by Jim Butcher
I didn’t have ten seconds.
I reached into myself, into the horrible red pain, and drew forth more power yet. I focused it on my staff, and the sigils and runes carved along its surface became suddenly suffused with eye-searing scarlet light. My nose filled with the smell of charring wood, and as the shield wavered out of existence, I screamed, “Ventas servitas!”
The power I’d gathered in my staff shot out of it, an invisible serpent of energy. The shield fell just as a shrieking gale of wind shot down the stairs. The column of air howled against me, throwing my duster forward around me like a flag, and caught the blazing napalm like a tub of Jell-O, hurling the fire back the way it had come and providing it with air enough to treble its size.
The fire went mad. It seared mortar from rough stone, and chewed cracks into the rock floor, the damp stone coughing and popping as water within expanded.
For an instant I could see the two Renfields, still spraying fire toward me. They started screaming, but they obeyed Mavra’s raspy howls to stand fast, and it killed them. The napalm molded itself to them and the flame embraced them.
What hit the ground as they fell could not have been easily identified as human remains.
I kept my will on the wind, the carved runes on my staff blazing ember-orange, and it spread the flames into the far room in a deadly river of searing light and charred black ash. For agonized seconds I held the winds and spread the flames, and then my will faltered, the runes on the staff dimming. Pain overcame me for a second, and it hurt so much that I literally could not see.
“Wizard!” howled Mavra’s voice, the words sounding like dusty scales and cold, reptilian fury. “Wizard! The wizard! Kill, kill, kill everything!”
“Get him!” Kincaid snarled. I felt Murphy get her arms under mine, and she started hauling me back with surprising power. I started seeing through the blinding agony in time to see a charred, inhuman-looking man wielding an ax leap at Kincaid. The mercenary rammed his spear full into the man’s chest, stopping him in his tracks. A second man appeared from the smoke behind the first, this one holding a shotgun. There was a roaring sound, and fire tore through the impaled Renfield, then struck the second one full in the face with hideous, searing results. Kincaid jerked the spear clean of the corpse of the first Renfield, even as the second flailed around wildly, then pointed the shotgun in more or less the right direction.
Kincaid whirled the spear into a reverse grip, slammed it into the second Reinfield’s chest and the second incendiary round blasted out from the housing at the butt end of the spear, and drove the remaining life from the man. A burning corpse hit the floor a second later.
A gun roared from the smoke. Kincaid grunted and staggered. The spear fell from his hands, but he didn’t fall. He drew a gun in either hand and backed unsteadily away, the semiautomatic barking out shots as swiftly as he could send them into the choking smoke down the hall.
More Renfields, roasted but functional, came through the smoke, shooting. Darkhounds bounded around them, the naked and bloody shells of dogs, but filled with horrible rage. Behind them I saw Mavra’s slender, deadly form, lit for the first time. She was wearing the same clothing I’d seen her in the last time—a tattered number from the Renaissance, all of black. Hamlet would have been happy to wear it. I saw her filmy dead eyes focus on me, and she lifted an ax in one hand.
The first two darkhounds reached Kincaid, and he went down under them before I could even cry out. One of the Renfields brought a sledgehammer down on him, while the other simply emptied a handgun into the pile as two more darkhounds threw themselves into it.
“No!” I shouted.
Murphy hauled me into the closet and out of the line of fire, just as Mavra threw. Her ax came tumbling end over end down the hall, and struck the stone wall at the back of the closet with such force that the head buried itself to the eye in the rock and the wooden handle shattered into splinters. Two of the children, still chained underneath where the ax hit, let out wails of pain and terror as splinters tore at them.
“Oh, God,” Murphy said. “Your hand, oh, God.” But she never stopped moving. She shoved me by main force into the back corner of the closet, picked up her gun, leaned into the doorway, and sent eight or nine measured shots down the hall, her face set in grim concentration. Her pale legs were a startling contrast against the black of her Kevlar vest. “Harry?” she shouted. “There’s smoke, I can’t see anything, but they’re at the foot of the stairs. What do we do?”
