Battle Ground (The Dresden Files #17) - Jim Butcher Page 0,19
the fridge—the White Council would never, ever leave my relationship to Thomas as a potential handle to be used against them. They would either reverse that pressure preemptively or else . . . remove the handle.
The White Council had never been a source of anything but grief to me.
Carlos Ramirez was my friend.
But Thomas was my brother.
“I don’t know what to tell you, ’Los,” I lied. “I was doing liaison stuff for Mab.”
“Liaison stuff,” Carlos said. “Rumor calls it something else.”
Hell’s bells, Freydis and her stupid illusion. “Stars and stones, it’s like a British sex comedy around here,” I said. “Look, there are shenanigans happening between Mab and Lara. I’m . . . moderating things.”
He gave me an uncertain look.
“I’d tell you more if I could,” I said. “But this is internal Winter stuff. And, honestly, man, we don’t have time for this.”
Ramirez looked away from me and sighed. “Dammit, Harry.”
“Hey, I don’t like it any more than you do,” I said. “But I need to talk to the old man. We have work to do.”
“Yeah,” he said. He took a slow breath and then nodded once, decisively. “Yeah, we do. Come on up.”
We went up the stairs together. Ramirez had a bruise forming on one cheek. There were ligature marks, sharp bruises, forming on his neck where his cloak had hauled him around.
Injuries I’d decided he needed to have.
Right before I’d lied to him.
Dammit.
I felt awful.
Chapter
Six
You look a little green, Hoss,” Ebenezar said.
The old man was holding down one corner of the castle’s roof, along with Martha Liberty and Listens-to-Wind. Martha Liberty was seated in a chalk circle, speaking to about half a dozen poppets—dolls, forms that spirits could animate to communicate with the mortal world—and then reporting in crisp, terse sentences to Warden Yoshimo, who lurked outside the circle with a notepad and pen.
Listens-to-Wind sat on the corner battlement of the castle, his legs hanging over the edge. He’d taken his sandals off and his feet were swinging idly. Every few moments, some kind of animal would come fluttering or sprinting up to him, mostly small birds and squirrels. They would chitter or tweet and the old shaman would tilt his head and listen gravely before nodding and speaking in quiet replies and sending the animal messengers off again. Wild Bill lurked at his shoulder, leaning in and tilting his head with a scowl, as if trying to pick up a new language and having only moderate luck. He also wrote down messages.
Both Wardens would tear off notes and pass them back to Senior Councilman Cristos, who was moving back and forth between them and Childs and Riley, each of whom was operating a ham radio.
“Ran my boat as hard as I could for a couple of hours,” I replied. “My stomach didn’t care for it.”
The old man lowered his voice. “Don’t expect me to feel sorry for you, boy. You’re a goddamned fool.”
Ebenezar didn’t much care for the White Court of vampires. My grandfather had objected to my “helping” my brother. When I’d told him that he had another grandson, he had objected to that, too. He’d objected loudly enough to sink several boats in the harbor, and the only reason one of them hadn’t been the Water Beetle was that I had stopped him, and gotten away with it.
The anger around him was still a crackling cloud of unreleased lightning.
But the old man was no fool. And he’d taught me how to reason when it came to supernatural conflict. He knew the direction of my thoughts, and what priorities would help us survive the night. “How far can you snare her from, do you think?” he asked me.
I made an effort not to put my hand on the knife at my side. “The lakeshore. If we get her there, she’ll be in range.”
Ebenezar grimaced. “And that’s just close enough for you to make the attempt?”
I nodded. “From what the island says, it’s a standard binding.”
“Ethniu is a Titan, boy,” he said. “Can you imagine trying to bind Mab?”
I shuddered.
“Well, she’s an order of magnitude beyond that in power and will,” Ebenezar said. “You can’t just go straight up against a mind like that. Not when she’s wearing Titanic bronze.”
“Why not?”
“The stuff . . . it affects Creation on a fundamental level,” he said. “As long as it has enough will behind it, the physical world is going to have a very limited effect on her.”