by Jim Butcher
He stopped talking in midsentence and his eyes widened.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Oh,” he said, still wide-eyed, apparently locked into motionlessness by surprise. It was a little creepy. Human beings still look like human beings when they’re standing still. Thomas’s pale skin and bright blue eyes went still, like a statue. “Oh.”
I nodded. “Say ‘oilcan.’ ”
Thomas blinked. “What?”
“You get to be the Tin Woodsman.”
“What?”
“Never mind, not important.” I sighed. “Look, without going into too many details: I have an eight-year-old daughter. Susan never told me. Duchess Arianna of the Red Court took her.”
“Um,” said Thomas. “If I’d known that, maybe I would have been here sooner.”
“Couldn’t say anything on the phone. The FBI and the cops are involved, having been made into roadblocks to slow me down.” I tilted my head down the street. “The cop who lives in that house at the end of the street has been coerced into helping whoever is trying to stop me. I’m here hoping to nab either his handler or his cleaner and grab every bit of information I can.”
Thomas looked at me and said, “I’m an uncle.”
I ran the palm of my hand over my face.
“Sorry,” he said. “I just thought this was going to be another chat, with you all worried that the evil White Court had been abusing me. I need to take a moment.”
“Make it a short moment,” I said. “We’re on the clock.”
Thomas nodded several times and seemed to draw himself back into order. “Okay, so you’re looking for . . . What’s her name?”
“Maggie.”
My brother paused for a couple of heartbeats, and bowed his head briefly. “That’s a good name.”
“Susan thought so.”
“So you’re looking for Maggie,” he said. “And you need my help?”
“I don’t know the exact date, but I know she’s going to be brought to Chichén Itzá. Probably tonight, tomorrow night at the latest.”
“Why?” Thomas asked. He then added, “And how does this have anything to do with me?”
“They’re using her in a bloodline curse,” I said. “When they sacrifice her, the curse kills her brothers and sisters, then her parents, then their brothers and sisters and so on.”
“Wait. Maggie has brothers and sisters? Since when have you ever gotten that busy?”
“No, dammit!” I half shouted in frustration. “That’s just an illustration for how the bloodline curse works.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Oh, crap. You’re saying that it’s going to kill me, too.”
“Yes, that is exactly what I’m freaking saying. You tool.”
“Um,” Thomas said, “I’m against that.” His eyes widened again. “Wait. What about the other Raiths? Are they in any danger through me?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Empty night,” he muttered. “Okay. You know where she’s going to be. You want me to saddle up and help you get Maggie back, like we did with Molly?”
“Not unless there’s no other choice. I don’t think we would survive a direct assault on the Red King and his retinue on their home turf.”
“Well, maybe you and I couldn’t, naturally. But with the Council behind y—”
“Way behind me,” I interrupted, my voice harsh with anger. “So far behind me you wouldn’t know they were there at all.”
My brother’s deep blue eyes flashed with an angry fire. “Those assholes.”
“Seconded, motion carried,” I agreed.
“So what do you think we should do?”
“I need information,” I said. “Get me whatever you can. Any activity at Chichén Itzá or a nearby Red stronghold, sightings of a little girl surrounded by Reds, anything. There’s got to be something, somewhere that will show us a chink in their armor. If we find out where they’re holding her, we can hit the place. If I can learn something about the defensive magic around the site, maybe I can poke a hole in it so that we can just grab the girl and go. Otherwise . . .”
“Yeah,” Thomas said. “Otherwise we have to take them on at Chichén Itzá. Which would suck.”
“It’s a couple of miles beyond suck.”
Thomas frowned. “What about asking Lara for help? She can command a lot of firepower from the other Houses of the White Court.”
“Why would she help me?” I asked.
“Self-preservation. She’s big on that.”
I grunted. “I’m not sure if the rest of your family is in any danger.”
“You aren’t sure they aren’t, either,” Thomas said. “And anyway, if you don’t know, Lara won’t.”
