by Jim Butcher
I spat more metal taste out of my mouth and wished I had a glass of water. Glau sat in a chair nearby, watching me. The little man had a gun resting in his lap, in hand and ready to go. A briefcase sat on the floor beside his chair.
“You,” I said.
Glau looked at me without any readable expression.
“You killed my dog,” I said. “Get your affairs in order.”
Something ugly flickered through his eyes. “An idle threat. You will not live to see the dawn.”
“You’d best hope I do,” I said. “Because if I go down, I know where my death curse is going.”
Glau’s lips peeled back from his teeth, and I swear to God that they were pointed—not like a vampire’s fangs or a ghoul’s canines, but in solid, serrated triangles, like a shark. He rose, the gun twitching in his hand.
“Glau!” snapped Crane.
Glau froze for a second, and then relaxed and let the gun fall to his side.
Crane shoved the cell phone into his pocket and stalked over to me. “Keep your tongue in your mouth, wizard.”
“Or what?” I asked. “You’ll kill me? From where I’m standing, that isn’t a worst-case scenario.”
“True,” Crane murmured. He withdrew a small handgun from his pocket and without so much as blinking shot Rawlins in the foot.
The big cop jerked against the cuffs that held him. His face contorted in surprised pain and he fell. The cuffs, fastened to the beam at shoulder level, cut cruelly into his wrists. Rawlins got his legs underneath him and let out a string of sulfurous curse words.
Crane regarded Rawlins for a moment, smiled, and then pointed the gun at the cop’s head.
“No!” I shouted.
“It’s entirely up to you, wizard, whether or not his children lose their father. Behave.” He smiled again. “We’ll all be happier.”
Again the rage threatened to drown any rational thought in my head. Threatening me is one thing. Threatening someone else to get to me is another. I’m sick of seeing decent people suffer. I’m sick of seeing them die.
Patience, Harry. Calm. Rational. I was going to have to discourage Crane from this tactic with extreme prejudice as a deterrent to future weasels. But not yet. Keep him talking.
“Do you understand me?” Crane said.
I jerked my chin in a brief nod.
He smirked. “I want to hear you say it.”
I clenched my jaw and said, “I understand.”
“I’m so glad we had this talk,” he said. There was a low buzzing sound, the almost-silent alert of his cell phone, I suppose, and he walked away again, taking it out of his pocket and lifting it to his ear.
“How long have we been here?” I asked Rawlins.
“Hour,” he mumbled. “Hour and a half.”
I nodded. “You okay?”
He let out a pained grunt. “Tore open the stitches on my arm,” he panted. “Foot, I don’t know. Can’t feel it. Doesn’t look like it’s bleeding much.”
“Hang in there,” I said. “We’ll get out of this.”
Glau’s rubbery lips stretched out into a silent little smile, though he looked at neither of us.
“Bull,” Rawlins said. “If you can get out, you should go. Once he gets what he wants, he’s going to kill me anyway. Don’t stay on my account.”
“You’re siphoning my noble hero vibe,” I told him. “Cease and desist or I’ll sue.”
Rawlins tried to smile, and leaned against the wall, weight off his injured foot. The lower portion of his left sleeve had soaked through with blood.
Crane returned a moment later, smiling like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. “Start building more tax shelters, Glau. This is going rather well.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “So who’s going to pony up for one Harry Dresden, slightly used?”
Crane showed me all his teeth. “I’m holding an auction as we speak. A rather energetic one.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “Who’s leading?”
His smiled widened. “Why, Paolo Ortega’s widow. Duchess Arianna of the Red Court.”
I suddenly felt cold, all over.
I was captured by the Red Court once. Held in the dark by a crowd of hissing, monstrous shapes.
They did things.
There was nothing I could do about it.
I still had the nightmares to remind me. Not every night, maybe, but often enough. Often enough.
