Side Jobs df-13

by Jim Butcher

  “But this is my day off!” I howled.

  I know things looked bad. But I honestly think I could have handled it if Mister hadn’t picked that exact moment to leap down from his perch and go streaking across the room, acting upon some feline imperative unknown and unknowable to mere mortals.

  Kirby, already on the edge of a feral frenzy, did what any canine would do—he let out a snarl and gave immediate chase.

  Mouse let out a sudden bellow of rage—for crying out loud, he hadn’t gotten that worked up over me being in danger—and launched himself after Kirby. Andi, upon seeing Mouse in pursuit of her fellow werewolf, shifted entirely to her own wolf shape and flung herself after Mouse.

  Mister rocketed around my tiny apartment, with several hundred pounds of furious canine in pursuit. Kirby bounded over and around furniture almost as nimbly as Mister. Mouse didn’t bother with nimble. He simply plowed through whatever was in the way, smashing my coffee table and one easy chair, knocking over another bookcase, and churning the throw rugs on the floor into hummocks of fabric and fiber.

  I leapt for the pipe bomb and picked it up, only to have my legs scythed out from beneath me by Kirby as he went by. Mouse accidently slammed a paw bearing his full weight down onto me as he rumbled past in pursuit, and got me right where the damn dog always gets a man. There was none of that delayed-reaction component to the pain, either. My testicles began reporting the damage instantly, loudly, and in nauseating intensity.

  I had no time for pain. I lunged for the pipe bomb and nearly wet my pants as another explosion shook the floor—only this one was followed an instant later by an absolute flood of bright green smoke that billowed up from the lab.

  I grabbed the pipe bomb and tried to pluck out the fuse, but it vanished into the cap and beyond the reach of my fingers. In a panic, I scrabbled across the floor to the door and ripped it open with terrified strength. I hauled back to throw the thing out and—

  There was a sharp burst of sound.

  My hand exploded into pins and needles.

  I fell limply to the floor, my head falling in such a way as to bring my gaze over to where my hand had been clutching the pipe bomb a few seconds before and—

  And I was still holding it now, unharmed. Heavy jets of scarlet and purple smoke were billowing wildly from both ends of the pipe, scented heavily with a familiar odor.

  Smoke bombs.

  The freaking thing had been loaded with something remarkably similar to Fourth of July smoke bombs, the kind kids play with. Bemused, I tugged one plastic cap off, and several little expended canisters fell out along with a note: The next time you interfere with me, more than smoke will interfere with you.

  More than smoke will interfere with you?

  Who talks like that?

  Mouse roared, snapping my focus back to the here and now, as he pounced onto Kirby’s back, smashing the werewolf to the floor by dint of sheer mass. Mister, sensing his opening, shot out the front door with a yowl of disapproval and vanished into the outdoors, seeking a safer environment, like maybe traffic.

  Andi leapt onto Mouse’s back, fangs ripping, but my dog held fast to Kirby—buying me a couple of precious seconds. I seized a bit of chalk from the basket by the door and, choking on smoke, ran in a circle around the embattled trio, drawing a line of chalk on the concrete floor. Then I willed the circle closed, and the magical construct snapped into existence, a silent and invisible field of energy that, among other things, completely severed the connection between the psychic parasites in the Nevernever and the werewolves whaling on my dog.

  The fight stopped abruptly. Kirby and Andi both blinked their eyes several times and hurriedly removed their fangs from Mouse’s hide. A few seconds later, they shimmered and resumed their human forms.

  “Don’t move!” I snapped at them, infuriated to no end. “Any of you! Don’t break the circle or you’ll go nuts again! Sit! Stay!”

  That last was for Mouse.

  Mostly.

  I couldn’t see what Molly had done to my lab, but the fumes down there were cloying and obviously dangerous. I hauled myself over to the trapdoor.

  Molly hadn’t made it up the folding staircase and just lay sprawled semiconscious against it. I had to grab her and haul her up the stairs. She was undressed from the waist up. I spotted her shirt and bra on the floor near the worktable, both of them riddled with acid-burned holes.

