Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

“SHALL I PREPARE ANOTHER CELL FOR THAT ONE?”

I turned to find the island’s spirit looming over my shoulder—and I hadn’t sensed Alfred’s approach.

Which … bothered me. I mean, my intellectus of the island was essentially without limit. With a minor effort of concentration, I could have known how many ants were on the island, how many birds, how many fish in the waters off its shores. But I couldn’t find out more about the inhabitants of the cells without dragging my brain through their psychic rap sheets, experiencing to some degree everything they were and had done. And I couldn’t sense Alfred or his movements. I mean, the spirit had come every time I’d called.

And I’d been assuming this whole time that it had to.

But Alfred was apparently able to hide things from me. The spirit could hide its presence from my intellectus of the island, for example. And it could hide the innate terror of the island’s inmates, preventing it from taking a toll on my psyche.

So I kind of had to wonder—what else could Demonreach be hiding from me?

“That won’t be necessary,” I muttered back to the spirit. “Alfred, how big a being can the cells contain?”

“PHYSICAL SIZE IS NOT A FACTOR,” the spirit replied. “METAPHYSICAL MASS IS A DIFFERENT CONSIDERATION.” The creature’s green eyes suddenly flashed fiercely. “THE LAST TITAN IS ON THE MOVE.”

“Yes,” I said simply. “Can you hold her?”

“IF YOU CAN PERFORM THE BINDING, I CAN HOLD HER,” Alfred said.

“From how far out?” I asked.

“I AM A JAILER, NOT A BOUNTY HUNTER,” Alfred replied. “PERHAPS TO THE SHORES OF THE LAKE—IF YOU USED THE ATHAME FROM THE ARMORY.”

An athame is a magical tool—think magic wand, but in the form of a knife. They’re powerful tools for ritual magic.

I had one locked up in the island’s armory. I’d stolen it from the God of the Underworld, from the same shelf as the Shroud and the Crown of Thorns. If it truly was what I was pretty sure it was, then using it was going to put me in a long-term pickle.

But if the storm coming for Chicago was as bad as I thought it was going to be, not using it would be unthinkable.

“To the shore, eh?” I said. “All right. Get me the knife. And a binding crystal. And the placard.”

“YOU WISH TWO OF THE WEAPONS?”

Alfred sounded … slightly intimidated.

That’s the kind of power level we were talking about.

“Sure,” I said in the most cavalier fashion I could. “After all, that’s only half the arsenal. And as soon as I leave, I want the full defensive measures of the island activated. Nothing gets in or out. Understood?”

“UNDERSTOOD, WARDEN,” the entity said with a bow.

“Great,” I sighed. “Now, run and get me my toys, Alfred. I’ve got a long night coming up.”

36

When I got back to the boat, Karrin was up on top of the boathouse, seated on the stool there. Her P90, a personal defense weapon that was the bastard child of an assault rifle and a box of Belgian chocolates, was resting on the safety railing, its barrel aimed in the same general direction as where I had been standing and negotiating moments before.

I checked. She had a good line of sight to where I’d been standing with Lara, as well as to where Freydis had come out of the water.

“Had them both lined up, huh?” I asked.

She shrugged. “I know who my friends are.”

“But you didn’t shoot.”

She folded her arms as if cold. “I know who my enemies are, too.” She glanced down, toward where Lara and Freydis were belowdecks, washing off mud and changing into some spare clothing. Some of it was Thomas’s and would sort of fit. “Lara’s tired and scared and running on instinct,” Karrin continued. “She’d have never come at you the way she did, here, otherwise.”

I regarded Karrin for a second. Then I said, surprised, “You like her.”

“I find her terrifying,” she replied calmly. “But I will acknowledge a certain amount of respect. When we worked together in the BFS, she always held up her end and always kept her word. That’s not nothing.”

“No, it isn’t,” I said. I opened up the boat so that the roar of the engine would prevent Lara from overhearing our conversation. Vampires and their hearing. “So, I made an enemy of her.”

Karrin snorted. “Maybe. But I saw the whole thing. You beat her, but you didn’t show her any disrespect. She’s not as petty as most of the rest of the supernatural types I’ve met. Maybe she’ll decide to overlook it.” She shrugged. “And if she wants a fight, we fight her.”

“Tonight was high-stress and special. I’m pretty sure any fight Lara starts in the future is going to be set up so that we don’t get a turn,” I said.

Karrin turned bright blue eyes up to me. “So? You want to kill her right here, drop her in the lake?”

“Course not,” I said, annoyed.

“Then stop borrowing trouble,” she said. “Either throw down right now, or accept the fact that by not doing so, you’re giving her the upper hand. Either way, complaining isn’t going to help you.”

“If the Council gives me the boot,” I said, “there’s nothing stopping her from coming at me however she wants.”

Karrin snorted. “Merely Mab.”

I pursed my lips. True, that. Honestly, my long-term prognosis was for death by Mab, one way or another, but until I fell trying to do something for her, I had a certain advantage in my role as the official Thug of Winter. I was high-profile. Anyone who wanted to come at me outside of the various shadow games would have to run a table of serious risks to make the attempt—and even then, if they didn’t pull it off perfectly, so that they could vanish the body and avoid my death curse, it would be bound to catch up to them sooner or later in the person of the Winter Queen.

Nobody particularly cared to cross anyone from Winter—much less the Sidhe who ruled over the other predatory fae by dint of sheer wickedness and power. Mab’s reputation and force of personality had created the Unseelie Accords from whole cloth.

Mab was not a kind or gentle boss, but she’d never betrayed me, either.

When she made a promise, she meant it, and everyone knew it. Everyone but Ethniu, apparently.

I found myself turning the binding crystal over and over in my hand. It was about six inches long and between an inch and two inches thick, and glowed with a very, very faint luminescence that one could see only indirectly.

“That like the one you used on Thomas?” Murph asked.

“Yeah.”

“You think you can get a Titan inside one of those?”

“Sure,” I lied.

She spat casually over the side of the boat and gave me a look.

I grimaced. “Bindings are difficult work. You pit your will against whatever you’re trying to bind. If your will is stronger, it gets bound. If not …”

“Whatever you tried to bind comes to kill you?”

“She was doing that anyway,” I pointed out.

Karrin bobbed her head to one side in a little gesture of acceptance. “So your head is harder than Thomas’s?”