Fic: Sympathetic Magic Part 1
This was written as a challenge from a friend to prove to her that book!verse "Dresden Files" is just as delightfully slashy as the television show, after she found out that ghostly Bob only makes an appearance on tv. So I tried to oblige her, telling her of the joys that came for a wizard/PI for hire in the yellow pages, and a mob boss with a taste for supernatural politics. She wanted more convincing, so I wrote what I intended to be a smutty PWP. And then the characters opened their mouths. And then snark happened.
Twenty-five pages later, and I was reminded of why I'm terrible at PWPs. And it's only been betaed by yours truly. Oh, well. Here it is:
Title: Sympathetic Magic
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Minor consent issues, in the form of 'the Apocalypse made them do it'
Pairing: Harry Dresden/John Marcone
Summary: So the world was ending, and I had to choose between murder and gay sex to save it. My life is so weird.
Disclaimer: They belong to Jim Butcher. I mean no offense and no infringement.
The world was exploding. I know it feels like that happens every other week for me, but this was way too literal and way too scary not to take really, really seriously. Everything in Chicago seemed to be burning or near to. There was panic in the streets; there was panic in city hall; there was pretty much panic everywhere. It was like the Great Fire was back with a vengeance and we hadn’t learned anything the first time around.
Of course, the real cause was magical. It always is. Long story short, some asshole decided to douse the whole city in the equivalent of a magical acid bath, poking holes through our reality and into something terrible. Fires and monsters were spilling out, and everyone who had ever been clued into the supernatural had taken up arms in defense. Or, you know, run away. There were quite a few of those.
Please understand, only under such apocalyptic circumstances could anything this crazy have ever happened. Even when I skidded into my apartment with John Marcone, Cujo Hendricks and Sigrund Gard on my heels, I never expected things to get so weird. I know I should have seen weirdness coming. You don't use a couch to barricade yourself against the tentacled horror with mobsters checking their semi-autos at your back without some indication that things were about to take a left turn at normal.
But John found me when the world was ending, and he expected that I could mend reality. I wouldn’t have even let them into my place if I wasn't a big softie about people dying on my doorstep. So I opened the door and just knew they’d get mobster all over my rugs.
So there I was, in my lab, hearing our local mafia kingpin and his two top bodyguards upstairs, banging around making impromptu fortifications. Marcone had made it pretty clear he expected me to pull a rabbit out of a hat on this one. I really wanted to tell him where he could stick his rabbit, but I’m not quite so petty as to destroy the world to get one over on Johnnie. I still told him to blow me, but that’s par for the course.
“Come on, Bob,” I shouted over a rumbling explosion from somewhere outside. “Work a little faster here. Spells to repair the fabric of reality can’t be that hard to come by.”
“Oh, yeah,” he grumbled from his shelf, his skull rattling as the explosions got closer, “I just leave 'em laying around. Why don’t you check the bathroom? I might have left one in there for a little light reading.”
“Bob, if you don’t come up with something the whole city’s going to burn.”
“Really, Captain Obvious? Look, Harry. Sure there are spells to do what you want, but they require way more power than you’ve got on hand.”
“What about soulfire?”
“No good. Even with what you’re packing, it isn’t going to be enough. What you really need is a ritual. Something to give you more bang than your buck normally has. Something to whip up, and with a few words at the end the whole city gets a nice metaphysical patch job.”
“Okay, come up with a ritual.” And pray there was enough time. Rituals felt like they took forever even on days when the world wasn’t ending.
Bob rattled on his perch while he thought. “Okay, um . . . okay, given what we have right here . . . no, you don’t have nearly enough mirrors for that . . . and not enough tar for that . . . aha! Wait, you wouldn’t go for that one.”
Apparently he’d missed the desperate-and-will-try-anything look I’d plastered on my face. “What? What wouldn’t I go for? Because at this point I’d say that anything is on the table.”
