by Jim Butcher
Murphy eyed the garlic. “I thought the vampires were going to be asleep. I mean, they staked Dracula in his coffin, right?”
“You’re thinking of the movie,” Kincaid said. He passed me a web belt with a canteen and a pouch on it. The pouch contained a medical kit, a roll of duct tape, a road flare, and a flashlight. The canteen had masking tape on the lid, and block letters in permanent marker identified it as holy water. “Read the book. Older or stronger members of the Black Court might not be totally incapacitated by sunlight.”
“Might not even inconvenience Mavra,” I said. “Stoker’s Dracula ran around in broad daylight. But between daylight and Ebenezar, Mavra shouldn’t have much in the way of powers. If there are any Black Court on their feet who want to come for us, they’ll have to do it the dirty way.”
“Which is why I got you a surprise, Dresden.”
“Oh, good,” I said. “A surprise. That’s sure to be fun.”
Kincaid reached into the van and presented me with a futuristic-looking weapon, a gun. It had a round tank the size of a gumball machine attached to its frame, and for a second I thought I’d been handed a pistol-sized flame thrower. Then I recognized it, cleared my throat, and said, “This is a paintball gun.”
“It’s a high-tech weapon,” he said. “And it isn’t loaded with paint. The ammunition is interspersed holy water and garlic loads. It’ll hurt and frighten darkhounds and it will chew holes in any vamps that are moving around.”
“While not putting any holes in us,” Murphy chimed in. “Or in innocent bystanders.”
“Okay,” I said. “But this is a paintball gun.”
“It’s a weapon,” Murphy said. “And a weapon that will do harm to the bad guys while not hurting your allies. That makes it a damned good one for you for such close quarters. You’re good in a fight but you don’t have close-quarters firearms or military training, Harry. Without ingrained fire discipline, you’re as likely to kill one of us as the bad guys.”
“She’s right,” Kincaid said. “Relax, Dresden. It’s sound technology, and a good tool for teamwork. We do this simple. I’m on point. Then the shotgun. Then you, Dresden. I see a Renfield with a gun, and I’m going to drop flat. Murphy handles it from there. If we get a vampire or a darkhound, I’ll crouch and hold it off with the spear. The two of you hit it with everything you can. Push it back until I can pin it on the spear. Then kill it.”
“How?” Murphy asked. “Stakes?”
“Screw stakes,” Kincaid said. He held out a heavy machete in an olive-drab sheath to Murphy. “Take off its head.”
She clipped the machete onto her belt. “Gotcha.”
“The three of us together should be able to take one vamp down the hard way if we’re alert. But if one of them closes on us, we’re probably going to die,” Kincaid said. “The best way to stay alive is to hit them fast and stay on the offensive. Once we’ve put down any unfriendlies, you two can go save the hostages or take the Renfields to therapy or tap dance or whatever. If things go south, stay together and come straight back out. McCoy should have the truck out front and ready where he can see the door.”
“I will,” Ebenezar agreed.
“Okay,” Kincaid said. “Anyone have any questions?”
“Why do they sell hot dogs in packages of ten but hot dog buns in packages of eight?” I said.
Everyone glared at me. I should probably leave off wizarding and chase my dream of becoming a stand-up comedian.
Instead, I put the toy gun in my right hand, my staff in my left, and said, “Let’s go.”
Chapter Thirty-one
I drove the Red Cross van up to the shelter. I pulled in right in front, put it in park, and said, “You two go in first. I’m sure whoever the vamps have working for them will recognize me, at least by description. Outside chance they’ll know Murph, too, but the uniform might make them play along until you can get any bystanders out of the building.”
“How should I do that?” Kincaid asked.
“Hell’s bells, you’re the big time mercenary. What am I paying you for?” I said, annoyed. “What’s unit response time down here, Murphy?”
“This is gang country. Officially about six minutes. Reality is more like ten or fifteen. Maybe more.”
