Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

I couldn’t stop her. It would be the same as telling her that she was weak and needed to stay home. That she wasn’t strong enough to help me. It would break her.

And besides.

You can’t go around making people’s choices for them. Not if you love them.

So I stepped back over the line between the hardwood floor of the living room and the tiles of the kitchen.

“Thank you,” Karrin said calmly.

“Murph,” I said.

She paused with the saw resting against her cast and looked at me. “What’s happening now … you’ve got no standing at all in it. No protection from the Accords. No badge.”

She watched my face, her expression serious.

“This is the jungle,” I said. “And none of the players in this are going to have a problem burying inconveniences if it means holding the Accords together.”

“You mean me,” she said.

“I mean you,” I said.

“You could have hexed the saw already,” she said.

“No,” I said. “I couldn’t have.”

“Well. You’re not all dumb,” she said, smiling faintly.

“Remains to be seen,” I said. “I know you well enough to know there’s no point trying to stop you. But I … I gotta know that you’re walking into this with your eyes open, Murph.”

She looked down for a long moment. Then she looked back up at me and said, “I have to do this.”

I stared at her bandaged, broken body for a long moment.

Then I clenched my jaw and nodded once.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll help.”

Murphy’s eyes softened for a moment.

Then she took the oscillating saw to the cast and started slicing away at it.

It didn’t take her long to get the cuts made, though she hissed in discomfort a couple of times as she went.

“Don’t cut yourself,” I said. “If you bleed out it will take a week to clean up.”

“They’re burns,” she said, annoyed. “The saw won’t cut flesh, but it heats up the cast. I’m just too impatient.”

“No kidding,” I said lightly.

“Okay,” she said. “Come help me pull it off.”

I did.

Look, when you’ve been in as much cast as Karrin had for as long as she had, the results are kind of gross. There was a buildup of dead skin, flakes of it white and hard like scales where her skin had been. There’s no dressing that up.

“Engh,” Karrin said, wrinkling her nose as her arm came free. “It’s the smell that bugs me.”

“Junior high gym lockers were that bad,” I said.

“Ew, boys,” she said. She lifted her wounded arm a little, moving it slowly, wincing.

“Leg next,” I said.

That one was worse. She hissed as the cast came free, and put a hand against her back. “Oh my God,” she muttered. “My hips forgot how to be at this angle.” She looked up at me, her face still pained. “I’ve got braces. We should put them o—”

She broke off when I simply picked her up, as carefully as I could. She got her good arm around my neck and helped as much as she was able.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked.

“Taking you to a hot bath,” I said. “Don’t try to move. Just … let me do it. Okay?”

Her blue eyes went very soft for a moment, and she looked down.

“For a minute,” she said.

I took her to the bathroom, moved aside the assistance equipment that was there, and set her down gently on the commode. It took me only a moment to get the bath going and then to help her out of her clothes and lower her carefully into the water.

We didn’t speak. I moved slowly, sluicing warm water over dried-out skin where necessary, and let her soak in the warm water for a while. There was some gentle soap on hand, and after a time, I used that, with just my hands, being as careful as I could to get the area clean without stripping up layers of skin down to the raw new stuff at the bottom in the process.

Karrin watched me at first. After a while, she closed her eyes and just sort of sank back into the tub, her limbs loose. Her hair spread out a little in the water. She looked drawn, gaunt, in the face and neck—and peaceful.

“I love you,” I said.

She opened her eyes and blinked a couple of times. Then she lifted one ear out of the water and said, “What did you say?”

I smiled at her. Then I went back to running my hands gently down her arm, encouraging some of the dead stuff to come off. It would take a few days for her to get back to normal.

“Oh,” she said, studying my face.

Then she sat up in the water, twisted a little toward me, and slid both of her arms around my neck. She pulled my mouth down to hers with a strength that no longer surprised me.

But the sudden, sweet, almost desperate softness of the kiss that followed nearly knocked me into the tub.

And in the middle of it, she breathed, “I love you, too.”

23

We were about halfway to Château Raith when Murphy asked, “You seeing this?”

“The Crown Vic behind us?” I asked. “Yeah.”

“Yeah, them,” Murphy said impatiently. “And also the other two cars.”

I frowned. I was driving the Munstermobile, which Murphy hated riding in because the custom-sized seat wasn’t adjustable, and her feet couldn’t reach my pedals. By almost a foot. The old car wasn’t exactly built with the driver’s lines of sight in mind, but I scanned the early-morning traffic, frowning.

It took me a good minute of looking to spot what Murphy had already alerted me to—a dark blue Crown Vic was following about three cars back. Probably Rudolph and Bradley, in one of Internal Affairs’ vehicles. Behind them, maybe three more cars back, was a battered old Jeep that looked like it would have been happier and more comfortable in the Rocky Mountains somewhere. And then there was a third car, a silver minivan, following along a ways behind the Jeep.

“You’re a little popular,” Murphy said.

“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. “Is it a whole surveillance team?”

“They’d be the worst one in the world,” Murphy said. “If they had three of them working together, there’s no reason for all of them to keep us in sight the entire time.”

“Huh,” I said, and watched the cars for a few minutes more. “They aren’t working together. Three different parties tailing us?”

“Rudolph and Bradley are here for me,” Murphy said. “Who are the other two?”

I chewed on the inside of my cheek for a second, thinking. “Um. Well, I suppose I could start driving like a lunatic and find out.”

“In this old death trap?” she asked, and shuddered. “No, thank you. Should we let them follow us?”

“Tough to know that if we don’t know who is back there,” I said. “Rudolph I don’t much care about, but I’d rather not have Bradley stick his head into a noose. He’s just trying to do his job right.”

“Well, you aren’t going to lose a Crown Vic in this boat.”

“True,” I said. “So maybe we do this the other way.”