Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(93)

I grabbed at the floor of the hallway and desperately levered a knee up into the opening to give me a couple of points of tension—but it was hardly a solid position. I pushed as hard as I could with my right arm, but it was out straight, and there was only so much power in my shoulder and upper back. I strained to lift my brother onto the floor, but I had no leverage, and my position was too precarious to apply much of my strength. My muscles burned and then began, slowly, to falter. I ground my teeth, reaching deep, and strained to gain a few fractions of an inch that began to fade almost at once.

I started preparing to drop in a controlled fall that would, hopefully, protect my brother—but then his weight suddenly vanished from my shoulder.

Lara dragged him to one side with quick efficiency, blue eyes bright, cheeks still flushed, and then seized the guard’s heavy leather jacket and tossed me one sleeve. I took it.

“You’re taking forever,” she said, and hauled me out of the hole.

“And yet you’re the one literally fucking around on the job,” I countered.

“That?” she asked, bobbing her head back toward the guard station and flashing me a wise, wicked smile. “No. That was just feeding. The other thing takes much, much longer. And preferably candles and champagne.”

I pulled my legs out of the way, barely, before she shut the trapdoor—my trapdoor—and threw the bolt.

“How is he?” she asked.

I held up my amulet so that she could see her brother better.

“Empty night,” she cursed. She crouched over him, peeling back one of his eyelids, and then his lips. His gums were swollen and blotchy with dark stains.

“What’s happening?” I asked her.

“He’s sustained too much trauma without feeding,” she said. “His Hunger needs life energy. It’s taking his. It’s turned on him. It’s killing him.”

White Court vampires led a bizarre symbiotic existence: They were born bound to a demon that existed in immaterial tandem with them, called a Hunger. It was the demon who gave them their strength, their speed, their long lives, their capacity to recover from injury. In exchange they had to feed on the life force of others, to sustain the Hunger. My brother was, I knew, a rather potent example of the breed. That meant that his Hunger was strong, too.

And now he was paying for it.

“What can we do?”

She shook her head, her face hard. “This is how White Court vampires die. How my father will die, sooner or later.”

“Justine,” I said.

That word got through. Thomas lifted his head, mirrored eyes on me. He reached out a weak hand toward me in a gesture that died of exhaustion halfway.

“No,” Lara said, her eyes intent on his face. “By the time a Hunger turns on one of us, it’s mad, uncontrollable, insatiable. Even if we could redirect the Hunger, it would kill her and the child, and he’d die anyway.” The muscles in her jaw tensed. “There’s still part of him in there. I might be able to reach him if we get him out of here—if we hurry.”

“Right,” I said, and slung my brother back up onto my shoulder.

Lara gave me a nod of approval and rose with me, and we both padded as quietly as we could back toward the dumbwaiter shaft. We passed the enormous guard, who was sprawled on his desk, pants back on but unfastened. He reeked of bourbon. I hesitated beside the guard long enough to be sure I saw his chest rise and fall.

“He’ll have a hell of a hangover,” Lara noted.

“You were also drinking?” I asked. “When did you have time? Do you have vampire party superpowers I don’t know about?”

“I found a bottle in his desk after he was finished and poured it on him,” Lara said primly, as if she’d been wearing a Victorian school-marm’s outfit instead of a whole lot of very well-tailored nothing. She strode to the dumbwaiter door and opened it. “Simple explanation for when he wakes up with a headache and a scrambled memory.” She tilted her head. “What was with those spiders? Why did you conjure them?”

I made a frustrated sound. “It just … happened.”

She frowned for a half second and then began fighting a smile from the corners of her mouth. “Oh, Empty Night. You’ve got conjuritis? I’ve heard about how awkward it can be when wizard kids get the disease. Aren’t you a few … decades old for that?”

“It’s not like I made an appointment.”

“It would have been nice if you’d told me,” Lara said. “That’s all I’m saying.”

“I took cold medicine,” I said defensively.

Lara arched an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

“Does everybody know about this disease but me?” I complained. And I swiped at my nose with my forearm, fighting back another itch.

There was a soft thump, and a bundle of towels unrolled from the bottom of the shaft, their ends neatly knotted together.

“Hurry up,” Freydis’s voice hissed from the shaft above. “I only made the illusion a quickie.”

“Help me,” I said to Lara, and together we got the makeshift rope around Thomas.

*

Getting my brother back up that narrow shaft wasn’t simple, even with Freydis’s arms pulling him as steadily as any heavy-duty winch. He was too weak to even hold his head up steadily, and he collected some scrapes and bangs on the way up—but we got him there.