by Jim Butcher
“Missed you, too, boy,” I said. “Just . . . kind of stopping by to say good-bye.”
Mouse’s tail stopped wagging. His big, doggy eyes regarded me very seriously, and then glanced at Uriel.
“What has begun must finish, little brother,” Uriel said. “Your task here is not yet over.”
Mouse regarded the archangel for a moment and then huffed out a breath in a huge sigh and leaned against me.
I scratched him some more and hugged him—and looked past him, to where my daughter slept.
Maggie Dresden was a dark-haired, dark-eyed child, which had been all but inevitable given her parents’ coloring. Her skin tone was a bit darker than mine, which I thought looked healthier than my skin ever had. I got kind of pasty, what with all the time in my lab and reading and running around after dark. Her features were . . . well, perfect. Beautiful. The first time I’d seen her in the flesh, despite everything else that was going on at the time, somewhere under the surface I had been shocked by how gorgeous she was. She was the most beautiful child I’d ever seen, like, in the movies or anywhere.
But I guess maybe all parents see that when they look at their kids. It isn’t rational. That doesn’t make it any less true.
She slept with the boneless relaxation of the very young, her arms carelessly thrown over her head. She wore one of Molly’s old T-shirts as pajamas. It had an old, worn, iron-on decal of R2-D2 on it, with the caption BEEP BEEP DE DEEP KERWOOO under it.
I knelt down by her, stroking Mouse’s fur, but when I tried to touch her hand, mine passed through hers, immaterial. I leaned my head against Mouse’s big, solid skull, and sighed.
“She’ll have a good life here,” I said quietly. “People who care about her. Who love kids.”
“Yes,” Uriel said.
Mouse’s tail thumped several more times.
“Yeah, buddy. And she’ll have you.” I glanced up at Uriel. “For how long? I mean, most dogs . . .”
“Temple dogs have been known to live for centuries,” he replied. “Your friend is more than capable of protecting her for a lifetime—even a wizard’s lifetime, if need be.”
That made me feel a little better. I knew what it was like to grow up without my birth parents around, and what a terrible loss it was not to have that sense of secure continuation most of the other kids around me had. Maggie had lost her foster parents, and then her birth mother, and then her biological father. She had another foster home now—but she would always have Mouse.
“Hell,” I said to Mouse, “for all I know, you’ll be smarter than I would have been about dealing with her, anyway.”
Mouse snorted, grinning a doggy grin. He couldn’t speak, but I could effortlessly imagine his response—of course he’d be smarter than I was. That particular bar hadn’t been set very high.
“Take care of her, buddy,” I said to Mouse, and gave his shoulders a couple of firm pats with my fists. “I know you’ll take good care of her.”
Mouse sat up away from me, his expression attentive and serious, and then, very deliberately, offered me his paw.
I shook hands with him gravely, and then rose to face the archangel.
“All right,” I said quietly. “I’m ready.”
Chapter Fifty-one
Uriel extended his hand again, and I took it.
The Carpenters’ house faded from around us and we reappeared in the world of empty white light. There was one difference this time. Two glass doors stood in front of us. One of them led to an office building—in fact, I recognized it as the interior of Captain Jack’s department in Chicago Between. I saw Carmichael go by the door, consulting a notepad and fishing in his pocket for his car keys.
The other door led only to darkness. That was the uncertain future. It was What Came Next.
“I can hardly remember the last time I spent this much time with one particular mortal,” Uriel said thoughtfully. “I wish I had time to do it more often.”
I looked at him for a long moment and said, “I don’t understand.”
He laughed. It was a sound that seethed with warmth and life.
I found myself smiling and joined him. “I don’t understand what your game is in all of this.”
“Game?”
I shrugged. “Your people conned me into taking a pretty horrible risk with my soul. I guess. If that’s what you call this.” I waved a hand. “And you’ve got plausible deniability—I know, I know—or maybe you really are sincere and Captain Murphy threw a curveball past all of us. Either way . . . it doesn’t make sense.”
“Why not?” Uriel asked.
