Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)

by Jim Butcher

My brother ruined a perfectly good run by saying, “Justine is pregnant.”

Then he said, “When the hell did you get deep?” “Through experience, wisdom I have earned,” I said in Yoda’s voice.

I unfolded it, shook sand off it, consulted it, and read, “‘All of my base are belong to me.’ What does that even mean?” Austri stared at me in frustration for a moment and sighed.

Austri was the svartalves in a nutshell. Anal-retentive, a ferocious stickler, inhumanly disciplined, inflexibly dedicated to his concepts of honor and duty—but good people once you got to know him.

And I calmly opened the apartment’s front door. An old man stood there. He was a couple of inches shorter than average, and stout. Like me, he carried a staff, though his was a good deal shorter and, like him, stouter than my own. Some wisps of white and silver hair drifted around his otherwise shining head, though there seemed to be more liver spots on the skin than I remembered from the last time I’d seen him. His dark eyes were bright, though, behind his spectacles, and he wore a plain white cotton T-shirt with his blue overalls and steel-toed work boots. He was my mentor, Ebenezar McCoy, senior member of the White Council of Wizardry.

How much did Eb age? Is time travel involved?

“I don’t have much time, so I’ll come right to it. You’re in trouble.”

Further time-travel support

“Truce. For now. What pretext is the Council basing this upon?” “An aggregate of various factors,” he replied.

Most of my support in the Senior Council was getting sent away at exactly the same time I was given a high-profile assignment providing security for the peace summit. Meanwhile, of the wizards who actually did know me, Ramirez and his bunch were the ones who would probably speak on my behalf—and they’d been sent to the summit, too. “I’m being set up.”

“I’ll see what I can do about this vote. Meanwhile, you do whatever you need to.” “To do what?” I asked. “To survive,” he said. He squinted at nothing in particular and said, “You’ve had it easy so far, in some ways.” “Easy?” I asked. “You’ve had troubles,” he said. “But you’ve gotten to play Lancelot at all of them. You’ve ridden forth to do open battle and you’ve won the day.” “Not all of them.” “More than most would have,” he said.

“You’re getting into deeper weeds now, boy. The stakes are getting higher.” “Meaning what?” “The past few years have shown them that you aren’t someone who is easily removed the direct way. They’re going to start trying alternate methods.” “Like what?” I asked. “The old way,” he said, his voice weary. “The way it always happens. I think someone you don’t expect is going to stab you in the back, Hoss.”

Does this mean Ramirez is Black Council knowing that he tells Dresden about his removal by the White Council?

“Would you relax, please?” “Who is that?” he demanded. He shot me a hard look. “Who?” “I just fed you pancakes,” I muttered. How tense were things in the old man’s world that he would react like that?

“Stars and stones.” “Don’t say that,” he said, his tone slipping into a more familiar, grouchier cadence. “You don’t even know what it means.” “The guy I learned it from wouldn’t teach me,” I said back. “Would you relax for five seconds, please? Please?”

“Maggie,” he said quietly. His voice sounded rough. “Hello, young lady.” She nodded at him a little. Ebenezar nodded back. Then he turned to me, and an anger I had never seen before smoldered in his eyes.

O shit.

“I did do it differently,” he snapped. “I made sure your mother grew up far away from the dangers of my life.” “How’d that work out?” I asked him. “Let’s ask Mom. Oh, wait. We can’t. She’s dead.” There was a sudden silence. I’m not sure if the sunlight literally dimmed for a few seconds or not. But the svartalves suddenly drifted even farther away from us. The old man’s voice was a quiet rumble. “What did you say to me, boy?”

Family fights are always the roughest. But damn.

“And since I’ve noticed that my life at times resembles a badly written Mexican soap opera,” I continued, “I want you to know something.” “What?” “I think that right now you’re considering protecting her by grabbing her and stashing her somewhere safe. If you go through with it, I’m going to take her back. Over your dead body if necessary, sir.”

I raised an eyebrow at the svartalf. I knew he was well respected in the supernatural community, which generally translated to considerable personal power, but only a fool squared off against Ebenezar McCoy. (Yes. I’m aware of the implications of that statement; I’d been doing it for like ten minutes.)

“No, wait,” I said. “Sir, I didn’t mean—” “Of course you are right, Etri,” Ebenezar said, his voice brusque. He started to turn away. “Sir,” I said. “Time to go,” Ebenezar said, his voice weary. “Work to be done.” And he walked out.

