Summer Knight (The Dresden Files #4) - Jim Butcher Page 0,101
You never do anything without a price."
She rolled her eyes and clarified, "None to you, child."
"Who, then?"
"No one you know, or knew," Lea said.
An intuition hit me. "My mother. Thats who youre talking about."
Lea left her hand extended. She smiled, but only said, "Perhaps."
I regarded her hand quietly for a moment, then said, "Im not sure I can believe that youre really going to protect me."
"But I already have."
I folded my arms. "When?"
"If you will remember that night in the boneyard, I healed a wound to your head that may well have killed you."
"You only did it to sucker me into getting you the sword!"
Leas tone became wounded. "Not only for that. And if you consider further, I also freed you of a crippling binding and rescued you from a blazing inferno not twenty-four hours later."
"You charged my girlfriend all her memories of me to do it! And you only saved me from the fire so that you could put me in a doghouse."
"That does not change the fact that I was, after all, protecting you."
I stared at her in frustration for a minute and then scowled. "What have you done for me lately?"
Lea closed her eyes for a moment, then opened her mouth and spoke. Her voice came out aged and querulous. "Whats all that racket! I have already called the police, I have! You fruits get out of our hall or theyll lock you away!"
I blinked. "Reuels apartment. That was you?"
"Obviously, child. And at the market, earlier this eve." She lifted her hand in the air, made an intricate motion with long, pale fingers, and opened her mouth again, as if singing a note of music. Instead, the sound of police sirens emerged, somewhat muted and indistinguishable from the real thing.
I shook my head. "I dont get it."
She moved her fingers again, and the sirens blended into another silver-sweet laugh, her expression amused, almost fond. "I am sure you do not, poppet." She offered her hand again. "Come. Time is pressing."
She had that part right at least. And I knew she was telling me the truth. Her words had left her little room for evasion. Id never gotten anything but burned when making deals with the faeries, and if Lea was offering to help me for free, there had to be a catch somewhere.
Leas expression told me that she either knew what Id been thinking or knew me well enough to guess, and she laughed again. "Harry, Harry," she said. "If it is of any consequence to you, remember that our bargain is still in effect. I am bound to do you no harm for several weeks more."
Id forgotten about that. Of course, I couldnt fully trust to that, either. Even if she had sworn to do me no harm, if I asked her to take me somewhere she could drop me off in a forest full of Unseelie nasties without breaking her word. Shed done something very similar to me last year.
Thunder rumbled again, and the light flared even more brightly in the clouds. Tick, tick, tick, the clock was running, and I wasnt going to get anything done standing here waffling. Either I trusted myself to my godmother or I went back home and waited for something to come along and squash me.
Going with Lea wasnt the best way to get what I wantedit was just the only way. I took a breath and took her hand. Her skin felt like cool silk, untouched by the rain. "All right. And after them, I need to see the Mothers."
Lea gave me an oblique glance and said, "Survive the flood before hurling yourself into the fire, child. Close your eyes."
"Why?"
Annoyance flickered over her eyebrows. "Child, stop wasting time with questions. You have given me your hand. Close your eyes."
I muttered a curse to myself and did it. My godmother spoke something, a string of liquid syllables in a tongue I could not understandbut it made my knees turn rubbery and my fingers suddenly feel weak. A wave of disorientation, dizzying but not unpleasantly so, scrambled my sense of direction. I felt a breeze on my face, a sense of movement, but I couldnt have said whether I was falling or rising or moving forward.
The movement stopped, and the whirling sensations passed. Thunder rumbled again, very loudly, and the surface I stood on shook with it. Light played against my closed eyelids.