Dangerous Women (15 page)

When he awoke he was in Sammy’s apartment, lying on a bed frame without mattress, sheets, or cover. He staggered out of bed and stood swaying in the middle of the bedroom. His eyes felt crusty; slowly the disjointed memories returned. He looked down at the crook of his elbow. There was a small red dot like the bite of a steel insect. His clothes were dumped on a chair in the corner of the room. He searched the pockets and found them empty. His keys, wallet, and comm were gone. Even his comb and monogrammed handkerchief had been taken.

“Just a thieving whore,” he said, testing out the words, and then recoiled at the unfamiliar sounds issuing from his throat. He had gone from a light baritone to a deep bass. His throat felt sore and his mouth was desert dry. That’s why he sounded so strange.

Pressure on his bladder sent him into the bathroom. As he relieved himself it started to penetrate: every vestige of Sammy was gone. No toothbrush, no hairbrush, no makeup, even the delicate perfume bottle he’d bought her—all gone. But if it had been nothing more than a con, why had she waited so many months and through so many encounters before robbing him? He staggered to the sink to wash his hands and splash his face, and recoiled from the image in the mirror.

A stranger looked back at him.

The frightened eyes staring out at him were now a pale grey. His hair was dark and straight rather than reddish and curly. His forehead was much higher because this alien hair seemed to be rapidly retreating toward the back of his neck. His skin tone was decidedly darker. Nose larger and bulbous on the tip. Ears clipped closer to his skull. His real ears had been rather protuberant. He looked down. His belly was larger, and the birthmark on his left hip was gone. He stumbled back to the toilet and vomited until he was reduced to dry heaves.

Whimpering, he returned to the sink, rinsed out his mouth, and gulped down water. Then stared at his hands. His wedding ring and the heavy signet ring with the family crest were missing. His gut twisted again, but he managed to keep from hurling. Back in the bedroom, he snatched up his clothes with trembling hands and started to dress. Because of his weight gain, he couldn’t close the top clasp on his trousers, and the straining buttons on his shirt gapped open enough to reveal skin.

He left the bedroom and found the living room to be equally void of any trace of the occupant. On an impulse, he checked the kitchen. All the dishes, utensils, and food were gone. In this room he was more aware of a faint disinfectant smell, as if every surface had been washed down with bleach.

He made his way down the stairs and out into the street, where he stood blinking in the sunlight. He had lost a night. Then he realized that heat and humidity pounded at his head and shoulders. Sweat bloomed in his armpits and went rolling down his sides. It was high summer. When he’d come looking for Sammy the night of the ball it had been a cool fall night. Dear God, he had lost
months
!

He needed to get home. But how to accomplish that journey loomed monumental. No money, no comm, no proof that he was who he claimed to be. Not even a face. He guessed it was about twenty miles from Pony Town to the Cascades and his mansion. He didn’t think he could walk one mile, much less twenty. Still, he wouldn’t know until he tried. He walked away from the building. He tried not to, but he looked back several times until its salmon-colored stucco was hidden by other structures.

Two hours later his feet were a mass of stabbing pain, and he felt the wetness of a burst blister. He saw the glowing shield that indicated a police station and realized that he was an idiot. He had been kidnapped, assaulted, surgically altered. The police would help him. They would call his home, Hobb would arrive with the flitter, and he would be whisked away from all this. And the hue and cry would be raised for Sammy. Rohan swallowed bile. It was unfortunate but necessary. The creature deserved nothing less. He walked into the precinct house.

“I need to report a crime,” he announced to the desk sergeant.

The man didn’t even look up, just pushed over an etablet. “Write it up. Bring it back when you’re done.”

When he presented his name and title in his aristocratic accent, the man became a good deal more attentive. His eyes did narrow with suspicion as he studied the ill-fitting clothing, but the sergeant offered coffee and water. It would never do to offend if Rohan really was a member of the FFH.

Mollified, Rohan settled into a chair and typed up his experiences. The beverages were supplied and the desk sergeant sent the report up to his superiors. A few minutes later a captain arrived. He walked up to stand in front of Rohan and called over his shoulder to the desk clerk.

