JIM BUTCHER - SMALL FAVOR

Which she was.

In the middle of a blizzard.

“It isn’t far,” I said. Then I went up to the door beside Kincaid and said, “Put the kid on your lap.”

“She wears the seat belt,” Kincaid said. “She’s in danger enough from exposure already.”

“Luccio doesn’t weigh much more than Ivy does,” I said in a flat tone. “She’s in almost as much danger as the kid. So you’re holding Ivy on your lap and letting my captain ride in the cab, like a gentleman.”

Kincaid gave me a level look, his pale eyes cold. “Or what?”

“I’m armed,” I said. “You’re not.”

He looked at me levelly, then at my hands. One of them was in my coat pocket. Then he said, “You think I believe that you’d kill me?”

“If you try to make me choose between you and Luccio,” I said, with a brittle smile, “I’m pretty sure whom I’m going to bid aloha.”

His teeth flashed in a sudden, wolfish smile. And he moved over, drawing the freezing child onto his lap.

By the time I got back to Luccio she was upright only because Mouse sat placidly in the cold, supporting her. She mumbled some kind of protest in a faint, commanding tone, but since she said it in Italian I declared her brain frozen and assumed command of the local Warden detachment, which was handy, since it consisted of only me anyway. I bundled her into the truck’s cab and got her buckled in beside Kincaid. He helped with it-my fingers were too cold and stiff to manage very quickly.

“Harry,” Michael said. He reached back, drew a rolled-up thermal blanket from behind the truck’s front seat, and tossed it to me. I caught it and nodded my thanks with the cold already starting to chew at my belly.

That left me and Mouse in the back of the truck, both of us soaking wet, in the middle of winter, in the middle of a blizzard. The cold moved from my belly to my chest, and I curled up into a ball because I didn’t have much choice in the matter. Magic wasn’t an option. My palm-sized ball of flame wouldn’t get along well with the back of a moving truck, especially given how much I was already shaking. I wanted to get warm, not set myself on fire.

“S-s-s-sometimes ch-ch-ch-chivalry s-s-s-sucks,” I growled to Mouse, teeth chattering.

My dog, whose thick winter coat wasn’t much good after it had gotten a good soaking, leaned against me as hard as I leaned against him, underneath the rough blanket, while the cab of the truck heated up nicely, its windows fogging. I felt like a Dickens character. I thought about explaining that to Mouse, just to occupy my thoughts, but he was suffering enough without being forced to endure Dickens, even by proxy. So we made the trip in miserable, companionable silence. There might have been emergency lights going by us. I was too busy enjoying the involuntary rhythmic contractions of every muscle cell in my freaking body to notice.

Thirty seconds into the trip I was fairly certain that I was going to black out and wake up five hundred years in the future, but as it turned out I had to endure only a miserable twenty minutes or so before Michael pulled up outside my apartment.

Both vehicle doors opened to the weary but authoritative ring of Luccio’s voice. “Get him to the door while he can still let us in through his wards.”

“I’m fine,” I said, rising. Only it came out sounding more like, “Mmmmnnngh,” and when I tried to stand up I all but fell out of the truck. Michael caught me, and Kincaid moved quickly to help him lift me to the ground.

I dimly felt one of Kincaid’s hands enter my jacket pocket and turn it out empty. “Son of a bitch,” he said, grinning. “I knew it.”

Luccio emerged from the truck’s cab, carrying the entirely limp form of the Archive draped over one hip. The girl’s arms and legs flopped loosely, her mouth hung open in sleep, and her cheeks were bright pink. “Get up, Dresden,” she stated. Her voice was firm, but though warmed by the trip, she was still nearly as damp as she had been at the station, and I saw her buckle as the cold sank its teeth into her. “Hurry.”

I moved my feet in a vague shuffle, and remembered somewhere that when you walked, you moved them alternately. This improved our progress considerably. We reached a door, and someone said something about dangerous wards.

No kidding , I thought. I’ve got some wards on my place that’ll fry you to greasy spots on the concrete. But you should see the ones Gard can do.

Luccio snapped something to me about the wards, and I thought she looked cold. I had a fire at my place, which she could probably use. I opened the door for her, the way you’re supposed to for a lady, but the damned thing was stuck until Michael shoved it open with his shoulder and muttered something disparaging about amateur work.

Then everything got sort of muddled, and my arms and legs hurt a lot.

I ended up thinking: Man, my couch feels nice.

Mouse snuffled at my face and then all but squashed me as he laid his head and most of his upper body across mine. I thought about chewing him out for it, but opted for sleep on my wonderful couch instead.

Blackness ensued.

I woke up to a room illuminated only by the light from my fireplace. I was toasty, though my fingers and toes throbbed uncomfortably. There was a gentle weight pressing down on me that proved to be virtually every blanket I owned. The deep, slow, steady sound of my dog’s breathing whispered from the rug in front of the couch, and one of my hands was lying on the rough, warm, dry fur of Mouse’s back.

Water trickled nearby.

Luccio sat on a footstool in front of the fire, facing the flames. My teapot hung on its latch over the fire. A basin of steaming water sat upon the hearth. As I watched, she dipped a cloth in the hot water and slid it over her shoulder and down the length of one arm, her face in profile to me. Her eyes were closed in an expression of simple pleasure. The light of the fire made lovely, exquisitely feminine shadows along the slender lines of her naked back, down to the waist of her jeans as she moved, muscles shifting beneath soft skin that shimmered golden like the firelight for a second after the warm cloth glided over it, leaving little wisps of vapor in its wake.

Something else had never really occurred to me before, either.

Luccio was beautiful.

Oh, she wasn’t cover-girl pretty, though I suspected that with the right preparation she’d be damned close. Her features were appealing, particularly around her little Cupid’s bow of a mouth, framed by its dimples, contrasted with a rather squared-off chin that stopped half an eyelash shy of masculinity. She had dark eyes that flashed when she was angry or amused, and her medium-brown hair was long, curling, and lustrous. She obviously took really good care of it-but there was too much strength in that face for her to be conventionally pretty.

Beauty runs deeper than that.

There was an inexpressible quality of femininity about her that appealed to me tremendously-some critical mixture of gentle curves, quiet grace, and supple strength that I had only that second realized happened to reside in the same place as the head of the Wardens. Maybe more important, I knew the quality of the person under the skin. I’d known Luccio for years, been in more than one tight spot with her, and found her to be one of the only veteran Wardens whom I both liked and respected.

She shook her hair to the other side of her back and washed the other shoulder and arm just as slowly, and just as evidently taking pleasure in doing so.

It had been a while since I’d seen a woman’s naked back and shoulders. It had been considerably rarer than my views of the various nightmares my job kept exposing me to. I guess even among all the nightmares, sooner or later you’ll get lucky enough to catch a glimpse of a beautiful dream. And despite the trouble I was in, for just that moment there, under all those blankets, I looked at something beautiful. It made me wish I had the talent to capture the sight with charcoal or inks or oils-but that had never been my gift. All I could do was soak up that simple sight: beautiful woman bathing in firelight.