right now, but she was an older woman. A much older woman.
And there I was, apparently sitting up from kissing a topless girl, with a naked couple a few feet away, and the air thick with a pall of smoke and the smell of noxious fumes. For crying out loud, my apartment looked like the set of some kind of bizarre porno.
“Um,” I said, and swallowed. “This isn’t what it might appear to be.”
Anastasia just stared at me. I knew it had been a long time since she’d opened up to anyone. It might not take much to make her close herself off again.
She shook her head, very slowly, and the smile lines at the corners of her eyes deepened along with her dimples. Then she burst out into a hearty belly laugh. “
I lifted my eyebrows in surprise. “You aren’t upset?”
“By the time you get to be my age,” she replied, “you’ve either worked out your insecurities, or they’re there to stay. Besides, I simply
I shook my head and then smiled at her. “I . . . My friends needed help.”
She looked back and forth between the Alphas and Molly. “And still do,” she said, nodding sharply. She came in and, as the only one actually wearing shoes, began picking up pieces of fallen glass from the broken window, literally rolling up her sleeves as she went. “Shall we?”
IT TOOK MOST of the day to get Molly to the hospital, gather the materials needed to fumigate Kirby’s and Andi’s auras, and actually perform the work to get the job done. By the time they left, all better and psychophage- free, it was after seven.
“So much for our day off,” I said.
She turned to consider me. “Would you do it differently if you had it to do again?”
“No. Of course not.”
She shrugged. “Then it was a day well spent. There will be others.”
“You never can be sure of that, though, can you?”
Her cheeks dimpled again. “Today is not yet over. You mourn its death somewhat prematurely.”
“I just wanted to show you a nice time for a day. Not get bogged down in more business.”
Anastasia turned to me and put her fingers over my mouth. Then she replaced her fingers with her lips.
“Enough talk,” she murmured.
I agreed.
BACKUP
Takes place between
This story was really fun to write. I’d been wanting to show a little more of Thomas and his world for several years, but it just hadn’t ever been a feasible thing for Harry to encounter. The vampires of the Dresden Files, the White Court especially, see themselves as a nation of outcasts, banded together by similar concerns and dangerous enemies. The kind of culture that emerges from that sort of foundation simply doesn’t make itself available to outsiders. If Harry had ever gotten to the “inside” to see that culture, it would have betrayed the us- against-them integrity of the White Court, and invalidated the whole setup.
So when Subterranean came to me with a proposal to produce a novelette illustrated by no less than Mike Mignola, I jumped at the chance. The challenge, here, was to present Thomas from his own viewpoint, one distinct from Harry’s. And, even better, I wanted to pit brother against brother in such a way that their relationship of trust and mutual regard was maintained, but they still got to slug it out with each other.
I also got to bring some of the other background material of the Dresden Files story world into play. The Oblivion War was something I really loved, conceptually, but like the White Court, its very nature prevented Dresden from getting involved without causing the entire thing to implode. This was an ideal place for that piece of universe background, and it made me feel all warm and fuzzy to finally get it out where the readers could see it, too.
1
Let’s get something clear right up front.
I’m not Harry Dresden.
Harry’s a wizard. A genuine, honest-to-goodness wizard. He’s Gandalf on crack and an IV of Red Bull, with a big leather coat and a .44 revolver in his pocket. He’ll spit in the eye of gods and demons alike if he thinks it needs to be done, and to hell with the consequences—and yet somehow my little brother manages to remain a decent human being.
I’ll be damned if I know how.
But then, I’ll be damned regardless.
My name is Thomas Raith, and I’m a monster.
The computer in my little office clamored for my attention. I’ve got it set up to play Nazi Germany’s national anthem whenever I receive e-mail from someone in my family. Not Harry, my half brother, naturally. Harry and e-mail go together like Robert Downey, Jr., and sobriety. I mean the other side of my family.
The monsters.
I finished cleaning off the workstation and checked the clock—five minutes until my next appointment. I took a quick look around my boutique, smiled at one of my regular customers, playfully scolded the young stylist working on her, and went back down the hall, around the corner, down the narrow stairwell, and then through ten feet of claustrophobic hallway to get to my office. I sat down at the desk and nudged my laptop to life. The virus scanner pored over the e-mail before it chimed again, a soft sound that a human wouldn’t have heard from the end of the hall, much less from upstairs, and pronounced it safe.
The e-mail from [email protected] was empty, but the subject line read,
Oh.
Super.
Just what I needed.
I never really enjoyed hearing from that side of the family, even when the subject was something boring— like business pertaining to the war between the Vampire Courts and the wizards’ White Council, for example. Whenever Lara wanted to get in touch with me, for any reason, it was bad news.
But when it was about an Oblivion matter, it was worse.
I had Lara’s number on the speed dial on my cell phone. I gave her a ring.
“Brother-mine,” purred my eldest sister, her voice pure honey. It was the kind of voice that would give men ideas—really bad ideas, though they’d never realize that part. “You hardly ever call me anymore.”
“I’ve hardly ever called you, Lara. Period.” I ignored the lure she was sliding into her voice. She’d fed very recently—or was doing so at the moment. “What do you want?”
“You received my e-mail?”
“Yes.”
“There’s a project I think you’ll be interested in.”
“Why?”