“Don’t follow politics, do you, Johnson? This is not the Chancellor.”

“As I indicated in my report, my appearance has been altered,” Rohan said.

“And I just talked to the Chancellor’s office. According to John Fujasaki, the Chancellor’s aide, the Conde is in a meeting with the Prime Minister. Now, get out of here and try your con someplace else.”

Rohan just kept staring up at the officer, trying to process the words. His removal was then expedited by the arrival of two burly officers, who frog-marched him out of the building.

Panic lay like a stone on his chest. Rohan gasped for breath. He stood on the sidewalk, blocking the flow of humanity and staring back at the police station. Eventually he resumed his slow march toward home.

He was getting odd looks because of his formal, too-small evening attire in the middle of the day, and his limping progress wasn’t helping. A Hajin message runner gave him a somewhat sympathetic look. Rohan gathered his nerve and approached the alien.

“Excuse me. I’ve been robbed, and I need to make a call. May I borrow your comm? If you’ll give me your name, I’ll see that you’re compensated once I have access to my funds.”

The Hajin handed over his comm. “Of course.” The creature ducked his head, his forelock veiling his eyes. “And you don’t have to pay me.”

The sudden kindness in the midst of the nightmare had tears stinging his eyes. “Thank you.” Rohan forced the words past the lump in his throat. He took the offered comm and called his private line at the Exchequer. John answered.

“Chancellor’s office, Fujasaki speaking.”

“John,” Rohan said. “John, listen. I’m in a nightmare. I think—”

“Who is this?”

“It’s Rohan. I know it sounds incredible—”

The line went dead. Numbly, Rohan handed back the comm to the Hajin. “Thank you,” he said automatically. One should always show respect to one’s inferiors.

He turned and continued walking.

At the house, he didn’t even attempt to explain the situation to the butler. Instead he shoved the elderly Hajin aside and ran, panting, up the long, curving staircase. Behind him were rising cries of alarm. He raced through Juliana’s mirrored and gold-inlaid dressing room. Her Isanjo maid clutched a discarded ball gown against her chest and gazed at Rohan from wide, frightened eyes.

“Where is she? Where’s my wife?”

The creature reverted to her alien nature and went swarming up the drapes to cower on the rod. The large golden eyes shifted toward the bedroom door.

Rohan stormed through. He was met with the sight of an expanse of bare white back, a few freckles on the shoulders. The man propped himself on his forearms, his doughy behind pumping in an age-old dance. A woman’s soft cries emerged from among the tumbled pillows.

Juliana opened her eyes, looked at Rohan, and let out a piercing scream. The man who had been plowing her gave a grunt and pulled out.

“What in the hell?” he roared, and now Rohan finally saw his face.

It was him.

“The authorities arrived and took away the
madman
. I kept trying to make them understand. To realize that the Cara had placed an agent at the very heart of government. No one would listen. I would show them articles that proved what the impostor was doing, sending money to companies that I knew were fronts for the aliens. An audit would have revealed that funds were missing, redirected, but they wouldn’t listen. Eventually, I realized if I ever wanted to be released I had to end my accusations. I also knew that in the sanatorium I was at greater risk of being assassinated. I needed to get free. Once I was released, I headed to the outer worlds. Here I tell the story to people like you.” He rose to his feet, swaying. “I am Rohan Danilo Marcus Aubrey, Conde de Vargas, and I adjure you to act! Inform your superiors. Alert them to the danger!”

He seemed to have expended all his strength in the ringing call to arms. The drunk dropped heavily into his chair and his head nodded toward his chest.

Disgusted by his gullibility, and out the cost of a bottle, Tracy pushed back violently from the table. The shriek of the chair legs on the floor brought Rohan, or whatever his name might be, out of his stupor. The drunk belched and raised his head.

“Wha …?”

“Nice. What a scam. He”—Tracy jerked a thumb at the bartender—“sells more booze, and you get to drink for free.”

“Wha …?” the grifter repeated.

“The Conde de Vargas is Prime Minister. Second only to the Emperor in power.” Tracy tapped the name into the comm set in his jacket sleeve. “
This
is the
real
Rohan.” Tracy thrust his arm under the man’s nose, showing him the photos.