Crane closed his eyes and inhaled with a satisfied expression. “She’ll be quite creative when it comes to dealing with her husband’s bane. I don’t blame you for feeling terrified. Who wouldn’t?”
“Hey,” I told him, grasping at straws. “Call the White Council. If nothing else, maybe they’ll run the bidding up for you.”
Crane laughed. “I already have,” he said.
Hope twitched somewhere inside me. If the Council knew I was in trouble, then maybe they would be able to do something. They might be on the way even now. I needed to stall Crane, keep him occupied. “Yeah? What did they say?”
His smile widened. “That the White Council’s unyielding policy is one of nonnegotiation with terrorists.”
Hope’s corpse went through some postmortem twitching.
His phone buzzed again. He stepped away and spoke quietly, his back to us. After a moment he snapped his fingers and said, “Glau, get on the computer. The auction is closing in five minutes and there’s always a last-second rush. We’ll need to verify an account.” He turned back to the phone. “No, unacceptable. A numbered account only. I don’t trust those people at PayPal.”
“Hey!” I protested. “Are you selling me on eBay?”
Crane winked at me. “Ironic, eh? Though I confess a bit of surprise. How do you know what it is?”
“I read,” I told him.
“Ahhh,” he said. “Glau. Computer.”
Glau nodded but said, “They should not be unwatched.”
“I can see them,” Crane replied, irritation in his voice. “Move.”
By his expression, Glau clearly did not agree with Crane, but he went.
I licked my lips, struggling to think through my headache and anxiety and a solid lump of despair. There had to be a way out of this. There was always a way out. I had found ways out of desperate straits before.
Of course, I’d had my magic available then. Damn those manacles. As long as they kept my power constrained, I would never be able to free myself or Rawlins.
So, moron, I thought to myself. Get rid of the manacles. Get around them. Do something. It’s your only chance.
“How?” I muttered out loud. “I don’t know a damned thing about them.”
Rawlins blinked at me. I grimaced, shook my head at him, and closed my eyes. I shut away the distractions and turned my focus inward. It was easy to imagine an empty place; flat, dark floor illuminated from above by a single light shining without apparent source. I imagined myself standing beneath it.
“Lasciel,” my image-self said quietly. “I seek counsel.”
She appeared at once, stepping into the circle of light. She wore her most familiar form, the functional white tunic, the tall, lovely figure, but her golden hair now appeared as a waist-length sheet of deep auburn. She bowed deeply and murmured, “I am here, my host.”
“You changed your hair,” I said.
Her mouth flirted with a smile. “There are too many blondes in your life, my host. I feared I would be lost in the press.”
I sighed. “The manacles,” I said. “Do you know of them?”
She bowed again. “Indeed, my host. They are of an ancient make, wrought by the troll-smiths of the Unseelie Court, and employed against those of your talents for a thousand years and more.”
I blinked at her. “Faeries made those?”
I was dimly aware that, in my surprise, I had spoken the words aloud. I clenched my physical jaws shut and focused on the image-me, briefly wondering just how badly cracked my engine block was going to get by trying to keep track of my own person
al internal reality in addition to the actual, threatening reality where Rawlins and I were in deep trouble. Hell, for that matter, I supposed it was entirely possible that I already had snapped. It wasn’t as though anyone but me had ever seen Lasciel. Perhaps, in addition to existing only in my head, she was all in my imagination, kind of a waking dream.
For a minute, I thought about abandoning the wizarding biz and taking up a career that would let me crawl under rocks and hide, professionally.
“You needn’t attempt to keep your inner self separate from your physical self,” Lasciel said in a reasonable tone. “I should be happy to advise you from the outside, so to speak.”
“Oh, no,” I said, keeping all the conversation on the inside. “I’ve got problems enough without adding a sentient hallucination to the mix.”
“As you wish,” Lasciel replied. “You are, I take it, seeking a way to overcome the bindings of the thorn manacles?”
“Obviously. Can it be done?”
