Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

Hell’s bells.

Evanna never looked away from Thomas and paid so little attention to me that I had to figure that she was confident her people could obliterate me before I could work any mischief. Given who the svartalves were—people even the Norse gods hadn’t cared to make angry—I was inclined to take her seriously.

“Well, Raith?” she said in a quiet voice. “Have you anything to say?”

It looked like neither her anger, nor her contempt, nor her question had really registered with him. My brother stayed silent and still, except for involuntary spasms of muscles and shudders of pain.

“I thought better of you, Thomas,” Evanna said. “If you had a problem with my people, you could have come to us as a friend.” Then she rose and walked away, her back rigid. She didn’t seem to care if I followed her or not, and I felt a little nervous that I might wind up locked inside the detention area if I didn’t leave when I had the opportunity—so I followed her.

As we were leaving, a voice croaked, “Ha’ay.”

The sound of it hurt. I steeled myself to look calm and confident, and turned back to face my brother.

A tear was cutting a slow pale scarlet trail across the dried blood on his cheek. “Junghg. S’Jnngh.”

He couldn’t say Justine.

“It’s okay,” I said gently. “I know. I’ll look after her.”

At my words, something in him broke. He started to contract with racking sobs. The sounds he made were those of an animal dying in a bewildering amount of pain.

I closed my eyes and breathed, willing away tears before they could fall. Then I turned my back on him and left him in the grip of the people who had hurt him so badly and who had every intention of taking his life.

What choice did I have?

My brother, my only brother, had just given the gathering of the oldest and most powerful supernatural beings on the planet a surpassingly excellent reason to kill him. In an hour, he had managed to put himself into a position where he was going to get more attention and more trouble from more excessively dangerous people than I’d ever managed to do in my life.

Trust me. I do it for my day job. I know what I’m talking about.

Stars and stones, Thomas, you idiot. What have you done?

9

What’s wrong, Dad?” Maggie asked me.

We were back in the apartment, and when I asked her to, she had dutifully retrieved her bugout bag from the closet.

Yeah, I know, it sounds a little paranoid to teach a child to keep a bag full of spare clothes, snacks, basic medical and survival supplies, and water, just in case she needs to suddenly go on the run. But then, most kids didn’t have to contend with the possibility of enemies coming up through the floor and grabbing them, either.

I’m raising my daughter to survive the kind of thing she might occasionally be adjacent to because of who her father is, and for the time being her best survival strategy was almost always to be ready to run away.

“I can’t explain it right now,” I said. I slid past her into her room and snagged the bowling bag that held Bonea’s wooden skull, then secured the rest of my own limited gear, along with a bugout bag of my own. “We’re going to drive Hobbit home, and you can stay with the Carpenters for a few days. How does that sound?”

Maggie looked at me with very serious young eyes for a moment. “Are you in trouble?”

“I don’t get in trouble,” I said, and winked at her. “I get bad guys in trouble.”

“It’ll be fine, munchkin,” Hope said, and slid a sisterly arm around my daughter’s shoulders. “I totally know this drill. You can sleep in my room. I’ve got a laptop. We can Netflix some fun stuff until as late as we want.”

Maggie leaned against Hope a little, but her eyes never left me. “Dad, why are the svartalves mad at us?”

“They aren’t mad, but something gave them a scare,” I said. “They’re going to be edgy for a while. Hope, could you get some tuna out of the fridge and put it at the back of Mister’s carrier so he’ll jump in? I don’t want to leave him here alone.”

“Sure, Harry,” Hope said, and set about it.

“They’re edgy? And that’s why you’re sending me back?” Maggie asked.

I’d been all ready to march out, efficiently and quickly, because I had a hundred things to do and sleep had just become a non-possibility for the foreseeable future—and while I’d prepared to do so, I’d forgotten that my daughter was still, in some ways, very small. So I paused. I put everything else out of my head, and I turned to drop to a knee in front of her and give her a hug. She hugged me back tightly, her thin little arms around my neck. Mouse ceased his pacing and came over to settle down at Maggie’s back and lean a shoulder against her.

“Oh, punkin,” I said. “I’m not sending you away. I just need someone to look out for you until I get back.”

“Because there’s monsters?”

“It’s looking that way,” I said.

“And you fight the monsters?” she asked.

“When they need fighting,” I said. Though sometimes that was a much harder thing to determine than I had always assumed it would be.

Her hug grew a little tighter and more desperate. “What if you don’t come back?”

This was the part where, in the movies, a quasi-hero dad is supposed to promise his little girl that he will be just fine and not to worry about him. In the movies, they have a lot to do, and they have to get the plot moving or the audience will get bored and start texting.

I hadn’t been a dad very long. But Maggie deserved better than a quick sound bite and a four-second hug while I looked tormented for the camera.

So I leaned back from her and kept my hands on her shoulders. They felt very thin and fragile, though I objectively knew that she was as sturdy as any child. Her eyes were very big and very brown and her expression was very uncertain.

“First, you should know that your dad is one tough son of a bitch,” I said quietly.

Her eyes widened. “Dad!”

“I have to tell the truth,” I said. “And I will fight to come home to you safe and sound. Always. I’m strong, and I’m sort of smart, and I have a lot of tough, smart allies to help me. But second, you should know that I’ve made arrangements to take care of you. If something happens to me, Michael and Charity have already agreed that they will watch over you. We signed the official papers and everything. And you’ll have Mouse with you, always. You will always be loved. Always.”

“Woof,” said Mouse, quietly but firmly.

“And even if I die,” I said gently, “there will be a part of me here. Even if you can’t see me or hear me, I’ll be near you. Death can’t take you out of my sight, punkin. I’ll just be watching over you from the next room.”

I wasn’t kidding. I’d collaborated with an ectomancer and everything. If someone managed to take me out, my daughter would still have one extremely ferocious shade watching over her sleep, protecting her from spiritual predation, and guarding her dreams—and a consulting archangel to monitor that shade’s mental and emotional function.

Not only that, but she would have teachers waiting for her, should she ever develop talents that ran toward the weird side of the street. People I knew and trusted who were not psychotic Winter fae. I’d made my wishes known to Mab, who regarded devotion to her duties as a liege lord as a force considerably more constant than gravity. She had agreed to make the arrangements on my behalf, should I die as a loyal henchman—and on promises such as that, I trusted Mab more than almost anyone else I had ever met.