He waved a pudgy hand in a vague circle, indicating his visage. “I told you. They stole my face, my life … my wife … he made her love him again, or maybe love him for the first time.”

Tracy shook his head and headed for the door.

“Wait!” the drunk called. The young officer looked back, and the drunken Scheherazade gave Tracy a desperate look. “Your duties will take you all over League space. If you see her tell her … tell her …” His voice was thick with unshed tears and an excess of booze. “I never saw Sammy again, and I need to … need to …” The man began to sob. “I love her,” Rohan said brokenly. “Love her so much.”

Embarrassment, pity, and fury warred for primacy. Tracy embraced the anger. Clapping slowly, Tracy said, “Nice touch.”

The young officer stepped out into the darkness. The cold air cleared his head a bit, but he was still very drunk. He stared at the distant glow of the spaceport. Follow through on his threat? Go AWOL? He was only twenty-one. Was it worth risking a noose to walk away from casual insults and petty condescension? He realized that he could far too easily become that pathetic drunk in the bar, telling fantastic stories for the price of a drink.

I saved the heir to the throne from a scandal that might have rocked the League. We shared a secret love. I know that Mercedes de Arango, the Infanta, loves me, the tailor’s son.

But his story was
true,
not like that bit of farrago to which he’d just been treated.

And your story is any less fantastic?

No, Rohan’s—or whatever his name was—his story couldn’t be true. If it was, then he, Tracy Belmanor, second lieutenant in the Imperial Fleet, was privy to a secret that would not just rock the League but destroy it. He peered suspiciously into the shadowy depths of the alley to his left and saw nothing beyond the hulking shadow of a garbage container. But what if they were there, hiding among them, watching, waiting, listening? What if they decided they needed to silence him?

Tracy broke into a run and didn’t stop until he reached the ship. The outer hatch cycled closed and he leaned, panting, against the bulkhead. Inside the steel-and-resin bulwark of the warship, his panic receded. How foolish. The whole thing had been a scam. Sammy didn’t exist. The Cara weren’t hiding among them. Human males were still at the apex of power.

It had just been a story.

New York Times
bestseller Jim Butcher is best known for the Dresden Files series, starring Harry Dresden, a wizard for hire who goes down some very mean streets indeed to do battle against the dark creatures of the supernatural world, and who is one of the most popular fictional characters of the twenty-first century to date; he even had his own TV show. The Dresden Files books include
Storm Front,
Fool Moon,
Grave Peril,
Summer Knight,
Death Masks,
Blood Rites,
Dead Beat,
Proven Guilty,
White Night,
Small Favor,
Turn Coat,
and
Changes
. Butcher is also the author of the swashbuckling sword and sorcery Codex Alera series, consisting of
Furies of Calderon,
Academ’s Fury,
Cursor’s Fury,
Captain’s Fury,
and
Princeps’ Fury
. His most recent books are
First Lord’s Fury,
the new Codex Alera novel, and
Ghost Story,
a Dresden Files novel. There’s also a collection of stories featuring Harry Dresden,
Side Jobs: Stories from the Dresden Files
. Coming up is a new Dresden Files novel,
Cold Days.
Butcher lives in Missouri with his wife, his son, and a ferocious guard dog.

Butcher flabbergasted everyone by killing Harry Dresden off at the end of
Changes
. (The next novel,
Ghost Story,
was told from the point of view of Harry’s ghost!) Here Harry’s young protégé, trying to carry on the fight against the forces of darkness
without
Harry, finds that she has some very big shoes to fill, and that she’d better fill them
fast
—or die.

I miss my boss.

It’s been most of a year since I helped him die, and ever since then I’ve been the only professional wizard in the city of Chicago.

Well, okay. I’m not, like, officially a wizard. I’m still sort of an apprentice. And no one really pays me, unless you count the wallets and valuables I lift from bodies sometimes, so I guess I’m more amateur than professional. And I don’t have a PI license like my boss did, or an ad in the phone book.

But I’m all there is. I’m not as strong as he was, and I’m not as good as he was. I’m just going to have to be enough.

So anyway, there I was, washing the blood off in Waldo Butters’ shower.