Chapter Three
Chapter
Three
Lara walked with her hand on my arm as we went back to our waiting carriages. The shadows were getting longer as the sun went down.
“So,” she said. “Next month?”
“Sure,” I said. “My people will get with your people.”
She sighed. “Yes, I suppose so.” We stopped and she took her hand back, studying my face. “Fill your cup, Harry. Whatever it is that gives you yourself. Do more of it.”
“I’ll get by,” I said.
“Getting by is surviving,” she said. “I thought you wanted to live.”
“Can’t always get what you want,” I said. “Ask you something?”
“I suppose.”
“What’s with your eyes?” I asked.
She tilted her head, her deep blue eyes narrowing. “How so?”
“They’ve been blue all day,” I said. “I’ve seen them grey. Silver sometimes. Sometimes white.”
“Ah,” she said. She seemed to consider it for a moment and then said, “When you see that, you’re seeing my Hunger peeking out.”
“You ate before our date,” I said.
“Sometimes three is a crowd.”
“So, when your eyes get lighter, I need to worry.”
Her expression was unreadable for a moment. Then she said, “We both do. May I ask a question in reply?”
“Seems fair.”
“Why won’t you meet my eyes for more than a second?”
“Bad things can happen when a wizard does that,” I said. “It’s called a soulgaze. I see you as you are.”
“That seems like it would be an advantage.”
One side of my mouth pulled up bitterly.
Murphy was gone by the time I’d decided to try it with her.
“Not really,” I said. “You’d get to see me back.”
“Would that be so terrible?”
“People have screamed and fainted,” I said.
Lara tilted her head. I looked at her eyes long enough to see the wheels spinning, then lengthened my gaze past her. “Now. That is fascinating. Good night, Dresden.”
I watched her go to her cart, which her bodyguards had turned around while we were inside. The Redcap had done the same with my carriage.
The two sets of guards tried not to show that they were watching the others too much. I got into the black carriage so that it rocked on its springs and slumped back into the seat. I pulled the brim of my cap down, folded my arms, and told the Redcap, “Drive.”
Perhaps wisely, he didn’t say a word to me. He clucked to the not-horse, and clip-clop we went down the clearing streets. The shadows were cooling off the streets as the sun went into the west, and people who remained outside had the look of those in a hurry to get somewhere safe.
Body removal had been a problem. Most of the people who died in the open had been collected by now, but there simply wasn’t the time or space to deal with them all.
There were mass graves being dug somewhere out west of town, but the dead didn’t have priority over bringing in supplies for the living, so the faintest taint of death was in the air almost anywhere you went.
They kept finding remains in the wreckage of buildings, in nooks and crannies where people had crawled off to die.
The first two weeks had been positively ghoulish.
Now it was just a fact.
The carriage passed into some deep shadow that gathered beneath some tall buildings, and when it came out into the next column of setting sunlight, the seat next to me was occupied.
Mab, the Queen of Air and Darkness, ruler of the Winter Court, sat primly in the seat next to me, dressed in white pants, silvery heels, and a winter-blue blouse.
She wore a broad-brimmed summer hat and black plastic sunglasses that reflected the colors of sunset in a deep blue and purple spectrum.
She was beautiful like few beings I had ever seen, and her lips were rich and soft-looking and the color of frozen mulberries.
The air around her was chill. It was like sitting next to an open refrigerator.
The Redcap turned enough to touch the brim of his cap and incline his head to her, then went back to driving.
“Barely adequate, my Knight,” Mab said in a calm, cool voice.
I didn’t move or react. “Gee. And here I was, longing for your approval.”
She didn’t move her head, but the weight of her gaze on me was palpable nonetheless. “Time is fleeting,” she said. “We have little to spare in preparation. This alliance is part of that preparation.”
“For what?” I asked.
One corner of her mouth twisted. “The next great conflict. The vampire wields a great deal of power among the mortals. That influence will be critical to my efforts. You must secure her…cooperation. By whatever means necessary.”
“Lara likes girls, too. Go seduce her yourself.”
“There are days when you say inane things,” Mab said. “And then there are days when you run your mouth and remind me how utterly young and witless you can be. I have a Knight for a reason, fool.”
“I’m not looking to get myself an addiction on top of my other problems,” I said. “And the way I am right now, I don’t think I’d be particularly healthy for Lara, either.”
“Mmmm,” Mab said, nodding her chin once. “True. You are currently more useless than you have generally proven in the past.”
