by Jim Butcher
“Bad move, so I’ve heard. The Faeries are going to take it out of their hides.”
“So we all thought,” the old man said. “In fact, Summer declared war upon the Red Court and began preliminary assaults on them. But Winter hasn’t responded-and Summer hasn’t done much more than secure its borders.”
“Queen Mab didn’t declare war?”
“No.”
I frowned. “Never thought she’d pass up the chance. She’s all about carnage and bloodshed.”
“It surprised us as well,” he said. “So I want to ask a favor of you.”
I eyed him without speaking.
“Find out why,” he said. “You have contacts within the Courts. Find out what’s happening. Find out why the Sidhe haven’t gone to war.”
“What?” I asked. “The Senior Council doesn’t know? Don’t you have an embassy and high-level connections and official channels? Maybe a bright red telephone?”
Ebenezar smiled without much mirth. “The general turbulence of the war has stretched everyone’s intelligence-gathering abilities,” he replied. “Even those in the spiritual realms. There’s another level entirely to the war in the conflict between spiritual spies and emissaries of everyone involved. And our embassy to the Sidhe has been…” He rolled a weathered, strong shoulder in a shrug. “Well. You know them as well as anyone.”
“They’ve been polite, open, spoken with complete honesty, and left you with no idea what is going on,” I guessed.
“Precisely.”
“So the Senior Council is asking me to find out?”
He glanced around again. “Not the Senior Council. Myself. A few others.”
“What others?” I asked.
“People I trust,” he said, and looked at me directly over the rims of his spectacles.
I stared at him for a second and then said in a whisper, “The traitor.”
The vampires of the Red Court had been a little too on top of the game to be merely lucky. Somehow, they had been obtaining vital secrets about the dispositions of the White Council’s forces and their plans. Someone on the inside had been feeding the vampires information, and a lot of wizards had died because of it-particularly during their heaviest attack, last year, in which they’d violated Sidhe territory in pursuit of the fleeing Council. “You think the traitor is someone on the Senior Council.”
“I think we can’t take any chances,” he said quietly. “This isn’t official business. I can’t order you to do it, Harry. I’ll understand if you don’t want to. But there’s no one better for the job-and our allies cannot maintain the current pace of operations for long. Their best weapon has always been secrecy, and their actions have forced them to pay a terrible cost of lives to give us what aid they have.”
I folded my arms over my stomach and said, “We need to help them, sure. But every time I look sideways at Faerie, I get into deeper trouble with them. It’s the last thing I need. If I do this, how-”
Ebenezar’s weight shifted, gravel crunching loudly. I glanced up to see the Merlin and Morgan emerge from the building, speaking quietly and intently.
“I wanted to talk to you,” Ebenezar said, evidently for the benefit of anyone listening. “Make sure Morgan and the other Wardens are treating you square.”
I went along with him. “When they talk to me at all,” I said. “About the only other Warden I ever see is Ramirez. Decent guy. I like him.”
“That says a lot for him.”
“That the Council’s ticking time bomb has a good opinion of him?” I waited for Morgan and the Merlin to leave, but they paused a little way off, still talking. I stared at the gravel for a long time, and then said, much more quiedy, “That could have been me in there today. I could have been that kid.”
“It was a long time ago,” Ebenezar said. “You were barely more than a child.”
“So was he.”
Ebenezar’s expression became guarded. “I’m sorry you had to see that business.”
“Is that why it happened here?” I asked him. “Why come to Chicago for an execution?”
He exhaled slowly. “It’s one of the great crossroads of the world, Harry. More air traffic comes through here than anywhere else. It’s an enormous port city for shipping of any kind-trucks, trains, ships. That means a lot of ways in and out, a lot of travelers passing through. It makes it difficult for any observers from the Red Court to spot us or report our movements.” He gave me a bleak smile. “And then there’s the way Chicago seems to be inimical to the health of any vampire who comes here.”
“That’s a pretty good cover story,” I said. “What’s the truth?”
