by Jim Butcher
"Thank you," I said quietly. "But…"
"Heh," Murphy said. "You said but."
We both grinned like fools. I looked down at our entwined hands. "I like this."
"So do I," Murphy said. "Why didn't we do this a long time ago?"
"Beats me."
"Are we just that stupid?" she asked. "I mean, people, in general. Are we really so blind that we miss what's right there in front of us?"
"As a species, we're essentially insane," I said. "So, yeah, probably." I lifted our hands and kissed her fingertips. "I'm not missing it now, though."
Her smile lit up several thousand square feet of the midway. "Good."
The echo of a thought rattled around in my head: Insane…
"Oh," I said. "Oh, hell's bells."
She frowned at me. "What?"
"Murph… I think we got whammied."
She blinked at me. "What? No, we didn't."
"I think we did."
"I didn't see anything or feel anything. I mean, nothing, Harry. I've felt magic like that before."
"Look at us," I said, waving our joined hands.
"We've been friends a long time, Harry," she said. "And we've had a couple of near misses before. This time we just didn't screw it up. That's all that's happening here."
"What about Kincaid?" I asked her.
She mulled over that one for a second. Then she said, "I doubt he'll even notice I'm gone." She frowned at me. "Harry, I haven't been this happy in… I never thought I could feel this way again. About anyone."
My heart continued to go pitty-pat. "I know exactly what you mean," I said. "I feel the same way."
Her smile warmed even more. "Then what's the problem? Isn't that what love is supposed to be like? Effortless?"
I had to think about that one for a second. And then I said, carefully and slowly, "Murph, think about it."
"What do you mean?"
"You know how good this is?" I asked.
"Yeah."
"How right it feels?"
She nodded. "Yeah."
"How easy it was?"
She nodded energetically, her eyes bright.
I leaned down toward her for emphasis. "It just isn't fucked-up enough to really be you and me."
Her smile faltered.
"My God," she said, her eyes widening. "We got whammied." WE RETURNED TO the Tunnel of Terror.
"I don't get it," she said. "I don't… I didn't feel anything happen. I don't feel any different now. I thought being aware of this kind of thing made it go away."
"No," I said. "But it helps sometimes."
"Do you still…?"
I squeezed her hand once more before letting go. "Yeah," I said. "I still feel it."
"Is it… Is it going to go away?"
I didn't answer her. I didn't know. Or maybe I didn't want to know.
The old carnie saw us coming, and his face flickered with apprehension as soon as he looked at us. He stood up and looked from the control board for the ride to the entranceway to the interior.
"Yeah," I muttered. "Sneaky bastard. You just try it."
He flicked one of the switches and shambled toward the tunnel's entrance.
I made a quick effort of will, raised a hand, and swept it in a horizontal arc, snarling, "Forzare!" Unseen force knocked his legs out from beneath him and tossed him into an involuntary pratfall.
Murphy and I hurried up onto the platform before he could get to his feet and run. We needn't have bothered. The carnie was apparently a genuine old guy, not some supernatural being in disguise. He lay on the platform moaning in pain. I felt kind of bad for beating up a senior citizen.
But hey. On the other hand, he did swindle me out of twenty bucks.
Murphy stood over him, her blue eyes cold, and said, "Where's the bolt-hole?"
The carnie blinked at her. "Wha?"
"The trapdoor," she snapped. "The secret cabinet. Where is he?"
I frowned and walked toward the entranceway.
"Please," the carnie said. "I don't know what you're talking about!"
"The hell you don't," Murphy said. She leaned down and grabbed the man by the shirt with both hands and leaned closer, a snarl lifting her lip. The carnie blanched.
Murph could be pretty badass for such a tiny thing. I loved that about her.
"I can't," the carnie said. "I can't. I get paid not to see anything. She'll kill me. She'll kill me."
I parted the heavy curtain leading into the entry tunnel and spotted it at once-a circular hole in the floor about two feet across, the top end of a ladder just visible. A round lid lay rotated to one side, painted as flat black as the rest of the hall. "Here," I said to Murph. "That's why we didn't spot anything. By the time you had your light on, it was already behind us."
