Changes (4 page)

“It wasn’t him,” Martin corrected her. “Are you the same person you were eight years ago?”

She didn’t say anything for a while.

I remembered how to walk, and started doing it on my own. I shook my head to clear it a little and looked back over my shoulder.

There were buildings on fire. More and more sirens were on the way. The spot in the skyline where my office building usually sat from this angle was empty except for a spreading cloud of dust. Fires and emergency lights painted the dust orange and red and blue.

My files. My old coffee machine. My spare revolver. My favorite mug. My ratty, comfortable old desk and chair. My frosted-glass window with its painted lettering reading, HARRY DRESDEN, WIZARD.

They were all gone.

“Dammit,” I said.

Susan looked up at me. “What was that?”

I answered in a weary mumble. “I mailed in the rent on my office this morning.”

5

We got a cab. We got out of the area before the cops had cordoned off a perimeter. It wasn’t all that hard. Chicago has a first-rate police department, but nobody can establish that big a cordon around a large area with a lot of people in the dead of night quickly or easily. They’d have to call and get people out of bed and onto the job, and pure confusion would slow everything down.

By morning, I knew, word of the explosion would be all over the news. There would be reporters and theories and eyewitness interviews with people who had sort of heard something happen and seen a cloud of dust. This hadn’t been a fire, like we’d seen a few times before. This had been an explosion, a deliberate act of destruction. They would be able to find out that much in the aftermath.

There would be search and rescue on the scene.

I closed my eyes and leaned my head on the window. Odds were good that there was no one else in the building. All the tenants were businesses. None of them was prone to operating late at night. But all of them had keys to get in when they needed to, just like I did. There could have been janitors or maintenance people there—employees of the Red Court, sure, but they didn’t know that. You don’t explain to the janitorial staff how your company is a part of a sinister organization with goals of global infiltration and control. You just tell them to clean the floor.

There could very well be dead people in that building who wouldn’t have been there except for the fact that my office was on the fourth floor.

Jesus.

I felt Susan’s eyes on me. None of us had spoken in front of the cabbie. Nobody spoke now, until Martin said, “Here. Pull over here.”

I looked up. The cab was pulling up to a cheap motel.

“We should stay together,” Susan said.

“We can go over the disk here,” Martin said. “We can’t do that at his place. I need your help. He doesn’t.”

“Go on,” I said. “People”—by which I meant the police—“are going to be at my place soon anyway. Easier if they only have one person to talk to.”

Susan exhaled firmly through her nose. Then nodded. The two of them got out of the cab. Martin doled out some cash to the driver and gave him my home address.

I rode home in silence. The cabbie was listening to the news on the radio. I was pretty beat, having tossed around a bunch of magic at the building. Magic can be awfully cool, but it’s exhausting. What was left buzzing around me wasn’t enough to screw up the radio, which was already alive with talk of the explosion. The cabbie, who looked like he was vaguely Middle Eastern in extraction, looked unhappy.

I felt that.

We stopped at my apartment. Martin had already paid him too much for the ride, but I duked him another twenty on top of that and gave him a serious look. “Your name is Ahmahd?”

It was right there on his cabbie license. He nodded hesitantly.

“You have a family, Ahmahd?”

He just stared at me.

I touched my finger to my lips in a hushing gesture. “You never saw me. Okay?”

He grimaced, but dipped his head in a nod.

I got out of the cab, feeling a little sick. I wouldn’t hurt the guy’s family, but he didn’t know that. And even if he did, that and the bribe together wouldn’t be enough to keep him from talking to the cops if they came asking—though I suspected it would be enough to keep him from jumping up to volunteer information. Buildings were exploding. Sane people would want to keep their heads down until it was over.

I watched the car drive away, put my hands in my coat pockets, and shuffled wearily home. I’d cut into my physical and psychic resources pretty hard when I’d turned all that energy loose on the vampires, and now I was paying the price. I’d unintentionally poured soulfire into every blast I’d leveled at them—which was why I’d had the nifty silver-white blasts of flame instead of the red-orange of standard-issue fire. I felt like falling into bed, but it wouldn’t be the smart move. I debated doing it anyway.

