In the ruins of my office stood a woman with the kind of beauty that makes men murder friends and start wars.
She stood by my desk with her arms folded, facing the door, hips cocked to one side, her expression skeptical. She had white hair. Not white-blond, not platinum. White as snow, white as the finest marble, bound up like a captured cloud to bare the lines of her slender throat. I don't know how her skin managed to look pale beside that hair, but it did. Her lips were the color of frozen mulberries, almost shocking in a smooth and lovely face, and her oblique eyes were a deep green that tinted to blue when she tilted her head and looked me over. She wasn't old. Wasn't young. Wasn't anything but stunning.
I tried to keep my jaw from hitting the floor and forced my brain to start doing something by taking stock of her wardrobe. She wore a woman's suit of charcoal grey, the cut immaculate. The skirt showed exactly enough leg to make it hard not to look, and her dark pumps had heels just high enough to give you ideas. She wore a bone-white V-neck beneath her jacket, the neckline dipping just low enough to make me want to be watching if she took a deep breath. Opals set in silver flashed on her ears, at her throat, glittering through an array of colors I wouldn't have expected from opals—too many scarlets and violets and deep blues. Her nails had somehow been lacquered in the same opalescence.
I caught the scent of her perfume, something wild and rich, heavy and sweet, like orchids. My heart sped up, and the testosterone-oriented part of my brain wished that I'd been able to bathe. Or shave. Or at least that I hadn't worn sweatpants.
Her mouth quirked into a smile, and she arched one pale brow, saying nothing, letting me gawk.
One thing was certain—no woman like that would have anything less than money. Lots of money. Money I could use to pay the rent, buy groceries, maybe even splurge a little and get a wheelbarrow to help with cleaning my apartment. I only hesitated for a heartbeat, wondering if it was proper for a full-fledged wizard of the White Council to be that interested in cash. I made up my mind fast.
Phenomenal cosmic powers be damned. I have a lease.
"Uh, Ms. Sommerset, I presume," I managed finally. No one can do suave like me. If I was careful, I should be able to trip over something and complete the image. "I'm Harry Dresden."
"I believe you are late," she replied. Sommerset had a voice like her outfit—rich, suggestive, cultured. Her English had an accent I couldn't place. Maybe European. Definitely interesting. "Your assistant informed me when to arrive. I don't like to be kept waiting, so I let myself in." She glanced at my desk, then back at me. "I almost wish I hadn't."
"Yeah. I didn't hear you were coming until, uh …" I looked around at my office, dismayed, and shut the door behind me. "I know this looks pretty unprofessional."
"Quite correct."
I moved to one of the chairs I keep for clients, facing my desk, and hurriedly cleared it off. "Please, sit down. Would you like a cup of coffee or anything?"
"Sounds less than sanitary. Why should I take the risk?" She sat, her back straight, on the edge of the chair, following me with her eyes as I walked around the desk. They were a cool, noticeable weight on me as I moved, and I sat down at my desk, frowning.
"Are you the kind who takes chances?"
"I like to hedge my bets," she murmured. "You, for example, Mister Dresden. I have come here today to decide whether or not I shall gamble a great deal upon your abilities." She paused and then added, "Thus far, you have made less than a sterling impression."
I rested my elbows on my desk and steepled my fingers. "Yeah. I know that all this probably makes me look like—"
"A desperate man?" she suggested. "Someone who is clearly obsessed with other matters." She nodded toward the stacks of envelopes on my desk. "One who is shortly to lose his place of business if he does not pay his debts. I think you need the work." She began to rise. "And if you lack the ability to take care of such minor matters, I doubt you will be of any use to me."
"Wait," I said, rising. "Please. At least let me hear you out. If it turns out that I think I can help you—"
She lifted her chin and interrupted me effortlessly. "But that isn't the question, is it?" she asked. "The question is whether or not I think you can help me. You have shown me nothing to make me think that you could." She paused, sitting back down again. "And yet …"
I sat back down across from her. "Yet?"
"I have heard things, Mister Dresden, about people with your abilities. About the ability to look into their eyes."
