Turn Coat

Chapter Twenty-three

I got back to my apartment, shouldered open my door, and found a bizarre tableau.

Again.

Morgan lay on the floor about five feet from the bedroom door. He’d apparently seized my walking cane from the old popcorn tin by the door, where I keep things like Ozark folk art carved quarter staves, blasting rods, umbrellas, and so on. The cane is an old Victorian-style sword-cane. You twist the handle and pull, and you can draw a slender thirty-inch spring steel blade from the wooden cane. Morgan had. He lay on his side on the floor, his arm extended up at about a forty-five-degree angle, holding the sword.

Its tip rested against Molly’s carotid artery, just under her left ear.

Molly, for her part, leaned back against one of my bookcases, her knees bent a little, her arms spread out to either side, as if she’d stumbled over something and flung out her hands to brace herself against the bookcase as she fell back.

To the left of the door, Mouse crouched with his fangs bared and resting lightly against Anastasia Luccio’s throat. She lay on her back, and her gun lay on the rug-covered floor about two feet beyond the reach of her hand. She appeared to be quite relaxed, though I couldn’t see much of her face from where I stood.

Mouse’s deep brown eyes were focused steadily on Morgan. Morgan’s steely gaze was locked on Mouse’s jaws.

I stared at them aghast for a minute. No one moved. Except Mouse. When I looked at him, his tail wagged hopefully once or twice.

I blew out a heavy breath, set my staff aside, and plodded to the icebox, stepping over Anastasia’s leg on the way. I opened it, considered the contents for a moment, and then pulled out a cold Coke. I opened it and took a long drink. Then I picked up a dry kitchen towel, went to the couch, and sat down.

“I would ask what the hell happened,” I said to the room at large. “Except that the only one with any sense who witnessed it can’t actually talk.” I eyed the dog and said, “This had better be good.”

Mouse wagged his tail tentatively again.

“Okay,” I said. “Let her go.”

Mouse opened his jaws and sat up and away from Anastasia at once. He immediately padded over to me, and leaned against me as his gaze flicked from Anastasia to Morgan and back.

“Morgan,” I said. “Ease off the psycho throttle a little and put down the sword.”

“No,” Morgan said in a voice half strangled with fury. “Not until this little witch is bound and wearing a gag and a blindfold.”

“Molly’s already done duty as a beer-calendar model today,” I said. “We’re not dressing her up for a BDSM shoot next.” I put the Coke down and thought about it for a second. Threats weren’t going to have any effect on Morgan, except to make him more determined. It was one of the charming side effects of having such a rigid old-school personality.

“Morgan,” I said quietly. “You are a guest in my home.”

He flashed me a quick, guilty glance.

“You came to me for help and I’m doing my best. Hell, the kid has put herself into harm’s way, trying to protect you. I’ve done everything for you that I would have for blood family, because you are my guest. There are monsters from whom I would expect better behavior, once they had accepted my hospitality. What’s more, they’d give it to me.”

Morgan let out a pained sound. Then he turned his head sharply away from Molly and dropped the sword at the same time. The steel of the blade chimed as it bounced off the thin rug.

Morgan settled into a limp heap on the floor, and Molly sagged, lifting her hand and covering the vulnerable skin of her throat for a moment.

I waited until Anastasia sat up to toss her the towel I’d brought from the kitchen. She caught it, her expression neutral, and lifted it to begin drying her neck. Mouse is a great dog, but he has to work hard to control his slobber issues.

“So I take it things almost devolved into violence again,” I said to them. “And Mouse had to get involved.”

“She just came walking in here,” Molly protested. “She saw him.”

I blinked and looked at her. “And you did . . . what, exactly?”

“She blinded me,” Anastasia said calmly. “And then she hit me.” She lifted the towel and wiped at her nose. Some blood came away, though most of it stayed crusted and brown below one nostril. So they hadn’t been in the standoff for long. Anastasia gave Molly a steady gaze and said, “She hit me like a girl. For goodness’ sake, child, have you had no combat training at all?”

“There’s been a lot of material to cover,” I growled. “Blinded you?”

