Dead Beat(58)

"McAnally," Morgan said to the tavern keeper.
"Donald," Mac replied.
Interesting. Hell, I'd been on the Council for years, and I hadn't known Morgan's first name.
"Dresden," Morgan said. "Have you checked for veils?"
"If I told you I had, you'd check it yourself anyway, Morgan," I said. "So I didn't bother."
"Of course you didn't," he said. I saw him frown a little in concentration, and then his eyes went a bit out of focus. He swept his gaze around the room, using his Sight, that odd, half-surreal sense that lets wizards observe the forces of magic moving around them. A wizard's Sight cuts through all kinds of veils and spells meant to disguise and distract. It's a potent ability, but it comes at a price. Anything you see through the Sight stays with you, never fading in your memory, always right there for recall, as if you'd just seen it. You can't just forget something that you See. It's there for life.
Morgan didn't let his gaze linger too long near Mac or myself, and then he nodded to himself, and called out, "Clear."
The door opened and Warden Luccio came in. She was a solid old matriarch of a woman, as tall as most men and built like someone who did plenty of physical labor. Her hair was a solid shade of iron grey, cropped into a neat, military cut. She too wore a Warden's grey cloak, though she wore clothes suitable for hiking or camping beneath that: jeans, cotton, flannel, boots, all in muted tones of grey and brown. She too carried a staff and bore a sword at her side, though hers was a slender scimitar, light and elegant. Though not as worn as Morgan's, her gear also showed evidence of recent action.
"Warden Luccio," I said, and rose from the bar stool to incline my head to her.
"Wizard," she said quietly. I would have needed a high-speed camera to take in the details of her smile, but at least it was there. She nodded to me and then a little more deeply to Mac.
Behind her came three more Wardens. The first was a young man I vaguely recognized from a Council meeting a few years back. He had naturally tanned skin, dark hair, dark eyes, and sharp-edged, classically Spanish features. I remembered him in an apprentice's brown robe back then, and covering his mouth with one hand to conceal a grin inspired by some of my dialogue with the Council's bigwigs.
The brown robe was gone, and he looked like he had filled in a little since I'd first seen him, but good Lord, he was younger than Billy the werewolf. He wore a grey cloak that looked reasonably clean and not at all damaged, and black fatigues beneath that. A simple, straight sword hung from one hip, and was balanced on the other side by a holstered Glock and, I kid you not, three round fragmentation grenades. His staff was fairly new-looking, but there were enough dents and nicks in it to make me think he had kept things from hitting him with it, and he walked with a kind of arrogant confidence you see only in people who have not yet realized their own mortality.
"This is Warden Ramirez," Luccio said. "Ramirez, Dresden."
"How's it going?" Ramirez said, flashing me a grin.
I shrugged. "You know. Pretty much the usual."
Two more Wardens came in behind him, and they looked even younger and greener. Their cloaks and staves were immaculate, and they wore clothes and equipment so similar to Ramirez's that they qualified as a uniform. Luccio introduced the blocky young man with distant, haunted eyes as Kowalski. The sweet-faced young Asian girl's name was Yoshimo.
I limped over to Luccio and nodded at the tables Mac had set up. "I hope there's room enough. When are the other Wardens arriving?"
Luccio fixed me with a quiet, weary gaze. Then she drew her hands from beneath her cloak and held out a folded bundle wrapped in brown paper, offering it to me. "Take it."
I took the bundle and unwrapped it.
It was a folded grey cloak.
"Put it on," said Luccio in her quiet, steady voice. "And then every available Warden will be here."

