demanding than people think. Especially when the air is still thick with the smell of God only knows what chemical combinations.
I finally got her to cough, and my racing heartbeat subsided a little as she began breathing again, raggedly, and opened her eyes.
I sat up slowly, breathing hard, and found Anastasia Luccio standing in the open doorway to my apartment, her arms folded over her chest, one eyebrow arched.
Anastasia was a pretty girl—not glamorously lovely, but believably, genuinely pleasant to look at, with a fantastic smile and killer dimples. She looked like someone in her twenties, for reasons too complex to go into right now, but she was an older woman. A much older woman.
And there I was, apparently sitting up from kissing a topless girl, with a naked couple a few feet away, and the air thick with a pall of smoke and the smell of noxious fumes. For crying out loud, my apartment looked like the set of some kind of bizarre porno.
“Um,” I said, and swallowed. “This isn’t what it might appear to be.”
Anastasia just stared at me. I knew it had been a long time since she’d opened up to anyone. It might not take much to make her close herself off again.
She shook her head, very slowly, and the smile lines at the corners of her eyes deepened along with her dimples. Then she burst out into a hearty belly laugh. “Madre di Dio, Harry. I cannot for the life of me imagine what it does appear to be.”
I lifted my eyebrows in surprise. “You aren’t upset?”
“By the time you get to be my age,” she replied, “you’ve either worked out your insecurities, or they’re there to stay. Besides, I simply must know how this happened.”
I shook my head and then smiled at her. “I . . . My friends needed help.”
She looked back and forth between the Alphas and Molly. “And still do,” she said, nodding sharply. She came in and, as the only one actually wearing shoes, began picking up pieces of fallen glass from the broken window, literally rolling up her sleeves as she went. “Shall we?”
IT TOOK MOST of the day to get Molly to the hospital, gather the materials needed to fumigate Kirby’s and Andi’s auras, and actually perform the work to get the job done. By the time they left, all better and psychophage-free, it was after seven.
“So much for our day off,” I said.
She turned to consider me. “Would you do it differently if you had it to do again?”
“No. Of course not.”
She shrugged. “Then it was a day well spent. There will be others.”
“You never can be sure of that, though, can you?”
Her cheeks dimpled again. “Today is not yet over. You mourn its death somewhat prematurely.”
“I just wanted to show you a nice time for a day. Not get bogged down in more business.”
Anastasia turned to me and put her fingers over my mouth. Then she replaced her fingers with her lips.
“Enough talk,” she murmured.
I agreed.
BACKUP
—novelette from Subterranean Press
Takes place between Small Favor and Turn Coat
This story was really fun to write. I’d been wanting to show a little more of Thomas and his world for several years, but it just hadn’t ever been a feasible thing for Harry to encounter. The vampires of the Dresden Files, the White Court especially, see themselves as a nation of outcasts, banded together by similar concerns and dangerous enemies. The kind of culture that emerges from that sort of foundation simply doesn’t make itself available to outsiders. If Harry had ever gotten to the “inside” to see that culture, it would have betrayed the us-against-them integrity of the White Court, and invalidated the whole setup.
So when Subterranean came to me with a proposal to produce a novelette illustrated by no less than Mike Mignola, I jumped at the chance. The challenge, here, was to present Thomas from his own viewpoint, one distinct from Harry’s. And, even better, I wanted to pit brother against brother in such a way that their relationship of trust and mutual regard was maintained, but they still got to slug it out with each other.
I also got to bring some of the other background material of the Dresden Files story world into play. The Oblivion War was something I really loved, conceptually, but like the White Court, its very nature prevented Dresden from getting involved without causing the entire thing to implode. This was an ideal place for that piece of universe background, and it