Storm Front df-1

by Jim Butcher

  I couldn't let Linda just come to the door and have Susan answer it. That would be the cattiest thing you've ever seen, and I would be the one to get all the scratches and bites, too.

  I rounded the corner from my bedroom into the main room and saw Susan reaching for the doorknob. Lightning flashed again, and thunder kept me from hearing the knob's click-clack. I heard something else, though, a snarling, spitting sound, and saw Mister, on his feet now, his back arched up and all his fur fluffed out, teeth bared, his no-longer-sleepy eyes fastened on the door.

  The thunder passed as Susan swung the door open. I could see her face in profile. One hand was on her hip, and there was an amused, dangerous little smile on her pretty mouth.

  As the door opened, I felt it, the cloud of energies that accompanies a spirit-being when it comes into the mortal world, disguised until now by the background clutter of the storm. A figure stood in the doorway, rather squat, less than five feet tall, dressed in a plain brown trench coat, illuminated by blue lightning overhead. There was something wrong to the shape, something that just wasn't a part of good old Mother Earth. It's «head» turned to look at me, and sudden twin points of fire, as blue as the lightning dancing above, flared up, illuminating the leathery, inhuman curves of a face that most closely resembled that of a large and warty toad.

  Susan got a good look at the demon's eyes and face from two feet away and screamed.

  "Susan!" I shouted, already moving toward the couch. "Get out of the way!" I threw myself to the floor behind the couch, landed with a whumph of hard floor hitting my ribs.

  The demon's jaws parted in a silent hiss, and its throat constricted weirdly as I vanished behind the couch. There was a hissing sound, and a heart-sized section of the couch just dissolved in a cloud of mist and foul stench. Droplets of liquid spattered through, onto the floor near me, and where they touched little holes corroded outward in the space of two seconds. I rolled away from the couch and the demon's acid.

  "Susan!" I shouted. "Get back toward the kitchen! Don't get between it and me!"

  "What is it?" she screamed back at me.

  "A bad guy." I poked my head up and peered through the smoking hole in the couch, ready to duck back down at a moment's notice. The demon, squat and bulkier than a human, was standing in the doorway, both long-fingered, pad-tipped hands leaning forward toward the inside of the house. It paused as though resting against a light screen.

  "Why isn't it coming in?" Susan asked from the far corner, near the door. Her back was pressed to the wall, and her eyes were wide and terrified. My God, I thought, just don't pass out on me, Susan.

  "Homestead laws," I said. "It isn't a mortal creature. It has to gather its energy to push through the barrier around a home."

  "Can it get in?" she said. Her voice was thin, reedy. She was asking questions, gathering information, data, falling back on her ingrained career instincts—because, I suspected, her rational brain had short-circuited. That happens to people who get a good hard look at a demon for the first time.

  I hurried over to her and grabbed her arm, dragging her back toward the door leading down to my lab. "Get down there," I shouted, jerking the door up and revealing the folding ladder-staircase.

  "It's dark!" Susan protested. "Oh, God." She blinked down at my waist. "Harry? Why are you naked?"

  I looked down. And blushed. The towel must have fallen off while I was dancing around. Looking down made the shampoo suds still in my hair runnel down into my eyes, making them sting and burn. Could this evening get any worse?

  There was a tearing sound from the doorway, and the toad-demon sort of surged forward a stumbling step. It was now in my house. Lightning still danced in the sky behind it, and I could only see it in ugly, hunchbacked outline, except for the electric light of its wide, round, googly eyes as it came toward me. Its throat was working in little, undulating motions.

  "Crap," I said. I'm quite eloquent in times of crisis. I shoved Susan toward the stairs, and turned toward the demon, tips of my thumbs touching, fingers spread, palms out toward it.

  The demon's mouth opened again, and it made a slick, spittooning sound.

  "Vento Riflittum," I shouted, willing my fear and anxiety into a tangible shape, throwing it down from my pounding heart through my shoulders and arms, directed at the foe. The globule of demonacid sped toward my face.

