"It's the same color," I said, "on both sides."
"Ah," Lara said, and inclined her head slightly to me. "I'd hardly respect you otherwise, I suppose. Still, should you ever desire a new wardrobe..." She touched the fabric of my shirt lightly. "You would look marvelous in white silk."
"Said the spider to the fly," I replied. "Forget it."
She smiled again, batted her lashes at me while my heart skipped a beat, and then slid on to Ramirez. She offered him her hand. "You must be Warden Ramirez."
This is the part where I got nervous. Ramirez loved women. Ramirez never shut up about women. Well, he never shut up about anything in general, but he'd go on and on about various conquests and feats of sexual athleticism and- "A virgin virgin?" Lara blurted. Lara Lara blurted. She turned her head to me, grey eyes several shades paler than they had been, and very wide. "Really, Harry, I'm not sure what to say. Is he a blurted. She turned her head to me, grey eyes several shades paler than they had been, and very wide. "Really, Harry, I'm not sure what to say. Is he a present present?"
I folded my arms and regarded Lara steadily, but said nothing. This was Ramirez's moment to make a first impression, and if he didn't do it on his own, Lara would regard him as someone who couldn't protect himself. It would probably mark him as a target.
Lara turned to walk a slow circle around Ramirez, inspecting him the way you might a flashy new sports car. She was of a height with him, but taller in the heels, and there was nothing but a languidly sensual confidence in the way she moved. "A handsome young bantam," she murmured. She trailed a finger across the line of his shoulders as she moved behind him. "Strong. Young. A hero of the White Council, I've heard." She paused to touch a fingertip to the back of his hand, and then shuddered. "And power, too." Her eyes went a few shades brighter as she completed the tour. "My goodness. I've recently fed, and still still...Perhaps you'd care to ride with me back to the estate, and let Dresden walk. I promise to entertain you until he arrives."
I knew the look on Ramirez's face. It was the look of a young man who wants nothing so badly as to discard the complex things in life, like civilization, social mores, clothing, and speech, and see what happened next.
Lara knew it, too. Her eyes glittered brightly, and her smile was serpentine, and she pressed closer.
But Ramirez apparently knew about glittery gold, too. I didn't know he'd hidden a knife up his sleeve, but it appeared in his hand an instant before its tip pressed into the bottom of Lara's throat.
"I," he said very quietly, "am not food." And he met her eyes.
I hadn't seen a soulgaze from the outside before. It surprised me, how simple and brief it looked, when one wasn't being shaken to the core by it. Both of them stared, eyes widening, and then shuddered. Lara took a small step back from Ramirez, her breathing slightly quickened. I noticed, because I'm a professional investigator. She could have been concealing a weapon in that decolletage.
"If you meant to dissuade me," Lara said a moment later, "you haven't."
"Not you," Ramirez replied, lowering the knife. His voice was rough. "It wasn't to dissuade you."
"Wise," she murmured, "for one so young. I advise you, young wizard, not to hesitate so long to act, should another approach you as I did. A virgin is...extremely attractive to our kind. One such as you is rare, these days. Give a less restrained member of the court an opportunity as you did me, and they'll throw themselves on you in dozens-which would reflect poorly on me."
She turned back to me and said, "Wizards, you have my pledge of safe conduct."
I inclined my head to her and said, "Thank you."
"Then I will await your company in the car."
I nodded my head to her, and Lara walked back to her bodyguard, who looked like he was fighting off a fit of apoplexy.
I turned and eyed Ramirez.
He turned bright red.
"Virgin?" I asked him.
He turned more red.
"Carlos?" I asked.
"She's lying," he snapped. "She's evil. She's really evil. And lying."
I rubbed at my mouth to keep anyone from seeing me grin.
Hey. On nights like this, you take your laughs where you can get them.
"Okay," I said. "Not important."
"The hell it isn't!" he spat. "She's lying! I mean, I'm not...I'm..."
I nudged him with an elbow. "Focus, Galahad. We've got a job to do."
He exhaled with a growl. "Right."
