meant. I took several slow, deep breaths, separating mind from body. Then I said quietly, “Susan. Whatever happens from here . . . we’re done.” I looked up at her. “You know that. You knew it when you chose not to tell me.”
She looked brittle. She nodded slowly, as if something might break off if she moved any more quickly than that. She folded her hands in her lap. “I . . . know that. I knew it when I did it.”
Silence stretched.
“Right,” I said finally. “Now . . .” I took another deep breath, and told myself it would help. “The way I see it, you didn’t fly into Chicago just for a chat with me. You wouldn’t need Martin for that.”
She lifted an eyebrow at me and nodded. “True.”
“Then why?”
She seemed to gather herself, her voice more businesslike. “There’s a Red outpost here. It’s a place to start.”
“Okay,” I said, rising. “Let’s start.”
3
“I hope there are no hard feelings,” Martin told me as he pulled out of the little gravel lot next to the house I board in.
Susan had yielded the passenger seat of the rental car to me, in deference to my storklike legs. “Hard feelings?” I asked.
“About our first meeting,” Martin said. He drove the same way he did everything—blandly. Complete stops. Five miles an hour under the limit. Wherever we were headed, it was going to take forever to get there.
“You mean the way you used me to attempt to assassinate old Ortega?” I asked. “Thereby ensuring that the Code Duello was broken, the duel invalidated, and the vamps’ war with the White Council continued?”
Martin glanced at me, and then into the rearview mirror at Susan.
“I told you,” she said to Martin. “He’s only dense in the short term. He sees everything eventually.”
I gave Susan a slight, wry tilt of my head in acknowledgment. “Wasn’t hard to realize what you were doing in retrospect,” I said. “The Red Court’s war with the White Council must have been the best thing to happen to the Fellowship in ages.”
“I’ve only been with them for slightly over one hundred years,” Martin said. “But it was the best thing to happen in that time, yes. The White Council is one of the only organizations on the planet with the resources to seriously threaten them. And every time the Council won a victory—or even survived what should have been a crushing defeat—it meant that the Red Court was tearing itself to shreds internally. Some of them have had millennia to nurse grudges with rivals. They are appropriately epic in scale.”
“Call me wacky,” I said, “but I had to watch a few too many children die in that war you helped guarantee. No hard feelings?” I smiled at him—technically. “Marty, believe me when I say that you don’t want me to get in touch with my feelings right now.”
I felt Martin’s eyes shift to me, and a little tension gather in his body. His shoulder twitched. He was thinking about his gun. He was pretty good with firearms. The night of my duel with the Red Court vampire named Ortega, Martin had put a round from one of those enormous sniper rifles into Ortega about half a second before the vampire would otherwise have killed me. It had been a gross violation of the Code Duello, the set of rules for resolving personal conflicts between individuals of the nations who had signed the Unseelie Accords.
The outcome of a clean duel might have put an early end to the war between the Red Court and the White Council of Wizards, and saved a lot of lives. It didn’t turn out that way.
“Don’t worry, guy,” I told him. “Ortega was already in the middle of breaking the Code Duello anyway. It would have fallen out the way it did regardless of what you had done that night. And your being there meant that he ate a bullet at the last second instead of me. You saved my life. I’m cognizant of that.”
I kept smiling at him. It didn’t feel quite right, so I tried to do it a little harder. “I’m also aware that if you could have gotten what you wanted by putting the bullet in my back instead of his chest, you would have done it without blinking. So don’t go thinking we’re pals.”
Martin looked at me and then relaxed. He said, “It’s ironic that you, the mustang of the White Council, would immediately cling to its self-righteous position of moral