Peace Talks (The Dresden Files, #16)(94)
After that, we moved quick. Freydis pulled out some cleaning wipes and swept them over Lara’s arms and legs, while Lara got her dress back on and stepped into her shoes. I was wearing the suit and had less exposed skin to clean. I used a wipe to swipe off my face, neck, and hands and flicked a comb through my hair, then dressed at my best speed.
The whole time I got dressed, I did my best to ignore the image in the boxing ring, of Lara and me sort of drowsily kissing and moving together in immediate postcoital languor. My image was breathing hard and gurgling out a self-satisfied chuckle against her throat. Her image’s hair was a mess, and her face and throat were the palest shade of pink imaginable, and it was entirely too damned easy to consider what that must feel like against my image’s lips.
“That’s very sweet, really,” Lara noted. “The personal bits in the afterglow. Perhaps not terribly believable, but a pretty fiction.”
“I should get drunk and write fucking romance,” Freydis agreed. She gave me a narrow-eyed glance. “I give the male leads too much credit. But this one seems less useless than some.”
While smoothing her dress Lara gave me a glance that made me want to swing from the various equipment around the gym while pounding my chest, and I looked away, feeling my face heat up. The problem with high-pressure situations was that they forced a lot of basic, primal things out that you could normally keep buttoned down.
“Can we focus, please?” I said, my voice only a little rough.
There was a sudden snap in the air, like an enormous discharge of static electricity, and the image in the ring burst into a spectrum of color and faded, leaving behind only a blackened, smoking wooden plaque about the size of a small domino.
“A Freydis production,” the Valkyrie noted. “Oh, one of the servers looked in and caught the show. He bought it and left discreetly, so as far as everyone at the peace talks is concerned, you guys are totally a thing as of, oh, an hour after tonight’s business.”
I blinked. “Um, what?”
“Potion,” Lara said, producing a test tube from her tiny handbag. She shook it up, uncorked it, and wrinkled her nose at the muddled, messy liquid inside. Then she closed her eyes, downed a quick swallow, and passed the tube to Freydis.
The Valkyrie looked at it askance. “I don’t normally accept drinks from guys like you, seidrmadr. What if this potion of yours makes me forget I’m protecting Lara?”
“Everyone who drinks it will be on the inside of the … the grey field,” I said. “We’ll be clear to each other. But to everyone else, we’ll seem like bland, unobtrusive background, already identified and not worthy of noticing.”
Freydis looked even more skeptical. “And this stuff actually works?”
“Too well, is the problem,” I said darkly. “Drink.”
She glowered but did. I took the tube and went to Thomas, dripping some into his mouth. He choked and twitched but he swallowed it down. Then it was my turn.
The details of all the contents aren’t terribly important, but magical potions rarely taste like anything you’d feed to an actual human. This one tasted like, and had the texture of, stale and mushy cardboard that might have had a little mold growing on it. I sort of fought it down, wishing the Mission: Impossible plan had included bringing enough water to get the taste out of my mouth afterward.
It took a couple of heartbeats and then the world sort of shifted, changing by subtle degrees, like when clouds gradually cover the sun. Color began to bleed out of the room, until the world was left in all subtle shades of grey—except for the others. I could clearly see my brother, Lara, and Freydis in full color against the monochromatic background. The air turned a little chillier, a little clammier, or maybe we just thought it did. The psychic resonance that the potion set up had some weird blowback effects on the drinker, and I’d experienced them once before, a long time ago.
“Okay,” I said. I hunched down and got one of Thomas’s arms over my shoulder. Lara got his other arm and we hauled him to his feet. “Move smoothly and calmly. If we start running around, we’ll wrinkle the seams at the edges of the glamour and make people take a second look. Once they do that, we’re screwed. So stay cool and we’ll be just fine.”
Freydis traded a look with Lara, smirking, and said, “Kids.”
“I think he’s being very sweet,” Lara said.
Right. Of the three of us in the conversation, I was the youngest by centuries at least. They had both probably faced enough dangerous situations to regard the entirety of my career as a promising rookie year. I felt like a bit of a jackass. When that happens, it’s an excellent idea to shut your mouth.
So I just started walking, leaving Lara to keep up, which she did, without effort, her blue eyes bright. We had to support maybe ninety percent of Thomas’s weight, and we stayed as close together as we could. Freydis paced along behind us, also keeping very near. Even in the realm of the supernatural, there are laws and limitations. Only so much power could go into the potion’s glamour. The less physical space the glamour would have to cover, the denser and more effective it would be. Spread it out too much, and we’d be better off shouting for the world to pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
It was an incredibly subtle working of magic—one that would have been far beyond my skill without the skull’s tutelage, back in the day. It had hidden me so effectively that even screaming at people in an attempt to warn them they were about to die had gone unnoticed.