Small Favor (The Dresden Files #10) - Page 21

Chapter Forty-six

I woke up covered in a couple of heavy down comforters and innumerable blankets, and it was morning. The bench seat on the Water Beetle had been folded out into a reasonably comfortable cot. A kerosene heater was burning on the other side of the cabin. It wasn't exactly toasty, but it made the cabin warm enough to steam up the windows.

I came to slowly, aching in every joint, muscle and limb. The after-action hangover was every bit as bad as I had anticipated. I tried to remind myself that this was a deliriously joyous problem to deal with, all things considered. I wasn't being a very good sport about it, though. I growled and complained bitterly, and eventually worked up enough nerve to sit up and get out from under the covers. I went to the tiny bathroom-though on a boat, I guess it's called a "head" for some stupid reason-and by the time I zombie-shuffled out, Thomas had come down from the deck and slipped inside. He was putting a cell phone back into his jacket pocket, and his expression was serious.

"Harry," he said. "How you doing?"

I suggested what he could do with his reproductive organs.

He arched an eyebrow at me. "Better than I'd expected."

I grunted. Then I added, "Thank you."

He snorted. That was all. "Come on. I've got coffee for you in the car."

"I'm leaving everything to you in my will," I said.

"Cool. Next time I'll leave you in the water."

I pulled my coat on with a groan. "Almost wish you had. Coin? Sword?"

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"Safe, stowed below. You want them?"

I shook my head. "Keep them here for now."

I followed him out to the truck, gimping on my bad knee. I noted that someone had, at some point in the evening, cleaned me up a bit and put new bandages on my leg, and on a number of scrapes and contusions I didn't even remember getting. I was wearing fresh clothing, too. Thomas. He didn't say anything about it, and neither did I. It's a brother thing.

We got into the battered Hummer, and I seized a paper cup of coffee waiting for me next to a brown paper bag. I grabbed the coffee, dumped in a lot of sugar and creamer, stirred it for about a quarter turn of the stick, and started sipping. Then I checked out the bag. Doughnut. I assaulted it.

Thomas began to start the car but froze in place and blinked at the doughnut. "Hey," he said. "Where the hell did that come from?"

I took another bite. Cake doughnut. White frosting. Sprinkles. Still warm. And I had hot coffee to go with it. Pure heaven. I gave my brother a cryptic look and just took another bite.

"Christ," he muttered, starting the truck. "You don't even explain the little things, do you?"

"It's like a drug," I said, through a mouthful of fattening goodness.

I enjoyed the doughnut while I could, letting it fully occupy all my senses. After I'd finished it, and the coffee started kicking in, I realized why I'd indulged myself so completely: It was likely to be the last bit of pleasure I was going to feel for a while.

Thomas hadn't said a damned thing about where we were going-or how anyone was doing after the events of the night before.

The Stroger building, the new hospital that has replaced the old Cook County complex as Chicago's nerve center of medicine, is only a few yards away from the old clump of buildings. It looks kind of like a castle. If you scrunch up your eyes a little, you can almost imagine its features as medieval ramparts and towers and crenellation, standing like some ancient mountain bastion, determined to defend the citizens of Chicago against the plagues and evils of the world.

Provided they have enough medical coverage, of course.

I finished the coffee and thought to myself that I might have been feeling a little pessimistic.

Thomas led me up to intensive care. He stopped in the hallway outside. "Luccio's coordinating the information, so I don't have many details. But Molly's in there. She'll have the rest of them for you."

"What do you know?" I asked him.

"Michael's in bad shape," he said. "Still in surgery, last I heard. They're waiting for him up here. I guess the bullets all came up from underneath him, and that armor he was wearing actually kept one of them in. Bounced around inside him like a BB inside a tin can."

I winced.

"They said he only got hit by two or three rounds," Thomas continued. "But that it was more or less a miracle that he survived it at all. They don't know if he's going to make it. Sanya didn't go into anything more specific than that."

I closed my eyes.

"Look," Thomas said. "I'm not exactly welcome around here right now. But I'll stay if you need me to."

