Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

“Right,” I said, and slung my brother back up onto my shoulder.

Lara gave me a nod of approval and rose with me, and we both padded as quietly as we could back toward the dumbwaiter shaft. We passed the enormous guard, who was sprawled on his desk, pants back on but unfastened. He reeked of bourbon. I hesitated beside the guard long enough to be sure I saw his chest rise and fall.

“He’ll have a hell of a hangover,” Lara noted.

“You were also drinking?” I asked. “When did you have time? Do you have vampire party superpowers I don’t know about?”

“I found a bottle in his desk after he was finished and poured it on him,” Lara said primly, as if she’d been wearing a Victorian school-marm’s outfit instead of a whole lot of very well-tailored nothing. She strode to the dumbwaiter door and opened it. “Simple explanation for when he wakes up with a headache and a scrambled memory.” She tilted her head. “What was with those spiders? Why did you conjure them?”

I made a frustrated sound. “It just … happened.”

She frowned for a half second and then began fighting a smile from the corners of her mouth. “Oh, Empty Night. You’ve got conjuritis? I’ve heard about how awkward it can be when wizard kids get the disease. Aren’t you a few … decades old for that?”

“It’s not like I made an appointment.”

“It would have been nice if you’d told me,” Lara said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“I took cold medicine,” I said defensively.

Lara arched an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Does everybody know about this disease but me?” I complained. And I swiped at my nose with my forearm, fighting back another itch.

There was a soft thump, and a bundle of towels unrolled from the bottom of the shaft, their ends neatly knotted together.

“Hurry up,” Freydis’s voice hissed from the shaft above. “I only made the illusion a quickie.”

“Help me,” I said to Lara, and together we got the makeshift rope around Thomas.

* * *

Getting my brother back up that narrow shaft wasn’t simple, even with Freydis’s arms pulling him as steadily as any heavy-duty winch. He was too weak to even hold his head up steadily, and he collected some scrapes and bangs on the way up—but we got him there.

After that, we moved quick. Freydis pulled out some cleaning wipes and swept them over Lara’s arms and legs, while Lara got her dress back on and stepped into her shoes. I was wearing the suit and had less exposed skin to clean. I used a wipe to swipe off my face, neck, and hands and flicked a comb through my hair, then dressed at my best speed.

The whole time I got dressed, I did my best to ignore the image in the boxing ring, of Lara and me sort of drowsily kissing and moving together in immediate postcoital languor. My image was breathing hard and gurgling out a self-satisfied chuckle against her throat. Her image’s hair was a mess, and her face and throat were the palest shade of pink imaginable, and it was entirely too damned easy to consider what that must feel like against my image’s lips.

“That’s very sweet, really,” Lara noted. “The personal bits in the afterglow. Perhaps not terribly believable, but a pretty fiction.”

“I should get drunk and write fucking romance,” Freydis agreed. She gave me a narrow-eyed glance. “I give the male leads too much credit. But this one seems less useless than some.”

While smoothing her dress Lara gave me a glance that made me want to swing from the various equipment around the gym while pounding my chest, and I looked away, feeling my face heat up. The problem with high-pressure situations was that they forced a lot of basic, primal things out that you could normally keep buttoned down.

“Can we focus, please?” I said, my voice only a little rough.

There was a sudden snap in the air, like an enormous discharge of static electricity, and the image in the ring burst into a spectrum of color and faded, leaving behind only a blackened, smoking wooden plaque about the size of a small domino.

“A Freydis production,” the Valkyrie noted. “Oh, one of the servers looked in and caught the show. He bought it and left discreetly, so as far as everyone at the peace talks is concerned, you guys are totally a thing as of, oh, an hour after tonight’s business.”

I blinked. “Um, what?”

“Potion,” Lara said, producing a test tube from her tiny handbag. She shook it up, uncorked it, and wrinkled her nose at the muddled, messy liquid inside. Then she closed her eyes, downed a quick swallow, and passed the tube to Freydis.

The Valkyrie looked at it askance. “I don’t normally accept drinks from guys like you, seidrmadr. What if this potion of yours makes me forget I’m protecting Lara?”

“Everyone who drinks it will be on the inside of the … the grey field,” I said. “We’ll be clear to each other. But to everyone else, we’ll seem like bland, unobtrusive background, already identified and not worthy of noticing.”

Freydis looked even more skeptical. “And this stuff actually works?”

“Too well, is the problem,” I said darkly. “Drink.”

She glowered but did. I took the tube and went to Thomas, dripping some into his mouth. He choked and twitched but he swallowed it down. Then it was my turn.

The details of all the contents aren’t terribly important, but magical potions rarely taste like anything you’d feed to an actual human. This one tasted like, and had the texture of, stale and mushy cardboard that might have had a little mold growing on it. I sort of fought it down, wishing the Mission: Impossible plan had included bringing enough water to get the taste out of my mouth afterward.

It took a couple of heartbeats and then the world sort of shifted, changing by subtle degrees, like when clouds gradually cover the sun. Color began to bleed out of the room, until the world was left in all subtle shades of grey—except for the others. I could clearly see my brother, Lara, and Freydis in full color against the monochromatic background. The air turned a little chillier, a little clammier, or maybe we just thought it did. The psychic resonance that the potion set up had some weird blowback effects on the drinker, and I’d experienced them once before, a long time ago.

“Okay,” I said. I hunched down and got one of Thomas’s arms over my shoulder. Lara got his other arm and we hauled him to his feet. “Move smoothly and calmly. If we start running around, we’ll wrinkle the seams at the edges of the glamour and make people take a second look. Once they do that, we’re screwed. So stay cool and we’ll be just fine.”

Freydis traded a look with Lara, smirking, and said, “Kids.”

“I think he’s being very sweet,” Lara said.

Right. Of the three of us in the conversation, I was the youngest by centuries at least. They had both probably faced enough dangerous situations to regard the entirety of my career as a promising rookie year. I felt like a bit of a jackass. When that happens, it’s an excellent idea to shut your mouth.

So I just started walking, leaving Lara to keep up, which she did, without effort, her blue eyes bright. We had to support maybe ninety percent of Thomas’s weight, and we stayed as close together as we could. Freydis paced along behind us, also keeping very near. Even in the realm of the supernatural, there are laws and limitations. Only so much power could go into the potion’s glamour. The less physical space the glamour would have to cover, the denser and more effective it would be. Spread it out too much, and we’d be better off shouting for the world to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.