Even as I watched her, evaluated her, and decided she would do, something deep in me threw up excuses. Not old enough. Not sick enough. Too dangerous a location. Too dangerous a time of day. Keep looking. Find someone better, someplace safer. But if I left here, left her, I would grow more tired, more distracted, and more disinterested with every passing hour.
She would do. She had to. For once, not a choice I could live with, but the choice that would let me live.
There was no way to approach without the woman seeing me. Unlike Aaron, I didn’t like to let my victims see the specter of death approach, but today I had no choice. So I straightened and started toward her, as if it was perfectly natural for a well-dressed middle-aged woman to cut through alleyways.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her look up as I passed. She tensed, then relaxed, seeing no threat. I turned, as if just noticing her. Then with a brisk nod, I took a twenty from my wallet.
A cruel ruse? Or making her last memory a pleasant one? Perhaps both. As expected, she smiled, her guard lowering even more. I reached down, but let go of the bill too soon. As it fluttered to the ground, I murmured an apology and bent, as if to retrieve it, but she was already snatching it up. I kept bending, still apologizing…and sank my fangs into the back of her neck.
She gave one gasp before the sedative took effect and she fell forward. I tugged her into the alcove, propped her against the wall, and crouched beside her still form.
As my fangs pierced her jugular, I braced myself. The blood filled my mouth, as thick, hot, and horrible as the drug dealer’s the night before. My throat tried to seize up, rejecting it, but I swallowed hard. Another mouthful. Another swallow. Drink. Swallow. Drink. Swallow.
My stomach heaved. I pulled back from the woman, closed my eyes, lifted my chin, and swallowed the blood. Another heave, and my mouth filled, the taste too horrible to describe. I gritted my teeth and swallowed.
With every mouthful now, some came back up. I swallowed it again. Soon my whole body was shaking, my brain screaming that this wasn’t right, that I was killing myself, drowning.
My stomach gave one violent heave, my throat refilling. I clamped my hand to my mouth, eyes squeezed shut as I forced myself to swallow the regurgitated blood.
Body shaking, I crouched over her again. I opened my eyes and saw the woman lying there. I couldn’t do this. I couldn’t—
One hand still pressed to my mouth, I tugged the pages from my pocket. I unfolded them and forced myself to look. Paris. Aaron. Paige. The council. I wasn’t done yet. Soon…but not yet.
I squeezed my eyes shut, then slammed my fangs into the woman’s throat and drank.
Her pulse started to fade. My stomach was convulsing now, body trembling so hard I could barely keep my mouth locked on her neck. Even as I pushed on, seeing the end in sight, I knew this wasn’t success. I’d won only the first round of a match I was doomed to lose.
The last drops of blood filled my mouth. Her heart beat slower, and slower, then…stopped.
Another life taken. Another year to live.
It’s My Birthday, Too
Jim Butcher
Jim Butcher is the author of The Dresden Files and the Codex Alera series. A martial arts enthusiast, Jim enjoys fencing, singing, bad science fiction movies, and live-action gaming. He lives in Missouri with his wife, son, and a vicious guard dog.
“Hey, Miyagi-san,” my apprentice said. Her jeans still dripped with purple-brown mucus. “You think the dry cleaners can get this out?”
I threw my car keys down on my kitchen counter, leaned my slimed, rune-carved wooden staff next to them, and said, “The last time I took something stained by a slime golem to a cleaner, the owner burned his place down the next day and tried to collect on the insurance.”
Molly, my apprentice, was just barely out of her teens, and it was impossible not to notice what great legs she had when she stripped out of her trendily mangled jeans. She wrinkled her nose as she tossed them into the kitchen trash can. “Have I told you how much I love the wizard business, Harry?”
“Neither of us is in the hospital, kid. This was a good day at work.” I took my mantled leather duster off. It was generously covered in splatters of the sticky, smelly mucus as well. I toted it over to the fireplace in my basement apartment, which I keep going during the winter. Given that I have to live without the benefits of electricity, it’s necessary. I made sure the fire was burning strongly and tossed the coat in.
