by Jim Butcher
“Gee whiz, Harry,” Bob said. “Maybe because he was the Summer Knight?”
My pencil fell out of my fingers and rolled on the table. “Whoa,” I said. “Are you sure?”
“What do you think?” Bob replied, somehow putting a sneer into the words.
“Uh,” I said. “This means trouble. It means . . .”
“It means that things with the Sidhe are more complicated than you thought. Gee, if only someone had warned you at some point not to be an idiot and go making deals.”
I gave the skull a sour look and recovered my pencil. “How much trouble am I in?”
“A lot,” Bob said. “The Knights are entrusted with power by the Sidhe Courts. They’re tough.”
“I don’t know much about them,” I confessed. “They’re some kind of representative of the faeries, right?”
“Don’t call them that to their faces, Harry. They don’t like it any more than you’d like being called an ape.”
“Just tell me what I’m dealing with.”
Bob’s eyelights narrowed until they almost went out, then brightened again after a moment, as the skull began to speak. “A Sidhe Knight is mortal,” Bob said. “A champion of one of the Sidhe Courts. He gets powers in line with his Court, and he’s the only one who is allowed to act in affairs not directly related to the Sidhe.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning that if one of the Queens wants an outsider dead, her Knight is the trigger man.”
I frowned. “Hang on a minute. You mean that the Queens can’t personally gun down anyone who isn’t in their Court?”
“Not unless the target does something stupid like make an open-ended bargain without even trying to trade a baby for—”
“Off topic, Bob. Do I or don’t I have to worry about getting killed this time around?”
“Of course you do,” Bob said in a cheerful tone. “It just means that the Queen isn’t allowed to actually, personally end your life. They could, however, trick you into walking into quicksand and watch you drown, turn you into a stag and set the hounds after you, bind you into an enchanted sleep for a few hundred years, that kind of thing.”
“I guess it was too good to be true. But my point is that if Reuel was the Summer Knight, Mab couldn’t have killed him. Right? So why should she be under suspicion?”
“Because she could have done it indirectly. And Harry, odds are the Sidhe don’t really care about Reuel’s murder. Knights come and go like paper cups. I’d guess that they were upset about something else. The only thing they really care about.”
“Power,” I guessed.
“See, you can use your brain when you want to.”
I shook my head. “Mab said something had been taken, and that I’d know what it was,” I muttered. “I guess that’s it. How much power are we talking about?”
“A Knight of the Sidhe is no pushover, Harry,” Bob said, his tone earnest.
“So we’re talking about a lot of magic going AWOL. Grand theft mojo.” I drummed my pen on the table. “Where does the power come from originally?”
“The Queens.”
I frowned. “Tell me if I’m off track here. If it comes from the Queens, it’s a part of them, right? If a Knight dies, the power should snap back to the Queen like it was on a rubber band.”
“Exactly.”
“But this time it didn’t. So the Summer Queen is missing a load of power. She’s been weakened.”
“If everything you’ve told me is true, yes,” Bob said.
“There’s no more balance between Summer and Winter. Hell, that could explain the toads. That’s a serious play of forces, isn’t it?”
Bob rolled his eyelights. “The turning of the seasons? Duh, Harry. The Sidhe are closer to the mortal world than any other beings of the Nevernever. Summer’s had a slight edge for a while now, but it looks like they’ve lost it.”
“And here I thought global warming was due to cow farts.” I shook my head. “So, Titania loses a bunch of juice, and naturally suspicion falls on her archenemy, Mab.”
“Yeah. Itis kind of an archenemy-ish thing to do, you have to admit.”
“I guess.” I frowned down at my notes. “Bob, what happens if this imbalance between the Courts continues?”
“Bad things,” Bob said. “It will mess around with weather patterns, cause aberrant behavior in plants and animals, and sooner or later the Sidhe Courts will go to war with one another.”
“Why?”
“Because, Harry. When the balance is destroyed, the only thing the Queens can do is to blow everything to flinders and let it settle out into a natural distribution again.”