Thomas wasn't telling me the whole truth. My brother wasn't comfortable in hospitals, and I was pretty sure I'd figured out why: They were full of the sick, the injured, and the elderly-i.e., the kind of herd animals that predators' instincts told them were weakest, and the easiest targets. My brother didn't like being reminded about that part of his nature. He might hate that it happened, but his instincts would react regardless of what he wanted or didn't want. It would be torture for him to hang around here.

"No," I said. "I'll be fine."

He frowned at me. "All right," he said after a moment. "You've got my number. Call me; I'll give you a ride home."

"Thanks."

He put a hand on my arm for a second, then turned, hunched his shoulders, bowed his head so that his hair fell to hide most of his face, and walked quickly away.

I went on into the intensive care ward and found the waiting area.

Molly was sitting inside, next to Charity. Mother and daughter sat side by side, holding hands. They looked strained and weary. Charity was wearing jeans and one of Michael's flannel shirts. Her hair was pulled back into a ponytail, and she didn't have any makeup on. She'd been pulled from her bed in the middle of the night to rush to the hospital. Her eyes were focused into the distance and blank.

Small wonder. This was her greatest nightmare come to life.

They looked up as I came in, and their expressions were exactly the same: neutral, distant, numb.

"Harry," Molly said, her voice hollow, ghostly.

"Hey, kid," I said.

It took Charity a moment to react to my arrival. She focused her eyes on the far wall, blinked them a couple of times, and then focused them on me. She nodded and didn't speak.

"I, uh," I said quietly.

Molly raised her hand to stop me from speaking. I shut up.

"Okay," she said. "Uh, let me think." She closed her eyes, frowning in concentration, and started ticking off one finger with each sentence. "Luccio says that the Archive is stable but unconscious. She's at Murphy's house and needs to talk to you. Murphy says to tell you her face will be fine. Sanya says that he needs to talk to you alone, and as soon as possible, at St. Mary's."

I waved a hand at all of that. "I'll take care of it later. How's your dad?"

"Severe trauma to his liver," Charity said, her voice toneless. "One of his kidneys was damaged too badly to be saved. One of his lungs collapsed. There's damage to his spine. One of his ribs was fractured into multiple pieces. His pelvis was broken in two places. His jaw was shattered. Subdural hematoma. There was trauma all through one ocular cavity. They aren't sure if he'll lose the eye or not. There might also be brain damage. They don't know yet." Her eyes overflowed and focused into the distance again. "There was trauma to his heart. Fragments of broken bone in it. From his ribs." She shuddered and closed her eyes. "His heart. They hurt his heart."

Molly sat back down beside her mother and put her arm around Charity's shoulders. Charity leaned against her, eyes still spilling tears, but she never made a sound.

I'm not a Knight.

I'm not a hero, either.

Heroes keep their promises.

"Molly," I said quietly. "I'm sorry."

She looked up at me, and her lip started quivering. She shook her head and said, "Oh, Harry."

"I'll go," I said.

Charity's face snapped up and she said, her voice suddenly very clear and distinct, "No."

Molly blinked at her mother.

Charity stood up, her face blotched with tears, creased with strain, her eyes sunken with fatigue and worry. She stared at me for a long moment and then said, "Families stay, Harry." She lifted her chin, sudden and fierce pride briefly driving out the grief in her eyes. "He would stay for you."

My vision got a little blurry, and I sat down in the nearest chair. Probably just a reaction to all the strain of the past couple of days.

"Yeah," I said, my throat thick. "He would."

I called everyone on the list Molly had quoted me and told them they could wait to see me until we knew about Michael. Except for Murph, they all got upset about that. I told them they could go to hell and hung up on them.

Then I settled in with Molly and Charity and waited.

Hospital waits are bad ones. The fact that they happen to pretty much all of us, sooner or later, doesn't make them any less hideous. They're always just a little bit too cold. It always smells just a little bit too sharp and clean. It's always quiet, so quiet that you can hear the fluorescent lights-another constant, those lights-humming. Pretty much everyone else there is in the same bad predicament you are, and there isn't much in the way of cheerful conversation.

And there's always a clock in sight. The clock has superpowers. It always seems to move too slowly. Look up at it and it will tell you the time. Look up an hour and a half later, and it will tell you two minutes have gone by. Yet it somehow simultaneously has the ability to remind you of how short life is, to make you acutely aware of how little time someone you love might have remaining to them.