“Hey!” Molly said. “Not the coat!”
“Relax,” I told her. “The spells on it should protect it. They’ll bake the slime hard and I’ll chisel it off tomorrow.”
“Oh, good. I like the coat.” The girl subsided as she tossed her secondhand combat boots and socks into my trash after her ruined jeans. She was tall for a woman and built like a schoolboy’s fantasy of the Scandinavian exchange student. Her hair was shoulder length and the color of white gold, except for the tips, which had been dyed in a blend of blue, red, and purple. She’d lost a couple of the piercings she’d previously worn on her face, and was now down to only one eyebrow, one nostril, her tongue, and her lower lip. She went over to the throw rug in the middle of my living room floor, hauled it to one side, and opened the trapdoor leading down to my lab in the subbasement. She lit a candle in the fire, wrinkling her nose at the stink from the greasy smoke coming up from my coat, and padded down the stepladder stairs into the lab.
Mouse, my pet Sabertoothed Retriever, padded out of my bedroom and spread his doggy jaws in a big yawn, wagging his shaggy gray tail. He took one step toward me, then froze as the smell of the mucus hit his nose. The big gray dog turned around at once and padded back into the bedroom.
“Coward!” I called after him. I glanced up at Mister, my tomcat, who drowsed upon the top of my heaviest bookshelf, catching the updraft from the fireplace. “At least you haven’t deserted me.”
Mister glanced at me, and then gave his head a little shake as the pungent smoke from the fireplace rose to him. He flicked his ears at me, obviously annoyed, and descended from the bookshelf with gracefully offended dignity to follow Mouse into the relative aromatic safety of my bedroom.
“Wimp,” I muttered. I eyed my staff. It was crusty with the ichor. I’d have to take it off with sandpaper and repair the carvings. I’d probably have to do the blasting rod, too. Stupid freaking amateurs, playing with things they didn’t understand. Slime golems are just disgusting.
Molly thumped back up the stairs, now dressed in her backup clothes. Her experiences in training with me had taught her that lesson about six months in, and she had a second set of clothing stored in a gym bag underneath the little desk I let her keep in the lab. She came up in one of those black broomstick skirts that’s supposed to look wrinkled and Doc Martens, inappropriate for the winter weather but way less inappropriate than black athletic panties. “Harry, are you going to be able to drive me home?”
I frowned and checked the clock. After nine. Too late for a young woman to trust herself to Chicago’s public transportation. Given Molly’s skills, she probably wouldn’t be in any real danger, but it’s best not to tempt fate. “Could you call your folks?”
She shook her head. “On Valentine’s Day, are you kidding? They’ll have barricaded themselves upstairs and forced the older kids to wear the little ones out so that they’ll sleep through the noise.” Molly shuddered. “I’m not interrupting them. Way too disturbing.”
“Valentine’s Day,” I groaned. “Dammit.”
“What?”
“Oh, I forgot, what with the excitement. It’s, uh, someone’s birthday. I got them a present and wanted to get it to them today.”
“Oh?” Molly chirped. “Who?”
I hesitated for a minute, but Molly had earned a certain amount of candor—and trust. “Thomas,” I said.
“The vampire?” Molly asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Wow, Harry,” she said, blue eyes sparkling. “That’s odd. I mean
, why would you get him a birthday present?” She frowned prettily. “I mean, you didn’t get my dad one, and you’re friends with him, and he’s a Knight of the Sword and one of the good guys, and he’s saved your life about twenty times and all.”
“More like four times,” I said testily. “And I do Christmas for hi—”
Molly was looking at me, a smug smile on her face.
“You figured it out,” I said.
“That Thomas was your brother?” Molly asked innocently. “Yep.”
I blinked at her. “How?”
“I’ve seen you two fight.” She lifted both pale eyebrows. “What? Have you seen how many brothers and sisters I have? I know my sibling conflicts.”
