Jim Butcher - Changes

“Is not,” I said, scowling. “She goes on dates and stuff.”

“I said she was in love. Not dead.” Her expression went neutral. “Or half-dead.” She stared after the vanished car for a moment and said, “Can I share something with you that I’ve learned in the past few years?”

“I guess.”

She turned to me, her expression sober. “Life is too short, Harry. And there’s nowhere near enough joy in it. If you find it, grab it. Before it’s gone.”

It cost Susan something to say that. She hid it well, but not as well as I knew her. Giving breath to those thoughts had caused her very real pain. I was going to disagree again, but hesitated. Then I said, “I never stopped loving you. Never wanted you to be gone.”

She turned a little away from me, letting her hair fall across her face as a curtain. Then she swallowed thickly and said, her voice trembling slightly, “Same here. Doesn’t mean we get to be together.”

“No,” I said. “I guess not.”

She suddenly balled her fists and straightened her spine. “I can’t do this. Not right now. We’ve got to focus. I . . .” She shook her head and started walking. She went to the end of the block, to stand there taking deep, slow breaths.

I glanced at Martin, who stood leaning against the wall of a building, his expression, of course, bland.

“What?” I snapped at him.

“You think what you’re feeling about your daughter is rage, Dresden. It isn’t.” He jerked his chin at Susan. “That is. She knew the Mendozas, the foster parents, and loved them like family. She walked into their house and found them. She found their children. The vampires had quite literally torn them limb from limb. One of the Mendozas’ four children was three years old. Two were near Maggie’s age.”

I said nothing. My imagination showed me terrible pictures.

“It took us half an hour to find all the pieces,” Martin continued calmly. “We had to put them back together like a jigsaw puzzle. And the whole time, the blood thirst was driving us both mad. Despite the fact that she knew those people. Despite her terror for her daughter. Imagine that for a moment. Imagine Susan standing there, filled with the urge to rip into the bloody limb with her teeth, even though she knew that little dismembered leg might have been her daughter’s. Picture that.”

At that point, I didn’t think I could avoid it.

“It was only when the puzzle was finished that we realized that Maggie had been taken,” Martin continued, his words steady and polite. “She’s barely holding on. If she loses control, people are going to die. She might be one of them.” Martin’s eyes went hard and absolutely cold. “So I would take it as a fucking courtesy if you wouldn’t torture her by stirring up her emotions five minutes before we kick down the door of a high-security facility.”

I looked over my shoulder at Susan. She was still facing away from us, but she was in the act of briskly pulling her hair back into a tail.

“I didn’t know,” I said.

“In this situation, your emotions are liabilities,” Martin said. “They won’t help Rodriguez. They won’t help the little girl. I suggest you postpone indulging them until this is all over.”

“Until what is all over?” Susan asked, returning.

“Uh, the trip,” I said, turning to lead them into the alley. “It won’t take us long—about thirty seconds of walking down a level hallway. But it’s dark and you have to hold your breath and nose the whole way.”

“Why?” Susan asked.

“It’s full of methane gas and carbon monoxide, among others. If you use a light source, you run the risk of setting off an explosion.”

Susan’s eyebrows rose. “What about your amulet?”

I shook my head. “The light from that is actually . . . Glah, it’s more complicated than you need to know. Suffice it to say that I feel there would be a very, very small possibility that it might make the atmosphere explode. Like those static electricity warnings at the gas stations. Why take the chance?”

“Ah,” Susan said. “You want us to walk blind through a tunnel filled with poisonous gases that could explode at the smallest spark.”

“Yeah.”

“And . . . you’re sure this is a good idea?”

“It’s a terrible idea,” I said. “But it’s the fastest way to the storage facility.” I lifted my fingertips to touch the red stone on my amulet as I neared the location of the Way. It was an old, bricked-over doorway into the ground level of the apartment building.

A voice with no apparent source began to speak quietly—a woman’s voice, throaty and calm. My mother’s voice. She died shortly after my birth, but I was certain, as sure as I had been of anything in my life: It was her voice. It made me feel warm, listening to it, like an old, favorite piece of music that you haven’t heard for years.

“The hallway on the other side is full of dangerous levels of methane and carbon monoxide, among other gases. The mixture appears to be volatile, and in the other side you can never be sure exactly which energies might or might not trigger an explosion. Forty-two walking steps to the far end, which opens on a ridge outside Corwin, Nevada.” There was a moment of silence, and then the same voice began to speak again, panting, shaking, and out of breath. “Notation: The hallway is not entirely abandoned. Something tried to grab me as I came through.” She coughed several times. “Notation secundus : Don’t wear a dress the next time you need to go to Corwin, dummy. Some farmer’s going to get a show.”

“Maybe it was a grue,” I murmured, smiling.

“What did you say?” Susan asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.” I put a hand on the doorway and immediately felt a kind of yielding elasticity beneath my fingertips. The separation between the world of flesh and spirit was weak here. I took a deep breath, laid out a fairly mild effort of will, and murmured, “ Aparturum .”

A circle of blackness began to expand from the center of my palm beneath my hand, rapidly swelling, overlaying the wall itself. I didn’t let it get too big. The gate would close on its own, eventually, but smaller gates closed more quickly, and I didn’t want some poor fool going through it.

Present company excluded, of course.

I glanced back to Susan and Martin. “Susan, grab on to my coat. Martin, you grab hers. Take a deep breath and let’s get this done fast and quiet.”

I turned to the Way, took a deep breath, and then strode forward.

Mom’s gem hadn’t mentioned that it was flipping hot in there. When I’d stepped into the hallway on the first trip, I felt like I was inside about three saunas, nested together like those Russian dolls. I found the righthand wall and started walking, counting my steps. I made them a bit shorter than normal, and nailed the length of Mom’s stride more accurately this time. I hit the Way out at forty-three.

Another effort of will and a whispered word, and I opened that gate as well, emerging into a cold mountain wind, and late twilight. Susan and Martin came out with me, and we all spent a moment letting out our pent-up breaths. We were in desert mountains, covered with tough, stringy plants and quick, quiet beasts. The gate behind me, another circle, stood in the air in front of what looked like the entrance to an old mine that had been bricked over a long time ago.

“Which way?” Martin said.

“Half mile this way,” I said, and set out overland.

It was an awfully good hidey-hole, I had to admit. We were out so far in the desert hills that the commute to nowhere was a long one. The facilities had been cut into a granite shelf at the end of a box canyon. There was a single road in, and the floor of the canyon was wide and flat and empty of any significant features, like friendly rocks that one might try to take cover behind. The walls of the canyon had been blasted sheer. No one was coming down that way without a hundred yards of rope or a helicopter.