The day crawled by. A doctor came to see Charity twice, to tell her that things were still bad, and that they were still working. The second visit came around suppertime, and the doc suggested that she get some food if she could, that they should know something more definite after the next procedure, in three or four hours.

He asked if Charity knew whether or not Michael had agreed to be an organ donor. Just in case, he said. They hadn't been able to find his driver's license. I could tell that Charity wanted to tell the doctor where he could shove his question and just how far it could go, but she told him what Michael would have told him-yes, of course he had. The doctor thanked her and left.

I walked down the cafeteria with Charity and Molly, but I didn't feel like eating or having food urged upon me. I figured that Charity probably had a critical back pressure of mothering built up after this much time away from her kids. On the way, I claimed that I needed to stretch my legs, which was the truth. Sometimes when there's too much going on in my head, it helps to walk around a bit.

So I walked down hallways, going nowhere in particular, just being careful not to pass too near any equipment that might be busy keeping someone alive at the moment.

I wound up sitting down in the hospital chapel.

It was the usual for such a place; quiet, subdued colors and lights, bench seating with an aisle in the middle, and a podium up at the front-the standard layout for the services of any number of faiths. Maybe it leaned a little harder toward Catholicism than most, but that might have been only natural. The Jesuits actually had a chaplaincy in residence, and held Mass there regularly.

It was quiet, which was the important thing. I sank onto a pew, aching, and closed my eyes.

Lots of details chased their way around my head. Michael had come in with gunshot wounds. The cops were going to ask lots of questions about that. Depending on the circumstances of the helicopter's return to Chicago, that could get really complicated, really fast. On the other hand, given the depth of Marcone's involvement, the problems might just vanish. He had his fingers in so many pies in Chicago's city government that he could probably have any inquiry quashed if he really wanted it done.

Given what he'd been saved from, it would be consistent with his character for Marcone to repay the people who bailed him out with whatever aid he could render in turn. It irked me that Marcone could ever be in a position to offer significant aid to Michael, regardless of the circumstances.

Of course, for that to happen, Michael would first need to survive.

My thoughts kept coming full circle back to that.

Would he be in danger right now if I hadn't insisted that he put on that harness? If I hadn't shoved him onto that rope ahead of me, would he still be up there under the knife, dying? Could I really have been that arrogant to assume, based on one glance at Gard's face, that I not only knew the future, but had the wisdom and the right to decide what that future should be?

Maybe it should be me up there. I didn't have a wife and a family waiting for me to come home.

I'd expected Charity to scream and throw things at me. Maybe I'd even wanted that. Because while I intellectually understood that I'd had no way of knowing what was going to happen, and that I'd only been trying to protect my friend, a big part of me couldn't help but feel that I deserved Charity's fury. After all, it reasoned, I had gotten her husband killed as surely as if I'd murdered him myself.

Except that he wasn't dead yet-and thinking like that was too much like giving up on him. I couldn't do that.

I looked up at the podium, where Whoever would presumably be when someone was there delivering a sermon.

"I know that we don't talk much," I said, speaking out loud to the empty room. "And I'm not looking for a pen pal. But I thought You should know that Michael makes You look pretty good. And if after all he's done, it ends like this for him, I'd think less of You. He deserves better. I think You should make sure he gets it. If You want to bill it to me, I'm fine with that. It's no problem."

Nobody said anything back.

"And while we're on the subject," I said, "I think the rules You've got set up suck. You don't get involved as much as You used to, apparently. And Your angels aren't allowed to stick their toes in unless the bad guys do it first. But I've been running some figures in my head, and when the Denarians pulled up those huge Signs, they had to have a lot of power to do it. A lot of power. More than I could ever have had, even with Lasciel. Archangel power. And I can only think of one of those guys who would have been helping that crew."

I stood up and jabbed a finger at the podium, suddenly furious, and screamed, "The Prince of fucking Darkness gets to cheat and unload his power on the earth-twice!-and You just sit there being holy while my friend, who has fought for You his whole life, is dying! What the hell is wrong with You?"

"I guess this is a bad time," said a voice from behind me.

