Jim Butcher: Changes

“You’re really going to leave Martin sitting outside?” she asked, amusement in her voice.

“I most certainly am,” I said calmly, and took a sip of my drink.

She nodded and touched her glass to her lips. Maybe she sipped a little water.

I waited as long as I could stand it, maybe two or three whole seconds, before I broke the heavy silence. “So,” I asked casually, “what’s new?”

Her dark eyes regarded me obliquely for a moment before her lips thinned slightly. “This is going to be painful for both of us. Let’s just have it done. We don’t have time to dance around it.”

“Okay. Our child?” I asked. “Yours and mine?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

She smoothed her face into a nonexpression. “There hasn’t been anyone else, Harry. Not since that night with you. Not for more than two years before that.”

If she was lying, it didn’t show. I took that in for a moment and sipped some Coke. “It seems like something you should have told me.”

I said it in a voice far calmer than I would have thought possible. I don’t know what my face looked like when I said it. But Susan’s darkly tanned skin became several shades lighter. “Harry,” she said quietly, “I know you must be angry.”

“I burn things to ash and smash holes in buildings when I’m angry,” I said. “I’m a couple of steps past that point right now.”

“You have every right to be,” she said. “But I did what I thought was best for her. And for you.”

The storm surged higher into my chest. But I made myself sit there without moving, breathing slowly and steadily. “I’m listening.”

She nodded and took a moment to gather her thoughts. Then she said, “You don’t know what it’s like down there. Central America, all the way down to Brazil. There’s a reason so many of those nations limp along in a state of near-anarchy.”

“The Red Court,” I said. “I know.”

“You know in the abstract. But no one in the White Council has spent time there. Lived there. Seen what happens to the people the Reds rule.” She shivered and folded her arms over her stomach. “It’s a nightmare. And there’s no one but the Fellowship and a few underfunded operatives of the Church to stand up to them.”

The Fellowship of St. Giles was a collection of the supernatural world’s outcasts and strays, many of them half vampires like Susan. They hated the Red Court with a holy passion, and did everything in their power to confound the vampires at every opportunity. They operated in cells, choosing targets, training recruits, planting bombs, and funding their operations through a hundred shady business activities. Terrorists, basically—smart, quick, and tough because they had to be.

“It hasn’t been Disneyland in the rest of the world, either,” I said quietly. “I saw my fair share of nightmares during the war. And then some.”

“I’m not trying to belittle anything that the Council has done,” she said. “I’m just trying to explain to you what I was facing at the time. Teams from the Fellowship rarely sleep in the same bed twice. We’re always on the move. Always planning something or running from something. There’s no place for a child in that.”

“If only there had been someone with his own home and a regular income where she could have stayed,” I said.

Susan’s eyes hardened. “How many people have gotten killed around you, Harry? How many hurt?” She raked her fingers through her hair. “For God’s sake. You said yourself that your apartment has been under attack. Would that have gone any better if you’d had a toddler to watch over?”

“Guess we’ll never know,” I said.

“I know,” she said, her voice suddenly seething with intensity. “God, do you think I didn’t want to be a part of her life? I cry myself to sleep at night—when I can sleep. But in the end, I couldn’t offer her anything but a life on the run. And you couldn’t offer her anything but a life under siege.”

I stared at her.

But I didn’t say anything.

“So I did the only thing I could do,” she said. “I found a place for her. Far away from the fighting. Where she could have a stable life. A loving home.”

“And never told me,” I said.

“If the Red Court had ever learned about my child, they would have used her against me. Period. As a means of leverage, or simple revenge. The fewer people who knew about her, the safer she was going to be. I didn’t tell you, even though I knew it was wrong. Even though I knew that it would make you furious because of your own childhood.” She leaned forward, her eyes almost feverish from the heat in her words. “And I would do a thousand times worse than that, if it meant that she’d be better protected.”

I sipped some more Coke. “So,” I said. “You kept her from me so that she would be safer. And you sent her away to be raised by strangers so that she would be safer.” The storm in me pushed up higher, tingeing my voice with the echo of its furious howl. “How’s that working out?”

Susan’s eyes blazed. Red, swirling tribal marks began to appear on her skin, like tattoos done in disappearing ink, only backward—the Fellowship’s version of a mood ring. They covered the side of her face, and her throat.

“The Fellowship has been compromised,” she said, her words crisp. “Duchess Arianna of the Red Court found out about her, somehow, and had her taken. Do you know who she is?”

“Yeah,” I said. I tried to ignore the way my blood had run cold at the mention of the name. “Duke Ortega’s widow. She’s sworn revenge upon me—and she once tried to buy me on eBay.”

Susan blinked. “How did . . . No, never mind. Our sources in the Red Court say that she’s planning something special for Maggie. We have to get her back.”

I took another slow breath and closed my eyes for a moment.

“Maggie, huh?”

“For your mother,” Susan whispered. “Margaret Angelica.” I heard her fumble at her pockets. Then she said, “Here.”

I opened my eyes and looked at a little wallet-sized portrait of a dark-eyed child, maybe five years old. She wore a pink dress and had purple ribbons in her dark hair, and she was smiling a wide and infectious smile. Some calm, detached part of me filed the face away, in case I needed to recognize her later. The rest of me cringed away from looking any closer, from thinking about the image as anything but a bit of paper and ink.

“It’s from a couple of years ago,” Susan said quietly. “But it’s my most recent picture.” She bit her lip and offered it to me.

“Keep it,” I told her quietly. She put it away. The red marks were fading from her skin, gone the way they had come. I rubbed at my eyes. “For now,” I said slowly, “we’re going to forget about your decision to edit me out of her life. Because chewing over it won’t help her right now, and because her best chance is for us to work together. Agreed?”

Susan nodded.

I spoke the next words through my teeth. “But I haven’t forgotten. Will never forget it. There will be a reckoning on that account later. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” she whispered. She looked up at me with large, shining dark eyes. “I never wanted to hurt you. Or her. I was just . . .”

“No,” I said. “Too late for that now. It’s just wasting time we can’t afford to lose.”

Susan turned her face sharply away from me, to the fire, and closed her eyes. When she opened them again, her expression was under control. “All right,” she said. “For our next step, we’ve got some options.”

“Like?”

“Diplomacy,” she said. “I hear stories about you. Half of them probably aren’t true, but I know you’ve got some markers you could call in. If enough of the Accord members raise a voice, we might get her back without incident.”