The medic avoided looking at her. “Yes, ma’am.”
“Very well,” Lara said. “Take Hennesy to Natalia’s chambers. Callo will go to Elisa.”
“Yes, ma’am. Should I send Wilson to the infirmary?”
Lara stared at him with absolutely no expression on her lovely face. Then she said, “No, Andrew. I’ll come for him in a moment.” She held out the clipboard, and the medic took it and hurried away.
I watched Lara for a moment and said, “You’re going to kill those men. When Elisa and Natalia wake up…”
“They will feed and their lives will be spared. Annoying as it may be to lose what I invested in those men, I can replace hired guns,” she said. “I cannot so easily replace members of my family and my House. As their leader, it is my responsibility to provide adequate care and sustenance in times of need-particularly when loyalty to the House is what created that need.”
“They’re your own men,” I said.
“That was before they became useless to the House,” she replied. “They know too much of our internal affairs to be allowed to leave. Lives must be lost if my kin are to survive their injuries. Rather than inflict that upon one who can still be of use to us, I preserve lives by seeing to it that these men serve us one last time.”
“Yeah. You’re a real humanitarian. A regular Mother Teresa.”
She turned that flat, empty gaze to me again. “At what point did you forget that I am a vampire, Dresden? A monster. A habitually neat, polite, civil, and efficient monster.” Her eyes drifted down the hallway, to where a well-muscled young man was being helped to sit down, while a medic secured bandages over his eyes. Lara stared intently at him, the color of her eyes lightening to silver, and her lips parted slightly. “I am what I am.”
I felt sick to my stomach. I pushed myself to my feet, and said, “So am I.”
She glanced obliquely at me. “Is that a threat, Dresden?”
I shook my head. “Just a fact. One day I’m going to take you down.”
Her eyes went back to the wounded man, her lips shifting to one side in a smirk. “One day,” she murmured. “But not today.”
“No. Not today.”
“Is there anything else I can do for you, wizard mine?”
“Yeah,” I said.
She glanced at me and raised an eyebrow.
“I need a car.”
Chapter Twenty-eight
I sort of shambled up one floor and down a wing to the Chateau’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 Chateau.
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.”
