Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(92)

Hell’s bells, I wanted to feel like I was home again.

And instead, I was standing in Marcone’s house.

Something stirred in me, down deep. It wasn’t rage. It wasn’t anything as ephemeral and temporary as rage. It wasn’t predicated on my emotional pain. It felt older than that. Primordial. What was mine had been taken away.

It wasn’t right. And no one was going to do anything about it.

Unless it was me.

Something went click somewhere inside.

Ever since the Red Court had taken my daughter, I’d been reeling from one disaster to the next, surviving. This entire situation was just one more entropy barrage hitting my life, forcing me to scramble once again, maybe getting me killed. (Again. Technically.)

Things were different now. I was a part of Maggie’s life. And she might need me to walk her down an aisle one day.

Maybe it was time I started getting ahead of this stuff.

Maybe it was time to get serious.

My brother was lying curled up in a fetal position, naked and shockingly thin, as if he’d lost forty pounds of muscle in the past day. He looked better and worse—the bruises were gone, as was the blood. His hands still looked knotted and horrible, but his face was recognizable again. Being a vampire has its privileges, even if his skin looked like it needed to be a couple of sizes larger, drawn tight against what remained of his formerly muscular frame.

It was his expression that sickened me. He looked up with mercury-colored eyes, dull and glazed with simple animal pain.

“Thomas,” I hissed. “It’s Harry.”

He blinked up at the light without speaking.

“Can you hear me, man?”

He stared and made a small choking sound.

“Hell’s bells,” I said. There was no ladder waiting for me below. So I grimaced, swung my legs over the opening, and then dropped down into it as quietly as I could.

It was a bit of a drop, but I managed not to land on Thomas or fall on my ass.

“Come on,” I said. “We have to go.”

For a long beat, nothing happened. Then he moved, and I felt myself let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. My brother was alive.

But there wasn’t much left of him.

Stars and stones, the svartalves had worked him over badly. They hadn’t put him in irons. They’d just beaten him until there was no possibility of him effecting his own escape. I wanted to be enraged about it, but among the supernatural nations, their actions would be considered effective, not sadistic. Hell, it would have been a simple matter for them to simply kill him out of hand and then announce that an assassin had made an attempt on Etri and been killed before he could do the job. But instead they were holding to the Accords.

He was alive. But his Hunger had evidently cannibalized his own body to keep him that way.

“Thomas, we haven’t got much time,” I said. “Get your lazy ass up. We have to go.”

He looked at me, and his brow furrowed. I wasn’t at all confident that he understood me.

“Of course,” I said. “I have to do all the work myself.”

I lifted my amulet and looked around the room, and my heart hurt. It was my old lab. I’d spent countless hours there, working, studying, brewing, casting, summoning, setting my hair on fire—you know, wizard stuff. So had Molly. There were smoke stains on the floor, and I could see the squares and rectangles where my old furniture had been, the feet of tables, the bases of bookshelves, the holes in the wall where I had screwed in the wire-frame storage shelving. My old copper summoning circle had survived, somehow, at the far end of the room. Maybe the floor of my old living room had collapsed over it, shielding it from the worst of the flames.

But it offered me no help.

I wouldn’t have any trouble reaching up and grabbing the lip of the opening, then hauling myself out. But climbing out while carrying my brother would be a hell of a trick. Damn, I wished I had spent more of my time on earth magic. Altering gravity for a few seconds would make this really simple—but doing it at my current level of skill would take time that we did not have.

I’d have to go with the alternative and hope I didn’t kill us both. Go, me.

I stooped down, wrapped exposed skin in towels as best as I could, and got hold of Thomas’s arms. He hissed out a breath, but he didn’t move, his body putting up all the resistance of boiled pasta. He was shockingly light, but even light, limp people are a pain and a half to move around. It took me a minute to get him up and over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. After that, I positioned myself under the exit, turning my body to, hopefully, make sure I didn’t take any of Thomas’s skin off on the way out.

“I should make a cloak of levitation,” I muttered. “Doctor Strange would never have this problem.”

I felt a flash of guilt at wasting time with smartassery and shoved it down. Time for that when my brother was safe.

And then I crouched, made the best guess I could, gathered my will, and thrust my right hand down at the floor while snarling, “Forzare!”

Raw kinetic force lashed down at the floor below me, and because of Sir Isaac Newton, it also propelled me up. I flew through the air, but I’d misjudged the amount of force needed. Magic is more art than science, and it was considerably harder to work with precision without a few tools to help me. So instead of gracefully sailing up to the level of the hallway’s floor, I sort of lurched up to the level of my belt and then started to fall back down.