Brief Cases (The Dresden Files, #15.1)

by Jim Butcher

Justine grimaced and looked away. “She was too small to swim out on her own. I couldn’t leave her.” I stared at the young woman for a long moment. Then I said, “You might consider speaking to Father Forthill at St. Mary of the Angels. The Church appears to have some sort of program to place those endangered by the supernatural into hiding.

Well. The wizard would immediately recognize that the claymores, the running water, and the magic-defense-piercing bullet had not been put into place to counter Mag or his odd folk at all. They were there to kill Harry Dresden. And they worked. Mag had proven that. An eventual confrontation with Dresden was inevitable—but murdering Justine would guarantee it happened immediately, and I wasn’t ready for that, not until I had rebuilt the defenses in the new location. Besides, the young woman had rules of her own. I could respect that.

“Maybe,” he said in a slow, rural drawl, “you could explain to me why I found you in the middle of an orgy.” “Well,” I said, “if you’re going to be in an orgy, the middle is the best spot, isn’t it?”

Dean hadn’t blustered or tried to intimidate me in any way. He wasn’t trying to scare me into talking. He was just telling me how it was going to be. And he drank his coffee old-school. I kinda liked the guy.

In the Midwest, if you show up to a college town on a weekend, you risk running into a football game. In my experience, that resulted in universal problems with traffic, available hotel rooms, and drunken football hooligans. Or wait: Soccer is the one with hooligans. Drunken American football fans are just . . . drunks, I guess.

Irwin Pounder, River Shoulders’s son, had a physics course at noon, so I picked up a notebook and a couple of pens at the university bookstore and ambled on into the large classroom. It was a perfect disguise. The notebook was college ruled.

Connie’s eyes sparkled again, and I finally got it. Her eyes weren’t twinkling. They were becoming increasingly flecked with motes of molten silver.

“Look, do you want the story or not?” Dean leaned back in his chair and propped his feet up on his desk. “You kidding? This is the best one in years.”

Heavy seconds ticked by, like the quiet before a shootout in an old Western. A tumbleweed went rolling by in the street. I’m not even kidding. An actual, literal tumbleweed. Man, Oklahoma.

“What are you blabbering about?” “Hell’s bells, man. Don’t any of you White Court bozos ever watch television? I’m giving you pop-reference gold here. Gold.”

And his wendigo has had its hand on his heart ever since. It shaped his life.” “Wendigo?” River Shoulders waved a hand. “General term. Spirit of Hunger. Can’t ever be sated.”

Then there was a crash so loud that it shook the building. Barrowill’s sleek, black Lincoln Town Car came crashing through the dorm room’s door, taking a sizable portion of the wall with it.

A large figure leapt up to the hole in the exterior wall and landed in the room across the hall, hitting with a crunch only slightly less massive than the car had made. I swear to you, if I’d heard that sound effect they used to use when Steve Austin jumped somewhere, I would not have been shocked.

You couldn’t have written it in musical notation any more than you could write the music of a thunderstorm, or write lyrics to the song of a running stream. But it was music nonetheless.

Power like nothing I had ever encountered surged out from that impact, a deep, shuddering wave that passed visibly through the dust in the air. The ceiling and the walls and the floor sang in resonance with the note and impact alike, and Barrowill’s psychic assault was swept away like a sand castle before the tide.

Twenty flesh-rending, superhumanly strong and durable predators flung themselves onto River Shoulders in an overwhelming wave. He vanished beneath a couple of tons of hungry ghoul. It was not a fair fight. Barrowill should have brought more goons.

He sucked in a deep breath, squared off against his father, and said, “Why?” And there it was. What had to be the Big Question of Irwin’s life.

“That’s the truth,” I said. “I told you that you wouldn’t believe it. You gonna let me go now?” “Oh, hell, no,” Dean said. “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard. You’re stoned out of your mind or insane. Either way, I’m going to put you in the drunk tank until you have a chance to sleep it off.”

I miss my boss. It’s been most of a year since I helped him die, and ever since then I’ve been the only professional wizard in the city of Chicago.

Big reveal for readers keeping up with the shorts. Man.

In my line of work, people can and will do awful things to you with discarded bits of your body. Not cleaning up after yourself is like asking for someone to boil your blood from twenty blocks away. No, thank you.

I still wanted to be with him so much, but maybe the time wasn’t right yet. That was okay. I could be patient. And I still got to be with him in a different way almost every day.

Promise me you won’t tell my high school math teacher about it, but after that I sat down and applied trigonometry to real life.

Her eyes widened. “Thou wouldst have killed me.” “I wouldst,” I agreed pleasantly. Her mouth spread into a wide smile, and her teeth were daintily pointed. “I have taught thee well.”

“Tell me, child,” Lea said, shifting abruptly out of her archaic dialect. She did that sometimes, when we were alone. “What do you know of svartalves?”

“Uh. You’re saying I need to pull a train to get Thomas out of there? ’Cause that just isn’t going to happen.”

Something ugly way down deep inside me somewhere unsheathed its claws and tensed up. That was the part of me that wanted to catch up to Listen and do things involving railroad spikes and drains in the floor. Everyone has that inside them somewhere. It takes fairly horrible things to awaken that kind of savagery, but it’s in all of us.

That part of me was awake and active and constantly pushing my emotions into conflict with my rationality. I told that part of me to shut up and sit its ass down.