“Hell’s bells,” I sighed. “Molly—”
She lifted a hand. “I know, boss. I know. Big secret; safe with me.” Her expression turned serious, and she gave me a look that was very knowing for someone so young. “Family is important.”
I’d grown up in a succession of orphanages and foster homes. “Yeah,” I said, “it is.”
She nodded. “So you haven’t given family presents much. And your brother doesn’t exactly have a ton of people bringing him presents on his birthday, does he?”
I just looked at her for a second. Molly was growing up into a person I thought I was going to like.
“No,” I said, quietly. “I haven’t and he doesn’t.”
“Well then,” she said, smiling. “Let’s go give him one.”
I frowned at the intercom outside Thomas’s apartment building and said, “I don’t get it. He’s always home this time of night.”
“Maybe he’s out to dinner,” Molly said, shivering in the cold—after all, her backup clothing had been summer wear.
I shook my head. “He limits himself pretty drastically when it comes to exposing himself to the public.”
“Why?”
“He’s a White Court vampire, an incubus,” I said. “Pretty much every woman who looks at him gets ideas.”
Molly coughed delicately. “Oh. It’s not just me, then.”
“No. I followed him around town once. It was like watching one of those campy cologne commercials.”
“But he does go out, right?”
“Sure.”
She nodded and immediately started digging into her backpack. “Then maybe we could use a tracking spell and run him down. I think I’ve got some materials we can use.”
“Me, too,” I said, and produced two quarters from my pocket, holding them up between my fingers with slow, ominous flair, like David Blaine.
Then I took two steps to the pay phone next to the apartment building’s entrance, plugged the coins in, and called Thomas’s cell phone.
Molly gave me a level look and folded her arms.
“Hey,” I told her as it rang. “We’re wizards, kid. We have trouble using technology. Doesn’t mean we can’t be smart about it.”
Molly rolled her eyes and muttered to herself, and I paid attention to the phone call.
“’Allo,” Thomas answered, the word thick with the French accent he used in his public persona.
“Hello, France?” I responded. “I found a dead mouse in my can of French roast coffee, and I’ve called to complain. I’m an American, and I refuse to stand for that kind of thing from you people.”
My half brother sighed. “A moment, please,” he said in his accent. I could hear music playing and people talking behind him. A party? A door clicked shut and he said, without any accent, “Hey, Harry.”
“I’m standing outside your apartment in the freaking snow with your birthday present.”
“That won’t do you much good,” he said. “I’m not there.”
“Being a professional detective, I had deduced that much,” I said.
“A birthday present, huh?” he said.
“I get much colder and I’m going to burn it for warmth.”
He laughed. “I’m at the Woodfield Mall in Schamburg.”
I glanced at my watch. “This late?”
“Uh-huh. I’m doing a favor for one of my employees. I’ll be here until midnight or so. Look, just come back tomorrow evening.”
“No,” I said stubbornly. “Your birthday is today. I’ll drive there.”
“Uh,” Thomas said. “Yeah. I guess, uh. Okay.”
I frowned. “What are you doing out there?”
“Gotta go.” He hung up on me.
I traded a look with Molly. “Huh.”
She tilted her head. “What’s going on?”
I turned and headed back for the car. “Let’s find out.”
Woodfield Mall is the largest such establishment in the state, but its parking lots were all but entirely empty. The mall had been closed for more than an hour.
“How are we supposed to find him?” Molly asked.
I drove my car, the beat-up old Volkswagen Bug I had dubbed the Blue Beetle, around for a few minutes. “There,” I said, nodding at a white sedan parked among a dozen other vehicles, the largest concentration of such transport left at the mall. “That’s his car.” I started to say something else but stopped myself before I wasted an opportunity to Yoda the trainee. “Molly, tell me what you see.”
