Marcone unseelie

I grinned easily and started to riposte, but the pay phone rang.
I hopped up, as much as I was capable of hopping, and answered it. "Dresden."
John Marcone's voice was as cool and eloquent as ever. "You must think me insane."
"You read the papers I had faxed to you?"
"As has my counsel at Monoc," Marcone replied. "That doesn't mean - "
I interrupted him purely because I knew how much it would annoy him. "Look, we both know you're going to do it, and I'm too tired to dance," I told him. "What do you want?"
There was a moment of silence that might have been vaguely irritated. Being adolescent at someone like Marcone is good for my morale.
"Say please," Marcone said.
I blinked. "What?"
"Say please, Dresden," he replied, his tone smooth. "Ask me."
I rolled my eyes. "Give me a break."
"We both know you need me, Dresden, and I'm too tired to dance." I could practically see the shark smile on his face. "Say please."
I stewed for a sullen minute before I realized that doing so was probably building Marcone's morale, and I couldn't have that. "Fine," I said. "Please."
“Pretty please," Marcone prompted me.
Some pyromaniacal madman's thoughts flooded my forebrain, but I took a deep breath, Tasered my pride, and said, "Pretty please."
"With a cherry on top."
"Fuck you," I said, and hung up on him.

White Night Chapter 32, Page 327-328


"I knew it," Ramirez snarled. "I knew it was a setup."
He turned to look and me and then blinked. It was only then that I realized that I had my teeth bared in a wide smile.
"That's right," I told him. "It is."
I have seen some real pros open gateways to the Nevernever. The youngest of the Summer Queens of the Sidhe could open them so smoothly that you'd never see it happening until it was over. I'd seen Cowl open ways to the Nevernever as casually and easily as a screen door, with the gate itself being barely noticeable until it van-ished a few seconds later, leaving behind it the same musty smell now flooding the cavern.
I couldn't do it that smoothly or with that much subtlety.
But I could do it just as quickly, and just as effectively.
I spun on my heel as the ghouls flooded the cavern and plunged into the gathered members of the White Court in a killing frenzy.
"Go!" Ramirez shouted. "I can't run anyway. I'll hold them; get out of here!"
"Get over yourself and cover my back!" I snarled.
I gathered my will again, shifting my staff into my right hand. The runes on the staff blazed to life, and I pointed the staff across my body, at the air four feet off the cavern floor. Then I released my gathered will, focused by my intentions and the energies aligned in my staff, and shouted, "Aparturum!" Furious golden and scarlet light flowed down the length of wood, searing a seam in reality. I drew the staff from left to right, drawing a line of fire in the air - and after a heartbeat, that line expanded, burning up like a fire running up a curtain, down like rain sluicing down a car window, and left behind it a gateway, an opening from the Raith Deeps to the Nevernever.
The gate opened on a cold and frozen woodland scene. Silvery moonlight slipped through, and a freezing wind gusted, blowing powdery white snow into the cavern - substance of the spirit world, which transformed into clear, if chilly, gelatin, the ectoplasm left behind when spirit matter reverted to its natural state.
There was a stir of shadows, and then my brother burst through the opening, saber in one hand, sawed-off shotgun in the other. Thomas was dressed in heavy biker leather and body armor, with honest-to-God chain mail covering the biker's jacket. His hair was tied back in a tail, and his eyes were blazing with excitement. "Harry!"
"Take your time," I barked back at him. "We're not in a crisis or anything!"
"The others are right beh - Look out !"