“All things are possible,” Lasciel assured me. “Though some of them are extremely unlikely.”
“How?” I demanded of her. “This is not the time to get coy with me. If I die, you’re coming along for the ride.”
“I am aware,” she replied, arching an eyebrow. “They are a crafting of faerie make, my host. Seek that which is bane to they who made it.”
“Iron,” I said at once, nodding. “And sunlight. Trolls can’t stand either.” I opened my actual eyes and glanced around the interior of the garage. “Sunlight’s out of town for a few hours yet, but we’ve got lots and lots of iron. Rawlins has a free hand. If I get a tool to him, maybe he could shatter a link of the manacles’ chain. Then I could break his cuffs or something.”
“Point of logic,” the fallen angel pointed out. “Given that you are not free to retrieve a tool, getting one to Rawlins seems problematic.”
“Yeah, but—”
“In addition,” she continued, “you are exhausted, and it is reasonable to assume that Crane will finish his negotiations shortly and turn you over to one of your foes. You have insufficient time to recover your strength.”
“I guess—”
She continued in the firm tone of a schoolteacher addressing a stubborn child. “You have in the past expressed much frustration and doubt that your control of physical forces was precise enough to break handcuffs without breaking the person held in them.”
I sighed. “True, but—”
“The only egress from this place is chained shut and you do not have the key.”
“It isn’t—”
“And finally,” she finished, “lest you forget, you are being guarded by at least one supernatural being who will hardly stand gawking while you attempt escape.”
I glowered. “Anyone ever told you that you have a very negative attitude?”
She arched a brow, the expression an invitation to continue the line of thought.
I chewed on my lip and forged another couple of links in the chain of thought. “Which isn’t helpful. But your ass is as deep in alligators as mine, and you want to help. So…” My stomach sank a little. “You can offer me another option.”
She smiled, pleased. “Very good.”
“I don’t want it,” I said.
“Why ever not?”
“Because a freaking fallen angel is offering it, that’s why ever not. You’re poison, lady. Don’t think I don’t know it.”
She lifted a long-fingered hand to me, palm out. “I ask only that you hear me out. If what I offer is not to your liking, I will of course support your efforts to form an alternate plan.”
I upgraded the glower to a glare. She regarded me in perfect calm.
Dammit. The best way to keep yourself from doing something grossly self-destructive and stupid is to avoid the temptation to do it. For example, it is far easier to fend off inappropriate amorous desires if one runs screaming from the room every time a pretty girl comes in. Which sounds silly, I know, but the same principle applies to everything else.
If I let her talk to me, Lasciel would propose something calm and sane and reasonable and effective. It would require a small price of me, if nothing else by making me a tiny bit more dependent upon her advice and assistance. Whatever happened, she’d gain another smidgen of influence over me.
Baby steps on the highway to hell. Lasciel was an immortal. She could afford patience, whereas I could not afford temptation.
It came down to this: If I didn’t hear her out and didn’t get out of this mess, Rawlins’s blood would be on my hands. And whoever was behind the slaughter around the convention might well keep right on escalating. More people could die.
Oh. And I’d wind up enjoying some kind of Torquemada-esque vacation with whichever fiend had the most money and the least lag.
When a concept like that is an afterthought, you know things are bad.
Lasciel watched me with patient blue eyes.
“All right,” I told her. “Let’s hear it.”
Chapter Twenty-seven
We plotted, the fallen angel and me. It went fast. It turns out that holding an all-mental conversation gets things done at the literal speed of thought, without all those clunky phonemes to get in the way.
Barely a minute had passed when I opened my eyes and said very quietly to Rawlins, “You’re right. They’ll kill you. We have to get out of here.”
The cop gave me a pained grimace and nodded. “How?”
I struggled and sat up. I rolled my shoulders a little, trying to get some blood flowing through my arms, which had been manacled together underneath me. I tested the chain. It had been slipped through an inverted U-bolt in the concrete floor. The links rattled metallically as they slid back and forth.