  My terror and adrenaline roared out of my fingertips in the form of wind, gathering up speed enough to tear the hair from a man's head. It caught the blob of acid and flung it back at the demon in a fine spray, stopped the thing dead in its tracks, and even drove it back several feet, its claw-tipped feet sliding on my smooth floor, catching on the rugs.

  The acid sizzled and spat little electric blue sparks on its skin, but it didn't seem to harm the demon. It did, however, dissolve the trench coat to shreds in less time than it takes to draw a breath and wreaked havoc on my rugs and furniture.

  The demon shook its head, gathering its wits. I turned to the far corner, near the door, and extended my hand, trumpeting, "Vento servitas!" The pale, smooth wood of my wizard's staff all but glowed in the darkness as it flew toward me, driven by a gentler, finer blast of the same wind. I caught it in my hand and spun it toward the demon, calling on the lines of power and force deep within the long, unbroken grains of wood in the staff. I extended the staff toward it, horizontally like a bar, and shouted, "Out! Out! Out! You are not welcome here!" A touch dramatic in any other circumstance, maybe—but when you've got a demon in your living room, nothing seems too extreme.

  The toad-demon hunched its shoulders, planted its broad feet, and grunted as a wave of unseen force swept out from my staff like a broom whisking along the floor. I could feel the demon resist me, pressing against the strength of the staff, as though I were leaning the wood against a vertical steel bar and attempting to snap it across that length.

  We strained silently for several seconds until I realized that this thing was just too strong for me. I wasn't going to be able to brush it off like a minor imp or a niggling poltergeist. It wouldn't take me long to exhaust myself, and once the demon could move again it was either going to dissolve me with its acid or else just waddle up to me and rip me into pieces. It would be stronger than a mortal, a hell of a lot faster, and it was not going to stop until I was dead or the sun had come up or one of any of a number of other unlikely conditions were met.

  "Susan!" I shouted, my chest heaving. "Are you down there?"

  "Yes," she said. "Is it gone?"

  "Not exactly, no." I felt my palms get sweaty, the smooth wood of the staff begin to slip. The burning of the soap suds in my eyes increased, and the lights of the demon's eyes brightened.

  "Why don't you set it on fire? Shoot it! Blow it up!" Her voice had a searching quality to it, as though she were looking around, down there in the lab.

  "I can't," I said to her. "I can't pump enough juice into it to hurt the thing without blowing us up along with it. You've got to get out of there." My mind was racing along, calculating possibilities, numbers, my reserves of energy, cold and rational. The thing was here for me. If I drew it off to one side, into my bedroom and bathroom, Susan might be able to escape. On the other hand, it might be under orders to kill me and any witnesses, in which case after it had finished me it would simply go after her as well. There had to be another way to get her out of here. And then I remembered it.

  "Susan!" I shouted. "There's a sports bottle on my table down there. Drink what's in it, and think about being away from here. Okay? Think about being far away."

  "I found it," she called up a second later. "It smells bad."

  "Dammit, it's a potion. It'll get you out of here. Drink it!"

  There was a gagging noise, and then a moment later she said, "Now what?"

  I blinked and looked at the stairs going down. "It should have work—" I broke off as the toad thing leaned forward, reached out a clawed foot, and in that stride gained three feet of ground toward me. I was able to stop it
again, barely, but I knew that it was going to be coming for my throat in a few more seconds.

  "Nothing happened," she said. "Dammit, Harry, we have to do something." And then she came pounding up the ladder, dark eyes flashing, my.38 revolver in her hand.

  "No!" I told her. "Don't!" I felt the staff slip more. The demon was getting ready to come through all my defenses.

  Susan raised the gun, face pale, her hands shaking, and started shooting. A.38 Chief's Special carries six rounds, and I use a medium-speed load, rather than armor-piercing or explosive bullets or anything fancy like that. Fewer chances that something will go wrong in the presence of a lot of magic.

  A gun is a pretty simple machine. A revolver approaches very simple. Wheels, gears, and a simple lever impact to ignite the powder. It's tough for magic to argue with physics, most of the time.

  The revolver roared six times.

  The first two shots must have gone wide and hit somewhere else. The next two struck the demon's hide and made deep dents in it before springing off and rebounding wildly around the room, as I had feared they would, more of a threat to us than to it. Fortunately, neither of us was injured or killed by the ricochets. The fifth shot went between its long, oddly shaped legs and past it.