Bob looked shifty, which is a rare talent for a skull. “Well, you’ve got the Freeholding Lord of the city upstairs, right?”
“You want him in on a ritual?” I tried to imagine convincing Marcone to paint himself blue and chant with me or something. Pretty sure I’d get a knife through my windpipe for my troubles.
“You’ve got to admit, Boss, the symbolism there is pretty strong. Get him in on the right ritual and you not only repair the fabric of Chicago's reality, you give it a good renovation on top of it.”
“Great, so why wouldn’t I go for that? A little public humiliation for Marcone and my day’s looking up.”
Was that pity I saw in his flamey little eyes? Bob doesn’t do pity, and that scared the crap out of me. “We’re not talking about public humiliation, Harry,” he said.
I didn’t want to ask, but I’m dumb, and I had to know. “What are we talking about?”
“Talk him down here. Play on whatever trust you’ve got going between you. Sweet talk him. Make promises. Doesn’t matter what. You won’t be keeping them. Once you've got him alone, he’s just one more vanilla mortal.”
Oh. Oh . . . “Bob,” I started to say, but didn't know what should come after that.
“Slit his throat, fast and clean. The blood and energy would be more than enough for any spell you could name.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I tried to wrap my head around it, and, failing that, managed to breathe, “What?”
“Human sacrifice, Boss. You’d be amazed how much energy you can get out of one death.” He sounded cold, detached, almost what he’d sounded like when he’d been forced to remember everything he’d done for Kemmler.
I looked up at the trap door. I had never liked Marcone. I hated his business. I hated the crime and the drugs and everything he stood for. He was an asshole who didn’t think twice about trying to buy my loyalty. He was smug, superior, and way too cocky for a vanilla mortal running around my big, dangerous world. He was the mafia kingpin of a city that was drowning in corruption, and he took pride in his work.
He was going to die for this city eventually. Why not make it now?
But he had this thing about innocents. I’d seen him willing to die to save the life of a little girl. I’d seen him fight with no hope of gain beyond the protection of innocent lives. And as much as I hate to admit it, Chicago could do a lot worse for the guy on top of the criminal heap. I’d seen some of the alternatives, and they weren’t pretty.
But he was still criminal scum, and all options were on the table. The fact that he wasn’t a straight-up black hat didn’t make him one of the good guys by any stretch of the imagination. I could kill him. I had to have that in me if push came to shove. I wasn’t a nice guy, either.
I tried to picture it. We’ve built a tentative trust between us, like Bob said. He’d come down if I told him the city was on the line. He’d even leave Hendricks and Gard up top. It would take seconds if I could catch him unawares, which was questionable. Guy’s got eyes like a hawk and reflexes that make cats envious. But if I was careful, if I planned it right, I could pull it off and cast my spell before Hendricks tried to take me apart. And I’d have to kill Cujo and Gard to get out of the apartment. That was three deaths, but they weren’t great people either.
So why did I feel like I was casting myself as the villain of this piece?
“Come up with something else,” I said, my voice so harsh I could barely recognize it.
“Okay, Boss,” Bob said, his own voice soft and meek.
A few more tense minutes passed, and I heard the people upstairs slowly fall quiet. I wondered if the crisis was over, or if this was just the eye of the storm.
“Um, Boss?”
I turned to Bob. “You’ve got something?”
“Yeah, I do, but I’m pretty sure that you’d prefer the human sacrifice thing.”
I couldn’t even imagine. My voice was full of trepidation when I asked, “What is it?”
“Well, you have enough crystals laying around to capture and hold a lot of energy, so I was thinking of a more sustained activity that you could take the energy from and just, you know, release it all in one go.”
“Like what?” I asked, now definitely certain I didn’t want to know.
“When it comes to humans creating energy, nothing quite beats sex,” he said, sounding forcibly cheerful.
“Sex,” I said, trying to wrap my brain around it. I mean, I’d suspected something like that, but to have it dangling between us was way too much.
“Yup.”