I turned around and found a little old guy in a dark blue coverall whose stenciled name tag read, JAKE. He was pulling behind him a janitor's cart with a trash bin and the usual assortment of brooms and mops and cleaning products. He had a round belly and short, curling silver hair that matched his beard, both cropped close to his dark skin. "Sorry. I'll come back later."

I felt like an idiot. I shook my head at him. "No, no. I'm not doing anything. I mean, you're not keeping me from anything. I'll get out of your way."

"You ain't in my way, young man," said Jake. "Not at all. You ain't the first one I ever seen upset in a hospital chapel. Won't be the last, either. You sure you don't mind?"

"No," I said. "Come on in."

He did, hauling the cart with him, and went over to the trash can in the corner. He took out the old liner. "You got a friend here, huh?"

"Yeah," I said, sitting down again.

"It's okay to be mad at God about it, son. It ain't His fault, what happened, but He understands."

"Maybe He does," I said with a shrug. "But He doesn't care. I don't know why everyone thinks He does. Why would He?"

Jake paused and looked at me.

"I mean, this whole universe, right? All those stars and all those worlds," I continued, maybe sounding more bitter than I had intended. "Probably so many different kinds of people out there that we couldn't count them all. How could God really care about what's happening to one little person on one little planet among a practically infinite number of them?"

Jake tied off the trash bag and tossed it in the bin. He replaced the liner with a thoughtful look on his face. "Well," he said, "I never been to much school, you understand. But seems to me that you assuming something you shouldn't assume."

"What's that?" I asked.

"That God sees the world like you do. One thing at a time. From just one spot. Seems to me that He is supposed to be everywhere, know everything." He put the lid back on the trash can. "Think about that. He knows what you're feeling, how you're hurting. Feels my pain, your pain, like it was His own." Jake shook his head. "Hell, son. Question isn't how could God care about just one person. Question is, how could He not."

I snorted and shook my head.

"More optimism than you want to hear right now," Jake said. "I hear you, son." He turned and started pushing the cart out the door. "Oh," he said. "Can an old man offer you one more thought?"

"Sure," I said, without turning around.

"You gotta think that maybe there's a matter of balance, here," he said. "Maybe one archangel invested his strength in this situation overtly and immediately. Maybe another one was just quieter about it. Thinking long-term. Maybe he already gave you a hand."

My right hand erupted into pins and needles again.

I sucked in a swift breath and rose, spinning around.

Jake was gone.

The janitor's cart was still there. A rag hanging off the back was still swinging back and forth slightly. A folded paperback book was shoved between the body of the cart and the handle. I went over to the cart and looked up and down the hall.

There was no one in sight, and nowhere they could have conveniently disappeared to.

I picked up the book. It was a battered old copy of The Two Towers. One page was dog-eared, and a bit of dialogue underlined in pencil.

"'The burned hand teaches best,'" I read aloud. I made my way back to my seat and shook my head. "What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

Grimalkin mewled from the pew beside me, "That your experience with resisting the shadow of the Fallen One has garnered the respect of the Watchman, my Emissary."

I twitched violently enough that I came up off my seat an inch or two, and came back down with a grunt. I slid down as far as I could to the end of the pew. It wasn't far. I bought myself only another inch or three before I turned to face Mab.

She sat calmly, dressed in a casual business suit of dark blue, wearing plenty of elegant little diamonds. Her white hair was bound up into a braided bun, held in place with ivory sticks decorated with lapis. She held Grimalkin on her lap like a favorite pet, though only a lunatic would have mistaken the malk for a domestic cat. It was the first time I'd seen Grimalkin in clear light. He was unusually large and muscular, even for a malk-and they tended to make your average lynx look a little bit scrawny. Grimalkin must have weighed sixty or seventy pounds, all of it muscle and bone. His fur was dark grey, patterned with rippling black fur almost like a subtle watermark. His eyes were yellow-green, very large, and far too intelligent for any animal.

"The Watchman?" I stammered.