"You saw what was inside her?" I asked.
He shuddered. "That pale thing. Her eyes...she was getting more turned on, and they kept looking more like its its eyes." eyes."
"Yep," I said. "It's a tip-off to how close they are to starting to take a bite of you. You handled it right."
"You think so?"
I couldn't resist jibing him, just a little. "Just think. If you'd messed it up," I said, as Lara slid into the car one long, perfect leg at a time, "you'd be in the limo with Lara ripping your clothes off right now."
Ramirez looked at the car and swallowed. "Um. Yeah. Close one."
"I've met several of the White Court," I said. "Lara's probably the smartest. She's the most civilized, progressive, adaptable. She's definitely the most dangerous."
"She didn't look that tough," Ramirez said, but he was frowning in thought as he said it.
"She's dangerous in a different way than most," I said. "But I think her word is good."
"It is," Ramirez said firmly. "I saw that much."
"It's one of the things that makes her dangerous," I said, and headed for the limo. "Stay cool."
We walked over and I leaned down to see Lara in the back of the limo, seated on one of the dogcart-style seats, all poise and beauty and gorgeous grey eyes. She smiled at me as I looked in, and crooked a finger.
"Step into my limo," said the spider to the fly.
And we did.
Chapter Thirty-Six
The limo rolled right past the enormous stone house that was the chateau proper. It was bigger than a parking garage, and covered with cornices and turrets and gargoyles, like some kind of neo-Medieval castle.
"We're, uh," I noted, "not stopping at the house."
"No," Lara said from the seat facing us. Even in the dark, you could see the glow of her luminous skin. "The conclave is being held in the Deeps." Her eyes glittered at me. "Less walking for everyone, that way."
I gave her a small smile and said, "I like the house. The whole castle-look thing. It's always nice to know you're living somewhere that could withstand a besieging army of Bohemian mercenaries if it had to."
"Or American wizards," she replied smoothly.
I gave her what I hoped was a wolfish smile, folded my arms, and watched the house go by. We turned down a little gravel lane and drove another mile or so before the car slowed and came to a stop. Bodyguard George got out and opened the door for Lara, whose thigh brushed against mine as she got out, and whose perfume smelled good enough to scramble my brain for a good two or three seconds.
Both I and Ramirez sat still for a second.
"That," I said, "is an awfully lovely woman. I thought I should let you know, kid, in case your inexperience had blinded you to the fact."
"Lying," Ramirez stated, blushing. "Evil."
I snickered and slid out of the car to follow Lara-and the three more bodyguards waiting for her-into the woods beside the gravel lane.
The last time I'd found the entrance to the Deeps, I'd been stumbling through the woods, focused on a tracking spell and tripping over roots and hummocks in the old-growth forest.
This time, there was a lighted path, with a red carpet, no less, leading down between the trees. The lights were all of soft blues and greens, small lamps that, upon a closer glance, proved to be elegant little crystal cages containing tiny, humanoid forms with wings. Faeries, tiny pixies, each surrounded by its own sphere of light, trapped and miserable, crouched in the cages.
Between each cage knelt more prisoners-humans, bound by nothing more than a single strand of white silk about their throats tied to a peg driven into the earth in front of them. They weren't naked. Lara wouldn't have gone in for anything that overt. Instead, they each wore a white silk kimono, accented with strands of silver thread.
Men and women, arrayed in a variety of ages, body types, hair colors, every single one of them beautiful, their eyes lowered as they knelt quietly. One of the young men sat shivering and was seemingly barely able to stay upright. His long, dark hair was marred with streaks of brittle white. His eyes were unfocused and he seemed totally unaware of anyone around him. His kimono was torn near the neck, leaving a broad swath of muscled chest exposed. There were raking nail marks, deep enough to draw tiny trickles of blood, all the way across one pectoral. There were repeated teeth marks deep in the slope of muscle between neck and shoulder, half a dozen sets of messy bruises and ugly little gashes. There were more nail marks, four side-by-side punctures, rather than rakes, on the other side of his neck.