“Not permanently,” Molly said, more sullenly now. She rubbed at the knuckles of her right hand with her left. “I just . . . kind of veiled everything that wasn’t her.”

“An unnecessarily complicated way to go about it,” Anastasia said primly.

“For you, maybe,” Molly said defensively. “Besides, who was the one on the ground getting pounded?”

“Yes. You’re forty pounds heavier than me,” Anastasia said calmly.

“Bitch, I know you didn’t say just say that,” Molly bristled, stepping forward with her hands clenched.

Mouse sighed and heaved himself back to his feet.

Molly stopped, eyeing the big dog warily.

“Good dog,” I said, and scratched Mouse’s ears.

He wagged his tail without taking his serious brown eyes from Molly.

“I had to stop her,” Molly said. “She was going to report Morgan to the Wardens.”

“So you physically and magically assaulted her,” I said.

“What choice did I have?”

I eyed Morgan. “And you staggered up out of the bed you’re supposed to be staying in, grabbed the first pointy thing you could reach, and forced her off of Anastasia.”

Morgan eyed me wearily. “Obviously.”

I sighed and looked at Anastasia. “And you thought the only solution you had was to take them both down and sort everything out later, and Mouse stopped you.”

Anastasia sighed. “There was a blade out, Harry. The situation had to be controlled.”

I eyed Mouse. “And you wound up holding Anastasia hostage so Morgan wouldn’t hurt Molly.”

Mouse ducked his head.

“I can’t believe I’m about to say this,” I said. “So think real careful about where this is coming from. Have you people ever considered talking when you’ve got a problem?”

That didn’t please anybody, and they gave me looks with varying degrees of irritation mixed with chagrin.

Except for Mouse, who sighed and said something like, “Uh-woof.”

“Sorry,” I told him at once. “Four-footed nonvocalizing company excepted.”

“She was going to get the Wardens,” Molly said. “If that happened before we proved who really killed LaFortier, all of us would be up the creek.”

“Actually,” Anastasia said, “that’s true.”

I turned my gaze to her. She rose and stretched, wincing slightly. “I assumed,” she said quietly, “that Morgan had recruited your apprentice to assist him in his escape scheme. And that they had done away with you.”

I made a small frustrated sound. “Why the hell would you assume something like that?”

She narrowed her eyes as she stared at me. “Why would Morgan flee to the home of the one wizard in the Council who had the most reason to dislike him?” she asked. “I believe your words were: ‘that would be crazy.’ ”

I winced. Ouch. “Uh,” I said. “Yeah. I . . .”

“You lied to me,” she said in a level tone. Most people probably wouldn’t have noticed the undertone of anger and pain in her voice, or the almost imperceptible pause between each word. I could see bricks being mortared into place behind her eyes and I looked away from her.

The room was completely silent, until Morgan said, in a small and broken voice, “What?”

I looked up at him. His hard sour face had gone gray. His expression was twisted up in shock and surprise, like that of a small child discovering the painful consequences of gravity for the first time.

“Ana,” he said, almost choking on the words. “You . . . you think that I . . . How could you think that I would . . . ?”

He turned his face away. It couldn’t have been a tear. Not from Morgan. He wouldn’t shed tears if he had to execute his own mother.

But for a fraction of a second, something shone on one of his cheeks.

Anastasia rose and walked over to Morgan. She knelt down by him and put her hand on his head. “Donald,” she said gently, “we’ve been betrayed by those we trusted before. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“That was them,” he said unsteadily, not looking up. “This is me.”

She stroked his hair once. “I never thought you had done it of your own free will, Donald,” she whispered quietly. “I thought someone had gotten into your mind. Held a hostage against your cooperation. Something.”

“Who could they have held hostage?” Morgan said in a bitter voice. “There’s no one. For that very reason. And you know it.”

She sighed and closed her eyes.

“You knew his wards,” Morgan went on. “You’ve been through them before. Often. You opened them in under a second when you came in. You have a key to his apartment.”

She said nothing.

His voice turned heavy and hollow. “You’re involved. With Dresden.”

Anastasia blinked her eyes several times. “Donald,” she began.

He looked up at her, his eyes empty of tears or pain or anything but weariness. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t you dare.”

