Small Favor

Chapter Thirty-five

I slept in the cab of Michael's truck all the way back to his place, leaning against the passenger-side window. Sanya had the middle seat. I was dimly aware that they were speaking quietly to each other on the way home, but their voices were just low rumbles, especially Sanya's, and I tuned them out until the truck crunched to a halt.

"It doesn't matter," Michael was saying in a patient voice. "Sanya, we don't recruit members. We're not a chapter of the Masons. It's got to be a calling."

"We act in the interests of God on a daily basis," Sanya said in a reasonable voice. "If He is being slow to call a new wielder for Fidelacchius, perhaps it is a subtle hint that He wishes us to take on the responsibility for ourselves."

"Don't you keep assuring me you are undecided on whether or not God exists?" Michael asked.

"I am speaking to you in your idiom, to make you comfortable," Sanya said. "She would make a good Knight."

Michael sighed. "Perhaps the reason no new wielder has been called is because our task is nearly complete. Perhaps one isn't needed."

Sanya's voice turned dry. "Yes. Perhaps all evil, everywhere, is about to be destroyed forever and there will be no more need for the strength to protect those who cannot protect themselves." He sighed. "Or perhaps..." he began, glancing at me. He saw me blinking my eyes open and hurriedly said, "Dresden. How are you feeling?"

"Nothing a few days in a hospital, a new set of lungs, a keg of Mac's dark, and a pair of feisty redheads couldn't cure," I mumbled. I tried for cavalier, but it came out a little flatter and darker than I'd meant it to. "I'll live."

Michael nodded and parked the truck. "When do we go after them?"

"We don't," I said quietly. "They've developed some kind of stealth defense against being found or scried upon magically."

Michael frowned. "Are you sure?"

"I'm sure it's really hard to defeat someone you can't find, Michael." I rubbed at my eyes and all but slapped my own hand away, it hurt so much. Ow. Stupid broken nose. Stupid Tessa tweaking it.

"You need to get some sleep, Harry," Michael said quietly.

"And perhaps a shower," Sanya suggested.

"You smell like dolphin water too, big guy," I shot back.

"But not nearly so much," he said. "And I didn't throw up on myself."

I glowered at him for a second. "Isn't Sanya a girl's name?"

Michael snorted. "Get some sleep first, Harry."

"After," I said. "First things first. War council in the kitchen. And if someone doesn't make me a cup of coffee, I'm going to shimmy dry all over everything, like Mouse."

"Mouse is too polite to do that in my house," Michael said.

"Like somebody else's dog then," I said. "Crap, I forgot my staff."

Michael swung out of the truck, reached into the bed of the pickup, and lifted my staff out of it. I got out, and he tossed it to me across the back of the truck. I caught it in my left hand and nodded to him. "Bless you. It's a real pain to make one of these. Way harder to carve out than, uh..." I shook my head as my thoughts wandered off-track. "Sorry. Long day."

"Get inside before you take a chill," Michael said quietly.

"Good idea."

We trooped in. The others arrived over the next twenty minutes or so. Gard had insisted on taking Kincaid by one of Marcone's buildings-probably someplace where he kept medical supplies for those times when he didn't want the police wondering why his employees came in with gunshot or knife wounds. To my amusement, Murphy had insisted on accompanying Kincaid-which meant that the cops were about to learn the location of another of Marcone's secret stashes, maybe even the name of whatever doctor he had on his payroll. And since it was Murphy's car, and Murphy was with me, and Gard needed my help, there wasn't diddly Gard could do about it.

That's my Murphy, manufacturing her own damned silver lining when the clouds didn't cough one up.

Mouse was delighted to see me, and greeted me with much fond twitching and bumping against my legs and tail wagging. He, at least, thought I merely smelled interesting. Molly greeted us with only slightly less enthusiasm, and immediately set about making food for everyone. It turns out that Molly wasn't her mother's daughter in that respect. Charity was like the MacGyver of the kitchen. She could whip up a five-course meal for twelve from an egg, two spaghetti noodles, some household chemicals, and a stick of chewing gum. Molly...

Molly once burned my egg. My boiled egg. I don't know how.