“With . . . with Gard, right? Which is sort of terrifying, but I could manage it. I mean, she's a good looking lady . . . if very tall . . . and with an axe. You don’t mean . . .”
“I do mean, Boss. I really do. Like I said, the symbolism is pretty powerful. You’re the Head Warden of the region and the unofficial protector of the city. He’s the Freeholding Lord and official protector of the city. Get the two of you together and sympathetic magic is more than a cliché.”
My brain heard the words, but didn’t process them. “Sex with Marcone,” I said. I tried to imagine it. Hell, I tried to imagine sex with a man, period. My sex life hasn’t exactly been anything to write home about, and those few partners I have had have all been women.
And there I was, caught between murder and gay sex to save the world. My life is so weird.
I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. Then, before I could give myself a chance to back out of anything, I shouted up the ladder, “Marcone! Get your criminal ass down here.”
There was a really satisfying silence upstairs, and I couldn’t wait to see the expression on his face. It didn’t disappoint in its subtle way. He came down the ladder with a tight look of irritation teasing at the edges of that blank mask he wore. His ridiculously expensive suit was smudged, and there was a smear of something right above the blaze of gray at his temples that trailed into a thin cut above one green eye.
I could see Gard’s foot start to follow him, heavy combat boots with steel reinforcement.
“Uh-uh, Blondie,” I said. “Marcone is really going to want this discussion to stay private.”
“Excuse me?” Marcone asked, quiet and suspicious. And, okay, maybe I was acting a little guilty. I refused to let myself tense further. Any more nerves from me and Marcone was going to get both Hendricks and Gard down, and I really couldn’t take that sort of humiliation.
So I was really damn proud when I sounded almost calm when I said, “No, really, trust me on this one. You don’t want her down here for this.”
She looked back and forth between Marcone and me, and then finally withdrew her foot and said, “I’ll be waiting at the top of the ladder.”
“Yeah, yeah, and you’ll smite my ruin on the mountainside, blah, blah,” I said. “I got it. Scoot.”
She let the trapdoor fall closed. Marcone tensed a tiny bit at that, but his expression was still a study in bored neutrality. “Do please hurry this along, Mr. Dresden,” he said. “The city isn’t going to save itself.”
“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“You have a solution?”
“Looks like.”
“And you were . . . what? Hoping for a pat on the head?”
Okay, the sarcasm was kind of a relief at that moment. At least I was used to the sarcasm. It made the weird seem a little further off. “I can’t do it alone,” I gritted out.
He got it. “I see. And you want me to participate in some magical ceremony? A ritual of some sort, perhaps? You certainly can’t expect me to cast any spells.”
“Yes, ritual. And as for your participation, I guess that depends on how much you want to save the city, now doesn’t it?”
He met my gaze and didn’t give anything away.
I gave him a grin guaranteed to irritate. “Come on, flattened city? Really bad for business.”
“Your concern is touching.” After studying me for a little longer, he said, “Very well, what’s your plan?”
“There are two options, actually. Neither of them are good.”
“Mr. Dresden, these things very rarely are. Now stop dithering and get to the point.”
He asked for it. “Option A is that I use you as a human sacrifice.”
That got a reaction. Marcone had a gun in his hand faster than I could see, and it was aimed at my face. His eyes had widened, and I could see him looking around the room. He wasn’t willing to kill me straight off, but he was also weighing immediate action against the fading likelihood of his beating me on my own turf. I’ve rarely seen him afraid, but I could see it in him right then.
“Uh, Boss?” I heard from my shelf. “Usually if you’re going with that sort of plan, you don’t tell the victim first. Just, you know, FYI.”
“Shut up, Bob.” I didn’t look away from Marcone as I raised my hands very slowly. “Easy. I told you that was Option A. I’ve already rejected Option A, which leads us to Option B. Which, frankly, isn’t a lot better, but we both come out of it alive.”
That gun wasn’t budging. “Talk,” he said.
