Small Favor

Chapter Eight

A wide-axled, full-of-itself, military-wannabe truck crunched through the snowy streets and came to a halt outside the little grocery store. The lights glared in through the doors. I squinted at it. After a minute the Hummer’s horn blared in two short beeps.

“Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered. I hobbled to the door and out to the truck, which blended seamlessly with the background and the foreground, and with most of the air.

The driver-side window rolled down and revealed a young man whom fathers of teenage daughters would shoot on sight. He had pale skin and deep grey eyes. His dark, slightly curly hair was long enough to declare casual rebellion, and tousled to careless perfection. He wore a black leather jacket and a white shirt, both of them more expensive than any two pieces of furniture at my apartment. In marked contrast, there was a scarf inexpertly crocheted from thick white yarn around his neck, under the collar of the jacket. He faced straight ahead, so that I saw only his profile, but I felt confident that he was smirking on the other side of his face, too.

“Thomas,” I said. “A lesser man than me would hate you.”

He grinned. “There’s someone lesser than you?” He rolled his eyes to me on the last word, to deadpan the delivery, and his face froze in an expression of absolute neutrality. He stayed that way for a few seconds. “Empty night, Harry. You look like…”

“Ten miles of bad road?”

He forced a smile onto his mouth, but that was as far as it went. “I was going to go with ‘a raccoon.’”

“Gee. Thanks.”

“Get in.”

He took the monorail to the other side of the Hummer’s cab to unlock the passenger-side door. I showed up eventually, and noticed every little ache in my body on the way-especially the throbbing burn centered on my broken nose. I tossed my staff into the back of Das Truck, half expecting an echoing clatter when it landed. I got in, shut the door, and put on my seat belt while Thomas got the truck moving. He peered carefully into the heavy snow, presumably looking for some runty little sedans he could drive over for fun.

“That’s gotta hurt,” he said after a moment.

“Only when I exhale,” I said testily. “What took you so long?”

“Well, you know how much I love getting called in the middle of the night to drive through snow and ice to play chauffeur for grumpy low-life investigators. The anticipation slowed me down.”

I grunted in what might have been construed as an apologetic manner by someone who knew me.

Thomas did. “What’s up?”

I told him everything.

Thomas is my half brother, my only family. I’m allowed.

He listened.

“And then,” I concluded, “I went for a ride in a monster truck.”

Thomas’s mouth twitched up in a quick smile. “It is kinda butch, isn’t it.”

I squinted around the truck. “Do TV shows start an hour later in the backseat than they do up here?”

“Who cares?” Thomas said. “It’s got TiVo.”

“Good,” I said. “It might be a little while before I return you to your regularly scheduled programming.”

Thomas let out a theatrical sigh. “Why me?”

“Because if I want to find Marcone, the best place to start is with his people. If word gets out that he’s gone missing, there’s no telling how some of them might react when I come snooping around. So you’ve got my back.”

“What if I don’t want your back?”

“Cope,” I said heartlessly. “You’re family.”

“You’ve got me there,” he admitted. “But I wonder if you’ve thought this through very thoroughly.”

“I try to make thinking an ongoing process.”

Thomas shook his head. “Look, you know I don’t try to tell you your business.”

“Except tonight, apparently,” I said.

“Marcone is a grown-up,” Thomas said. “He signed on to the Accords willingly. He knew what he was going to be letting himself in for.”

“And?” I said.

“And it’s a jungle out there,” Thomas said. He squinted through the thick snow. “Metaphorically speaking.”

I grunted. “He made his bed, and I should let him lie in it?”

“Something like that,” Thomas said. “And don’t forget that Murphy and the police aren’t going to be thrilled with a ‘Save the Kingpin’ campaign.”

“I know,” I said, “and I’d love to stand back and see what happens. But this isn’t about Marcone anymore.”

“Then what is it about?”

“Mab skinning me alive if I don’t give her what she wants.”

“Come on, Harry,” Thomas said. “You can’t really think that Mab’s motives and plans are that direct, that cut-and-dried.” He adjusted the setting of the Hummer’s wipers. “She wants Marcone for a reason. You might not be doing him any favors by saving him on Mab’s behalf.”