“Don’t be too sure,” I said. “No. If I go to her with this, she’ll assume it’s a ploy motivated by desperation.”
Thomas folded his arms. “A lame ploy, at that. But you’re missing another angle.”
“Oh?”
Thomas lowered his arms and then brought them up to frame his own torso the way Vanna White presents the letters on Wheel of Fortune. “Incontestably, I’m in danger. She’ll want to protect me.”
I looked at him skeptically.
Thomas shrugged. “I play for the team now, Harry. And everyone knows it. If she lets something bad happen to me when I ask for her help, it’s going to make a lot of people upset. And not in the helpful, ‘I sure don’t want to mess with her’ kind of way.”
“For that to work as leverage, the stakes would have to be known to the rest of the Court,” I said. “They’d have to know why you were in danger from a bloodline curse aimed at me. Then they’d all know about our blood relation. Not just Lara.”
Thomas frowned over that for a moment. Then he shrugged. “Still. It might be worth the effort to approach her. She’s a resourceful woman, my sister.” His expression smoothed over into neutrality. “Quite gifted when it comes to removing obstacles. She could probably help you.”
Normally I slap down suggestions like that without a second thought. This time . . .
I had the second thought.
Lara probably knew the Red Court as well as anyone. She’d been operating arm in arm with them, to one degree or another, for years. She was the power behind the throne of the White Court, which prided itself on its skills of espionage, manipulation, and other forms of indirect strength. If anyone was likely to know something about the Reds, it was Lara Raith.
The clock just kept on ticking. Maggie was running out of time. She couldn’t afford for me to be squeamish.
“I would prefer not to,” I said quietly. “I need you to find out whatever you can, man.”
“What happens if I can’t find it?”
“If that happens . . .” I shook my head. “If I do nothing, my little girl is going to die. And so is my brother. I can’t live with that.”
Thomas nodded. “I’ll see what I can do.”
“Don’t see it. Do it.”
It came out harsh enough that my brother flinched, though it was a subtle motion. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s—”
His head whipped around toward Rudolph’s house.
“What?” I asked.
He held up a hand for silence, turning to focus intently. “Breaking glass,” he murmured. “A lot of it.”
“Harry!” Molly called.
I turned to see the Beetle’s passenger door swing open. Molly emerged, hanging on to Mouse’s collar with both hands. The big dog was focused on Rudolph’s house as well, and his chest bubbled with the deep, tearing snarl I’d heard only a handful of times, and always when supernatural predators were nearby.
“Someone’s there for Rudolph,” I said, and launched myself forward. “Let’s go!”
Chapter 25
I looked like a cool guy leading the charge for about a second and a half, and then my brother and my dog left me and Molly eating their dust. If I hadn’t been a regular runner, Molly would have done the same, albeit more gradually. By the
time I had covered half the distance, Thomas and Mouse had already bounded around to the back, one around either side of Rudolph’s house.
“Get gone, grasshopper!” I called, and even as we ran forward Molly vanished behind her best veil. It took us another quarter of a minute to cover the distance, and I went around the side of the house Thomas had taken. I pounded around the back corner to see that a large glass sliding door leading from a wooden deck into the house had been shattered. I could hear a big, thumping beat, as if from a subwoofer, pounding away inside the house.
I took the stairs up to the deck in a single jumping stride, and barely avoided a sudden explosion of glass, wood, drywall, and siding that came hurling toward me. I had an instant to realize that the projectile that had just come through the wall was my brother, and then something huge and black and swift came crashing through the same wall, expanding the hole to five times its original size.
The whatever-it-was stood within a step or two, and I was already sprinting. I kept doing it. I slapped one hand down and vaulted the railing on the far side of the deck. I barely jerked my hand from the rail before the thing smashed it to kindling with one huge, blindingly fast talon. That deep beat grew louder and faster as I landed, and I realized with a shock that I could hear the thing’s rising heart rate as clearly as if it had been pounding on a drum.