And staring down the barrel of a gun was not the way I figured I’d be propositioning anyone ever. But then again, this was Marcone. Would me propositioning him ever have happened any other way?
“Well,” I said, “we’d . . . um . . . we’d set up a circle with crystals and things to store energy, and then . . . um . . . we’d . . . uh . . . we’d have sex. Probably . . . um, magically fueled just to give it that little extra punch. I have potions. Don’t ask.”
It got a blink and a jerk of that gun and I reached fast for my shield bracelet, thinking only to throw up enough of a barrier that I didn’t end up accidentally perforated while Marcone got over the shock.
Which, of course, made Marcone think I was trying something. I was flat on my ass before I knew what happened, and he was standing over me. His gun hadn’t wavered, but it had maybe inched closer to my mouth. I figure he’d heard of death curses, and wanted to forestall any nastiness I might get out before he snuffed me.
I didn’t move. I knew it was my only chance of not dying in a pathetic heap on my lab floor. I could hear Bob rattling on his shelf.
“Mr. Dresden,” I heard at length, “what you propose is not only impossible, given my position, but also unacceptable. There has to be an alternative.”
“No there doesn’t,” Bob chimed in.
“Shut up, Bob!” I snapped. I ventured a look up, and I knew what a rabbit felt like when an eagle pinned it down. I thought back on Plan A and realized it would never have worked. Marcone would never drop his guard around me, and he would be more than willing to put one between my eyes if it came down to an 'only one of us is walking away' scenario. I’m good, but even I can’t sling a spell faster than he can fire a gun. And if I did get a shield up, he’d use something with a low enough velocity to get through to me. Say, one of those knives he keeps stashed on him.
I put my hands up very slowly, palms facing away from him so he didn’t think I was casting in his general direction. “Look, you wanted a solution. I’m not happy about it either, but it gets the job done. I think you’d be willing to put up with a little embarrassment to save the world.”
Yeah, he didn’t even twitch. “I may eschew a great deal of the machismo that is required in my line of work, Mr. Dresden, but there are certain lines I cannot cross.”
“You think I’d talk about this? Newsflash, John! Neither of us really wants to do this, and neither of us is going to run around shooting his mouth off.” I winced. “Figure of speech. Gun. Please. Down.”
Inch by inch the gun lowered to Marcone’s side, and still he stared at me, his neutrality cracking while he gave me a look a guy might give the giant, unidentified bug crawling up his pants leg. I scrambled to my feet.
For the first time since I’d met him I got to witness the spectacle of John Marcone groping for words. He opened his mouth a few times, but thought better of it until finally a single word managed to get out: “Potions?”
And, okay, that’s kind of embarrassing. I looked anywhere but him when I said, “Hey, people pay good money for that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing, exactly?”
Asshole. “You know, the kind that relaxes you, lowers inhibitions, makes you friendly. Makes you more than friendly. Add a boost to stamina, and this thing is popular.”
“It’s a magical roofie.” He sounded seriously disapproving. The guy who ran drugs for all of Chicago sounded disapproving of my lust potions. That was just great.
“What? No! I do thorough background checks before I’d ever sell something like this. Committed couples that want to try something new. That’s it.”
“Or unwilling partners during the end of the world, apparently.”
I heaved a sigh and rested my elbows on the table where Little Chicago lived in all its smashed glory, presenting him with my side. A little lowering of the defenses had to happen on someone’s part, and it seemed like it wasn’t going to be his. “Look,” I said. “What else are we going to do? We can’t kill what’s attacking us. We have to repair the very fabric of reality, and to do that we need one huge battery. You’re magically tied to the city, so the resonance creates a huge jolt of power. Add me to the mix, and we’d have enough for this spell. I can’t think of any other acceptable way to do this. Can you?”
I could see him thinking. He looked more human when he was flustered, and it was really nice to know I wasn’t the only one who felt so completely weirded out by this whole thing.