     
 

      Chapter Thirty-one
I stared at Luccio for a second. "That's a joke," I said. "Right?"
She gave me a brief, bitter smile. "Master McAnally," she said to Mac. "I think we could use a round. Do you have anything decent to drink?"
Mac grunted and said, "Got a new dark."
"Is it worth drinking?" Luccio asked. She sounded tired, but there was a teasing tone to her voice.
Mac glowered at her in answer, and she gave him a smile that was part challenge and part apology, and took a seat at one of the tables. She gestured at the table and said, "Wardens, please join me."
Morgan took the seat to Luccio's right, and the look he gave me could have burned holes in sheet metal. I did what I always did when Morgan did that: I eyed him right back, then dismissed him as if he weren't even there. I pulled out the chair opposite Luccio and sat. The two youngest Wardens sat down, but Ramirez stayed standing until Mac had brought over bottles of his dark ale and left them on the table. He headed back over to the bar.
Ramirez glanced at Luccio, and she nodded. "Close the circle, please, Warden."
The young man drew a piece of chalk from his pocket, and quickly drew a heavy line on the floor all the way around the table. He finished the circle, then touched it lightly with the forefinger of his right hand and spoke a quiet word. I felt a flicker of his will as he released a tiny bit of power into the circle. The circle closed around us in a sudden, silent tension, raising a thin barrier around us that was almost entirely impregnable to magical forces. If anyone had been trying to spy on the meeting with magic, the circle would prevent it. If anyone had left some kind of listening device nearby, the magic-saturated air within the circle would be certain to fry it within a minute.
Ramirez nodded to himself and then reversed the last open chair at the table and straddled it, resting one arm on the back. Morgan slid him the last bottle of ale, and he took it in one hand.
"Absent friends," Luccio murmured, holding up her bottle.
I could get behind that toast. The rest of us muttered, "Absent friends," and we had a drink, and Luccio stared at her bottle for a moment.
I waited in the pregnant silence and then said, "So. Making me a Warden. That's a joke, right?"
Luccio took a second, slower taste of the ale and then arched an eyebrow at the bottle.
Behind the bar again, Mac smiled.
"It's no joke, Warden Dresden," Luccio said.
"As much as we all would like it to be," Morgan added.
Luccio gave him a look of very gentle reproof, and Morgan subsided into silence. "How much have you heard about recent events in the war?"
"Nothing in the past several days," I said. "Not since my last check-in."
She nodded. "I thought as much. The Red Court has begun a heavy offensive. This is the first time that they've concentrated their efforts on disrupting our communications. We suspect that a great many wizards never received word through our usual messengers."
"Then they found weaknesses in the communications lines," I said. "But they waited to exploit them until it would hurt us the most."
Luccio nodded. "Precisely. The first attack came in Cairo, at our operations center there. Several Wardens were taken, including the senior commander of the region."
"Alive?" I asked.
She nodded. "Yes. Which was an unacceptable threat."
When vampires take you alive, it isn't so that they can treat you to ice cream. That was one of the really nightmarish facets of the war with the Red Court. If the enemy got you, they could do worse than kill you.
They could make you one of their own.
If they managed to turn a Warden, especially one of the senior commanders, it would give them access to a treasury of knowledge and secrets-to say nothing of the fact that they would effectively gain, in many ways, a wizard of their own. Vampires didn't use magic in the same way that mortal wizards did. They tapped into the same nauseating well of power that Kemmler and those like him used. But from what I understood of it, the skills carried over. A turned wizard would be a deadly threat to the Wardens, the Council, and mortals alike. We never talked about it, but there was a sort of silent understanding among wizards that we would never be taken alive. And an equally silent fear that we might be.
"You went after them," I guessed.
Luccio nodded. "A major assault. Madrid, Sao Paolo, Acapulco, Athens. We struck at enemy strongholds there to acquire intelligence to the whereabouts of the prisoners. Our people were being held in Belize." She waved a hand vaguely at Morgan.
"Our intelligence indicated the presence of the highest-ranking members of the Red Court, including the Red King himself. The Merlin and the rest of the Senior Council took the field with us," Morgan said quietly.
That made me raise my brows. The Merlin, the leader of the Senior Council, was as defensive-minded as it was possible to be. He'd guided the White Council into the equivalent of a cold war with the Red Court, with everyone moving carefully and unwilling to commit, in the hopes that it would give the war time to settle away into negotiations and some kind of diplomatic resolution. An offensive action like a full assault from the Senior Council, the seven oldest and strongest wizards on the planet, had been long overdue.
"What changed the Merlin's mind?" I asked quietly.
"Wizard McCoy," Luccio said. "When our people were taken, he persuaded most of the Senior Council to take action, including Ancient Mai and the Gatekeeper."