Mab's head moved slightly with the words, but it was Grimalkin's mewling voice that actually spoke. "The Prince of the Host is all pomp and ceremony, and when he moves it is with the thunder of the wings of an army of seraphim, the crash of drums, and the clamor of horns. The Trumpeter never walks quietly when he can appear in a chorus of light. The Demon Binder takes tasks upon his own shoulders and solves his problems with his own hands. But the Watchman…" Mab smiled. "Of the archangels, I like him the most. He is the quiet one. The subtle one. The one least known. And by far the most dangerous."

I sorted through what knowledge I had of the archangels. It was meager enough, but I knew that much, at least. "Uriel," I said quietly.

Mab lifted a finger and continued speaking through the malk. "Caution is called for, Emissary mine. Were I in your position, I would speak his name sparingly, if ever."

"What has he done to me?" I asked her.

Mab stared at me with iridescent eyes. "That is a question only you can answer. But I can say this much: He has given you the potential to be more of what you are."

"Huh?"

She smiled, reached to the bench on the other side of her body, and produced my blasting rod. "The return of your property," the malk said. "The need to keep it from you has passed."

"Then I was right," I said, accepting it. "You took it. And you took the memory of it happening."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I deemed it proper," she replied, as if speaking to a rather slow-witted child. "You would have risked your own life-and my purpose-to protect your precious mortals had I not taken your fire from you. Summer would have tracked and killed you two days ago."

"Not having it could have gotten me killed, too," I said. "And then you'd have wasted all that time you've put in trying to recruit me to be the next Winter Knight."

"Nonsense," Mab said. "If you died, I would simply recruit your brother. He would be well motivated to seek revenge upon your killers."

A little cold feeling shot through me. I hadn't realized that Mab knew who he was. But I guess it made sense. My godmother, the Leanansidhe, had been tight with my mother, one way or another. If Lea had known, then it might make sense that Mab did, too. "He isn't a mortal," I said quietly. "I thought the Knights had to be mortals."

"He is in love," Grimalkin mrowled for Mab. "That is more than mortal enough for me." She tilted her head. "Though I suppose I might make him an offer, while you yet live. He would give much to hold his love again, would he not?"

I fixed her with a hard gaze and said, "You will stay away from him."

"I will do as I please," she said. "With him-and with you."

I scowled at her. "You will not. I do not belong to y-"

The next thing I knew I was on my knees in the center aisle, and Mab was walking away from me, toward the door. "Oh, but you do, mortal. Until you have worked off your debt to me you are mine. You owe one favor more."

I tried to get up, and I couldn't. My knees just wouldn't move. My heart beat far too hard, and I hated how frightened I felt.

"Why?" I demanded. "Why did you want the Denarians stopped? Why send the hobs to kill the Archive? Why recruit me to save the Archive and Marcone in the event that the hobs failed?"

Mab paused, turned, casually showing off the gorgeous curves of her calves, and tilted her head at me. "Nicodemus and his ilk were clearly in violation of my Accords, and obviously planning to abuse them to further his ambition. That was reason enough to see his designs disrupted. And among the Fallen was one with much to answer for to me, personally, for its attack upon my home."

"The Black Council attack on Arctis Tor," I said. "One of them used Hellfire."

Mab showed me her snow-white teeth. "The Watchman and I," Grimalkin mewled for her, "had a common enemy this day. The enemy could not be allowed to gain the power represented by the child Archive."

I frowned and thought of the silver hand that had batted the fallen angel and his master sorceries around as if he'd been a stuffed practice dummy. "Thorned Namshiel."

Mab's eyes flashed with sudden, cold fury and frost literally formed over every surface of the chapel, including upon my own eyelashes.

"There are others yet who will pay for what they have done," Mab snarled in her own voice. It sounded hideous-not unmelodious, because it was as rich and full and musical as it ever had been. But it was filled with such rage, such fury, such pain and such hate that every vowel clawed at my skin, and every consonant felt like someone taking a staple gun to my ears.

"I am Sidhe," she hissed. "I am the Queen of Air and Darkness. I am Mab." Her chin lifted, her eyes wide and white around the rippling colors of her irises-utterly insane. "And I repay my debts, mortal. All of them."

There was an enormous crack, a sound like thick ice shattering on the surface of a lake, and Mab and her translator were gone.

I knelt there, shaking in the wake of hearing her voice. I realized a minute later that I had a nosebleed. A minute after that, I realized that there was a trickle of blood coming out of my ears, too. My eyes ached with strain, as if I'd been outdoors in bright sunlight for too many hours.

