by Jim Butcher
Ramirez was a beat slow in transferring his sword to his other hand so that he could fling green fire at Vitto, and the vampire lowered his arms and crossed them in front of him, hissing words in some strange tongue as he did. Ramirez’s strike shattered upon that defense, though bits of greenish fire dribbled onto Vitto’s arms, each of them chewing out a scoop of flesh as far across as a nickel.
“Crap!” Ramirez snarled.
But I didn’t have time to listen.
I could feel it. Feel power building on the cave floor in front of the white throne. It wasn’t explosive magic, but it was strong, quivering on a level so fundamental that I could feel it in my bones. A second later, I recognized this power. I had felt the dim echoes of its passing, months before, in a cave in New Mexico.
There was a deep throb. Then another. Then a third. And then the air before the white throne suddenly swirled. It spun for a moment, and then there was abruptly an oblong disk of darkness hanging in the air. It spun open, pushing the space of the cavern aside, and a dank, musty, mildew-scented flood of cold air washed out of the passage that had been opened from the Nevernever and into the Deeps.
Seconds later, there was movement in the passage, and then a ghoul sprang through it.
Well. I call it a ghoul. But just looking at it, I knew I was seeing something from another age. It was…like seeing drawings of things from the last ice age—familiar animals, most of them, but they were all too large, too heavy with muscle, many of them festooned with extra tusks, spurs of horn, and lumpy, armored hide.
This thing, this ghoul, was of the same order. Eight feet tall if it was an inch, and its hunched shoulders were so wide that it made the thing look more like a gorilla than it did a hyena or baboon, the way most of them did. It had serrated ridges of horn on its stark cheekbones, and its jaw was far more massive with muscle. Its forearms were even longer than a normal ghoul’s, its claws heavier, longer, and backed by knobbed ridges of horn that would let the thing crush and smash as effectively as it sliced and diced. Its brow ridge was far heavier, too, and its eyes, so recessed as to be little more than glitters from the indirect lighting, could hardly be seen.
The ghoul crouched and leaped twenty feet forward with an easy grace, then landed with a roar that made my knees feel a little weak.
More of them poured out of the gate. Ten. Twenty. They kept coming and coming.
“Hell’s bells,” I whispered.
Beside me, Ramirez swallowed. “I,” he said, “am going to die a virgin.”
Vitto let out a wild cackle of glee, and howled, “At last!” He actually capered a little dance step in place. “At last the masquerade ends! Kill them! Kill them all!”
I don’t know if it was one of the vampires or one of the thralls, but suddenly a woman screamed in utter terror, and the Ghouls went mad with bloodlust and surged forward in an unstoppable wave.
I dropped all the power in my shield, and all that I had put into the blasting rod, too. Neither of them would get me out of the hellish Cuisinart of pain and death that this cavern was about to become.
“Right, then,” I panted. “This would be the trap.”
Chapter Thirty-Nine
“I knew it,” Ramirez snarled. “I knew it was a setup.”
He turned to look and me and then blinked. It was only then that I realized that I had my teeth bared in a wide smile.
“That’s right,” I told him. “It is.”
I have seen some real pros open gateways to the Nevernever. The youngest of the Summer Queens of the Sidhe could open them so smoothly that you’d never see it happening until it was over. I’d seen Cowl open ways to the Nevernever as casually and easily as a screen door, with the gate itself being barely noticeable until it vanished a few seconds later, leaving behind it the same musty smell now flooding the cavern.
I couldn’t do it that smoothly or with that much subtlety.
But I could do it just as quickly, and just as effectively.
I spun on my heel as the ghouls flooded the cavern and plunged into the gathered members of the White Court in a killing frenzy.
“Go!” Ramirez shouted. “I can’t run anyway. I’ll hold them; get out of here!”
“Get over yourself and cover my back!” I snarled.
