Turn Coat

Chapter Twenty-eight

I sort of shambled up one floor and down a wing to the Château’s infirmary, escorted there by a guard who was being very careful not to limp on a wounded leg. The skinwalker had smacked my bean against hardwood and knocked something loose. I felt fairly confident that if I jumped up and down and wiggled my head, my brain would slosh squishily around the inside of my skull.

Not that I was going to be doing any of those things. Walking was hard enough.

In the infirmary, I found a white-coated young woman tending to the wounded. She moved with the brisk professional manner of a doctor, and was just finishing seeing to Justine’s injuries. The young woman was laid out on a bed, her midsection swathed in bandages, her eyes glazed with the distant, peaceful expression of someone on good drugs.

Anastasia sat on the bed next to Justine’s, her back straight, her expression calm. Her right arm was bound up close against her body in a black cloth sling. She came to her feet as I entered the room. She looked a little pale and shaky, but she stood without leaning on her slender wooden staff. “We’re leaving now?”

“Yeah,” I said. I moved to her side to support her. “You okay to walk?”

She leaned her staff toward me, stopping me from coming any closer, though she smiled slightly as she did. “I’ll bloody well walk out of here,” she said. And she said it in an atrocious Scottish accent.

I lifted both eyebrows at her in shock. “You told me you fell asleep during Highlander.”

Her dark eyes sparkled. “I always say that when I find myself at a vintage movie showing at a drive-in theater while in the company of a man two centuries younger than me.”

“And not because you didn’t want to hurt my feelings with your professional opinion of the swordsmanship on display?”

“Young men can be so delicate,” she said, her dimples making a brief appearance.

“We should get you to a hospital,” I said, nodding at her sling.

She shook her head. “The break is set back in place already. From here, all one can do is wear a sling and wait for it to stop hurting so badly.”

I grimaced. “I’ve got some meds at my place.”

She smiled again, but this time I could see how much she was straining to keep up appearances. “That would be lovely.”

“Harry,” said a soft voice.

I turned to face the wounded Justine, who looked at me with drowsy eyes. I turned to the bed and bent down to smile at her. “Hey there.”

“We heard that thing talking,” she said. All the hard consonants in her words had blurred, rounded edges. “We heard it talking to you and Lara.”

I glanced up at Anastasia, who gave me a short nod of her head.

“Yeah,” I said to Justine. I desperately did not want her to say anything she ought not to be saying. “I’ll take care of it.”

Justine smiled at me, though she looked like she could hardly keep her eyes open. “I know you will. He loves you, you know.”

I did not look up at Anastasia. “Uh. Yeah.”

Justine took my hand in one of hers, her eyes reaching for mine. “He always worried that he’d never be able to talk to you. That the world he came from was so different. That he wouldn’t know enough about being human to relate. That he wouldn’t know about being a br—”

“Brass-plated pain in my ass,” I said. “He knows that plenty well.” I avoided her eyes. The last thing I needed was to endure another soulgaze now. “Justine, you need to rest. I’ll dig him up. Don’t worry.”

She smiled again and her eyes closed all the way. “You’re like family to me, Harry. You always care.”

I bowed my head, embarrassed, and settled Justine’s hands back on the bed, then tugged the thin hospital blankets up over her.

Anastasia watched me with thoughtful eyes as I did.

We walked back to the front of the house, and past the fairly fresh plaster that might have hidden ridiculously lethal booby traps, out over a front porch the size of a tennis court, and down several steps to the circular drive, where the car Lara had lent me was waiting.

I stopped so suddenly that Anastasia nearly walked into my back. She caught her balance with a hiss of discomfort, and then looked up and caught her breath. “Oh, my.”

Nearly two tons of British steel and chrome sat idling in the drive. Its purring engine sounded like a sewing machine. The white Rolls limo was an old model, something right out of a pulp-fiction adventure film, and it was in gorgeous condition. Its panels shone, freshly waxed and without blemish, and the chrome of its grill gleamed sienna in the light of dusk over the Château.

