Ghost Story (The Dresden Files #13) - Jim Butcher Page 0,199

is just what I need.”

Uriel looked past Sir Stuart to me and winked. “Excellent,” he said, and shook hands with Sir Stuart. “A man named Carmichael will be in touch.”

I lingered until everyone had vanished into the thick mist that still cloaked the earth. It took less time than it usually did for these sorts of things; no one had died. No need to call in the lab guys. The uniform cops closed the old metal door as best they could, drew a big X over it with crime-scene tape, and seemed willing to ignore the hole that had been blasted in it.

“They’re going to be all right, you know,” Uriel said quietly. “Tonight’s injuries will not be lethal to any of them.”

“Thank you,” I said. “For telling me that.”

He nodded. “Have you decided?”

I shook my head. “Show me my brother.”

He arched an eyebrow at me. Then he shrugged, and once again offered his hand.

We vanished from the night and appeared in a very expensively furnished apartment. I recognized my brother’s place at once.

It had changed a bit. The brushed steel décor had been softened. The old Broadway musical posters had been replaced with paintings, mostly pastoral landscapes that provided an interesting counterpoint of warmth to the original style of the place. Candles and other decorative pieces had filled in the rather Spartan spaces I remembered, adding still more warmth. All in all, the place looked a lot more like a home now, a lot less like a dressed stage.

A couple of things were out of place. There was a chair in the living room positioned in front of the large flat-screen, high-definition television set the size of a dining room table. The chair was upholstered in brown leather and looked comfortable, and it didn’t match the rest of the room. There were also food stains on it. Empty liquor bottles littered the side table next to it.

The door opened and my brother, Thomas, walked in. He might have been an inch under six feet tall, though it was hard for me to tell—he had worn so many different kinds of fashionable shoes that his height was always changing subtly. He had dark hair, currently as long as my shortest finger, and it was a mess. Not only was it messy, it was simply messy, instead of attractively messy, and for Thomas that was hideous. He had a couple of weeks’ growth of beard; not long enough to be an actual beard yet, but too long to be a sexy shadow.

His cold grey eyes were sunken, with dark rings beneath them. He wore jeans and a T-shirt with drink stains on it. He hadn’t even pretended to need a coat against the night’s cold, and breaking their easily maintained cover as human beings was something that the vampires of the White Court simply did not do. For God’s sake, he was barefoot. He’d just walked out like that, apparently to the nearest liquor store.

My brother took a bottle of whiskey—expensive whiskey—from a paper bag and let the bag fall to the floor. Then he sat down in the brown leather chair, pointed a remote at the television, and clicked it on. He clicked buttons and it skipped through several channels. He stopped clicking based, apparently, on his need to take a drink, and stopped on some kind of sports channel where they were playing rugby.

Then he simply sat, slugged from the bottle, and stared.

“It’s hard for the half-born,” Uriel observed in a quiet, neutral tone.

“What did you call him?” I asked. Belligerently. Which probably wasn’t really bright, but Thomas was my brother. I didn’t like the thought of anyone judging him.

“The scions of mortals and immortals,” Uriel said, unperturbed. “Halflings, half-bloods, half-born. The mortal road is difficult enough without adding a share of our burdens to it as well.”

I grunted. “That skinwalker got hold of him a while back. It broke something in him.”

“The naagloshii feel a need to prove that every creature they meet is as flawed and prone to darkness as they themselves proved to be,” Uriel said. “It . . . gives them some measure of false peace, I think, to lie to themselves like that.”

“You sound like you feel sorry for them,” I said, my voice hard.

“I feel sorry for all the pain they have, and more so for all that they inflict on others. Your brother offers ample explanation for my feelings.”

“What that thing did to Thomas. How is that different from what the Fallen