At length he said, “If you breathe a word of this to anyone-”
“Yeah, great, concrete galoshes. Got it. Let’s just do this and get it done.”
“Ever the romantic.”
“Kiss my ass, Schnookums.”
Part II
Part III
Twenty-five pages later, and I was reminded of why I'm terrible at PWPs. And it's only been betaed by yours truly. Oh, well. Here it is:
Title: Sympathetic Magic
Rating: NC-17
Warnings: Minor consent issues, in the form of 'the Apocalypse made them do it'
Pairing: Harry Dresden/John Marcone
Summary: So the world was ending, and I had to choose between murder and gay sex to save it. My life is so weird.
Disclaimer: They belong to Jim Butcher. I mean no offense and no infringement.
The world was exploding. I know it feels like that happens every other week for me, but this was way too literal and way too scary not to take really, really seriously. Everything in Chicago seemed to be burning or near to. There was panic in the streets; there was panic in city hall; there was pretty much panic everywhere. It was like the Great Fire was back with a vengeance and we hadn’t learned anything the first time around.
Of course, the real cause was magical. It always is. Long story short, some asshole decided to douse the whole city in the equivalent of a magical acid bath, poking holes through our reality and into something terrible. Fires and monsters were spilling out, and everyone who had ever been clued into the supernatural had taken up arms in defense. Or, you know, run away. There were quite a few of those.
Please understand, only under such apocalyptic circumstances could anything this crazy have ever happened. Even when I skidded into my apartment with John Marcone, Cujo Hendricks and Sigrund Gard on my heels, I never expected things to get so weird. I know I should have seen weirdness coming. You don't use a couch to barricade yourself against the tentacled horror with mobsters checking their semi-autos at your back without some indication that things were about to take a left turn at normal.
But John found me when the world was ending, and he expected that I could mend reality. I wouldn’t have even let them into my place if I wasn't a big softie about people dying on my doorstep. So I opened the door and just knew they’d get mobster all over my rugs.
So there I was, in my lab, hearing our local mafia kingpin and his two top bodyguards upstairs, banging around making impromptu fortifications. Marcone had made it pretty clear he expected me to pull a rabbit out of a hat on this one. I really wanted to tell him where he could stick his rabbit, but I’m not quite so petty as to destroy the world to get one over on Johnnie. I still told him to blow me, but that’s par for the course.
“Come on, Bob,” I shouted over a rumbling explosion from somewhere outside. “Work a little faster here. Spells to repair the fabric of reality can’t be that hard to come by.”
“Oh, yeah,” he grumbled from his shelf, his skull rattling as the explosions got closer, “I just leave 'em laying around. Why don’t you check the bathroom? I might have left one in there for a little light reading.”
“Bob, if you don’t come up with something the whole city’s going to burn.”
“Really, Captain Obvious? Look, Harry. Sure there are spells to do what you want, but they require way more power than you’ve got on hand.”
“What about soulfire?”
“No good. Even with what you’re packing, it isn’t going to be enough. What you really need is a ritual. Something to give you more bang than your buck normally has. Something to whip up, and with a few words at the end the whole city gets a nice metaphysical patch job.”
“Okay, come up with a ritual.” And pray there was enough time. Rituals felt like they took forever even on days when the world wasn’t ending.
Bob rattled on his perch while he thought. “Okay, um . . . okay, given what we have right here . . . no, you don’t have nearly enough mirrors for that . . . and not enough tar for that . . . aha! Wait, you wouldn’t go for that one.”
Apparently he’d missed the desperate-and-will-try-anything look I’d plastered on my face. “What? What wouldn’t I go for? Because at this point I’d say that anything is on the table.”
Bob looked shifty, which is a rare talent for a skull. “Well, you’ve got the Freeholding Lord of the city upstairs, right?”
“You want him in on a ritual?” I tried to imagine convincing Marcone to paint himself blue and chant with me or something. Pretty sure I’d get a knife through my windpipe for my troubles.