Ebenezar sighed and held up his hand in a conciliatory gesture. “It wasn’t my idea.”
I looked at him for a minute and then said, “The Merlin called the meeting here.”
Ebenezar nodded and arched a shaggy grey brow. “Which means…?”
I chewed on my lower lip and scrunched up my eyes. It never helped me think any better, but that was no reason not to keep trying it. “He wanted to send me a message. Kill two birds with one stone.”
Ebenezar nodded. “He wanted you stripped of your position as a Warden, but Luccio is still the technical commander of the Wardens, though Morgan commands in the field. She supported you and the rest of the Senior Council overruled him.”
“Bet he loved that,” I said.
Ebenezar chuckled. “I thought he was having a stroke.”
“Joy,” I said. “I didn’t want the job to begin with.”
“I know,” he said. “You got rocks and hard places, boy. Not much else.”
“So the Merlin figures he’ll show me an execution and scare me into toeing the line.” I frowned, thinking. “I take it there’s no word on the attack last year? No one found with mysterious sums of money dumped into their bank accounts that would incriminate a traitor?”
“Not yet,” Ebenezar said.
“Then with the traitor running around loose, all the Merlin has to do is wait for me to screw something up. Then he can call it treason and squish me.”
Ebenezar nodded, and I saw the warning in his eyes-another reason to take the job he was offering. “He genuinely believes that you are a threat to the Council. If your behavior confirms his belief, he’ll do whatever is necessary to stop you.”
I snorted. “There was another guy like that once. Name of McCarthy. If the Merlin wants to find a traitor, he’ll find one whether or not one actually exists.”
Ebenezar scowled, a hint of a Scots burr creeping into his voice, as it did anytime he was angry, and he glanced at the Merlin. “Aye. I thought you should know.”
I nodded, still without looking up at him. I hated being bullied into anything, but I didn’t get the vibe that Ebenezar was making an effort to maneuver me into a corner. He was asking a favor. I might well help myself by doing him the favor, but he wasn’t going to bring anything onto my head if I turned him down. It wasn’t his style.
I met his eyes and nodded. “Okay.”
He exhaled slowly and nodded back, silent thanks in his expression. “Oh. One other thing,” he said, and passed me an envelope.
“What’s this?”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “The Gatekeeper asked me to give it to you.” The Gatekeeper. He was the quietest of the wizards on the Senior Council, and even the Merlin showed him plenty of respect. He was taller than me, which is saying something, and he stayed out of most of the partisan politics of the Senior Council, which says even more. He knew things he shouldn’t be able to know-more so than most wizards, I mean-and as far as I could tell, he’d never been anything but straight with me.
I opened the envelope. A single piece of paper was inside. Letters in a precise, flowing hand read:
Dresden,
In the past ten days there have been repeated acts of black magic in Chicago. As the senior Warden in the region, it falls to you to investigate and find those responsible. In my opinion, it is vital that you do so imme
diately. To my knowledge, no one else is aware of the situation.
Rashid
I rubbed at my eyes. Great. More black magic in Chicago. If it wasn’t some raving, psychotic, black-hatted bad guy, it was probably another kid like the one who’d died a few minutes ago. There wasn’t a whole lot of in-between.
I was hoping for the murderous madman-sorry, political correction; madperson. I could deal with those. I’d had practice.
I didn’t think I could handle the other.
I put the letter back in the envelope, thinking. This was between the Gatekeeper and me, presumably. He hadn’t asked me publicly, or told Ebenezar what was going on, which meant that I was free to decide how to handle this one. If the Merlin knew about this and officially gave me the assignment, he’d make damned sure I didn’t have much of a choice in how to handle it-and I’d have to do the whole thing under a microscope.
The Gatekeeper had trusted me to handle whatever was wrong. That was almost worse. Man.
Sometimes I get tired of being the guy who is supposed to deal with un-deal-withable situations.