The way she said “useless” made me shift uncomfortably in my seat.
“You are not irreplaceable,” she reminded me in a quiet voice.
“I’m not invincible, either,” I replied in a dull tone. “I went to war just like you wanted me to. There’s a cost for that.”
“Perhaps it was too high to be borne,” she suggested in a very lovely, very poisonous voice.
I glowered at her from beneath the brim of my cap. “Perhaps I let Ethniu out and you can dance with her again,” I said. “Perhaps if anything happens to me, that’s already set up with Demonreach. Perhaps that’s the real reason I went out there before this first date.”
Mab’s face turned slowly toward me. She stared for a long moment.
“Finally,” she said. “You are at least learning something, my Knight.” She turned back to face front and was silent for a moment more. “You will give yourself to Ms. Raith. If not now, then later. But it will happen.”
I let out a light breath through my nose.
“Time will tell,” Mab said smoothly. “Meanwhile, you have another task.”
“Oh?”
She nodded. “King Etri of the Svartalves knows that you have somehow concealed Thomas Raith from him,” Mab said. “He has demanded that I give him your head in compensation for the loss of Raith.”
I swallowed. “Oh?”
“You will mend fences with Etri,” Mab said. “In the conflict that is coming, the svartalves are necessary allies. They are my armory, and thanks to your actions, they refuse to speak to me or my court, or to the allies I have chosen for the fight, much less arm any of us. That will not do. Fix it.”
“How the hell am I supposed to do that?” I asked her. “Etri is old-school. Thomas killed one of his closest henchmen. Even assuming Etri is willing to bargain, he’ll want a life in recompense.”
“Then provide it,” Mab said in a soft, sharply edged tone. “This matter falls upon you. Rectify the situation.”
“Or what?”
“There is no ‘or what.’ You will do it. This task is more necessary and needful than anything you are capable of imagining. If I must seize your mind and walk you like a puppet through negotiation and give you over to Etri’s service in repayment for the life-debt, I will do so.
” She regarded me over the rims of her glasses, her eyes a poisonous shade of green.
“Or some other life connected to yours.”
The dull void of emotions I felt thanks to my essential weariness vanished in a sudden boiling flash of rage.
“Did you,” I asked very quietly, “just threaten my daughter?”
“There would be a certain amount of justice in it,” Mab said. “Blood for blood.”
“You try it,” I said, “and I will empty Demonreach’s cells and give every single one of the things in it your address.”
Mab let out a low laugh. It was cold and it was cruel.
“You would unleash a black tide upon humanity itself, should you do that.” She settled back into her own seat, relaxed and confident.
“Do not assume you can predict the outcome of such an act. Far better for both of us and for tens of millions of your precious mortals that we work in tandem with one another.”
I ground my teeth. “Even if I wanted to pacify Etri,” I said, “I’d have no idea how to go about it.”
“I have great confidence in your base cunning and ingenuity,” Mab replied. “You will think of something. Or else.” She pushed her sunglasses back up on her nose. “That,” she added, “was a threat.”
“Okay,” I said. “So you want me to addict myself to the personification of heroin, and pull off a major diplomatic coup between supernatural nations at the same time.”
“Yes,” Mab said, her tone very, very faintly exasperated. “At any point did I stutter?”
“If you did, I might have missed it,” I said. “I wasn’t listening as closely as I usually do.”
Mab pressed her luscious lips together and shook her head. “I suggest, Sir Knight,” she said, “that you pull yourself together as quickly as possible. I know you suffered loss. But there is no time to waste upon your mourning.”
“It doesn’t work like that for mortals, Mab,” I said quietly. “It hurts until you’re done hurting. You heal as fast as you heal. I just need time.”
“You haven’t been exactly mortal in quite a while, my Knight,” Mab said in a low, firm tone. “There are too many lives at stake for you to fall to the ground weeping. And not even I can readily summon extra seconds from the void. There is no time. Get up and fight. Or I will find someone who can.”
The carriage passed into another deep, cool shadow, and when it came back out into the bloody sunset shafts of light again, I was alone.
God, I felt tired.
“Pick up the pace,” I growled at the Redcap.
He didn’t speak to me. But he nodded and flicked the reins, and the not-horse began to trot faster.
I closed my eyes and summoned images of my daughter to raise like a shield against nihilistic despair. Honestly, I wasn’t sure I cared enough about me to work all that hard to keep myself alive.
Maggie was a different story.
She needed her father.
How the hell was I going to handle this one?