Skin Game (The Dresden Files 15)

I narrowed my eyes. “Wait. You’re saying that the parasite isn’t actually a parasite. But that means . . .”

“The wheel is turning,” my double said, in the tone of a reporter covering a sports event. “The fat, lazy old hamster looks like he’s almost forgotten how to make it go, but he’s sort of moving it now. Bits of rust are falling off. The cobwebs are slowly parting.”

“Screw you,” I said, annoyed. “It’s not like you’ve showed up with a ton to say ever since . . .” I trailed off and fell entirely silent for a long moment.

“Ah,” he said, and pointed a finger at me, bouncing up onto his toes. “Ah hah! Ah hah, hah, hah, the light begins to dawn!”

“Ever since I touched Lasciel’s Coin,” I breathed quietly.

“Follow that,” my double urged me. “What happened next?”

“Touching the Coin put an imprint of Lasciel in my head,” I said. “Like a footprint in clay, the same shape as the original. She tried to tempt me into accepting the true Lasciel into my head along with her, but I turned her down.”

My double rolled his wrist in a “keep it moving” gesture. “And then?”

“And then the imprint started to change,” I said. “Lasciel was immutable, but the imprint was made of me. A shape in the clay. As the clay changed, so did the imprint.”

“And?”

“And I gave her a name,” I said. “I called her Lash. She became an independent psychic entity in her own right. And we kind of got along until . . .” I swallowed. “Until there was a psychic attack. A bad one. She threw herself in the way of it. It destroyed her.”

“Yeah,” my double said quietly. “But . . . look, what she did was an act of love. And you were about as intimate with her as it gets, sharing the same mental space. I mean, it’s funny, you get twitchy when you start considering living with a woman, but having one literally inside your head was not an issue.”

“What do you mean?”

“Christ, you’re supposed to be the intellect here,” my double said. “Think.” He stared at me for a long moment, visibly willing me to understand.

My stomach fell into some unimaginable abyss at the same time my jaw dropped open. “No,” I said. “That isn’t . . . that’s not possible.”

“When a mommy and a daddy love each other very much,” my double said, as if speaking to a small child, “and they live together and hug and kiss and get intimate with each other . . .”

“I’m . . .” I felt a little ill. “You’re saying . . . I’m pregnant?”

My double threw up his arms. “Finally, he gets it.”

In years and years and years of experience as a wizard, I’d dealt with concepts, formulae, and mental models that ranged from bizarre to downright insanity-inducing. None of them had, in any way whatsoever, ever prepared my head to wrap around this. At all. Ever. “How is that . . . That isn’t even . . . What the hell, man?” I demanded.

“A spiritual entity,” my double said calmly. “Born of you and Lash. When she sacrificed herself for you, it was an act of selfless love—and love is fundamentally a force of creation. It stands to reason, then, that an act of love is fundamentally an act of creation. You remember it, right? After she died? When you could still play the music she’d given to you, even though she was gone? You could hear the echoes of her voice?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling dazed.

“That was because a part of her remained,” my double said. “Made of her—and made of you.”

And very gently, he drew back the black blanket.

She looked like a child maybe twelve years old, in the last few weeks of true childhood before the sudden surge of hormones brought on the chain of rapid changes that lead into adolescence. Her hair was dark, like mine, but her eyes were a crystalline blue-green, the way Lash’s had often appeared. Her features were faintly familiar, and I realized in a surge of instinct that her face had been constructed from those of people in my life. She had the square, balanced chin of Karrin Murphy, the rounded cheeks of Ivy the Archive, and Susan Rodriguez’s jawline. Her nose had come from my first love, Elaine Mallory, her hair from my first apprentice, Kim Delaney. I knew because they were my memories, right there in front of me.

Her eyes were fluttering uncertainly, and she was shivering so hard that she could barely stand. There was frost forming on her eyelashes, and even as I watched it started spreading over her cheeks.

“She’s a spiritual entity,” I breathed. “Oh, my God. She’s a spirit of intellect.”

“What happens when mortals get it on with spirits,” my double confirmed, though now without heat.