Murphy scowled down at the carnie and said, "Give me twenty bucks."
The man licked his lips. Then he fished my folded twenty out of his shirt pocket and passed it to Murphy.
She nodded and flashed her badge. "Get out of here before I realize I witnessed you taking a bribe and endangering lives by letting customers use the attraction in an unsafe manner."
The carnie bolted.
Murphy handed me the twenty. I pocketed it, and we climbed down the ladder. WE REACHED THE bottom and went silent again. Murphy's body language isn't exactly subtle-it can't be, when you're her size and working law enforcement. But she could move as quietly as smoke when she needed to. I'm gangly. It was more of an effort for me.
The ladder took us down to what looked like the interior of a buried railroad car. There were electrical conduits running along the walls. Light came from a doorway at the far end of the car. I moved forward first, shield bracelet at the ready, and Murphy walked a pace behind me and to my right, her Sig held ready.
The doorway at the end of the railroad car led us into a large workroom, teeming with computers, file cabinets, microscopes, and at least one deluxe chemistry set.
Maroon sat at one of the computers, his profile in view. "Dammit, Stu," he snarled. "I told you that you can't keep coming down here to use the john. You'll just have to walk to one of the-" He glanced up at us and froze in midsentence, his eyes wide and locked on Murphy's leveled gun.
"Stu took the rest of the night off," I said amiably. "Where's your boss?"
A door opened at the far end of the workroom and a young woman of medium height appeared. She wore glasses and a lab coat, and neither of them did anything to make her look less than gorgeous. She looked at us and then at Maroon and said, in a precise, British accent, "You idiot."
"Yeah," I said. "Good help is hard to find."
The woman in the lab coat looked at me with dark, intense eyes, and I sensed what felt like a phantom pressure against my temples, as if wriggling tadpoles were slithering along the surface of my skin. It was a straightforward attempt at mental invasion, but I'd been practicing my defenses for a while now, and I wasn't falling for something that obvious. I pushed the invasive thoughts away with an effort of will and said, "Don't meet her eyes, Murph. She's a vampire. Red Court."
"Got it," she said, her gun never moving from Maroon.
The vampire looked at us both for a moment. Then she said, "You need no introduction, Mr. Dresden. I am Baroness LeBlanc. And our nations are not, at the moment, in a state of war."
"I've always been a little fuzzy on legal niceties," I said. I had several devices with me that I could use to defend myself. I was ready to use any of them. A vampire in close quarters is nothing to laugh at. LeBlanc could tear off three or four of my limbs in the time it takes to draw and fire a gun. I watched her closely, ready to act at the slightest semblance of an attack. "We both know the war is going to start up again eventually."
"You are out of anything reasonably like your territory," she said, "and you are trespassing upon mine. I would be well within my rights under the Accords to kill you and bury your torso and limbs in individual graves."
"That's the problem with this ride," I
complained to Murphy. "There's nothing that's actually scary in the Tunnel of Terror."
"You did get your money back," she pointed out.
"Ah, true." I smiled faintly at LeBlanc. "Look, Baroness. You know who I am. You're doing something to people's minds, and I want it stopped."
"If you do not leave," she said, "I will consider it an act of war."
"Hooray," I said in a Ben Stein monotone, spinning one forefinger in the air like a New Year's noisemaker. "I've already kicked off one war with the Red Court, and I will cheerfully do it again if that is what is necessary to protect people from you."
"That's irrational," LeBlanc said. "Completely irrational."
"Tell her, Murph."
"He's completely irrational," Murphy said, her tone wry.
LeBlanc regarded me impassively for a moment. Then she smiled faintly and said, "Perhaps a physical confrontation is an inappropriate solution."
I frowned. "Really?"
She shrugged. "Not all of the Red Court are battle-hungry blood addicts, Dresden. My work here has no malevolent designs. Quite the opposite, in fact."
I tilted my head. "That's funny. All the corpses piled up say differently."