I walked down to peer inside the Rolls. The passenger seating in the back was larger than my freaking apartment. Or at least it looked that way. The interior was all silver-grey and white leather and similarly colored woodwork, polished to a glowing sheen and accented with silver. The carpet on the floor of the Rolls was thicker and more luxurious than a well-kept lawn.

“Wow,” I said quietly.

Anastasia, standing beside me, breathed, “That’s a work of bloody art.”

“Wow,” I said quietly.

“Look at the filigree.”

I nodded. “Wow.”

Anastasia gave me a sidelong look. “And there’s plenty of room in back.”

I blinked and looked at her.

Her expression was innocent and bland. “All I’m saying is that it is rather crowded in your apartment right now. . . .”

“Anastasia,” I said. I felt my face getting a little warm.

The dimples reappeared. She was just teasing me, of course. In her condition it would be some time before she could engage in that kind of activity.

“What model is this?” she asked.

“Um,” I said. “Well, it’s a Rolls-Royce. It’s . . . I think it’s from before World War Two. . . .”

“It’s a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, of course,” said Lara’s voice from behind me. “At this house? What else would it be?”

I looked over my shoulder, to see Lara Raith standing in the shadowy doorway of the house.

“You have special needs, obviously,” she said. “So I provided you with an appropriate vintage. Nineteen thirty-nine.” She folded her arms, rather smugly, I thought, and said, “Bring it back with a full tank.”

I tilted my head at her in a gesture that wasn’t quite an affirmation, and muttered, as I opened the passenger-side door, “The loan officer will have to run a check on my credit first. What’s this thing get, about two gallons per mile?”

Anastasia slid into the car with a brief sound of discomfort. I winced and held out my hands in case she fell back, but she managed it without any other difficulty. I shut the door, and caught a glimpse of Lara taking a sudden step forward.

She focused sharply on Anastasia for a moment—and then upon me.

Lara’s eyes flickered several shades paler as her ripe lips parted in dawning realization. A very slow smile crept over her mouth as she stared at me.

I turned away from her rather hurriedly, got into the Rolls, and got it moving. And I didn’t look back again until the vampires’ house was five miles behind us.

Anastasia let me get most of the way back to town before she looked at me and said, “Harry?”

“Hmmm?” I asked. Driving the Rolls was like driving a tank. It had all kinds of momentum behind it, no power steering, and no power brakes. It was a vehicle that demanded that I pay my respects to the laws of physics and think a little bit further ahead than I otherwise might.

“Is there something you want to tell me?” she asked.

“Dammit,” I muttered.

She watched me with eyes much older than the face around them. “You were hoping I didn’t hear Justine.”

“Yeah.”

“But I did.”

I drove for another minute or two before asking, “Are you sure?”

She considered that for a moment before she said, more gently, “Are you sure there’s nothing you want to tell me?”

“I have nothing to say to Captain Luccio,” I said. It came out harder than I had anticipated.

She reached out and put her left hand on my right, where it rested on the gearshift. “What about to Anastasia?” she asked.

I felt my jaw tighten. It took me a moment to make them relax and ask, “Do you have any family?”

“Yes,” she said. “Technically.”

“Technically?”

“The men and women I grew up with, who I knew? They’ve been dead for generations. Their descendants are living all over Italy, in Greece, and there are a few in Algeria—but it isn’t as though they invite their great-great-great-great-great-great-grandaunt to their Christmas celebrations. They’re strangers.”

I frowned, thinking that over, and looked at her. “Strangers.”

She nodded. “Most people aren’t willing to accept a radical fact like the life span of our kind, Harry. There are some families who have—Martha Liberty, for example, lives with one of her multiple-great-granddaughters and her children. But mostly, it ends badly when wizards try to stay too close to their kin.” She bowed her head, apparently studying her sling as she spoke. “I look in on them every five or six years, without them knowing. Keep an eye out for any of the children who might develop a talent.”