He was on the tall side of medium height, good-looking, with a regulation high-and-tight for his dark hair, although he’d added a thick mustache to his look that, admittedly, set off his blue eyes very well. He wore a suit too expensive for his pay grade and had a thick manila envelope tucked under one arm. “Detective Rudolph,” I said

!^#$ing bastard on the take wearing his stupid too-expensive suit with all the brains of a phytoplankton

Karrin didn’t look at me, and I didn’t look at her. We didn’t need to check in on this particular subject. Like most of the rest of the world, the cops didn’t have much time for the world of the supernatural. They would look at us blankly if we tried to tell them about a heist run by demon-possessed, two-thousand-year-old maniacs, and including ourselves, a shapeshifter, a Sasquatch, a one-man army, and a pyromancer. They’d figure we were going for an insanity plea and run us in. The capacity of humanity to deny what is right in front of it is staggering. Hell, Rudolph had seen a loup-garou tear apart a Chicago police station with his own eyes, and he was still in denial.

“I regret my Knight’s . . . excessive impulse-control issues,” Mab said, turning to Lara. “I trust it has not cast a sour tone upon this meeting.” “On the contrary,” Lara said. “I find it rather charming.” Mab’s expression was entirely unreadable. “Your response does nothing to increase my good opinion of you, Ms. Raith. My Knight needs no encouragement.”

See Mab's wheels turning

“Three?” I blurted. “I had to fight for my life through Arctis Tor and slug it out with an Elder Phobophage just to earn one favor!” Mab’s eyes swiveled to me. “And you were repaid appropriately for your deeds.” “I got a doughnut!”

I’m raising my daughter to survive the kind of thing she might occasionally be adjacent to because of who her father is, and for the time being her best survival strategy was almost always to be ready to run away.

“I’m not sending you away. I just need someone to look out for you until I get back.” “Because there’s monsters?” “It’s looking that way,” I said. “And you fight the monsters?” she asked. “When they need fighting,” I said.

Maggie nodded to me several times and then said, very seriously, “You’re a little scary sometimes. You should know that. Regular dads don’t say things like this.” I tried to smile at her, but my eyes got all blurry.

I wasn’t making any effort to perceive the energies in question, and I’m not a particularly sensitive sort, but even I could see the flickering, ghostly colors dancing elusively about her head and shoulders.

Work of Nemesis?

My brother is not exactly a complicated guy. He likes, in order, Justine, sex, exercise, food and drink, and occasionally fighting someone who needs fighting.

I absolutely did not jump in surprise. Not even a little. I turned calmly and with immense dignity and regarded the speaker with stoic calm, and not one of you can prove otherwise.

I started drawing in power. The old man sensed it and did the same. The universe yawed slightly in his direction as he did, a subtle bending of light, a minor wobble of gravity, a shudder in the very ground as Ebenezar drank power from the earth itself. That’s how much more juice the old man was taking in than me.

The thing that slithered into our world was the size of a horse, but lower, longer, and leaner. It was canine in shape, generally—a quadruped, the legs more or less right, and everything else subtly wrong. A row of short, powerful-looking tentacles ran along its flanks. A longer, thicker tentacle lashed like a whip where its tail should have been. The feet were spread out, wide, for grasping, kind of like an eagle’s talons, and where its head should have been was nothing but a thick nest of more of the tendrils. It had something like scales made of mucus, rather than fur, and flesh squelched on flesh. “Cornerhound,” Ebenezar said, his voice purely disgusted.

“All right, boy. Time to start teaching you this starborn business.” I blinked and almost tripped over my own feet. “Wait, what? You’re going to start talking about it . . . now?!” He cuffed me on the shoulder irritably. “We got maybe half a minute. Do you want to take a walk down memory lane?” “Freaking wizards,” I complained, rubbing at my shoulder.

“Every couple or three wizard generations,” Ebenezar said, “the stars line up just right, and what amounts to a spotlight plays over the earth for a few hours. Any child born within that light—” “Is starborn. I get it,” I said. “What does it mean?” “Power against the Outsiders,” the old man growled. “Among other things, that their minds can’t be magically tainted by contact with anything from Outside. Which means . . .”

But that was sort of like rubbing your brain against a bus station toilet; you simply had no idea what you were going to pick up by doing it—and wizards who frequently tangled with Outsiders (or even the weirder entities from within our own reality) tended to go a little loopy due to the contamination of direct contact with alien, inhuman intelligences. That’s why there was a whole Law of Magic about reaching beyond the Outer Gates. But if I was insulated against such influences . . .

“Out of morbid curiosity, what happens to us if they, uh . . . get us?” “They take us into one of those corners,” Ebenezar said, “and drag us back to wherever they came from.” I swallowed. “Then what?” The old man looked faintly disturbed and said something that, for wizards, is akin to dropping an F-bomb. “I don’t know.” I blinked at him and felt my eyes widening. “Oh.”

