Turn Coat (29 page)

“You might try looking at the Hotel Sax, room twelve thirty-three,” I said. “If I’m right, you’re going to find Mr. Aramis’s body there. Madeline’s working for someone, a man. She didn’t say anything that would help identify him. You should also know that she has hired the services of a mercenary named Binder. Not exactly a rocket scientist, but smart enough to be dangerous.”

Lara was silent for a second. Then she said, “How did you learn this?”

“Shockingly, with magic.”

I heard her speaking to someone in the room with her. Then she got back on the phone and said, “If Aramis is dead, Madeline has tied up the loose end in her plan. It will be impossible to provide credible evidence that I did not in fact pay for LaFortier’s murder.”

“Yeah. That’s why she did it.”

I heard her make a displeased sound, but it was still ladylike. “What do we intend to do about this, Harry?”

“Do you have a nice dress?”

“Pardon?”

I found myself grinning maniacally. “I’m throwing a party.”

Thomas’s phone rang four times before the connection opened. There was a moment of silence. Then Thomas spoke, his voice raw and ragged. “Harry?”

My heart just about stopped beating to hear my brother’s voice. “Thomas. How’s it going?”

“Oh,” he rasped, “I’m just hanging around.”

I’ve seen Thomas in agony before. He sounded exactly like this.

The phone emitted random noises, and then the yowl-purring voice of the skinwalker came over the line. “He is here. He is alive. For now. Give me the doomed warrior.”

“Okay,” I said.

There was a moment of silent consternation from the far end of the line.

“Bring him to me,” it said.

“Nah. That isn’t going to happen.”

“What?”

“You’re coming to me.”

“Do you wish me to end his life this instant?”

“Frankly, Shaggy, I don’t give a damn,” I said, forcing boredom into my voice. “It’d be nice to be able to return one of the vampires to his own, get myself a marker I can call in some day. But I don’t need it.” I paused. “You, on the other hand, need Thomas to be alive, if you expect me to trade Morgan for him. So this is how it’s going to go down. At dusk, you will be contacted on this phone. You will be told where our meeting will take place. When you arrive, you will show me the vampire, alive and well, and when he is returned to me, you will take Morgan without contest.”

“I am
not
some mortal scum you can command, mageling,” Shagnasty seethed.

“No. You’re immortal scum.”

“You blind, flesh-feeding
worm
,” Shagnasty snarled. “Who are you to speak to me so?”

“The worm who’s got what you need,” I said. “Dusk. Keep the phone handy.”

I hung up on him.

My heart hammered against my chest and cold sweat broke out over my upper body. I felt myself shaking with terror for Thomas, with weariness, with reaction to the conversation with Shagnasty. I leaned my aching head against the earpiece of the phone and hoped that I hadn’t just ended my brother’s life.

One more call.

The White Council of Wizards uses telephone communications like everyone else, albeit with a lot more service calls. I gave headquarters a ring, gave them the countersign to their security challenge, and got patched through to one of the administrative assistants, an earnest young woman not quite finished with her apprenticeship.

“I need to get a message to every member of the Senior Council,” I told her.

“Very well, sir,” she said. “What is the message?”

“Get this verbatim. Okay?”

“Yes, sir.”

I cleared my throat and spoke. “Be advised that I have been sheltering Warden Donald Morgan from discovery and capture for the past two days. An informant has come to me with details of how Warden Morgan was framed for the murder of Senior Council Member LaFortier. Warden Morgan is innocent, and what’s more, I can prove it.

“I am willing to meet with you tonight, on the uncharted island in Lake Michigan, east of Chicago at sundown. The informant will be present, and will produce testimony that will vindicate Warden Morgan and identify the true culprit of the crime.

“Let me be perfectly clear. I will
not
surrender Warden Morgan to the alleged justice of the Council. Come in peace and we will work things out. But should you come to me looking for a fight, be assured that I will oblige you.”

The assistant had started making choking sounds after the very first sentence.

“Then sign it ‘Harry Dresden,’ ” I said.

“Um. Yes, sir. Sh-shall I read that back to you?”

“Please.”

She did. I’d heard sounds of movement in the background around her, but as she read aloud, all of those sounds died to silence. When she finished, she asked, in a rather small, squeaky voice, “Do I have that down correctly, sir?”

