Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

“Karrin,” I said.

She gave one of my cheeks a little slap, annoyed. “Did that sound like a request? Do it. If my advice means a goddamned thing, do it right now. That’s how important this is.”

“What if …” I swallowed. “What if that’s me, one day? What if that’s what I’m like?”

“There’s a difference between you and him,” Murph said.

“Yeah?”

She moved a bit, leaned down, and kissed my forehead. “Yeah. You’ve got me.”

And … something little and warm kindled in my heart. It didn’t stop the pain. Oh God, did it not stop the pain.

But it told me the pain wouldn’t be there forever.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll talk to him.”

I made a weary X over my heart.

She patted my cheek approvingly and said, “Good man.”

And I reached for her hand, closed my eyes, and spent a few minutes with tears less bitter.

33

I pulled myself together after a bit. There was a cabinet in the wheelhouse where I kept a bunch of long-term-storage snacks. Nuts and beef jerky, mostly, plus bottled water. Nothing fancy, but projecting your consciousness was an exhausting activity, and my body needed the calories so badly that the stale nuts and dried jerky tasted freaking delicious. I chomped and guzzled.

It took most of an hour to get to the island on a normal trip, but I opened the throttle all the way, so we would get there in slightly less than most of an hour.

Murphy limped into the boathouse and kept me company in steady silence, watching my face. After about ten minutes of that, she said, “You’re scared.”

I shot her a glance. Shrugged a shoulder.

“That bad?”

I thought about it for a moment, while trying not to think about how sick I felt, how worried. Then I said, “I can do things. You know? I can burn down buildings if I want to. I can blow up cars. Call up things from the Nevernever.”

She nodded.

“Right now, right under my feet, my brother is dying. And maybe the people who want to kill him are already on the way and we won’t even get him to the island. And what’s about to start happening back in town …” I didn’t quite manage to suppress a shudder. “I feel very small.”

Murphy looked at me evenly for a moment. And then her face twisted and she choked down chortling laughter.

“ You … you …” She shook her head and slammed her shoulder gently against me, still laughing.

“What?” I asked.

“Welcome to the club,” she said. “Tiny.”

“I mean it,” I said. “This is bad stuff.”

“Right now,” she said, “every precinct in Chicago is scrambling to round up every officer it can get. They’ll be doing everything they can to get ahead of the chaos that’s going to come from the blackout. Firefighters, too, for all the good it will do them.” She shook her head. “They don’t feel too big, either. And they don’t even have a magic island.”

I thought about footprints on a beach.

“Maybe they’re about to feel a whole lot smaller,” I said. “Maybe we all are.”

Karrin frowned at that. She folded her coat closed around her a little more tightly and leaned against me. I put my arm around her.

“Just how bad are we talking, here?” she asked me.

“The Fomor think they can wipe out the city, whether we know they’re coming or not,” I said. “They seem sincere.”

“Wipe out,” Murphy said.

“Old-school. Think Attila. Genghis Khan.”

“Jesus Christ,” she breathed, and leaned against me. “The radio’s out. So is the Internet, in town. How do we warn them?”

“If only we’d put out the word to be on guard already,” I said wryly. “The Paranetters are used to surviving the big kids slugging it out. They’ll get together at their safe houses, Mac’s, places like that.”

“And everyone else?” Murphy asked.

“Hey, everybody,” I said, “mythological monsters are coming to kill you. Please evacuate.”

She pressed her lips together in frustration but acknowledged the point. “So what do we do?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“What’s going to happen?

I stared out at the darkness ahead of us, tracking the location of the island as surely as I would the progress of an ant across my arm, and pushed emotion away from things, thought through the matter as I would any mathematical problem.

“What makes this different,” I said, “is Ethniu. And this weapon she has. The Eye of Balor.”

“Yeah,” Murphy said. “What’s up with that thing?”

I blew out a breath. “Hell of a lot of variants in Celtic traditional folklore. It’s hard to say. Balor was kind of an equivalent to a Greek Titan, up in Celt territory. He had this eye that could be used to wither the world, to destroy everything it saw, to set it on fire. He kept it covered behind a bunch of eye patches and veils, and he could remove a few of them at a time to get different kinds of destructive effects, from making things rot to setting them on fire to blasting them to dust.”

“Kind of like gradually reducing the shielding around a radioactive core,” Murphy noted.

“I …” I blinked. “Ugh. That’s unpleasant to consider. But yes. I don’t know how accurate the folklore is, and I haven’t talked to anyone with direct knowledge yet. But it’s safe to assume that the Eye is a weapon of mass destruction,” I said. “There’s a city-killer coming to our town.”

“How will they do it?” she asked.

“Come in from the lake,” I said. “After that, it’s old-school.”

“Kill everyone they see,” she said.

“And use the Eye to blow away any points of hard resistance,” I said, nodding. “They’ll kill or take anyone they can, while the mortal authorities flounder in the blackout. Do their worst with the Eye, and I have no idea how bad that could be. Then they’ll be gone before the National Guard can get there.”

“The people,” Murphy said quietly. “Tonight. There’s no one to protect them.”

“The hell there isn’t,” I said, and coaxed a little more speed out of the old engine. “I’ll be back before they get here.”

“You, huh,” Murphy said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “Against a protogod with a pocket nuke and an army of monsters.”

“Not just me,” I said. “But if it had to be just me, yeah. I’d be good with that. It’s home. You gotta die somehow. Standing up to a monster at the door isn’t a bad way to do it.”

She was quiet for a moment before she said, “I feel you.”

I squeezed her against me a little harder. “Here I am, getting all dramatic. How are you holding up?”

She shrugged one shoulder. Her voice was heavy and tired. “Everything hurts. But I can move some.”

“Maybe you should take shelter,” I said. “The Paranetters are going to head for Mac’s place. They’ll need someone to keep a cool head and a sharp watch.”