Turn Coat

Chapter Eleven

Thomas stopped his Jag in front of the boardinghouse where my apartment was and said, “I’ll have my cell phone on me. Try to call me before things start exploding.”

“Maybe this time it’ll be different. Maybe I’ll work everything out through reason, diplomacy, dialogue, and mutual cooperation.”

Thomas eyed me.

I tried to look wounded. “It could happen.”

He reached into his jeans pocket, pulled out a plain white business card with a phone number on it, and passed it to me. “Use this number. It’s to a clone.”

I looked at him blankly.

“It’s a supersecret sneaky phone,” he clarified. “No one knows I have it, and if someone traces your calls and goes looking for me, they’ll find someone else.”

“Oh,” I said. “Right.”

“You sure you don’t want to just load Morgan up and go?”

I shook my head. “Not until I give him the score. He sees me coming in with a vampire in tow, he’s going to flip out. As in try to kill us both.” I got out of the Jag, glanced at the house, and shook my head. “You stay alive for a dozen decades doing what Morgan does, paranoia becomes reflex.”

Thomas grimaced. “Yeah. Give me an hour or so to get what you need. Call me when you’ve got him ready to go.”

I glanced at the number, committed it to memory, and pocketed the card. “Thanks. I’ll pay you back for the gear.”

He rolled his eyes. “Shut up, Harry.”

I snorted out a breath, and nodded my head in thanks. We rapped knuckles, and he pulled out onto the street and cruised out into the Chicago night.

I took a slow look around the familiar shapes of dark buildings where only a few lights still burned. I’d lived in this neighborhood for years. You’d think I’d be confident about spotting anything out of the ordinary fairly quickly. But, call me crazy, there were just too many players moving in this game, with God only knew what kinds of abilities to draw upon.

I didn’t spot anyone out there getting set to kill me to get to Morgan. But that didn’t mean that they weren’t there.

“If that’s not paranoid reflex,” I muttered, “I don’t know what is.”

I shivered and walked down the steps to my apartment. I disarmed the wards, and reminded myself, again, that I really needed to do something about the deep divots in the steel security door. The last thing I needed was for old Mrs. Spunkelcrief, my near-deaf landlady, to start asking me why my door looked like it had been shot a dozen times. I mean, I could always tell her, “because it has been,” but that isn’t the sort of conversation one has with one’s landlady if one wants to keep one’s home.

I opened the bullet-dented door, went inside, turned toward the bedroom door, and was faced with a bizarre tableau.

Morgan was off the bed, sitting on the floor with his back to it, his wounded leg stretched out in front of him. He looked awful, but his eyes were narrowed and glittered with suspicion.

Sprawled in the bedroom doorway was my apprentice, Molly Carpenter.

Molly was a tall young woman with a bunch of really well-arranged curves and shoulder-length hair that was, this month, dyed a brilliant shade of sapphire. She was wearing cutoff blue jeans and a white tank top, and her blue eyes looked exasperated.

She was sprawling on the floor because Mouse was more or less lying on top of her. He wasn’t letting his full weight rest on her, because it probably would have smothered her, but it seemed obvious that she was not able to move.

“Harry!” Molly said. She started to say something else, but Mouse leaned into her a little, and suddenly all she could do was gasp for air.

“Dresden!” Morgan growled at about the same time. He shifted his weight, as if to get up.

Mouse turned his head to Morgan and gave him a steady look, his lips peeling back from his fangs.

Morgan settled down.

“Hooboy,” I sighed, and pushed the door shut, leaving the room in complete darkness. I locked the door, put the wards back up, and then muttered, “Flickum bicus.” I waved my hand as I spoke, and sent a minor effort of will out into the room, and half a dozen candles flickered to life.

Mouse turned to me and gave me what I could have sworn was a reproachful look. Then he got up off of Molly, padded into the alcove that served as my kitchen, and deliberately yawned at me before flopping down on the floor to sleep. The meaning was clear: now it’s your problem.

“Ah,” I said, glancing from Mouse to my apprentice to my guest. “Um. What happened here, exactly?”

“The warlock tried to sneak up on me while I slept,” Morgan spat.

Molly quickly stood up and scowled at Morgan, her hands clenched into fists. “Oh, that’s ridiculous.”

“Then explain what you’re doing here this late at night,” Morgan said. “What possible reason could you have to show up here, now?”

“I’m making concentration-supporting potions,” she said from between clenched teeth, in a tone that suggested she’d repeated herself about a hundred times already. “The jasmine has to go in at night. Tell him, Harry.”

Crap. In all the excitement, I’d forgotten that the grasshopper was scheduled to show up and pull an all-nighter. “Um,” I said. “What I meant to ask was, how is it that Mouse came to be sitting on you both?”

“The warlock summoned up her will and prepared to attack me,” Morgan said frostily. “The dog intervened.”

Molly rolled her eyes and glared at him. “Oh, please. You are such an asshole.”

The air in the room seemed to tighten a little, as power gathered around the young woman.

“Molly,” I said gently.

She glanced over at me, scowling. “What?”

I cleared my throat and gestured at her with one hand.

She blinked for a second, then seemed to catch on. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled it slowly. As she did, the ominous sense of stormy energy faded. Molly ducked her head a little, her cheeks flushing. “Sorry. But it wasn’t like that.”

Morgan snorted.

I ignored him. “Go on,” I told Molly. “Talk.”

“He just . . . I just got so angry,” Molly said. “He made me so upset. I couldn’t help it.” She gestured to Mouse. “And then he just . . . just flattened me. And he wouldn’t let me up, and he wouldn’t let Morgan move, either.”

“Seems to me that the dog had better sense than you,” I said. I glanced up at Morgan. “Either of you. You’re supposed to stay still. You wanna kill yourself?”