I looked up to find Ebenezar squinting at me. The expression made his face a mass of wrinkles. “What?” I asked.
“You get a haircut or something, Hoss?”
“Uh, nothing new. Why?”
“You look…” The old wizard’s voice trailed off thoughtfully. “Different.”
My heartbeat sped up a little. As far as I knew, Ebenezar was unaware of the entity who was leasing out the unused portions of my brain, and I wanted to keep it that way. But though he had a reputation for being something of a magical brawler, his specialty the summoning up of primal, destructive forces, he had a lot more on the ball than most of the Council gave him credit for. It was entirely possible that he had sensed something of the fallen angel’s presence within me.
“Yeah, well. I’ve been wearing the cloak of the people I spent most of my adult life resenting,” I said. “Between that and being a cripple, I’ve been off my sleep for almost a year.”
“That can do it,” Ebenezar said, nodding. “How’s the hand?” I bit back my first harsh response, that it was still maimed and scarred, and that the burns made it look like a badly melted piece of wax sculpture. I’d gone up against a bad guy with a brain a couple of years back, and she’d worked out that my defensive magic was designed to stop kinetic energy- not heat. I found that out the hard way when a couple of her psychotic goons sprayed improvised napalm at me. My shield had stopped the flaming jelly, but the heat had gone right through and dry roasted the hand I’d held out to focus my shield. I held up my gloved left hand and waggled my thumb and the first two fingers in jerky little motions. The other two fingers didn’t move much unless their neighbors pulled them. “Not much feeling in them yet, but I can hold a beer. Or the steering wheel. Doctor’s had me playing guitar, trying to move them and use them more.”
“Good,” Ebenezar said. “Exercise is good for the body, but music is good for the soul.”
“Not the way I play it,” I said.
Ebenezar grinned wryly, and drew a pocket watch from the front pocket of the overalls. He squinted at it. “Lunchtime,” he said. “You hungry?”
There wasn’t anything in his tone to indicate it, but I could read the subtext.
Ebenezar had been a mentor to me at a time I’d badly needed it. He’d taught me just about everything I thought was important enough to be worth knowing. He had been unfailingly generous, patient, loyal, and kind to me.
But he had been lying to me the whole time, ignoring the principles he had been teaching me. On the one hand, he taught me about what it meant to be a wizard, about how a wizard’s magic comes from his deepest beliefs, about how doing evil with magic was more than simply a crime- it was a mockery of what magic meant, a kind of sacrilege. On the other hand, he’d been the White Council’s Blackstaff the whole while-a wizard with a license to kill, to violate the Laws of Magic, to make a mockery of everything noble and good about the power he wielded in the name of political necessity. And he’d done it. Many times.
I had once held the kind of trust and faith in Ebenezar that I had given no one else. I’d built a foundation for my life on what he’d taught me about the use of magic, about right and wrong. But he’d let me down. He’d been living a lie, and it had been brutally painful to learn about it. Two years later, it still twisted around in my belly, a vague and nauseating unease.
My old teacher was offering me an olive branch, trying to set aside the things that had come between us. I knew that I should go along with him. I knew that he was as human, as fallible, as anyone else. I knew that I should set it aside, mend our fences, and get on with life. It was the smart thing to do. It was the compassionate, responsible thing to do. It was the right thing to do.
But I couldn’t.
It still hurt too much for me to think straight about it.
I looked up at him. “Death threats in the guise of formal decapitations sort of ruin my appetite.”
He nodded at me, accepting the excuse with a patient and steady expression, though I thought I saw regret in his eyes. He lifted a hand in a silent wave and turned away to walk toward a beat-up old Ford truck that had been built during the Great Depression. Second thoughts pressed in. Maybe I should say something. Maybe I should go for a bite to eat with the old man.
My excuse hadn’t been untrue, though. There was no way I could eat. I could still feel the droplets of hot blood hitting my face, still see the body lying unnaturally in a pool of blood. My hands started shaking and I closed my eyes, forcing the vivid, bloody memories out of the forefront of my thoughts. Then I got in the car and tried to leave the memories behind me.