“But Mab said she was a parasite,” I said.

“Lot of people make jokes, refer to fetuses like that,” he said.

“Mab called her a monster. Said she would hurt those closest to me.”

“She’s a spirit of intellect, just like Bob,” my double said. “Born of the spirit of a fallen freaking angel and the mind of one of the most potent wizards on the White Council. She’s going to be born with knowledge, and with power, and be absolutely innocent of what to do with them. A lot of people would call that monstrous.”

“Argh,” I said, and clutched at my head. I got it now. Mab hadn’t been lying. Not precisely. Hell, she’d as much as told me that the parasite was made of my essence. My soul. My . . . me-ness. Spirits of intellect had to grow, and my head was a limited space. This one had been filling it up for years, slowly expanding, putting more psychic and psychological pressure on me—reflected in the growing intensity of my migraines over that time.

If I’d realized what was happening, I could have done something sooner, and probably a lot more simply. Now . . . I was overdue and it was looking like this was going to be a very, very rough delivery. And if I didn’t have help, I’d be in much the same shape as a woman giving birth alone and encountering complications. Odds were good that my head wouldn’t be able to stand the pressure of such a being abruptly parting ways with me, fighting its way out of a space that had become too small, in sheer instinct for its own survival. It could drive me insane, or kill me outright.

If that happened, it would leave the newly born spirit of intellect alone and bewildered in a world it didn’t understand, but about which it had lots and lots of data. Spirits like Bob liked to pretend they were all about rationality, but they had emotions, attachments. The new spirit would want to connect. And it would try to do so with the people who mattered most to me.

I shuddered, imagining little Maggie suddenly gaining a very, very seriously dangerous imaginary friend.

“See?” I demanded of my double. “You see? This is why you don’t go around having sex with everyone all the time!”

“You’re the brain,” he said. “Figure it out.” The lights flickered and he looked up and around. “Ugh,” he said. “Nail’s coming out.”

He was right. I could feel a faint pang in my chest, and a fading echo of the agony in my head. Frost continued covering the little girl, and she sighed, her knees buckling.

My double and I both stooped down and caught her before she could fall.

I picked her up. She didn’t weigh anything. She didn’t look dangerous. She just looked like a little girl.

Her eyes fluttered open. “I’m sorry,” she stammered. “Sorry. But it hurts and I c-c-couldn’t talk to you.”

I traded a look with my double and then looked down at her. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay. I’m going to take care of it. It’ll be all right.”

She sighed slightly and her eyes closed. Frost covered her in fine layers upon layers, as the spell on Mab’s earring wrapped her in sleep and silence, stilling her—for now—and turning her into a beautiful white statue.

I hadn’t even known she was there—and she was entirely my responsibility.

And if I didn’t handle it, she would kill me bein

g born.

I passed her carefully to my double. “Okay,” I said. “I’ve got it.”

He took her, very gently, and gave me a nod. “I know she’s weird. But she’s still your offspring.” His dark eyes flashed. “Protect the offspring.”

Primal drives indeed.

I’d torn apart a nation protecting my physical child. I was looking at part of the reason why. That drive was a part of me, too.

I took a deep breath and nodded to him. “I’m on it,” I said.

He wrapped the girl in a blanket and turned to carry her back into the darkness. He took the light with him, and darkness swallowed me again.

“Hey,” my double called abruptly, from the distance.

“What?”

“Don’t forget the dream!” he said. “Don’t forget how it ended!”

“What is that supposed to mean?” I asked.

“You flipping idiot!” my double snarled.

And then he was gone along with everything else.

Twenty-four

I opened my eyes and saw the ceiling of Karrin’s bedroom. It was dark. I was lying down. Light from the hallway came creeping under the bedroom door, and was almost too bright for my eyes.

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Butters’s voice was saying. “I don’t know. There’s no AMA-approved baseline for a freaking wizard Knight of Winter. He could be in shock. He could be bleeding from the brain. He could be really, really sleepy. Dammit, Karrin, this is what hospitals and practicing physicians are for!”