Turn Coat

by Butcher, Jim

  “The warlock summoned up her will and prepared to attack me,” Morgan said frostily. “The dog intervened.”

  Molly rolled her eyes and glared at him. “Oh, please. You are such an asshole.”

  The air in the room seemed to tighten a little, as power gathered around the young woman.

  “Molly,” I said gently.

  She glanced over at me, scowling. “What?”

  I cleared my throat and gestured at her with one hand.

  She blinked for a second, then seemed to catch on. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled it slowly. As she did, the ominous sense of stormy energy faded. Molly ducked her head a little, her cheeks flushing. “Sorry. But it wasn’t like that.”

  Morgan snorted.

  I ignored him. “Go on,” I told Molly. “Talk.”

  “He just . . . I just got so angry,” Molly said. “He made me so upset. I couldn’t help it.” She gestured to Mouse. “And then he just . . . just flattened me. And he wouldn’t let me up, and he wouldn’t let Morgan move, either.”

  “Seems to me that the dog had better sense than you,” I said. I glanced up at Morgan. “Either of you. You’re supposed to stay still. You wanna kill yourself?”

  “It was a reaction to her approach,” Morgan said calmly. “I survived it.”

  I shook my head. “And you,” I said to Molly. “How many months have we spent working on your emotional control?”

  “I know, I know,” she said. “It’s never good to use magic in anger. I know, Harry.”

  “You’d better know it,” I said quietly. “If it’s so easy to get a rise out of you that one bitter old washed-up Warden can blow your O-ring, the first reactionary goomba to come along looking for an excuse to take you out is going to put you in a casket, claim it was self-defense, and get away with it.”

  Morgan bared his teeth in an expression only remotely resembling a smile. “You’d know all about that, Dresden, wouldn’t you?”

  “You son of a bitch!” Molly snarled and whirled toward Morgan, seizing a candlestick and hefting it like a club. The candle on it tumbled to the floor.

  Morgan sat perfectly still with that same gruesome smile on his face, never flinching.

  I lurched forward and grabbed Molly’s arm on her backswing, an instant before she would have brought the heavy candlestick crashing down on Morgan’s skull. Molly was strong for a woman, and I had to make a pretty serious effort to hold her back, my fingers digging into her wrist, while I snagged her around the waist with my other arm and bodily hauled her away from Morgan.

  “No!” I demanded. “Dammit, Molly, no!” I actually had to lift her feet off the ground to turn her away from the bedroom. I tightened my grip on her wrist and said, “Drop the candlestick, Molly. Now.”

  She let out a sound full of anger and laced with a little pain, and the heavy candlestick dropped to the floor, making a dull thud as it hit the rug-covered concrete. The air around her was alive with power, buzzing against my skin like a thousand tiny sparks of static electricity in a dry winter. “He can’t talk to you like that,” Molly snarled.

  “Think,” I told her, my voice hard but measured. “Remember the lessons. They’re just words, Molly. Look for the thought behind them. He set you up for this reaction. You’re allowing him to make you embarrass me.”

  Molly opened her mouth on an angry retort, then forced her mouth closed and turned her face away from me. She remained rigidly tense, and after a fuming half minute, she said, her voice more calm, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry,” I replied as gently as I could. “Be disciplined. You can’t afford to let them rattle you. Not ever.”

  She took another deep breath, exhaled, and then I felt her begin to ease down, relaxing her mental grasp on the power she’d instinctively prepared. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, Harry.”

  I let her go slowly. She began to rub at her right wrist with her other hand. I winced a little on her behalf. I thought I’d left bruises on her skin.

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Take Mouse and grab the mail.”

  “I’m fine. I don’t need—” she began. Then she stopped herself, shook her head, and looked at Mouse.

  The big dog heaved himself up, walked over to the basket next to the door, grasped his leather lead in his jaws, and dragged it out. Then he looked up at Molly, his head cocked to one side, his tail wagging hopefully.

  Molly let out a rueful little laugh and knelt down to hug the big dog. She clipped his lead onto his collar, and the two of them left.