She could, however, make a mean cup of coffee.

Once Kincaid had been settled down on the guest bed in Charity's sewing room, everyone else gathered in the kitchen. Murphy looked strained. I poured her a cup of joe, and she came to stand next to me. I offered Luccio one as well. She accepted with a small, grateful nod.

"How is he?" she asked Murphy.

"Sleeping," Murphy said. "Gard got him some painkillers."

I guzzled coffee, fighting off a round of chills. "Okay, people. Here's the situation. We are bent over, greased up, and Nicodemus and his crew are about to drive one of those Japanese bullet trains right up our collective ass."

The room went quiet.

"They took Ivy," I said. "That's bad."

"Harry," Murphy said, "I know I'm the new kid, but you're going to have to explain this thing with the little girl to me again."

"Ivy is the Archive," I said quietly. "A long time ago-we don't know when-somebody-we don't know who-created the Archive. A kind of intellectual construct."

"What?" Sanya asked.

"A kind of entity composed of pure information. Think of it as software for the brain," Luccio said. "Like a very advanced database management system."

"Ah," Sanya said, nodding.

I arched an eyebrow at Luccio in surprise.

She shrugged, smiling a little. "I like computers. I read all about them. It's...my hobby, really. I understand the theory behind them."

"Right," I said. "Ahem. Okay. The Archive is passed from one generation to the next, mother to daughter-all the memories of the previous bearers of the Archive, and all the facts they have gathered.

"All that knowledge makes the Archive powerful-and it was created as a repository of learning, a safeguard against the possibility of a cataclysm of civilization, a loss of all knowledge, the destruction of all learning. It was bound to neutrality, to the preservation and gathering of knowledge."

"Gathering?" Murphy said. "So...the Archive reads a lot?"

"It goes deeper than that," I said. "The Archive is a magic so complex that it's practically alive-and it just knows. Anything that gets printed or written down, the Archive knows."

Hendricks said a bad word.

"Sideways," I agreed. "That's what Nicky and the Nickelheads have taken."

"With that kind of information at their disposal," Murphy said, "they could...My God, they could blackmail officials. Control governments."

"Launch nuclear warheads," I said. "Stop thinking so small." I nodded at Michael. "Remember, you told me that Nicodemus was playing Armageddon lotto. He makes big plans, but he plots them out so that he can make an incremental profit along the way. This was just one more scheme."

Michael frowned. "He was after the Archive all along? He deliberately came here and provoked a confrontation to get you to call her in to arbitrate?"

"That isn't much of a plan," Luccio said. "You could have chosen any one of a dozen neutral arbiters."

Murphy snorted. "But it's Dresden. He's lived in the same apartment since I first met him. Drives the same car. Drinks at that same little pub. Favorite restaurant is Burger King. He gets the same damned meal every time he goes there, too."

"You can't improve on perfection," I said. "That's why it's called perfection. And what's your point?"

"You're a creature of habit, Harry. You don't like change."

There wasn't much use denying that. "Even if I hadn't called Ivy, Nicodemus still could realize some gains. Maybe recruit Marcone. Maybe kill off Michael or Sanya. Maybe ditch some deadwood within his own organization. Who knows? The point is, I did call Ivy in, he did get the opportunity to take her down, and it paid off."

"But the Archive was created neutral," Sanya said. "Constrained. You said so yourself."

"The Archive was," I said. "But Ivy wasn't, and Ivy controls the Archive. She's still a child. That child can be hurt. Frightened. Coerced. Tempted." I rubbed at the spot between my eyes. "They want to make her one of them. Probably hoping to gobble up Marcone along the way."

"God help us if they're taken," Murphy said quietly.

"God help them if they're taken," Michael murmured. "We have to find them, Harry."

"Not even Mab could locate the Denarians with magic," I said. "Gard. Could your firm do any better?"

She shook her head.

I glanced at Michael. "I don't suppose anyone's drawn a big flashing arrow in the sky for you two to see?"

Michael shook his head, his expression sober. "I looked."

"Okay, then. Barring divine intervention we have no way of finding them." I took a deep breath. "So. We're going to make them find us."