  I got her laid out on her back, elevated her feet on a stray cushion from the smashed easy chair, and checked her breathing. It didn’t take long, because she wasn’t, though she did still have a faint pulse. I started rescue breathing for her—which is a lot more demanding than people think. Especially when the air is still thick with the smell of God only knows what chemical combinations.

  I finally got her to cough, and my racing heartbeat subsided a little as she began breathing again, raggedly, and opened her eyes.

  I sat up slowly, breathing hard, and found Anastasia Luccio standing in the open doorway to my apartment, her arms folded over her chest, one eyebrow arched.

  Anastasia was a pretty girl—not glamorously lovely, but believably, genuinely pleasant to look at, with a fantastic smile and killer dimples. She looked like someone in her twenties, for reasons too complex to go into right now, but she was an older woman. A much older woman.

  And there I was, apparently sitting up from kissing a topless girl, with a naked couple a few feet away, and the air thick with a pall of smoke and the smell of noxious fumes. For crying out loud, my apartment looked like the set of some kind of bizarre porno.

  “Um,” I said, and swallowed. “This isn’t what it might appear to be.”

  Anastasia just stared at me. I knew it had been a long time since she’d opened up to anyone. It might not take much to make her close herself off again.

  She shook her head, very slowly, and the smile lines at the corners of her eyes deepened along with her dimples. Then she burst out into a hearty belly laugh. “Madre di Dio, Harry. I cannot for the life of me imagine what it does appear to be.”

  I lifted my eyebrows in surprise. “You aren’t upset?”

  “By the time you get to be my age,” she replied, “you’ve either worked out your insecurities, or they’re there to stay. Besides, I simply must know how this happened.”

  I shook my head and then smiled at her. “I . . . My friends needed help.”

  She looked back and forth between the Alphas and Molly. “And still do,” she said, nodding sharply. She came in and, as the only one actually wearing shoes, began picking up pieces of fallen glass from the broken window, literally rolling up her sleeves as she went. “Shall we?”

  IT TOOK MOST of the day to get Molly to the hospital, gather the materials needed to fumigate Kirby’s and Andi’s auras, and actually perform the work to get the job done. By the time they left, all better and psychophage-free, it was after seven.

  “So much for our day off,” I said.

  She turned to consider me. “Would you do it differently if you had it to do again?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  She shrugged. “Then it was a day well spent. There will be others.”

  “You never can be sure of that, though, can you?”

  Her cheeks dimpled again. “Today is not yet over. You mourn its death somewhat prematurely.”

  “I just wanted to show you a nice time for a day. Not get bogged down in more business.”

  Anastasia turned to me and put her fingers over my mouth. Then she replaced her fingers with her lips.

  “Enough talk,” she murmured.

  I agreed.

  BACKUP

  —novelette from Subterranean Press

  Takes place between Small Favor and Turn Coat

  This story was really fun to write. I’d been wanting to show a little more of Thomas and his world for several years, but it just hadn’t ever been a feasible thing for Harry to encounter. The vampires of the Dresden Files, the White Court especially, see themselves
as a nation of outcasts, banded together by similar concerns and dangerous enemies. The kind of culture that emerges from that sort of foundation simply doesn’t make itself available to outsiders. If Harry had ever gotten to the “inside” to see that culture, it would have betrayed the us-against-them integrity of the White Court, and invalidated the whole setup.

  So when Subterranean came to me with a proposal to produce a novelette illustrated by no less than Mike Mignola, I jumped at the chance. The challenge, here, was to present Thomas from his own viewpoint, one distinct from Harry’s. And, even better, I wanted to pit brother against brother in such a way that their relationship of trust and mutual regard was maintained, but they still got to slug it out with each other.

  I also got to bring some of the other background material of the Dresden Files story world into play. The Oblivion War was something I really loved, conceptually, but like the White Court, its very nature prevented Dresden from getting involved without causing the entire thing to implode. This was an ideal place for that piece of universe background, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy to finally get it out where the readers could see it, too.

