Jim Butcher - Proven Guilty

Son of a bitch.

Now I knew who’d been following me around town.

“You,” Crane said in a hollow-sounding voice, staring at Thomas.

“Me,” Thomas agreed, insouciant cheer thick in his voice. “Lose the gun, Madrigal.”

Crane’s lip lifted into a sneer, but he did lower the pistol and drop it to the ground.

“Kick it over here,” Thomas said.

Crane did it, ignoring me completely. “I thought you’d be dead by; now, coz. God knows you made enemies enough within the House, much less the rest of the Court.”

“I get by,” Thomas drawled. Then he used a toe to flick the gun over to me.

Crane’s eyes widened in surprise, then narrowed.

I picked up the revolver and checked the cylinder. My distorted left hand functioned, weakly, but it hurt like hell, and would until I could get enough quiet and focus to get everything back into its proper place. My headache intensified to a fine, distracting agony as I bent over, but I ignored that, too. Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of trauma, I will fear no concussion.

Crane’s revolver held freshly loaded rounds, all six of them. I put them back and checked on Rawlins. Between the pain of his recent injuries and the strain of our flight and recapture, the big cop did not look well.

“Isn’t bad,” he said quietly. “Just hurts. Tired.”

“Sit tight,” I told him. “We’ll get you out of here.”

He nodded and lay there, watching developments, his eyes only half aware.

I made sure he wasn’t bleeding too badly, then rose, pointed the gun at Crane, and took position between him and Rawlins.

“How’s it going, Dresden?” Thomas asked.

“Took you long enough,” I said.

Thomas grinned, but it didn’t touch his eyes. His gaze never left Crane. “Have you ever met my cousin, Madrigal Raith?”

“I knew he didn’t look like a Darby,” I said.

Thomas nodded. “Wasn’t that a movie with Janet Munro?”

“And Sean Connery.”

“Thought so,” Thomas said.

Madrigal Raith watched the exchange through narrowed eyes. Maybe it was a trick of the light, but he looked paler now, his features almost eerily fine. Or maybe now that Thomas had identified him as a White Court vampire, I could correctly interpret the warnings my instincts had shrieked at me during our first talk. There was little but contempt in Madrigal’s eyes as he stared at my brother. “You have no idea what you’re getting yourself involved in, coz. I’ll not surrender this prize to you.”

“Oh, but you will,” Thomas said in his best Snidely Whiplash villain voice.

Crane’s eyes flickered with something hot and furious. “Don’t push me, little coz. I’ll make you regret it.”

Thomas’s laugh rang out, full of scorn and confidence. “You couldn’t make water run downhill. Walk away while you still can.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Madrigal replied. “Do you know what kind of money he’s worth?”

“Is it the kind that spends in hell?” Thomas asked. “Because if you keep this up, you’ll need it.”

Madrigal sneered. “You’d kill family in cold blood, Thomas? You?”

There are statues that don’t have a poker face as good as Thomas’s. “Maybe you haven’t put it together yet, Madrigal. I’m banished, remember? You aren’t family.”

Madrigal regarded Thomas for a long minute before he said, “You’re bluffing.”

Thomas looked at me, a quality of inquiry to his expression, and said, “He thinks I’m bluffing.”

“Make sure he can talk,” I said.

“Cool,” Thomas said, and shot Madrigal in the feet.

The light and thunder of the shotgun’s blast rolled away, leaving Madrigal on the ground, hissing out a thready shriek of agony. He curled up to clutch at the gory ruins of his ankles and feet. Blood a few shades too pale to be human spattered the gravel.

“Touche,” grunted Rawlins, a certain satisfaction in his tone.

It took Madrigal a while to control himself and find his voice. “You’re dead,” he whispered, pain making the words quiver and shake. “You gutless little swine. You’re dead. Uncle will kill you for this.”

My half brother smiled and worked the action of the shotgun again. “I doubt my father cares,” he replied. “He wouldn’t mind losing a nephew. Particularly not one who has been consorting with scum like House Malvora.”

“Aha,” I said quietly, putting two and two together. “Now I get it. He’s like them.”

“Like what?” Thomas asked.

“A phobophage,” I said quietly. “He feeds on fear the way you feed on lust.”

Thomas’s expression turned a bit nauseated. “Yes. A lot of the Malvora do.”

Madrigal’s pale, strained face twisted into a vicious smile. “You should try it some night, coz.”

“It’s sick, Mad,” Thomas said. There was an almost ghostly sense of sadness or pity in his tone, so subtle that I would not have seen it before living with him. Hell, I doubt he realized it was there himself. “It’s sick. And it’s made you sick.”

“You feed on mortal desires for the little death,” Madrigal said, his eyes half closing. “I feed on their desire for the real thing. We both feed. In the end, we both kill. There’s no difference.”

“The difference is that once you’ve started, you can’t let them go running off to report you to the authorities,” Thomas said. “You keep them until they’re dead.”

Madrigal let out a laugh, unsettling for how genuine it sounded given his situation. I got the sneaking suspicion that the vampire was a couple of Peeps short of an Easter basket.

“Thomas, Thomas,” Madrigal murmured. “Always the self-righteous little bleeding heart. So concerned for the bucks and does-as though you never tasted them yourself. Never killed them yourself.”

Thomas’s expression went opaque again, but his eyes were flat with sudden anger.

Madrigal’s smile widened at the response. His teeth shone white in the evening’s gloom. “I’ve been feeding well. Whereas you… well. Without your little dark-eyed whore to take-”

Without warning, without a flicker of expression on Thomas’s face, the shotgun roared again, and the blast took Madrigal across the knees. More too-pale blood spattered the gravel.

Holy crap.

Madrigal went prone again, body arching in agony, the pain choking his scream down to an anemic little echo of a real shriek.

Thomas planted his boot on Madrigal’s neck, his expression cold and calm but for the glittering rage in his eyes. He pumped the next shell in, and held the shotgun in one hand, shoving the barrel against Madrigal’s cheekbone.

Madrigal froze, quivering in agony, eyes wide and desperate.

“Never,” Thomas murmured, very quietly. “Ever. Speak of Justine.”

Madrigal said nothing, but my instincts screamed again. Something in the way he held himself, something in his eyes, told me that he was acting. He’d maneuvered the conversation to Justine deliberately. He was playing on Thomas’s feelings for Justine, distracting us.

I spun to see Glau on his feet just as though he hadn’t been given a lethal dose of buckshot in the chest from ten feet away. He shot across the parking lot at a full sprint, running for the van parked about fifty feet away. He ran in utter silence, without the crunch of gravel or the creak of shoes, and for a second I thought I saw maybe an inch and a half of space between where he planted his running feet and the ground.

“Thomas,” I said. “Glau’s running.”

“Relax,” Thomas said, and his eyes never left Madrigal.

I heard the scrabble of claws on gravel and then Mouse shot out of the shadows that had hidden Thomas. He flashed by me in what was for him a relaxed lope, but as Glau approached the van, Mouse accelerated to a full sprint. In the last couple of steps before Glau reached the van, I thought I saw something forming around the great dog’s forequarters, tiny flickers of pale colors, almost like Saint Elmo’s fire. Then Mouse threw himself into a leap. I saw Glau’s expression reflected in the van’s windshield, his too-wide eyes goggling in total surprise. Then Mouse slammed his chest and shoulder into Glau’s back like a living battering ram.