I had time to get a shower, take Mouse out for a much-needed trip outside, put on a pot of coffee, and was just finishing up cleaning the debris and trash from my leather duster with some handy-dandy leather-cleaning wipes Charity Carpenter, Molly’s mother, had sent over, when there was a knock at the door.

Mouse lifted his head from where he lay near me, his brown eyes wary and serious. Then his ears perked up, and his tail began to wag. He got up and took a step toward the door, then looked at me.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “I’m going.”

I got up and opened the door. It stuck halfway. I pulled harder and got it open the rest of the way.

A woman a little more than five feet tall stood at my door, her face weary and completely free of makeup. Her hair was golden blond, but hanging all over her face and badly in need of attention from a brush and maybe a curling iron. Or at least a scrunchie. She was wearing sweat-pants and an old and roomy T-shirt, and her shoulders were hunched up in rigid tension.

She stared at me for a moment. Then she closed her eyes and her shoulders relaxed.

“Hiya, Murphy,” I said.

“Hey,” she said, her voice a little feeble. I enjoyed the moment. I didn’t get to see Murphy’s soft side often. “Do I smell coffee?”

“Made a fresh pot,” I said. “Get you some?”

Murphy let out a groan of something near lust. “Marry me.”

“Maybe when you’re conscious.” I stepped back and let her in. Murph sat down on the couch and Mouse came over to her and laid his head shamelessly on her lap. She yawned and scratched and petted him obligingly, her small, strong hands making his doggy eyes close in bliss.

I passed her a cup of coffee and got one for myself. She took it black with a couple of zero-calorie sweeteners in it. Mine came with cream and lots and lots of sugar. We sipped coffee together, and her eyes became more animate as the caffeine went in. Neither of us spoke, and her gaze eventually roved over my apartment and me. I could hear the wheels spinning in her head.

“You showered less than an hour ago. I can still smell the soap. And you just got done cleaning your coat. At four in the morning.”

I sipped coffee and neither confirmed nor denied.

“You were at the building when it blew up,” she said.

“Not
at
it,” I said. “I’m good, but I don’t know about having a building fall on me.”

She shook her head. She stared at the remainder of her coffee. “Rawlins called. Told me that your office building had exploded. I thought someone had gotten to you, finally.”

“We on the record?” I asked. Murphy was a detective sergeant with Chicago PD’s Special Investigations division. It was the dead-end department of CPD and the only one with any clue whatsoever about the supernatural world. Even so, Murphy was a cop to the bone. She could stretch the line when it came to legality, but she had limits. I’d crossed them before.

She shook her head. “No. Not yet.”

“Red Court,” I said. “They bought the building a few years back. They wired it to blow if they wanted to do it.”

Murphy frowned. “Why do it now? Why not blow you up years ago?”

I grunted. “Personal grudge, I guess,” I said. “Duchess Arianna is upset about what happened to her husband when he tangled with me. She thinks it’s my fault.”

“Is it?”

“Pretty much,” I said.

She swirled the coffee around the bottom of the cup. “So why not just kill you? Click, boom.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “She figured it wasn’t enough, maybe. Click-boom is business. What I have going with her is personal.”

My jaws creaked a little as I clenched them.

Murphy’s blue eyes missed little. “Personal?” She looked around again. “Your place looks too nice. Who was it?”

“Susan.”

Her back straightened a little. It was the only sign of surprise she showed. Murphy knew all about Susan. “You want to talk about it?”

I didn’t, but Murphy needed to know. I laid it out for her in sentences of three and four words. By the time I’d finished, she had set her mug on the coffee table and was listening to me intently.

“Jesus and Mary, Mother of God,” she breathed. “Harry.”

“Yeah.”

“That . . . that
bitch
.”

I shook my head. “Pointing fingers does nothing for Maggie. We’ll do that later.”

She grimaced, as if swallowing something bitter. Then she nodded. “You’re right.”

“Thank you.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“Martin and Susan are seeing what they can get off the disk,” I said. “They’ll contact me as soon as they know something. Meantime, I’ll get a couple hours horizontal, then start hitting my contacts. Go to the Council and ask them for help.”

