Cold Days (The Dresden Files #14) - Jim Butcher Page 0,80
heavy lifting. She’s tired.”
He frowned. “Like that time you collapsed at my dad’s place?”
“More or less,” I said. “Molly’s still relatively new at this. The first few times you hit your wall, it just about knocks you out. She’ll be fine.”
“So how come the Sidhe didn’t hex up their own engines? I mean, I’m guessing a Jet Ski would run for about ten seconds with you on it.”
“I’d give it ten or fifteen minutes,” I said. “And it worked for the Sidhe because they aren’t human.”
“Why should that make a difference?”
I shrugged. “No one really knows. Ebenezar thinks it’s because human beings are inherently conflicted creatures. Magic responds to your thoughts and to your emotions—and people’s thoughts and emotions are constantly conflicting with one another. The way he figures it, that means that there’s a kind of turbulence around people with magical talent. The turbulence is what causes mechanical failure.”
“Why?”
I shrugged again. “It’s just the way things are. The specific effects this turbulence causes tend to change slowly over time. Three hundred years ago, it made cream turn sour, disturbed animals, and tended to encourage minor skin infections in wizards. Gave them blemishes and moles and pockmarks.”
“Fun,” Thomas said.
“Yeah, I’m not upset about missing out on that kind of fun,” I said. “Then sometime between then and now, it segued into triggering odd flashes of hallucination in the people who hung around in close proximity to us. You know the whole ergot theory of history? People with talent, especially people who didn’t even know they had it, probably had a lot to do with that. Now it mucks around with probability where machines are concerned.”
Thomas eyed me. Then he carefully powered off his truck’s stereo.
“Funny,” I said. After a moment I added, “I don’t mean to do it. I mean, I try not to do it, but . . .”
“I don’t mind if you break my stuff,” Thomas said. “I’ll just make Lara buy me new stuff.”
Lara, Thomas’s half sister, was the power behind the throne of the White Court of vampires. Lara was gorgeous, brilliant, and sexier than a Swedish bikini team hiking up a mountain of money. As a potential enemy, she was a little scary. As an occasional ally, she was freaking terrifying.
I wasn’t ever going to tell Thomas this, but when I’d been arranging my own murder, Lara had been the runner-up on my list of possible administrators of my demise. I mean, hey, if you’re going to go, there are worse ways to do it than to be taken out by the freaking queen of the world’s succubi.
“Like the Brighter Future Society?” I asked. The BFS was an alliance of unlikely bedfellows of the supernatural scene in Chicago, headquartered out of a small but genuine castle, guarded by hired guns from Valhalla.
Thomas bared his teeth in a smile. “That was Lara’s idea, actually. Marcone imported that freaking castle and had it rebuilt over your old boardinghouse. Lara says it’s impregnable.”
“The Death Star was impregnable,” I said. “So Lara got in bed with Marcone?”
“She tried,” Thomas said, “but Marcone kept it purely business. That’s two men who have turned her down in the same century. She was annoyed.”
I grunted. I’d been the other guy. John Marcone was the crime lord of Chicago. He could buy and sell United States congressmen, and had the establishment in Chicago completely wired. He was also the first regular mortal to sign on to the Unseelie Accords, and according to them, he was the baron of Chicago.
“I was sort of hoping she’d kill him,” I said.
“I was sort of hoping for the other way around,” Thomas said. “But with the Fomor trying to muscle in on everyone’s territory, they need each other—for now.”
“The Fomor are that bad?” I asked. They were a crew of bad guys whose names were known primarily in old mythology books, the survivors of a number of dark mythoi across the world, the worst of the worst—or at least the most survival-minded of the worst.
“They’re ruthless,” Thomas said. “And they’re everywhere. But between Marcone’s hired goons, Lara’s resources, and Murphy’s people, they haven’t gotten a solid foothold here. Other cities, it’s bad. Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco, Miami, and Boston are the worst off. They’re grabbing anyone with a lick of magical ability and carrying them away. Thousands of people.”
“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. “What about the White Council?”