by Butcher, Jim
I turned to her and shouted, “Ladder! Where’s the ladder? I need to use the ladder!”
“No!” she shouted back. “You need to use the ladder!”
Good grief.
“Okay!” I shouted back, and gave her a thumbs-up.
She hustled back to the little storage shed in the backyard. She picked a key and unlocked it. I swung the door open and seized the metal extending ladder I used to put up and take down Christmas lights every year. I ditched my crutch and used the ladder itself to take some of the weight. I went as fast as I could, but it seemed to take forever to position the ladder under the Willoughbys’ bedroom windows.
Mrs. Spunkelcrief handed me a loose brick from a little flower planter’s wall and said, “Here. I can’t climb this thing. My hip.”
I took the brick and dropped it in my duster pocket. Then I started humping myself up the ladder, taking a grip with both hands, then hopping up with a painful little jump. Repeat, each time growing more painful, more difficult. I clenched my teeth over the screams.
And then there was a window in front of me.
I got the brick out of my pocket, hauled off, and shattered the window.
Black smoke bellowed out, catching me on the inhale. I started coughing viciously, my voice strangled as I tried to shout, “Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby! Fire! You’ve got to get out! Fire! Come to the window and down the ladder!”
I heard two people coughing and choking. They were trying to say, “Help!”
Something, maybe the little propane tank on Mrs. Spunkelcrief’s grill, exploded with a noise like a dinosaur-sized watermelon hitting the ground. The concussion knocked Mrs. S down—and kicked the bottom of the ladder out from under me.
I fell. It was a horrible, helpless feeling, my body twisting uselessly as I tried to land well—but I’d had no warning at all, and it was a futile attempt. The small of my back hit the brick planter, and I achieved a new personal best for pain.
“Oh, God in Heaven,” Mrs. Spunkelcrief said. She knelt beside me. “Harry?”
Somewhere, sirens had begun to wail. They wouldn’t get there in time for the Willoughbys.
“Trapped,” I choked out, as soon as I was able to breathe again. “They’re up there, calling for help.”
The fire roared louder and grew brighter.
Mrs. S stared up at the window. She grabbed the ladder and wrestled it all the way back up into position, though the effort left her panting. Then she tried to put a foot up on the first step. She grasped the ladder, began to shift her weight—and groaned as her leg buckled and she fell to the ground.
She screamed, agony in her quavering voice. “Oh, God in Heaven, help us!”
A young black man in a dark, knee-length coat hurdled the hedges at the back of the yard and bounded onto the ladder. He was built like a professional lineman, moved more quickly than a linebacker, and started up the ladder like it was a broad staircase. The planet’s only Knight of the Cross flashed me a quick grin on the way up. “Dresden!”
“Sanya!” I howled. “Two! There’re two of them in the bedroom!”
“Da, two!” he replied, his deep voice booming. The curving saber blade of Esperacchius rode at his hip and he managed it with thoughtless, instinctive skill as he went through the window. He was back a moment later, with Mrs. Willoughby draped over one shoulder, while he supported most of Mr. Willoughby’s staggering body with the other.
Sanya went first, the old woman hanging limply over his shoulder, so that he could help Mr. Willoughby creep out the window and onto the ladder. They came down slowly and carefully, and as Sanya carefully laid the old woman out onto the grass, the first of the emergency response crews arrived.
“God in Heaven,” Mr. S said, weeping openly as she put her hand on Sanya’s arm. “He must have sent you to us, son.”
Sanya smiled at her as he helped Mr. Willoughby lower himself to the ground. Then he turned to my landlady and said, his Russian accent less heavy than the last time I had seen him, “It was probably just a coincidence, ma’am.”
“I don’t believe in those,” said Mrs. Spunkelcrief. “Bless you, son,” she said, and hugged him hard. Her arms couldn’t have gotten around half of him, but Sanya returned the hug gently for a moment.
“Ma’am,” he said, “you should direct the medical technicians to come back here.”
