I nodded. I said, "Real bad. We're ..." I shook my head. "Without the Council's support, I don't see how it can be done."
"There's a way," she said. "There's always a way."
"That's ... sort of the problem," I said. I looked at the hopelessly organized bookshelf nearest me. "I ... think I'd like to be by myself for a while," I said.
Molly looked at me, her posture that of someone being careful, as if they're concerned that any move might shatter a delicate object. "You're sure?"
Mouse made a little whining noise in his throat.
"I'm not going to do anything desperate," I told her. Not yet, anyway Not yet, anyway. "I just need some time."
"Okay," she said. "Come on, Mouse."
Mouse watched me worriedly, but padded out of the apartment and up the stairs with Molly.
I went to my shower, started it up, stripped, and got under the cold water. I just stood there with it sheeting over me for a while and tried to think.
Mostly, I thought about how good Susan's mouth had felt. I waited for the cold water to sluice that particular thought down to a bearable level. Then I thought about Vadderung's warning about the Red Court.
I've taken on some tough customers in my time. But none of them had been godlike beings-or the remnants of them, or whatever the Lords of Outer Night and the Red King were. You couldn't challenge something like that in a direct confrontation and win. I might have powers, sure. Hell, on a good day I'd go along with someone who said that I was one of the top twenty or thirty wizards on the planet, in terms of sheer magical muscle. And my finesse and skill continued to improve. Give me a couple of hundred years and I might be one of the top two or three wizards on the planet.
Of course, if Marcone was right, I'd never make it that high. And the boss predator of the concrete jungle was not stupid. In fact, I'd say that there was an excellent chance I wouldn't live another two or three days.
I couldn't challenge the masters of the Red Court and win.
But they had my little girl.
I know. It shouldn't matter that she was my little girl in particular. I should have been just as outraged that any any little girl was trapped in such monstrous hands. But it did matter. Maggie was my child, and it mattered a whole hell of a lot. little girl was trapped in such monstrous hands. But it did matter. Maggie was my child, and it mattered a whole hell of a lot.
I stood in the shower until the cold water had muted away all the hormones, all the emotion, all the mindless power of blood calling to blood. After thinking about it for a while, I decided that three courses lay open to me.
The enemy was strong. So I could show up with more muscle on my side. I could round up every friend, every ally, every shady character who owed me a solid. Enough assistance could turn the tide of any battle-and I had no illusions that it would would be a battle of epic proportions. be a battle of epic proportions.
The problem was that the only people who would show up to that kind of desperate fight were my friends. And my friends would die. I would literally be using them to shield myself against the crushing power of the Red King and his court, and I had no illusions of what such a struggle would cost. My friends would die. Most of them. Hell, probably all of them, and me with them. Maybe I could get to the kid and get out, while my friends gave their lives to make it possible. But after that, then what? Spend my life running with Maggie? Always looking over my shoulder, never stopping in one place for longer than a few days?
The second thing I could do was to change the confrontation into something else. Find some way to sneak up close enough to grab the girl and vanish, skipping the whole doomed-struggle part of option one. That plan wouldn't require me to get my friends killed.
Of course, to pull it off, I'd have to find some way to get more clever and sneakier than beings with millennia of practice and experience at just such acts of infiltration and treachery. You didn't survive for as long as they had among a nation of predators without being awfully smart and careful. I doubted it would be as simple as bopping a couple of guards over the head, then donning their uniforms and sneaking in with my friends the Cowardly Lion and the Tin Woodsman.
(I had cast myself as the Scarecrow in that one. If I only had a brain, I'd be able to come up with a better plan.) So, the stand-up fight with an all-star team was a bad idea. It probably wouldn't work.
The sneaky smash-and-grab at the heart of Red Court power was a bad idea. It probably wouldn't work, either.
And that left option three. Which was unthinkable. Or had been, a few days ago. Before I knew I was a father.
My career as a wizard has been ... very active. I've smacked a lot of awfully powerful things in the kisser. I've mostly gotten away with it, though I bear the scars, physical and otherwise, of the times I didn't. A lot of the major players looked at me and saw potential for one kind of mayhem or another.
Some of them had offered me power.
A lot lot of power. of power.
I mean, if I went out, right now, and gathered together everything I could-regardless of the price tag attached to it-it would change the game. It would make me more than just a hotshot young wizard. It would give my power an intensity, a depth, a scope I could hardly imagine. It would give me the chance to call upon new allies to fight beside me. It would place an almost unlimited number of new weapons at my disposal, open up options that could never otherwise exist.
But what about after?
I wouldn't have to go on the run with Maggie to protect her from the monsters.
I'd be one.
Maybe not that day. Maybe not that week. But one day before too long, the things I had taken into me would change me. And I probably wouldn't mind, even if I bothered to notice it happening. That was the nature of such power. You didn't feel it changing you.
There is no sensation to warn you when your soul turns black.
Option three shared one commonality with options one and two: I wouldn't survive it. Not as the man I was. The one who tried to make the world a little brighter or more stable. The one who tried to help, and who sometimes screwed things up. The one who believed in things like family, like responsibility, like love.
But Maggie might survive it. If I did it right-only to be orphaned again, in one way or another.
I felt so tired.
Maybe there isn't a way, whispered a voice in the back of my head.
I snapped the water off and reached for a towel. "Screw that kind of thinking, Dresden," I ordered myself. "There's a way through this. There's a way. You've just got to find it."