  1

  Let’s get something clear right up front.

  I’m not Harry Dresden.

  Harry’s a wizard. A genuine, honest-to-goodness wizard. He’s Gandalf on crack and an IV of Red Bull, with a big leather coat and a .44 revolver in his pocket. He’ll spit in the eye of gods and demons alike if he thinks it needs to be done, and to hell with the consequences—and yet somehow my little brother manages to remain a decent human being.

  I’ll be damned if I know how.

  But then, I’ll be damned regardless.

  My name is Thomas Raith, and I’m a monster.

  The computer in my little office clamored for my attention. I’ve got it set up to play Nazi Germany’s national anthem whenever I receive e-mail from someone in my family. Not Harry, my half brother, naturally. Harry and e-mail go together like Robert Downey, Jr., and sobriety. I mean the other side of my family.

  The monsters.

  I finished cleaning off the workstation and checked the clock—five minutes until my next appointment. I took a quick look around my boutique, smiled at one of my regular customers, playfully scolded the young stylist working on her, and went back down the hall, around the corner, down the narrow stairwell, and then through ten feet of claustrophobic hallway to get to my office. I sat down at the desk and nudged my laptop to life. The virus scanner pored over the e-mail before it chimed again, a soft sound that a human wouldn’t have heard from the end of the hall, much less from upstairs, and pronounced it safe.

  The e-mail from admin@whitecourt.com was empty, but the subject line read, Re: 0b.ll.vl.0n.

  Oh.

  Super.

  Just what I needed.

  I never really enjoyed hearing from that side of the family, even when the subject was something boring—like business pertaining to the war between the Vampire Courts and the wizards’ White Council, for example. Whenever Lara wanted to get in touch with me, for any reason, it was bad news.

  But when it was about an Oblivion matter, it was worse.

  I had Lara’s number on the speed dial on my cell phone. I gave her a ring.

  “Brother-mine,” purred my eldest sister, her voice pure honey. It was the kind of voice that would give men ideas—really bad ideas, though they’d never realize that part. “You hardly ever call me anymore.”

  “I’ve hardly ever called you, Lara. Period.” I ignored the lure she was sliding into her voice. She’d fed very recently—or was doing so at the moment. “What do you want?”

  “You received my e-mail?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s a project I think you’ll be interested in.”

  “Why?”

  “Take a look at it,” she said. “You’ll understand.”

  The line was supposedly secure, but we both knew how much that was worth. Neither of us would mention any details over the phone— and we certainly would not use the word oblivion. Too many Venatori had discovered, too late, that the enemy had very sharp ears, and that they would swiftly carry the war into the homes of those careless enough not to guard their tongues.

  It had been nearly eight years since I had been involved in the Oblivion War. I suppose I had known I couldn’t avoid being drawn back into the fight forever. Lara, the only other Venator in the White Court, was largely occupied with her current responsibilities—namely, spending her days manipulating our father like a puppet on her psychic strings and ruling the White Court from the shadows behind his throne. Naturally, if something came up, she would pass it along to me to deal with.

  “I’m busy,” I told her.

  “Grooming pets?” she said. “Trimming their fur? Checking for fleas? Priorities, brother-mine.”

  Lara is most annoying when she has a point. “Where do you want to meet?”

  She laughed, a warm little sound. “Tommy, Tommy, I’m flattered you want to be with me, but no. I’ve no time to spend playing games with you. I’ve sent a courier with everything you need and . . . Mmmmmm.” Her voice turned into a sensual little purr of pleasure. “You know the stakes. Don’t ask too many questions, brother-mine,” she murmured. “Don’t start using that pretty little head for anything taxing. Go back to your apartment. Talk to the courier. Take the job. Or you and I are going to have a very . . . ahhhhh . . .” Her breathing sped up. “A very serious falling-out.”

  I could hear other soft sounds in the background, and another voice. A woman. Maybe two. Most of my family isn’t what you’d call particular, when it comes to feeding on mortals.

  “I’d tell you that you were a much nicer person before you got into the power-behind-the-throne game, Lara,” I said. “But you were a bitch then, too.”

