Jim Butcher: Changes

I snorted. “Or?”

“Offer reparations to the Red King in exchange for the child’s life. He doesn’t have a personal interest in this matter, and he outranks Arianna. Give him a bribe big enough and she’ll have to let Maggie go.”

“Right off the top of a building, probably,” I growled.

Susan watched me steadily. “What do you think we should do?”

I felt my lips do something that probably didn’t look like a smile. The storm had settled somewhere around my heart, and heady tendrils of its fury were curling up into my throat. It was a good ten seconds before I could speak, and even then it came out in a snarl.

“Do?” I said. “The Reds stole our little girl. We sure as hell aren’t going to pay them for that .”

A hot and terrible hunger flared up in Susan’s eyes in response to my voice.

“We find Maggie,” I said. “We take her back. And we kill anyone who gets in the way.”

Susan shuddered and her eyes overflowed. She bowed her head and made a small sound. Then she leaned over and gently touched my left hand, the one still covered in slowly fading burn scars. She looked at my hand and winced, beginning to draw away.

I caught her fingers and squeezed hard. She settled her fingers against mine and did the same. We held hands for a silent moment.

“Thank you,” she whispered. Her hand was shaking in mine. “Thank you, Harry.”

I nodded. I was going to say something to stiff-arm her and keep the distance, but the warmth of her hand in mine was suddenly something I couldn’t ignore. I was furious with Susan, furious with an intensity you can feel only when someone you care deeply about hurts you. But the corollary of that was unavoidable—I still cared, or I wouldn’t be angry.

“We’ll find her,” I said. “And I will do everything in my power to bring her back safe.”

Susan looked up at me, tears streaking her face, and nodded. Then she lifted a hand and traced her fingers lightly over the scar on my cheek. It was a newer one, still angry and colorful. I thought it made me look like some old-school German character from Golden Age Hollywood with a dueling scar on his cheek. Her fingertips were gentle and warm.

“I didn’t know what I was going to do,” she said. “There was no one willing to stand up to them. There was no one.”

Our eyes met, and suddenly the old heat was there between us, quivering out from our joined hands, from her fingertips against my face. Her eyes widened a little, and my heart started pounding along rapidly. I was furious with Susan. But apparently my body just read that as “excited” and didn’t bother examining the fine print. I met her eyes for a long moment and then said, through a dry throat, “Isn’t this how we got into this mess?”

She let out a shaking sound that was meant to be a laugh, but was filled with awareness of the inherent irony, and drew her hands away. “I . . . I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to . . .” Her voice turned wry. “It’s been a while for me.”

I knew what she meant. I took several slow, deep breaths, separating mind from body. Then I said quietly, “Susan. Whatever happens from here . . . we’re done.” I looked up at her. “You know that. You knew it when you chose not to tell me.”

She looked brittle. She nodded slowly, as if something might break off if she moved any more quickly than that. She folded her hands in her lap. “I . . . know that. I knew it when I did it.”

Silence stretched.

“Right,” I said finally. “Now . . .” I took another deep breath, and told myself it would help. “The way I see it, you didn’t fly into Chicago just for a chat with me. You wouldn’t need Martin for that.”

She lifted an eyebrow at me and nodded. “True.”

“Then why?”

She seemed to gather herself, her voice more businesslike. “There’s a Red outpost here. It’s a place to start.”

“Okay,” I said, rising. “Let’s start.”

“I hope there are no hard feelings,” Martin told me as he pulled out of the little gravel lot next to the house I board in.

Susan had yielded the passenger seat of the rental car to me, in deference to my storklike legs. “Hard feelings?” I asked.

“About our first meeting,” Martin said. He drove the same way he did everything—blandly. Complete stops. Five miles an hour under the limit. Wherever we were headed, it was going to take forever to get there.

“You mean the way you used me to attempt to assassinate old Ortega?” I asked. “Thereby ensuring that the Code Duello was broken, the duel invalidated, and the vamps’ war with the White Council continued?”

Martin glanced at me, and then into the rearview mirror at Susan.

“I told you,” she said to Martin. “He’s only dense in the short term. He sees everything eventually.”

I gave Susan a slight, wry tilt of my head in acknowledgment. “Wasn’t hard to realize what you were doing in retrospect,” I said. “The Red Court’s war with the White Council must have been the best thing to happen to the Fellowship in ages.”

“I’ve only been with them for slightly over one hundred years,” Martin said. “But it was the best thing to happen in that time, yes. The White Council is one of the only organizations on the planet with the resources to seriously threaten them. And every time the Council won a victory—or even survived what should have been a crushing defeat—it meant that the Red Court was tearing itself to shreds internally. Some of them have had millennia to nurse grudges with rivals. They are appropriately epic in scale.”

“Call me wacky,” I said, “but I had to watch a few too many children die in that war you helped guarantee. No hard feelings?” I smiled at him—technically. “Marty, believe me when I say that you don’t want me to get in touch with my feelings right now.”

I felt Martin’s eyes shift to me, and a little tension gather in his body. His shoulder twitched. He was thinking about his gun. He was pretty good with firearms. The night of my duel with the Red Court vampire named Ortega, Martin had put a round from one of those enormous sniper rifles into Ortega about half a second before the vampire would otherwise have killed me. It had been a gross violation of the Code Duello, the set of rules for resolving personal conflicts between individuals of the nations who had signed the Unseelie Accords.

The outcome of a clean duel might have put an early end to the war between the Red Court and the White Council of Wizards, and saved a lot of lives. It didn’t turn out that way.

“Don’t worry, guy,” I told him. “Ortega was already in the middle of breaking the Code Duello anyway. It would have fallen out the way it did regardless of what you had done that night. And your being there meant that he ate a bullet at the last second instead of me. You saved my life. I’m cognizant of that.”

I kept smiling at him. It didn’t feel quite right, so I tried to do it a little harder. “I’m also aware that if you could have gotten what you wanted by putting the bullet in my back instead of his chest, you would have done it without blinking. So don’t go thinking we’re pals.”

Martin looked at me and then relaxed. He said, “It’s ironic that you, the mustang of the White Council, would immediately cling to its self-righteous position of moral authority.”

“Excuse me?” I said quietly.

He spoke dispassionately, but there was a fire somewhere deep down behind the words—the first I’d ever heard in him. “I’ve seen children die, too, Dresden, slaughtered like animals by a threat no one in the wise and mighty Council seemed to give a good goddamn about—because the victims are poor, and far away, and isn’t that a fine reason to let them die. Yes. If putting a bullet in you would have meant that the Council brought its forces to bear against the Red Court, I would have done it twice and paid for the privilege.” He paused at a stop sign, gave me a direct look, and said, “It is good that we cleared the air. Is there anything else you want to say?”