"That would be a good trick if we could do it," Sanya said. "What did you have in mind?"

Hendricks lifted his head suddenly. "Coins."

Everyone turned to stare at him.

Hendricks counted on his fingers for a second. "They only got six. And six people. So how they gonna get the creepy little girl a coin? Or one for the boss?"

"Good thinking, Cujo," I said. "It'll only hurt for a minute. But we've got to move fast to make it work. Nicodemus can't afford to throw away any more manpower, but his conscience won't hesitate for one itty-bitty second to kill one of his own people for their coin, if it comes to that. So we're going to offer him a trade. Eleven old nickels in exchange for the girl."

Michael and Sanya both came to their feet in an instant, speaking loudly and in two different languages. It was hard to make out individual words, but the gestalt of their protest amounted to, Are you out of your mind?

"Dammit all, Michael!" I said, swinging around to face him, thrusting out my jaw. "If Nicodemus manages to take the Archive, it won't matter how many of the damned coins you have locked away."

Silence. The clock in the entry hall ticked very loudly.

I didn't back down. "Right now six demons are torturing an eleven-year-old girl. The same way they tortured me. The same way they tortured Shiro."

Michael flinched.

"Look me in the eye," I told him, "and tell me you think that we should let that child suffer when we have the means to save her."

Tick, tock.

Tick, tock.

Michael shook his head.

Sanya subsided, sinking back to lean against a cabinet again, his expression pensive and solemn.

"Nicodemus will never accept that trade," Michael said quietly.

Luccio smiled, showing a lot of teeth. "Of course he will. Why sacrifice a useful retainer when he can show up for the exchange, double-cross us, steal the coins, and keep the Archive?"

"Bingo," I said. "And we'll be ready for him. Captain, do you know how to contact him through the channels outlined in the Accords?"

"Yes," she said.

"Harry," Michael said gently, "we're taking a terrible risk."

He and Luccio exchanged a glance pregnant with silence, swayed by deep undercurrents.

"At this point," Luccio said, "the only riskier thing we can do is..." She shrugged and spread her hands. "Nothing."

Michael grimaced and crossed himself. "God be with us."

"Amen," Sanya said, winking over Michael's shoulder at me.

"Call Nicodemus," I said. "Tell him I want to make a deal."

Chapter Thirty-six

I t takes time to go through channels.

The last thing I wanted to do was get wet again, but I was still freezing, and shaky, and as it turns out, there are a number of other inconvenient and unpleasant side effects to accidentally gulping down gallons of salt water. It's the little things that get to you the most.

It took me a couple of hours to get my system straightened out, get showered, and get horizontal, and by the time I finally did it I was so tired that I could barely focus my eyes. Molly was committing dinner by that time, aided and abetted by Sanya, who seemed to take some kind of grim Russian delight in watching train wrecks in progress. I fell down on the couch to debate whether or not I wanted to risk putting anything else in the pipes, and Rip van Winkled my way right through the danger.

I didn't want to wake up. I was having a dream where I wasn't hurt, and no one was kicking me around. The walls were white and smooth and clean, lit only by frosty moonlight, and someone with a gentle voice was speaking quietly to me. But my right hand had broken into fierce tingling, all pins and needles, and sleep began to retreat. I started to wake slowly. Voices murmured in the room.

"...can she possibly be sure?" Murphy demanded in a heated whisper.

"It isn't my area of knowledge," Michael rumbled back. "Ma'am?"

Luccio's tone was cautious. "It is a delicate area of the art," she said. "But the girl does have a gift."

"Then we need to say something."

"You can't," Molly said, her tone quiet and sad. "It wouldn't help. It might make things worse."

"And you know that?" Murphy demanded. "You know that for a fact?"

I was so tired, I'd probably missed a sentence or three in there. I blinked my eyes open and said muzzily, "The kid knows what she's talking about." I fumbled about and found Mouse lying on the floor beside the couch, immediately under my arm. I decided sitting up could wait for a minute. "What are we talking about?"

Molly gave Murphy a look that said, There, see?

Murphy shook her head and said, "I'm going to see if Kincaid is awake yet." She left, her expression set in stony displeasure.

