Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(3)

“That stunt he pulled with Mab this spring,” I said, scowling.

Ramirez shrugged and spread his hands. “Marcone maneuvered Nicodemus Archleone into a corner and took everything he had, without breaking a single one of the bylaws of the Accords. Say what you will about the man, but he’s competent. It impressed a lot of people.”

“Yeah,” I said darkly. “That was all him. Tell me that the Council doesn’t want me to be our emissary.”

Ramirez blinked. “Wait, what? Oh … oh God, no, Harry. I mean … no. Just no.”

My brother covered up his mouth with one hand and coughed. I chose to ignore the wrinkles at the corners of his eyes.

Ramirez cleared his throat before continuing. “But they will expect you to be the Council’s liaison with Winter, if needed, and to provide security for the Senior Council members in attendance. Everyone will be conducting themselves under guest-right, but they’ll all bring their own muscle, too.”

“Trust but verify,” I said. I took off the weighted vest with disgust and tossed it onto the beach. It made an extremely weighty thump when it hit.

Ramirez arched an eyebrow. “Christ, Harry. How much does that thing weigh?”

“Two-twenty,” I replied.

He shook his head. His expression, for a moment, was probing and pensive. I’d learned to recognize the look—that “I wonder if Harry Dresden is still Harry Dresden or if the Queen of Air and Darkness has turned him into her personal monster” look.

I get that one a lot these days. Sometimes in the mirror.

I looked down at my feet again and studied the ground. I could see it better as the sun drew nearer the horizon.

“You sure the Senior Council wants me to be on the security team?” I asked.

Ramirez nodded firmly. “I’m heading it up. They told me I could pick my own team. I’m picking you. I want you there.”

“Where you can more easily keep an eye on him,” Thomas murmured.

Ramirez grinned and inclined his head. “Maybe. Or maybe I just want to see some more buildings burn down.” He nodded to me and said, “Harry. I’ll be in touch.”

I nodded back. “Good to see you, ’Los.”

“Raith,” Ramirez said.

“Warden Ramirez,” my brother answered.

Ramirez shambled off, leaning on his cane, moving without much grace but with considerable energy.

“Well,” Thomas said. He watched Ramirez depart, and his eyes narrowed in thought. “It looks like I’d better get moving. Things are going to get complicated.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “Maybe it’ll be a nice dinner, and everyone will sing ‘Kumbaya’ together.”

He eyed me.

I looked down at my feet again and said, “Yeah. Maybe not.”

He snorted, clapped my arm, and started walking back to the car without saying anything further. I knew he’d wait for me.

Once he was gone, I stepped out of the depression in the sand and picked up my weighted vest. Then I turned and studied it as the sun began to come up in earnest and I could finally see clearly.

I’d been standing in a humanoid footprint.

It was well over three feet long.

Once I looked, I saw that there was a line of them, with several yards stretching between each one and the next. The line led toward the water. The rising lakeshore breeze was already beginning to blur the footprints’ outlines.

Maybe their appearance was a complete coincidence.

Yeah. Maybe not.

I slung the weighted vest over my shoulder and started trudging back to the car. I had that sinking feeling that things were about to get hectic again.





2


Thomas came with me back to my place for a post-exercise breakfast.

Well. Technically, it was Molly’s place. But she wasn’t around much, and I was living there.

The svartalf embassy in Chicago was a neat little building in the business district, with a lawn that was an absolute gaping expanse when you considered the cost of real estate in town. It looked like the kind of building that should be full of people in severely sober business attire, doing things with money and numbers that were too complicated, fussy, and god-awful boring to be widely understood.

As it happened, that was pretty close to the truth.

There was a little guardhouse on the drive in, a fairly recent feature, and a bland-looking man in a bland and expensive fitted suit and dark sunglasses looked up from his book. We stopped at the window and I said, “The purple mustang flies tonight.”

The guard stared at me.

“ Uh … hang on,” I said, and racked my brain. “Sad Tuesdays present no problem to the local authorities?”

He kept staring at me. “State your names, please.”

“Oh come on, Austri,” I said. “Do we have to do this dance every single morning? You know who I am. Hell, we watched the kids play together for an hour last night.”

“I wasn’t on duty then,” Austri said, his tone entirely neutral, his eyes flat. “State your names, please.”

“Once,” I said. “Just once, would it kill you to let security protocol slide?”

He gave me more of that blank stare, a slow blink, and said, “Potentially. Which is why we have security protocols.”