find FBI

"Okayyyyy," I said with forced cheer, clapping my hands. "Way, way too personal. Um. The job. I have a job for you."
Toot-toot leapt up to his feet. His stomach was already constricting back toward its normal size. "Yes, my liege!"
Where the hell did he put it all? I mean . . . it just wasn't possible for him to eat that much pizza and then . . . I shook my head. Now wasn't the time.
I produced my picture of Susan. "This human is somewhere in Chicago. I need your folk to find her. She's probably accompanied by a human man with blond hair, about the same size she is."
Toot took to his wings again and zoomed down to the picture. He picked it up and held it out at arm's length, studying it, and nodded once. "May I have this, my lord, to show the others?"
"Yeah," I said. "Be careful with it, though. I want it back."
"Yes, my liege!" Toot said. He brandished his sword with a flourish, sheathed it, and zipped straight up into the October sky.
Sanya stood looking steadily at me.
I coughed. I waited.
"So," he said. "Mab."
I grunted vaguely in reply.
"You hit that," Sanya said.
I did not look at him. My face felt red.
"You" - he scrunched up his nose, digging in his memory - "tapped that ass. Presumably, it was phat."
"Sanya!"
He let out a low, rolling laugh and shook his head. "I saw her once. Mab. Beautiful beyond words."
"Yeah," I said.
"And dangerous."
"Yes," I said, with emphasis.
"And you are now her champion," he said.
"Everybody's gotta be something, right?"
He nodded. "Joking about it. Good. You will need that sense of humor."
"Why do you say that?"
"Because she is cold, Dresden. She knows wicked secrets Time himself has forgotten. And if she chose you to be her Knight, she has a plan for you." He nodded slowly. "Laugh whenever you can. Keeps you from killing yourself when things are bad. That and vodka."
"That some kind of Russian saying?" I asked.
"Have you seen traditional folk dances?" Sanya asked. "Imagine them being done by someone with a bottle of vodka in them. Laughter abounds, and you survive another day." He shrugged. "Or break your neck. Either way, it is pain management."
His voice sounded almost merry, though the subject matter was grim as hell. If not more so.
I had expected him to try to talk me out of it. Or at least to berate me for being an idiot. He didn't do either. There was a calm acceptance of terrible things that was part and parcel of Sanya's personality. No matter how bad things got, I didn't think anything would ever truly faze him. He simply accepted the bad things that happened and soldiered on as best he could.
There was probably a lesson for me in there, somewhere.
I was quiet for a while before I decided to trust him. "I get to save my girl first," I said. "That was the deal."
"Ah," he said. He seemed to mull it over and nodded. "That is reasonable."
"You really think that?"
He lifted both eyebrows. "The child is your blood, is she not?"
I nodded and said quietly, "She is."
He spread his hands, as if it were a self-evident fact that needed no further exploration. "As horrible fates go, that is a good one," he said. "Worthwhile. Save your little girl." He clapped me on the shoulder. "If you turn into a hideous monster and I am sent to slay you, I will remember this and make it as painless as I can, out of respect for you."
I knew he was joking. I just couldn't tell which part of it he was joking about. "Uh," I said. "Thanks."
"It is nothing," he said. We stood around quietly for another five minutes before he frowned, looking at the other pizza boxes, and asked, "Is there some purpose for the rest of th - "
A scene out of The Birds descended upon the alley. There was a rush of wing-beaten wind, and hundreds of tiny figures flashed down onto the pizza. Here and there I would spot one of the Pizza Lord's Guard, recognizable thanks to the orange plastic cases of the box knives they had strapped to their backs. The others went by in twinkles and flashes of color, muted by the daylight but beautiful all the same. There were a lot of the Little Folk involved. If I'd been doing this at night, it might have induced a seizure or something.
The Little Folk love pizza. They love it with a passion so intense that it beggars the imagination. Watching a pizza being devoured was sort of like watching a plane coming apart in midair on those old WWII gun camera reels. Bits would fleck off here and there, and then suddenly in a rush, bits would go flying everywhere, each borne away by the individual fairy who had seized it.
It was over in less than three minutes.
Seriously. Where do they put it?
Toot came to hover before me and popped a little fistful of pizza into his mouth. He gulped it down and saluted.
"Well, Major General?" I asked.
"Found her, my liege," Toot reported. "She is a captive and in danger."
Sanya and I traded a look.
"Where?" I asked him.
Toot firmly held up the picture, still in one piece, and two strands of dark hair, each curled into its own coil of rope in his tiny hands. "Two hairs from her head, my liege. Or if it is your pleasure, I will guide you there."
Sanya drew his head back a little, impressed. "They found her? That quickly?"
"People underestimate the hell out of the Little Folk," I said calmly. "Within their limits, they're as good as or better than anything else I know for getting information - and there are a lot of them around Chicago who are willing to help me out occasionally."
"Hail the Pizza Lord!" Toot-toot shrilled.
"Hail the Pizza Lord!" answered a score of piping voices that came from no apparent source. The Little Folk can be all but invisible when they want to be.
"Major General Minimus, keep this up and I'm making you a full general," I said.
Toot froze. "Why? Is that bad? What did I do?"
"It's good, Toot. That's higher than a major general."
His eyes widened. "There's higher?"
"Oh, yeah, definitely. And you're on the fast track for the very top." I took the hairs from him and said, "We'll get the car. Lead us to her, Toot."
"Yes, sir!"
"Good," Sanya said, grinning. "Now we know where to go and have someone to rescue. This part I know how to do."

Changes Chapter 33, Page 328-333


"Admittedly," Sanya said a few minutes later, "normally I do not storm headquarters buildings of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And in broad daylight, too."
We were parked down the block from the FBI's Chicago office, where Toot had guided us, crouched on the dashboard and demanding to know why Sanya hadn't rented one of the cars that could fly instead of the poky old landbound minivan he had instead. Toot hadn't taken the answer that "cars like that are imaginary" seriously, either. He had muttered a few things in Russian that only made Sanya's smile wider.
"Damn," I said, staring at the building. "Toot? Was Martin with her?"
"The yellow-hair?" Toot sat on the dashboard facing us, waving his feet. "No, my liege."
I grunted. "I don't like that, either. Why wouldn't they have been taken together? Which floor is she on, Toot?"
"There," Toot said, pointing. I leaned over and hunkered down behind him so that I could look down the length of his little arm to the window he was pointing at.
"Fourth," I said. "That was where Tilly was talking to me."

Changes Chapter 34, Page 334-335