Mouse set about industriously licking my right hand, a canine grooming ritual he sometimes pursued. It broke up the pins and needles a bit, so I didn't argue. I still had no idea what was up with my hand. I'd never heard of anything like this happening to anyone-but it wasn't terribly uncomfortable, and all things considered it wasn't anywhere near the top of my priority list at the moment.

Nobody answered my question, though.

The silence got awkward. I coughed uncomfortably. "Uh. Anyone know what time it is?"

"Almost midnight," Luccio said quietly.

I waited for a minute, but apparently no one was going to do me a favor and knock me unconscious again, so I did my best to ignore the aches and pains and sat up. "What's the word from Nicodemus?"

"He hasn't returned our call," Luccio said.

"Not really a surprise," I muttered, raking my fingers through my hair. I'd gone to sleep wearing one of Michael's old pairs of sweats and one of his T-shirts, so my ankles stuck way out, and both shirt and sweats fit me as well as a tent. "Whatever they're doing to keep Ivy restrained, it's got to be pretty elaborate. I'd hold my calls until I was sure it was solid, too."

"As would I," Luccio agreed.

"Is she really that dangerous?" Michael asked.

"Yes," Luccio said calmly. "The Council regards her as a significant power in her own right, on par with the youngest Queens of the Sidhe Courts."

"If anything, I think that profile in the Wardens' files underestimates her," I said quietly. "She had barely anything to work with, and she was making Tessa and her crew look like pygmies trying to capture an elephant. If she hadn't been cut off so entirely, I think she'd have eaten them alive."

Luccio frowned, disturbed. "Truly?"

"You had to have seen it," I said. "I've never seen anyone...You had to have seen it."

"If she's that powerful," Michael said quietly, "can she be contained?"

"Oh, yes," I said. "Absolutely. But it would take a greater circle-heavy-duty ritual stuff in a prepared location. And it would have to be freaking flawless, or she could break it."

Molly screwed up her face in distress. "She won't...won't take one of the coins. Will she?" She glanced back and forth between Luccio and me and shrugged a little. "Because...it would be bad if she did."

I looked at Michael. "The Fallen can't just jump in and overwhelm someone, can they? Outright, nonconsensual possession?"

"Not normally," Michael replied. "There are circumstances that can change that, though. Mentally damaged people can be susceptible to it. Other things can open a spirit to possession. Drugs, involvement with dark rituals, extended, deliberate contact with spiritual entities. A few other things."

"Drugs," I said tiredly. "Jesus."

Michael winced.

"Sorry."

"Even if a soul is made vulnerable to assault," Michael said, "the mind and will can fight against an invasive spirit. Surely the Archive qualifies as a formidable mind and will."

"Sure. But that doesn't necessarily mean that Ivy does. Since she was born she's been the Archive. She's never had a chance to develop her own mind, her own personality." I stood up, shaking my head, and started to pace restlessly around the room. "She's going to be helpless, probably for the first time since she could walk. Alone. Scared." I looked at Michael. "You think that those...people...won't know how to terrify a little girl?"

He grimaced and bowed his head.

"And then along comes the Fallen and tells her how it can help her. How it wants to be her friend. How it can make the bad people stop hurting her." I shook my head and clenched my hands. "Maybe she'll know the facts. But those facts aren't going to be much comfort to her. They aren't going to feel tr-"

I blinked and looked at Michael. Then Molly. Then I stormed past them into the kitchen and grabbed the pad of paper Charity kept stuck to the fridge with a magnet to use to make grocery lists. I found a pencil on top of the fridge and sat down at the kitchen table, writing furiously.

Ivy,

You are not alone.

Kincaid is alive. I'm all right. We're coming after you.

Don't listen to them. Hang on.

We're coming.

You are not alone.

Harry

"Oh," said Molly, reading over my shoulder. "That's clever."

"If it works," Luccio said. "Will she know it?"

"I don't know," I said. "But I don't know what else I can do." I rubbed at my forehead. "Is there any food?"

"I made pot roast," Molly said.

"But is there any food?"

She swatted me on the back of the head, though not too hard, and went to the refrigerator.