I scowled out at the night.

He held up a hand, ticking off fingers. “And that’s assuming that, one, he’s alive at all right now. Two, that you can find him. Three, that you can get him out alive. And four, that the opposition doesn’t cripple or kill you.”

“What’s your point?” I asked.

“That you’re playing against a stacked deck, and that you have no idea if Mab is going to be there to cover your bets when the bad guys call.” He shook his head. “It would be smarter for you to skip town. Go someplace warm for a few weeks.”

“Mab might take that kinda personal,” I said.

“Mab’s a businesswoman,” Thomas said. “Creepy and weird, but she’s cold, too. Calculating. As long as you still represent a potential recruit to her, I doubt she’d elect to depreciate your value prematurely.”

“Depreciate. I like that. You might be right-unless, to return to the original metaphor, Mab isn’t playing with a full deck. Which the evidence of recent years seems to imply with increasing frequency.” I nodded out the window. “And I’ve got a feeling that I’d have had even more trouble with the gruffs I’ve seen so far if we weren’t in the middle of a freaking blizzard. If I waltz off to Miami or somewhere warm, I’ll be putting myself that much nearer to the agents of Summer-who are also planning my murder.”

Thomas frowned and said nothing.

“I could run, but I couldn’t hide,” I said. “Better to face it here, on my home ground, while I’m still relatively rested”-I let out a huge and genuine yawn-“instead of waiting for faerie goons from one Court or the other to, ah, depreciate me by surprise after I’ve been on the run for a few weeks.”

“What about the Council?” Thomas demanded. “You’ve been wearing the grey cloak for how long, now? And you’ve fought for them how many times?”

I shook my head. “Right now the Council is still stretched to the limit. We might not be in open battle with the Red Court at the moment, but the Council and the Wardens have got years of catch-up work to do.” I felt my jaw tighten. “Lot of warlocks have come up in the past few years. The Wardens are working overtime to get them under control.”

“You mean kill them,” Thomas said.

“I mean kill them. Most of them teenagers, man.” I shook my head. “Luccio knows my feelings on the matter. She refuses to assign any of it to me. Which means that other Wardens are forced to pick up the slack. I’m not going to add to their workload by dragging them into this mess.”

“You don’t seem to mind adding to mine,” Thomas noted.

I snorted. “That’s because I respect them.”

“So long as we have that clear,” he said.

We drove past a city snowplow. It had foundered in a deep drift, like some kind of metallic Ice Age beast trapped in a tar pit. I watched it with bemusement as Thomas’s truck crunched slowly, steadily on by.

“By the way,” he asked, “where do you want to go?”

“First things first,” I said. “I need food.”

“You need sleep.”

“Tick-tock. Food will do for now.” I pointed. “There, an IHOP.”

He hauled the big truck into a slow, steady turn. “Then what?”

“I ask people impertinent questions,” I said. “Hopefully turning up pertinent answers.”

“Assuming someone doesn’t kill you while you do.”

“That’s why I’m bringing my very own vampire bodyguard.”

Thomas parked across three spaces in the tiny, otherwise unoccupied lot of an International House of Pancakes.

“I like the scarf,” I said. I leaned over and inhaled through my nose as best I could. It stung, but I detected a faint whiff of vanilla and strawberries. “She make it for you?”

Thomas nodded without saying anything. The leather-gloved fingers of one hand traced over the soft, simple yarn. He looked quietly sad. I felt bad for mentioning Justine, my brother’s lost lover. Then I understood why he wore the gloves: If she’d made it for him, a token of her love, he didn’t dare touch it with his skin. It would sear him like a hot skillet. So he kept it close enough for him to smell her touch upon it, but he didn’t dare let it brush against him.

Every time I think my romantic life is a wasteland, I look at my brother and see how much worse it could be.

Thomas shook his head and killed the engine and we sat for a moment in silence.

So I clearly heard a deep male voice outside the truck say, “Don’t either of you move.” There was the distinct click-clack of a shotgun’s pump working. “Or I will kill you.”