“Because it doesn’t have anything to do with balancing the scales of one of the Fallen lying to me,” I said. “You haven’t done any fortunecookie whispers into my head, have you?”
“No,” he said. “Not yet.”
“Well, that’s what I mean,” I said. “The scale still isn’t balanced. And I don’t think you send people back just for kicks.”
Uriel regarded me pleasantly. He said nothing.
“So you did it for a reason. Something you couldn’t have gotten with your seven whispered words.”
“Perhaps it was to balance the situation with Molly,” he said.
I snorted. “Yeah. I bet all the time you go around solving your problems one by one, in neat little rows. I bet you never, ever try to hit two birds with one stone.”
Uriel regarded me pleasantly. He said nothing.
“I’m headed for the great beyond, and you still won’t give me a straight answer?” I demanded, smiling.
Uriel regarded me pleasantly. He said nothing. A lot.
I laughed again. “Tell you what, big guy. Just tell me something. Something useful. I’ll be happy with whatever I get.”
He pursed his lips and thought about it for a moment. Then he said, “No matter where you go, there you are.”
I blinked. “Goodness,” I said. “Buckaroo Banzai?”
“Confucius,” he said.
“Wow. How very fortune cookie of you.” I gave him a half smile and offered him my hand. “But despite your cryptic ways, I’m sure of one thing now that I wasn’t before.”
“Oh?”
“Souls,” I said. “I mean, you always wonder if they’re real. Even if you believe in them, you still have to wonder: Is my existence just this body? Is there really something more? Do I really have a soul?”
Uriel’s smile blossomed again. “You’ve got it backward, Harry,” he said. “You are a soul. You have a body.”
I blinked at that. It was something to think about. “Mr. Sunshine, it has been a dubious and confusing pleasure.”
“Harry,” he said, shaking my hand. “I feel the same way.”
I released his hand, nodded, and squared my shoulders.
Then, moving briskly, lest my resolve waver, I opened the black door and stepped through.
Given the way my life has typically progressed, I probably should have guessed that What Came Next was pain.
A whole lot of pain.
I tried to take a breath, and a searing burst of agony radiated out from my chest. I held off on the next breath for as long as I could, but eventually I couldn’t put it off anymore, and again fire spread across my chest.
I repeated that cycle for several moments, my entire reality consumed by the simple struggle to breathe and to avoid the pain. I was on the losing side of things, and if the pain didn’t exactly lessen, it did, eventually, become more bearable.
“Good,” whispered a dry, rasping voice. “Very good.”
I felt the rest of my body next. I was lying on something cool and contoured. It wasn’t precisely comfortable, but it wasn’t a torment, either. I clenched my fingers, but something was wrong with them. They barely moved. It was as though someone had replaced my bones and flesh with lead weights, heavy and inert, and my tendons and muscles were too weak to break the inertia. But I felt cool, damp earth crumbling beneath my fingertips.
“Doesn’t seem to bode well,�
�� I mumbled. My tongue didn’t work right. My lips didn’t, either. The words came out a slushy mumble.
“Excellent,” rasped the voice. “I told you he had strength enough.”
My thoughts resonated abruptly with another voice, one that had no point of contact with my ears: WE WILL SEE.
What had my godmother said at my grave? That it was all about respect and . . .
. . . and proxies.
“The eyes,” rasped the voice. “Open your eyes, mortal.”
My eyelids were in the same condition as everything else. They didn’t want to move. But I made them. I realized that they felt cooler than the rest of my skin, as if someone had recently wiped them with a damp washcloth.
I opened them and cried out weakly at the intensity of the light.
I waited for a moment, then tried again. Then again. On the four or five hundredth try, I was finally able to see.
I was in a cave, lit by wan, onion-colored light. I could see a roof of rock and earth, with roots of trees as thick as my waist trailing through here and there. Water dripped down from overhead, all around me. I could hear it. Some dropped onto my lips, and I licked at it. It tasted sweet, sweeter than double-thick cherry syrup, and I shivered in pleasure this time.
I was starving.
