Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

I considered setting them all on fire for a while, until I started getting looks from the table. It was only then that I noticed how widely I was smiling and moved along.

A black banner with black gemstones draped down into a semi-alcove shape, surrounding a single enormous chair in shadow. A very tall, very large man, apparently in his fifties, sat lazily in the chair, silently regarding the gathering. He held a pipe negligently in one hand, apparently unlit, but smoke trailed sinuously down from his nostrils with each breath, and his eyes reflected the light of the room like a cat’s. Ferrovax, the dragon, disguised in human form. The last time we’d met had been at an event like this, and he’d tossed me around like a chew toy. I avoided his eyes, and his lips curled into a smirk as he tracked me going by. Some of my antics a few months back had disturbed some of his treasures, held in Marcone’s vault. I had a feeling he was the type to take that personally.

I shivered at that. There was plenty of fallout from that job that was still due to come raining down, I was pretty sure.

There was a dizzying array of other delegations. The Summer Court of the Fae held the far corners of the room, in the complementary cardinal direction from the svartalves and the White Court, opposite the Winter Court on the other side. Both were centered around a single thronelike chair, but no principals were seated yet—only five of the Sidhe, in armor respective of their queens’ colors, deep blues and greens and purples for winter, with more springlike greens and golds for summer.

Other beings were all over the place. I recognized a naga from a mess I’d gotten into on a rough weekend a few years back, at the moment disguised as a woman with smoky skin in a lovely white evening gown, chatting with Ivy the Archive, who was startlingly older than the last time I’d seen her, and dressed to match in a black evening gown without jewelry or other accoutrements.

Should Ivy even have hips yet? I did some math, making an effort not to count on my fingers, and realized that, yes, it really had been that long since I’d seen her. Now she looked like a girl going to prom, only way more self-assured—and she was evidently there alone, absent the bodyguard I’d come to associate with her as surely as I did coffee with doughnuts. Where was Kincaid? I tried to make eye contact with Ivy as I went by, but either she was too involved in the conversation to notice or she ignored me.

I felt awkward. I was never much good at parties.

I went by a sky blue banner swirling with cloudy whites and flashing lines of gold, opposite Ferrovax’s cozy alcove, and exchanged a nod with Vadderung, CEO of Monoc Securities, seated in a comfortable stuffed chair that looked like it would be good for reading. Vadderung looked like a tall, muscular man in his early sixties who could probably bench-press a motorcycle. He wore a charcoal suit, his long wolf-grey hair and trimmed beard made rakish by a black eye patch on a leather thong. Like Ferrovax, he sat alone, without guards, with a rather large glass of wine in one hand and a smoldering pipe in the other.

I traded a nod with him as I passed, and he mouthed the word “Later” at me as I did.

I made it to the buffet without causing any major diplomatic incidents, which for me is remarkable. I picked up a plate and started with the platter of tiny tenderloin steaks. I mean, sure, they were meant to be little nothings, appetizers, but if you stacked a dozen of them together you had something that resembled a real steak.

I was moving on to look for something delicious to go with them when a hairy hand the size of a cafeteria tray, lumpy with scars and muscle, clamped down on my right shoulder.

I nearly flew out of my shoes as panic flashed through me, and my brain took me back to a few months before, when the owner of a hand like that had been stalking me through the burning ruins of one of the weapons vaults kept by the King of the Underworld, Hades himself. The Genoskwa had occupied more than the usual space in my nightmares since, and the sudden surge of adrenaline caused the Winter mantle to go berserk, readying my body for combat in an instant.

Only it was already too late. The fingers, thick as summer sausages, had already tightened down. It had me.

“Dresden,” growled an enormous, rumbling voice. “Good. Finally, I can pay you back properly.”

21

When someone has ahold of you, there’s a basic rule of thumb to follow, which Murphy had taught me a while back. I called it the Rule of Thumb. The idea is to twist whatever part they’ve got hold of toward their thumb in a circling motion. The basic principle is that it’s easier to overcome the power of one thumb than it is four fingers supported by the thumb. The Genoskwa’s grip was incredibly strong—but the Winter mantle gave me enough physical capability, at moments like this, that I wasn’t exactly a ninety-pound weakling, either.

His right hand was on my right shoulder. So I dipped suddenly, spinning clockwise and pulling sharply back and down, pitting the weight and power of my entire body against the monster’s single thumb.

I did it just right—and even so, only barely managed to break the grip and pull away. I also managed to jostle the buffet table, setting the serving trays to clanking, and nearly knocked the thing over with my ass as I crouched, dropping my plate to lift my arms in what would probably be a useless gesture of self-defense.

Only it wasn’t the Genoskwa.

Standing in front of me was a goddamned Sasquatch, a hairy humanoid figure a solid nine feet and change in height, layered with dark brown hair and muscle. He was wearing—I’m not even kidding —what looked like a Victorian-era tuxedo, tailored to his enormous size. He had spectacles across his broad, flat nose, their lenses the size of tea saucers, and they still looked a little small on him. His hair, all of it that was visible, had been shampooed and conditioned, and for a second I thought I was looking at a Wookie.

“Hah,” rumbled the Sasquatch. His face spread into an uneasy smile that showed me broad teeth that looked like they could crunch through a fence post like it was a stalk of celery. “I heard you met my cousin.”

I blinked several times and then realized that everyone in the room nearby was staring at us. I’d dropped both my staff and my snack plate, and the servers behind the buffet table looked like they wanted to quietly vanish. I huffed out a breath, pushed away the Winter mantle’s scream to engage in bloody combat, and said, “Wow. River Shoulders? Is that you?”

“Ungh,” River Shoulders grunted in the affirmative. He gestured down at the tuxedo awkwardly. “Had to put on this monkey suit. Didn’t mean it to be a disguise.”

Strength of a River in His Shoulders was a shaman of the Forest People who had apparently been living right under everyone’s nose for hundreds of years. He’d hired me for some jobs in the past, and he was a decent guy. He also happened to be very large and very scary.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

He shrugged. His shoulders were a good five and a half feet across, so it was a fairly impressive motion. “After that mess in Oklahoma, I thought a lot about what you had to say, about my child. And you were right.” He pursed his lips briefly. “Out of line, arrogant, but right.”

I felt myself flash him a grin. “Seems about correct for a wizard.”

“Eh, for a human,” he agreed. “Called a council of my people. Told them to leave my son alone or I’d start breaking skulls. And then we decided to join the Accords.”