  I turned and eyed the candle. It had spilled hot wax onto a genuine Navajo rug on the floor, but it hadn’t set anything on fire. I bent down and picked up the candle, then started trying to clean up the spilled wax as best I could.

  “Why?” I asked in a hard voice.

  “It’s one way to take a measure of a man,” he said. “Looking at his students.”

  “You didn’t look,” I said. “You needled her until she broke.”

  “She’s a self-proclaimed warlock, Dresden,” he replied. “Guilty of one of the most hideous and self-destructive crimes a wizard can commit. Is there some reason she shouldn’t be tested?”

  “What you did was cruel,” I said.

  “Was it?” Morgan asked. “There are others she is going to meet, one day, who will be even less gracious. Are you preparing her to deal with those people?”

  I glared at him.

  His gaze never wavered. “You aren’t doing her any favors by going easy on her, Dresden,” he said, more quietly. “You aren’t preparing her for exams. She doesn’t receive a bad mark if she fails.”

  I was quiet for a minute. Then I asked, “Did you learn shields as an apprentice?”

  “Of course. One of my earliest lessons.”

  “How did your master teach you?”

  “She threw stones at me,” he said.

  I grunted, without looking at him.

  “Pain is an excellent motivator,” he said. “And it teaches one to control one’s emotions at the same time.” He tilted his head. “Why do you ask?”

  “No reason,” I told him. “She could have broken your head open, you know.”

  He gave me that same unsettling smile. “You wouldn’t have let her.”

  Molly came back into the apartment, carrying a handful of mail, including one of those stupid Circuit City fliers that they just won’t stop sending me. She shut the door, put the wards back up, and took Mouse’s lead off. The big dog went over to the kitchen and flopped down.

  Molly put the mail on the coffee table, gave Morgan a level pensive look, and then nodded at him. “So . . . what’s he doing here, boss?”

  I stared at Molly for a moment, and then at Morgan. “What do you think?” I asked him.

  He shrugged a shoulder. “She already knows enough to implicate her. Besides, Dresden—if you go down with me, there’s no one left to take responsibility for her. Her sentence will not remain suspended.”

  I ground my teeth together. Molly had made a couple of bad choices a few years back, and violated one of the Laws of Magic in doing so. The White Council takes a harsh view of such things—their reactions start with beheadings, and become progressively less tolerant. I’d staked my own life on the belief that Molly wasn’t rotten to the core, and that I could rehabilitate her. When I did it, I’d known that I was risking my own well-being. If Molly backslid, I’d bear the responsibility for it, and get a death sentence about twenty seconds after she did.

  I hadn’t really considered that it would also work the other way around.

  Say for a minute that it was Morgan’s intention to get caught and take me down with him. It also meant that Molly would take a fall. He’d get rid of both of the Council’s former warlocks with the same move. Two birds, one stone.

  Well, crap.

  “Okay,” I sighed. “I guess you’re in.”

  “I am?” Molly looked at me with widening eyes. “Um. In what?”

  I told h
er.

  Chapter Twelve

  “I don’t like it,” Morgan growled, as I pushed the wheelchair over the gravel toward the street and the van Thomas had rented.

  “Gee. There’s a shock,” I said. Morgan was a lot to push around, even with the help of the chair. “You upset with how I operate.”

  “He’s a vampire,” Morgan said. “He can’t be trusted.”

  “I can hear you,” Thomas said from the driver’s seat of the van.

  “I know that, vampire,” Morgan said, without raising his voice. He eyed me again.

  “He owes me a favor,” I said, “from that coup attempt in the White Court.”

  Morgan glowered at me. “You’re lying,” he said.

  “For all you know it’s true.”

  “No, it isn’t,” he said flatly. “You’re lying to me.”

  “Well, yes.”

  He looked from me to the van. “You trust him.”

  “To a degree,” I said.