Murmurs burst out in the background over the phone, excited and low.

“Yeah,” I told her. “Perfect.”

Chapter Thirty-eight

I
figured I had an hour, maybe, before someone was going to show up from Edinburgh. It was time enough to grab a cab and head to the hospital.

Back in the ICU, Will was sacked out in the waiting room and Georgia was the one sitting with Andi. A middle-aged couple who looked as if they hadn’t slept much was in there with her. I knocked on the glass. Georgia said something to the couple and rose to come out into the hallway with me. She looked tired but alert, and had her long, rather frizzy hair pulled back into a ponytail.

“Harry,” she said, hugging me.

I returned the hug, cutting it off a little early. “How is she?”

Georgia studied me for a second before she answered. “In bad shape. The doctors don’t seem to be willing to say whether or not she’ll recover.”

“Better that way,” I said. “If one of them said she’d be fine and then she wasn’t . . .”

Georgia glanced at the couple sitting beside Andi’s bed, holding each other’s hands. “I know. It would be cruel to offer false hope, but . . .”

“But you’re still irrationally angry that the docs haven’t saved her yet. You know better, but you’re upset anyway.”

She nodded. “Yes. Irrationality is not something I’m comfortable with.”

“It isn’t irrational,” I said. “It’s human.”

She gave me a small smile. “Will and I talked. And you’re in a hurry.”

I nodded. “I need you both, and right now.”

“I’ll get him,” Georgia said.

We took Georgia’s SUV back down to the marina and arrived with ten minutes to spare on my estimated time window. I definitely wanted to be out over open water by the time members of the Council started showing up. The water wouldn’t be a perfect protection from incoming magic, but it would make it a lot harder for anyone to target me solidly, and it was a hell of a lot better than nothing.

“Okay,” I said. “You guys wait here for a minute.”

Will frowned. “Why?”

“I need to talk to someone who can be a little shy around strangers. One minute.” I hopped out of the SUV and walked down the rows of cars until I found two vans parked together. I slipped between them, put the fingers of one hand to my lips, and let out a sharp whistle.

There was a whirring sound and Toot-toot streaked down from overhead, came to a hover in front of me, drew his little sword, and saluted. “Yes, my liege!”

“Toot, I have two missions for you.”

“At once, my lord!”

“No, I want you to do them one at a time.”

Toot lowered his sword, his expression crestfallen. “Oh.”

“First, I want you to find the boat out on the lake that my apprentice is in. She’s not more than a mile or two from shore.” I took off my silver pentacle amulet, wrapped the chain around it, and handed it to Toot-toot. “Leave this where she will notice it right away.”

Toot accepted the amulet gravely, tucking it under one arm. “It will be done.”

“Thank you.”

Toot-toot’s chest swelled out, and he stood a little bit straighter.

“Second,” I told him. “I need to know how many of the little folk you could convince to join the Guard for one night.”

He frowned and looked dubious. “I don’t know, Lord Harry. The pizza ration is already stretched as far as it can go.”

I waved a hand. “The Guard’s pay won’t change. I’ll order extra to pay for the new guys’ service. Call them the Za-Lord’s Militia. We only need them sometimes. How many do you think would agree to that?”

Toot buzzed in an excited circle. “For
you
? Every sprite and pixie and dewdrop faerie within a hundred miles knows that you saved our kind from being imprisoned by the Lady of the Cold Eyes! There’s not a one who didn’t have comrade or kin languishing in durance vile!”

I blinked at him. “Oh,” I said. “Well. Tell them that there may be great danger. Tell them that if they wish to join the Militia, they must obey orders while they serve. And I will pay them one large pizza for every fourscore volunteers.”

“That’s less than you pay the Guard, Harry,” Toot said smugly.

“Well, they’re amateurs, not full-time veterans like you and your men, are they?”

“Yes, my lord!”

I looked at him seriously. “If you can recruit a Militia and if they perform as asked, there’s a promotion in it for you, Toot.”

His eyes widened. “Does it come with cheese in the crust and extra toppings?”

“It isn’t a pizza.” I said. “It’s a promotion. Get this work done, and from that time forward, you will be . . .” I paused dramatically. “Major-General Toot-toot Minimus commanding the Za-Lord’s Elite.”

