White Night (The Dresden Files 9)

I looked over my shoulder to see a very, very young-looking Marcone.

He wasn't wearing a business suit. He had on jeans and a black leather jacket. His hair was longish, a little mussed, and he also sported a stubble of beard that gave him the kind of rakish look that would attract attention from the girls who fantasized about indulging with a bad boy.

His eyes were still green - but they were the green of a summer hunter's blind, bright and intelligent and predatory, but touched with more... something. Humor, maybe. More life. And he was skinnier. Not a lot skinnier or anything, but it surprised me how much younger it and the other minor changes made him look.

Marcone crouched next to another young man, a now-dead thug I'd christened Spike years ago. Spike had his pistol out, and was hammering away at the moving car. The barrel of his 1911-model Colt tracked the vehicle - and its course drew its muzzle into line with the Beckitt family.

Marcone snarled something and slapped the barrel of the gun away from the family. Spike's shot rang out wild and splashed into the lake. There was a last rattle of fire from the moving car, and it roared away. Marcone and Spike piled into their own car and fled the scene. Spike was driving.

Marcone was staring back over his shoulder.

They left the little girl's broken body, limp and spattered with scarlet, behind them.

Helen saw it first, looking down to the hand that gripped her daughter's. She let out a cry as she turned to her child.

In the wake of the gunshots, the silence was deafening.

I didn't want to see what was coming. Again, I had no choice.

The girl wasn't unconscious. There was a lot of blood. Her father screamed and knelt with Helen, trying to stop the bleeding. He tore off his shirt, pressing it to the child's midsection. He babbled something to Helen and ran for the nearest phone.

His white shirt soaked through as Helen tried to hold it to the weakly struggling girl.

This was the worst part.

The child was in pain. She cried out with it. I expected her to sound horrible and inhuman, but she didn't. She sounded like every little kid who had ever suddenly found herself faced with her first experience of real, nontrivial pain.

"Owie," she said, over and over, her voice rough. "Owie, owie, owie."

"Baby," Helen said. The tears were blocking her vision. "I'm here. I'm here."

"Mommy, Mommy, Mommy," the girl said. "Owie, owie, owie."

The little girl said that.

She said it over and over.

She said it for maybe sixty seconds.

Then she went silent.

"No," Helen said. "No, no, no." She leaned down and felt her daughter's throat, then desperately pressed her ear to the girl's chest. "No, no, no."

Their voices, I realized, sounded almost identical. They blazed with the same anguish, the same disbelief.

I watched Helen shatter, rocking back and forth, trying through blinding tears to apply CPR to the silent little form. Everything else became an unimportant blur. Ghostly figures of her husband, cops, paramedics. Dim little echoes of sirens and voices, a church organ.

I'd known that the Beckitts set out to tear Marcone down out of revenge for what the warring gangsters had done to their daughter - but knowing the story was one thing. Seeing the soul-searing agony the little girl's death had inflicted upon her helpless mother was something else.

And suddenly, everything was bright and new again. Helen and her family were laughing again. In a few moments, they were walking again toward the parking lot, and I could hear the engine of the car whose gunmen would miss Marcone and kill the little girl as it approached.

I tore my eyes away from it, fighting to end the soulgaze.

I could not go through that again, could not remain locked in that horrible moment that had shaped what Helen had become.

I came back to myself standing, turned half away from Helen, leaning heavily on my staff with my head bowed.

There was a long moment of silence before Helen said, "I didn't call anyone in the Ordo, Dresden."

She hadn't. Now I was sure of it.

If Helen hadn't led the Ordo on a merry chase around town, drawing them out into vulnerability for the Skavis hunting them, someone else had.

Priscilla.

She'd been the one receiving all the calls, reporting all the "conversations" with Helen. That meant that she'd been working with the killer, drawing out Anna and the others on his behalf, isolating one of the women from the safety of the group so that he could take them alone.

And then I jerked my head up, my eyes wide.

Fact ten: In the middle of a Chicago summer, Priscilla, none too pretty a woman, had been wearing nothing but turtlenecks.

Priscilla hadn't been working with the Skavis.

Priscilla was the Skavis.

And I had left her holed up in safety with Olivia and Abby and all those women and children.

Predators. The White Court were predators. The Skavis had to know that I was closing in, and that it would not be long before I either caught up to Helen and got the real story or else figured it out on my own. Fight-or-flight instincts must have come down on the former.

I'd been sent after Helen on purpose. The Skavis had meant to send me haring off after her, leaving him alone with all those targets.

No. I hadn't left him alone with the women he'd been tracking. They were no threat to him. The Skavis had decided to fight. He had isolated a target, all right, just as he had while hunting helpless women - one who would present a deadly danger to him, should she ever learn his true identity. One who would be distinctly vulnerable, provided he could approach her while camouflaged.

"Oh, God," I heard myself say. "Elaine."

Chapter Thirty

Murphy came out of the building about ten seconds after I did. "Thomas answered his phone, said he was on the way. He sounded kind of out of it, though. I called both rooms, but the call went straight to the hotel's voice mail," she reported, slipping her cell phone away as she approached me.

"Does it do that by itself?"

"No. You have to call the desk and ask for it."

"Dammit," I said, and tossed her my keys. "The Skavis thought of that already. Drive."

Murphy blinked at me, but turned to the Beetle at once. "Why?"

"I'm going to try to reach Elaine my way," I said. I hurried around my car to the passenger seat and jerked open the door. "Get us there as fast as you can."

"Magic on the road? Won't that kill the car?"

"This car? Probably not," I said. "I hope not." I threw my staff in the backseat.

"Ow!" shrieked a voice.

Murphy's gun came out every bit as fast as I raised my blasting rod, its tip glowing with a scarlet incandescence.