Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

It was an incredibly subtle working of magic—one that would have been far beyond my skill without the skull’s tutelage, back in the day. It had hidden me so effectively that even screaming at people in an attempt to warn them they were about to die had gone unnoticed.

But those people hadn’t been the most skillful, potent masters of the supernatural world and its various Arts. This would be a much, much tougher room. And I was about to pit the wiliness of Bob the Skull against the wariness and suspicion of some of the most powerful beings of the supernatural world—with utter disaster looming, should anything go amiss. We reached the doors back to the great hall, and I paused there, taking a breath and fighting down a slow shudder that tried to run up my spine.

“You’re sure,” Lara said, very quietly, “that the people here won’t see through this … disguise?”

“It’s the best I’ve got,” I said.

“That wasn’t exactly an answer.”

“Yeah,” I said, and put my hand on the door to open it. “But it’s the best I’ve got.”

28

My father, Malcolm, died when I was young. I don’t have very many memories of him, even though I realized, maybe around the age of ten, that I would lose even those if I didn’t keep them. So when I was young, I would lie awake quietly at night, thinking of him—of his face, his voice, the things he had said, and the things he had done.

Once, on the way to one of his gigs, we picked up two hitchhiking couples and drove them three hundred miles. Dad bought them a meal and replaced two of their pairs of shoes, even though we barely had enough to get by. He once found a sick and puny kitten in an alley outside a club he’d been playing, somewhere in Ohio, and spent the next three weeks carrying the little creature around with us so that he could nurse it back to health and find it a stable home. And he never passed a used bookstore. He loved books.

He took me to see Star Wars movies.

Him and me.

But it was always him and me. Until he was gone.

The brightest and best memories I had of him were getting lessons from him on magic. Not the Art—Dad was a performing illusionist.

“Everyone who comes to the show knows I’m going to try to trick them,” my father said one night. We were sitting in an all-night diner when he said it, getting dinner on the way to a show he was playing in Colorado. He was a lean, dark-haired man, with serious eyes and a quick smile. He wore a denim jacket and a Cubs baseball cap. “I know that they know. And that’s how you play the game.”

“What game?” I asked him.

He picked up a coin and held it in his palm where I could see it.

“When someone is suspicious, they’re looking for things to notice,” he said. “Sometimes the best way to trick them is to give them something to notice. Once they’re focused on that, you know where they’re looking.”

There was a loud crash and I jumped. The chair next to Dad had fallen backwards onto the floor.

When I looked back, his hand was still there, but the coin was gone.

“This example is pretty crude, but it works well enough. Once you know where they’re looking, you also know where they aren’t looking. That’s when you have room to make the illusion happen. It’s called misdirection. If I do it right, it looks like magic, and everyone is happy.”

“What if you do it wrong?”

He smiled and reached for my ear. I caught his wrist. I might have been little, but I knew some of his moves by then. He had the quarter tucked into the fold of skin on the back of his hand, between his thumb and forefinger.

I grinned at him, took the coin, and pocketed it. That was the deal. If I ever was smart enough to catch him in the act, the coin was my reward, and I could put them in any video game I wanted.

“If I do it wrong, then it looks to the audience like I’m incompetent, like I’m stupid, and like I think they’re stupid to be fooled by such a simple trick.” He gave me a wry grin. “People don’t react well to that.”

Tough room, I thought to myself. Not sure you ever played to a crowd that could react with as much … manifest enthusiasm as this one, Dad.

I needed to stop talking to ghosts.

Showtime.

I pushed open the door behind the buffet table and surveyed the room. It seemed simple enough. Cristos was on the little speaking stage now, and all the illustrious bigwigs were watching him.

“… and I’m very pleased to announce that we have been contacted by King Corb of the Fomor, who will be arriving shortly. Matters of state required his immediate attention, but they have been resolved, and His Majesty will arrive within moments.”

There was a round of polite applause, which Cristos acknowledged with a beaming smile. “Recent events among the supernatural nations may have caused a great deal of confusion and turmoil—but they could also be an opportunity to forge even stronger bonds between the various nations. It is my hope that, should we reach a successful treaty, our neighbors the Fomor will work hand in hand with the rest of the Accorded nations… .”

It got dull after that, even for a black-and-white feature, despite Cristos’s excellent speaking presence, and if all the supernatural grown-ups found him as cloying as I did, they hid it a hell of a lot better than I would have. Granted, the misdirection hadn’t been specifically timed to interrupt Cristos and his speech.

That was merely a happy accident.

I took a second ampule, identical to the one I’d crushed on Ramirez, out of my suit’s inner pocket and crushed it in the same hand I had the first. I’d been careful not to clean that spot on my palm, and the potion in the fresh ampule mixed with the residue from the one I’d slapped on Ramirez.

My hand quivered, clenched spasmodically once, and suddenly felt heavy, as if a large, slightly damp beach towel had been draped across it.

“On me,” I whispered. “Here we go.”

And then I spread my fingers out as if guiding a marionette, started wiggling them, and Lara and I started hauling Thomas out, Freydis close behind us.

The potion I’d slipped onto Ramirez’s cloak had been half of the brew. The stuff currently on my hand was the other half. The two were magically linked by a drop of my blood, the most powerful agent for magical bindings known to reality. With that bond formed, it was a simple enough trick to send a pulse of energy from my hand over to poor Carlos’s cloak.

The grey cloth abruptly flared, whipped wildly around as if in a hurricane wind, and promptly dragged the young Warden off his feet and across the floor—toward the back of the hall, in the opposite direction of the front door.

People and not-people let out noises of distress. Several dozen security teams bolted for their primaries. A lot of folks got tackled to the floor by their own retainers. I caught a glimpse of Molly being surrounded by a group of Sidhe and hustled to one side of the room—and I recognized one of them, the goddamned Redcap. The murderous Sidhe assassin had traded in his baseball cap for a scarlet headband of a leather whose origins I shuddered to consider.

We moved through the chaos as Carlos struggled with his cloak. He managed to unfasten it, and the damned thing promptly began flapping around like an enormous bat.

And it worked. The room stayed black-and-white. Everyone’s paranoia was so focused on the potential threat that they didn’t have enough cognitive cycles left to be paranoid about us.