“What does that mean to me?” I asked.
“Depends on who has the edge when everything is settled,” Bob said. “A war could start the next ice age, or set off an era of rampant growth.”
“That last one doesn’t sound so bad.”
“No. Not if you’re an Ebola virus. You’ll have lots of friends.”
“Oh. Bad, then.”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “Keep in mind that this is theory, though. I’ve never seen it happen. I haven’t existed that long. But it’s something the Queens will want to avoid if they can.”
“Which explains Mab’s interest in this, if she didn’t do it.”
“Even if she did,” Bob corrected me. “Did she ever actually tell you she was innocent?”
I mulled it over for a moment. “No,” I said finally. “She twisted things around a lot.”
“So it’s possible that shedid do it. Or had it done, at any rate.”
“Right,” I said. “So to find out if it was one of the Queens, we’d need to find her hitter. How tough would it be to kill one of these Knights?”
“A flight of stairs wouldn’t do it. A couple of flights of stairs wouldn’t do it. Maybe if he went on an elevator ride with you—”
“Very funny.” I frowned, drumming my pen on the table. “So it would have taken that little something extra to take out Reuel. Who could manage it?”
“Regular folks could do it. But they wouldn’t be able to do it without burning buildings and smoking craters and so on. To kill him so that it looked like an accident? Maybe another Knight could. Among the Sidhe, it was either the Winter Knight or one of the Queens.”
“Could a wizard do it?”
“That goes without saying. But you’d have to be a pretty brawny wizard, have plenty of preparation and a good channel to him. Even then, smoking craters would be easier than an accident.”
“The wizards have all been in duck-and-cover mode lately. And there are too many of them to make a practical suspect pool. Let’s assume that it was probably internal faerie stuff. That cuts it down to three suspects.”
“Three?”
“The three people who could have managed it. Summer Queen, Winter Queen, Winter Knight. One, two, three.”
“Harry, I said it could have been one of the Queens.”
I blinked up at the skull. “There are more than two?”
“Yeah, technically there are three.”
“Three?”
“In each Court.”
“Three Queens in eachCourt ?Six ? That’s just silly.”
“Not if you think about it. Each Court has three Queens: The Queen Who Was, the Queen Who Is, and the Queen Who Is to Come.”
“Great. Which one does the Knight work for?”
“All of them. It’s kind of a group thing. He has different duties to each Queen.”
I felt the headache start at the base of my neck and creep toward the crown of my head. “Okay, Bob. I need to know about these Queens.”
“Which ones? The ones Who Are, Who Were, or Who Are to Come?”
I stared at the skull for a second, while the headache settled comfortably in. “There’s got to be a simpler parlance than that.”
“That’s so typical You won’t steal a baby, but you’re too lazy to conjugate.”
“Hey,” I said, “my sex life has nothing
to do with—”
“Conjugate, Harry. Conju—oh, why do I even bother? The Queen is just the Queen. Queen Titania, Queen Mab. The Queen Who Was is called the Mother. The Queen Who Is to Come is known as the Lady. Right now, the Winter Lady is Maeve. The Summer Lady is Aurora.”
“Lady, Queen, Mother, gotcha.” I got a pencil and wrote it down, just to help me keep it straight, including the names. “So six people who might have managed it?”
“Plus the Winter Knight,” Bob said. “In theory.”
“Right,” I said. “Seven.” I wrote down the titles and then tapped the notebook thoughtfully and said, “Eight.”
“Eight?” Bob asked.
I took a deep breath and said, “Elaine’s alive. She’s on the investigation for Summer.”
“Wow,” Bob said. “Wow. And I told you so.”
“I know, I know.”
“You think she might have gacked Reuel?”
“No,” I said. “But I never saw it coming when she and Justin came after me, either. I only need to think about if she had the means to do it. I mean, if you think it would have been tough for me, maybe she wasn’t capable of taking down Reuel. I was always a lot stronger than her.”