Toot’s body practically convulsed in a spasm of excitement. Had a giant yellow exclamation point suddenly appeared in the air over his head, I would not have been surprised. “A
Major-General
?”

I couldn’t resist. “Yes, yes,” I said solemnly. “A Major-General.”

He let out a whoop of glee and zipped up and down the little space between vans. “What do you wish us to do when I have them, my lord!”

“I want you to play,” I said. “Here’s what we’re going to do. . . .”

I rejoined Will and Georgia, and ten minutes later, the
Water Beetle
came chugging back toward the marina. The grasshopper got my brother’s boat into dock with only a mildly violent impact. I secured lines quickly, and Will and Georgia jumped on. Almost before Will’s feet were on the deck, I was already untying the lines and following them onto the boat. Molly, for her part, already had the engine in reverse.

“Now what?” she called down to me from the wheel atop the cabin.

“Use the compass on the dashboard. One to two degrees south of due east, and call me when you spot the island.”

“Aye aye!”

Will squinted at Molly and then at me. “ ‘Aye aye’?”

I shook my head sadly. “Landlubbers. I’m going to go shiver timbers or something. I haven’t slept in a while.”

“Go ahead, Harry,” Georgia said. “We’ll wake you if anything happens.”

I nodded, shambled down to the second bunk, and passed out immediately.

Someone shook me two seconds later and I said, “Go away.”

“Sorry, Harry,” Will said. “We’re here.”

I said several uncouth and thoughtless things, then manned up and opened my eyes, always the hardest part of waking up. I sat up, and Will retreated from the cramped cabin with a glance at Morgan’s unconscious form. I sat there with my mouth feeling like it had been coated in Turtle Wax. It took me a second to identify a new sound.

Rain.

Raindrops pattered onto the deck of the boat and the roof of the cabin.

I shambled out onto the deck, unconcerned about the rain ruining my leather duster. One handy side effect of going through the painfully precise ritual of enchanting it to withstand physical force as if it had been plate steel was that the thing was rendered waterproof and stainproof as well—yet it still breathed. Let’s see Berman’s or Wilson’s do
that
.

Sufficiently advanced technology, my ass.

I climbed up to the bridge, keeping an eye on the sky as I did. Lowering clouds of dark grey had covered the sky, and the rain looked to be a long, steady soaker—a rarity in a Chicago summer, which usually went for rough-and-tumble thunderstorms. The heat hadn’t let up much, and as a result the air was thick and heavy enough to swim through.

I took the wheel from Molly, oriented myself by use of the compass and the island, now only a few minutes away, and yawned loudly. “Well. This makes things less pleasant.”

“The rain?” Molly asked. She passed me my pentacle.

I slipped it back over my head and nodded. “I’d planned on lying off the island until closer to dark.”

“Why?”

“Mostly because I just challenged the Senior Council to a brawl there at sundown,” I said.

Molly choked on her gum.

I ignored her. “I didn’t want to make it easy for them to slip up on me. Oh, and I’ve arranged to trade Thomas for Morgan with Shagnasty. He won’t get word of where to go until later, though. I think otherwise he’d cheat and show up early. He looks like a shifty character.”

The pun went past Molly, or maybe she was just that good at ignoring it. “You’re trading Morgan for Thomas?”

“Nah. I just want to get Shagnasty out here with Thomas in one piece so that the White Court can take him down.”

Molly stared at me. “The White Court, too?”

I nodded happily. “They’ve got a stake in this as well.”

“Um,” she said. “Why do you think the Senior Council will take you up on your challenge?”

“Because I told them I was going to be producing an informant who would give testimony about who really killed LaFortier.”

“Do you have someone like that?” Molly asked.

I beamed at her. “No.”

She stared at me for a moment, clearly thinking. Then she said, “But the killer doesn’t know that.”

My smile widened. “Why, no, Miss Carpenter. He doesn’t. I made sure word got around headquarters of my challenge to the Senior Council. He’s got no
choice
but to show up here if there’s any chance at all that I might actually have found an informant ready to blow his identity—which, by the way, would also provide substantial proof of the existence of the Black Council.”

