Jim Butcher: Songs of Love & Death

The echo of a thought rattled around in my head: Insane…

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, hell’s bells.”

She frowned at me. “What?”

“Murph… I think we got whammied.”

She blinked at me. “What? No, we didn’t.”

“I think we did.”

“I didn’t see anything or feel anything. I mean, nothing , Harry. I’ve felt magic like that before.”

“ Look at us,” I said, waving our joined hands.

“We’ve been friends a long time, Harry,” she said. “And we’ve had a couple of near misses before. This time we just didn’t screw it up. That’s all that’s happening, here.”

“What about Kincaid?” I asked her.

She mulled over that one for a second. Then she said, “I doubt he’ll even notice I’m gone.” She frowned at me. “Harry, I haven’t been this happy in… I never thought I could feel this way again. About anyone.”

My heart continued to go pit-a-pat. “I know exactly what you mean,” I said. “I feel the same way.”

Her smile warmed even more. “Then what’s the problem? Isn’t that what love is supposed to be like? Effortless?”

I had to think about that one for a second. And then I said, carefully and slowly, “Murph, think about it.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know how good this is?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“How right it feels?”

She nodded. “Yeah.”

“How easy it was?”

She nodded energetically, her eyes bright.

I leaned down toward her for emphasis. “It just isn’t fucked up enough to really be you and me.”

Her smile faltered.

“My God,” she said, her eyes widening. “We got whammied.”

....

WE RETURNED TO the Tunnel of Terror.

“I don’t get it,” she said. “I don’t… I didn’t feel anything happen. I don’t feel any different now. I thought being aware of this kind of thing made it go away.”

“No,” I said. “But it helps sometimes.”

“Do you still…?”

I squeezed her hand once more before letting go. “Yeah,” I said. “I still feel it.”

“Is it… is it going to go away?”

I didn’t answer her. I didn’t know. Or maybe I didn’t want to know.

The old carnie saw us coming and his face flickered with apprehension as soon as he looked at us. He stood up and looked from the control board for the ride to the entranceway to the interior.

“Yeah,” I muttered. “Sneaky bastard. You just try it.”

He flicked one of the switches and shambled toward the Tunnel’s entrance.

I made a quick effort of will, raised a hand, and swept it in a horizontal arc, snarling, “Forzare!” Unseen force knocked his legs out from beneath him and tossed him into an involuntary pratfall.

Murphy and I hurried up onto the platform before he could get to his feet and run. We needn’t have bothered. The carnie was apparently a genuine old guy, not some supernatural being in disguise. He lay on the platform moaning in pain. I felt kind of bad for beating up a senior citizen.

But hey. On the other hand, he did swindle me out of twenty bucks.

Murphy stood over him, her blue eyes cold, and said, “Where’s the bolt hole?”

The carnie blinked at her. “What?”

“The trap door,” she snapped. “The secret cabinet. Where is he?”

I frowned and walked toward the entranceway.

“Please,” the carnie said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“The hell you don’t,” Murphy said. She leaned down and grabbed the man by the shirt with both hands and leaned closer, a snarl lifting her lip. The carnie blanched.

Murph could be pretty badass for such a tiny thing. I loved that about her.

“I can’t,” the carnie said. “I can’t. I get paid not to see anything. She’ll kill me. She’ll kill me.”

I parted the heavy curtain leading into the entry tunnel and spotted it at once—a circular hole in the floor about two feet across, the top end of a ladder just visible. A round lid lay rotated to one side, painted as flat black as the rest of the hall. “Here,” I said to Murph. “That’s why we didn’t spot anything. By the time you had your light on, it was already behind us.”

Murphy scowled down at the carnie and said, “Give me twenty bucks.”

The man licked his lips. Then he fished my folded twenty out of his shirt pocket and passed it to Murphy.

She nodded and flashed her badge. “Get out of here before I realize I witnessed you taking a bribe and endangering lives by letting customers use the attraction in an unsafe manner.”

The carnie bolted.

Murphy handed me the twenty. I pocketed it, and we climbed down the ladder.

WE REACHED THE bottom and went silent again. Murphy’s body language isn’t exactly subtle—it can’t be, when you’re her size and working law enforcement. But she could move as quietly as smoke when she needed to. I’m gangly. It was more of an effort for me.

The ladder took us down to what looked like the interior of a buried railroad car. There were electrical conduits running along the walls. Light came from a doorway at the far end of the car. I moved forward first, shield bracelet at the ready, and Murphy walked a pace behind me and to my right, her Sig in hand.

The doorway at the end of the railroad car led us into a large workroom, teaming with computers, file cabinets, microscopes, and at least one deluxe chemistry set.

Maroon sat at one of the computers, his profile in view. “Dammit, Stu,” he snarled. “I told you that you can’t keep coming down here to use the john. You’ll just have to walk to one of the—” He glanced up at us and froze in midsentence, his eyes wide and locked on Murphy’s leveled gun.

“Stu took the rest of the night off,” I said amiably. “Where’s your boss?”

A door opened at the far end of the workroom and a young woman of medium height appeared. She wore glasses and a lab coat, and neither of them did anything to make her look less than gorgeous. She looked at us and then at Maroon and said, in a precise, British accent, “You idiot.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Good help is hard to find.”

The woman in the lab coat looked at me with dark, intense eyes, and I sensed what felt like a phantom pressure against my temples, as if wriggling tadpoles were slithering along the surface of my skin. It was a straightforward attempt at mental invasion, but I’d been practicing my defenses for a while now, and I wasn’t falling for something that obvious. I pushed the invasive thoughts away with an effort of will and said, “Don’t meet her eyes, Murph. She’s a vampire. Red Court.”

“Got it,” she said, her gun never moving from Maroon.

The vampire looked at us both for a moment. Then she said, “You need no introduction, Mr. Dresden. I am Baroness LeBlanc. And our nations are not, at the moment, in a state of war.”

“I’ve always been a little fuzzy on legal niceties,” I said. I had several devices with me that I could use to defend myself. I was ready to use any of them. A vampire in close quarters is nothing to laugh at. LeBlanc could tear three or four limbs off in the time it takes to draw and fire a gun. I watched her closely, ready to act at the slightest resemblance of an attack. “We both know that the war is going to start up again eventually.”

“You are out of anything reasonably like your territory,” she said, “and you are trespassing upon mine. I would be well within my rights under the Accords to kill you and bury your torso and limbs in individual graves.”

“That’s the problem with this ride,” I complained to Murphy. “There’s nothing that’s actually scary in the Tunnel of Terror.”

“You did get your money back,” she pointed out.