“You’ve got to admit, Boss, the symbolism there is pretty strong. Get him in on the right ritual and you not only repair the fabric of Chicago's reality, you give it a good renovation on top of it.”
“Great, so why wouldn’t I go for that? A little public humiliation for Marcone and my day’s looking up.”
Was that pity I saw in his flamey little eyes? Bob doesn’t do pity, and that scared the crap out of me. “We’re not talking about public humiliation, Harry,” he said.
I didn’t want to ask, but I’m dumb, and I had to know. “What are we talking about?”
“Talk him down here. Play on whatever trust you’ve got going between you. Sweet talk him. Make promises. Doesn’t matter what. You won’t be keeping them. Once you've got him alone, he’s just one more vanilla mortal.”
Oh. Oh . . . “Bob,” I started to say, but didn't know what should come after that.
“Slit his throat, fast and clean. The blood and energy would be more than enough for any spell you could name.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach. I tried to wrap my head around it, and, failing that, managed to breathe, “What?”
“Human sacrifice, Boss. You’d be amazed how much energy you can get out of one death.” He sounded cold, detached, almost what he’d sounded like when he’d been forced to remember everything he’d done for Kemmler.
I looked up at the trap door. I had never liked Marcone. I hated his business. I hated the crime and the drugs and everything he stood for. He was an asshole who didn’t think twice about trying to buy my loyalty. He was smug, superior, and way too cocky for a vanilla mortal running around my big, dangerous world. He was the mafia kingpin of a city that was drowning in corruption, and he took pride in his work.
He was going to die for this city eventually. Why not make it now?
But he had this thing about innocents. I’d seen him willing to die to save the life of a little girl. I’d seen him fight with no hope of gain beyond the protection of innocent lives. And as much as I hate to admit it, Chicago could do a lot worse for the guy on top of the criminal heap. I’d seen some of the alternatives, and they weren’t pretty.
But he was still criminal scum, and all options were on the table. The fact that he wasn’t a straight-up black hat didn’t make him one of the good guys by any stretch of the imagination. I could kill him. I had to have that in me if push came to shove. I wasn’t a nice guy, either.
I tried to picture it. We’ve built a tentative trust between us, like Bob said. He’d come down if I told him the city was on the line. He’d even leave Hendricks and Gard up top. It would take seconds if I could catch him unawares, which was questionable. Guy’s got eyes like a hawk and reflexes that make cats envious. But if I was careful, if I planned it right, I could pull it off and cast my spell before Hendricks tried to take me apart. And I’d have to kill Cujo and Gard to get out of the apartment. That was three deaths, but they weren’t great people either.
So why did I feel like I was casting myself as the villain of this piece?
“Come up with something else,” I said, my voice so harsh I could barely recognize it.
“Okay, Boss,” Bob said, his own voice soft and meek.
A few more tense minutes passed, and I heard the people upstairs slowly fall quiet. I wondered if the crisis was over, or if this was just the eye of the storm.
“Um, Boss?”
I turned to Bob. “You’ve got something?”
“Yeah, I do, but I’m pretty sure that you’d prefer the human sacrifice thing.”
I couldn’t even imagine. My voice was full of trepidation when I asked, “What is it?”
“Well, you have enough crystals laying around to capture and hold a lot of energy, so I was thinking of a more sustained activity that you could take the energy from and just, you know, release it all in one go.”
“Like what?” I asked, now definitely certain I didn’t want to know.
“When it comes to humans creating energy, nothing quite beats sex,” he said, sounding forcibly cheerful.
“Sex,” I said, trying to wrap my brain around it. I mean, I’d suspected something like that, but to have it dangling between us was way too much.
“Yup.”
“With . . . with Gard, right? Which is sort of terrifying, but I could manage it. I mean, she's a good looking lady . . . if very tall . . . and with an axe. You don’t mean . . .”