“That bunch of heartless, gutless, spineless old pricks,” she said.

I found myself smiling, a little, at my coffee.

“Are they going to give it to you?” Murphy asked.

“Maybe. It’s complicated,” I said. “Are
you
going to get CPD to help me?”

Her eyes darkened. “Maybe. It’s complicated.”

I spread my hands in a “there you are” gesture, and she nodded. She rose and paced over to the sink to put her cup down. “What can I do to help?”

“Be nice if the police didn’t lock me up for a while. They’ll realize that the explosives were around my office eventually.”

She shook her head. “No promises. I’ll do what I can.”

“Thank you.”

“I want in,” she said. “You’re both too involved in this. You’ll need someone with perspective.”

I started to snap back something nasty, but shut my stupid mouth because she was probably right. I put my own coffee cup in the sink to give me an excuse not to talk while I tried to cool down. Then I said, “I would have asked you anyway, Murph. I need a good gun hand.”

Tiny Murphy might be, but she’d survived more scrapes with the supernatural than any other vanilla mortal I’d ever met. She’d keep her head in a crisis, even if the crisis included winged demons, howling ghouls, slavering vampires, and human sacrifice. She’d keep anyone—by which I meant Martin—from stabbing me in the back. She’d keep her gun up and firing, too. I’d seen her do it.

“Harry . . .” she began.

I waved a hand. “Won’t ask you to break any of Chicago’s laws. Or U.S. laws. But I doubt we’re going to be in town for this one.”

She absorbed that for a moment, folded her arms, and looked at the fire. Mouse watched her silently from where he sat near the couch.

She said, “I’m your friend, Harry.”

“Never had a doubt.”

“You’re going to take Maggie back.”

My jaw ached. “Damn right I am.”

“Okay,” she said. “I’m in.”

I bowed my head, my eyes abruptly burning, the emotion clashing with the storm in my belly.

“Th—” I began. My voice broke. I tried again. “Thank you, Karrin.”

I felt her hand take mine for a moment, warm and steady.

“We
will
get her back,” she said, very quietly. “We
will
, Harry. I’m in.”

6

I didn’t sleep long, but I did it well. When my old Mickey Mouse windup alarm clock went off at seven, I had to fight my way up from a deep place on the far side of dreamland. I felt like I could use another eighteen or twenty hours.

It was another instance of my emotions getting the better of me. Using soulfire on pure, instinctive reflex was a mistake—potentially a fatal one. The extramortal well of power that soulfire offered was formidable in ways I understood only imperfectly. I don’t know if it made my spells any more effective against the Red Court—though I had a hunch that it sure as H-E-double-hockey-sticks did—but I was dead certain that it had drawn upon my own life energy to do it. If I pulled on it too much, well. No more life energy kinda means no more life. And if that energy was indeed the same force that is commonly known as a soul, it might mean oblivion.

Depending on what actually happened when you got to the far side, I guess. I have no idea. And no mortal or immortal creature I had ever met had sounded like he knew for sure, either.

I did know that powerful emotions were an excellent source of additional energy for working magic, sort of a turbocharger. Throw a destructive spell in the grip of a vast fury, and you’d get a lot more bang for your effort than if you did it while relaxed on a practice field. The danger, of course, was that you could never really be sure how much effect such an emotion would have on a spell—which meant that you ran a much higher risk of losing control of the energy. Guys operating on my level can kill others or themselves at the slightest mistake.

Maybe the soulfire came from a similar place as the emotions. Maybe you couldn’t have one without at least a little bit of the other. Maybe they were all mixed together, like protein powder and skim milk in a health smoothie.

Didn’t matter, really. Less than sixty seconds of action the night before left me exhausted. If I didn’t get a handle on the soulfire, I could literally kill myself with it.

“Get it together, Harry,” I growled to myself.

I shambled out of bed and out into the living room to find that my apprentice, Molly, had come in while I was sleeping and was profaning breakfast in my tiny kitchen.