It took me still another minute to get my legs to start moving again. After that I staggered to the nearest bathroom and cleaned up. I spent a little while poking at my memory and trying to see if there were any holes in it that hadn't been there before. Then I spent a while more wondering if I'd be able to tell if she had taken something else.

"Jesus Christ," I breathed, shivering.

Because though I hadn't been in on the original attack on Mab's tower, and when I did attack it I had been unwittingly serving Mab's interests, the fact remained that I had indeed offered her the same insult as Thorned Namshiel. The lacerating fury that turned her voice into razor blades could very well be directed at me in the near future.

I hurried out of the chapel and went down to the cafeteria.

Being bullied into eating dinner sounded a lot more pleasant than it had a few minutes ago.

The doctor came into the waiting room at ten seventeen that night.

Charity came to her feet. She'd spent much of the day with her head bowed, praying quietly. She was beyond tears, at least for the moment, and she put a sheltering arm around her daughter, pulling Molly in close to her side.

"He's in recovery," the doctor said. "The procedures went…" The doctor sighed. He looked at least as tired as either of the Carpenter women. "As well as could be expected. Better, really. I hesitate to make any claims at this point, but he seems to be stable, and assuming there are no complications in the next hour or two, I think he'll pull through."

Charity bit her lip hard. Molly threw her arms around her mother.

"Thank you, Doctor," Charity whispered.

The doctor smiled wearily. "You should realize that…the injuries were quite extensive. It's unlikely that he'll be able to fully recover from them. Brain damage is a possibility-we won't know until he wakes up. Even if that isn't an issue, the other trauma was severe. He may need assistance, possibly for the rest of his life."

Charity nodded calmly. "He'll have it."

"That's right," Molly said.

"When can I see him?" Charity asked.

"We'll bring him up in an hour or two," the doctor said.

I cleared my throat. "Excuse me, Doc. Is he going to be on a respirator?"

"For the time being," the doctor said. "Yes."

I nodded. "Thank you."

The doctor nodded to us, and Charity thanked him again. He left.

"Okay, grasshopper," I said. "Time for us to clear out."

"But they're going to bring hi- Oh," Molly said, crestfallen. "The respirator."

"Better not to take any chances, huh?" I asked her.

"It's all right, baby," Charity said quietly. "I'll call home as soon as he wakes up."

They hugged tightly. Molly and I started walking out.

"Oh," Molly said, her voice very tired. "I did that homework."

I felt pretty tired, too. "Yeah?"

She nodded and smiled wearily up at me. "Charlemagne."

I called Thomas, and he gave me and Molly a ride to Murphy's place.

The night was clear. The cloud cover had blown off, and the moon and the stars got together with the snow to turn Chicago into a winter wonderland months ahead of schedule. The snow had stopped falling, though. I suppose that meant Mab had turned her attention elsewhere. Thomas dropped me off a short distance away, and then left to drive the grasshopper back to her home. I covered the last hundred yards or so on foot.

Murphy lives in a teeny little house that belonged to her grandmother. It was just a single story, with two bedrooms, a living room, and a little kitchen. It was meant for one person to live in, or possibly a couple with a single child. It was certainly overloaded by the mob of Wardens who had descended on the place. Luccio's reinforcements had arrived.

There were four Wardens in the little living room, all of them grizzled veterans, two young members in the kitchen, and I was sure that there were at least two more outside, standing watch behind veils. I was challenged for a password in an amused tone by one of the young Wardens when I came in the kitchen door. I told him to do something impolite, please, and asked him where Luccio might be.

"That's anatomically unlikely," the young man replied in a British accent. He poured a second cup of steaming tea and said, "Drink up. I'll let her know you're here."

"Thanks."

I was sipping tea and sitting at Murphy's table when Luccio came in a few minutes later. "Give us the room, please, Chandler, Kostikos."

The younger men cleared out to the living room-a polite illusion, really. The house was too small to provide much in the way of privacy.

Luccio poured herself a cup of tea and sat down across from me.

I felt my shoulders tense up a little. I forced myself to remain quiet, and sipped