“I do mean, Boss. I really do. Like I said, the symbolism is pretty powerful. You’re the Head Warden of the region and the unofficial protector of the city. He’s the Freeholding Lord and official protector of the city. Get the two of you together and sympathetic magic is more than a cliché.”
My brain heard the words, but didn’t process them. “Sex with Marcone,” I said. I tried to imagine it. Hell, I tried to imagine sex with a man, period. My sex life hasn’t exactly been anything to write home about, and those few partners I have had have all been women.
And there I was, caught between murder and gay sex to save the world. My life is so weird.
I rubbed at the bridge of my nose. Then, before I could give myself a chance to back out of anything, I shouted up the ladder, “Marcone! Get your criminal ass down here.”
There was a really satisfying silence upstairs, and I couldn’t wait to see the expression on his face. It didn’t disappoint in its subtle way. He came down the ladder with a tight look of irritation teasing at the edges of that blank mask he wore. His ridiculously expensive suit was smudged, and there was a smear of something right above the blaze of gray at his temples that trailed into a thin cut above one green eye.
I could see Gard’s foot start to follow him, heavy combat boots with steel reinforcement.
“Uh-uh, Blondie,” I said. “Marcone is really going to want this discussion to stay private.”
“Excuse me?” Marcone asked, quiet and suspicious. And, okay, maybe I was acting a little guilty. I refused to let myself tense further. Any more nerves from me and Marcone was going to get both Hendricks and Gard down, and I really couldn’t take that sort of humiliation.
So I was really damn proud when I sounded almost calm when I said, “No, really, trust me on this one. You don’t want her down here for this.”
She looked back and forth between Marcone and me, and then finally withdrew her foot and said, “I’ll be waiting at the top of the ladder.”
“Yeah, yeah, and you’ll smite my ruin on the mountainside, blah, blah,” I said. “I got it. Scoot.”
She let the trapdoor fall closed. Marcone tensed a tiny bit at that, but his expression was still a study in bored neutrality. “Do please hurry this along, Mr. Dresden,” he said. “The city isn’t going to save itself.”
“That’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“You have a solution?”
“Looks like.”
“And you were . . . what? Hoping for a pat on the head?”
Okay, the sarcasm was kind of a relief at that moment. At least I was used to the sarcasm. It made the weird seem a little further off. “I can’t do it alone,” I gritted out.
He got it. “I see. And you want me to participate in some magical ceremony? A ritual of some sort, perhaps? You certainly can’t expect me to cast any spells.”
“Yes, ritual. And as for your participation, I guess that depends on how much you want to save the city, now doesn’t it?”
He met my gaze and didn’t give anything away.
I gave him a grin guaranteed to irritate. “Come on, flattened city? Really bad for business.”
“Your concern is touching.” After studying me for a little longer, he said, “Very well, what’s your plan?”
“There are two options, actually. Neither of them are good.”
“Mr. Dresden, these things very rarely are. Now stop dithering and get to the point.”
He asked for it. “Option A is that I use you as a human sacrifice.”
That got a reaction. Marcone had a gun in his hand faster than I could see, and it was aimed at my face. His eyes had widened, and I could see him looking around the room. He wasn’t willing to kill me straight off, but he was also weighing immediate action against the fading likelihood of his beating me on my own turf. I’ve rarely seen him afraid, but I could see it in him right then.
“Uh, Boss?” I heard from my shelf. “Usually if you’re going with that sort of plan, you don’t tell the victim first. Just, you know, FYI.”
“Shut up, Bob.” I didn’t look away from Marcone as I raised my hands very slowly. “Easy. I told you that was Option A. I’ve already rejected Option A, which leads us to Option B. Which, frankly, isn’t a lot better, but we both come out of it alive.”
That gun wasn’t budging. “Talk,” he said.
And staring down the barrel of a gun was not the way I figured I’d be propositioning anyone ever. But then again, this was Marcone. Would me propositioning him ever have happened any other way?
