JIM BUTCHER - SMALL FAVOR

“Look at this,” I said to Thomas. I gestured at the houses, each of them on a lot that exceeded the building’s foundation by the width of a postage stamp. “People pay to live in places like this?”

“You live in the basement of a boardinghouse,” Thomas said.

“I live in a big city, and I rent,” I said. “Houses like these go for several hundred thousand dollars, if not more. It’ll take thirty years to pay them off.”

“They’re nice houses,” Thomas said.

“They’re nice cages,” I responded. “No space around them. Nothing alive. Places like this turn a man into a gerbil. He comes home and scurries inside. Then he stays there until he’s forced to go back out to the job he has to work so that he can make the mortgage payments on this gerbil habitat.”

“And they’re way nicer than your apartment,” Thomas said.

“Totally.”

He brought the Hummer to a crunching halt in the snow, glaring through the windshield. “Damn snow. I’m only guessing where the streets are at this point.”

“Just don’t drive into what’s going to be somebody’s basement,” I said. “We passed Twenty-third a minute ago. We must be close.”

“Twenty-third Court, Place, Street, Terrace, or Avenue?” Thomas asked.

“Circle.”

“Damned cul-de-sacs.” He started forward again, driving slowly. “There,” he said, nodding to the next sign that emerged from the haze. “That one?”

“Yeah.” Next to the customized street sign was a standard road sign declaring Twenty-fourth Terrace a dead end.

“Damned foreshadowing,” I muttered.

“What’s that?”

“Nothing.”

We drove through the murky grey and white of a heavy snowfall, the light luminous, without source, reflected from billions of crystals of ice. The Hummer’s engine was a barely audible purr. By comparison the crunch of its tires on snow was a dreadful racket. We rolled past half a dozen model houses, all of them lovely and empty, the snow piling up around windows that gaped like eye sockets in a half-buried skull.

Something wasn’t right. I couldn’t have told you what, exactly, but I could feel it as plainly as I could feel the carved wood of the staff I gripped in my hands.

We weren’t alone.

Thomas felt it too. Moving smoothly, he reached an arm behind the driver’s seat and drew forth his sword belt. It bore an old U.S. Cavalry saber he’d carried on a number of dicey occasions, paired up with a more recent toy he’d become fond of, a bent-bladed knife called a kukri, like the one carried by the Ghurkas.

“What is that?” he asked quietly.

I closed my eyes for a moment, reaching out with my arcane senses, attempting to detect any energies that might be moving in around us. The falling snow muffled my magical perceptions every bit as much as it did my physical senses. “Not sure,” I said quietly. “But whatever it is, it’s a safe bet it knows we’re here.”

“How do you want to play it if the music starts?”

“I’ve got nothing to prove,” I said. “I say we run like little girls.”

“Suits me. But don’t let Murphy hear you talking like that.”

“Yeah. She gets oversensitive about ‘little.’”

My shoulders tightened with the tension as Thomas drove forward slowly and carefully. He stopped the car beside the last house on the street. It had a finished look to it, the bushes of its landscaping poking up forlornly through the snow. There were curtains in the windows, and the faint marks of tire tracks, not quite full of new snowfall, led up the drive and to the closed garage.

“Someone’s behind that third window,” Thomas said quietly. “I saw them move.”

I hadn’t seen anything, but then I wasn’t a supernatural predator, complete with a bucketful of preternaturally sharp senses. I nodded to let him know that I’d heard him, and scanned the ground around the house. The snow was untouched. “We’re the first visitors,” I said. “We’re probably making someone nervous.”

“Gunman?”

“Probably,” I said. “That’s what most of Marcone’s people are used to. Come on.”

“You don’t want me to wait out here?”

I shook my head. “There’s something else out here. It might be nothing, but you’re a sitting duck in the car. Maybe if you’d gotten the armored version…”

“Nag, nag, nag,” Thomas said.

“Let’s be calm and friendly,” I said. I opened the door of the Hummer and stepped out into snow that came up over my knees. I made sure not to move too quickly, and kept my hands out in plain sight. On the other side of the Hummer Thomas mirrored me.

“Hello, the house!” I called. “Anyone home?” My voice had that flat, heavy timbre you can only get when there’s a lot of snow, almost like we were standing inside. “My name is Dresden. I’m here to talk.”

Silence. The snow started soaking through my shoes and my jeans.

Thomas whipped his head around toward the end of the little street, where the subdivision ended and the woods that were next in line for the bulldozers began. He stared intently for a moment.

“It’s in the trees,” he reported quietly.

The hair on the back of my neck stood up, and I hoped fervently that whatever was out there, it didn’t have a gun. “I’m not here for trouble!” I called toward the house. I held up two fingers and said, “Scout’s honor.”

This time I saw the curtain twitch, and caught a faint stir of motion behind it. The inner door to the house opened and a man’s voice said, “Come in. Hands where I can see them.”

I nodded at Thomas. He lifted his hand, holding his car key, and pointed it at the Hummer. It clunked and chirped, its doors locking. He came around the car, sword belt hanging over his shoulder, while I broke trail to the front porch, struggling through the snow. I knocked as much of the powder as I could off my lower body, using it as an excuse to give me time to ready my shield bracelet. I didn’t particularly want to step through a dark doorway, presenting a shooting-gallery profile to any gunman inside, without taking precautions. When I came in I held my shield before me, silent and invisible.

“Stop there,” growled a man’s voice. “Staff down. Show your hands.”

I leaned my staff against the wall and did so. I’d know those monosyllables anywhere. “Hi, Hendricks.”

A massive man appeared from the dimness in the next room, holding a police-issue riot gun in hands that made it look like a child’s toy. He was built like a bull, and you could apply thick and rocklike to just about everything in his anatomy, especially if you started with his skull. He came close enough to let me see his close-cropped red hair. “Dresden. Step aside.”

I did, and the shotgun was trained on my brother. “You, vampire. Sword down. Fingers laced behind your head.”

Thomas rolled his eyes and complied. “How come he doesn’t have to put his hands behind his head?”

“Wouldn’t make any difference with him,” Hendricks replied. Narrow, beady eyes swiveled like gun turrets back to me. “What do you want?”

I wasn’t sure I’d ever heard Hendricks speak a complete sentence, much less string phrases together. It was sort of disconcerting, the way it would be if Mister suddenly developed the capacity to open his own cans of cat food. It took me a second to get over the mental speed bump. “Uh,” I said. “I want to…”

I realized how lame this was going to sound. I gritted my teeth and said it quickly. “I want to help your boss.”

There was a clicking sound from the wall, the sound of an audio speaker popping to life. A woman’s voice said, “Send the wizard up.”

Hendricks growled. “You sure?”