He was also obviously, even painfully, aroused beneath the kimono.
Lara paused beside him and rolled her eyes in irritation. "Made-line?"
"Yes, ma'am," said one of the bodyguards.
"Oh, for hunger's sake." She sighed. "Get him indoors before the conclave is over or she'll finish him off on her way out."
"Yes, ma'am," he said, turned aside, and began speaking to nobody. I spotted a wire running to an earpiece.
I kept walking down the long line of kneeling captives and trapped pixies, and got angrier with every step.
"They're willing, Dresden," Lara said a few paces later. "All of them."
"I'm sure they are," I said. "Now."
She laughed. "There is no shortage of mortals who long to kneel before another, wizard. There never has been."
We passed several more kneeling men and women who looked mussed and dazed, though none so badly as the first. We also walked past spaces where there was a peg and a strip of white cloth-but no person kneeling within.
"I'm sure they all knew that they might die by doing it," I said.
She shrugged one shoulder. "It happens at these meetings. Guests have no need to dispose of a body, since as hosts we are responsible for such necessities. As a result, many of our visitors make no effort to control themselves."
"You're responsible, all right." I gripped my staff harder and kept my voice neutral. "What about the little folk?"
"They trespassed upon our land," she replied, her voice calm. "Most would simply have killed them, rather than pressing them into service."
"Yeah. You're all heart."
"Where there is life, there is hope, Dresden," Lara replied. "My father's policies on such matters have changed of late. Death is...gauche, when it can be avoided. Alternative courses are far more profitable and agreeable to all involved. It is for precisely that reason that my father seeks to help create a peace between your folk and mine."
I glanced aside at the shining eyes of a short-haired redhead in her early thirties, absolutely lovely, her kimono still open from whatever had fed on her, the tips of her small breasts taut as she panted, the muscles of a lean stomach still trembling. Behind us, the thralls stretched out into the darkness. Ahead of us, they went on for a hundred yards or more. So many many of them. of them.
I started to shudder, but the faces of the women the Skavis and his pretenders had murdered flickered through my mind, and I fought it down. Like hell was I going to let Lara see me look discomfited, no matter how sick the display of the White Court's seductive power made me feel.
The path went for another hundred yards through the woods and stopped at the mouth of a cave. It wasn't large or sinister or dramatic. It was simply a fissure in an almost-flat stretch of ground at the base of a tree, with the hypnotic sway of firelight dancing somewhere below. There were guards outside-set back in the woods, out of obvious sight. I spotted a couple of deer stands, occupied by dark shapes. There were others standing silent sentinel. I assumed that there would be more guards I could not see.
Lara turned to us. "Gentlemen," she said. "If you will wait here for a moment, I will send someone when the White King is ready to receive you."
I nodded once, settled my staff on the ground, and leaned on it a little, saying nothing. Ramirez took his cue from me.
Lara gave me a level look. Then she turned and descended into the Deeps, flawlessly graceful despite her high heels.
"You've met her before," Ramirez noted quietly.
"Yeah."
"Where?"
"Set of a porn movie. She was acting."
He stared at me for a second. Then shrugged in acceptance and said, "What were you doing?"
"Stuntman," I replied.
"Uh..." he said.
"I'd been hired by the producer to find out why people involved with the movie were being killed."
"Did you?"
"Yeah."
"So...did you and she...?"
"No," I said. "You can tell from how I'm breathing and possessed of my own will." I nodded toward the entrance of the cave, where a shadow briefly darkened the firelight from below. "Someone's coming."
A young woman in an especially fine white kimono, heavily embroidered with silver thread, emerged from the fissure. I thought she was blond for a second, but that was because of the light. As she approached us with slow, quiet steps, her hair turned blue, then green, passing through the light of the faerie lamps. Her hip-length hair was pure white. She was lovely, very nearly as much so as Lara, but there was none of the predatory sense of hunger in her that I'd come to associate with the White Court. She was slim, and sweetly shaped, and looked quite frail and vulnerable. It took me a second to recognize her.
"Justine?" I asked.