Death Masks

The old Knight’s support was a relief, but I felt guilty, somehow, for accepting it. Too many people had been hurt on my behalf in the past. Michael and I had faced trouble together before, looked out for each other before. Somehow, it made it easier for me to go to him and ask for help. Accepting the same thing from a stranger, Knight of the Cross or not, grated on my conscience. Or maybe on my pride.

But what choice did I have?

I sighed and nodded. "I just don’t want to drag someone else into more trouble with me."

Charity muttered, "Let me think. Where have I heard that before?"

Shiro smiled at her, the expression both paternal and amused, and said, "I’ll make the call."

I waited while Shiro made a call from the room that served as the family study and the office for Michael’s contracting business. Charity stayed in the kitchen and wrestled a huge Crock-Pot onto the counter. She got out a ton of vegetables, stew meat, and a spice rack and set to chopping things up without a word to me.

I watched her quietly. She moved with the kind of precision you see only in someone who is so versed at what they are doing that they are already thinking of the steps coming twenty minutes in the future. I thought she took her knife to the carrots a little more violently than she needed to. She started preparing another meal somewhere in the middle of making the stew, this one chicken and rice and other healthy things I rarely saw in three dimensions.

I fidgeted for a bit, until I stood up, washed my hands in the sink, and started cutting vegetables.

Charity frowned at me for a moment. She didn’t say anything. But she got a few more veggies out and put them down next to me, then collected what had been cut so far and pitched them into the Crock-Pot. A couple of minutes later she sighed, opened a can of Coke, and put it on the counter next to me.

"I worry about him," she said.

I nodded, and focused on cucumbers.

"I don’t even know when he’ll be home tonight."

"Good thing you have a Crock-Pot," I said.

"I don’t know what I would do without him. What the children would do. I’d feel so lost."

What the hell. An ounce of well-intentioned but irrational reassurance didn’t cost anything. I took a sip of the Coke. "He’ll be all right. He can handle himself. And he has Shiro and Sanya with him."

"He’s been hurt three times, you know."

"Three?" I asked.

"Three. With you. Every time."

"So it’s my fault." My turn to chop vegetables like teenagers in a slasher movie. "I see."

I couldn’t see her face but her voice was, more than anything else, tired. "It isn’t about blame. Or whose fault it is. All that matters is that when you’re around, my husband, my children’s father, gets hurt."

The knife slipped and I cut off a neat little slice of skin on my index finger. "Ow," I snarled. I slapped the cold water on in the sink and put my finger under it. You can’t tell, with cuts like that, how bad they’re going to be until you see how much you’re leaking. Charity passed me a paper towel, and I examined the cut for a minute before wrapping the towel around it. It wasn’t bad, though it hurt like hell. I watched my blood stain the paper towel for a minute and then I asked, "Why didn’t you get rid of me, then?"

I looked up to see Charity frowning at me. There were dark circles under her eyes that I hadn’t noticed before. "What do you mean?"

"Just now," I said. "When Shiro asked you if Michael would help me. You could have said no."

"But he would have helped you in an instant. You know that."

"Shiro didn’t."

Her expression became confused. "I don’t understand."

"You could have lied."

Her face registered comprehension, and some fire came back into her eyes. "I don’t like you, Mister Dresden. I certainly don’t care enough for you to abandon beliefs I hold dear, to use you as an excuse to cheapen myself, or to betray what my husband stands for." She stepped to a cabinet and got out a small, neat medical kit. Without another word, she took my hand and the paper towel and opened the kit.

"So you’re taking care of me?" I asked.

"I don’t expect you to understand. Whether or not I can personally stand you, it has no bearing on what choices I make. Michael is your friend. He would risk his life for you. It would break his heart if you came to grief, and I will not allow that to happen."

She fell silent and doctored the cut with the same brisk, confident motions she’d used for cooking. I hear that they make disinfectants that don’t hurt these days.

But Charity used iodine.

Chapter Sixteen

Shiro came out of the office and showed me an address written on a piece of paper. "We meet them tonight at eight."

"After sundown," I noted. "I know the place. I’ll pick you up here?"

"Yes. I will need a little time to prepare."

"Me too. Around seven." I told them good-bye and headed for the door. Charity didn’t answer me but Shiro did. I got into my car. More kids came pelting into the house as I did, two boys and a girl. The smaller of the two boys stopped to peer at my car, but Charity appeared in the door and chivvied him inside. She frowned at me until I coaxed the Blue Beetle to life and pulled out.

Driving home left me with too much time to think. This duel with Ortega was something I had no way to prepare for. Ortega was a warlord of the Red Court. He’d probably fought duels before. Which meant that he’d killed people before. Hell, maybe even wizards. I’d squared off against various toughs but that had been free-for-all fighting. I had been able to find ways to cheat, by and large. In a one-on-one duel, I wasn’t going to be able to fall back on cleverness, to take advantage of whatever I could find in my environment.

This was going to be a straight fight, and if Ortega was better than me, he’d kill me. Simple as that. The fear was simple, too. Simple and undeniable.

I swallowed, and my knuckles turned white. I tried to relax my fingers but they wouldn’t. They were too afraid to let go of the wheel. Stupid fingers.

I got back to my apartment, pried my fingers off the steering wheel, and found my door halfway open. I ducked to one side, in case someone had a gun pointed up the narrow stairway down to my apartment door, and drew out my blasting rod.

"Harry?" called a quiet, female voice from my apartment. "Harry, is that you?"

I lowered the blasting rod. "Murph?"

"Get inside," Murphy said. I looked down the stairway and saw her appear in the doorway, her face pale. "Hurry."

I came down the stairs warily, feeling out my wards as I did. They were intact, and I relaxed a little. I had given Murphy a personalized talisman that would let her through my defenses, and it would only have worked for her.