Turn Coat

Chapter Thirty-three

Murphy looked at the Rolls and said, “You’re kidding.” We’d driven down to the Sax separately, and she hadn’t seen the wheels I was using. I was parked closer to the hotel, so we were about to get into the Silver Wraith together.

“It’s a loaner,” I said. “Get in.”

“I am not a material girl,” she said, running a hand over the Rolls’s fender. “But . . . damn.”

“Can we focus, here?” I said. “The world’s coming to an end.”

Murphy shook her head and then got in the car with me. “Well. At least you’re going out in style.”

I got the Rolls moving. It got plenty of looks, even in the dead of night, and the other motorists out so late gave it a generous amount of room, as if intimidated by the Wraith’s sheer artistry.

“Actually,” I said, “I’m kind of finding the Rolls to be irrationally comforting.”

Murphy glanced aside at me. “Why’s that?”

“I know how I’m going to die, you know? One of these days, maybe real soon, I’m going to find out I’ve bitten off more than I can chew.” I swallowed. “I mean, I just can’t keep from sticking my nose in places people don’t want it. And I always figured it would be the Council who punched my ticket, regardless of who believed what about me. Because there’s a bunch of assholes there, and I just can’t let them wallow in their own bull and pretend it’s an air of nobility.”

Murphy’s expression became more sober. She listened in silence.

“Now the Council’s coming. And they’ve got good reason to take me out. Or it looks like it to them, which is the same thing.” I swallowed again. My mouth felt dry. “But . . . I somehow just have the feeling that when I go out . . . it isn’tgoing to be in style.” I gestured at the Rolls with a vague sweep of one hand. “This just isn’t the car I drive to my death. You know?”

Murph’s mouth tucked up at one corner, though most of the smile was in her eyes. She took my hand between hers and held it. Her hands felt very warm. Maybe mine were just cold. “You’re right, of course, Harry.”

“You think?”

“Definitely,” she said. “This car just isn’t you. You’ll die in some badly painted, hideously recycled piece of junk that seems to keep on running despite the laws of physics that say it should be melted scrap by now.”

“Whew,” I said. “I thought I might be the only one who thought that.”

Her fingers tightened on mine for a moment, and I clung back.

The Council was coming.

And there wasn’t anything I could do to fight them.

Oh sure, maybe I could poke someone in the nose and run. But they would catch up to me sooner or later. There would be more of them than me, some of them every bit as strong as I was, and all of them dangerous. It might take a day or a week or a couple of weeks, but I had to sleep sooner or later. They’d wear me down.

And that pissed me off. My sheer helplessness in the face of this whole stupid mess was infuriating.

It wasn’t as if I didn’t have options. . . . Mab still held a job offer open to me, for example. And it was more than possible that Lara Raith might have the resources to shield me, or broker me a better deal than the Council was going to offer. When I thought of how unfair the whole thing was, I had more than a passing desire to grab whatever slender threads I could reach, until I could sort things out, later.

Put that way, it almost sounded reasonable. Noble, even. I would, after all, be protecting other wrongly persecuted victims of the Council who littered the theoretical landscape of the future. It didn’t sound nearly so much like entering bargains that went against everything I believed so that I could forcibly impose my will over those who were against me.

I knew the truth. But just because it was true didn’t make it any less tempting.

What the hell was I going to do? I had a hidey-hole planned out, but it had already been compromised. There was nowhere even a little bit safe I could take Morgan but my apartment, and the Wardens were going to find him there. And on top of all that, I still had no freaking clue as to the identity of our mysterious puppet master.

Maybe it was time to admit it.

This one was too big for me. It had been from the very start.

“Murph,” I said quietly. “I don’t know how I’m going to get out of this.”

Silence filled the beautiful old car.

“When’s the last time you slept?” Murphy asked.

I had to take my hand back from hers to work the clutch. I gestured at my bandaged head. “I can barely remember what day of the week it is. This morning, a couple hours, I think?”

She nodded judiciously. “You know what your problem is?”

I eyed her and then started laughing. Or at least making an amused, wheezing sound. I couldn’t help it.

“Problem, singular,” I choked out, finally. “No, what?”

“You like to come off like you’re the unpredictable chaos factor in any given situation, but at the end of the day you obsess about having everything ordered the way you want it.”

“Have you seen my lab?”

“Again with the inappropriately timed come-ons,” Murphy said. “I’m serious, Harry.”

“I know some people who would really disagree with you. Like what’s-his-face, Peabody.”

“He’s Council?”

“Yeah. Says I have no place in his bastion of order.”

She smirked. “The problem is that your bastion of order is sort of tough to coexist with.”

