Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(41)
I sat at the little table in Butters’s apartment kitchen. I had my duster off and both arms resting on the table with my palms up. Butters sat across from me wearing loose exercise clothes. An EMT’s toolbox sat on the table next to him, and he was currently peering at my hands through his thick glasses, which he now wore in the form of securely fastened athletic goggles.
Butters was a little guy in his early forties, even littler since he’d gotten in shape. Now he was all made of wire. Maybe five foot five, but if he weighed more than a hundred and forty pounds, I’d eat my duster without salt. His hair was a dark, curly, unkempt mess, but that might have been a factor of my showing up at his door after hours.
“God,” Butters muttered, using a wipe to try to clean up the deep, gashing cuts on my hands. “You’ve got motor oil in the gashes.”
“That a problem?”
He gave me a sleepy, unamused look. “Considering all the debris it collects, yes. Yes, it is.” He sighed. “Gotta debride it. Sorry, man.”
I nodded. “Just get it over with.”
After that, it was about twenty minutes of water, Betadine solution, and a stiff-bristled brush being applied to the area around and inside the wound. Could have been worse. Butters could have used iodine. Could have been worse—but it wasn’t exactly a picnic, either. Hands are sensitive.
Twenty minutes later, I was sweating and grumpy, and Butters was glowering at the injuries with dissatisfaction. “That’s the best I can do here. I’ll wrap them up, but you’ll need to change the bandages every day and watch like hell for any sign of infection. But in the ‘ounce of prevention’ department, until you get invulnerable skin, buy some gloves to protect your hands, Hulk.”
“Not a bad idea,” I said. “How bad is the damage?”
I have this issue with feeling pain. It’s part of the Winter Knight package. When something happens to me, I sort of notice it, but ongoing pain just fades into my background. So bad things can happen to me without my knowing it, if I don’t use my head.
“I don’t think there’s damage to the actual working structure of your hands,” Butters said. “But the human body isn’t really made for flipping trucks, man. You’ re … developed to something like the maximum potential for your height and build, but your joints are still human joints. Your cartilage is still only cartilage, and even though your body will actually heal damage to it, it has a failure point. And your bones are still just made of bone.” He shook his head. “Seriously. One of these days you’re going to try to lift something too heavy, and even if your muscles can handle it, your bones and joints won’t.”
“What’s that gonna look like?” I wondered aloud.
“An industrial accident,” Butters said. He wiped down my hands one more time, thoroughly, and then began wrapping the injuries. “Okay. So the White Council wants to give you a hard time. So what else is new?”
Butters was not up on the concept of the Black Council, a covert group of wizards who were nebulous and impossible to identify with absolute certainty, working toward goals that seemed nefarious at best. That information was being held under wraps by the wizards dedicated to fighting them. Partly because we had little hard evidence about the Black Council, what they wanted, and who their members were, and partly because the bad guys would have more trouble taking action against us if they couldn’t even be sure who was their enemy.
Butters was trustworthy, but the Black Council was a wizard problem.
“Yeah,” I said. “Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss.”
Butters gave me a look, because I’m not a very good spy, and lying to a friend doesn’t come naturally to me. But he shrugged and let it pass. “Okay.” He yawned. “When you called, you said something about health issues, plural. What else is bothering you?”
I told him about my sneezes and the conjuritis.
His eyes narrowed and he said, “This isn’t some kind of prank you’re playing on the new guy in the game, is it? Cause I’ve sort of been expecting that.”
“What? No, that’s crazy talk,” I said, and tried hard not to think about my “Dino Serenade,” due for his birthday. “This is a real problem, man.”
“Sure,” Butters said, snapping his rubber gloves off and beginning to clean up. “Whatever.”
Augh, of all the crazy things to happen in my life, I wouldn’t think that my randomly involuntarily conjuring objects out of nothing at the drop of a hat would really ping anyone’s radar. All the things happening right now, and this is the point that Butters picks to decide to stonewall me on?
I sneezed again. Hard.
There was an enormous crash as a section of mortared stone wall, maybe four feet square, landed on Butters’s kitchen floor so hard that the tables and chairs jumped off the floor. Butters yelped and fell over backwards out of his chair—into a backwards roll that brought him onto his feet right next to the steak-knife holder on the counter. He had his hand on a knife before I could get all the way to my feet.
Little guy. But fast. Knights of the Sword aren’t ever to be underestimated.
“Dere,” I said, swiping awkwardly at my nose with my forearms. “Dere, do yuh see dow?”
Butters just stared at the stone wall. Then he quivered when it shuddered, went transparent, and then collapsed into gallons and gallons of ectoplasm. The supernatural gelatin kind of spread out slowly over the floor, like a test shot for a remake of The Blob.