Jim Butcher - Changes

Except now we weren’t doing it.

I looked at the folded letter in my hands and had the sudden, instinctive impression that I was watching an enormous tree begin to fall. Slowly at first, made to seem so by its sheer size—but falling nonetheless, to the ruin of anything sheltered beneath its boughs.

I was pretty tired, which probably explained why I didn’t have any particular emotional reaction to that line of thought. It should have scared the hell out of me for a laundry list of reasons. But it didn’t.

Susan came over to stand near me. “Harry. What is it?”

I stared at the fire. “The White Council can’t help us find Maggie,” I said quietly. “There are things happening. They’ll be of no use to us.”

After all they had wrongly inflicted upon me, after all the times I had risked my neck for them, when I needed them, truly needed their help, they were not there.

I watched my hands crush the letters and envelopes without telling them to do it. I threw them into the fire and glowered as they burned. I didn’t notice that the fire in the fireplace had risen to triple its normal height until the blue-white brightness of the flames made me shade my eyes against them. Turning my face slightly away was like twisting the spigot of a gas heater—the fire immediately died back down to normal size.

Control, moron , I warned myself. Control. You’re a loaded gun.

No one spoke. Martin had settled down on one of the sofas and was cleaning his little pistol on the coffee table. Molly stood at the wood-burning stove, stirring a pot of something.

Susan sat down next to me, not quite touching, and folded her hands in her lap. “What do we have left?”

“Persons,” I said quietly.

“I don’t understand,” Susan said.

“As a whole, people suck,” I replied. “But a person can be extraordinary. I appealed to the Council. I told them what Arianna was doing. I went to that group of people looking for help. You saw what happened. So . . . next I talk to individuals.”

“Who?” she asked me quietly.

“Persons who can help.”

I felt her dark eyes on me, serious and deep. “Some of them aren’t very nice, I think.”

“Very few of them, in fact,” I said.

She swallowed. “I don’t want you to endanger yourself. This situation wasn’t of your making. If there’s a price to be paid, I should be the one to pay it.”

“Doesn’t work like that,” I said.

“He’s right,” Martin confirmed. “For example: You paid the price for his failure to sufficiently discourage you from investigating the Red Court.”

“I made my choice,” Susan said.

“But not an informed one,” I said quietly. “You made assumptions you shouldn’t have, because you didn’t have enough information. I could have given it to you, but I didn’t. And that situation wasn’t of your making.”

She shook her head, her expression resigned. “There’s no point in all of us fighting to hold the blame stick, I guess.”

Martin began to run a cleaning patch through his pistol’s barrel on a short ramrod and spoke in the tone of a man repeating a mantra. “Stay on mission.”

Susan nodded. “Stay on mission. Where do we start, Harry?”

“Not we,” I said, “me. I’m going down to the lab while you four stay up here and watch for trouble. Make sure you warn me when it shows up.”

“When it shows up?” Susan asked.

“Been that kind of day.”

Molly turned from the stove, her expression worried. “What are you going to do, boss?”

I felt as if my insides were all cloying black smoke, but I summoned up enough spirit to wink at Molly. “I gotta make a few long-distance calls.”

I went to my lab and started cleaning off my summoning circle. I’d knocked a few things onto it in the course of sweeping up anything incriminating. The FBI or Rudolph had added a bit to the mess. I pushed everything away from the circle and then swept it thoroughly with a broom. When you use a circle as a part of ritual magic, its integrity is paramount. Any object that falls across it or breaks its plane would collapse the circle’s energy. Dust and other small particles wouldn’t collapse a circle, but they did degrade its efficiency.

After I was done sweeping, I got a new shop cloth and a bottle of cleaning alcohol and wiped it down as thoroughly as if I were planning to perform surgery upon it. It took me about twenty minutes.

Once that was done, I opened an old cigar box on one shelf that was full of river rocks. All but one of them were decoys, camouflage. I pawed through it until I found the smooth piece of fire-rounded obsidian, and took it out of the box.

I went to the circle and sat in it, folding my legs in front of me. I touched the circle with a mild effort of will, and it snapped to life in a sudden curtain of gossamer energy. The circle would help contain and shape the magic I was about to work.

I put the black stone down on the floor in front of me, took a deep breath, straightened my back, and then began to draw in my will. I remained like that, relaxed, breathing deeply and slowly as I formed the spell in my head. This one was a fairly delicate working, and probably would have been beyond my skill before I had begun teaching Molly how to control her own power. Now, though, it was merely annoyingly difficult.

Once the energy was formed in my mind, I took a deep breath and whispered, “ Voce, voco, vocius. ” I waited a few seconds and then repeated myself. “ Voce, voco, vocius .”

That went on for a couple of minutes, while I sat there doing my impression of a Roman telephone. I was just starting to wonder whether or not the damned rock was going to work when the lab around me vanished, replaced by an inky darkness. The circle’s energy field became visible, a pale blue light in the shape of a cylinder, stretching from the floor up into the infinite overhead space. Its light did not make my surroundings visible, as if the glow from the circle simply had nothing to reflect from.

“Uh,” I said, and my voice echoed strangely. “Hello?”

“Hold on to your horses,” said a grumpy, distant voice. “I’m coming.”

A moment later, there was a flash of light and a cylinder like my own appeared, directly in front of me. Ebenezar sat in it, legs folded the same way mine were. A black stone that was a twin to my own sat in front of him. Ebenezar looked tired. His hair was mussed, his eyes sunken. He was wearing only a pair of pajama bottoms, and I was surprised at how much muscle tone he had kept, despite his age. Of course, he’d spent the last few centuries mostly working on his farm. That would put muscle on anyone.

“Hoss,” he said by way of greeting. “Where are you?”

“My place,” I said.

“Situation?”

“My wards are down. I’ve got backup but I don’t want to stay here for long. The police and FBI have gotten involved and the Reds have swung at me twice in the past two days. Where are you?”

Ebenezar grunted. “Best if I don’t say. The Merlin is preparing his counterstrike, and we’re trying to find out how much they already know about it.”

“When you say ‘we,’ I assume you mean the Grey Council.”

The Grey Council was the appellation that had stuck to our little rogue organization inside the White Council itself. It consisted of people who could see lightning, hear thunder, and admit to themselves that wizards everywhere were increasingly in danger of being exterminated or enslaved by other interests—such as the Vampire Courts or the Black Council.

The Black Council was mostly a hypothetical organization. It consisted of a lot of mysterious figures in black robes with delusions of Ringwraith-hood. They liked to call up the deadly dangerous demons from outside of reality, the Outsiders, and to infiltrate and corrupt every supernatural nation they could get to. Their motivations were mysterious, but they’d been causing trouble for the Council and everyone else for quite a while. I had encountered members of their team, but I had no hard proof of their existence, and neither did anyone else.