I tilted my head. "I wouldn't call it an ability. It just happens."
"Yet you are able to see within them? You call it a soulgaze, do you not?"
I nodded warily and started adding together lots of small bits and pieces. "Yes."
"Revealing their true nature? Seeing the truth about the person upon whom you look?"
"And they see me back. Yes."
She smiled, cool and lovely. "Then let us look upon one another, Mister Dresden, you and I. Then I will know if you can be of any use to me. Surely it will cost me nothing."
"I wouldn't be so sure. It's the sort of thing that stays with you." Like an appendectomy scar, or baldness. When you look on someone's soul, you don't forget it. Not ever. I didn't like the direction this was going. "I don't think it would be a good idea."
"But why not?" she pressed. "It won't take long, will it, Mister Dresden?"
"That's really not the issue."
Her mouth firmed into a line. "I see. Then, if you will excuse me—"
This time I interrupted her. "Ms. Sommerset, I think you may have made a mistake in your estimations."
Her eyes glittered, anger showing for a moment, cool and far away. "Oh?"
I nodded. I opened the drawer to my desk and took out a pad of paper. "Yeah. I've had a rough time of things lately."
"You can't possibly know how little that matters to me."
I drew out a pen, took off the lid, and set it down beside the pad. "Uh-huh. Then you come in here. Rich, gorgeous—kind of too good to be true."
"And?" she inquired.
"Too good to be true," I repeated. I drew the.44-caliber revolver from the desk drawer, leveled it at her, and thumbed back the hammer. "Call me crazy, but lately I've been thinking that if something's too good to be true, then it probably isn't. Put your hands on the desk, please."
Her eyebrows arched. Those gorgeous eyes widened enough to show the whites all the way around them. She moved her hands, swallowing as she did, and laid her palms on the desk. "What do you think you are doing?" she demanded.
"I'm testing a theory," I said. I kept the gun and my eyes on her and opened another drawer. "See, lately, I've been getting nasty visitors. So it's made me do some thinking about what kind of trouble to expect. And I think I've got you pegged."
"I don't know what you are talking about, Mister Dresden, but I am certain—"
"Save it." I rummaged in a drawer and found what I needed. A moment later I lifted a plain old nail of simple metal out of the drawer and put it on the desk.
"What's that?" she all but whispered.
"Litmus test," I said.
Then I flicked the nail gently with one finger, and sent it rolling across the surface of my desk and toward her perfectly manicured hands.
She didn't move until a split second before the nail touched her—but then she did, a blur of motion that took her two long strides back from my desk and knocked over the chair she'd been sitting on. The nail rolled off the edge of the desk and fell to the floor with a clink.
"Iron," I said. "Cold iron. Faeries don't like it."
The expression drained from her face. One moment, there had been arrogant conceit, haughty superiority, blithe confidence. But that simply vanished, leaving her features cold and lovely and remote and empty of all emotion, of anything recognizably human.
"The bargain with my godmother has months yet to go," I said. "A year and a day, she had to leave me alone. That was the deal. If she's trying to weasel out of it, I'm going to be upset."
She regarded me in that empty silence for long moments more. It was unsettling to see a face so lovely look so wholly alien, as though something lurked behind those features that had little in common with me and did not care to make the effort to understand. That blank mask made my throat tighten, and I had to work not to let the gun in my hand shake. But then she did something that made her look even more alien, more frightening.
She smiled. A slow smile, cruel as a barbed knife. When she spoke, her voice sounded just as beautiful as it had before. But it was empty, quiet, haunting. She spoke, and it made me want to lean closer to her to hear her more clearly. "Clever," she murmured. "Yes. Not too distracted to think. Just what I need."
A cold shiver danced down my spine. "I don't want any trouble," I said. "Just go, and we can both pretend nothing happened."
"But it has," she murmured. Just the sound of her voice made the room feel colder. "You have seen through this veil. Proven your worth. How did you do it?"
"Static on the doorknob," I said. "It should have been locked. You shouldn't have been able to get in here, so you must have gone through it. And you danced around my questions rather than simply answering them."
Still smiling, she nodded. "Go on."
