Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(119)

“Tonight was high-stress and special. I’m pretty sure any fight Lara starts in the future is going to be set up so that we don’t get a turn,” I said.

Karrin turned bright blue eyes up to me. “So? You want to kill her right here, drop her in the lake?”

“Course not,” I said, annoyed.

“Then stop borrowing trouble,” she said. “Either throw down right now, or accept the fact that by not doing so, you’re giving her the upper hand. Either way, complaining isn’t going to help you.”

“If the Council gives me the boot,” I said, “there’s nothing stopping her from coming at me however she wants.”

Karrin snorted. “Merely Mab.”

I pursed my lips. True, that. Honestly, my long-term prognosis was for death by Mab, one way or another, but until I fell trying to do something for her, I had a certain advantage in my role as the official Thug of Winter. I was high-profile. Anyone who wanted to come at me outside of the various shadow games would have to run a table of serious risks to make the attempt—and even then, if they didn’t pull it off perfectly, so that they could vanish the body and avoid my death curse, it would be bound to catch up to them sooner or later in the person of the Winter Queen.

Nobody particularly cared to cross anyone from Winter—much less the Sidhe who ruled over the other predatory fae by dint of sheer wickedness and power. Mab’s reputation and force of personality had created the Unseelie Accords from whole cloth.

Mab was not a kind or gentle boss, but she’d never betrayed me, either.

When she made a promise, she meant it, and everyone knew it. Everyone but Ethniu, apparently.

I found myself turning the binding crystal over and over in my hand. It was about six inches long and between an inch and two inches thick, and glowed with a very, very faint luminescence that one could see only indirectly.

“That like the one you used on Thomas?” Murph asked.

“Yeah.”

“You think you can get a Titan inside one of those?”

“Sure,” I lied.

She spat casually over the side of the boat and gave me a look.

I grimaced. “Bindings are difficult work. You pit your will against whatever you’re trying to bind. If your will is stronger, it gets bound. If not …”

“Whatever you tried to bind comes to kill you?”

“She was doing that anyway,” I pointed out.

Karrin bobbed her head to one side in a little gesture of acceptance. “So your head is harder than Thomas’s?”

“He wasn’t in much shape to fight,” I said. I chewed on my lip thoughtfully. “He’d had a long, long day.”

Karrin nodded. “You hurt him putting him in there. Didn’t you.”

“Maybe more than he’s ever been hurt,” I said. “Didn’t have many options.”

“Mother of God.” She looked up at me and then out at the dark. “I’m sorry that you had to do that to him.”

“Didn’t hurt me.”

“Sure. What happens to Thomas if you don’t make it through the fight?”

“He stays there,” I said. “Probably for good.”

“Harry, I need your honesty here. Can he be healed? Or are you just buying him time?”

I shrugged a shoulder and shook my head. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t?”

“Hey, I’m making this up as I go along.” I thought of my brother, trapped in a crystal prison for the next foreseeable eternity. And Justine and his kid, alone. “But I have to try.”

She exhaled through her teeth and nodded. “You do.”

The boat chugged steadily through the water back toward town. We both stood, staring toward it, silent tension rising.

I felt her hand slip into mine.

There were lights shining in the city now, though we couldn’t see them until we got within sight of shore—candles in windows. Larger fires, maybe in trash cans.

The city was silent and dim in the darkness, unnaturally still.

Waiting.

And somewhere inside it, my daughter would be asleep right now, with Mouse somewhere under her feet.

I thought of the hideous scarlet light of the Eye, tearing through Marcone’s little fortress.

“ This …” I breathed. “This is too big.”

“What do you mean?” she asked.

“It’s too big,” I said. “This isn’t a war-torn nation where it can be explained away. Or an odd-duck private investigator with a quirky shtick. It’s Chicago. Ethniu and King Corb aren’t even trying to keep this quiet. The kind of blood that’s going to be spilled … It will cry out.”

“People will be terrified,” Murphy said.

“And they’ll set out to destroy what frightens them,” I said. “It’ll make the Spanish Inquisition look like a bouncy castle.”

Murphy shuddered. “If Ethniu and Corb pull this off, they’ll set the mortal world and the supernatural world at war.”

I stared ahead at the dim skyline of my city, ghostly in the darkness.

“Yeah,” I growled. “If.”

And I gave the old boat all it had.