Jim Butcher - Changes

Cautionary rumors of their presence had been met with derision and accusations of paranoia by most of the White Council until last year, when a Black Council agent had killed more than sixty wizards and infiltrated the Edinburgh facility so thoroughly that more than 95 percent of the staff and security team had gotten their brains redecorated to one degree or another. Even the Senior Council members had been influenced.

The traitor had been stopped, if just barely, and at a heavy cost. And after that, the Council as a whole believed that there might be a faceless, nameless organization running amok in the world—and that any number of them could actually be members of the White Council itself, operating in disguise.

Paranoia and mistrust. They had been steadily growing within the White Council, whose leader, the Merlin, still refused to admit that the Black Council was real, for fear that our own people would start going over to the bad guys out of fear or ambition. His decision had actually had the opposite effect on the frightened, nervous wizards of the White Council. Instead of throwing the clear light of truth on the situation, the Merlin had made it that much more murky and shadowy, made it easier for fear to prey upon his fellow wizards’ thoughts.

Enter the Grey Council, which consisted of me and Ebenezar and unspecified others, organized in cells in order to prevent either one of the other Councils from finding out about us and wiping out all of us at once. We were the ones who were trying to be sane in an insane time. The whole affair could backlash on us spectacularly, but I guess some people just aren’t any good at watching bad things happen. They have to do something about it.

“Yes,” Ebenezar said. “That is who I mean.”

“I need the Grey Council to help me,” I said.

“Hoss . . . we’re all sitting under the sword of Damocles waiting for it to fall. The events unfolding in Edinburgh right now could mean the end of organized, restrained wizardry. The end of the Laws of Magic. It could drive us back to the chaos of an earlier age, unleash a fresh wave of warlock-driven monsters and faux demigods upon mankind.”

“For some reason, sir, I always feel a little more comfortable when I’m sitting under that sword. Must be all the practice.”

Ebenezar scowled. “Hoss . . .”

“I need information,” I said, my voice hard. “There’s a little girl out there. Someone knows something about where she is. And I know that the Council could dig something up. The White Council already shut the door in my face.” I thrust out my jaw. “What about the Grey?”

Ebenezar sighed, and his tired face looked more tired. “What you’re doing is good and right. But it ain’t smart. And it’s a lesson you haven’t learned yet.”

“What lesson?”

“Sometimes, Hoss,” he said very gently, “you lose. Sometimes the darkness takes everyone. Sometimes the monster escapes to kill again another day.” He shook his head and looked down. “Sometimes, Hoss, the innocent little ones are murdered. And there’s not one goddamned thing you can do about it.”

“Leave her to die,” I snarled. “That’s what you want me to do?”

“I want you to help save millions or billions of little girls, boy,” he said, his own voice dropping into a hard, hard growl. “Not throw them away for the sake of one.”

“I am not going to leave this alone,” I snapped. “She—”

Ebenezar made a gesture with his right hand and my voice box just stopped working. My lips moved. I could inhale and exhale freely—but I couldn’t talk.

His dark eyes flashed with anger, an expression I had seldom seen upon his face. “Dammit, boy, you’re smarter than this. Don’t you see what you’re doing? You’re giving Arianna exactly what she wants. You’re dancing like a puppet on her strings. Reacting in precisely the way she wants you to react, and it will get you killed.

“I told you long ago that being a real wizard means sacrifice. It means knowing things no one else does,” he said, still growling. “I told you that it meant that you might have to act upon what you knew, and knew to be right, even though the whole world set its hand against you. Or that you might have to do horrible, necessary things. Do you remember that?”

I did. Vividly. I remembered the smell of the campfire we’d been sitting beside at the time. I nodded.

“Here’s where you find out who you are,” he said, his voice harsh and flat. “There’s a lot of work to do, and no time to do it, let alone waste it arguing with you over something you should know by now.” He closed his eyes for a moment and took a deep breath, as if bringing himself back under control. “Meet me at the Toronto safe house in twelve hours.” He spoke in a voice of absolute authority, something I’d heard from him only a handful of times in my life. He expected his order to be obeyed.

I turned my head from him. In the edge of my vision, I saw him scowl again, reach down, and pick up his own black stone—and suddenly I was sitting on the floor of my lab again.

I picked up my sending stone wearily and slipped it into my pocket. Then I just lay back on the floor, breaking the circle as I did, and stared up at the ceiling for a little while. I turned my head to my left, and spotted the green, extra-thick three-ring binder where I stored all my files on entities I could summon from the Nevernever.

No.

I looked away from the book. When you call things up for information, you’ve got to pay their price. It’s always different. It’s never been pleasant.

And the thought frightened me.

This would be the time those beings had been waiting for. When my need was so dire that I might agree to almost anything if it meant saving the child. For her, I might make a deal I would never consider otherwise.

I might even call upon—

I stopped myself from so much as thinking the name of the Queen of Air and Darkness, for fear that she might somehow detect it and take action. She had been offering me temptation passively and patiently for years. I had wondered, sometimes, why she didn’t make more of an effort to sell me on her offer. She certainly could have done so, had she wished.

Now I understood. She had known that in time, sooner or later, there would come a day when I would be more needful than cautious. There was no reason for her to dance about crafting sweet temptations and sending them out to ensnare me. Not when all she had to do was wait awhile. It was a cold, logical approach—and that was very much in her style.

But there were other beings I could question, in the light blue binder sitting on top of the green one—beings of less power and knowledge, with correspondingly lower prices. It seemed unlikely that I would get anything so specific from them, but you never knew.

I reached for the blue book, rose, and set about calling creatures into my lab to answer a few questions.

After three hours of conjuring and summoning, I came up with absolutely nothing. I had spoken with nature spirits in the shape of a trio of tiny screech owls, and with messenger spirits, the couriers between the various realms within the Nevernever. None of them knew anything. I plucked a couple of particularly nosy ghosts who lived around Chicago out of the spirit world, and summoned servants of the Tylwyth Teg, with whose king I was on good terms. I asked spirits of water what they and their kin had seen regarding Maggie, and stared into the flickering lights of creatures of sentient flame, whose thoughts were revealed in the images quivering inside them.

One of the fire spirits showed me an image that lasted for no more than three or four seconds—the face of the little girl in Susan’s picture, pale and a little grubby and shivering with fear or cold, reaching out to warm her hands over the fluttering lights of a fire. In profile, she looked a lot like her mother, with her huge dark eyes and slender nose. She’d gotten something of my chin, I think, which gave her little face the impression of strength or stubbornness. She was much paler than Susan, too, more like her father than her mother that way.