“So we call it six or seven minutes to get clear after someone calls CPD screaming about rabid dogs and gunfire,” I said. “The longer before that happens the better. So get it done calmly and quietly, Kincaid. Talk them out if you can.”
“No problem,” Kincaid said, and leaned his spear against the dashboard. “Let’s go.”
Murphy held her weapon down and close to her side and followed Kincaid into the building. I waited, but I had already planned to go on in if I didn’t hear anything in the next minute or so. I started counting to sixty.
On forty-four, the door opened and a couple of bedraggled men and three or four raggedly dressed women, all of them more beaten down than actually aged, came shambling out.
“Like I said, it shouldn’t take long,” Kincaid was saying in a bluff, heavy, cheerful voice marked with the harder, shorter vowels of a Chicago accent. He came along behind the street folk, shepherding them out. “It’s probably just a faulty detector. As soon as the guys from the gas company check out the basement and make sure it’s safe, we’ll get set up and get everyone paid. An hour, tops.”
“Where is Bill?” demanded one of the women in a querulous voice. “Bill is the man from the Red Cross. You aren’t Bill.”
“Vacation,” Kincaid said. His good-natured smile did not touch his eyes. They remained cold and uncaring as he reached through the van’s window and picked up his spear. The woman took one look at his expression, another at the weapon, then ducked her head and scurried away from the shelter. The others followed suit, scattering like a covey of quail alerted to sudden danger.
I went inside, and Kincaid backed in after me, shutting the door. The reception area looked more like a security checkpoint—a small room, a couple of chairs, a heavy-duty security door, and a guard station behind a window of heavy bars. But the security door had been propped open with one of the chairs, and I could see Murphy standing in the room on the other side, her riot gun held level, her stance alert and ready.
I walked over to her. The room beyond the reception area was the size of a small cafeteria. Cubicle walls sprouted in one corner like some kind of crystalline growth. Half a dozen people dressed in business casual stood passively against the nearest cubicle wall, and Murphy had her gun leveled at them.
They should have been afraid. They weren’t. They just stood there, eyes dull, faces set in vacant, bovine expressions. “Harry,” she said. “Kincaid said we shouldn’t let them out until you made sure they weren’t dangerous.”
“Yeah,” I said. I hated to think of leaving simple thralls staring stupidly at nothing, given all the violence on the immediate agenda, but that would have been better than setting some bloodthirsty Renfield loose somewhere behind me. I closed my eyes for a moment, concentrating. There were a thousand other things I would rather do than examine victims of the Black Court with my Sight, but we didn’t have time for anything else.
I opened my eyes along with my Sight, and focused on the people standing in line.
I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a sheep slaughtered for mutton. The process isn’t fast, even if it isn’t really cruel. They make the sheep lie down on its side and cover its eyes. The sheep lies there without struggling, and the shepherd takes a sharp knife and draws a single, neat line across its throat. The sheep jerks in a sharp twitch of surprise, while the shepherd holds it gently down. It smells blood and stirs more. Then the animal quiets again under the shepherd’s hand. It bleeds.
It doesn’t look real, the first time you see it, because the blood is too bright and thick, and the animal isn’t struggling. There’s a lot of blood. It spreads out on the ground, soaking into dirt or sand. It dyes the wool of the sheep’s chest, throat, and legs a dark, rusty red. Sometim
es the blood gets into a puddle around its nose, and the animal’s breaths make scarlet ripples.
Before the end, the sheep might twitch and jerk another time or two, but it’s silent, and it doesn’t really make an effort to fight. It lies there, becoming more still, and after several minutes that stroll past in no great hurry, it dies.
That’s what they looked like to my Sight, those people the vampires had enthralled. They stood calmly, relaxed, thinking of nothing. Like sheep, they had been blindfolded to the truth somehow. Like sheep, they did not struggle or flee. Like sheep, they were being kept for whatever benefit their lives would provide—and like sheep they would eventually be taken for food. I saw them, defenseless and beaten, blood soaking into their clothing while they lay still under the hand of a being more powerful than they.