“Yeah,” Bob said, “but she was better than you. She had a lot going for her that you didn’t. Grace. Style. Elegance. Breasts.”
I rolled my eyes. “So she’s on the list, until I find some reason she shouldn’t be.”
“How jaded and logical of you, Harry. I’m almost proud.”
I turned to the folder Mab had given me and went through the newspaper clippings inside. “Any idea who the Winter Knight is?”
“Nope. Sorry,” Bob said. “My contacts on the Winter side are kinda sketchy.”
“Okay, then,” I sighed and picked up the notebook. “I know what I need to do.”
“This should be good,” Bob said dryly.
“Bite me. I have to find out more about Reuel. Who was close to him. Maybe someone saw something. If the police assumed an accident, I doubt there was an investigation.”
Bob nodded, somehow managing to look thoughtful. “So are you going to take out an ad in the paper or what?”
I went around the lab and started snuffing candles. “I thought I’d try a little breaking and entering. Then I’ll go to his funeral, see who shows.”
“Gosh. Can I do fun things like you when I grow up?”
I snorted and turned to the stepladder, taking my last lit candle with me.
“Harry?” Bob said, just before I left.
I stopped and looked back at him.
“For what it’s worth, be careful.” If I hadn’t known any better, I’d have said Bob the Skull was almost shaking. “You’re an idiot about women. And you have no idea what Mab is capable of.”
I looked at him for a moment, his orange eyes the only light in the dimness of my frenetically neat lab. It sent a little shiver through me.
Then I clomped back up the stepladder and went out to borrow trouble.
Chapter Eleven
I made a couple of phone calls, slapped a few things into a nylon backpack, and sallied forth to break into Ronald Reuel’s apartment.
Reuel had lived at the south edge of the Loop, in a building that looked like it had once been a theater. The lobby yawned up to a high ceiling and was spacious and pretty enough, but it left me looking for the velvet ropes and listening for the disorganized squawking of an orchestra warming up its instruments.
I walked in wearing a hat with an FTD logo and carrying a long white flower box under one arm. I nodded to an aging security guard at a desk and went on past him to the stairs, my steps purposeful. You’d be surprised how far a hat, a box, and a confident stride can get you.
I took the stairs up to Reuel’s apartment, on the third floor. I went up them slowly, my wizard’s senses open, on the lookout for any energies that might yet be lingering around the site of the old man’s death. I paused for a moment, over the spot where Reuel’s body had been found, to be sure, but there was nothing. If a lot of magic had been put to use in Reuel’s murder, someone had covered its tracks impressively.
I went the rest of the way up to the third floor, but it wasn’t until I opened the door to the third-floor hallway that my instincts warned me I was not alone. I froze with the door from the stairway only half open, and Listened.
Listening isn’t particularly hard. I’m not even sure it’s all that magical. I can’t explain it well, other than to say that I’m able to block out everything but what I hear and to pick up things I would normally miss. It’s a skill that not many people have these days, and one that has been useful to me more than once.
This time, I was able to Listen to a half-whispered basso curse and the rustle of papers from somewhere down the hall.
I opened the flower box and drew out my blasting rod, then checked my shield bracelet. All in all, in close quarters like this, I would have preferred a gun to my blasting rod, but I’d have a hell of a time explaining it to security or the police if they caught me snooping around a dead man’s apartment. I tightened my grip on the rod and slid quietly down the hall, hoping I wouldn’t need to use it. Believe it or not, my first instinct isn’t always to set things on fire.
The door to Reuel’s apartment stood half open, and its pale wood glared where it had been freshly splintered. My heart sped up. It looked like someone had beaten me to Reuel’s place. It meant that I must have been on the right track.
It also meant that whoever it was would probably not be thrilled to see me.
I crept to the door and peered inside.
