Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(49)
“Without your support,” I said very quietly, “he has no chance at all.”
She closed her eyes and exhaled. Then she turned to me, her gaze intense, her eyes now a grey so deep that they were nearly blue, and said, “No, Harry. He still has one.”
I swallowed and said, “Oh.”
Me.
15
The Munstermobile wasn’t exactly designed for speed. It didn’t have power steering or power brakes—just power—and it got about two gallons to the mile.
I settled in for the drive back. Riley and the Machinegun Hummer Revue escorted me back to the front gates. I turned out of the estate and onto an unlit country road that would take me back to the highway. We’d reached the witching hour, and the summer night was overcast, pregnant with heat and rain that hadn’t fallen. The windows started steaming over as vampire Graceland receded behind me, and I cranked them down laboriously.
My brother was in trouble and Lara wasn’t going to be any help.
I thought furiously about how to get him out. The White Council wasn’t going to be of any use unless Lara went to them with a formal request—an action that would have to happen openly, and which Etri’s people would be sure to regard as a tacit admission of guilt regarding Thomas. Mab wouldn’t help Thomas. His only use to her was as a replacement Knight should anything happen to me, and she could have been deceiving me about that. She didn’t do things for the sake of kindness. If I was unable to show her the profit to Winter in saving my brother, she would care no more about him than about the floor she walked on.
My only two sources of diplomatic muscle weren’t going to be any help, and I was pretty sure that I couldn’t get into a fully on-alert svartalf stronghold and drag him out all by myself. That would be a suicide mission, just as Thomas’s had been. If I went in and took along friends for support, would it count as a murder-suicide?
God, I felt sick. And tired. Stupid cornerhounds. Stupid allergy meds.
What was I going to do?
My stomach rumbled. I debated hitting an all-night hamburger franchise when I got to the highway. On the one hand, my body definitely needed the fuel. On the other hand, my stomach felt like it would probably object to adding much of anything to it. I was fumbling in my pockets for a coin to flip when grey shapes loomed up in the road in front of me. I stood on the brakes and left broad swaths of rubber on the road behind me as I fought the big old car to a halt.
I wound up with the nose of the car pointing into the weeds and the headlights casting a harsh cone of white light, partly over the road and partly over the thick trees that hemmed it in.
I killed the engine and stared out the driver’s-side window at the four Wardens who barred my way.
Ramirez stood in the middle of the crew and slightly forward, leaning on his cane, his dark eyes steady. He’d have been the first one to meet bumper if I hadn’t been able to stop the car. Gone were the casual civilian clothes—he was dressed in the White Council’s version of tactical gear, complete with his grey Warden’s cloak.
To his right stood “Wild Bill” Meyers. Wild Bill had filled out a lot as he got into his late twenties, adding on the muscle and solidity of a maturing body. He’d grown his beard out, and it wasn’t all skinny and patchy like it used to be. He kind of reminded me of Grizzly Adams now. His cloak was shorter on him than it had been when we’d started the war with the Red Court—Wild Bill hadn’t been done growing yet. Rather than one of the enchanted swords most of the established Wardens carried, Wild Bill had a bowie knife he’d been working on steadily for years. It rode his belt across from a .45-70 Big Frame Revolver that weighed as much as my leg.
In the shadows cast to the left side of the road by my headlights stood Yoshimo, who refused to let anyone call her by her first name. It had taken Ramirez a couple of years to find out that it was Yukie, and I’m pretty sure she hadn’t forgiven him. She was a girl of Okinawan heritage, about five four, and she carried a katana on her hip and an assault rifle on a strap around one shoulder. She could use either of them like a Hong Kong action-movie star.
The fourth member of Ramirez’s crew stood to his left, looking steadily into my headlights. He was a slim, very dapper young man dressed in a camel-colored bespoke suit and wearing a neatly complementary bowler hat. Chandler had indulged in experimental facial hair as well, and currently sported a thick, fierce Freddie Mercury mustache. It could have looked dopey with his outfit, but Chandler being Chandler, he carried it off with panache. Maybe the strictly ornamental walking cane helped. He was the only one of the four not geared up for a fight—but then Chandler had always made it a point to uphold the forms of civilization harder than were strictly necessary.
The five of us had been through more than a little together, though Chandler had been our handler and point of contact, not usually a field guy.
None of them were smiling.
I could recognize game faces when I saw them.
Harry, I thought to myself. These kids might be here to hurt you.
I sat in the car for a moment while the engine clicked. Then I said, “In the future, you guys should probably look for a crosswalk. Or maybe an adult to hold your hand.”
“We need to talk, Harry,” Ramirez said. “Got a minute?”
I eyed him and then mused, “How’d you pull off the tracking spell?”