I looked around me slowly. It made my head feel like it was about to fly apart every time I twitched it, but I persevered. I was, so far as I could tell, naked. I was lying on fine, soft earth that had somehow been contoured to the shape of my body. There were pine needles—soft ones—spread about beneath me in lieu of a blanket, their scent sharp and fresh.
There was a dull throb coming from my arms, and I looked down to see . . .
There were . . . roots or vines or something, growing into me. They wrapped around my wrists and penetrated the skin there, structures that were plantlike but pale and spongy-looking. I could barely make out some kind of fluid flowing through the tendrils and presumably into my body. I wanted to scream and thrash my arms, but it just seemed like too much work. A moment later, my leaden thoughts notified me that the vines looked something like . . . an intravenous fluid line. An IV.
What the hell kind of Hell was this supposed to be?
I realized that something rounded and unyielding was supporting my head. I twitched and moved myself enough to look up, and realized that my head was being held in someone’s lap.
“Ah,” whispered the voice. “Now you begin to understand.”
I looked up still farther . . . and found myself staring into the face of Mab, Queen of Air and Darkness, the veritable mother of wicked faeries herself.
Mab looked . . . not cadaverous. It wasn’t a word that applied. Her skin seemed stretched tight over her bones, her face distorted to inhuman proportions. Her emerald green eyes were inhumanly huge in that sunken face, her teeth unnaturally sharp. She brushed a hand over one of my cheeks, and her fingers looked too long, her nails grown out like claws. Her arms looked like nothing but bone and sinew with skin stretched over them, and her elbows were somehow too large, too swollen, to look even remotely human. Mab didn’t look like a cadaver. She looked like some kind of nearly starved insect, a praying mantis smiling down at its first meal in weeks.
“Oh,” I said, and if my speech was halting, at least it sounded almost human. “That kind of Hell.”
Mab tilted back her head and cackled. It was a dull, brittle sound, like the edge of a rusted knife. “No,” she said. “Alas, no, my knight. No, you have not escaped. I have far too much work for your hand to allow that. Not yet.”
I stared at her dully, which was probably the only way I was capable of staring at the moment. Then I croaked, “I’m . . . alive?”
Her smile widened even more. “And well, my dear knight.”
I grunted. It was all the enthusiasm I could summon. “Yay?”
“It makes me feel like singing,” Mab’s voice grated from between sharp teeth. “Welcome back, O my knight, to the green lands of the living.”
ENOUGH, said that enormous thought-voice, the same one from the graveyard, but less mind annihilating. THE FOOLISH GAMBLE IS CONCLUDED. HIS PHYSICAL NEEDS MUST BE MET.
“I know what I am doing,” Mab purred. Or it would have been a purr, if cats had been made from steel wool. “Fear not, ancient thing. Your custodian lives.”
I turned my head slowly the other way. After a subjective century, I was able to see the other figure in the cave.
It was enormous, a being that had to crouch not to bump its head on the ceiling. It was, more or less, human in form—but I could see little of that form. It was almost entirely concealed in a vast cloak of dark green, with shadows hiding whatever lay beneath it. The cloak’s hood covered its head, but I could see tiny green fires, like small, flickering clouds of fireflies, burning within the hood’s shadowed depth.
Demonreach. The genius loci of the intensely weird, unmapped island in the middle of Lake Michigan. We’d . . . sort of had an arrangement, made a couple of years back. And I was beginning to think that maybe I hadn’t fully understood the extent of that arrangement.
“I’m . . . on the island?” I rasped.
YOU ARE HERE.
“Long have this old thing and I labored to keep your form alive, my knight,” Mab said. “Long have we kept flesh and bone and blood knit together and stirring, waiting for your spirit’s return.”
MAB GAVE YOU BREATH. HERE PROVIDED NOURISHMENT. THE PARASITE MAINTAINED THE FLOW OF BLOOD.
Parasite? What?
I’d already had a really, really long day.
“But . . . I got shot,” I mumbled.
“My knight,” Mab hissed, the statement one of possession. “Your broken body fell from your ship into cold and darkness—and they are my domain.”
THE COLD QUEEN BROUGHT YOU TO HERE, Demonreach emitted. My head was starting to ache, hearing his psychic voice. YOUR PHSYICAL VESSEL WAS PRESERVED.