White Night Chapter 39, Page 406


Murphy screamed, "Harry, Thomas, Ramirez, down!"
I dropped and dragged Carlos down with me, lowering my shield as I went. Thomas hit the ground a fraction of a second after I did.
And the world came apart in thunder. Sound hammered at my head and ears, and I found myself screaming in pain and shock, before I ground my teeth and shot a quick glance behind me, trying not to lift my head any higher than I had to.
Murphy knelt on the ground by my feet in her dark fatigues, body armor, black baseball cap, and amber safety glasses. She had a weird little rectangular gun about the size of a big box of chocolates held to one shoulder. It had a tiny little barrel, one of those little red dot optical sights, and Murphy's cheek was laid on it, one eye aligned with the sight as she poured automatic fire into the oncoming ghouls in neat, chattering bursts that ripped the ghoul that had been pounding on my shield into a spray of broken bits. It went over backward, thrashing one arm and howling in agony.
Beside Murphy, playing Clifford the Big Red Dog to her Emily Elizabeth, was Hendricks. The huge redheaded enforcer was also kneeling and firing, but the gun he held to his shoulder was approximately the size of an intercontinental ballistic missile and spat out a stream of tracer rounds that ripped into the attacking creatures with a vengeance. Several men I recognized from Marcone's organization were lined up next to him, all firing. So were several more men I didn't recognize, but whose clothing and equipment were sufficiently different to make me think they were freelancers, hired for the job. A few more were still pouring through the open gate and into the cavern.
The ghouls were hardy as hell, but there is a difference between shrugging off a few rounds from a sidearm and wading through the disciplined hail of assault-weapon fire that Marcone's people laid down on them. Had it been one man firing at one ghoul, it might have been different - but it wasn't. There were at least twenty of them shooting into a packed mass, and they kept shooting, even after the targets were thrashing on the ground, until their guns were empty. Then they reloaded, and returned to firing. Marcone had given his men the instructions I'd advised - and I imagined the guns he had hired on must have been used to facing supernatural threats of this sort as well. Marcone was nothing if not resourceful.
Murphy stopped shooting and screamed something at me, but it wasn't until Marcone stepped forward into the peripheral vision of the armed gunmen and held up a hand with a closed fist that they stopped firing.
For a second, nothing but a high, heavy tone buzzed in my ears, making me deaf to the other sounds in the cavern. The air was full of the sewer stench of wounded ghoul and the sharp scent of burning cordite. A swath of stone floor ten yards across and thirty deep had just been carpeted in pureed ghoul.
The fight was still going on all around us, but the main force of ghouls was concentrating on the hard-pressed vampires. We'd bought ourselves a temporary quiet spot, but it couldn't last.
"Harry!" Murphy screamed over the merely horrific cacophony of the slaughter.
I gave her a thumbs-up. I pushed myself to my feet. Someone gave me a hand up and I took it gratefully - until I saw that it was Marcone, dressed in his black fatigues, holding a shotgun in his other hand. I jerked my fingers away as if he were more disgusting than the things fighting and dying all around us.
His cold green eyes wrinkled at the corners. "Dresden. If it's all right with you, I think it would be prudent to retreat back through the gate."

White Night Chapter 39,Page 411-412


"One wonders," Murphy said, "why Marcone agreed to help."
I settled back on the couch and rubbed at the back of my neck Tilth one hand, closing my eyes. "I bribed him."
"With what?" Murphy asked.
"A seat at the table," I said quietly.
"Huh?"
"I offered Marcone a chance to sign on to the Unseelie Accords as a freeholding lord."
Murphy was quiet for a moment, and then she said, "He wants to keep expanding his power." She thought about it a minute more and said, "Or he thinks his power might be threatened from someone on that end."
"Someone like the vampires," I said. "The Red Court had defacto control of prostitution in Chicago until Bianca's place burned down. And an agent of the White Court has just shown up and killed one of his prostitutes."
"Are we sure it was Madrigal?"
"I am," I said. "No way to prove it, but he was the Raith involved in this mess."
"That was more or less an accident," Murphy said. "Taking out one of Marcone's people, I mean."
"She's just as dead," I replied. "And Marcone won't stand by when someone - anyone - kills one of his own."
"How does becoming a... what was it? And how does it help?"
"Freeholding lord," I said. "It means he's entitled to rights under the Accords - like rights of challenge when someone kills his employees. It means that if a supernatural power tries to move in on him, he'll have an opportunity to fight it and actually win."
"Are there many of these lords?"
"Nope," I said. "I had Bob look into it. Maybe twenty on the whole planet. Two dragons, Drakul - the original, not baby Vlad - the Archive, the CEO of Monoc Securities, some kind of semi-immortal shapeshifter guru in the Ukraine, people like that. The Accords let them sign on as individuals. They have the same rights and obligations. Most people who consider the idea aren't willing to agree to be a good, traditional host for, let's say, a group of Black Court vampires, and don't want to get caught up as a mediator in a dispute between the major powers. They don't want to make themselves the targets of possible challenges, either, so not many of them even try it." I rubbed at my jaw. "And no one who is just a vanilla human being has tried it. Marcone is breaking new ground."
Murphy shook her head. "And you were able to set him up for it?"
"You have to have three current members of the Accords vouch for you to sign on," I said. "I told him I'd be one of them."
"You can speak for the Council in this?"
"When it comes to defending and protecting my area of responsibility as a Warden, I damned well can. If the Council doesn't like it, they shouldn't have dragooned me into the job."
Murphy chewed on some Cheerios, scrunched up her nose in thought, and then gave me a shrewd look. "You're using Marcone."
I nodded. "It's only a matter of time before someone like Lara Raith tries to push for more power in Chicago. Sooner or later they'll swamp me in numbers, and we both know SI will always have their hands tied by red tape and politics. If Marcone signs the Accords, he'll have a strong motivation to oppose any incursion - and the means to do so."
"But he's going to use his new means to secure his position here even more firmly," Murphy said quietly. "Make new allies, probably. Gain new resources."
"Yeah. He's using me, too." I shook my head. "It isn't a perfect solution."
"No," Murphy said. "It isn't"
"But he's the devil we know."
Neither of us said anything for several minutes.
"Yes," Murphy admitted. "He is."

White Night Chapter 43, page 468-470