They stood quietly, dying like sheep. Or rather, five of them did.
The sixth was a Renfield.
For the briefest second, I saw the sixth victim, a burly man of middle years and wearing a blue oxford shirt, as a sheep like the rest of them. Then that image vanished, replaced by something inhuman. His face looked twisted and deformed, and his muscles swelled hideously, bulging with blackened veins and quivering with unnatural power. There was a band of shimmering, vile energy wreathing his throat in an animal’s collar—the reflection of the dark magic that had enslaved him.
But worst of all were his eyes.
The man’s eyes looked as if they had been clawed out by something with tiny, scalpel-sharp talons. I met his blind gaze, and there was nothing there. Nothing. Just an empty darkness so vast and terrible that my lungs froze and my breath locked in my throat.
By the time I realized what I was seeing, the man had already let out a feral shriek and charged me. I shouted in surprise and tried to back up, but he was simply too fast. He backhanded me. The enchantments on my duster diverted much of the power in it, so it didn’t crack any of my ribs, but it was still strong enough to throw me from my feet and into a wall. I dropped to the floor, stunned.
An angel, blazing with fury and savage strength, spun toward the Renfield, her eyes shining with azure flame, a shaft of fire in her hands. The angel was dressed in soiled robes smudged with smoke and blood and filth, no longer white. She bled from half a dozen wounds, and moved as if in terrible pain.
Murphy.
There was a peal of thunder, and flame leapt from the shaft of light in her hands. The Renfield, now deformed with muscle like some kind of madman’s gargoyle, accepted the blow, and batted the shaft of light from the angel’s hands. She dove for the weapon. The Renfield followed, reaching for her neck.
Something hit it hard, a second shaft, though this one was made not of light but of what looked like solidified smog of black and deep purple. The blow drove the Renfield from its feet, and the angel recovered the fallen weapon. Another shaft of light thundered into the Renfield’s head, and it collapsed abruptly to the ground.
I shook my head, trying to tear away from painful clarity of my Sight. I heard a footstep nearby. Still stunned, I looked behind me.
For just a second I saw something standing there. Something enormous, malformed, something silent and merciless and deadly. It had to crouch to keep from brushing the ceiling with the horns curling away from its head, and batlike wings spread from its shoulders to fall around it and behind it, to drag along the floor, and I thought I saw some kind of hideous double image lurking behind it like the corpse-specter of Death himself.
Then the second was past, I pushed my Sight away, and Kincaid stood frowning down at me. “I said, are you all right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, just clipped me.”
Kincaid offered me his hand.
I didn’t take it. I pushed myself to my feet instead.
His expression became opaque. It had an alien quality to it that made it more frightening than when it had been merely unreadable. He stepped over to the body of the middle-aged man in the blue oxford shirt, and jerked his spear out of the corpse. It was wet with blood all the way to the cross-brace.
I shuddered, but asked Murphy, “You okay?”
She still gripped the riot gun as she stood over the body, keeping her eyes on the five people remaining. There was a bloody, pulpy mess where the first shot had ripped open the man’s leg, but it hadn’t even slowed him down. It was messier where Murphy’s second shot had torn into his head. Not that he would have been any better off if she’d hit him in the chest. People don’t survive direct hits from shotguns delivered from a couple of steps away.
“Murph?” I asked.
“Fine,” she said. Some of the Renfield’s blood had sprayed onto her cheek, beading into red droplets below her distant eyes. “I’m fine. What now?”
Kincaid stepped up beside Murphy and put his hand on the end of the riot gun’s barrel. He pushed gently, and she shot him a look before taking a steadying breath and lowering the weapon.
Kincaid nodded at the remaining thralls. “I’ll get these five out and meet you at the stairs. Don’t go down without me.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “We won’t.”
He prodded the five thralls into motion and herded them out of the building. I oriented myself on the room’s doors, remembering Bob’s handy-dandy map, and headed for the door that led down to the basement. Murphy walked beside me. She said nothing, but fed two more shells into the riot gun. She reached for the doorknob.
