I stomped over to the carriage and got up into it, and a second later the “horse” (I didn’t believe for a second that it was a natural horse, and a quick probe with my wizard’s senses told me it was just something, maybe a Black Dog, glamoured to look like one) took off at a trot and soon we were moving, clippety-clop down the streets of a modern city.
A lot of people were out walking. Not many jobs were still functioning, but cold storage of food had vanished, so everyone had to get out for a lot of things most every day. That meant either walking a long way or standing in a long line, or both, so simply procuring victuals had become a full-time job for many. They kept mostly to the sidewalks by pure habit, but a lot of kids and young people were using the streets, and the few cars that were moving around them proved to be no faster than my own conveyance.
The city was weirdly silent. No one was talking much. People stayed in tight groups or defended the space around them with body language and glares. I got a lot of glowers as the carriage went down the street. I even heard someone mutter my name to a companion.That’s Harry Dresden. Wizard.
The looks I got weren’t friendly ones.
The government might have been trying to convince people that terrorists had hit the city, but the people who were actually there knew how full of crap the government was. They’d seen mythic armies smashing into one another, seen monsters tearing people apart, seen giants and ogres and elves and twisted things with no names go screaming into battle with their own eyes. They’d seen their neighbors run down and killed. Their homes smashed and burned.
They knew the supernatural world had come to their town and gutted it.
And I was the town wizard. The guy in the phone book. A known quantity of weird. The fact that I’d been fighting to keep the town safewouldn’t matter much in the aftermath, not to people who were as hurt and scared and shocked and tired as I was. I understood. And I just didn’t have the energy to be angry about it.
Well. No one threw any rocks at me. At least that was something.
The carriage took about forty minutes to make a trip that had taken ten a month ago, and wound up outside of McAnally’s Pub.
There was a crowd gathered in the parking lot, where a sort of impromptu market of walled plastic canopies and tents had popped up. I recognized a lot of the faces from the local supernatural community. There were several of the larger and rougher types from our crowd hanging around conspicuously, returning the glares of passersby with level looks, while the rest of the magical crowd conducted business, doing some with cash and some by barter.
A lot of enclaves like this one had sprung up around the city, where neighbors or other like-minded folk had gathered together, forted up, and posted guards. Wolves like easy targets. If they had a choice between going at an organized group and going at isolated individuals, they went for the loners.
At the same time my carriage was pulling up, there was a shining white and silver cart drawn by a pair of muscular security guys who wore light jackets, even on a simmering July evening on bicycles, coming down the street from the other direction. The black carriage and the white cart stopped opposite each other next to the little parking lot, and the not-horse and the Redcap traded steady looks with the two security guys, who dismounted and braced to attention.
I got out of the carriage, while Lara got out of her white cart.
Lara Raith cut a stunning figure, like always. She was a woman who looked like a magnificent thirty, though I knew she was at least a century old. She wore black riding boots, blue jeans that she made look amazing, and a simple white T-shirt that was dating out of its class, like me. Her raven-dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail that fell past her shoulders, and silver glinted at her pale throat and upon her ears. She smiled and nodded at the nearest people in the crowd outside of the pub.
They smiled back, even if they did it nervously.
I knew how they felt.
Lara’s summer-sky-blue eyes fell on me, and her smile widened as she walked toward me. I went forward to meet her about halfway between our guards.
“Harry,” she said, and extended her hand.
“Hey, Lara,” I said. I took her cool fingers in mine, and my body’s engines revved, somewhere in the background. They weren’t important. I bowed over her hand, almost brushing her fingers with my lips, but not quite. Then I stepped forward, capturing her hand under my arm, and she fell into step beside me smoothly as we approached the pub. The sun cast our shadows out in front of us, hers slim and straight, and mine long, wide, and looming.
I felt her fingers tighten slightly on my duster’s sleeve and stroke it thoughtfully. “Isn’t that terribly hot?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said.
She looked up at me for a moment, lips pursed, began to say something, and then seemed to think better of it. She fell quiet, nodding to those we passed like a queen.
I suppose she was one, of sorts.
We went down the steps to the sunken entrance. I opened the door, and we went into McAnally’s.
It was my favorite pub. The thirteen ceiling fans spread throughout the barroom were still now. Thirteen wooden columns carved with figures from the Grimm fairy tales, the unvarnished ones, supported a fairly low ceiling. Thirteen stools stood along the winding bar, and thirteen tables were spread throughout the room. The layout of the place was intended to disperse and disrupt negative magical energies, and it had always felt like being home. Behind the bar, Mac himself was tending to a woodstove and a charcoal grill, both being vented by battery-powered fans blowing up into their hoods. The bar and all the tables but one were filled, and that one in the far corner, set a bit away from everyone else.
“Look at all the witnesses,” I muttered.
“Depending on how it goes, I suppose they could always be innocent bystanders,” Lara said, the corner of her mouth quirked.
“Heh,” I said, a little surge of something that wasn’t quite so heavyflickering through my chest. I walked her to the table, nodding to a couple of folks I knew, studying a lot of faces I didn’t. The alliance between the White Court of vampires and the Winter Court of the Fae was big news. The marriage I’d been threatened with was a part of that alliance. I think it was mostly a PR thing. That was the whole reason for the series of dates Mab had required—we were showing the flag for the new alliance.
I held out a chair for Lara, got her settled, then took off my duster, looking around the room for any potential hostile gazes. Jokes aside, I didn’t have any illusions about innocent bystanders. The proper people to witness Lara and me together had been carefully curated—and some of them would probably be representing beings who didn’t like me very much.
A lot of eyes dropped as my gaze swept around the room.