Harry told me once that you can always tell when you’re about to rationalize your way to a bad decision. It’s when you start using phrases such as It would be wrong, but . . . His advice was to leave the conjunction out of the sentence: It would be wrong. Period.

I had to make my choices with my head. My heart was too broken to be trusted.

The Fomor were kind of an all-star team of bad guys, the survivors and outcasts and villains of a dozen different pantheons that had gone down a long time ago. They’d banded together under the banner of a group of beings known as the Fomor, and had been laying quiet for a long time—for thousands of years, in fact. Now they were on the move—and even powerful interests like Svartalfheim, the nation of the svartalves, were getting out of the way.

Is it paranoid to worry about things like that? It seemed reasonable to me at the time. Man, maybe I’m more messed up than I thought I was.

She leaned very slightly away from me. Just when I thought you couldn’t get any more weird and disturbing. I gave her a maliciously wide smile and the crazy eyes I used to use to scare my kid brothers and sisters. Andi snorted and then began testing the air with her nose.

He was a tall, extremely gaunt being, yet somehow not thin. His hands and feet were too large, and his stomach bulged as if it contained a basketball. His jowls were oversized as well, his jaws swollen as if he had the mumps. His lips were too wide, too thick, and too rubbery-looking. His hair was too flattened, too limp, like strands of seaweed just washed up onto shore, and on the whole he looked like some kind of gangling, poisonous frog. He was dressed only in a blanket draped across his shoulders. Ew.

“The one I made for the Red Court in the Congo was deadly enough,” Lord Froggy said, a smug tone in his voice. My heart pounded even harder. During its war with the White Council, the Red Court had used some kind of nerve gas on a hospital tending wounded wizards. The weapon had killed tens of thousands of people in a city far smaller and less crowded than Chicago.

Sometimes I think my life is all about bad timing.

And from the other side of the broken door, Thomas Raith, vampire, said, “It’s Listen, right? Wow. Did you clowns ever pick the wrong room.” “We made a mistake,” Listen said. “Yes. Yes, you did.” And things started going crunch and thump in the room beyond.

Lord Froggy’s eyes flared even larger and more furious that he’d missed. “Mortal cow!” Okay, now. That stung. I mean, maybe it’s a little shallow, and maybe it’s a little petty, and maybe it shows a lack of character of some kind that Froggy’s insult to my appearance got under my skin more effectively than attempted murder. “Cow?” I snarled as water from the sprinkler system started soaking me. “I rock this dress!”

My eyes weren’t focusing very well, but I found myself staring down a dark tunnel toward one of the dead girls on the bedroom floor, and the dark purple band of bruising around her throat. Then the floor a few feet away rippled, and an odd-looking grey creature popped up out of it.

I thanked him and let him pull me up to a sitting position. My throat hurt. My head hurt. My face hurt. It’s killing me, nyuk, nyuk, nyuk. C’mere, you. You know you’ve been punched loopy when you’re doing a one-person Three Stooges routine in your internal monologue.

My body did what it always did around him and started screaming at me to make babies. I ignored it. Mostly.

“But why? Why send us in there?” “The treaty with the Fomor could not be allowed to conclude,” she said. “If one nation agreed to neutrality with them, a dozen more would follow. The Fomor would be able to divide the others and contend with them one by one. The situation was delicate. The presence of active agents was intended to disrupt its equilibrium—to show the Fomor’s true nature in a test of fire.”

But the Fomor are betrayers. Ever have they been; ever will they be. The only question is what form their treachery will take. The svartalves had to be shown.”

Harry. Alive. I hadn’t killed him. Best reward ever. “Thank you, Auntie,” I whispered. “Thank you.”

And finally, I wanted to show more of Molly, who has been through so much and learned such bitter lessons—and to demonstrate why it might just be possible that Mab may have bitten off more than she could chew in the inestimable Miss Carpenter.

All my life, magically speaking, I had been used to being a spinner of cobwebs of illusion and mental magic. I’d always had enormous finesse, and always lacked the kind of power I had seen my mentor wield. I’d forced myself to adjust to the idea that I would always have to be subtle, indirect, manipulative—that only indirect power was mine to command. That was no longer true.

Carlos squinted his eyes and studied the bartender, as if weighing the value of heeding her words versus the personal pleasure he would take in being contrary. Harry Dresden has had a horrible influence on far too many people, and has much to answer for.

The Winter Court of Faerie had an ironclad code of law laid out by Mab herself. It didn’t work like mortal law did. If you broke it, you didn’t get punished. You didn’t break it. Period. You were physically incapable of doing so. When Mab laid down the law, the beings of her Court followed it, whether they wanted to or not. They actually knew the law, on a subconscious level, but it took a real effort to summon it to your conscious mind. I took a slow breath and realized that any of the Hidden Peoples of the Winter Court were entitled to their privacy and could not be outed to the mortals or anyone else without their prior consent.

Help from a mortal, on my first job? Mab wouldn’t like that. On the other hand, I was pretty sure that when it came to me filling the role of the Winter Lady, Mab wasn’t going to like a lot of things I did. She might as well get used to it now.

Harry’d always been a good source of advice about problems. He dealt with them on a continuous basis, after all, and in his studied opinion, if you had one problem, you had a problem. But if you had multiple problems, you might also have an opportunity. One problem, he swore, could often be used to solve another, and he had stories about a zombie tyrannosaurus to prove it.

“Dammit, man. I’m a Faerie Princess, not a forensic analyst.” I jerked my head to tell him to follow me, and we set out after our quarry.