I gathered my will again, shifting my staff into my right hand. The runes on the staff blazed to life, and I pointed the staff across my body, at the air four feet off the cavern floor. Then I released my gathered will, focused by my intentions and the energies aligned in my staff, and shouted, “Aparturum!” Furious golden and scarlet light flowed down the length of wood, searing a seam in reality. I drew the staff from left to right, drawing a line of fire in the air—and after a heartbeat, that line expanded, burning up like a fire running up a curtain, down like rain sluicing down a car window, and left behind it a gateway, an opening from the Raith Deeps to the Nevernever.
The gate opened on a cold and frozen woodland scene. Silvery moonlight slipped through, and a freezing wind gusted, blowing powdery white snow into the cavern—substance of the spirit world, which transformed into clear, if chilly, gelatin, the ectoplasm left behind when spirit matter reverted to its natural state.
There was a stir of shadows, and then my brother burst through the opening, saber in one hand, sawed-off shotgun in the other. Thomas was dressed in heavy biker leather and body armor, with honest-to-God chain mail covering the biker’s jacket. His hair was tied back in a tail, and his eyes were blazing with excitement. “Harry!”
“Take your time,” I barked back at him. “We’re not in a crisis or anything!”
“The others are right beh—Look out!”
I spun in time to see one of the ghouls bound into the air and sail toward me, the claws on both its hands and feet extended to rip and slash.
Ramirez shouted and flung one of his green blasts at the thing. It caught the ghoul at the apex of its flight and simply bored a hole the size of a garbage can in its lower abdomen.
The ghoul landed in a splatter of gore and fury. It kept fighting, though its legs flopped around like a seal’s tail, of almost no use to it.
I sprang back—or at least, I tried to spring. Opening a gate to the Nevernever is not complicated, but it isn’t easy, either, and between that and all the fighting I’d done, I was beginning to bump up against my physical limits. My legs wobbled, and my spring was more like the lazy, hot, and motionless end of summer.
Thomas dragged me the last six inches or I wouldn’t have avoided the ghoul’s claws. He extended his arm, shotgun in hand, and blew the ghoul’s head off its shoulders in a spray of flying bits of bone and horn and a mist of horrible black blood.
After which, the ghoul seized him with one arm and began raking its talons at him with the other.
The terrible power of the mangled ghoul was enormous. Links of chain mail snapped and went flying, and Thomas let out a scream of surprise and outrage.
“What the hell!” he snarled. He dropped the shotgun and took off the ghoul’s attacking arm with his saber. Then he broke the grip of the last clawed hand, and flung the ghoul’s body away from him.
“What the hell was that?” he gasped, recovering the shotgun.
“Uh,” I said. “That was one.”
“Harry!” Ramirez said, backpedaling as best he could with the wounded leg, and bumped into me. I steadied him before he lost his balance. That damned knife was still sticking out of his calf.
A dozen more ghouls were charging us.
Everything slowed down, the way it sometimes does when fresh adrenaline shifts me into overdrive.
The cavern had gone insane. The ghouls had been there for maybe thirty seconds, but there were several dozen of them at least, with more pouring out of the neat oval gate on the other side of the cavern. The ghouls had apparently attacked everyone with equal amounts of ferocity and fury. More of them had poured into the Malvoran and Skavis contingent than the Raith side, but that might have been a function of simple numbers
and proximity.
The vampires, most of them unarmed and unprepared for a fight, had been taken off guard. That doesn’t mean as much to vamps as it does to regular folks, but the walls had been splattered with pale blood where the ghouls had rushed in among them, and the battle now raging was horrific.
In one spot, Lady Malvora ripped the arm from a ghoul’s socket, her skin gone marble-white and hard-looking, and proceeded to beat it about the head and shoulders with its own detached limb. The ghoul went down with a shattered skull, but four more of the creatures buried the White Court noblewoman under their weight and power, and literally ripped her to pieces in front of my eyes.
Elsewhere, a male vampire picked up an eight-foot-long sofa and slammed its end down onto a pair of ghouls ripping at the body of a fallen thrall. Still elsewhere, Lord Skavis had rallied a number of his retainers to him, standing off against the maddened ghouls like a rock ignoring a flash flood—for the moment, at least.
Other sights weren’t nearly so pleasant.
