Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

“Not really an option,” I said. I had to clear my throat in the middle. “We’re here.”

She looked up at me, her silver eyes sharp and clear. “And you’re sure you can protect him here? Even from his own Hunger?”

“Everything we need,” I said. “Give him to me.”

She nodded and said, “Take him.”

She transferred Thomas to me, wrapped in a blanket. The air around her was cold. Like, gorgeously cold. Like, I wanted to take my shirt off and stretch out in it and cool off. And the Winter mantle let out a low growl in my mind that suggested that a number of terrible ideas were in fact the most interesting concepts I had ever considered.

“Dammit, Lara,” I snapped in irritation. “We’re working.”

She blinked at me for a moment at that, as I wrapped a blanket around him and gathered Thomas up like a child. Then she said, “Involuntary. Honestly. We can always choose to use the Hunger. We can’t always choose not to.”

“Well, it’s annoying,” I said grumpily.

She lifted her hand and quickly covered a smile. “Oh. You know, I’ve … never been told that before. Not once.”

I rolled my eyes and said, “I believe you.” It would be a trick to carry my brother up the narrow stairwell to the deck, but whatever. I growled in irritation and toted him out. He was still barely conscious, and he felt entirely too light.

Stupid svartalves.

Stupid vampires.

Stupid Titans.

Stupid Thomas. Why in the hell had my brother gotten himself into this mess?

I got him up on the deck and Freydis was there to steady me. The redheaded Valkyrie eyed me in the light and nodded toward the island. “Not much here.”

“Everything we need,” I said. “Don’t step off the dock. I’m not sure what would happen to you.”

Freydis looked at me and shuddered. “I won’t.”

I brushed past her and carried my brother down the dock toward the island itself. No one stopped me. Everyone was too worried about what was happening back in Chicago. Which was just as well.

I had told everyone Thomas would be safe on the island. I hadn’t yet told them where he’d be staying.

See, the thing about keeping people safe is that, in the end, if you really want to keep someone truly protected, your only option is to lock them up. Fortresses are prisons.

And vice versa.

I started up the dock and stepped onto the rough ground of the island, walking with perfectly sure footing, my intellectus of the place making it impossible to slip or fall. I knew Demonreach, every tree and stone, as thoroughly as I knew my own body.

I had taken fewer than a dozen steps onto the stones of the island before there was a massive movement in the trees. I came to a halt, waiting, as the figure came gliding out of the darkness. It was enormous, as tall as the Titan, and far broader, a menacing shape in a billowing, shadowy cloak and hood that hid its form from the human eye. A pair of green flames burned somewhere back in the hood, supernaturally bright eyes that were currently narrowed in something like concern.

The vast figure drifted out to a halt in front of me and bowed slowly, formally, from the waist.

“WARDEN,” it said. Its voice was a grating rumble of stone and tearing earth, heard as much inside my head and chest as with my ears. “YOU HAVE RETURNED.”

“Alfred,” I said. “We’ve got trouble right here in River City.”

The genius loci of the island regarded me in stillness for a moment before it said, “THE ISLAND IS IN A LAKE.”

The supernatural crowd is not generally up on any cultural reference that has occurred since the Renaissance. “Human reference, Alfred. Pay it no mind.”

“AS YOU COMMAND, WARDEN.” The enormous hood tilted to one side, verdant gaze fixing on my brother’s unmoving form. “YOUR BLOOD KIN IS DYING.”

“I know,” I said. “We’re going to help him.”

“I AM NOT MADE TO HELP,” Alfred said. There wasn’t any passion to the statement. There was no mercy, either. Alfred was … the spirit of the prison itself, a place constructed to contain magical threats too dangerous to be permitted to roam the world. Over the millennia, more than six thousand beings of terrible power had been consigned to the oubliette tunnels beneath the island: They were a legion of nightmares, the least of which made me shudder in a very real fear I could never quite shake.

Alfred was the being created to maintain their isolation. He wasn’t what you call easygoing.

“Right,” I said. “We’re going to place him in stasis.”

Alfred’s eyes blazed several shades brighter with eagerness. “IT HAS BEEN OVERLONG SINCE THE LAST FOULNESS WAS CONSIGNED TO MY EVERLASTING CARE,” it said. “THIS PARASITE-RIDDLED VERMIN SCARCELY QUALIFIES FOR MINIMUM SECURITY.”

“I want him held,” I said. “I want his Hunger held helpless as well, until such time as I return to release him.”

“WHICH PENITENCE PROTOCOL SHALL HE SUFFER, WARDEN?”

There were several that could be inflicted on the inmates of the prison. Some were bound in darkness. Some in torment. Some in simple confinement. The various Wardens of Demonreach had tinkered with the cells for a very, very long time. Some of the protocols had been developed before civilization had been more than a few collections of huts and fires in the darkness, and they were not kind.

There was one prisoner held below in a kind of unique stasis, something that could most closely be considered sleep, though he could also awaken and perform limited communications for short periods of time. It was, as best as I could understand, the only protocol with sanitysaving sleep built into it.

The prison had never been meant for something as frail and nearly mortal as my brother.

Thomas made a soft, ugly little sound, as if only his utter exhaustion was holding him back from screaming in pain.

“Contemplation,” I responded quietly. “He is to be shielded from any communication with other prisoners not enduring the same protocol. Give me the crystal.”

The great spirit bowed again. When it straightened, a shard of crystal about the length of a socket wrench, like quartz but pulsing with a quiet green light, lay shimmering upon the earth.

I lowered my brother to the ground. He groaned as I settled him down. The grey in his eyes had faded again, as his Hunger apparently renewed its assault on his life force. He had slowly begun to show signs of helpless agony as whatever palliative energy Lara had given him began to fade.

“Hey, man,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

He might have focused his eyes on me for a second. Only sounds of pain came out of his mouth.

“Look,” I said quietly. I drew a pocketknife I’d stuffed in my suit pants before leaving and used the needle point to pink the pad of flesh between thumb and forefinger. After a second, droplets of blood welled up, and I smeared the blade of the pocketknife over them, staining its length with a shade of scarlet just a little too pale to be human. “I can keep your demon from hurting you. Keep you alive. But going in will be rough.”

One of his ruined hands landed on my arm. He squeezed weakly. It was barely there, but it was there. He’d heard me.

“Part of the process of being taken into the cells is …” I took a deep breath. “You suffer the pain you’ve inflicted on others,” I said. “It was meant to get through to the most alien of beings, why they were being imprisoned. It’s not fair. It’s not meant for people. It could hurt you. But if I don’t do it, you’re going to die.”