I dried myself off and stared intently at my stark, scarred, unshaven face in the mirror. It didn't look like the kind of face a child would love. Kid would probably start crying when she got a good look at me.
But it might be the kind of face that belonged to a man who could pull her safely out of a mob of bloodthirsty beasts. It was too early to throw in the towel.
I had no idea what I was going to do.
I just knew that I couldn't give up.
Chapter Twenty-three
I called Murphy's cell phone. called Murphy's cell phone.
"Murphy here."
"Heya, Murph. How you doing?"
"This line isn't-"
"I know," I said. "I know. Mine either. Hello, FBI guys. Don't you get bored doing this stuff all the time?"
Murphy snorted into the phone. "What's up?"
"I'm thinking about getting a broken-down doormat to go with my broken-down door and the broken frame around it," I said. "Thank you, FBI guys."
"Don't make demons of the Bureau," Murphy said. "They aren't much more inept than anyone else. There's only so much they can do when they're given bad intelligence."
"What about your place?" I asked.
"They came, they searched, they left. Rawlins and Stallings and a dozen other guys from SI were here assisting. The Bureau dusted and took out my trash after they were done."
I barked out a laugh. "The boys at SI got away with that?"
Murphy sounded decidedly smug. "They were there at the request of the new agent in charge."
"Tilly?"
"You met him, huh?"
"Did, and glad to. Spoke well of you."
"He's an aikidoka aikidoka," Murphy said. "I've been to his dojo a few times to teach some practical application classes. He's come out to Dough Joe's to teach forms and some formal weapons classes."
"Oh, right. He's the guy who taught you staff fighting?"
"That's him. We started off in the same class, many moons ago."
I grunted. "Shame to meet him this way."
"The Bureau generally aren't a bad bunch. This is all about Rudolph. Or whoever is giving Rudolph his marching orders."
A thought struck me, and I went silent for a moment.
"Harry? You still there?"
"Yeah, sorry. Was just about to head out for a steak sandwich. Interested?"
"Sure. Twenty?"
"Twenty."
Murphy hung up and I said, to the still-open line, "Hey, if you've got someone watching my place, could you call the cops if anyone tries to steal my Star Wars Star Wars poster? It's an original." Then I vindictively hung up on the FBI. It made my inner child happy. poster? It's an original." Then I vindictively hung up on the FBI. It made my inner child happy.
Twenty minutes later, I walked into McAnally's.
It was too early for it to be properly crowded, and Murphy and I sat down at a corner table, the one farthest from the windows, and therefore from laser microphones, in case our federal pursuers had doubled up on their paranoia meds.
I began without preamble. "Who said Rudolph was getting his orders from his direct superiors? Or from anyone in Chicago at all?"
She frowned and thought about it for a moment. I waited it out patiently. "You don't really think that," she said. "Do you?"
"I think it's worth looking at. He looked shaky when I saw him."
"Yeah," Murphy said thoughtfully. "At my place, too."
I filled her in on the details of what she'd missed, at my apartment and the FBI building, and by the time I was done she was nodding confidently. "Go on."
"We both know that ladder climbers like Rudolph don't usually get nervous, rushed, and pressured when they're operating with official sanction. They have too much fun swaggering around beating people over the head with their authority club."
"Don't know if all of them do that," she said, "but I know damned well that Rudolph does."
"Yeah. But this time, he was edgy, impatient. Desperate." I told her about his behavior in general, and specifically at my place and in the interrogation room downtown. "Tilly said that Rudolph had lied his ass off to point the FBI at me."
"And you believe that?" Murphy asked.
"Don't you?"
She shrugged. "Point. But that doesn't mean he's being used as some kind of agent."
"I think it does," I said. "He's not operating with the full authority of his superiors. Someone else has got to be pushing him-someone who scared him enough to make him nervous and hasty."
"Maybe that works," Murphy said. "Why would he do it?"
"Someone wanted to make sure I wasn't involved in the search for Maggie. So, maybe they sent Rudolph after me. Then, when Tilly turns me loose, they take things to the next level and try to whack me outside the FBI building."
Murphy's blue eyes were cold at the mention of the assassination attempt. "Could they have gotten someone into position that fast?"
I tried to work it through in my head. "After Tilly sent Rudolph out of the room, it didn't take long for me to get out. Ten minutes, fifteen at the most. Time enough to call in his failure, and for his handler to send in a hit, you think?"
Murphy thought about it herself and then shook her head slowly. "Only if they were very, very close, and moved like greased lightning. But ... Harry, that hit was too calm, too smooth for something thrown together at the last possible moment."
I frowned, and we both clammed up as Mac came over to our table and put a pair of brown bottles down. He was a spare man, bald, and had been ever since I knew him, dressed in dark clothes and a spotless white apron. We both murmured thanks, and he withdrew again.
"Okay," she said, and took a pull from the bottle. "Maybe Rudolph's handler had already put the assassin in place as a contingency measure, in case you got loose despite Rudolph's efforts."
I shook my head. "It makes more sense if the assassin was already there, positioned to remove Rudolph Rudolph, once he had served his purpose. Whoever his handler was, they would need a safety measure in place, a link they could cut out of the chain so that nothing would lead back to them. Only once Rudy calls them and tells them he isn't able to keep me locked up, they have the shooter switch targets."
Which meant ... I had taken three bullets meant for Rudolph.
"Harry?" Murphy asked. "Why are you laughing?"
"I heard a joke yesterday," I said. "I just got it."
She frowned at me. "You need some rest. You look like hell. And you're obviously tired enough to have gotten the giggles."