She met his eyes. I’d never seen such gentle pain on her face. “You’re running a fever. Donald, please. You should be in bed.”

He laid his head on the rug and closed his eyes. “It doesn’t matter.”

“Donald—”

“It doesn’t matter,” he repeated dully.

Anastasia started crying in silence. She stayed next to Morgan, stroking her hand over his mottled silver-and-brown hair.

An hour later, Morgan was unconscious in bed again. Molly was down in the lab, pretending to work on potions with the trapdoor closed. I was sitting in the same spot with an empty can of Coke.

Anastasia came out of the bedroom and shut the door silently behind her. Then she leaned back against it. “When I saw him,” she said, “I thought he had come here to hurt you. That he had learned about the two of us and wanted to hurt you.”

“You,” I asked, “and Morgan?”

She was quiet for a moment before she said, “I never allowed it to happen. It wasn’t fair to him.”

“But he wanted it anyway,” I said.

She nodded.

“Hell’s bells,” I sighed.

She folded her arms over her stomach, never looking up. “Was it any different with your apprentice, Harry?”

Molly hadn’t always been the grasshopper she was today. When I’d first begun teaching her, she’d assumed that I would be teaching her all sorts of things that had nothing to do with magic and everything to do with her being naked. And that had been more than all right with her.

Just not with me.

“Not much,” I acknowledged. “But he hasn’t been your apprentice for a long, long time.”

“I have always been of the opinion that romantic involvement was a vulnerability I could not afford. Not in my position.”

“Not always,” I said, “apparently.”

She exhaled slowly. “It was a much easier opinion to hold in my previous body. It was older. Less prone to . . .”

“Life?” I suggested.

She shrugged. “Desire. Loneliness. Joy. Pain.”

“Life,” I said.

“Perhaps.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “When I was young, I reveled in love, Harry. In passion. In discovery and in new experiences and in life.” She gestured down at herself. “I never realized how much of it I had forgotten until Corpsetaker left me like this.” She opened her pained eyes and looked at me. “I didn’t realize how much I missed it until you reminded me. And by then, Morgan wasn’t . . . He was like I had been. Detached.”

“In other words,” I said, “he’d made himself more like you. Patterned himself after you. And because he’d done that, after your change he wasn’t capable of giving you what you wanted.”

She nodded.

I shook my head. “A hundred years is a long time to carry a torch,” I said. “That one must burn like hell.”

“I know. And I never wanted to hurt him. You must believe me.”

“Here’s where you say, ‘The heart wants what the heart wants,’ ” I said.

“Trite,” she said, “but true all the same.” She turned until her right shoulder leaned on the door, facing me. “We should talk about where this leaves us.”

I toyed with the can of Coke. “Before we can do that,” I said, “we have to talk about Morgan and LaFortier.”

She exhaled slowly. “Yes.”

“What do you intend to do?” I asked.

“He’s wanted by the Council, Harry,” she said in a gentle voice. “I don’t know how he’s managed to avoid being located by magical means, but sooner or later, in hours or days, hewill be found. And when that happens, you and Molly will be implicated as well. You’ll both die with him.” She took a deep breath. “And if I don’t go to the Council with what I know, I’ll be right there beside you.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You really think he’s innocent?” she asked.

“Of LaFortier’s murder,” I said. “Yes.”

“Do you have proof?”

“I’ve found out enough to make me think I’m right. Not enough to clear him—yet.”

“If it wasn’t Morgan,” she said quietly, “then the traitor is still running around loose.”

“Yeah.”

“You’re asking me to discard the pursuit of a suspect with strong evidence supporting his guilt in favor of chasing a damn ghost, Harry. Someone we’ve barely been able to prove exists, much less identify. Not only that, you’re asking me to gamble your life, your apprentice’s life, and my own against finding this ghost in time.”

“Yes. I am.”

She shook her head. “Everything I’ve ever learned as a Warden tells me that it’s far more likely that Morgan is guilty.”

“Which brings us back to the question,” I said. “What are you going to do?”

Silence yawned.

She pushed off the door and came to sit down on the chair facing my seat on the couch.

“All right,” she said. “Tell me everything.”