Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

“I don’t get to be me anymore,” she whispered.

She’d been injured before, and she’d come back from it.

But everyone has limits. She was only human.

We sat in the silence while her old grandfather clock ticked steadily.

“Is there anything that …” she began.

I shook my head. “When it comes to healing, magic isn’t much ahead of medicine at this point. Our people go to study from yours. Unless you want to get Faustian.”

“No,” she said firmly.

I nodded. There wasn’t much else I could say. “I’m sorry,” I said finally.

She gave her head a tiny shake. “Don’t,” she said. “I cried about it earlier. And I’ll do it again later. But right now I don’t want to think about it. Talk about something else.”

I tried to think of something. I came up empty. So instead, I kissed her.

“You are the last of the red-hot raconteurs, Dresden,” she murmured against my mouth. But then she closed her eyes and leaned into the kiss, and everything else started going away.

Kissing was something I had to be cautious about. After about twenty seconds of feeling her breath mingling with mine, the Winter mantle started going berserk with naked lust. The damned aura of power Mab had given me let me do some incredible things, but the constant drumbeat of sex and violence it kept playing at my thoughts and emotions never went away. So at twenty seconds, I started breathing faster, and at thirty my head was besieged by impulses of Things to Do with Karrin, and by the time a minute had gone by I was forcing myself to remember that I was stronger than I realized and to be careful not to clench my hands on her and haul her bodily against me.

Though, to be fair, she was reacting in almost exactly the same way and she didn’t have an aura of wicked Faerie power to blame it on.

So maybe it wasn’t the mantle at all. Maybe it was just me, which was scary.

Or maybe it was just … us.

Which was actually kind of an amazing thought.

Her fingers twined in my hair and gripped hard and she gasped, “Okay. You are a genius of conversation. This is exactly what I need.”

“Are you su—” I began to ask.

“God, stop talking, Harry,” she growled, and her hand got more intimate, sliding under my shirt. “I’m tired of waiting. You’re tired of waiting. We’re tired of waiting.”

I made a vague sound of agreement that sort of turned into a growl. Then her mouth found mine again and muffled the sound and my heart rate accelerated to the level of frantic teenager. So did hers. Our breaths were coming out faster, synced, and then my hand slid over her hip and she let out a sound of need that robbed me of the ability to think about anything at all.

“Now,” she gasped. Then she made a bunch of sounds that sort of had a consonant and a vowel as clothes got removed, or at least rearranged. I helped her a little with mine, because after all, she only had one hand to work with. She kept urging me to hurry, though without words. And then I was kneeling on the floor and she was spread beneath me on the couch, our hips aligning, and I leaned down to find her mouth again and—

—and I felt her stiffen with sudden pain, felt the catch in her breath as it hit her. Her shoulder or her leg, I couldn’t tell, but, dammit, she was supposed to be recovering, not … being athletic.

Her eyes opened all the way. She blinked at me a few times and asked, “What?”

“I …” I mumbled. “I don’t know if …”

She seized my shirt in her good hand and dragged me toward her, eyes lambent. “I am not made of glass. Harry, I want this. For once in your life, would you please shut your mouth, stop thinking, and just do me.”

I looked down and said, “Um.”

Karrin looked down, and then up at me. She rolled her eyes to the ceiling for a second, and I swear to you, she must have had an even better sexual frustration face than I did. Then she sort of deflated, which made two of us, and let out her breath in a slow sigh.

“Dresden,” she said, “this chivalrous self-identity thing you have going is often endearing. But right now, I want to kick it in the nuts.”

“I can’t hurt you,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

She rolled her eyes again and pulled me down so that she could put an arm around my neck, while I carefully kept any weight off her. She kissed my temple and said, very gently, “I know. You dear idiot.”

I put my arms around her carefully and hugged her back. And that was when someone knocked briskly at the front door.

I jumped up, en déshabillé, and tried to rearrange my clothes. Murphy sort of flopped about, trying to do the same with one hand and two largely immobile limbs. We both stopped to notice, and then to notice the other noticing, and then burst out into absurd laughter while we continued trying to dress.

“The door,” Murphy tittered, dragging a quilted throw across her bare legs. I managed to stagger to it, glanced out the peephole and recognized the caller, and opened the door slightly while using it to hide the fact that my pants had fallen back to my knees.

The fuzz stood on the porch.

Two men were waiting there politely, with polite, neutral cop faces. I recognized one of them, though it had been a while since I’d seen him. He was on the tall side of medium height, good-looking, with a regulation high-and-tight for his dark hair, although he’d added a thick mustache to his look that, admittedly, set off his blue eyes very well. He wore a suit too expensive for his pay grade and had a thick manila envelope tucked under one arm.

“Detective Rudolph,” I said as I finished pulling my pants on. In a tone of voice generally reserved for phrases like Crucify him or I’m going to cut your throat, I continued, “How nice to see you again.”

“Dresden,” Rudolph said, smirking for a moment. “Great. Two birds with one stone. Is Ms. Murphy home?”

He put a little emphasis on the title, just to remind everyone that she wasn’t a cop anymore. I wanted to smack him. I restrained myself in a manly fashion and said, “It isn’t a good time. She’s still recuperating from her injuries.”

“The ones from last winter,” Rudolph noted.

I arched a brow. Murphy’s injuries from our little outing with a pack of psychotic killers and sociopathic malcontents hadn’t involved gunshot wounds, and they hadn’t happened at a crime scene. The medical establishment hadn’t needed to report them to the police—which meant that the cops had gone sniffing around to find out about them. That wasn’t good.

Murphy had been helping me with a smash-and-grab operation. We’d robbed Hell. Or at least, a hell. The target hadn’t been anything inside Chicago PD’s jurisdiction, but we’d kind of had to get there through the basement of a bank, and it had gotten pretty thoroughly wrecked as a result. Plus there’d been the guards. And the police who had surrounded the bank. And the cops we’d gone through on the way out. We’d worked hard to make sure no one would be killed, but one of our associates had slaughtered a guard anyway.

That made us accomplices to murder at least, as far as the law was concerned. And they weren’t wrong.

“Yeah, those injuries,” I told him. “So buzz off.”

“Or what?” Rudolph asked mildly.