She wore a simple outfit—jeans and a black T-shirt that read, in very small white letters,
IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’D BETTER HAVE BOUGHT ME DINNER.
Her golden hair was longer—she’d been letting it grow—and hung down to her shoulder blades in back. She’d colored it near the tips with green that darkened to blue as it went down.

I’m not sure if Molly was “bangin’,” or “slammin’,” or “hawt,” since the cultural catchphrase cycles every couple of minutes. But if you picked a word meant to be a term of praise and adoration for the beauty of a young woman, it was probably applicable. For me, the effect was somewhat spoiled, because I’d known her since she was a skinny kid somewhere between the ages of training wheels and training bra, but that didn’t mean that I didn’t have an academic appreciation for her looks. When she paid any attention, men fell all over her.

Mouse sat alertly at her feet. The big dog was very good about not taking food off the table or from the stove or the counter or on top of the refrigerator, but he had drawn a line on the linoleum: If any bits fell to the floor, and he could get to them first, they were his. His brown eyes tracked Molly’s hands steadily. From the cheerful wag of his tail, she had probably already dropped things several times. She was a soft touch where the pooch was concerned.

“Morning, boss,” she chirped.

I glowered at her, but shambled out to the kitchen. She dumped freshly scrambled eggs onto a plate next to bacon, toast, and some mixed bits of fruit, and pressed a large glass of OJ into my hand.

“Coffee,” I said.

“You’re quitting this week. Remember? We had a deal: I make breakfast and you quit morning coffee.”

I scowled at her through the coffeeless haze. I dimly remembered some such agreement. Molly had grown up being interested in staying healthy, and had gotten more so of late. She was careful about what she ate, and had decided to pass that joy on to me.

“I hate morning people,” I said, and grabbed my breakfast. I stalked over to the couch and said, “Don’t feed Mouse anything. Not good for him.”

Mouse didn’t twitch an ear. He just sat there watching Molly and grinning.

I drank orange juice, which I found a completely inadequate beginning to my day. The bacon turned out to be made of turkey, and the edges were burned. I ate it anyway, along with toast that was not quite done enough. The grasshopper had talents, but cooking was not among them. “Things are up,” I said.

She stood at the sink, scrubbing a pan, and looked up at me interestedly. “Oh? What?”

I grunted and thought about the matter carefully for a moment. Molly was not much for combat. It just wasn’t her field. The next few days would certainly be hazardous for me, and I could live with that. But if Molly got involved, they might well be murderous.

I’d seen both sides of the “ignorance is safety” line of thinking in action. I’d seen people die who wouldn’t have if they hadn’t been told about the supernatural and its hazards, and I’d seen them die because they’d been forewarned, and it just wasn’t enough to really impress the scale of the threat upon them. There was just no way to know what would happen.

And
because
I had no way to know what would happen, I’d come to the conclusion that, absent factors that might make me believe to the contrary, I just wasn’t wise enough to deny them the choice. Molly was a part of my life. This would affect her strongly, in one way or another. The only responsible thing to do was to let her decide for herself how she wanted to live her life. That included endangering it, if that was what she felt was appropriate.

So, much as I had for Murphy, I laid it out for the grasshopper.

By the time I was finished, Molly was kneeling on the floor next to where I sat at the sofa, her blue eyes wide. “Wow, Harry.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Wow.”

“You said that.”

“This changes everything.”

I nodded.

“How can I help?”

I hoped that she hadn’t just chosen to get herself killed. “You tell me. What’s the smart move, padawan?”

She chewed on her lip for a moment and then peered up at me. “We need information. And we need backup. Edinburgh?”

I drank the last swallow of my orange juice, resented its healthiness, and said, “Bingo.”

We took the Ways to Edinburgh, taking advantage of the weird geography of the spirit world to cover a lot more physical distance in the material world. Only certain previously explored routes were safe and reliable, and you had to have some serious supernatural juice to open the door, so to speak, between the real world and the Nevernever, but if you could do it, the Ways were darned handy. The Chicago-to-Edinburgh trip took us about half an hour.