She scrunched up her nose, frowning, as I drove through the lot to park next to Thomas’s car. The tires crunched over the thin dusting of snow that had frosted itself over scraped asphalt, streaks of salt and ice melt, and stubborn patches of ice. I killed the engine. It ticked for a few seconds, and then the car filled with the kind of soft, heavy silence you only get on a winter night with snow on the ground.
“The mall is closed,” Molly said. “But there are cars at this entrance. There is a single section of lights on inside when the rest of them are out. I think one of the shops is lit inside. There’s no curtain down over it, even though the rest of the shops have them.”
“So what should we be asking?” I prompted.
“What is Thomas doing, in a group, in a closed mall, on Valentine’s Day night?” Her tone rose at the end, questioning.
“Good; the significance of the date might mean something,” I said. “But the real question is this: Is it a coincidence that the exterior security camera facing that door is broken?”
Molly blinked at me, then frowned, looking around.
I pointed a finger up. “Remember to look in all three dimensions. Human instincts don’t tend toward checking up above us or directly at our own feet, in general. You have to make yourself pick up the habit.”
Molly frowned and then leaned over, peering up through the Beetle’s window to the tall streetlamp pole above us.
Maybe ten feet up, there was the square, black metal housing of a security camera. Several bare wires dangled beneath it, their ends connected to nothing. I’d seen it as I pulled the car in.
My apprentice drew in a nervous breath. “You think something is happening?”
“I think that we don’t have enough information to make any assumptions,” I said. “It’s probably nothing. But let’s keep our eyes open.”
No sooner had the words left my mouth than two figures stepped out of the night, walking briskly down the sidewalk outside the mall toward the lighted entrance.
They both wore long black capes with hoods.
Not your standard wear for Chicago shoppers.
Molly opened her mouth to stammer something.
“Quiet,” I hissed. “Do not move.”
The two figures went by only thirty or forty feet away. I caught a glimpse of a very, very pale face within one of the figure’s hoods, eyes sunken into the skull like pits. They both turned to the door without so much as glancing at us, opened it as though they expected it to be unlocked, and proceeded inside.
“All right,” I said quietly. “It might be something.”
“Um,” Molly said. “W-were those v-vampires?”
“Deep breaths, kid,” I told her. “Fear isn’t stupid, but don’t let it control you. I have no idea what they were.” I made
sure my old fleece-lined heavy denim coat was buttoned up and got out of the car.
“Uh. Then where are you going?” she asked.
“Inside,” I said, walking around to the Beetle’s trunk. I unwrapped the wire that had held it closed ever since a dozen vehicular mishaps ago. “Whatever they are, Thomas doesn’t know about them. He’d have said something.”
I couldn’t see her through the lifted hood, but Molly rolled down the window enough to talk to me. “B-but you don’t have your staff or blasting rod or coat or anything. They’re all back at your apartment.”
I opened the case that held my .44 revolver and the box that held my ammunition, slipped shells into the weapon, and put it in my coat pocket. I dropped some extra rounds into the front pocket of my jeans and shut the hood. “They’re only toys, Padawan.” Familiar, capable, proven toys that I felt naked without, but a true wizard shouldn’t absolutely rely on them—or teach his apprentice to do so. “Stay here, start up the car, and be ready to roll if we need to leave in a hurry.”
“Right,” she said, and wriggled over into the driver’s seat. Give Molly credit, she might be nervous, but she had learned the job of wheelman—sorry, political correctioners, wheelperson—fairly well.
I kept my right hand in my coat pocket, on the handle of my gun, hunched my shoulders against a small breath of frozen wind, and hurried to the mall entrance, my shoes crunching and squeaking on the little coating of snow. I walked toward the doors like I owned them, shoved them open like any shopper, and got a quick look around.
The mall was dark, except for the entrance and that single open shop—a little bistro with tinted windows that would have been dimly lit even when all the lights were on. I could see figures seated at tables inside and at a long dining counter and bar. They wore lots of black, and none of them looked much older than Molly, though the dim lights revealed few details.
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