“Well,” I said, “we’d . . . um . . . we’d set up a circle with crystals and things to store energy, and then . . . um . . . we’d . . . uh . . . we’d have sex. Probably . . . um, magically fueled just to give it that little extra punch. I have potions. Don’t ask.”
It got a blink and a jerk of that gun and I reached fast for my shield bracelet, thinking only to throw up enough of a barrier that I didn’t end up accidentally perforated while Marcone got over the shock.
Which, of course, made Marcone think I was trying something. I was flat on my ass before I knew what happened, and he was standing over me. His gun hadn’t wavered, but it had maybe inched closer to my mouth. I figure he’d heard of death curses, and wanted to forestall any nastiness I might get out before he snuffed me.
I didn’t move. I knew it was my only chance of not dying in a pathetic heap on my lab floor. I could hear Bob rattling on his shelf.
“Mr. Dresden,” I heard at length, “what you propose is not only impossible, given my position, but also unacceptable. There has to be an alternative.”
“No there doesn’t,” Bob chimed in.
“Shut up, Bob!” I snapped. I ventured a look up, and I knew what a rabbit felt like when an eagle pinned it down. I thought back on Plan A and realized it would never have worked. Marcone would never drop his guard around me, and he would be more than willing to put one between my eyes if it came down to an 'only one of us is walking away' scenario. I’m good, but even I can’t sling a spell faster than he can fire a gun. And if I did get a shield up, he’d use something with a low enough velocity to get through to me. Say, one of those knives he keeps stashed on him.
I put my hands up very slowly, palms facing away from him so he didn’t think I was casting in his general direction. “Look, you wanted a solution. I’m not happy about it either, but it gets the job done. I think you’d be willing to put up with a little embarrassment to save the world.”
Yeah, he didn’t even twitch. “I may eschew a great deal of the machismo that is required in my line of work, Mr. Dresden, but there are certain lines I cannot cross.”
“You think I’d talk about this? Newsflash, John! Neither of us really wants to do this, and neither of us is going to run around shooting his mouth off.” I winced. “Figure of speech. Gun. Please. Down.”
Inch by inch the gun lowered to Marcone’s side, and still he stared at me, his neutrality cracking while he gave me a look a guy might give the giant, unidentified bug crawling up his pants leg. I scrambled to my feet.
For the first time since I’d met him I got to witness the spectacle of John Marcone groping for words. He opened his mouth a few times, but thought better of it until finally a single word managed to get out: “Potions?”
And, okay, that’s kind of embarrassing. I looked anywhere but him when I said, “Hey, people pay good money for that kind of thing.”
“What kind of thing, exactly?”
Asshole. “You know, the kind that relaxes you, lowers inhibitions, makes you friendly. Makes you more than friendly. Add a boost to stamina, and this thing is popular.”
“It’s a magical roofie.” He sounded seriously disapproving. The guy who ran drugs for all of Chicago sounded disapproving of my lust potions. That was just great.
“What? No! I do thorough background checks before I’d ever sell something like this. Committed couples that want to try something new. That’s it.”
“Or unwilling partners during the end of the world, apparently.”
I heaved a sigh and rested my elbows on the table where Little Chicago lived in all its smashed glory, presenting him with my side. A little lowering of the defenses had to happen on someone’s part, and it seemed like it wasn’t going to be his. “Look,” I said. “What else are we going to do? We can’t kill what’s attacking us. We have to repair the very fabric of reality, and to do that we need one huge battery. You’re magically tied to the city, so the resonance creates a huge jolt of power. Add me to the mix, and we’d have enough for this spell. I can’t think of any other acceptable way to do this. Can you?”
I could see him thinking. He looked more human when he was flustered, and it was really nice to know I wasn’t the only one who felt so completely weirded out by this whole thing.
At length he said, “If you breathe a word of this to anyone-”
“Yeah, great, concrete galoshes. Got it. Let’s just do this and get it done.”
“Ever the romantic.”
“Kiss my ass, Schnookums.”
Part II
Part III