“Thank you, thank you,” she said, releasing him. “But now I have to go get those ambulance boys over here.” She paused and gave me a smile. “And thank you, Harry. Such a good boy.” Then she hurried away.
Mouse came racing around the side of the house where Mrs. S had just gone, and rushed to stand over me, lapping at my face. Molly wasn’t far behind. She let out a little cry and threw her arms around my shoulders. “Oh, God, Harry!” She shouldered Mouse aside and squeezed tight for several seconds. She looked up and said, “Sanya? What are you doing here?”
“Hey, hey,” I said. “Take it easy.”
Molly eased up on her hug. “Sorry.”
“Sanya,” I said, nodding to him. “Thanks for your help.”
“Part of the job, da?” he replied, grinning. “Glad to help.”
“All the same,” I said, my voice rough, “thank you. If anything had happened to them . . .”
“Oh, Harry,” Molly said. She hugged me again.
“Easy, padawan, easy,” I said quietly. “Think you should be careful.”
She drew back with a frown. “Why?”
I took a slow breath and said, very quietly, “I can’t feel my legs.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
It didn’t take me long to talk Sanya and Molly out of taking me to the hospital. The Eebs, as it turned out, had shown up, pitched their firebomb from a moving car, and kept going, a modus operandi that was consistent with the earlier attempt on my life, except this time they’d been identified. Molly’s description of the thrower was a dead ringer for Esteban.
I had to admit, the vampire couple had a very practical long- term approach to violence—striking at weakness and harassing the victim while exposing themselves to minimal risk. If I’d been a couple of steps higher up when that Molotov hit, I’d be dead, or covered in third-degree burns. Individually, their attempts might not enjoy a high success rate—but they needed to get it right only once.
It would be consistent with that practical, cold- blooded style to keep an eye on the hospitals in order to come finish me off—during surgery, for example, or while I was still in recovery afterward. Sanya, though, had EMT training of some kind. He calmly stole a backboard out of an open ambulance while its techs were seeing to the Willoughbys, and they loaded me onto it in a procedure that Sanya said would protect my spine. It seemed kind of “too little, too late” to me, but I was too tired to rib him over it.
I couldn’t feel anything below the waist, but that apparently didn’t mean that the rest of me got to stop hurting. I felt them carrying the board out, and when I opened my eyes it was only to see nearly a third of the building give way and crash down into the basement—into my apartment. The building was obviously a lost cause. The firemen were focusing on containing the blaze and preventing it from spreading to the nearby homes.
They loaded the backboard into the rental minivan Sanya had, by happy coincidence, been given at the airport when he arrived, at no additional fee, in order to substitute for the subcompact he’d reserved but couldn’t have. As it drove away during the confusion and before the cops could lock everything down, I got to watch my home burn down through the back window of the van.
Even after we were several blocks away, I could see the smoke rising up in a black column. I wondered how much of that smoke was made of my books. My secondhand guitar. My clothes. My comfy old furniture. My bed. My blankets. My Mickey Mouse alarm clock. The equipment in my lab that I’d worked so hard to attain or create—the efforts of years of patient effort, endless hours of concentration and spellcraft.
Gone.
Fire is as destructive
spiritually as it is materially, a purifying force that can devour and scatter magical energy. In a fire that large everything I’d ever built, including purely magical constructs, would be destroyed.
Dammit.
Dammit, but I hated vampires.
I’d had one hell of a day, all in all, but practically the only thing I had left to me was my pride. I didn’t want anyone to see me crying. So I just kept quiet in the back of the van, while Mouse lay very close to me.
At some point, sorrow became sleep.
I woke up in the utility room at St. Mary of the Angels, where Father Forthill kept several spare folding cots and the bedding to go with them. I’d visited several times in the past. St. Mary’s was a surprisingly stout bastion against supernatural villains of nearly any stripe. The ground beneath it was consecrated, as was every wall, door, floor, and window, blessed by prayers and stately rituals, Masses, and communions over and over through the decades, until that gentle, positive energy had permeated the ground and the very stone from which the church was built.