"The process does have its side effects," she admitted. "But the lessons garnered from them serve only to improve my work and make it safer and more effective. Honestly, you should be supporting me, Dresden, not trying to shut me down."
"Supporting you?" I smiled a little. "Just what is it you think you're doing that's so darned wonderful?"
"I am creating love."
I barked out a laugh.
LeBlanc's face remained steady, serious.
"You think that this, this warping people into feeling something they don't want to feel is love?"
"What is love," LeBlanc said, "if not a series of electrochemical signals in the brain? Signals that can be duplicated, like any other sensation."
"Love is more than that," I said.
"Do you love this woman?"
"Yeah," I said. "But that isn't anything new."
LeBlanc showed her teeth. "But your current feelings of longing and desire are new, are they not? New and entirely indistinguishable from your genuine emotions? Wouldn't you say, Sergeant Murphy?"
Murphy swallowed but didn't look at the vampire. LeBlanc's uncomplicated mental attack might be simple for a wizard to defeat, but any normal human being would probably be gone before they realized their minds were under attack. Instead of answering, she asked a question of her own. "Why?"
"Why what?"
"Why do this? Why experiment with making people fall in love?"
LeBlanc arched an eyebrow. "Isn't it obvious?"
I sucked in a short breath, realizing what was happening. "The White Court," I said.
The Whites were a different breed of vampire from the Reds, feeding on the life essence of their victims, generally through seduction. Genuine love and genuine tokens of love were their kryptonite, their holy water. The love of another human being in an intimate relationship sort of rubbed off on you, making the very touch of your skin an anathema to the White Court.
LeBlanc smiled at me. "Granted, there are some aberrant effects from time to time. But so far, that's been a very small percentage of the test pool. And the survivors are, as you yourself have experienced, perfectly happy. They have a love that most of your kind seldom find and even more infrequently keep. There are no victims here, Wizard."
"Oh," I said. "Right. Except for the victims."
LeBlanc exhaled. "Mortals are like mayflies, Wizard. They live a brief time, and then they are gone. And those who have died because of my work at least died after days or weeks of perfect bliss. There are many who ended a much longer life with less. What I'm doing here has the potential to protect mortalkind from the White Court forever."
"It isn't genuine love if it's forced upon someone," Murphy said, her tone harsh.
"No," LeBlanc said. "But I believe the real thing will very easily grow from such a foundation of companionship and happiness."
"Gosh, you're noble," I said.
LeBlanc's eyes sparkled with something ugly.
"You're doing this to get rid of competition," I said. "And, hell, maybe to try to increase the world's population. Make more food."
The vampire regarded me levelly. "There are multiple motivations behind the work," she said. "Many of my Court agreed to the logic you cite when they would never have supported the idea of strengthening and defending mortals."
"Ohhhhh," I said, drawing the word out. "You're the vampire with a heart of gold. Florence Nightingale with fangs. I guess that makes it okay, then."
LeBlanc stared at me. Then her eyes flicked to Murphy and back. She smiled thinly. "There is a special cage reserved for you at the Red Court, Dresden. Its bars are lined with blades and spikes, so that if you fall asleep, they will cut and gouge you awake."
"Shut up," Murphy said.
LeBlanc continued in a calmly amused tone. "The bottom is a closed bowl nearly a foot deep, so that you will stand in your own waste. And there are three spears with needle-sized tips waiting in a rack beneath the cage, so that any who pass you can pause and take a few moments to participate in your punishment."
"Shut up," Murphy growled.
"Eventually," LeBlanc purred, "your guts will be torn out and left in a pile at your feet. And when you are dead, your skin will be flayed from your body, tanned, and made into upholstery for one of the chairs in the Red Temple."
"Shut up!" snarled Murphy, and her voice was savage. Her gun whipped over to cover LeBlanc. "Shut your mouth, bitch!"
I realized the danger an instant too late. It was exactly the reaction LeBlanc had intended to provoke. "Murph! No!"