The headquarters of the White Council of wizards is a dull, dim, drafty sort of place—not unlike the insides of the heads of a great many people who work there. It’s all underground, a network of tunnels, its walls covered in carvings of mystic runes and sigils, of stylized designs and genuinely beautiful artistry. The ceilings are kind of low for me in places. Some of the tunnels are pitch-black, but most of them are bathed in a kind of ambient light without a visible source, which is an awfully odd look—sort of like one of those black lights that makes certain other colors seem to glow.

We passed two security checkpoints and walked for another five minutes before Molly shook her head. “How big is this place?” Her subdued voice echoed down the empty tunnels.

“Big,” I said. “Almost as big as the city above, and it has multiple levels. Way more than we actually use.”

She trailed her fingers over an elaborate carving in the stone as we passed it, a mural depicting a forest scene, its edges and lines crisp and clean despite the smoke from occasional torches and the passage of centuries. Her fingers left little trails in the light layer of dust coating the wall. “Did the Council carve it out?”

“Nah,” I said. “That would have been too much like work. Rumor has it that it used to be the palace of the lord of the Daoine Sidhe. That the original Merlin won it from him in a bet.”

“Like,
Merlin
Merlin?” she asked. “Sword in the stone and so on?”

“Same guy,” I said. “Doubt he was much like in the movies.”

“Wrote the Laws of Magic, founded the White Council, was custodian of one of the Swords and established a stronghold for the Council, too,” Molly said. “He must have been something else.”

“He must have been a real bastard,” I said. “Guys who get their name splashed all over history and folklore don’t tend to be Boy Scout troop leaders.”

“You’re such a cynic,” Molly said.

“I think cynics are playful and cute.”

There was no traffic at all in the main corridor, which surprised me. I mean, it was never exactly crowded, but you usually bumped into
someone
.

I headed for Warden country. There was a large dormitory set up for the militant branch of the White Council, where I could generally be confident of finding a surly, suspicious face. It was also very possible that Anastasia Luccio, captain of the Wardens, was there. The cafeteria and the administrative offices were nearby, so it was hands down the busiest part of the stronghold.

Warden country and the cafeteria were both empty, though there was a deck of cards spread out on a table in one of the lounges. “Weird,” I muttered. “All the checkpoints are business-as-usual or I’d think something was wrong.”

Molly frowned. “Maybe someone got into the heads of the sentries.”

“Nah. They’re jerks, but they’re not incompetent jerks. No one around here is going to get away with mental buggery for a while.”

“Buggery?” Molly asked.

“Hey, we’re in the United Kingdom. When in Rome.”

We went across the hall to administration and, finally, found someone: a harried-looking woman who sat at an old switchboard—the kind with about a million holes and plugs that had to be manually inserted and removed to run it. She wore a pair of ancient-looking headphones and spoke into an old radio microphone. “No. No, we have no word at this time. When we learn something, you will be informed.” She jerked the wire out, plugged it in under another flashing light, and repeated her spiel. I watched that half a dozen times before I literally waved a hand in front of her face to get her to notice us.

She stopped and blinked up at me. She was a matronly-looking woman, iron grey woven smoothly through her brown hair, which meant that she could be anywhere between forty-five and two hundred years old. Her eyes flicked over me and then Molly, and I saw her body tense. She eased her rolling chair a few inches back from us—like most of the older crew of wizards, she probably regarded me as a sociopath looking for a nice bell tower. The switchboard lights blinked on and off steadily. They were the old kind that made little clicking sounds as they did.

“Ah,” she said. “Wizard Dresden. I am quite busy.”

“It looks like it,” I said. “Wizard MacFee, right? Where is everybody?”

She blinked at me again, as though I had spoken in Ewok. “Why, they’re in the Senior Council’s residence hall. It was the only place big enough for everyone who wished to witness it.”

I nodded pleasantly and tried to remain calm. “Witness what?”

“The ambassador,” MacFee said, impatience touching her voice. She gestured at the switchboard. “You haven’t heard?”

“Was sort of busy yesterday,” I said. “Heard what?”

“Why, the Red Court, of course,” she said. “They’ve sent an ambassador plenipotentiary.” She beamed. “They want to change the cease-fire into a genuine peace. They’ve sent no less than Duchess Arianna Ortega to ask for terms.”