I was kidding myself if I thought I could run from something that fast. I had a step or two on the creature, but it reclaimed them within half a dozen strides and swiped at my head with terrible speed and power.
I whirled desperately, drawing my blasting rod and letting out a burst of flame, but I stumbled and fell during the spin. The fire hammered into the creature, and for all the good it did me I might as well have hit it with a rubber chicken.
I thought I was done for—until Mouse emerged from the house onto the back deck, bathed in a faint nimbus of blue light. He took a single, bounding, thirty-yard leap that ended at the attacking creature’s enormous, malformed shoulders. Mouse’s claws dug into the thing’s hide, and his massive jaws closed on the back of its thick, almost indistinguishable neck.
The creature arched up in pain, but it never made a sound. It tripped over me, too distracted to actually attack, but the impact of so much mass and power sent up flares of agony from my ribs and from one thigh.
Mouse rode the creature down into the dirt, tearing and worrying it, his claws digging furrows in the flesh of its back. His snarls reverberated in the evening air, and each shake and twist of his body seemed to send up little puffs of glowing blue mist from his fur.
Mouse had the thing dead to rights, but nobody seemed to have told the creature that. It twisted lithely, bouncing up from the ground as if made of rubber, seized Mouse’s tail, and swung the huge dog in a single, complete arc. Mouse hit the ground like a two-hundred-pound sledgehammer, drawing a high-pitched sound of pain from him.
I didn’t think. I lifted my blasting rod again, filling it with my will and with all the soulfire I could shove in, screaming, “Get off my dog!”
White fire slammed out of the rod and drew a line on the creature from hip to skull, digging into flesh and setting it ablaze. Once again, it convulsed in silent agony, and the boom-box beat of its heart ratcheted up even higher. It fell, unable to hold on to Mouse, and writhed upon the ground.
I tried to get up, but my injured leg wouldn’t support me, and the sudden surge of weariness that overtook me made my arms collapse, too. I lay there, panting and helpless to move. Mouse staggered slowly to his feet, his head hanging, his tongue dangling loosely from his mouth. Behind me, I heard a groan and twisted awkwardly to see Thomas sit up, one shoulder hanging at a malformed angle. His clothes had been ripped to shreds, there was a piece of metal protruding from his abdomen, just next to his belly button, and half his face was covered in a sheet of blood a little too pale to belong to a human.
“Thomas!” I shouted. Or tried to shout. The acoustics were odd in this tunnel within which I was suddenly sprawled. “Get up, man!”
He gave me a blank, concussed stare.
The creature’s movements had slowed. I turned to see it beginning to relax, its body shuddering, the drumbeat of its heart steadying, and I got a better look at it than I had before.
It was huge, easily the size of a full-grown bull, and it carried a stench with it that was similar in potency. Or maybe that was because I had just overcooked it. Its body was odd, seemingly able to move on two legs or four with equal efficiency. Its flesh was a spongy blackness, much like the true skin of a Red vampire, and its head was shaped like something mixing the features of a human being, a jaguar, and maybe a crocodile or wild boar. It was pitch-black everywhere, including its eyes, its tongue, and its mouth.
And, despite the punishment I had just dealt out, it was getting up again.
“Thomas!” I shouted. Or wheezed.
The creature shook its head and its dead-black eyes focused on me. It started toward me, pausing briefly to swat my stunned dog out of its path. Mouse landed in a tumble, seemingly struggling to find his balance but unable to do so.
I lifted my blasting rod again as it came on, but I didn’t have enough juice left in me to make the rod do anything but smoke faintly.
And then a stone sailed in from nowhere and struck the creature on the snout.
“Hey!” called Molly’s voice. “Hey, Captain Asphalt! Hey, tar baby! Over here!”