A vampire, trying to flee, tripped over a human thrall, a girl no more than eighteen, and dealt her a blow of his fist in pure frustration, snapping her neck. He was brought down by ghouls a breath later. Elsewhere, other vampires seemed to have lost control of their demonic Hunger completely, and they had thrown down whatever thralls they could seize, with no regard for gender or for what their particular favorite food might be. One thrall, writhing under a Skavis, was screaming and pushing her thumbs into her own eyes. Another shuddered under the fear-compulsion of a Malvora, clearly in the midst of a seizure or heart attack, right up until a tide of ghouls overran predator and prey alike. The Raith didn’t seem to be as wholly frenzied as the other Houses—or maybe they’d just eaten more today. I saw only a couple of thralls downed by them, being torn out of their clothes and ravaged on the stone.
Like those near Lord Skavis, a core of organization had formed around Lara and her father. Someone—I saw a flash of Justine’s terrified face—was holding a little air horn up and triggering it wildly. I spotted Vitto Malvora, charging the ghouls around his fallen aunt—and watched as he threw himself on the remains with an inhuman howl, and began feasting beside the creatures who had killed her.
It had taken seconds for intrigue to devolve into insanity in a thousand simultaneous nightmare-inducing vignettes—none of which I could afford to think significant, save one: the dozen ghouls plunging directly toward me like a football team on the kickoff, huge and fast and ferocious, charging me on a straight line from the enemy gate.
For a second, I thought I saw a dark shape in that gate, the suggestion of an outlined hood and cloak. It might have been Cowl. I’d have hit him with all the fire I could call if I’d had a second to spare, but I didn’t.
I brought my shield up as the ghouls came over the floor, and held it fast as the leader of the pack slammed into it in a flare of blue and silver light and a cloud of sparks. The ghoul only howled and began slamming at the barrier with his fists. Every single one hit with the energy of a low-speed car crash, and even with my nifty new bracelet, I could feel the surge of power I needed to keep the shield steady when each of the blows came thundering down.
Boots thudded behind me. Someone was shouting.
Bam, bam, bam. The ghoul slammed against my shield, and it was an almost painful effort to hold it.
“Justine!” Thomas screamed.
I wouldn’t be able to hold this ghoul off for long—which was all right, because the other eleven were going to go right around my shield while he forced me to hold it steady against him, and tear me into tiny pieces and eat me. Hopefully in that order.
Bootsteps thudded behind me, and a voice barked. A second ghoul, several steps in front of the rest, flung itself around my shield but was intercepted by Ramirez. It leaped at him and hit that gelatinous-looking green cloud of a shield he used.
What happened to the ghoul as its speed carried its whole mass all the way through the shield does not bear thinking on. But Ramirez was going to need new clothes.
Bam. Bam. BAM!
Murphy screamed, “Harry, Thomas, Ramirez, down!”
I dropped and dragged Carlos down with me, lowering my shield as I went. Thomas hit the ground a fraction of a second after I did.
And the world came apart in thunder. Sound hammered at my head and ears, and I found myself screaming in pain and shock, before I ground my teeth and shot a quick glance behind me, trying not to lift my head any higher than I had to.
Murphy knelt on the ground by my feet in her dark fatigues, body armor, black baseball cap, and amber safety glasses. She had a weird little rectangular gun about the size of a big box of chocolates held to one shoulder. It had a tiny little barrel, one of those little red dot optical sights, and Murphy’s cheek was laid on it, one eye aligned with the sight as she poured automatic fire into the oncoming ghouls in neat, chattering bursts that ripped the ghoul that had been pounding on my shield into a spray of broken bits. It went over backward, thrashing one arm and howling in agony.
Beside Murphy, playing Clifford the Big Red Dog to her Emily Elizabeth, was Hendricks. The huge redheaded enforcer was also kneeling and firing, but the gun he held to his shoulder was approximately the size of an intercontinental ballistic missile and spat out a stream of tracer rounds that ripped into the attacking creatures with a vengeance. Several men I recognized from Marcone’s organization were lined up next to him, all firing. So were several more men I didn’t recognize, but whose clothing and equipment were sufficiently different to make me think they were freelancers, hired for the job. A few more were still pouring through the open gate and into the cavern.