What I could see of the apartment could have been imported from 429-B Baker Street. Dark woods, fancy scrollwork, and patterns of cloth busier than the makeup girl at a Kiss concert filled every available inch of space with Victorian splendor. Or rather, it once had. Now the place looked wrecked. A sideboard stood denuded of its drawers, which lay upturned on the floor. An old steamer chest lay on its side, its lid torn off, its contents scattered onto the carpet. An open door showed me that the bedroom hadn’t been spared the rough stuff either. Clothes and broken bits of finery lay strewn about everywhere.
The man inside Reuel’s apartment looked like a catalog model for Thugs-R-Us. He stood a hand taller than me, and I couldn’t tell where his shoulders left off and his neck began. He wore old frayed breeches, a sweater with worn elbows, and a hat that looked like an import from the Depression-era Bowery, a round bowler decorated with a dark grey band. He carried a worn leather satchel in one meat-slab hand, and with the other he scooped up pieces of paper, maybe index cards, from a shoe box on an old writing desk, depositing them in the bag. The satchel bulged, but he kept adding more to it with rapid, sharp motions. He muttered something else, emitted a low rumble, and snatched up a Rolodex from the desk, cramming it into the satchel.
I drew back from the door and put my back against the wall. There wasn’t any time to waste, but I had to figure out what to do. If someone had shown up at Reuel’s place to start swiping papers, it meant that Reuel had been hiding evidence of one kind or another. Therefore, I needed to see whatever it was Kong had in that satchel.
Somehow, I doubted he would show me if I asked him pretty please, but I didn’t like my other option, either. In such tight quarters, and with other residents nearby, I didn’t dare resort to any of my kaboom magic. Kaboom magic, or evocation, is difficult to master, and I’m not very good at it. Even with my blasting rod as a focus, I had accidentally dealt out structural damage to a number of buildings. So far, I’d been lucky enough not to kill myself. I didn’t want to push it if I didn’t have to.
Of course, I could always just jump the thug and try to take his bag away. I had a feeling I’d be introduced to whole new realms of physical discomfort, but I could try it.
I took another peek at the thug. With one hand, he casually lifted a sofa that had to weigh a couple of hundred pounds and peered under it. I drew back from the door again. Fisticuffs, bad idea. De
finitely a bad idea.
I chewed on my lip a moment more. Then I slipped the blasting rod back into the flower box, squared up my FTD hat, stepped around the corner, and knocked on the half-open door.
The thug’s head snapped around toward me, along with most of his shoulders. He bared his teeth, anger in his eyes.
“FTD,” I said, trying to keep my voice bland. “I got a delivery here for a Mr. Reuel. You want to sign for it?”
The thug glowered at me from beneath the shelter of his overhanging brow. “Flowers?” he rumbled a minute later.
“Yeah, buddy,” I said. “Flowers.” I came into the apartment and thrust the clipboard at him, idly wishing I had some gum to chomp. “Sign there at the bottom.”
He glowered at me for a moment longer before accepting the clipboard. “Reuel ain’t here.”
“Like I care.” I pushed a pen at him with the other hand. “Just sign it and I’ll get going.”
This time he glared at the pen, then at me. Then he set the satchel on the coffee table. “Whatever.”
“Great.” I stepped past him and put the flower box down on the table. He clutched the pen in his fist and scrawled on the bottom of the paper. I reached down with one hand as he did, plucked a piece of paper a little bigger than a playing card from the satchel, and palmed it. I got my hand back to my side just before he finished, growled, and shoved the clipboard at me.
“Now,” he said, “leave.”
“You bet,” I told him. “Thanks.”
I turned to go, but his hand shot out and his fingers clamped on to my arm like a steel band. I looked back. He narrowed his eyes, nostrils flared, and then growled, “I don’t smell flowers.”
The bottom fell out of my stomach, but I tried to keep the bluff going. “What are you talking about, Mr., uh”—I glanced down at the clipboard—“Grum.”
Mr. Grum?
He leaned down closer to me, and his nostrils flared again, this time with a low snuffling sound. “I smell magic. Smell wizard.”
