Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(89)

“I’ll manage,” Lara murmured, and the painful pressure of my desire was abruptly mitigated.

I gritted my teeth and said, through them, “I meant the details. Are you sure he isn’t going to see or hear anything else?”

“Give me sixty seconds,” Lara said. “Once I get close enough, he’s not going to notice anything else, even if you walked by him playing a trumpet and pounding drums. And even if he noticed, he’d not remember it.”

“Sixty seconds,” Freydis sighed. She was knotting towels together with mechanical precision. “Men.”

Lara turned her eyes to Freydis, who suddenly caught her breath, her cheeks flushing with color.

“Darling, this isn’t the same thing at all,” Lara purred. “It’s a pity your contract was so specific, or I’d demonstrate for you sometime.”

Freydis let out a deep sigh and then went back to knotting towels without looking up.

Lara gave me an impish smile, held out her hands, and said, “Help me up, Harry.”

“You don’t need any help from me,” I said, a little thickly. Even when she wasn’t shining the come-hither flashlight right in my face, Lara Raith still left me feeling a little bit dazzled.

The de facto monarch of the White Court responded with an amused laugh and entered the shaft like a diver, silently vanishing down into the darkness.

“Sixty seconds,” I muttered. “Going to take me twice that just to climb down.”

“Going to lose my mind on this damned job,” Freydis noted. “I’ll have the rope ready in five.”

“Cover,” I said.

“Oh, right.” She shook her head, dipped a hand into her dress, and took out a little wooden plaque. “If my head wasn’t attached. I’ve never worked for a client this distracting.”

She picked up my suit coat and Lara’s dress and dropped them into the boxing ring. Then she touched the plaque to them, muttered something, and snapped the wood in her fingers. There was an eye-searing flash of light that left a Norse rune shaped like a lightning bolt burned on my retina in purple, and suddenly there I was, on top of Lara in the boxing ring, making out furiously.

As illusions went, it was excellent. Just really … detailed. Maybe too much so. I turned away, a little embarrassed.

“She likes you, you know,” Freydis said, watching the illusion with amusement.

“From what I can tell, Lara mostly likes Lara,” I said.

“Maybe. But she treats you differently than she does others.”

I grunted and said, “Wonderful. Just the attention I need in my life.”

And then I shoved my shoulders and head into a narrow, lightless, handleless stone shaft and started wriggling down it in my underwear.





26


Going headfirst down a three-story shaft in complete darkness isn’t ever going to do well as a recreational business. I was completely reliant on keeping pressure against the walls to prevent me from falling. In that, the limited space was actually useful—it meant more of my body’s surface area could be pressed against the walls, and less strain being placed on any one spot.

Unless the hand-cut stone shaft narrowed along the line and I got stuck, in which case I was just screwed. Or if it got a lot wider, in which case, also screwed. I might be kind of tough, but a three-story fall onto my head wasn’t going to end well.

I started shimmying down. It was tough work, but I’d been doing a lot of cardio.

Lara had evidently left the dumbwaiter door open behind her, because there was dim light coming through, showing me a lumpy mass of white towels at the bottom of the shaft, as well as the shape of the walls. Once I had an idea of distance, it was possible to move more quickly—I could just relax a little and half slide down.

I paid with a little skin, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The stones of the castle were ancient. Time (and I didn’t want to think too closely about what else) had worn off many of the rough edges. As long as I didn’t start bleeding and making the walls slippery, I should be fine.

Fine. I felt like a wad of paper trying not to be blown through a straw, but other than that, everything was super.

I went down carefully, moving only one limb at a time, like the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Except that I couldn’t actually stick to walls. And if I slipped, I didn’t have any webbing to save myself with, and I’d fall and break my neck.

“ ‘Friendly neighborhood Spider Man,’ ” I sang under my breath, and inched lower.

My shoulders stuck.

My heart started beating a lot faster.

Not because I was scared or anything. This was just cardio.

It’s not like I was experiencing claustrophobia. I was a wizard of the White Council. We don’t let our emotions control us.

I forced myself to breathe slowly, to stop moving, to think. I was stuck because my muscles were contracted, holding me against the walls of the shaft. I had to relax. But if I relaxed, I would fall and die and that would be counterproductive, too. So the trick was going to be to relax part of me while keeping the rest of me tense.

I stretched out an arm, trying to get my shoulders unsquared to the walls, but it didn’t work. I felt myself wedge in further, and my breathing increased. I strained harder and felt the pressure on my joints increase.