  I hung up on her before she had a chance to reply and went back upstairs, thinking. It was always good to get as much thinking done as you could, before the actual mind-boggling crisis came down. That way, when it got there and you only had half a second to decide what to do before something from beyond the borders of sanity started ripping at your soul, you could skip the preliminaries and go straight to the mistake.

  When you deal with someone like my sister, you never take anything at face value. She was up to something. Whatever it was, it included putting pressure on me to hurry. Lara wanted me to rush into the situation blindly. If that was what she wanted me to do, it was probably a good idea not to do it.

  Besides, I didn’t want Lara to start getting used to the idea that I would run to do her bidding every time she snapped her fingers. More important, I didn’t want to get into the habit of obeying her. It was an important first step toward becoming ensnared by more inflexible means, the way she had done to our father.

  Anyway, I had a business to run.

  And I was hungry.

  Michelle Marion, eldest daughter of the Honorable Senator Marion of the Great State of Illinois, had arrived a minute or two early for her haircut. My clients almost always did—especially the young ones. Michelle was a brunette, though you couldn’t tell that by looking. Only her hairdresser knew for sure.

  “Thomas!” she exclaimed, smiling at me, pronouncing it with the Latin emphasis. “What have you done with your hair?”

  I had cut it a bit shorter after getting a rather large section of it burned off by a flaming arrow fired by a faerie assassin—but that isn’t the sort of thing you share with your customers when you’re supposed to be a flaming French master stylist. “Darling,” I said, taking her hands and kissing her on either cheek.

  The Hunger inside me stirred as my skin touched hers. The demon gleefully danced through her for a heartbeat or two, and as it did, she shivered, her heart rate rose, and her pupils dilated. The Hunger told me what it always did about Michelle. Though she looked sweet, gentle, and kind, her repressed desires, far darker, would make her easy prey. Fingers tightening in the back of her hair, feeling a man’s body press he
rs against a wall—that was the stuff of her fantasies. She would follow me to the hall downstairs without hesitation. I could take her there. I could fulfill her desires, feed the Hunger, draw away her life, and take my fill. I could leave my mark ripped into her mind and soul so that forever after she would come to me willingly, eagerly, yearning to be taken again and again and agai—

  Until she died.

  I pushed the Hunger back down into the corruption that passes for my soul, and I smiled at Michelle, slipping on the accent as easily as an Italian leather glove. “I grew bored, so tediously bored, darling. I had half decided to shave it all, just to shock everyone.”

  The girl laughed, her cheeks still flushed with excitement, in the wake of my demon’s touch. “Don’t you dare!”

  “Have no fear,” I assured her, tucking her arm through mine and walking her to my station. “The men who prefer such things aren’t really my type in any case.”

  She laughed again, and I kept up the inane chatter until I could lean her chair back to the sink and begin washing her hair.

  The Hunger lunged forward, eager as always—and I let it begin to feed upon the girl.

  Michelle’s eyes glazed over slightly as I went through the wash—very slowly, very thoroughly, working a full-scalp massage into the process. I felt her mind slip into idle fantasy as the thin warmth of her aura pooled around my fingertips and slid up into me.

  The Hunger screamed for me to do more, to take more, that it wasn’t enough. But I didn’t. Feeding would have been . . . delicious. But it might have hurt her, too. It might even have killed her. So I kept on with the steady, gentle circular motions, barely tasting of her life force. She sighed in bliss as her fantasies dissolved into a gentle euphoria, and I shuddered with the need to give in to my Hunger and take more.

  Some days, it was more difficult than others to hold back. But it’s what I do. It’s what I have left.

  Michelle left about an hour later, hair trimmed, color retouched, blissfully relaxed, flushed, happy, and humming to herself under her breath. I watched her go, and my Hunger snarled and paced about restlessly in the cage I’d built for it in my thoughts, furious that the prey had escaped. For just a second, I found myself turning toward her, my weight shifting as if to take a step forward, to follow her to someplace quiet and—