At the house, he didn’t even attempt to explain the situation to the butler. Instead he shoved the elderly Hajin aside and ran, panting, up the long, curving staircase. Behind him were rising cries of alarm. He raced through Juliana’s mirrored and gold-inlaid dressing room. Her Isanjo maid clutched a discarded ball gown against her chest and gazed at Rohan from wide, frightened eyes.
“Where is she? Where’s my wife?”
The creature reverted to her alien nature and went swarming up the drapes to cower on the rod. The large golden eyes shifted toward the bedroom door.
Rohan stormed through. He was met with the sight of an expanse of bare white back, a few freckles on the shoulders. The man propped himself on his forearms, his doughy behind pumping in an age-old dance. A woman’s soft cries emerged from among the tumbled pillows.
Juliana opened her eyes, looked at Rohan, and let out a piercing scream. The man who had been plowing her gave a grunt and pulled out.
“What in the hell?” he roared, and now Rohan finally saw his face.
It was him.
“The authorities arrived and took away the madman. I kept trying to make them understand. To realize that the Cara had placed an agent at the very heart of government. No one would listen. I would show them articles that proved what the impostor was doing, sending money to companies that I knew were fronts for the aliens. An audit would have revealed that funds were missing, redirected, but they wouldn’t listen. Eventually, I realized if I ever wanted to be released I had to end my accusations. I also knew that in the sanatorium I was at greater risk of being assassinated. I needed to get free. Once I was released, I headed to the outer worlds. Here I tell the story to people like you.” He rose to his feet, swaying. “I am Rohan Danilo Marcus Aubrey, Conde de Vargas, and I adjure you to act! Inform your superiors. Alert them to the danger!”
He seemed to have expended all his strength in the ringing call to arms. The drunk dropped heavily into his chair and his head nodded toward his chest.
Disgusted by his gullibility, and out the cost of a bottle, Tracy pushed back violently from the table. The shriek of the chair legs on the floor brought Rohan, or whatever his name might be, out of his stupor. The drunk belched and raised his head.
“Wha …?”
“Nice. What a scam. He”—Tracy jerked a thumb at the bartender—“sells more booze, and you get to drink for free.”
“Wha …?” the grifter repeated.
“The Conde de Vargas is Prime Minister. Second only to the Emperor in power.” Tracy tapped the name into the comm set in his jacket sleeve. “This is the real Rohan.” Tracy thrust his arm under the man’s nose, showing him the photos.
He waved a pudgy hand in a vague circle, indicating his visage. “I told you. They stole my face, my life … my wife … he made her love him again, or maybe love him for the first time.”
Tracy shook his head and headed for the door.
“Wait!” the drunk called. The young officer looked back, and the drunken Scheherazade gave Tracy a desperate look. “Your duties will take you all over League space. If you see her tell her … tell her …” His voice was thick with unshed tears and an excess of booze. “I never saw Sammy again, and I need to … need to …” The man began to sob. “I love her,” Rohan said brokenly. “Love her so much.”
Embarrassment, pity, and fury warred for primacy. Tracy embraced the anger. Clapping slowly, Tracy said, “Nice touch.”
The young officer stepped out into the darkness. The cold air cleared his head a bit, but he was still very drunk. He stared at the distant glow of the spaceport. Follow through on his threat? Go AWOL? He was only twenty-one. Was it worth risking a noose to walk away from casual insults and petty condescension? He realized that he could far too easily become that pathetic drunk in the bar, telling fantastic stories for the price of a drink.
I saved the heir to the throne from a scandal that might have rocked the League. We shared a secret love. I know that Mercedes de Arango, the Infanta, loves me, the tailor’s son.
But his story was true, not like that bit of farrago to which he’d just been treated.
And your story is any less fantastic?
No, Rohan’s—or whatever his name was—his story couldn’t be true. If it was, then he, Tracy Belmanor, second lieutenant in the Imperial Fleet, was privy to a secret that would not just rock the League but destroy it. He peered suspiciously into the shadowy depths of the alley to his left and saw nothing beyond the hulking shadow of a garbage container. But what if they were there, hiding among them, watching, waiting, listening? What if they decided they needed to silence him?
Tracy broke into a run and didn’t stop until he reached the ship. The outer hatch cycled closed and he leaned, panting, against the bulkhead. Inside the steel-and-resin bulwark of the warship, his panic receded. How foolish. The whole thing had been a scam. Sammy didn’t exist. The Cara weren’t hiding among them. Human males were still at the apex of power.
It had just been a story.
Jim Butcher
New York Times bestseller Jim Butcher is best known for the Dresden Files series, starring Harry Dresden, a wizard for hire who goes down some very mean streets indeed to do battle against the dark creatures of the supernatural world, and who is one of the most popular fictional characters of the twenty-first century to date; he even had his own TV show. The Dresden Files books include Storm Front, Fool Moon, Grave Peril, Summer Knight, Death Masks, Blood Rites, Dead Beat, Proven Guilty, White Night, Small Favor, Turn Coat, and Changes. Butcher is also the author of the swashbuckling sword and sorcery Codex Alera series, consisting of Furies of Calderon, Academ’s Fury, Cursor’s Fury, Captain’s Fury, and Princeps’ Fury. His most recent books are First Lord’s Fury, the new Codex Alera novel, and Ghost Story, a Dresden Files novel. There’s also a collection of stories featuring Harry Dresden, Side Jobs: Stories from the Dresden Files. Coming up is a new Dresden Files novel, Cold Days. Butcher lives in Missouri with his wife, his son, and a ferocious guard dog.
Butcher flabbergasted everyone by killing Harry Dresden off at the end of Changes. (The next novel, Ghost Story, was told from the point of view of Harry’s ghost!) Here Harry’s young protégé, trying to carry on the fight against the forces of darkness without Harry, finds that she has some very big shoes to fill, and that she’d better fill them fast—or die.
I miss my boss.
It’s been most of a year since I helped him die, and ever since then I’ve been the only professional wizard in the city of Chicago.
Well, okay. I’m not, like, officially a wizard. I’m still sort of an apprentice. And no one really pays me, unless you count the wallets and valuables I lift from bodies sometimes, so I guess I’m more amateur than professional. And I don’t have a PI license like my boss did, or an ad in the phone book.
But I’m all there is. I’m not as strong as he was, and I’m not as good as he was. I’m just going to have to be enough.
So anyway, there I was, washing the blood off in Waldo Butters’ shower.
I did a lot of living outdoors these days, which didn’t seem nearly as horrible during the summer and early autumn as it had during the arctic chill of the previous superwinter. It was like sleeping on a tropical beach by comparison. Still, I missed things like regular access to plumbing,