“And now here you are,” Mab murmured. “Oh, the Quiet One angered us, sending your essence out unprotected. Had he been incorrect, I would have been robbed of my knight, and the old monster of his custodian.”
OUR INTERESTS COINCIDED.
I blinked slowly, and again my lagging brain started catching up to me.
Mab had me.
I hadn’t escaped her. I hadn’t escaped what she could make me become.
Oh, God.
And all the people who’d gotten hurt, helping me . . . They’d done it for nothing.
“Told me . . . I was dead,” I muttered.
“Dead is a grey word,” Mab hissed. “Mortals fear it, and so they wish it to be black—and they have but few words to contain its reality. It escapes from such constraints. Death is a spectrum, not a line. And you, my knight, had not yet vanished into the utter darkness.”
I licked at my lips again. “Guess . . . you’re kind of upset with me. . . .”
“You attempted to cheat the Queen of Air and Darkness,” Mab hissed. “You practiced a vile, wicked deception upon me, my knight.” Her inhuman eyes glittered. “I expected no less of you. Were you not strong enough to cast such defiance into my teeth, you would be useless to my purposes.” Her smile widened. “To our purposes now.”
The very ground seemed to quiver, to let out an unthinkably low, deep, angry growl.
Mab’s eyes snapped to Demonreach. “I have his oath, ancient one. What he has given is mine by right, and you may not gainsay it. He is mine to shape as I please.”
“Dammit,” I said tiredly. “Dammit.”
And a voice—a very calm, very gentle, very rational voice whispered in my ear, “Lies. Mab cannot change who you are.”
I struggled and twitched my fingers. “Five,” I muttered, “Six. Seven. Heh.” I couldn’t help it. I laughed again. It hurt like hell and it felt wonderful. “Heh. Heh.”
Mab had gone very still. She stared at me with wide eyes, her alien face void of expression.
“No,” I said then, weakly. “No. Maybe I’m your k
night. But I’m not yours.”
Emerald fire flickered in her eyes, cold and angry. “What?”
“You can’t make me your monster,” I slurred. “Doesn’t work. And you know it.”
Mab’s eyes grew colder, more distant. “Oh?”
“You can make me do things,” I said. “You can mess with my head. But all that makes me is a thug.” The effort of so many words cost me. I had to take a moment to rest before I continued. “You wanted a thug; you get that from anywhere. Lloyd Slate was a thug. Plenty where he came from.”
Demonreach’s burning eyes flickered, and a sense of something like cold satisfaction came from the cloaked giant.
“Said it yourself: need someone like me.” I met Mab’s eyes with mine and curled my upper lip into a sneer. “Go on. Try to change me. The second you do, the second I think you’ve played with my head or altered my memory, the first time you compel me to do something, I’ll do the one thing you can’t have in your new knight.” I lifted my head a little, and I knew that I must have looked a little crazy as I spoke. “I’ll do it. I’ll follow your command. And I will do nothing else. I’ll make every task you command one you must personally oversee. I’ll have the initiative of a garden statue. And do you know what that will give you, my queen?”
Her eyes burned. “What?”
I felt my own smile widen. “A mediocre knight,” I said. “And mediocrity, my queen, is a terrible, terrible fate.”
Her voice came forth from lips so cold that frost began forming on them. The next drop of water to fall on me thumped gently, a tiny piece of sleet. “Do you think I cannot punish you for such defiance? Do you think I cannot visit such horrors upon those you love as to create legends that last a thousand years?”
I didn’t flinch. “I think you’ve got too much on your plate already,” I spat back. “I think you don’t have the time or the energy to spare to fight your own knight anymore. I think you need me, or you wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble of keeping me alive for this long, of taxing your strength this much to get it done. You need me. Or else why are you here? In Chicago? In May?”
Again, the inhuman eyes raked at mine. But when she spoke, her voice was very, very soft and far more terrible than a moment before. “I am not some mortal merchant to be bargained with. I am not some petty president to be argued with. I am Mab.”
