JIM BUTCHER: SMALL FAVOR

A flicker of satisfaction went through Sanya’s eyes. “Magog? Good. But Namshiel, no.”

“What do you mean, no? I saw Michael cut his hand off and drop it into his pouch.”

“ Da ,” Sanya said, “and the coin was under the skin of his right hand. But it was not in his pouch when he went to the hospital.”

“What?”

Sanya nodded. “We took off his armor and gear in helicopter, to stop the bleeding. Maybe it fell out into the lake.”

I snorted.

He grimaced and nodded. “ Da , I know. That did not happen.”

I sighed. “Marcone. I’ll look into it.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah. I know those people. I’ll go see them right now. Though I was looking forward to going home for a while.” I pushed my hips up off the counter they leaned on. “Well, what’s one more thing, right?”

“Two more things,” Sanya said. He vanished and returned a moment later.

He was carrying Amoracchius in its scabbard. He offered it to me.

I lifted both eyebrows.

“Instructions,” Sanya said. “I’m to give it to you and you will kn-”

“Know who to give it to,” I muttered. I eyed the ceiling. “Someone is having a huge laugh right now at my expense.” I raised my voice a little. “I don’t have to do this, You know! I have free will! I could tell You to go jump in a lake!”

Sanya stood there, offering me the sword.

I snatched it out of his hands, grumbling under my breath, and stalked out to my Volkswagen. I threw the sword into the back. “As if I didn’t have enough problems,” I muttered, slamming the passenger door and stalking around to the driver-side door. “No. I gotta be carrying around freaking Excalibur now, too. Unless it isn’t, who knows.” I slammed the driver-side door, and the old paperback copy of The Two Towers Uriel had left me, and which I’d dropped into the pocket of my duster, dug into my side.

I frowned and pulled it out. It fell open to the inside front cover, where there was writing in a flowing hand: The reward for work well-done is more work.

“Ain’t that the truth,” I muttered. I stuffed the book back in my pocket and hit the road again.

It took a phone call and an hour to set it up, but Marcone met me at his office on the floor over Executive Priority. I walked in carrying the sword to find Marcone and Hendricks in his office-a plain and rather Spartan place for the time being. He had only recently moved in, and it looked more like the office of an active college professor, functional and put together primarily from expediency, than that of a criminal mastermind.

I cut right to the chase. “Someone is backstabbing the people who saved your life, and I won’t have it.”

Marcone raised his eyebrows. “Please explain.”

I told him about Thorned Namshiel and the coin.

“I don’t have it,” Marcone said.

“Do any of your people?” I asked.

He frowned at that question. Then he leaned back in his chair and put his elbows on the arms of it, resting the fingertips of his hands together.

“Where is Gard?” I asked.

“Reporting to her home office,” he murmured. “I will make inquiries.”

I wondered if Marcone was lying to me. It wasn’t a habit of his, but that only meant that when he did tell a lie, it was all the more effective. I wondered if he was telling the truth. If so, then maybe Monoc Securities had just acquired their own Fallen angel and expert in magic and magical theory.

“The child,” Marcone said. “Is she well?”

“She’s safe,” I said. “She’s with people who care about her.”

He nodded. “Good. Was there anything else?”

“No,” I said.

“Then you should get some rest,” Marcone said. “You look”-his mouth twitched up at the corners-“like a raccoon. Who has been run over by a locomotive.”

“Next time I leave your wise ass on the island,” I said, scowling, and stalked out.

I was on the way out of the building when I decided to make one more stop.

Madam Demeter was in her office, dressed as stylishly as ever.

“Hello, Mister Dresden,” she said as she put several files away, neatly, precisely ordering them. “I’m quite busy. I hope this won’t take too long.”

“No,” I said. “I just wanted to share a theory with you.”

“Theory?”

“Yeah. See, in all the excitement and explosions and demonic brouhaha, everyone’s forgotten a small detail.”

Her fingers stopped moving.

“Someone gave the Denarians the location of Marcone’s panic room. Someone close to him. Someone who would know many of his secrets. Someone who would have a good reason to want to hurt him.”

Demeter turned just her head to face me, eyes narrowed.

“A lot of men talk to the women they sleep with,” I said. “That’s always been true. And it would give you a really good reason to get close to him.”

“He’s like a lot of men,” Demeter said quietly.

“I know you’ve got a gun in that drawer,” I told her. “Don’t try it.”

“Why shouldn’t I?” she said.

“Because I’m not going to give you to Marcone.”

“What do you want from me?” she asked.

I shrugged. “I might ask you for information sometimes. If you could help me without endangering yourself, I’d appreciate it. Either way, it doesn’t affect whether or not I talk to Marcone.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Why not?”

“Maybe I want to see him go down someday,” I said. “But mostly because it’s none of my damned business. I just wanted you to know that I’d seen you. This time maybe he won’t put it all together. He’s got more likely suspects than you inside his organization-and I’d be shocked if you hadn’t already realized what a great patsy Torelli is going to make.”

Demeter gave me a wintry smile.

“But don’t get overconfident. If you make another move that obvious, he’ll figure it out. And you’ll disappear.”

Demeter let out a bare laugh and shut the filing cabinet. “I disappeared years ago.” She gave me a steady look. “Are you here to do business, Mister Dresden?”

Granted, there was a building full of very…fit girls who would be happy to, ah, work on my tone. And my tone was letting me know that it would be happy to be worked on. The rest of my body, however, thought that a big meal and about two weeks of sleep was a much better idea. And once you got up to my neck, the rest of me thought that this whole place was looking prettier and hollower every time I visited.

“It’s done,” I said, and left.

At home, I couldn’t sleep.

Finally I had enough spare time to worry about what the hell was wrong with my right hand.

I wound up in my lab, dangling the packet of stale catnip for Mister and filling Bob in on the events of the past few days.

“Wow,” Bob said. “Soulfire. Are you sure he said soulfire?”

“Yeah,” I said wearily. “Why?”

“Well,” the skull said. “Soulfire is…well. It’s Hellfire, essentially. Only from the other place.”

“Heavenfire?”

“Well…” Bob said, “yes. And no. Hellfire is something you use to destroy things. Soulfire is used the opposite way-to create stuff. Look, basically what you do is, you take a portion of your soul and you use it as a matrix for your magic.”

I blinked. “What?”

“It’s sort of like using rebar inside concrete,” Bob said. “You put a matrix of rebar in, then pour concrete around it, and the strength of the entire thing together is a great deal higher than either one would be separately. You could do things that way that you could never do with either the rebar or the concrete alone.”

“But I’m doing that with my soul ?” I demanded.