“What a pleasure, Mr. Dresden,” he said, his voice suddenly tight. “What brings you out to Oklahoma?”
“I heard it was a nice place for perambulating,” I said. Behind Barrowill, his guards had picked up on the tension. Both of them had become very still. Barrowill was quiet for a moment, as if trying to parse some kind of meaning from my words. Heavy seconds ticked by, like the quiet before a shootout in an old Western.
A tumbleweed went rolling by in the street. I’m not even kidding. An actual, literal tumbleweed. Man, Oklahoma.
Then Barrowill took a slow breath and said to Connie, “Darling, I’d like to speak to you for a few moments, if you have time.”
“Actually …” Connie began.
“Now, please,” Barrowill said. There was something ugly under the surface of his pleasant tone. “The car. I’ll give you a ride back to the dorms.”
Connie folded her arms and scowled. “I’m entertaining someone from out of town, Daddy. I can’t just leave him here.”
One of the guards’ hands twitched.
“Don’t be difficult, Connie,” Barrowill said. “I don’t want to make a scene.”
His eyes never left me as he spoke, and I got his message loud and clear. He was taking the girl with him, and he was willing to make things get messy if I tried to stop him.
“It’s okay, Connie,” I said. “I’ve been to Norman before. I can find my way to a hotel easily enough.”
“You’re sure?” Connie asked.
“Definitely.”
“Herman,” Barrowill said.
The driver opened the passenger door again and stood next to it attentively. He kept his eyes on me, and one hand dangled, clearly ready to go for his gun.
Connie looked back and forth between me and her father for a moment, then sighed audibly and walked over to the car. She slid in, and Herman closed the door behind her.
“I recognize you,” I said pleasantly to Barrowill. “You were at the Raith Deeps when Skavis and Malvora tried to pull off their coup. Front row, all the way on one end in the Raith cheering section.”
“You have an excellent memory,” Barrowill said.
“Got out in one piece, did you?”
The vampire smiled without humor. “What are you doing with my daughter?”
“Taking a walk,” I said. “Talking.”
“You have nothing to say to her. In the interests of peace between the Court and the Council, I’m willing to ignore this intrusion into my territory. Go in peace. Right now.”
“You never told her, did you?” I asked. “Never told her what she was.”
One of his jaw muscles twitched. “It is not our way.”
“Nah,” I said. “You wait until the first time they get twitterpated, experiment with sex, and kill whoever it is they’re with. Little harsh on the kids, isn’t it?”
“Connie is not some mortal cow. She is a vampire. The initiation builds character she will need to survive and prosper.”
“If it was good enough for you, it’s good enough for her?”
“Mortal,” Barrowill said, “you simply cannot understand. I am her father. It is my obligation to prepare her for her life. The initiation is something she needs.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “Holy … That’s what happened, isn’t it? You sent her off to school to boink some poor kid to death. Hell, I’d bet you had the punch spiked at that party. Except the kid didn’t die—so now you’re in town to figure out what the hell went wrong.”
Barrowill’s eyes darkened, and he shook his head. “This is no business of yours. Leave.”
“See, that’s the thing,” I said. “It is my business. My client is worried about his kid.”
Barrowill narrowed his eyes again. “Irving.”
“Irwin,” I corrected him.
“Go back to Chicago, wizard,” he said. “You’re in my territory now.”
“This isn’t a smart move for you,” I said. “The kid’s connected. If anything bad happens to him, you’re in for trouble.”
“Is that a threat?” he asked.
I shook my head. “Chuck, I’ve got no objection to working things out peaceably. And I’ve got no objection to doing it the other way. If you know my reputation, then you know what a sincere guy I am.”
“Perhaps I should kill you now.”
“Here, in public?” I asked. “All these witnesses? You aren’t going to do that.”
“No?”
“No. Even if you win, you lose. You’re just hoping to scare me off.” I nodded toward his goons. “Ghouls, right? It’s going to take more than two, Chuck. Hell, I like fighting ghouls. No matter what I do to them, I never feel bad about it afterward.”
Barrowill missed the reference, like the monsters usually do. He looked at me, then at his Rolex. “I’ll give you until midnight to leave the state. After that, you’re gone. One way or another.”
“Hang on,” I said, “I’m terrified. Let me catch my breath.”
Barrowill’s eyes shifted color slightly, from a deep green to a much paler, angrier shade of green-gold. “I react poorly to those who threaten my family’s well-being, Dresden.”
“Yeah. You’re a regular Ozzie Nelson. John Walton. Ben Cartwright.”
“Excuse me?”
“Mr. Drummond? Charles … in Charge? No?”
“What are you blabbering about?”
“Hell’s bells, man. Don’t any of you White Court bozos ever watch television? I’m giving you pop-reference gold here. Gold.”
Barrowill stared at me with opaque, reptilian eyes. Then he said simply, “Midnight.” He took two steps back before he turned his back on me and got into his car. His goons both gave me hard looks before they, too, got into the car and pulled away.
I watched the car roll out. Despite the attitude I’d given Barrowill, I knew better than to take him lightly. Any vampire is a dangerous foe—and one of them with holdings and resources and his own personal brute squad was more so. Not only that, but … from his point of view, I was messing around with his little girl’s best interests. The vampires of the White Court were, to a degree, as dangerous as they were because they were partly human. They had human emotions, human motivations, human reactions. Barrowill could be as irrationally protective of his family as anyone else.
Except that they were also inhuman. All of those human drives were intertwined with a parasitic spirit they called a Hunger, where all the power and hunger of their vampire parts came from.
Take one part human faults and insecurities and add it to one part inhuman power and motivation. What do you get?
Trouble.
“BARROWILL?” OFFICER DEAN asked me. “The oil guy? He keeps a stable. Of congressmen.”
“Yeah, probably the same guy,” I said. “All vampires like having money and status. It makes their lives easier.”
Dean snorted. “Every vampire. And every nonvampire.”
“Heh,” I said. “Point.”
“You were in a fix,” he said. “Tell the girl, you might wreck her. Don’t tell her, and you might wreck her and Kid Bigfoot both. Either way, somebody’s dad has a bone to pick with you.”
“Pretty much.”
“Seems to me a smart guy would have washed his hands of the whole mess and left town.”
I shrugged. “Yeah. But I was the only guy there.”
FOREST ISN’T EXACTLY the dominant terrain in Norman, but there are a few trees here and there. The point where I’d agreed to meet with River Shoulders was in the center of the Oliver Wildlife Preserve, which was a stand of woods that had been donated to the university for research purposes. As I hiked out into the little wood, it occurred to me that meeting River Shoulders there was like rendezvousing with Jaws in a kiddie wading pool. But he’d picked the spot, so whatever floated the big guy’s boat.
It was dark out, and I drew my silver pentacle amulet off my neck to use for light. A whisper of will and a muttered word, and the little symbol glowed with a dim blue light that would let me walk without bumping into a tree. It took me maybe five minutes to get to approximately the right area, and River Shoulders’s soft murmur of greeting came to me out of the dark.
We sat down together on a fallen tree, and I told him what I’d learned.
He sat in silence for maybe two minutes after I finished. Then he said, “My son has joined himself to a parasite.”
I felt a flash of mild outrage. “You could think of it that way,” I said.