  “Idiot,” he said, though he sounded like his heart wasn’t in it. “Even when a White Court vampire is sincere, you can’t trust it. Sooner or later, its demon takes control. And then you’re nothing but food. It’s what they are.”

  I felt a little surge of anger and clubbed it down before it could make my mouth start moving. “You came to me, remember? You don’t like how I’m helping you, feel free to roll yourself right out of my life.”

  Morgan gave me a disgusted look, folded his arms—and shut his mouth.

  Thomas turned on the hazard lights as the van idled on the street; then he came around and opened up the side door. He turned to Morgan and picked up the wheelchair the wounded Warden sat in with about as much effort as I’d use to move a sack of groceries from the cart into my car’s trunk. Thomas put the wheelchair carefully into the van, while Morgan held the IV bag steady on its little metal pole clamped to the chair’s arm.

  I had to give Morgan a grudging moment of admiration. He was one tough son of a bitch. Obviously in agony, obviously exhausted, obviously operating in the shambles of his own shattered pride, he was still stubborn enough to be paranoid and annoying. If he wasn’t aiming it all at me, I probably would have admired him even more.

  Thomas slid the door shut on Morgan, rolled his eyes at me, and got back into the driver’s seat.

  Molly came hurrying up, carrying a pair of backpacks, holding one end of Mouse’s leash. I held out my hand, and she tossed me the black nylon pack. It was my trouble kit. Among other things, it contained food, water, a medical kit, survival blankets, chemical light sticks, duct tape, two changes of clothing, a multitool, two hundred dollars in cash, my passport, and a couple of favorite paperbacks. I always kept the trouble kit ready and available, in case I need to move out in a hurry. It had everything I would need to survive about ninety percent of the planet’s environments for at least a couple of days.

  Molly, acting on her own initiative, had begun putting her own trouble kit together the same day she’d learned about mine. Except that her backpack was pink.

  “You sure about this?” I asked her, pitching my voice low enough that Morgan wouldn’t hear.

  She nodded. “He can’t stay there alone. You can’t stay with him. Neither can Thomas.”

  I grunted. “Do I need to search your bag for candlesticks?”

  She gave me a chagrined shake of her head.

  “Don’t feel too bad, kid,” I told her. “He had a couple of hours to work you up to that. And he’s the guy who nearly cut your head off, during that mess around SplatterCon.”

  “It wasn’t that,” she said quietly. “It’s what he said to you. What he’s done to you.”

  I put my hand on her arm and squeezed gently.

  She smiled faintly at me. “I’ve never . . . never really felt . . . hate before. Not like that.”

  “Your emotions got the better of you. That’s all.”

  “But it isn’t,” she insisted, folding her arms against her stomach, her shoulders hunching a little. “Harry, I’ve seen you all but kill yourself to help people who were in trouble. But for Morgan, that doesn’t matter. You’re just this . . . this thing that did something wrong once, and you’ll never, ever be anything else.”

  Aha.

  “Kid,” I said quietly, “maybe you should think about who you were really angry with back there.”

  “What do you mean?”

  I shrugged. “I mean there’s a reason you snapped when he started in on me. Maybe the fact that he was being Morgan just happened to be coincidental.”

  She blinked her eyes several times, but not fast enough to stop one tear.

  “You did a bad thing once,” I said. “It doesn’t make you a monster.”

  Two more tears fell. “What if it does?” She wiped at her cheeks with a brusque frustrated motion. “What if it does, Harry?”

  I nodded. “Because if Morgan’s right, and I’m just a ticking time-bomb, and I’m trying to rehabilitate you, you haven’t got a chance in hell. I get it.”

  She pressed her lips together, and it made her words sound stiff. “Just before Mouse knocked me down, I wanted to . . . to do things to Morgan. To his mind. To make him act differently. I was so angry, and it felt right.”

  “Feeling something and acting on it are two different things.”

  She shook her head. “But who would want to do that, Harry? What kind of monster would feel that?”

  I slung the pack over one shoulder so that I could put my hands on either side of her face and turn her eyes to mine. Her tears made them very blue.