I felt safer, but only a little. Vampires might not be able to set foot on the holy ground, but they knew that, and someone like the Eebs would certainly take that into account. Hired human killers could be just as dangerous as vampires, if not more so, and the protective aura around the building couldn’t make them blink an eye.
And, I supposed, they could always just set it on fire and burn it down around me if they really, really wanted to get me. I tried to imagine myself a century from now, still dodging vampires and getting my home burned to the ground on an irregular basis.
No way in hell was I gonna accept that. I’d have to deal with the Eeb problem.
And then I remembered my legs. I reached a hand down to touch my thigh.
I felt nothing. Absolutely nothing. It felt like touching the limb of someone else entirely. I tried to move my legs and nothing happened. Maybe I’d been too ambitious. I pulled at my blanket until I could see my toes. I tried wiggling them. I failed.
I could feel the backboard beneath me, and the band around my head that kept me from moving it to look around. I gave up on my legs with a sharp surge of frustration and lifted my eyes to the ceiling.
There was a piece of paper taped to it, directly over my head. Molly’s handwriting in black marker was scrawled in large letters across it: Harry. Don’t try to get up, or move your neck or back. We’re checking in on you several times an hour. Someone will be there soon.
Chapter Thirty
The third repetition of her name hung ringing in the air, and deafening silence came after as I awaited the response.
When you trap something dangerous, there are certain fundamental precautions necessary to success. You’ve got to have good bait, something to draw your target in. You’ve got to have a good trap, something that works and works fast. And, once the target is in the trap, you’ve got to have a net or a cage strong enough to hold it.
Get any of those three elements wrong, and you probably won’t succeed. Get two of them wrong, and you might be looking at a result far more disastrous than mere failure.
I went into this one knowing damned well that all I had was bait. Mab, for her own reasons, had wanted to suborn me into her service for years. I knew that calling her by her name and title would be enough to attract her interest. Though the mechanism of my improved summoning circle would have been a fine trap—if it still existed, I mean—the cage of my will had always been the weakest point in any such endeavor.
Bottom line, I could get the tiger to show up. Once it was there, all I had was a really good chalk drawing of a pit on the sidewalk and “Nice kitty.”
I wasn’t going into it blind and ignorant, though. I was desperate, but not stupid. I figured I had the advantage of position. Mab couldn’t kill a mortal. She could only make him desperately wish he was dead, instead of enduring her attentions. I didn’t have a lot to lose. She couldn’t make me any more useless to my daughter than I was already.
I waited, in perfect darkness, for the mistress of every wicked fairy in every dark tale humanity had ever whispered in the night to put in an appearance.
Mab didn’t disappoint me.
Surprise me, yes. But she didn’t disappoint.
Stars began to appear in front of my eyes.
I figured that was probably a really bad thing, for a moment. But they didn’t spin around in lazy, dizzy motion like the kind of stars that mean your brain is smothering. They instead burned steady and cold and pure above me, five stars like jewels on the throat of Lady Night.
Seconds later, a cold wind touched my face, and I became conscious of a hard smoothness beneath me. I laid my hands carefully flat, but I didn’t feel the cot and the backboard under me. Instead, my fingers touched only cold, even stone, a planar surface that seemed level beneath my entire body. I wriggled my foot and confirmed that there was stone beneath it there, too.
I stopped and realized that I could feel my foot. I could move it.
My whole body was there. And it was naked. I wavered between yelping at the cold suddenly being visited upon my ass, and yelling in joy that I could feel it at all. I saw land to one side and scrambled to get off the cold slab beneath me, crouching down and hanging on to the edge of the slab for balance.
This wasn’t reality, then. This was a dream, or a vision, or something that was otherwise in between the mortal world and the spiritual realm. That made sense. My physical body was still back in St. Mary’s, lying still and breathing deeply, but my mind and my spirit were here.
Wherever “here” was.