The ghouls were hardy as hell, but there is a difference between shrugging off a few rounds from a sidearm and wading through the disciplined hail of assault-weapon fire that Marcone’s people laid down on them. Had it been one man firing at one ghoul, it might have been different—but it wasn’t. There were at least twenty of them shooting into a packed mass, and they kept shooting, even after the targets were thrashing on the ground, until their guns were empty. Then they reloaded, and returned to firing. Marcone had given his men the instructions I’d advised—and I imagined the guns he had hired on must have been used to facing supernatural threats of this sort as well. Marcone was nothing if not resourceful.
Murphy stopped shooting and screamed something at me, but it wasn’t until Marcone stepped forward into the peripheral vision of the armed gunmen and held up a hand with a closed fist that they stopped firing.
For a second, nothing but a high, heavy tone buzzed in my ears, making me deaf to the other sounds in the cavern. The air was full of the sewer stench of wounded ghoul and the sharp scent of burning cordite. A swath of stone floor ten yards across and thirty deep had just been carpeted in pureed ghoul.
The fight was still going on all around us, but the main force of ghouls was concentrating on the hard-pressed vampires. We’d bought ourselves a temporary quiet spot, but it couldn’t last.
“Harry!” Murphy screamed over the merely horrific cacophony of the slaughter.
I gave her a thumbs-up. I pushed myself to my feet. Someone gave me a hand up and I took it gratefully—until I saw that it was Marcone, dressed in his black fatigues, holding a shotgun in his other hand. I jerked my fingers away as if he were more disgusting than the things fighting and dying all around us.
His cold green eyes wrinkled at the corners. “Dresden. If it’s all right with you, I think it would be prudent to retreat back through the gate.”
That was probably a very smart idea. The gate was six feet away from me. We could pull up stakes, hop through, and close it behind us. Gates to the spirit world paid absolutely no attention to trivial things like geography—they obeyed laws of imagination, intention, patterned thought. Even if Cowl was back there, he wouldn’t be able to open a gate to the same place as mine, because he didn’t think like me, feel like me, or share my intent and purpose.
Seeing fallout from the
war with the Red Court had convinced me that running when you didn’t have to fight was a really great idea. In fact, the Merlin had written a letter to the Wardens directing them to do so, rather than lose even more of our dwindling combat resources. If we hung around much longer, no one was getting out of this abattoir.
Thomas’s sword came down on a thrashing ghoul, and he shouted, with desperation bordering on madness, “Justine!” He spun to me. “Harry, help me!”
Leaving was smart.
But my brother wasn’t leaving. Not without the girl.
So I wasn’t leaving without her, either.
Come to think of it, there were a whole lot of people who didn’t need to be here. And, in point of fact, there were some damned compelling reasons to take them with us when we went. Those reasons didn’t make it any less dangerous, and they sure as hell didn’t make the idea any less scary, but that didn’t stop them from existing.
Without Lara’s peace initiative (fronted by her puppet father), the White Court would pitch in more heavily with the Reds than they already had. If I didn’t get Lara and her puppet out, what was already a grim war with the vampires would quite possibly become an impossible one. That was a damned good reason to stay.
But it wasn’t the one that kept me there.
I saw another ghoul tear into a helpless, unresisting thrall, closed my eyes for a second, and realized that if I did nothing to save as many as I could, I would never leave this cavern. Oh, sure, I might get out alive. But I’d be back here every time I closed my eyes.
“Dresden!” Marcone shouted. “I agreed to an extraction. Not to a war.”
“A war’s all we’ve got!” I shouted back. “We’ve got to get Raith out of this in one piece, or the whole thing was for nothing and no one pays you off!”
“No one will pay me off if I’m dead, either,” Marcone said.
I snarled and stepped closer, getting into Marcone’s face.
Hendricks rolled a half a step toward me and growled.
Murphy seized the huge man by one enormous paw, did something that involved his wrist and his index finger, and with a grunt Hendricks dropped to one knee while Murphy held one of his arms out straight behind him and angled painfully upward. “Take it easy, big guy,” she said. “Someone might get hurt.”