Once Murphy's Sig was pointing elsewhere, Maroon produced a gun from beneath his desk and raised it. He was pulling the trigger even before he could level it for a shot, blazing away as fast as he could move his finger. He wasn't quite fifteen feet away from Murphy, but the first five shots missed her as I spun and brought the invisible power of my shield bracelet down between the two of them. Bullets hit the shield with flashes of light and sent little concentric blue rings rippling through the air from the point of impact.
Murphy, meanwhile, had opened up on LeBlanc. Murph fired almost as quickly as Maroon, but she had the training and discipline necessary for combat. Her bullets smacked into the vampire's torso, tearing through pale flesh and drawing gouts of red-black blood. LeBlanc staggered to one side-she wouldn't be dead, but the shots had probably rung her bell for a second or two.
I lowered the shield as Maroon's gun clicked on empty, lifted my right fist, and triggered the braided energy ring on my index finger with a short, uplifting motion. The ring saved back a little energy every time I moved my arm, storing it so that I could unleash it at need. Unseen force flew out from the ring, plucked Maroon out of his chair, and slammed him into the ceiling. He dropped back down, hit his back on the edge of the desk, and fell into a senseless sprawl on the floor. The gun flew from his fingers.
"I'm out!" Murphy screamed.
I whirled back to find LeBlanc pushing herself off the wall, regaining her balance. She gave Murphy a look of flat hatred, and her eyes flushed pure black, iris and sclera alike. She opened her mouth in an inhuman scream, and then the vampire hiding beneath LeBlanc's seemingly human form exploded outward like a racehorse emerging from its gate, leaving shreds of pale, bloodless skin in its wake.
It was a hideous thing-black and flabby and slimy looking, with a flaccid belly, a batlike face, and long, spindly limbs. LeBlanc's eyes bulged hideously as she flew toward me.
I brought my shield up in time to intercept her, and she rebounded from it, to fall back to the section of floor already stained with her blood.
"Down!" Murphy shouted.
I dropped down onto my heels and lowered the shield.
LeBlanc rose up again, even as I heard Murphy take a deep breath, exhale halfway, and hold it. Her gun barked once.
The vampire lost about a fifth of her head as the bullet tore into her skull. She staggered back against the wall, limbs thrashing, but she still wasn't dead. She began to claw her way to her feet again.
Murphy squeezed off six more shots, methodically. None of them missed. LeBlanc fell to the floor. Murphy took a step closer, aimed, and put another ten or twelve rounds into the fallen vampire's head. By the time she was done, the vampire's skull looked like a smashed gourd.
A few seconds later, LeBlanc stopped moving.
Murphy reloaded again and kept the gun trained on the corpse.
"Nice shootin', Tex," I said. I checked out Maroon. He was still breathing.
"So," Murphy said, "problem solved?"
"Not really," I said. "LeBlanc was no practitioner. She can't be the one who was working the whammy."
Murphy frowned and eyed Maroon for a second.
I went over to the downed man and touched my fingers lightly to his brow. There was no telltale energy signature of a practitioner. "Nope."
"Who, then?"
I shook my head. "This is delicate, difficult magic. There might not be three people on the entire White Council who could pull it off. So… it's most likely a focus artifact of some kind."
"A what?"
"An item that has a routine built into it," I said. "You pour energy in one end, and you get results on the other."
Murphy scrunched up her nose. "Like those wolf belts the FBI had?"
"Yeah, just like that." I blinked and snapped my fingers. "Just like that!"
I hurried out of the little complex and up the ladder. I went to the tunnel car and took the old leather seat belt out of it. I turned it over and found the back inscribed with nearly invisible sigils and signs. Now that I was looking for it, I could feel the tingle of energy moving within it. "Hah," I said. "Got it."
Murphy frowned back at the entry to the Tunnel of Terror. "What do we do about Billy the Kid?"
"Not much we can do," I said. "You want to try to explain what happened here to the Springfield cops?"
She shook her head.
"Me, either," I said. "The kid was LeBlanc's thrall. I doubt he's a danger to anyone without a vampire to push him into it." Besides, the Reds would probably kill him on general principles, anyway, once they found out about LeBlanc's death.