  “The human kind. Molly, you are a good person. Don’t let anyone take that away from you. Not even yourself.”

  She didn’t even try to stop the tears. Her lip quivered. Her eyes were wide and her cheeks were fever-warm under my fingers. “A-are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  She bowed her head, and her shoulders shook. I leaned down to rest my forehead against hers. We stayed that way for a minute. “You’re okay,” I told her quietly. “You aren’t a monster. You’re gonna be all right, grasshopper.”

  A series of sharp, rapping sounds interrupted us. I looked over my shoulder and found Morgan glowering at me. He held up a pocket watch—an honest to God gold pocket watch—and jabbed a forefinger at it impatiently.

  “Jerk,” Molly mumbled, sniffling. “Big fat, grumpy jerk.”

  “Yes. But he has a point. Tick-tock.”

  She swiped a hand at her nose and collected herself. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  The storage rental facility was located a couple of blocks from Deerfield Square in a fairly upscale suburban neighborhood north of Chicago proper. Most of the buildings nearby were residential, and it was tough to go more than a quarter of an hour without spotting a patrol car.

  I’d picked it as the spot for my bolt hole for one reason: shady characters would stand out against the upper-middle-class background like mustard stains under a black light.

  Granted, it would probably work even better if I wasn’t one of them.

  I used my key at the security gate, and Thomas pulled the van around to my unit, a storage unit the size of a two-car garage. I unlocked the steel door and rolled it up while Thomas got Morgan out of the van. Molly followed, and when I beckoned, she wheeled Morgan into the storage space. Mouse got down out of the van and followed us. I rolled the door back down, and called wizard light to the amulet I held up in my right hand, until its blue-white glow filled the unit.

  The interior of the place was mostly empty. There was a camp cot, complete with sleeping bag and pillow, placed more or less in the middle of the room, along with a footlocker I had filled with food, bottled water, candles, and supplies. A second footlocker sat next to the first one, and was filled with hardware and magical gear—a backup blasting rod, and all manner of useful little items one could use to accomplish a surprisingly broad spectrum of thaumaturgic workings. A camp toilet with a couple of jugs of cleaning liquid sat on the opposite side
of the cot.

  The floor, the walls, and the ceiling were covered in sigils, runes, and magical formulae. They weren’t proper wards, like the ones I had on my home, but they worked on the same principles. Without a threshold to build them upon, no single one of the formulae was particularly powerful—but there were lots of them. They began to gleam with a silvery glow in the light coming from my amulet.

  “Wow,” Molly said, staring slowly around her. “What is this place, Harry?”

  “Bolt hole I set up last year, in case I needed someplace quiet where I wouldn’t get much company.”

  Morgan was looking, too, though his face was pale and drawn with pain. He swept his eyes around and said, “What’s the mix?”

  “Concealment and avoidance, mostly,” I replied. “Plus a Faraday cage.”

  Morgan nodded, glancing around. “It looks adequate.”

  “What’s that mean?” Molly asked me. “A Faraday what?”

  “It’s what they call it when you shield equipment from electromagnetic pulses,” I told her. “You build a cage of conductive material around the thing you want to protect, and if a pulse sweeps over it, the energy is channeled into the earth.”

  “Like a lightning rod,” Molly said.

  “Pretty much,” I said. “Only instead of electricity, this is built to stop hostile magic.”

  “Once,” Morgan corrected me primly.

  I grunted. “Without a threshold to work with, there’s only so much you can do. The idea is to protect you from a surprise assault long enough for you to go out the back door and run.”

  Molly glanced at the back of the storage unit and said, “There’s no door there, Harry. That’s a wall. It’s kind of the opposite of a door.”

  Morgan nodded his head at the back corner of the space, where a large rectangular area on the floor was clear of any runes or other markings. “There,” he said. “Where’s it come out?”

  “About three long steps from one of the marked trails the Council has right of passage on in Unseelie territory,” I said. I nodded at a cardboard box sitting in the rectangle. “It’s cold there. There’re a couple of coats in the box.”