The old man blinked at the bucket. “Hell’s bells, boy. Conjuritis? At your age?” “Conjurwhatnow?” I asked.

Okay, look. You’re going to have to trust me on this one: Having a friggin’ Tyrannosaurus rex roaring out the tune of “Happy Birthday to You” at full volume is an entirely appropriate birthday present for Waldo Butters.

It did, in fact, check in at around a hundred and sixty decibels. It wasn’t a hundred and sixty-five because when I’d tried that much, it broke all the glasses in the kitchen and set my hair on fire. I’m not kidding.

So I stood my ground as the hound tore free of the heavy gravity, and shouted, “Hounds of Tindalos, return to the Void that awaits thee! I banish thee!” I raised my staff in both hands and began to release my will. And I felt them. Inside my head. Felt the Outside. I’m not going to try to explain to you what it was like to experience that. If it hasn’t happened to you, there’s no common point of reference.

Their thoughts, or whatever madness it was that passed for them, began to devour mine. I felt like my mind was being chewed apart by a swarm of ants. And then for just an instant, the alien thought patterns made sense, and I saw an image from their point of view—a being made of coherent light, a column of glowing energy centers, and pure dread, standing like an obelisk before the cornerhounds, a bolt of terrible lightning gathered around its upraised fists, head, and shoulders, like a miniature storm front. I saw what they saw when they looked at me. And I felt their fear.

“Not until I get something on this whole starborn thing.” His jaw flexed a couple of times. Then he said, “I told you. You were born at the right time and place. As a result, you . . .” He sighed as if struggling to find an explanation. “Your life force resonates at a frequency that is the mirror opposite and cancellation of the Outsiders. They can’t take away your free will. They’re vulnerable to your power. Hell, you can punch them and they’ll actually feel pain from it.”

“This starborn thing. It happens all the time?” The old man seemed to think about that one before he answered. “Once every six hundred and sixty-six years.”

The old man shook his head. “Lesson’s over for tonight. I already said more’n I should’ve.”

Time travel duded

And Ebenezar didn’t just have issues with vampires: He had volumes and ongoing subscriptions.

I swallowed. “Then get off me.” At least I’d gotten the words in the right order. “This is a business trip. I came here to try to find a way to help Thomas. Not to get frisky with an apex sexual predator.” Lara blinked at me, and her eyes darkened by several shades. Her mouth turned up into a slow, genuine smile. “What did you call me?” she asked. “You heard me,” I said.

Secrets are heavy, heavy things. Carry around too many of them for too long and the weight will crush the life out of you.

Fear is a prison. But when you combine it with secrets, it becomes especially toxic, vicious. It puts us all into solitary, unable to hear one another clearly.

A cold feeling kind of spread through me, starting right behind my belt buckle. Because that circle shouldn’t have been able to hold Molly. Which meant that the being talking to me . . . wasn’t.

But there’s a deeper meaning to home. Something simpler, more primal. It’s where you eat the best food because other predators can’t take it from you very easily there. It’s where you and your mate are the most intimate. It’s where you raise your children, safe against a world that can do horrible things to them. It’s where you sleep, safe. It’s where you relax. It’s where you dream. Home is where you embrace the present and plan the future. It’s where the books are. And more than anything else, it’s where you build that world that you want.

It had begun to dawn on me, through all the awful, that Molly still hadn’t told her mom and dad about her new gig as the Winter Lady. And it had been . . . how long now? Hell’s bells.

I eyed the phone. Then I got into my pocket, got out the dollar bill that had been stuck in a pocket on a ride through the laundromat and was now a wadded block of solid pseudo-wood. I put it in an envelope, sealed it, and wrote GREY on it in pink highlighter. I stowed that in a pocket.

Without hesitating an instant, Sanya held out his hand and put it squarely into the blade. Absolutely nothing happened. It just passed into his flesh and then continued on the other side as if there’d been no interruption at all. “Weird,” Butters breathed. He reached up and tested it with a pinky finger—then put his whole hand into the beam as well. “Huh,” he said. “It just feels a little warm.” Michael took his turn next, calmly passing his whole right hand into it on the first try. “Interesting.” “My turn,” I said, and poked the burn-scarred forefinger of my left hand at the blade. There was heat there, uncomfortably warm but bearable, like washing dishes with the hot water turned up. I was sensing the raw energy of the sword, which absolutely seethed with stored potential, as if the power of a star could be bound into a physical form.

Oh how this pays off in BG. Man.