I checked Crane at the noise. The man kept speaking intently into his cell phone, and took no apparent notice of the movement.
“I’m going to slip one of these manacles off my wrist,” I told him. I nodded at a discarded old rolling tool cabinet. “There should be something in there I can use. I’ll cut us both out.”
Rawlins shook his head. “Those two going to stand there watching while we do all that?”
“I’ll do it fast,” I said.
“Then what?”
“I kill the lights and we get out.”
“Door is chained shut,” Rawlins said.
“Let me worry about that.”
Rawlins squinted. He looked very tired. “Why not,” he said, nodding. “Why not.”
I nodded and closed my eyes, slowed my breathing, and began to concentrate.
“Hey,” Rawlins said. “How you going to slip your cuffs?”
“Ever heard about yogis, out east?”
“Yogi Berra,” he said at once. “And Yogi Bear.”
“Not those yogis. As in snake charmers.”
“Oh. Right.”
“They spend a lifetime learning to control their body. They can do some fairly amazing stuff.”
Rawlins nodded. “Like fold themselves up into a gym bag and sit inside it at the bottom of a pool for half an hour.”
“Right,” I said. I followed Lasciel’s instructions, sinking into deeper and deeper focus. “Some of them can collapse the bones in their hands. Use their muscles and tendons to alter tensions. Change the shape.” I focused on my left hand, and for a moment was a bit grateful that it was already so badly maimed and mostly numb. What I was about to do, even with Lasciel’s instruction, was going to hurt like hell. “Keep an eye out and be ready.”
He nodded, holding still and not turning his head toward either Crane or Glau.
I dismissed him, the warehouse, my headache, and everything else that wasn’t my hand from my perceptions. I had the general idea of what was supposed to happen, but I didn’t have any practical, second-to-second knowledge of it. It was a terribly odd sensation, as though I were a skilled pianist whose fingers had suddenly forgotten their familiarity with the keys.
Not too quickly, murmured Lasciel’s voice in my hea
d. Your muscles and joints have not been conditioned to this. There was an odd sensation in my thoughts, somehow similar to abruptly remembering how to tie a knot that had once been thoughtlessly familiar. Like this, Lasciel’s presence whispered, and that same familiarity suddenly thrummed down my arm.
I flexed my thumb, made a rippling motion of my fingers, and tightened every muscle in my hand in a sudden clench. I dislocated my thumb with a sickly little crackle of damaged flesh.
For a second, I thought the pain would drop me unconscious.
No, Lasciel’s voice said. You must control this. You must escape.
I know, I snarled back at her in my mind. Apparently nerve damage from burns doesn’t stop you from feeling it when someone pulls your fingers out of their sockets.
Someone? Lasciel said. You did it to yourself, my host.
Would you back off and give me room to work?
That’s ridiculous, Lasciel replied. But the sense of her presence abruptly retreated.
I took deep, quiet breaths, and twisted my left hand. My flesh screamed protest, but I only embraced the pain and continued to move, slow and steady. I got the fingers of my right hand to lightly grasp the manacle on my left wrist, and began to draw my hand steadily against the cold, binding circle of metal. My hand folded in a way that was utterly alien in sensation, and the screaming pain of it stole my breath.
But it slipped an inch beneath the metal cuff.
I twisted my hand again, in exactly the same motion, never letting up the pressure, working to encompass the pain as something to aid me, rather than distract.
I slipped an inch closer to freeing my hand. The pain became more and more intense despite my efforts to divert it, like an afternoon sun that burns brightly into your eyes even though they’re closed. Only a moment more. I only needed to remain silent and focused for a few more seconds.
I bore the pain. I kept up the pressure, and abruptly I felt the cold metal of the cuff flick over the outside of my thumb, one of the few spots on my fingers where much tactile sensation remained. My hand came free, and I clutched tightly to the empty cuff with my right hand, to keep it from rattling.