“But you had a real family once,” I said.

She sighed and looked out the window. “Oh, yes. It was a very long time ago.”

“I remember my father, a little. But I was raised an orphan.”

She winced. “

Dio , Harry.” Her fingers squeezed mine. “You never had anyone, did you?”

“And if I did find someone,” I said, feeling my throat constricting as I spoke, “I would do anything necessary to protect him. Anything.”

Anastasia looked out the window, letting out a hiss of what sounded like anger. “Margaret. You selfish bitch.”

I blinked and looked at her, and nearly got us both killed when a passing car cut me off and I almost couldn’t stop the monster Rolls in time. “You . . . you knew my mother?”

“All the Wardens knew her,” Anastasia said quietly.

“She was a Warden?”

Anastasia was silent for a moment before shaking her head. “She was considered a threat to the Laws of Magic.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that she made it a point to dance as close to the edge of breaking the Laws as she possibly could whenever she got the chance,” Anastasia replied. “It took her all of a year after she was admitted to the Council to start agitating for change.”

I had to focus on the road. This was more than I had ever heard from anyone in the Council about the enigmatic figure who had given me life. My hands were sweating and my heart was thudding. “What kind of change?”

“She was furious that ‘the Laws of Magic have nothing to do with right and wrong.’ She pointed out how wizards could use their abilities to bilk people out of their money, to intimidate and manipulate them, to steal wealth and property from others or destroy it outright, and that so long as the Laws were obeyed, the Council would do nothing whatsoever to stop them or discourage others from following their example. She wanted to reform the Council’s laws to embrace concepts of justice as well as limiting the specific use of magic.”

I frowned. “Wow. What a monster.”

She exhaled slowly. “Can you imagine what would happen if she’d had her way?”

“I wouldn’t have been unjustly persecuted by the Wardens for years?”

Anastasia’s lips firmed into a line. “Once a body of laws describing justice was applied to the Council, it would only be a short step to using that body to involve the Council in events happening in the outside world.”

“Gosh, yeah,” I said. “You’re right. A bunch of wizards trying to effect good in the world would be awful.”

“Whose good?” Anastasia asked calmly. “No one is an unjust villain in his own mind, Harry. Even—perhaps even especially—those who are the worst of us. Some of the cruelest tyrants in history were motivated by noble ideals, or made choices that they would call ‘hard but necessary steps’ for the good of their nation. We’re all the hero of our own story.”

“Yeah. It was really hard to tell who the good guys and bad guys were in World War Two.”

She rolled her eyes. “You’ve read the histories written by the victors of that war, Harry. As someone who lived through it, I can tell you that at the time of the war, there was a great deal less certainty. There were stories of atrocities in Germany, but for every one that was true, there were another five or six that weren’t. How could one have told the difference between the true stories, the propaganda, and simple fabrications and myths created by the people of the nations Germany had attacked?”

“Might have been a bit easier if there’d been a wizard or three around to help,” I said.

She gave me an oblique look. “Then by your argument, you would have had the White Council destroy the United States.”

“What?”

“Your government has drenched its hands in innocent blood as well,” she replied, still calm. “Unless you think the Indian tribesmen whose lands were conquered were somehow the villains of the piece.”

I frowned over that one. “We’ve gone sort of far afield from my mother.”

“Yes. And no. What she proposed would inevitably have drawn the Council into mortal conflicts, and therefore into mortal politics. Tell me the truth—if the Council, today, declared war upon America for its past crimes and current idiocy, would you obey the order to attack?”

“Hell, no,” I said. “The U.S. isn’t a perfect place, but it’s better than most people have managed to come up with. And all my stuff is there.”