  The sixth hit the thing square between its lightning-lantern eyes, knocked it off-balance, and sent it tumbling over with a toady hiss of frustration.

  I gasped and grabbed at Susan's wrist. "Basement," I wheezed, as she dropped the gun. We both scrambled down the ladder. I didn't bother to shut it behind me. The thing could just tear its way through the floor, if it needed to. This way, I would at least know where it would come down, rather than have it tunnel through the floor and come out on top of my head.

  At my will, the tip of the staff I still held burst into light, illuminating the room.

  "Harry?" Bob's voice came from the shelf. The skull's eyelights came on, and he swiveled around to face me. "What the hell is going on? Woo woo, who is the babe?"

  Susan jumped. "What is that?"

  "Ignore him," I said, and followed my own advice. I went to the far end of my lab table and started kicking boxes, bags, notebooks, and old paperbacks off the floor. "Help me clear this floor space. Hurry!"

  She did, and I cursed the lack of cleaning skills that had left this end of the lab such a mess. I was struggling to get to the circle I had laid in the floor, a perfect ring of copper, an unbroken loop in the concrete that could be empowered to hold a demon in—or out.

  "Harry!" Bob gulped as we worked. "There's, a, um. A seriously badass toad-demon coming down the ladder."

  "I know that, Bob." I heaved a bunch of empty cardboard boxes aside as Susan frantically tossed some papers away, exposing the entirety of the copper ring, about three feet across. I took her hand and stepped into the circle, drawing her close to me.

  "What's happening?" Susan asked, her expression bewildered and terrified.

  "Just stay close," I told her. She clung tightly to me.

  "It sees you, Harry," Bob reported. "It's going to spit something at you, I think."

  I didn't have time to see if Bob was right. I leaned down, touched the circle with the tip of my staff, and willed power into it, to shut the creature out. The circle sprang up around us, a silent and invisible tension in the air.

  Something splattered and hissed against the air a few inches from my face. I looked up to see dark, sputtering acid slithering off the invisible shield the circle's power provided us. Half a second earlier and it would have eaten my face off. Cheery thought.

  I tried to catch my breath, stand straight, and not let any part of me extend outside the circle, which would break its circuit and negate its power. My arms were shaking and my legs felt weak. Susan, too, was visibly trembling.

  The demon stalked over to us. I could see it clearly in the light of my staff, and I wished that I couldn't. It was horribly ugly, misshapen, foul, heavily muscled, and I compared it to a toad only because I knew of nothing else that even remotely approached a description of it. It glared at us and drove a fist at the circle's shield. It rebounded in a shower of blue sparks, and the thing hissed, a horrible and windy sound.

  Outside, the storm continued to rumble and growl, muffled by the thick walls of the subbasement.

  Susan was holding close to me, and almost crying. "Why isn't it killing us? Why isn't it getting us?"

  "It can't," I said, gently. "It can't get through, and it can't do anything to break the circle. So long as neither of us crosses that line, we'll be safe."

  "Oh, God," Susan said. "How long do we have to stand here?"

  "Dawn," I said. "Until dawn. When the sun rises, it has to go."

  "There's no sun down here," she said.

  "Doesn't work that way. It's got a sort of power cord stretching back to whoever summoned it. A fuel line. As soon as the sun comes up, that line gets cut, and he goes away, like a balloon with no air."

  "When does the sun come up?" she asked.

  "Oh, well. About ten more hours."

  "Oh," she said. She laid her head against my bare chest and closed her eyes.

  The toad-demon paced in a slow circuit around the circle, searching for a weakness in the shield. It would find none. I closed my eyes and tried to think.

  "Uh, Harry," Bob began.

  "Not now, Bob."

  "But Harry—" Bob tried again.

  "Dammit, Bob. I'm trying to think. If you want to be really useful, you could try to figure out why that escape potion you were so confident of didn't work for Susan."

  "Harry," Bob protested, "that's what I'm trying to tell you."

  Susan murmured, against my chest, "Is it getting warm in here? Or is it just me?"

