JIM BUTCHER - SMALL FAVOR

I’d lamed two of them, and figured it would be enough to make them back off the chase, at least for the moment. But you never can tell. I wasted no time in following Toot through back alleys and away from the chosen emissaries of Summer. Around me the little glowing Christmas balls of light, the Za-Lord’s Guard, darted back and forth, a wary ring of sentinels spread in a perimeter that moved as I did.

Several blocks away I found an all-night grocery store and staggered in out of the cold. The clerk glared at me until I hobbled over, clumsily dug change out of my pockets, and left it next to the cash register before shuffling to the coffee counter. At that point the clerk evidently decided that he wouldn’t have to get out the shotgun or whatever he had behind the counter, and went back to staring out the window.

There were a few other shoppers there, and I saw a police car crunch through the snow on the street outside, probably responding to the alarm at the building. Nice and public. Probably safe. I was so cold I could barely fill up the cup. The coffee, which burned my tongue a little, was absolutely delicious, even served black. I guzzled the hot drink and felt sensation begin returning to my body.

I stood there for a moment with my eyes closed and finished the coffee. Then I crushed the paper cup and tossed it into the trash.

Someone had snatched John Marcone, and I had to find him and protect him. I had a feeling that Murphy wasn’t going to be thrilled with the circumstances around this one. Hell’s bells, I wasn’t happy with it. But that really wasn’t what was bothering me.

What really worried me was that Mab had been involved.

What was the deal with having Grimalkin along to do her talking for her? Aside from making her seem even more extremely disturbing than usual, I mean. Oh, sure, Mab may have seemed fairly straightforward, but there was a lot more going on than she was saying.

For example: Mab had said that Summer’s hit men were after me because Mab had chosen me to be her Emissary. But for that to be true, she had to have done it hours ago, at least a little while before the first crew of gruffs had attacked me at the Carpenter place.

And that had happened several hours before the bad guys grabbed Marcone.

Someone was running a game, all right. Someone was keeping secrets.

I had a bad feeling that if I didn’t find out who, why, and how, Mab would toss me into the trash like a used paper cup.

Right after she crushed me, of course.

A wide-axled, full-of-itself, military-wannabe truck crunched through the snowy streets and came to a halt outside the little grocery store. The lights glared in through the doors. I squinted at it. After a minute the Hummer’s horn blared in two short beeps.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered. I hobbled to the door and out to the truck, which blended seamlessly with the background and the foreground, and with most of the air.

The driver-side window rolled down and revealed a young man whom fathers of teenage daughters would shoot on sight. He had pale skin and deep grey eyes. His dark, slightly curly hair was long enough to declare casual rebellion, and tousled to careless perfection. He wore a black leather jacket and a white shirt, both of them more expensive than any two pieces of furniture at my apartment. In marked contrast, there was a scarf inexpertly crocheted from thick white yarn around his neck, under the collar of the jacket. He faced straight ahead, so that I saw only his profile, but I felt confident that he was smirking on the other side of his face, too.

“Thomas,” I said. “A lesser man than me would hate you.”

He grinned. “There’s someone lesser than you ?” He rolled his eyes to me on the last word, to deadpan the delivery, and his face froze in an expression of absolute neutrality. He stayed that way for a few seconds. “Empty night, Harry. You look like…”

“Ten miles of bad road?”

He forced a smile onto his mouth, but that was as far as it went. “I was going to go with ‘a raccoon.’”

“Gee. Thanks.”

“Get in.”

He took the monorail to the other side of the Hummer’s cab to unlock the passenger-side door. I showed up eventually, and noticed every little ache in my body on the way-especially the throbbing burn centered on my broken nose. I tossed my staff into the back of Das Truck , half expecting an echoing clatter when it landed. I got in, shut the door, and put on my seat belt while Thomas got the truck moving. He peered carefully into the heavy snow, presumably looking for some runty little sedans he could drive over for fun.

“That’s gotta hurt,” he said after a moment.

“Only when I exhale,” I said testily. “What took you so long?”

“Well, you know how much I love getting called in the middle of the night to drive through snow and ice to play chauffeur for grumpy low-life investigators. The anticipation slowed me down.”

I grunted in what might have been construed as an apologetic manner by someone who knew me.

Thomas did. “What’s up?”

I told him everything.

Thomas is my half brother, my only family. I’m allowed.

He listened.

“And then,” I concluded, “I went for a ride in a monster truck.”

Thomas’s mouth twitched up in a quick smile. “It is kinda butch, isn’t it.”

I squinted around the truck. “Do TV shows start an hour later in the backseat than they do up here?”

“Who cares?” Thomas said. “It’s got TiVo.”

“Good,” I said. “It might be a little while before I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.”

Thomas let out a theatrical sigh. “Why me?”

“Because if I want to find Marcone, the best place to start is with his people. If word gets out that he’s gone missing, there’s no telling how some of them might react when I come snooping around. So you’ve got my back.”

“What if I don’t want your back?”

“Cope,” I said heartlessly. “You’re family.”

“You’ve got me there,” he admitted. “But I wonder if you’ve thought this through very thoroughly.”

“I try to make thinking an ongoing process.”

Thomas shook his head. “Look, you know I don’t try to tell you your business.”

“Except tonight, apparently,” I said.

“Marcone is a grown-up,” Thomas said. “He signed on to the Accords willingly. He knew what he was going to be letting himself in for.”

“And?” I said.

“And it’s a jungle out there,” Thomas said. He squinted through the thick snow. “Metaphorically speaking.”

I grunted. “He made his bed, and I should let him lie in it?”

“Something like that,” Thomas said. “And don’t forget that Murphy and the police aren’t going to be thrilled with a ‘Save the Kingpin’ campaign.”

“I know,” I said, “and I’d love to stand back and see what happens. But this isn’t about Marcone anymore.”

“Then what is it about?”

“Mab skinning me alive if I don’t give her what she wants.”

“Come on, Harry,” Thomas said. “You can’t really think that Mab’s motives and plans are that direct, that cut-and-dried.” He adjusted the setting of the Hummer’s wipers. “She wants Marcone for a reason. You might not be doing him any favors by saving him on Mab’s behalf.”

I scowled out at the night.

He held up a hand, ticking off fingers. “And that’s assuming that, one, he’s alive at all right now. Two, that you can find him. Three, that you can get him out alive. And four, that the opposition doesn’t cripple or kill you.”

“What’s your point?” I asked.