Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

I stood there for a moment, thinking. Thomas had gone gunning for Etri. Had it been personal? Unlikely. Thomas had been, ahem, in the good graces of the svartalves. Especially their females. I don’t think he’d even spoken to Etri.

Had it had something to do with jealousy, then? Had Thomas been defending himself against, or maybe trying to make a point to, a jealous boyfriend? Or brother?

Again, unlikely. Svartalves didn’t understand the concept of sexual monogamy. Their pairings were based upon shared assets, biological or otherwise, and beyond an ironclad code of honor when it came to taking care of one’s progeny, they found the usual human approach to sexuality baffling. If I’d sat down to dinner with Etri and announced that I’d boinked his sister, Etri would have found the remark of casual interest and inquired as to whether or not I had enjoyed myself.

Okay, I’m going to say something a little mean, here: 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. That last would not seem to include Etri and his people, who as a group were about as threatening as the Amish on your average day. So there just weren’t many reasons Thomas would have wanted to kill Etri.

So maybe he didn’t want to. Assume I was your average world-conquering, troublemaking megalomaniac, and I wanted Thomas to whack someone for me. How would I get him to do it?

Obvious answer. She’d still been dabbing at the occasional tear when I left.

If someone had threatened Justine, then at the very least they’d have her under surveillance. But who would do that?

To answer that question, I supposed I had to find out who was watching her and ask them.

I cracked my knuckles and got to work.

I did a quick sweep of the hallway outside their apartment and found nothing, which I expected. Lara and her security teams already had the place covered, and my brother had inherited vestiges of Mom’s power. He wasn’t anything close to a wizard, but he had enough juice to be aware of magical patterns, and it would be a hell of a job to slip around this hallway laying down surveillance spells for an hour or two without being noticed.

I did a second, more careful sweep to be sure, and then went outside, slowly, senses open to perceive any magical forces that might be present. I even took a quick peek at the doorman with my Sight—the dangerous practice of opening one’s mind to the raw input of the energy of the universe. Under the Sight, you see things for what they are, and you remember everything you see, and no enchantment can hide from it.

I got nothing. The doorman was clean, magically speaking, or at least unwounded by the kind of psychic attack it would take to coerce him. Someone could have bribed him just as easily, I supposed, though I felt confident that Lara’s security people would have had that one covered fairly well. Hell, for that matter, I assumed that the doorman was one of Lara’s people. It would be exactly her kind of move to do that.

So I took my search outside, as alert to any kind of magical mischief as I was to any purely vanilla suspicious activity. I circled the building carefully, all my senses open, and found … absolutely nothing.

Which made no damned sense, so I did it again, only slower and more thoroughly, not finishing until after midnight. Apparently, there was a whole lot of nothing going around. But at least it had taken me an hour and a half to determine as much.

I growled to myself, turned to go again, and readied my Sight to make absolutely sure I hadn’t missed anything.

“When a hound goes too hard after a scent,” said a man’s voice behind me, “he ain’t watching his own back trail. A wizard ought to do better.”

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 turned to find Ebenezar stepping forward out of a veil, stumpy staff in hand. He stared at me for a good long moment, his craggy face devoid of emotion.

“Little late to be your apprentice now, sir,” I said.

“You’d be surprised,” the old man replied. “Hoss—”

“Busy,” I said brusquely. “I’m working. How’d you find me?”

The old man clenched his jaw and looked out at nothing for a minute. “Harry, word is out, about Thomas Raith. Once I knew who the svartalves were holding, I figured you’d be in one of a couple places. This was the first one.”

“You want to be a detective, you could apprentice with me for a year,” I said. “If my license is still current. Gotta be honest, I’ve been too busy to give the city of Chicago as much attention as it thinks it needs.”

“Hoss, Thomas Raith is not your responsibility,” Ebenezar said.

The hell he wasn’t.

“The hell he isn’t, sir,” I said. “I owe him my life, several times.”

“It ain’t about that, boy,” Ebenezar said, keeping his voice calm with an effort. “This one ain’t about right and wrong. It’s about authority and territory.”

My feet hurt. And I wasn’t a child to be lectured about the way of the goddamned world. “You know, it’s funny how many times I hear something isn’t about right and wrong from people who are about to do something awful,” I said. “It’s almost as if they know they’re about to do something awful, and they just don’t want to face any of the negative consequences associated with their choice.”

The muscles at the base of the old man’s jaws clenched until it looked like he was smuggling walnuts in his jowls. “Excuse me?”

“He’s my ally,” I said. “My friend. I recall you telling me about how one should respond to loyalty, once upon a time. That when you get it, you gotta give it back, or else a man starts looking at those people like they’re things to be used.”

“I said like coins to be spent,” the old man snapped, heat everywhere in his tone. Which was an admission that I was right, as much as anything.

We traded a look, and his expression told me that he knew what I was thinking, and it made him angrier.

“You think you know the world,” the old man said. “You’re barely in it yet. You ain’t seen what it gets like. How bad it can get. How cruel.”

I thought of Susan’s face. At the last. And the rage that went through me was incandescent, yet weirdly remote, like seeing fireworks from a passing jet. The scent of woodsmoke came to me, and the alley was suddenly filling with green-gold light from the runes of my staff.

“Maybe I’ve seen a thing or two,” I said back, and my voice sounded perfectly calm.

The wrinkles on the old man’s face were heavier and thicker in the harsh lighting as his expression darkened, even as his voice became gentler, pleading. “You’ve put your feet in the water and you think you know the ocean. My God, boy, I hope you never see the things I’ve seen. But if you keep going the way you’re going, you’ll get that and worse. I’m trying to protect you from the mistakes that damn near killed me. That did kill so many of the people I cared about.”

I thought of Karrin. Of Nicodemus deliberately, efficiently breaking her body. For good. It had been one of those quiet, close winter nights. I had been near enough to hear the cartilage tearing.