Her golden brows knitted. “What if there’s no chance of such an informant existing?”

I snorted. “Kid, groups like these guys, the ones who maim and kill and scheme and betray—they do what they do because they love power. And when you get people who love power together, they’re all holding out a gift in one hand while hiding a dagger behind their back in the other. They regard an exposed back as a justifiable provocation to stick the knife in. The chances that this group has no one in it who might believably have second thoughts and try to back out by bargaining with the Council for a personal profit are less than zero.”

Molly shook her head. “So . . . he or she will call in the Black Council to help?”

I shook my head. “I think this is happening because the killer slipped up and exposed himself to LaFortier. He had to take LaFortier out, but with all the security at Edinburgh, there was every chance something could go wrong and it did. Everything else he’s done has smacked of desperation. I think that if the Black Council finds out that their mole has screwed up this thoroughly, they’d kill him themselves to keep the trail from leading back to them.” I stared at the glowering mass of Demonreach. “His only chance is to tie off any loose ends that might lead back to him. He’ll be here tonight, Molly. And he’s
got
to win. He has nothing to lose.”

“But you’re putting
everyone
together in a confined space, Harry,” Molly said. “This is going to be a huge mess.”

“Pressure cooker, padawan,” I said, nodding. “The perp is already desperate enough to be acting hastily and making mistakes. Especially the mistake of taking things a step too far and trying to incriminate the White Court in LaFortier’s death as well.”

Molly stared out at the water thoughtfully. “So you put him together in a confined space with two major groups of power who will want to kill him. His worst nightmare has got to be the wizards and the White Court being drawn into a
closer
alliance because of what he’s done. And with as much power as they have, there’s no way he’s going to be able to fight them all.”

I smiled at her. “Yeah. It
sucks
to feel helpless,” I said. “Especially for a wizard, because we usually aren’t. Or at least, we’re usually able to convince ourselves that we aren’t.”

“You think he’ll crack,” she said.

“I think he’ll be there. I think that with enough pressure, something is going to pop loose, somewhere. I think he’ll try something stupid. Maybe a preemptive spell, something to take everyone down before they know a fight is on.”

“A sneak attack,” Molly said. “Which won’t be a sneak attack if you know where he is and what he’s doing. Intellectus!”

I tapped my temple with a finger. “Capital thinking, grasshopper.”

Thunder rumbled far away.

I sighed. “Thomas can sail in bad weather, but I don’t know how to do it intelligently. Something like this could turn ugly, fast. We’re going to have to head into the dock and take our chances.”

I navigated. Sheesh, listen to me, “navigated.” The boat had a steering wheel and a lever to make it go faster. It was about as complicated to make move as a bumper car. Granted, simple isn’t the same thing as easy, but even so. The actual process of pointing the boat and making it go is not complicated enough to deserve to be called navigation.

I drove the
Water Beetle
around to the safe passage through the reef, and pulled her into the dock, much more smoothly this time. Will was waiting by the rail and ready. He hopped onto the dock and Georgia threw him the mooring lines.

“Don’t step onto the land until I get a chance to get there, first!” I called to them. “I want to, ah, sort of introduce you.”

Billy gave me an oblique look. “Um. Okay, Harry.”

I climbed down from the bridge and was just about to hop to the dock when a tall, slender figure in a black robe, black cape, and black hood appeared from behind a veil, standing at the very end of the dock. He lifted his old rune-carved staff, muttered a word, and then brought it smashing down onto the wooden planks.

A disk of sparkling blue light washed out from the point of impact. I had time, barely, to draw in my will, cross my arms at the wrists, holding them against my chest, and slam will into both my shield bracelet and into strengthening my mental defenses.

Smears of deep blue, purple, and dark green appeared like puffs of smoke where the expanding ring struck Molly, Will, and Georgia, and the three of them simply collapsed, dropping into sprawling heaps on the dock and the deck of the boat. My vision darkened and for an instant I felt unbearably tired—but in a panic I forced more energy into my defenses, and the instant passed.

The robed figure stood staring at me for a few seconds. Then it spoke in a deep voice. “Put the staff down, Dresden.” Swirling narcotic colors gathered around his staff, and he pointed it at me like a gun. “It is over.”