My eyes adjusted to the darkness and I saw gentle mist and fog hanging in the air. Boiling clouds let a flash of moonlight in, and it played like a spotlight over the hilltop around me, and upon the ancient table of stone beside me. The moon’s touch made deeply carved runes all around the table’s edge dance with flickers of illumination, writing done in some language I did not know.
Then I understood. Mab had created this place for our meeting. It was known as the Valley of the Stone Table. It was a broad, bowl-shaped valley, I knew, though the mist hid most of it from me. In its exact center stood a mound maybe fifty feet across and twelve feet high at its center. Atop the mound stood the massive slab of stone, held up on four stumpy pillars. Other stones stood in a circle around it, some tumbled down, some broken, only one remaining in Stonehenge- like lintel. The stones all shed faint illumination in shades of blue and purple and deep, deep green. Cold colors.
Winter colors.
Yeah. It was after the equinox. So that tracked. The Table was in Winter’s domain. It was an ancient conduit of power, transferred in the most primitive, atavistic fashion of all—in hot blood. There were grooves and whorls in the table’s surface, coated with ancient stains, and it squatted on the hill, patient and hungry and immovable, like a snapping turtle waiting for warm, vital creatures to wander too close.
The blood spilled upon this table would carry the power of its life with it, and would flow into the well of power in the control of the Winter Queen.
A movement across the table from me drew my eye. A shadow seemed to simply congeal from the mist, forming itself into a slender, feminine shape draped in a cloak and cowl. Glittering green candle flames flickered in what looked like two eyes within the cowl’s hood.
My throat went dry. It took me two tries to rasp, “Queen Mab?”
The form vanished. A low, feminine laugh drifted through the mist to my right. I turned to face it.
A furious cat squall erupted from the air six inches behind me and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I spun to find nothing there, and the woman’s laugh echoed around the top of the misty mound, this time more amused.
“You’re enjoying this, aren’t you,” I said, my heart pounding in my throat. “You told me so, didn’t you?”
Whispering voices hissed among the stones around me, none of them intelligible. I saw another flicker of mocking green eyes.
“Th-this is a limited-t
ime offer,” I said, trying to make my voice sound steady. “It’s been forced by circumstance. If you don’t get off your royal ass and jump on it, I’m walking.”
“I warned you,” said a calm voice behind me. “Never let her bring you here, my godchild.”
I carefully kept myself from letting out a shriek. It would have been unwizardly. Instead, I took a deep breath and turned to find the Leanansidhe standing a few feet away, covered in a cloak the color of the last seconds of twilight, the deep blue-purple fabric hiding her completely except for her pale face inside the hood. Her green cat eyes were wide and steady, her expression solemn.
“But I’m here,” I said quietly.
She nodded.
Another shadow appeared beside her, green eyes burning. Queen Mab, I presumed, and noted that she was actually a couple of inches shorter than my godmother. Of course, especially in a place like this, Mab could be as gargantuan or Lilliputian as she chose.
Probably-Mab stepped closer, still covered in shadows despite the fact that she was nearer to me than my godmother was. Her eyes grew brighter.
“So many scars,” said my godmother, and her voice had changed subtly, growing cold and precise. “Your scars are beautiful things. Within and without.” The shadowed figure stepped behind one of the fallen stones and emerged from behind another on the opposite side of the circle. “Yes,” said the cold voice coming from the Leanansidhe’s lips. “I can work with this.”
I shivered. Because it was really cold and I was naked, I’m sure. I looked from the dark figure to my godmother and back, and asked, “You’re still using a translator?”
“For your sake,” said the cold voice, as a shadowed figure stepped behind the next menhir and appeared atop another. Walking deosil, clockwise.
Mab was closing the circle around me.
“Wh-why for my sake?” I asked.
The cold voice laughed through the Leanansidhe’s lips. “This conversation would quickly grow tedious if you kept falling to your knees, screaming in agony and clawing at your bleeding ears, my wizard.”
