White Night (The Dresden Files #9) - Jim Butcher Page 0,31
their lives for each other in the midst of a crisis, and the love confirmed by doing so had rendered Justine deadly to my brother, poisonous to him. Love is like that to the White Court, an intolerable agony to them, the way holy water is to other breeds. Someone touched by pure and honest love cannot be fed upon—which had more or less put an end to Thomas's ability to be near Justine.
It was probably just as well. That last time they'd been together had all but killed Justine. The last time I'd seen her, she'd been a wasted, frail, white-haired thing barely capable of stringing sentences together. It had torn my brother apart to see what he had done to her. To my knowledge he hadn't even tried to be a part of her life again. I couldn't blame him.
Lara watched over Justine now, though she could not feed upon the girl any more than Thomas could.
But Lara could cut her throat, if it came to that.
My brother might very well be capable of some unpleasant things in the interests of protecting Justine. Strike that. He was capable of anything where the girl was concerned.
Means. Motive. Opportunity. The equation of murder was balanced.
I looked back at the illusory wall, where the pictures, maps, and notes grouped together in a broad band near the top, then descended into fewer notes on the next strip down, and so on, forming a vague V-shape. At the top of the V rested a single, square yellow sticky note.
That note read, in a heavy hand, Ordo Lebes? Find them.
"Dammit, Thomas," I murmured quietly. I addressed Lasciel. "Get rid of it."
Lasciel nodded and the illusion disappeared. "There is something else you should know, my host."
I eyed her. "What's that?"
"It may concern your safety and the course of your investigation. May I show you?"
The word no came strongly to mind, but I was already in for a penny, so to speak. Lasciel's wealth of intelligence and experience made her an extremely capable adviser. "Briefly."
She nodded, rose, and suddenly I was standing in Anna Ash's apartment, as I had been that afternoon.
"My host," Lasciel said, "Remember you how many women you observed entering the building?"
I frowned. "Sure. As many as half a dozen had the right look, though anyone who arrived before Murphy and I got there could have already been inside."
"Precisely," Lasciel said. "Here."
She waved a hand, and an image of me appeared in the apartment's entry, Murphy at my side.
"Anna Ash," Lasciel said. She nodded toward me, and Anna's image appeared, facing me. "Can you describe the others in attendance?"
"Helen Beckitt," I said. "Looking leaner and more weathered than the last time I saw her."
Beckitt's image appeared where she had been standing by the window.
I pointed at the wooden rocking chair. "Abby and Toto were there." The plump blond woman and her dog appeared. I rubbed at my forehead. "Uh, two on the sofa and one on the love seat."
Three shadowy forms appeared in the named places.
I pointed at the sofa. "The pretty one, in the dance leotard, the one worried about time." She appeared. I pointed at the shadowed figure next to her. "Bitter, suspicious Priscilla who was not being polite." The shadowy figure became Priscilla's image.
"And there you go," I said.
Lasciel shook her head, waved her hand, and the people images all vanished.
All except the shadowy figure sitting on the love seat.
I blinked.
"What can you remember about this one?" Lasciel asked me.
I racked my brain. It's usually good for this kind of thing. "Nothing," I said after a moment. "Not one damned detail. Nothing." I added two and two together and got trouble. "Someone was under a veil. Someone good enough to make it subtle. Hard to tell it was there at all. Not invisible so much as extremely boring and unremarkable."
"In your favor," Lasciel said, "I should point out that you had crossed the threshold uninvited, and thus were deprived of much of your power. In such a circumstance it would be most difficult for you to sense a veil at all, much less to pierce it."
I nodded, frowning at the shadowy figure. "It was deliberate," I said. "Anna goaded me into walking over the threshold on purpose. She was hiding Miss Mystery from me."
"Entirely possible," Lasciel concurred. "Or…"
"Or they didn't know someone was there, either," I said. "And if that's the case…" I tossed the notebook aside with a growl and rose.