She smiled faintly. “Exactly. And since the Council is made up of members from all over the world, it would mean that no matter where we acted, we would almost certainly be faced with dissidence and desertion from those who felt their homelands wronged.” She shrugged—and grimaced in pain before arresting the motion. “I myself would have issues if the Council acted against any of the lands where my family has settled. They may not remember me, but the reverse is not true.”

I thought about what she’d said for a long moment. “What you’re saying is that the Council would have to turn on some of its own.”

“And how many times would that happen before there was no Council?” she asked. “Wars and feuds can live for generations even when there isn’t a group of wizards involved. Settling the conflicts would have required even more involvement in mortal affairs.”

“You mean control,” I said quietly. “You mean the Council seeking political power.”

She gave me a knowing look. “One of the things that makes me respect you more than most young people is your appreciation for history. Precisely. And for gaining control over others, for gathering great power to oneself, there is no better tool than black magic.”

“Which is what the Laws of Magic cover already.”

She nodded. “And so the Council limits itself. Any wizard is free to act in whatever manner he chooses with his power—provided he doesn’t break any of the Laws. Without resorting to black magic, the amount of damage an individual can inflict on mortal society is limited. As harsh an experience as it has created for you, Harry, the Laws of Magic are not about justice. The White Council is not about justice. They are about restraining power.” She smiled faintly. “And, occasionally, the Council manages to do some good by protecting mankind from supernatural threats.”

“And that’s good enough for you?” I asked.

“It isn’t perfect,” she admitted. “But it’s better than anything else we’ve come up with. And the things I’ve spent my lifetime building are there.”

“Touché,” I said.

“Thank you.”

I stroked her fingers with my thumb. “So you’re saying my mother was short-sighted.”

“She was a complex woman,” Anastasia said. “Brilliant, erratic, passionate, committed, idealistic, talented, charming, insulting, bold, incautious, arrogant—and short-sighted, yes. Among a great many other qualities. She loved pointing out the areas of ‘grey’ magic, as she called them, and constantly questioning their legitimacy.” She shrugged. “The Senior Council tasked the Wardens to keep an eye on her. Which was damn near impossible.”

“Why?”

“The woman had a great many contacts among the Fey. That’s why everyone called her Margaret LaFey. She knew more Ways through the Nevernever than anyone I’ve ever seen, before or since. She could be in Beijing at breakfast, Rome at lunch, and Seattle for supper and stop for coffee in Sydney and Capetown in between.” She sighed. “Margaret vanished once, for four or five years. Everyone assumed that she’d finally run afoul of something in Faerie. She never seemed able to restrain her tongue, even when she knew better.”

“I wonder what that’s like.”

Anastasia gave me a rather worn sad smile. “But she didn’t spend all that time in Faerie, did she?”

I looked up at the rearview mirror, back toward Château Raith.

“And Thomas is the son of the White King himself.”

I didn’t answer.

She exhaled heavily. “You look so different from him. Except perhaps for something in the jaw. The shape of the eyes.”

I didn’t say anything until we got to the apartment. The Rolls went together with the gravel lot like champagne and Cracker Jacks. I turned the engine off and listened to it click as it began to cool down. The sun was gone over the horizon by that time, and the lengthening shadows began to trigger streetlights.

“Are you going to tell anyone?” I asked quietly.

She looked out the window as she considered the question. Then she said, “Not unless I think it relevant.”

I turned to look at her. “You know what will happen if they know. They’ll use him.”

She gazed straight out the front of the car. “I know.”

I spoke quietly to put all the weight I could into each word I spoke next. “Over. My. Dead. Body.”

Anastasia closed her eyes for a moment, and opened them again. Her expression never flickered. She took her hand slowly, reluctantly from mine and put it in her lap. Then she whispered, “I pray to God it never comes to that.”

We sat in the car separately.

It seemed larger and colder, for some reason. The silence seemed deeper.

Luccio lifted her chin and looked at me. “What will you do now?”

“What do you think?” I clenched my fists so that my knuckles popped, rolled my neck once, and opened the door. “I’m going to find my brother.”