I stared at a black box up on the wall, near the ceiling. Presumably Kincaid’s antipersonnel mine. He’d been right. It was set up to open and spew its deadly projectiles diagonally down, so that they would bounce and fill both closet and hall with death.
“Harry!” Murphy shouted.
I barely had breath enough to answer. “Can you hook up the mine again?”
She looked over her shoulder at me, eyes wide. “You mean we can’t get out?”
“Can you do it?” I barked.
She nodded, once.
“Wait for my signal, then arm it and get low.”
She spun and leapt up onto a wooden chair near the mine, either something she had dragged there or something the bad guys had used too. She hooked up two alligator clips and held up a third, looking over her shoulder at me, her face pale. The children wept and screamed below her.
I dragged myself over to kneel in front of the children, facing down the hallway. I lifted my left hand, and stared at it in shock for a second. I always thought I looked good in red and black, but as a rule I preferred that to be my clothes. Not my limbs. My hand was a blackened, twisted claw of badly cooked meat, burned dark wherever it wasn’t bloodred. My silver shield bracelet dangled beneath it, the charm-shields heat-warped, gleaming and bright.
I raised my other hand to signal Murphy, but then I heard a scream from down the hall, snarling and vicious and hardly human. The smoke swirled and cleared for a second, and I saw Kincaid, dragging one leg, his back against the wall. He had one hand clenched hard to his leg, and a gun in the other. He shot at a target I couldn’t see until the gun started clicking.
“Now, Murphy!” I shouted. My voice thundered down the hall. “Kincaid! Bolshevik Muppet!”
The mercenary’s head whipped around toward me. He moved like hamstrung lightning, swift and lurching and grotesque. He dropped the gun, released his leg, and threw himself straight at me with his three unwounded limbs.
Again I raised my shield, and prayed that the mine’s infrared trip wire functioned.
Time slowed.
Kincaid flung himself through the doorway.
The mine beeped. There was a sharp, snapping click of metal.
Kincaid tumbled past me. I leaned aside to let him, and at the same instant brought every scrap of strength I had left to bear on the shield.
Lumpy metal spheres, maybe twenty or thirty of them, flew out into the air. I had angled my shield in a simple inclined plane, its base at the closet’s doorway, its summit at the back wall of the closet, about four feet off the ground. Several of the spheres hit the shield, but the slope of it sent them rebounding out into the hall.
The submunitions exploded in a ripple of thunder and light. Steel balls flew in deadly sprays, rattling off stone walls and tearing into flesh with savage efficiency. The sloped shield flared into azure incandescence, energy from the shrapnel being absorbed and shed as flashbulb-bright bursts of light. The sound was indescribable, almost loud enough to kill all on its own.
And then it was over.
Silence fell, broken only by the crackling of flames. Nothing moved but drifting smoke.
Murphy, Kincaid, the captive children, and I were all huddled together in an unorganized pile of frightened humanity. We all sat there stunned for a moment. Then I said, “Come on. We have to get moving before the fire spreads.” My voice sounded raw. “Let’s get these kids out. I might be able to break these chains.”
Kincaid reached up without speaking and took a
key down from a high hook on the opposite wall. He settled back down to sit leaning against it, and tossed me the key.
“Or we could do that,” I said, and passed the key to Murphy. She started unlocking them. I was too tired to move. My hand didn’t hurt, which was a very bad sign, I knew. But I was too tired to care. I just sat there and stared at Kincaid.
He had his hand clamped down on his leg again. He was bleeding from it. There was more blood on his belly, on one hand, and his face was positively smothered with it, as if he’d been bobbing for apples in a slaughterhouse.
“You’re hurt,” I said.
“Yep,” he replied. “Dog.”
“I saw you go down.”
“It got nasty,” he confirmed.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I lived.”
“Your chest is bleeding,” I said. “And there’s blood on your hand.”
“I know that.”
“And your face is drenched in it.”
