Jim Butcher - Changes

We had the same contour of chin, and our eyes resembled each other’s unmistakably in shape, if not in color. Mom gave them to us.

Thomas and I had finally met as adults. He’d been right there next to me in some of the worst places I’d ever walked. He saved my life more than once. I’d returned the favor. But that had been when he decided to fight against his Hunger, the vampiric nature native to the vampires of the White Court. He’d spent years maintaining control of his darker urges, integrating with Chicago’s society, and generally trying to act like a human being. We’d had to keep our kinship a secret. The Council would have used him to get at the White Court if they knew. Ditto for the vampires getting at the Council through me.

Then something bad happened to him, and he stopped trying to be human. I might have seen him for a total of two, even three minutes since he’d been knocked off the life- force-nibbling wagon and started taking big hearty bites again.

Thomas swaggered up to me as if we’d been talking just yesterday, looked me up and down, and said, “You need an image consultant, stat, little brother.”

I said, “Guess what. You’re an uncle.”

Thomas let his head fall back as he barked out a little laugh. “What? No, hardly, unless one of Father’s by-blows actually survived. Which essentially just doesn’t happen among—”

He stopped talking in midsentence and his eyes widened.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Oh,” he said, still wide-eyed, apparently locked into motionlessness by surprise. It was a little creepy. Human beings still look like human beings when they’re standing still. Thomas’s pale skin and bright blue eyes went still , like a statue. “ Oh .”

I nodded. “Say ‘oilcan.’ ”

Thomas blinked. “What?”

“You get to be the Tin Woodsman.”

“What?”

“Never mind, not important.” I sighed. “Look, without going into too many details: I have an eight-year-old daughter. Susan never told me. Duchess Arianna of the Red Court took her.”

“Um,” said Thomas. “If I’d known that, maybe I would have been here sooner.”

“Couldn’t say anything on the phone. The FBI and the cops are involved, having been made into roadblocks to slow me down.” I tilted my head down the street. “The cop who lives in that house at the end of the street has been coerced into helping whoever is trying to stop me. I’m here hoping to nab either his handler or his cleaner and grab every bit of information I can.”

Thomas looked at me and said, “I’m an uncle.”

I ran the palm of my hand over my face.

“Sorry,” he said. “I just thought this was going to be another chat, with you all worried that the evil White Court had been abusing me. I need to take a moment.”

“Make it a short moment,” I said. “We’re on the clock.”

Thomas nodded several times and seemed to draw himself back into order. “Okay, so you’re looking for . . . What’s her name?”

“Maggie.”

My brother paused for a couple of heartbeats, and bowed his head briefly. “That’s a good name.”

“Susan thought so.”

“So you’re looking for Maggie,” he said. “And you need my help?”

“I don’t know the exact date, but I know she’s going to be brought to Chichén Itzá. Probably tonight, tomorrow night at the latest.”

“Why?” Thomas asked. He then added, “And how does this have anything to do with me?”

“They’re using her in a bloodline curse,” I said. “When they sacrifice her, the curse kills her brothers and sisters, then her parents, then their brothers and sisters and so on.”

“Wait. Maggie has brothers and sisters ? Since when have you ever gotten that busy?”

“No, dammit!” I half shouted in frustration. “That’s just an illustration for how the bloodline curse works.”

His eyebrows shot up. “Oh, crap. You’re saying that it’s going to kill me , too.”

“Yes, that is exactly what I’m freaking saying. You tool.”

“Um,” Thomas said, “I’m against that.” His eyes widened again. “Wait. What about the other Raiths? Are they in any danger through me?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“Empty night,” he muttered. “Okay. You know where she’s going to be. You want me to saddle up and help you get Maggie back, like we did with Molly?”

“Not unless there’s no other choice. I don’t think we would survive a direct assault on the Red King and his retinue on their home turf.”

“Well, maybe you and I couldn’t, naturally. But with the Council behind y—”

“Way behind me,” I interrupted, my voice harsh with anger. “So far behind me you wouldn’t know they were there at all.”

My brother’s deep blue eyes flashed with an angry fire. “Those assholes.”

“Seconded, motion carried,” I agreed.

“So what do you think we should do?”

“I need information,” I said. “Get me whatever you can. Any activity at Chichén Itzá or a nearby Red stronghold, sightings of a little girl surrounded by Reds, anything. There’s got to be something, somewhere that will show us a chink in their armor. If we find out where they’re holding her, we can hit the place. If I can learn something about the defensive magic around the site, maybe I can poke a hole in it so that we can just grab the girl and go. Otherwise . . .”

“Yeah,” Thomas said. “Otherwise we have to take them on at Chichén Itzá. Which would suck.”

“It’s a couple of miles beyond suck.”

Thomas frowned. “What about asking Lara for help? She can command a lot of firepower from the other Houses of the White Court.”

“Why would she help me?” I asked.

“Self-preservation. She’s big on that.”

I grunted. “I’m not sure if the rest of your family is in any danger.”

“You aren’t sure they aren’t, either,” Thomas said. “And anyway, if you don’t know, Lara won’t.”

“Don’t be too sure,” I said. “No. If I go to her with this, she’ll assume it’s a ploy motivated by desperation.”

Thomas folded his arms. “A lame ploy, at that. But you’re missing another angle.”

“Oh?”

Thomas lowered his arms and then brought them up to frame his own torso the way Vanna White presents the letters on Wheel of Fortune . “Incontestably, I’m in danger. She’ll want to protect me.”

I looked at him skeptically.

Thomas shrugged. “I play for the team now, Harry. And everyone knows it. If she lets something bad happen to me when I ask for her help, it’s going to make a lot of people upset. And not in the helpful, ‘I sure don’t want to mess with her’ kind of way.”

“For that to work as leverage, the stakes would have to be known to the rest of the Court,” I said. “They’d have to know why you were in danger from a bloodline curse aimed at me. Then they’d all know about our blood relation. Not just Lara.”

Thomas frowned over that for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Still. It might be worth the effort to approach her. She’s a resourceful woman, my sister.” His expression smoothed over into neutrality. “Quite gifted when it comes to removing obstacles. She could probably help you.”

Normally I slap down suggestions like that without a second thought. This time . . .

I had the second thought.

Lara probably knew the Red Court as well as anyone. She’d been operating arm in arm with them, to one degree or another, for years. She was the power behind the throne of the White Court, which prided itself on its skills of espionage, manipulation, and other forms of indirect strength. If anyone was likely to know something about the Reds, it was Lara Raith.