“I have no bastions. I am bastionless.”

“Hah,” Murphy said. “You like the same car, the same apartment, the same restaurant. You like not needing to answer to anyone, and doing the jobs your conscience dictates you should do, without worrying about the broader issues they involve. You hang out, fairly happy without much in the way of material wealth and follow your instincts, and be damned to anyone who tells you otherwise. That’s your order.”

I eyed her. “Is there some other way it should be?”

She rolled her eyes. “I rest my case.”

“And how is this my problem?”

“You’ve never really compromised your order for someone else’s, which is why you drive the Wardens nuts. They have procedures, they have forms, they have reports—and you ignore them unless someone twists your arm to make you do it. Am I right?”

“Still don’t see how that’s a problem.”

She rolled down the passenger-side window and let one hand hang out. “It’s a problem because you never learned how to adjust inside someone else’s order,” she said. “If you had, you’d realize what an incredible force you have working on your side.”

“The A-Team?”

“Bureaucracy,” Murphy said.

“I would rather have the A-Team.”

“Listen and learn, maverick,” Murphy said. “The Wardens are an organization, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Lots of members.”

“Almost three hundred and growing,” I said.

“Lots of members who all have many obligations, who live in different areas, who speak different languages, but who have to communicate and work together somehow?”

“Yeah.”

“Behold,” Murphy said. “Bureaucracy. Organization to combat the entropy that naturally inhibits that kind of cooperative effort.”

“Is there going to be a quiz later, or . . . ?”

She ignored me. “Bureaucracies share common traits—and I think you’ve got more time to move in than you realize. If you weren’t tired and hurting and an obnoxious fly in the ointment to anyone’s order but your own, you’d see that.”

I frowned. “How so?”

“Do you think Madeline Raith called up the White Council on her home phone, identified herself, and just told them you were helping Morgan?” Murphy shook her head. “ ‘Hello, I’m the enemy. Let me help you for no good reason.’ ”

I sucked thoughtfully on my lower lip. “The Wardens would probably assume that she was trying to divert their resources during a manpower-critical situation.”

Murphy nodded. “And while they will look into it, they’ll never really believe it, and it will go straight to the bottom of their priority list.”

“So she calls in an anonymous tip instead. So?”

“So how many tips do you think the Wardens have gotten?” Murphy asked. “Cops go through the same thing. Some big flashy crime goes down and we have a dozen nuts claiming credit or convinced their neighbor did it, another dozen jerks who want to get their neighbor in trouble, and three times that many well-meaning people who have no clue whatsoever and think they’re helping.”

I chewed on that thought for a moment. Murphy wasn’t far off the mark. There were plenty of organizations and Lord only knew how many individuals who would want to stay on the Wardens’ good side, or who would want to impress them, or who would simply want to have a real reason to interact with them. Murph was probably right. There probably were tips flooding in from all over the world.

“They’ll check the tip out,” Murphy said. “But I’m willing to bet you real money that, depending on their manpower issues, it won’t happen until several hours after the tip actually makes it into the hands of the folks running the show—and with any luck, given the Council’s issues with technology and communication,that will take a while as well.”

I mulled that one over for a minute. “What are you saying?”

She put her hand on my arm and squeezed once. “I’m saying don’t give up yet. There’s still a little time.”

I turned my head and studied Murphy’s profile for a moment.

“Really?” I asked her quietly.

She nodded. “Yeah.”

Like “love,” “hope” is one of those ridiculously disproportional words that by all rights should be a lot longer.

I resettled my grip on the Rolls’s steering wheel. “Murph?”

“Mmm?”

“You’re one hell of a dame.”

“Sexist pig,” she said. She smiled out the windshield. “Don’t make me hurt you.”

“Yeah,” I said. “It wouldn’t be ladylike.”

She shook her head as we neared my apartment. “If you like,” she said, “take him to my place. You can hide out there.”

I didn’t actually smile, but her words made me feel like doing it. “Not this time. The Wardens know where you live, remember? If they start looking hard at me . . .”

“. . . they’ll check me out, too,” Murphy said. “But you can’t keep him at your place.”

“I know that. I also know that I can’t drag anyone else into the middle of this clust—this mess.”

“There’s got to be somewhere,” she said. “Someplace quiet. And not well-known. And away from crowds.” She paused. “And where you can protect him from tracking magic. And where you’d have the advantage, if it did come to a fight.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Okay,” Murphy said. “I guess maybe there aren’t any places like that around here.”

I snapped my head up straight.

“Hell’s bells!” I breathed. I felt a grin stretch my mouth. “I think maybe there is!”