Changes by Jim Butcher

inserted and removed to run it. She wore a pair of ancient-looking headphones and spoke into an old radio microphone. “No. No, we have no word at this time. When we learn something, you will be informed.” She jerked the wire out, plugged it in under another flashing light, and repeated her spiel. I watched that half a dozen times before I literally waved a hand in front of her face to get her to notice us.
    She stopped and blinked up at me. She was a matronly-looking woman, iron grey woven smoothly through her brown hair, which meant that she could be anywhere between forty-five and two hundred years old. Her eyes flicked over me and then Molly, and I saw her body tense. She eased her rolling chair a few inches back from us—like most of the older crew of wizards, she probably regarded me as a sociopath looking for a nice bell tower. The switchboard lights blinked on and off steadily. They were the old kind that made little clicking sounds as they did.
    “Ah,” she said. “Wizard Dresden. I am quite busy.”
    “It looks like it,” I said. “Wizard MacFee, right? Where is everybody?”
    She blinked at me again, as though I had spoken in Ewok. “Why, they’re in the Senior Council’s residence hall. It was the only place big enough for everyone who wished to witness it.”
    I nodded pleasantly and tried to remain calm. “Witness what?”
    “The ambassador,” MacFee said, impatience touching her voice. She gestured at the switchboard. “You haven’t heard?”
    “Was sort of busy yesterday,” I said. “Heard what?”
    “Why, the Red Court, of course,” she said. “They’ve sent an ambassador plenipotentiary.” She beamed. “They want to change the cease-fire into a genuine peace. They’ve sent no less than Duchess Arianna Ortega to ask for terms.”

7
    I felt my stomach flutter around inside me.
    The duchess was playing dirty. As the Red Court envoy, of course she’d have some advance knowledge about her people’s intentions. There was no way in hell that this was a coincidence. It was too perfect.
    If the Red Court was offering a return to the status quo—and older wizards love status quo, let me tell you—and adding in something to sweeten it to boot . . . the Senior Council would never authorize an action that would jeopardize such a peace. Not for some random little girl—and certainly not for the offspring of the White Council’s most famous maybe-psychotic problem child, Harry Dresden, and a half-vampire terrorist.
    Plenty of the people on the Council thought I should have been beheaded when I was sixteen. It made the younger wizards think I was cool and dangerous, which probably explained my popularity with them. The older members of the Council, though, held the lion’s share of its influence and authority. That set would be happy to take any reasonable excuse to leave me hanging in the wind, and Duchess Arianna clearly planned to give it to them.
    She was cutting me off.
    It wasn’t until then that I noticed that while my brain had been calmly paddling down the stream of logic, the raging cauldron in my belly had overflowed, and I was walking with smooth, swift strides down a hallway, my staff in my left hand, my blasting rod in my right, and the runes and carvings of both were blazing with carmine light.
    That was somewhat alarming.
    Someone was shaking my arm, and I looked down to see that Molly was hanging on to my left arm with both hands. I was dragging her sneakers forward across the stone floor, though she was clearly trying to stop me.
    “Harry!” she said desperately. “Harry! You can’t!”
    I turned my face away from her and kept walking.
    “Harry, please!” she all but screamed. “This won’t help Maggie!”
    It took me a few seconds to work out how to stop walking. I did it, and took a slow breath.
    Molly leaned her forehead against my shoulder, panting, her voice shaking. She still held on tight. “Please. You can’t. You can’t go in there like this.