my eyes open and said muzzily, “The kid knows what she’s talking about.” I fumbled about and found Mouse lying on the floor beside the couch, immediately under my arm. I decided sitting up could wait for a minute. “What are we talking about?”

  Molly gave Murphy a look that said, There, see?

  Murphy shook her head and said, “I’m going to see if Kincaid is awake yet.” She left, her expression set in stony displeasure.

  Mouse set about industriously licking my right hand, a canine grooming ritual he sometimes pursued. It broke up the pins and needles a bit, so I didn’t argue. I still had no idea what was up with my hand. I’d never heard of anything like this happening to anyone-but it wasn’t terribly uncomfortable, and all things considered it wasn’t anywhere near the top of my priority list at the moment.