I made a sandwich out of things. I'm an American. We can eat anything as long as it's between two pieces of bread. With enough mustard I almost couldn't taste the roast. For a few minutes I paid attention to eating, and was hungry enough to actually enjoy part of the experience-the part where Molly's pot roast finally terrified my growling stomach into silence.

The phone rang.

Michael answered. He listened for a moment and then said gently, "It isn't too late to seek redemption. Not even for you."

Someone laughed merrily on the other end of the phone.

"Just a moment," Michael said a breath later. He turned, holding his hand over the phone, and said, "Harry."

"Him," I said.

Michael nodded.

I went to the phone and took it from him. "Dresden."

"I'm impressed, Dresden," Nicodemus said. "I expected the Hellhound to make a good showing, of course, but you surprised me. Your skills are developing quite rapidly. Tessa is furious with you."

"I'm tired," I replied. "Do you want to talk deal or not?"

"I wouldn't have called, otherwise," Nicodemus replied. "But let's keep this a bit simpler, shall we? Just you and me. I have no desire to drag Chicago's underworld or the rest of the White Council into this ugly little affair. Mutually guaranteed safe passage, of course."

"We did that once," I said.

"And despite the fact that you betrayed the neutrality of the meeting well before I or any of my people took action-which I take as a highly promising act on your part-I am willing to extend my trust to you once more."

I bit out a little laugh. "Yeah. You're a saint."

"One day," Nicodemus said. "One day. But for now, let's say a face-to-face meeting. A talk. Just you and I."

"So you and your posse can jump me alone? No, thanks."

"Come now. As you say, I do want to talk deal. If you're willing to extend your word of safe passage, we can even have it on your own ground."

"Oh?" I asked. "And where would that be?"

"It doesn't matter to me, as long as I don't have to be seen with you while you're wearing that ridiculous borrowed ensemble."

The hairs on the back of my neck started crawling up into my hairline. I turned my head around very slightly. The windows to the Carpenters' backyard had blinds and curtains, but neither was wholly drawn. The kitchen lights made the windows into mirrors. I couldn't see beyond them.

"What is it going to be, Dresden?" Nicodemus asked. "Will you give me your word of safe passage for our talk? Or shall I have my men open fire on that lovely young lady at the kitchen sink?"

I glanced over my shoulder to where Molly was drying dishes. She watched me out of the corner of her eye, clearly interested in the discussion, but trying not to look like it.

I couldn't possibly warn anyone before Nick's men could open fire-and I believed that he had them there. Probably up in the tree house. It had a reasonably good view of the kitchen.

"All right," I said, speaking so that everyone there could hear me. "I'm giving you my word of safe passage. For ten minutes."

"And hope to die?" Nicodemus prompted.

I gritted my teeth. "At the rate we're going, someone will."

He laughed again. "Keep the subject matter of this conversation between you and I, and it won't have to be anyone in the kitchen."

The phone disconnected.

A beat later someone knocked at the front door.

Mouse's growl rumbled through the whole house, even though he'd remained in the front room.

"Harry?" Michael asked.

I found my shoes and stuffed my bare feet into them. "I'm going out to talk to him. Keep an eye on us, but don't do anything if he doesn't start it. And watch your back. The last chat with him was a distraction." I stood up, pulled on my duster, and picked up my staff. I met Michael's eyes and said, "Watch your back."

Michael's head tilted slightly. Then he looked past me, to the windows to the backyard. "Be careful."

I took my shield bracelet out of my duster pocket and fastened it on, wincing as it went over the mild burns on my wrist. "You know me, Michael. I'm always careful."

I walked to the front door and looked out the window.

The lights on the street were all out, except for the streetlight in front of Michael's house. Nicodemus stood in the center of the street outside. His shadow stretched out long and dark to one side of him-the side opposite the one it should have been on, given the position of the light.

Mouse came to my side and planted himself there firmly.

I rested my hand on my dog's thick neck for a moment, searching the darkness outside for anything or anyone else. I saw nothing-which meant nothing, really. Anything could be out there in the dark.

But the only thing I knew was out there was a scared little girl.

"Let's go," I said to Mouse, and stalked out into the snow.