Small Favor

Molly’s eyes gleamed. "Excellent," she said, and hurried over to join me.

Chapter Sixteen

I was more than an hour late, and Murphy was not amused.

"Your nose looks worse than it did yesterday," she said when I sat down at the table. "I think the black eyes have grown, too."

"Gosh, you’re cute when you’re angry," I responded.

Her eyes narrowed dangerously.

"It makes your little button nose all pink and your eyes get bloodshot and even bluer."

"Did you have any last words, Dresden, or should I just choke you now?"

"Mac!" I called, raising a hand. "Two pale!"

She fixed me with a steady look and said, "Don’t think you can buy your way out of this with good beer."

"I don’t," I said, rising. "I’m buying my way out of it with really, really good beer."

I walked over to the bar as Mac set two bottles of his microbrewed liquid nirvana down and took off the caps with a deft twist of his hand, disdaining a bottle opener. I winked at him and picked up both bottles, then sauntered back over to Murphy.

I gave her my bottle, took mine, and we drank. She paused after the first taste and blinked at the bottle before drinking again more deeply. "This beer," she pronounced after that, "just saved your life."

"Mac’s a master beeromancer," I replied. I’d never tell him, but at the time I wished he’d serve his brew cold. I’d have loved to hold a frosty bottle against my aching head for a moment. You’d think the pain from the damned broken nose would fade eventually. But it just kept on stubbornly burning.

We had settled down at a table along one wall of the pub. There are thirteen tables in the room, and thirteen wooden pillars, each extensively carved with scenes mostly out of Old World fairy tales. The bar is crooked and has thirteen stools, and thirteen ceiling fans whir lazily overhead. The setup of the entire place is designed to diffuse and refract random magical energies, the kind that often gather around practitioners of magic when they’re grumpy or out of sorts. It offers a measure of protection from accumulated negative energies, enough to make sure that annoying or depressing "vibes," for lack of a more precise term, don’t adversely affect the moods and attitudes of the pub’s clientele.

It doesn’t keep out any of the supernatural riffraff-that’s what the sign by the door is for. Mac had the place legally recognized as neutral ground among the members of the Unseelie Accords, and members of any of the Accorded nations had a responsibility to avoid conflict in such a place, or at least to take it outside.

Still, neutral ground is safe only until someone thinks they can get away with violating the Accords. It’s best to be cautious there.

"On the other hand," Murphy said, more quietly, "maybe you’re too pathetic to beat to death right now."

"My nose, you mean. Compared to the way my hand felt, it’s nothing," I said.

"Still can’t be much fun."

"Well. No."

She watched me through her next sip and then said, "You’re about to play the wizard card and tell me to butt out."

"Not exactly," I said.

She gave me her cop eyes, all professionally detached neutrality, and nodded once. "So talk."

"Remember the guys from the airport a few years back?"

"Yeah. Killed the old Okinawan guy in the chapel. He died real bad."

I smiled faintly. "I think he’d probably argue the point, if he could."

She shrugged and said, tone quietly flat, "It was a mess."

"The guys behind it are back. They’ve abducted Marcone."

Murphy frowned, her eyes distant for a moment, calculating. "They’re grabbing his business?"

"Or forcing him onto their team," I said. "I’m not sure yet. We’re working on it."

"We?"

"You remember Michael?" I asked.

"Charity’s husband?"

"Yeah."

"I remember that at the airport we found a couple of men with no tongues and fake identification. They’d been killed with long blades. Swords, if you can believe that in this day and age. It was messy, Harry." She put her hands flat on the table and leaned toward me. "I don’t like messy."

"I’m all kinds of sorry about that, Murph," I said. It’s possible that a grain or two of sarcasm was showing in my reply. "I’ll be sure to ask them to put on the kid gloves. If I survive asking the question, I’ll let you know what they say."

Murphy regarded me calmly. "They’re back, then?"

I nodded. "Only this time they brought more friends to the party."

She nodded. "Where are they?"

"No, Murph."

"Where are they, Harry?" Murph asked, her voice hard. "If they’re that dangerous, I’m not waiting for them to choose their ground so that we have to rush into a hostile situation in response to them. We’ll go after them right now, before they have a chance to hurt anyone else."

"It’d be a slaughter, Murphy."

"Maybe," she said. "Maybe not. You’d be surprised what kinds of resources the department has gotten its hands on, what with the whole War on Terror."

"Right. And you’re going to tell your bosses what?"

"That the same terrorists who attacked the airport and murdered a woman in the marina are in the city, planning another operation. That the only way to ensure the safety of its citizens is to preemptively assault them. Then show up with SWAT, SI, every cop in town, anyone we can get from the Bureau, and all the military backup available on short notice."

I sat back in my chair at that, startled at Murphy’s tone-and at the possibilities.

Hell. The kind of firepower she was talking about might give even the Denarians pause. And given the current climate, terrorist plot was all but synonymous with respond with overwhelming force. Oh, sure, most modern weaponry was far less effective on supernatural targets than anyone without knowledge of them would expect-but even reduced to the effectiveness of bee stings, enough bee stings can be just as deadly as a knife in the heart.

Humanity, at large, enjoys a dichotomous role in supernatural politics. On the one hand they are sneered at and held in contempt for being patently unable to come to grips with reality, to the point where the supernatural world hardly needed to bother to hide from them. Given half a chance, the average human being would rationalize the most bizarre of encounters down to "unusual but explainable" events. They are referred to as herd animals by a lot of the things that prey on them, and often toyed with and tormented.