The Blue Beetle is no muscle car, but it flung up a respectable amount of gravel as I left.
The streets weren’t as bad as they usually were, but it was still hotter than hell, so I rolled down the windows at the first stoplight and tried to think clearly.
Investigate the faeries. Great. That was absolutely guaranteed to get complicated before I got any useful answers. If there was one thing faeries hated doing, it was giving you a straight answer, about anything. Getting plain speech out of one is like pulling out teeth. Your own teeth. Through your nose.
But Ebenezar was right. I was probably the only one on the Council with acquaintances in both the Summer and Winter Courts of the Sidhe. If anyone on the Council could find out, it was me. Yippee.
And just to keep things interesting, I needed to hunt down some kind of unspecified black magic and put a stop to it. That was what Wardens spent all their time doing, when they weren’t fighting a war, and what I’d done two or three times myself, but it wasn’t ever pretty. Black magic means a black practitioner of some kind, and they tended to be the sorts of people who were both happy to kill an interfering wizard and able to manage it.
Faeries.
Black magic.
It never rains but it pours.
Chapter Three
Between one heartbeat and the next, the passenger seat of the Blue Beetle was suddenly occupied. I let out a yelp and nearly bounced my car off of a delivery truck. The tires squealed in protest and I started to slide. I turned into it and recovered, but if I’d had another coat of paint on my car I’d have collided with the one next to me. My heart in my throat, I got the car moving smoothly again, and turned to glare at the sudden passenger.
Lasciel, aka the Temptress, aka the Webweaver, apparently some kind of photocopy of the personality of a fallen angel, sat in the passenger seat. She could look like anything she chose, but her most common form was that of a tall, athletic blonde wearing a white Greek-style tunic that fell almost to her knee. She sat with her hands in her lap, staring out the front of the car, smiling very slightly.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I snarled at her. “Are you trying to get me killed?”
“Don’t be such a baby,” she replied, her tone amused. “No one was harmed.”
“No
thanks to you,” I growled. “Put the seat belt on.”
She gave me a level look. “Mortal, I have no physical form. I exist nowhere except within your mind. I am a mental image. An illusion. A hologram only you can see. There is no reason for me to wear my seat belt.”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” I said. “My car, my brain, my rules. Put on the damned seat belt or get lost.”
She heaved a sigh. “Very well.” She twisted around like anyone would, drawing the seat belt forward around her waist and clicking it. I knew she couldn’t have picked up the physical seat belt and done that, so what I was seeing was only an illusion-but it was a convincing one. I would have had to make a serious effort to see that the actual seat belt hadn’t moved.
Lasciel looked at me. “Acceptable?”
“Barely,” I said, thinking furiously. Lasciel, as she appeared to me now, was a portion of a genuine fallen angel. The real deal was trapped inside an ancient silver denarius, a Roman coin, which was buried under a couple of feet of concrete in my basement. But in touching the coin, I’d created a kind of outlet for the demon’s personality-embodied as an entirely discrete mental entity living right in my own head, presumably in the ninety percent of the brain that humans never use. Or in my case, maybe ninety-five. Lasciel could appear to me, could see what I saw and sense what I sensed, could look through my memories to some degree and, most disturbing, could create illusions that I had to work hard to see through-just as she was now creating the illusion of her physical presence in my car. Her extremely attractive and wholesome-looking and entirely desirable presence. The bitch.
“I thought we had an understanding,” I growled. “I don’t want you coming to see me unless I call you.”
“And I have respected our agreement,” she said. “I simply came to remind you that my services and resources are at your disposal, should you need them, and that the whole of my self, currently residing beneath the floor of your laboratory, is likewise prepared to assist you.”
“You act like I wanted you there in the first place. If I knew how to erase you from my head without getting killed, I’d do it in a heartbeat,” I replied.