He lifted an eyebrow and touched his free hand to his chin, then looked at the blood. “Oh. That isn’t mine.” He started fumbling at his belt.
I got enough energy together to go to him and help. He pulled a roll of black duct tape from a pouch on his belt and with sharp, jerking motions we wound the tape tightly around his wounded leg several times, layering the wound in adhesive, literally taping it closed. He used about a third of the roll, then grunted and tore it off. Then he said, “You’re going to lose that hand.”
“I was sending it back to the kitchen anyway. I ordered it medium well.”
Kincaid stared at me for a second and then started letting out soft, wobbly-sounding laughter, as if it were something he didn’t have a lot of practice at. He stood up, wheezing soft laughter, drew another gun and his own machete from his belt, and said, “Get them out. I’m going to dismember whatever is left.”
“Groovy,” I said.
“All that trouble we went to, and you just blew the place up. We could have done this to begin with, Dresden.”
Murphy got the kids loose and they started getting away from the wall. One of them, a girl no more than five years old, just collapsed against me crying. I held on to her for a moment, letting her cry, and said, “No, we couldn’t have.”
Kincaid regarded me, his expression unreadable. I thought I saw something wild and bloodthirsty and satisfied in his eyes for just a second. Then he said, “Maybe you’re right.”
He vanished into the smoke.
Murphy helped me to my feet. She had all the kids join hands, took the hand of the lead child herself, and led us all to the stairs. She bent and scooped up her jeans on the way. There wasn’t enough denim left to avoid public indecency, and she dropped them with a sigh.
“Pink panties,” I said, looking down. “With little white bows. I wouldn’t have guessed that.”
Murphy looked too tired to glare, but she tried.
“They really go with the Kevlar and the gun belt, Murph. Shows you’re a woman with her priorities straight.”
She stepped on my foot, smiling.
“Clear,” said Kincaid’s voice from the smoke. He appeared again, coughing a little. “Found four coffins occupied. One of them was that One-ear guy you told me about. Beheaded them. Vampires are history.”
“Mavra?” I asked.
He shook his head. “That whole end of the hall looks like a chop shop for a black market organ bank. The vampire took that blast from the mine right in the kisser. You’d need her dental records and a jigsaw puzzle all-star to get a positive ID.”
Kincaid didn’t see Mavra flicker into sight. She rose out of the smoke behind him, horribly torn and mangled, badly burned, and angry as hell. She was missing her lower jaw, half of an arm, a basketball-sized section of lower abdomen, and one of her legs was attached by only a scrap of flesh and her black tights. For all of that, she moved no less swiftly, and her eyes burned with dead fire.
Kincaid saw the look on my face. He dropped flat.
I whipped the stupid little paintball gun out of my duster and emptied it at Mavra.
May lightning strike me dead if the damned thing didn’t work like a charm. Hell, better than most charms, and I’m the guy who should know. The shots poured out almost as swiftly as from Kincaid’s deadly little machine guns, and they splattered into Mavra, sizzling viciously. Silver fire immediately began chewing at her flesh wherever the paintballs struck and broke. It ripped into her and it happened fast, as if some hyperkinetic gourmet were taking a melon baller to her flesh.
Mavra let out a shocked and dusty shriek.
The holy water and garlic paintballs put a hole as wide as a three-liter bottle of Coke all the way through her. I could see the glow of fire in the pall of smoke behind her. She staggered and fell to her knees.
Murphy drew the machete from her belt and threw it underhand.
Kincaid caught it as he turned back to Mavra, and took her head off at the base of her neck. The head went one way. The body went straight down—there was no thrashing, no howling or spurting ichor, no gales of magical wind or sudden clouds of dust. Mavra’s remains simply thumped to the ground, nothing but a withered cadaver once more.
I looked from Mavra’s corpse to the paintball gun, impressed. “Kincaid. Can I keep this?”
“Sure,” he said. “I’ll add it to the bill.” He stood up slowly, looking at the destruction. He shook his head. Then he joined us as we went up the stairs. “Even seeing it, it’s tough to believe.”
