Turn Coat (The Dresden Files 11)

He opened his eyes calmly. "Got him."

"Yeah," I said. "You got him."

He smiled a little. "That's twice I pulled your ass out of the fire."

I choked out a little laugh. "I know."

"They'll blame me," he said quietly. "There's no confession from Peabody, and I'm a better candidate politically. Let them pin it on me. Don't fight it. I want it."

I stared down at him. "Why?"

He shook his head, smiling wearily.

I stared down at him for long seconds, and then I got it. Morgan had been lying to me from the very start. "Because you already knew who killed LaFortier. She was there when you woke up in his chambers. You saw who did it. And you wanted to protect her."

"Anastasia didn't do it," Morgan said, his voice intense and low. "She was a pawn. Asleep on her feet. She never even knew she was being used." He shuddered. "Should have thought of that. She got put in that younger body, made her mind vulnerable to influence again."

"What happened?" I asked.

"Woke up, LaFortier was dead, and she had the knife. Took it from her, veiled her, and pushed her out the door," Morgan said. "Didn't have time to get both of us out."

"So you took the blame thinking you'd sort things out in the aftermath. But you realized that the frame was too good for anyone to believe you when you tried to tell them what was up." I shook my head. Morgan hadn't given a damn about his own life. He'd escaped when he realized that Anastasia had still been in danger, that he wouldn't be able to expose the real traitor alone.

"Dresden," he said quietly.

"Yeah?"

"I didn't tell anyone about Molly. What she tried to do to Ana. I... I didn't tell."

I stared at him, unable to speak.

His eyes became cloudy. "Do you know why I didn't? Why I came to you?"

I shook my head.

"Because I knew," he whispered. He lifted his right hand, and I gripped it hard. "I knew that you knew how it felt to be an innocent man hounded by the Wardens."

It was the closest he'd ever come to saying that he'd been wrong about me.

He died less than a minute later.

Chapter Forty-nine

Thorsen kept me from bleeding to death from the cut Peabody had given me. The Swede and his backup squad had been faced with a long run to catch up, a lot of locked gates, and the confusion we'd left in our wake. They reached me about three minutes after Morgan died. They did their best to revive Morgan, but his body had taken enough torment and lost too much blood. They didn't even bother with Peabody. Morgan had double-tapped the traitor's head with Luccio's pistol.

They bundled me off to the infirmary, where Injun Joe and a crew of healers-some of whom had gone to medical school when the efficacy of leeches was still being debated-were caring for those wounded in the attack.

After that, things fell into place without requiring my participation.

The Senior Council managed to contain and banish the mordite-infused mistfiend, a rare and dangerous gaseous being from the far reaches of the Nevernever, before it had killed more than forty or fifty wizards. All things considered, it could have been a lot worse, but the fact that it had been the gathering of LaFortier's former political allies who had been subject to the attack occasioned an enormous outcry of suspicion, with the offended parties claiming that the Merlin had disregarded their safety, been negligent in his security precautions, etc., etc. The fact that the attack had occurred while unmasking LaFortier's true killer was brushed aside. There was political capital to be had.

Basically the entire supernatural world had heard about LaFortier's death, the ensuing manhunt for Morgan, and the dustup during his trial, though most of the details were kept quiet. Though there was never any sort of official statement made, word got out that Morgan had been conspiring with Peabody, and that both of them had been killed during their escape attempt.

It was a brutal and callous way for the Council to save face. The Merlin decided that it was ultimately less dangerous for the wizards of the world if everyone knew that the Council responded to LaFortier's murder with a statement of deadly strength and power-i.e., the immediate capture and execution of those responsible.

But I knew that whoever Peabody had been in bed with, the people who had really been responsible knew that the Council had killed an innocent man, and one of their largest military assets, at that, to get the job done.

Maybe the Merlin was right. Maybe it's better to look stupid but strong than it is to look smart but weak. I don't know. I'm not sure I want to believe that the world stage bears that strong a resemblance to high school.

The Council's investigators worked more slowly than Lara's had, but they got to the same information by following the money, eventually. The Council confronted the White Court with the information.

Lara sent them the heads of the persons responsible. Literally. Leave it to Lara to find a way to get one last bit of mileage out of Madeline and the business manager's corpses. She told the Council to keep the money, too, by way of apology. The next best thing to six million in cash buys a lot of oil to pour on troubled waters.

He might have wound up with his brains splattered all over a desolate little hellhole in the Nevernever, but Peabody had inflicted one hell of a lot of damage before he was through. A new age of White Council paranoia had begun.

The Merlin, the Gatekeeper, and Injun Joe investigated the extent of Peabody's psychic infiltration. In some ways, the worst of what he'd done was the easiest to handle. Damn near every Warden under the age of fifty had been programmed with that go-to-sleep trance command, and it had been done so smoothly and subtly that it was difficult to detect even when the master wizards were looking and knew where to find it.

Ebenezar told me later that some of the young Wardens had been loaded up with a lot more in the way of hostile psychic software, though it was impossible for one wizard to know exactly what another had done. Several of them, apparently, had been intended to become the supernatural equivalent of suicide bombers-the way Luccio had been. Repairing that kind of damage was difficult, unpredictable, and often painful to the victim. It was a long summer and autumn for a lot of the Wardens, and a mandatory psychic self-defense regimen was instituted within weeks.

It was tougher for the members of the Senior Council, in my opinion, all of whom had almost certainly been influenced in subtle ways. They had to go back over their decisions for the past several years, and wonder if they had been pushed into making a choice, if it had been their own action, or if the ambiguity of any given decision had been natural to the environment. The touch had been so light that it hadn't left any lasting tracks. For anyone with half a conscience, it would be a living nightmare, especially given the fact that they had been leading the Council in time of war.