"You don't have a purse. Not many women go out in a three-thousand-dollar suit and no purse."
"Mmmm," she said. "Yes. You'll do perfectly, Mister Dresden."
"I don't know what you're talking about," I said. "I'm having nothing more to do with faeries."
"I don't like being called that, Mister Dresden."
"You'll get over it. Get out of my office."
"You should know, Mister Dresden, that my kind, from great to small, are bound to speak the truth."
"That hasn't slowed your ability to deceive."
Her eyes glittered, and I saw her pupils change, slipping from round mortal orbs to slow feline lengths. Cat-eyed, she regarded me, unblinking. "Yet have I spoken. I plan to gamble. And I will gamble upon you."
"Uh. What?"
"I require your service. Something precious has been stolen. I wish you to recover it."
"Let me get this straight," I said. "You want me to recover stolen goods for you?"
"Not for me," she murmured. "For the rightful owners. I wish you to discover and catch the thief and to vindicate me."
"Do it yourself," I said.
"In this matter I cannot act wholly alone," she murmured. "That is why I have chosen you to be my emissary. My agent."
I laughed at her. That made something else come into those perfect, pale features—anger. Anger, cold and terrible, flashed in her eyes and all but froze the laugh in my throat. "I don't think so," I said. "I'm not making any more bargains with your folk. I don't even know who you are."
"Dear child," she murmured, a slow edge to her voice. "The bargain has already been made. You gave your life, your fortune, your future, in exchange for power."
"Yeah. With my godmother. And that's still being contested."
"No longer," she said. "Even in this world of mortals, the concept of debt passes from one hand to the next. Selling mortgages, yes?"
My belly went cold. "What are you saying?"
Her teeth showed, sharp and white. It wasn't a smile. "Your mortgage, mortal child, has been sold. I have purchased it. You are mine. And you will assist me in this matter."
I set the gun down on my desk and opened the top drawer. I took out my letter opener, one of the standard machined jobs with a heavy, flat blade and a screw-grip handle. "You're wrong," I said, and the denial in my voice sounded patently obvious, even to me. "My godmother would never do that. For all I know, you're trying to trick me."
She smiled, watching me, her eyes bright. "Then by all means, let me reassure you of the truth."
My left palm slammed down onto the table. I watched, startled, as I gripped the letter opener in my right hand, slasher-movie style. In a panic, I tried to hold back my hand, to drop the opener, but my arms were running on automatic, like they were someone else's.
"Wait!" I shouted.
She regarded me, cold and distant and interested.
I slammed the letter opener down onto the back of my own hand, hard. My desk is a cheap one. The steel bit cleanly through the meat between my thumb and forefinger and sank into the desk, pinning me there. Pain washed up my arm even as blood started oozing out of the wound. I tried to fight it down, but I was panicked, in no condition to exert a lot of control. A whimper slipped out of me. I tried to pull the steel away, to get it out of my hand, but my arm simply twisted, wrenching the letter opener counterclockwise.
The pain flattened me. I wasn't even able to get enough breath to scream.
The woman, the faerie, reached down and took my fingers away from the letter opener. She withdrew it with a sharp, decisive gesture and laid it flat on the desk, my blood gleaming all over it. "Wizard, you know as well as I. Were you not bound to me, I would have no such power over you."
At that moment, most of what I knew was that my hand hurt, but some dim part of me realized she was telling the truth. Faeries don't just get to ride in and play puppet master. You have to let them in. I'd let my godmother, Lea, in years before, when I was younger, dumber. I'd given her the slip last year, forced an abeyance of her claim that should have protected me for a year and a day.
But now she'd passed the reins to someone else. Someone who hadn't been in on the second bargain.
I looked up at her, pain and sudden anger making my voice into a low, harsh growl. "Who are you?"
The woman ran an opalescent fingernail through the blood on my desk. She lifted it to her lips and idly touched it to her tongue. She smiled, slower, more sensual, and every bit as alien. "I have many names," she murmured. "But you may call me Mab. Queen of Air and Darkness. Monarch of the Winter Court of the Sidhe."