“What is?” I asked.
“Your shield. And that bit with all the wind and fire, especially with your hand like that.” He glanced at me, something like caution in his expression. “I’ve never seen a wizard cut loose before.”
What the hell. It wouldn’t hurt to encourage the mercenary to be wary of me. I stopped and leaned on my staff. The runes still glowed with a sullen fire, though it was slowly fading. Tiny, white wisps of wood smoke curled up from it, sharp in my nose. It hadn’t ever done that before, but there was no reason to mention that for the time being.
I looked straight at him until it was obvious that he was refusing to meet my eyes. Then I said in a quiet, gentle voice, “You still haven’t.”
I walked on out, leaving him to stare after me. I didn’t think for a second that he would allow what he’d seen to scare him out of killing me if I didn’t pay him. But it might scare him enough to make him more cautious about taking that option. Every little bit helps.
Before we got out of the shelter, I took off my duster and draped it onto Murphy’s shoulders. It enveloped her entirely, its hem dragging the ground, covering her legs. She gave me a grateful look just as Ebenezar appeared in the doorway. The old man looked at the kids, then at my hand, and drew in a sharp breath.
“You all right to walk yourself out?” he asked.
“So far. We need to get these kids and ourselves the hell away from here.”
“Fine,” he said. “Where?”
“We’ll take the kids to Father Forthill at Saint Mary of the Angels,” I said. “He’ll have a good idea of what can be done to help them.”
Ebenezar nodded. “I know him by reputation. Good man.”
We went outside and started loading kids into Ebenezar’s old Ford truck. The old man had a gun rack at the back of the cab, his thick old staff in the bottom rack, his old Greener shotgun in the top one. He lifted the kids into the back one by one, where he had them lie down on a thick old thermal blanket and covered them with a second one.
Kincaid came out of the shelter carrying a contractor’s heavy garbage bag, the smoke growing thicker behind him. The bag was half full. He threw it over one shoulder, then turned to me and said, “Taking care of details. As I see it, the contract is done. You satisfied with that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Nice working with you. Thank you.”
Kincaid shook his head. “The money is how you thank me.”
“Yeah, uh,” I said, “about that. It’s Saturday, and I�
��m going to have to talk to someone at the bank. . . .”
He stepped closer to me and handed me a white business card. It had a number printed on it in gold lettering. There was another number written in ink that made the balance currently in my checking account look extremely small. Nothing else.
“My Swiss account,” he explained. “And I’m in no hurry. Have it there by Tuesday and we’ll be square.”
He got in the van and left.
Tuesday.
Crap.
Ebenezar watched the white van pull out, then helped Murphy get me into the truck. I sat in the middle, my legs over on Murphy’s side of the cab. She had a first-aid kit in her hands, and as we rode along she covered my burned hand lightly with gauze, entirely silent. Ebenezar drove off cautiously. We heard sirens start up when we were a couple of blocks away. “The kids to the church,” he said. “Then where?”
“My place,” I said. “I’ll get patched up for round two.”
“Round two?” Ebenezar asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “If I don’t do something, a ritual entropy curse is gonna head my way before midnight.”
“How can I help?” he asked.
I looked steadily at him. “We’ll have to talk about it.”
He squinted out ahead of us and kept his emotions off of his face. “Hoss. You’re too involved. You do too much. You take on way too damned much.”
“There’s a bright side, though,” I said.
“Oh?”
“Uh-huh. If I buy it tonight, at least I won’t have to figure out how to pay Kincaid before he kills me.”
Chapter Thirty-four
Ebenezar drove, and I felt myself float off into a pensive haze. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. It was more of a pense-less haze, but I didn’t complain about it. My mouth didn’t want to work, and on some level I knew that numb, floating shock was better than searing agony. Somewhere in the background, Murphy and Ebenezar talked enough to work out details, and we must have dropped the kids off with Father Forthill, because when I finally got out of the truck, the back was empty of children.