I put mine there first. “Hold it, Murph,” I said. “Let me check it for surprises.”
She looked at me for a second and then nodded.
I closed my eyes and laid my hand on the door, gently pushing my awareness through the door, feeling silently for patterns of energy that might indicate magical wards like the ones protecting my apartment. My magical awareness was akin to the Sight, just as my sense of touch was akin to my sense of sight. It cost me less than opening the Sight, and was infinitely more gentle to my psyche.
I felt nothing, no waiting wards or prereadied traps of Mavra’s deadly black magic. Generally speaking, the bad guys weren’t terribly interested in learning defensive magic when they could be out blowing things up instead, but I was determined not to get sucker punched on something that basic.
“He was already gone,” I told Murphy.
She said nothing.
“I saw him, Murph. I Saw him. There wasn’t anything left inside him. He was . . . less than an animal. There was nothing else you could have done.”
She spoke very quietly. “Shut the fuck up, Harry.”
I did. I finished my check, felt around for the presence of any supernatural entities that might be right on the other side of the door, and Listened, to boot. Nothing. When I opened my eyes again, Kincaid was standing there with Murphy. I hadn’t heard his approach. “Clear?” he asked.
I nodded. “The door isn’t warded. I don’t think there’s anything waiting on the other side, but I can’t be sure.”
Kincaid grunted, glanced at Murphy, then leaned back and kicked the door open.
Murphy blinked at me. Kincaid was a big guy, sure, but it’s tough to kick doors down on the first try. I’d seen men batter one with those same vicious kicks for fifteen minutes before the door gave way. Maybe he’d just gotten lucky.
Yeah, I believed that. The image of that enormous, demonic thing that had crouched in the mercenary’s place loomed with a terrible clarity in my head.
Kincaid landed on balance, lifted the spear, and pointed the head and its attached flashlight down the closed, narrow stairway.
There was only silence.
And then the sound of a soft, mocking laugh from somewhere in the darkness below us.
Hell’s bells. The back of my neck crawled up my scalp and into one ear.
“Form up,” I murmured, because it sounded more military and tougher than saying, “You guys go first.” Kincaid nodded and took a step down. Murphy readied the riot gun again and pressed in behind him. I picked up my air-powered popgun and followed her.
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“Where are they keeping the hostages again?” Murphy asked.
“In a closet at the bottom of the stairs, on the right.”
“That was hours ago,” Kincaid said quietly. “They could be anywhere now. Once we go down there, there’s no room for playing around.”
“The hostages are our first concern.”
“Screw that. That’s exactly why the vamps took hostages in the first place,” Kincaid said. “If you let them dictate your tactics, they’re going to use it to kill you.”
“That isn’t your concern,” I said.
Kincaid’s voice became quieter and harder. “It is when I’m standing this close to you. They might get me instead.”
“That’s why you get the big bucks.”
He shook his head. “We don’t even know if they’re alive. Look, this is a basement. All we have to do is roll down the grenades and then go mop up whatever is left afterward. We’re underground. The collateral damage will be minimal.”
“That’s not good enough,” I said. “We save the hostages first. Once they’re clear, then we take care of business with Mavra.”
Kincaid glanced over his shoulder at me, his eyes narrow and cold. Defiance and contempt rang in every word. “It might be a little harder to rescue them if we’re dead.”
Murphy put the mouth of the riot gun against Kincaid’s spine and said, “How good is that armor?”
Sometimes Murphy has a way with words.
We were all quiet for a couple of seconds. Then I said, “We might get killed trying to save the hostages. We will get killed if we don’t stick together. Do the math, Kincaid. Or break your agreement and get out.”
He stared at Murphy for a second and then relented, turning back to face the stairway. “Fine,” he said. “We do it your way. It’s amateur night.”
We started down the first flight of stairs together, while whatever waited in the darkness below us laughed again.
Chapter Thirty-two