  A terrible suspicion struck me. I looked down at Susan and got a sinking feeling. Surely not. No. It couldn't be.

  She looked up at me, her dark eyes smoky. "We're going to die, aren't we Harry? Have you ever thought you'd want to die making love?"

  She kissed my chest, almost absently.

  It felt nice. Really, really nice. I tried not to notice all the bare, lovely back that was naked underneath my hand.

  "I've thought that, many times," she said, against my skin.

  "Bob," I began, my voice getting furious.

  "I tried to tell you," Bob wailed. "I did! She grabbed the wrong potion and just chugged it down." Bob's skull turned toward me a bit, and the lights brightened. "You've got to admit, though. The love potion works great."

  Susan was kissing my chest and rubbing her body up against me in a fashion that was unladylike and extremely pleasant and distracting. "Bob, I swear, I am going to lock you in a wall safe for the next two hundred years."

  "It's not my fault!" Bob protested.

  The demon watched what was happening in the circle with froggy eyes and kicked a section of floor clear enough of debris for it to squat down on its haunches and stare, restless and ready as a cat waiting for a mouse to stick its head out of its hole. Susan stared up at me with sultry eyes and tried to wrench me to the floor, and consequently out of the circle's protective power. Bob continued to wail his innocence.

  Who says I don't know how to show a lady a good time?

  Chapter Fourteen

  Susan tugged at my neck and jerked my head down to hers for a kiss. As kisses went, well. It was, um, extremely interesting. Perfectly passionate, abandoned, not a trace of self-consciousness or hesitation to it. Or at any rate not from her. I came up for air a minute later, my lips itching with the intensity of it, and she stared up at me with burning eyes. "Take me, Harry. I need you."

  "Uh, Susan. That's not really a good idea right now," I said. The potion had taken hold of her hard. No wonder she had recovered from her terror enough to come back up the stairs and fire my gun at the demon. It had lowered her inhibitions to a sufficient degree that it must also have dulled her fears.

  Susan's fingers wandered, and her eyes sparkled. "Your mouth says no," she purred, "but this says yes."


  I went up on my toes, and swallowed, trying to keep my balance and get her hand off me at the same time. "That thing is always saying something stupid," I told her. She was beyond reason. The potion had kicked her libido into suicidal overdrive. "Bob, help me out here!"

  "I'm stuck in the skull," Bob said. "If you don't let me out, I can't do much of anything, Harry."

  Susan stood up on tiptoe to gnaw at my ear, wrapped her shapely thigh around one of mine, and started whimpering and pulling me toward the floor. My balance wavered. A three-foot circle was not enough to perform wrestling or gymnastics or … anything else in, without leaving something sticking out for the waiting demon to chew on.

  "Is the other potion still there?" I asked.

  "Sure," Bob said. "I can see it where it fell on the floor. Could throw it to you, too."

  "Okay," I said, growing excited—well. More excited. I might yet get out of this basement alive. "I'm going to let you out for five minutes. I want you to help me by throwing me the potion."

  "No, boss," Bob said, his voice maddeningly cheerful.

  "No? No?!"

  "I get a twenty-four-hour leave, or nothing."

  "Dammit, Bob! I'm responsible for what you do if I let you out! You know that!"

  Susan whispered, into my ear, "I'm not wearing any underwear," and tried something approximating a pro-wrestling takedown to drop me to the floor. I wavered in balance and barely managed to stave her off. The demon's frog-eyes narrowed, and it came to its feet, ready to leap on us.

  "Bob!" I yelled. "You slimy jerk!"

  "You try living in a bony old skull for a few hundred years, Harry! You'd want to get a night off once in a while, too!"

  "Fine!" I shouted, my heart leaping into my throat as my balance wavered again. "Fine! Just make sure you get me the potion! You have twenty-four hours."

  "Just make sure you catch it," Bob replied. And then a flood of orangish light flowed out of both of the skull's eye sockets and into the room. The lights swooped down in an elongated cloud over the potion bottle that lay on the floor at the far side of the lab, gathered it up, and hurled it through the air toward me. I reached up with my spare hand and caught it, bobbled it for a minute, and then secured it again.