“It was a reaction to her approach,” Morgan said calmly. “I survived it.”

I shook my head. “And you,” I said to Molly. “How many months have we spent working on your emotional control?”

“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s never good to use magic in anger. I know, Harry.”

“You’d better know it,” I said quietly. “If it’s so easy to get a rise out of you that one bitter old washed-up Warden can blow your O-ring, the first reactionary goomba to come along looking for an excuse to take you out is going to put you in a casket, claim it was self-defense, and get away with it.”

Morgan bared his teeth in an expression only remotely resembling a smile. “You’d know all about that, Dresden, wouldn’t you?”

“You son of a bitch!” Molly snarled and whirled toward Morgan, seizing a candlestick and hefting it like a club. The candle on it tumbled to the floor.

Morgan sat perfectly still with that same gruesome smile on his face, never flinching.

I lurched forward and grabbed Molly’s arm on her backswing, an instant before she would have brought the heavy candlestick crashing down on Morgan’s skull. Molly was strong for a woman, and I had to make a pretty serious effort to hold her back, my fingers digging into her wrist, while I snagged her around the waist with my other arm and bodily hauled her away from Morgan.

“No!” I demanded. “Dammit, Molly, no!” I actually had to lift her feet off the ground to turn her away from the bedroom. I tightened my grip on her wrist and said, “Drop the candlestick, Molly. Now.”

She let out a sound full of anger and laced with a little pain, and the heavy candlestick dropped to the floor, making a dull thud as it hit the rug-covered concrete. The air around her was alive with power, buzzing against my skin like a thousand tiny sparks of static electricity in a dry winter. “He can’t talk to you like that,” Molly snarled.

“Think,” I told her, my voice hard but measured. “Remember the lessons. They’re just words, Molly. Look for the thought behind them. He set you up for this reaction. You’re allowing him to make you embarrass me.”

Molly opened her mouth on an angry retort, then forced her mouth closed and turned her face away from me. She remained rigidly tense, and after a fuming half minute, she said, her voice more calm, “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” I replied as gently as I could. “Be disciplined. You can’t afford to let them rattle you. Not ever.”

She took another deep breath, exhaled, and then I felt her begin to ease down, relaxing her mental grasp on the power she’d instinctively prepared. “Okay,” she said. “Okay, Harry.”

I let her go slowly. She began to rub at her right wrist with her other hand. I winced a little on her behalf. I thought I’d left bruises on her skin.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Take Mouse and grab the mail.”

“I’m fine. I don’t need—” she began. Then she stopped herself, shook her head, and looked at Mouse.

The big dog heaved himself up, walked over to the basket next to the door, grasped his leather lead in his jaws, and dragged it out. Then he looked up at Molly, his head cocked to one side, his tail wagging hopefully.

Molly let out a rueful little laugh and knelt down to hug the big dog. She clipped his lead onto his collar, and the two of them left.

I turned and eyed the candle. It had spilled hot wax onto a genuine Navajo rug on the floor, but it hadn’t set anything on fire. I bent down and picked up the candle, then started trying to clean up the spilled wax as best I could.

“Why?” I asked in a hard voice.

“It’s one way to take a measure of a man,” he said. “Looking at his students.”

“You didn’t look,” I said. “You needled her until she broke.”

“She’s a self-proclaimed warlock, Dresden,” he replied. “Guilty of one of the most hideous and self-destructive crimes a wizard can commit. Is there some reason she shouldn’t be tested?”

“What you did was cruel,” I said.

“Was it?” Morgan asked. “There are others she is going to meet, one day, who will be even less gracious. Are you preparing her to deal with those people?”

I glared at him.

His gaze never wavered. “You aren’t doing her any favors by going easy on her, Dresden,” he said, more quietly. “You aren’t preparing her for exams. She doesn’t receive a bad mark if she fails.”

I was quiet for a minute. Then I asked, “Did you learn shields as an apprentice?”

“Of course. One of my earliest lessons.”

“How did your master teach you?”

“She threw stones at me,” he said.

I grunted, without looking at him.

“Pain is an excellent motivator,” he said. “And it teaches one to control one’s emotions at the same time.” He tilted his head. “Why do you ask?”

“No reason,” I told him. “She could have broken your head open, you know.”

He gave me that same unsettling smile. “You wouldn’t have let her.”

Molly came back into the apartment, carrying a handful of mail, including one of those stupid Circuit City fliers that they just won’t stop sending me. She shut the door, put the wards back up, and took Mouse’s lead off. The big dog went over to the kitchen and flopped down.

Molly put the mail on the coffee table, gave Morgan a level pensive look, and then nodded at him. “So . . . what’s he doing here, boss?”

I stared at Molly for a moment, and then at Morgan. “What do you think?” I asked him.

He shrugged a shoulder. “She already knows enough to implicate her. Besides, Dresden—if you go down with me, there’s no one left to take responsibility for her. Her sentence will not remain suspended.”

I ground my teeth together. Molly had made a couple of bad choices a few years back, and violated one of the Laws of Magic in doing so. The White Council takes a harsh view of such things—their reactions start with beheadings, and become progressively less tolerant. I’d staked my own life on the belief that Molly wasn’t rotten to the core, and that I could rehabilitate her. When I did it, I’d known that I was risking my own well-being. If Molly backslid, I’d bear the responsibility for it, and get a death sentence about twenty seconds after she did.

I hadn’t really considered that it would also work the other way around.

Say for a minute that it was Morgan’s intention to get caught and take me down with him. It also meant that Molly would take a fall. He’d get rid of both of the Council’s former warlocks with the same move. Two birds, one stone.

Well, crap.

“Okay,” I sighed. “I guess you’re in.”

“I am?” Molly looked at me with widening eyes. “Um. In what?”

I told her.