The creature and I turned to see Molly standing maybe twenty yards away, in plain sight. She flung another rock, and it bounced off the creature’s broad chest. Its heartbeat began to accelerate and grow louder again.
“Let’s go, gorgeous!” Molly called. “You and me!” She turned sideways to the thing, rolled her hips, and made an exaggerated motion of swatting herself on the ass. “Come get some!”
The thing tensed and then rushed forward, covering the ground with astonishing speed.
Molly vanished.
The creature smashed into the earth where she’d been standing, with its huge talons balled into furious fists, slamming them eight inches into the earth.
There was a peal of mocking laughter, and another rock bounced off of the thing, this time from the left. Furious, it whirled to rush Molly again—and again, she vanished completely. Once more it struck at empty ground. Once more, Molly got its attention with a rock and a few taunts, only to vanish from sight as it came at her.
Each time, she was a little closer to the creature, unable to match its raw speed. And each time, she led it a little farther away from the three of us. A couple of times, she even shouted, “Toro, toro! Olé!”
“Thomas!” I called. “Get up!”
My brother blinked his eyes several times, each time a little more quickly. Then he swiped a hand at the bloodied side of his face, shook his head violently to get the blood out of his eyes, and looked down at the section of metal bar sticking out of his stomach. He clenched it with his hand, grimaced, and drew it slowly out, revealing a six-inch triangle that must have been a corner brace in the wall he’d gone through. He dropped it on the ground, groaning in pain, and his eyes rolled briefly back into his head.
I saw his other nature coming over him. His skin grew paler, and almost seemed to take on its own glow. His breathing stabilized immediately, and the cut along his hairline where he’d been bleeding began to close. He opened his eyes, and their color had changed from a deep, contented blue to a hungry, metallic silver.
He got up smoothly and glanced at me. “You bleeding?”
“Nah,” I said. “I’m good.”
A few feet away, Mouse got to his feet and shook himself, his tags jingling. Molly had gotten as far as the street again, and there was an enormous crashing sound.
“This time, we do it smart,” Thomas said. He turned to Mouse instead of me. “I’m going to go in first and get its attention. Go for its strings. I think you’ll have to hit two limbs to really cripple it.”
Mouse woofed, evidently an affirmative, l
et out a grumbling growl, and once more very faint, very pale blue light gathered around him.
Thomas nodded, and picked up a section of ruined deck that had scattered around where he landed. He shouldered a corner post, a section of four-by-four about a yard and a half long, and said, “Don’t sweat, Harry. We’ll be back for you in a minute.”
“Go, Team Dresden,” I wheezed.
The two of them took off, zero to cheetah speed in about a second. Then they were out of sight. I heard Thomas let out a high-pitched cry that was a pretty darn good Bruce Lee impersonation, and there was a thunder crack of wood striking something hard.
An instant later, Mouse let out his battle roar. There was a flicker of strobing colors of light as Molly pitched a bit of dazzling magic at the creature. It wouldn’t hurt the thing, but the kid could make eye-searing light in every color imaginable burst from empty air, accompanied by a variety of sounds if she so chose. She called it her One-woman Rave spell, and during the last Independence Day, she had used it to throw up a fireworks display from her parents’ backyard so impressive that evidently it had caused traffic problems on the expressway.
It was hard to lie there twisted halfway around at the waist, to see only the occasional flash of light or to hear the thumps and snarls of combat. I tried my leg again and had no luck. So I just settled down and concentrated on not blacking out or breathing too hard. The creature had definitely cracked at least one of my ribs.
That was when I noticed the two sets of glowing red eyes staring at me from the forest, staring with the unmistakable fixation of a predator, and coming slowly, steadily, silently closer.
I suddenly realized that everyone around who might have helped me was sort of distracted at the moment.
“Oh,” I breathed. “Oh, crap.”
Chapter 26
The eyes rushed toward me, and something dark and strong struck me across the jaw. I was already close to losing consciousness. The blow was enough to ring my bells thoroughly.
