Jim Butcher - Changes

“And I’ve never been able to indulge,” Lea said, studying me absently. “This won’t do.” She waved her hand again. “Perhaps a bit more . . .”

My clothing writhed again, the sensation so odd and intrusive that I all but banged my head on the roof again.

We went through a dozen outfits in half as many minutes. A Victorian suit and coat, complete with tails, was nixed in favor of another silk outfit, this one inspired by imperial China. By then, Susan and Lea were actively engaged in the project, exchanging commentary with each other and ignoring absolutely every word that came out of my mouth. By the seventh outfit, I had given up trying to have any say whatsoever in how I was going to be dressed.

I was given outfits drawing inspiration from widely diverse cultures and periods of history. I lobbied for the return of my leather duster stridently, but Lea only shushed me and kept speaking to Susan.

“Which outfit is really going to get that bitch’s goat?” Susan asked her.

Finally, Lea’s mouth curled up into a smile, and she said, “Perfect.”

My clothes writhed one more time and I found myself dressed in ornate Gothic armor of the style used in Western Europe in the fifteenth century. It was black and articulated, with decorated shoulder pauldrons and an absurdly ornate breastplate. Gold filigree was everywhere, and the thing looked like it should weigh six hundred pounds.

“Cortés wore armor in just this style,” Lea murmured. She studied my head and said, “Though it needs . . .”

A weight suddenly enclosed my head. I sighed patiently and reached up to remove a conquistador’s helmet decorated to match the armor. I put it down on the floor of the limo and said firmly, “I don’t do hats.”

“Poo,” Lea said. “Arianna still hates the Europeans with a vengeance, you know. It was why she took a conquistador husband.”

I blinked. “Ortega?”

“Of course, child,” Lea said. “Love and hate are oft difficult to distinguish between. She won Ortega’s heart, changed him, wed him, and spent the centuries after breaking his heart over and over again. Calling for him and then sending him away. Giving in to him and then reversing her course. She said it kept her hatred fresh and hot.”

“Explains why he was working in bloody Brazil,” I said.

“Indeed. Hmmm.” She flicked a hand and added a Roman-style cloak of dark grey to my armor-broadened shoulders, its ties fastened to the front of the breastplate. Another flick changed the style of my boots slightly. She added a deep hood to the cloak. Then she thoughtfully wrought all the gold on the armor into a spectrum that changed from natural gold to a green that deepened along the color gradient to blue and then purple the farther it went from my face, giving the gold filigree a cold, eerily surreal look. She added front panels to the cloak, so that it fell like some kind of robe in the front, belted to my waist with a sash of deep, dark purple. A final adjustment made the armor over my shoulders a bit wider and thicker, giving me that football shoulder-pad profile I remembered from Friday nights in high school.

I looked down at myself and said, “This is ridiculous. I look like the Games Workshop version of a Jedi Knight.”

Susan and Lea blinked at me, then at each other.

“I want my duster back, dammit,” I clarified.

“That old rag?” Lea said. “You have an image to maintain.”

“And I’m gonna maintain it in my duster,” I said stubbornly.

“Harry,” Susan said. “She might have a practical point here.”

I eyed her. Then my outfit. “Practical?”

“Appearances and first impressions are powerful things,” she said. “Used correctly, they’re weapons in their own right. I don’t know about you, but I want every weapon I can get.”

Lea murmured, “Indeed.”

“Okay. I don’t see why my image can’t wear my duster. We need to be quick, too. This getup is going to be binding and heavier than hell.”

Lea’s mouth curled up at one corner. “Oh?”

I scowled at her. Then I shook my shoulders and twisted about a bit. There was a kind of springy flexibility to the base material of the armor that steel would never match. More to the point, now that I was actually moving about, I couldn’t feel its weight. At all. I might as well have been wearing comfortable pajamas.

“No mortal could cut through it by strength of mundane arms,” she said calmly. “It will shed blows from even such creatures as the vampires of the Red Court—for a time, at least. And it should help you to shield your mind against the wills of the Lords of Outer Night.”

“Should?” I asked. “What do you mean, ‘should’?”

“They are an ancient power, godchild,” Lea replied, and gave me her cat’s smile again. “I have not had the opportunity to match my new strength against theirs.” She looked me up and down one more time and nodded, satisfied. “You look presentable. Now, child,” she said, turning to Susan. “Let us see what we might do for you.”

Susan handled the whole thing a lot better than I had.

I got distracted while they were working. I looked out the window and saw us blowing past a highway patrol car as if it were standing still instead of racing down the highway with its bulbs flashing and its siren wailing. We had to be doing triple digits to have left him eating our dust so quickly.

The patrolman didn’t react to our passage, and I realized that Glenmael must be hiding the car behind some kind of veil. He was also, I noticed, weaving and darting through the traffic with entirely impossible skill, missing other motorists’ bumpers and fenders by inches, with them apparently none the wiser. Not only that, but I couldn’t feel the motion at all within the passenger compartment. By all rights, we should have been bouncing off the windows and the roof, but it didn’t feel as if the car were moving at all.

Long story short: He got us to St. Mary’s in less than fifteen minutes, and gave me several dozen new grey hairs in the process.

We pulled up and Glenmael was opening the door to the rear compartment at seemingly the same instant that the car’s weight settled back against its parking brakes. I got out, the dark grey cowl covering my head. My shadow, on the sidewalk in front of me, looked friggin’ huge and scary. Irrationally, it made me feel a little better.

I turned to help Susan out and felt my mouth drop open a little.

Her outfit was . . . um, freaking hot.

The golden headdress was the first thing I noticed. It was decorated with feathers, with jade carved with sigils and symbols like those I had seen on the stone table, and with flickering gems of arctic green and blue. For a second, I thought her vampire nature had begun to rise again, because her face was covered in what I mistook for tattoos. A second glance showed me that they were some kind of precisely drawn design, sort of like henna markings, but far more primitive and savage-looking in appearance. They were also done in a variety of colors of black and deep, dark red. The designs around her dark brown eyes made them stand out sharply.

Under that, she wore a shift of some material that looked like simple, soft buckskin, split on the sides for ease of movement, and her feet were wrapped in shoes made of similar material, also decorated with feathers. The moccasins and shift both were pure white, and made a sharp contrast against the dark richness of her skin, and displayed the smooth, tight muscles of her arms and legs tremendously well.

A belt of white leather had an empty holster for a handgun on one of her hips, with a frog for hanging a scabbard upon it on the other. And over all of that, she wore a mantled cloak of feathers, not too terribly unlike the ones we had seen in Nevada—but the colors were all in the rich, cool tones of the Winter Court: glacial blue, deep sea green, and twilight purple.