by Jim Butcher
“Don’t move,” Marcone snarled—to his men, not to me. His eyes never wavered from mine. “Yes, Dresden?”
“I could tell you to do it or I’d strand you all in the Nevernever on the way home,” I said quietly. “I could tell you to help me or I’d close the gate, and we’d all die here. I could even tell you to do it or I’d burn you to ashes where you stand. But I won’t tell you that.”
Marcone narrowed his eyes. “No?”
“No. Threats won’t deter you. We both know that. I can’t force you to do anything, and we both know that, too.” I jerked my head at the cavern. “People are dying, John. Help me save them. God, please help me.”
Marcone’s head rocked back as if I’d slapped him. After a second he asked, “Who do you think I am, wizard?”
“Someone who can help them,” I said. “Maybe the only one.”
He stared at me with empty, opaque eyes.
Then he said, very quietly, “Yes.”
I felt a fierce smile stretch my mouth and turned to Ramirez at once. “Stay here with these guys and hold the gate.”
“Who are these people?” Ramirez said.
“Later!” I whirled back to Marcone. “Ramirez is with the Council, like me. Keep him covered and hold the gate.”
Marcone pointed at several of the men. “You, you, you. Guard this man and hold the gate.” He pointed out several more. “You, you, you, you, you, start rounding up anyone close enough to us to get to without undue risk and help them through.”
Men leaped to obey, and I felt impressed. I’d never seen Marcone quite like this before: animated, decisive, and totally confident despite the nightmare all around. There was a power to it, something that brought order to the terrifying chaos around us.
I could see why men followed him, how he had conquered the underworld of Chicago.
One of the hired guns cut loose with a burst of fire, still shockingly loud enough to make me flinch. “You know what else?” I asked Marcone. “I don’t really need this cave. Neither do you.”
Marcone narrowed his eyes at me, then nodded once, and said something over his shoulder to one of the hired guns. “Dresden, I would appreciate it if you would ask the sergeant to release my employee.”
“Murph,” I complained, “can’t you pick on someone your own size?” I took a second to admire Hendricks’s expression, but said, “We need him with his arm still attached.”
Murphy eased up on the pressure and then released Hendricks’s arm. The big man eyed Murphy, rubbing his arm, but regained his feet and his enormous machine gun.
“Harry,” Thomas said, voice tight. “We need to move.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thomas, Murphy, and…” We needed mass. “Hendricks, with me.”
Hendricks checked that with Marcone, who nodded.
“Follow me,” I told them. “Stay—What are you doing, Marcone?”
Marcone had accepted a weapon from one of his gunmen, a deadly little MAC-10 that could spew out about a berjillion bullets in a second or two. He checked it and clipped a strap hanging from it to a ring on his weapon harness. “I’m going with you. And you don’t have enough time to waste any more of it arguing with me about it.”
Dammit. He was right.
“Fine. Follow my lead and stay close. We’re going to go round up Lord Raith and get him and everyone else we can out of here before—”
Marcone abruptly raised his shotgun and put a blast through one of the nearer fallen ghouls that had begun to move. It thrashed, and he put a second shell into it. The ghoul stopped moving.
That was when I noticed that the black ichor that spewed from the ghouls was on the ground…
…and it was moving.
By itself.
The black fluid rolled and ran like liquid mercury, gathering together in little droplets, then larger gobs. Those, in turn, ran over the floor—uphill, in some cases—back toward broken ghoul bodies. As I watched, bits of missing flesh ripped from the ghouls began to fill in again as the ichor returned to their bodies. The one Thomas had beheaded actually came crawling back over the floor, having regained some of the use of its legs. It was holding its head up against the stump of its neck with its one arm, and the ichor was flowing from both the severed head and the stump, merging, reattaching it. I saw the ghoul’s jaws suddenly stretch, its eyes blink and then focus.
On me.
Holy crap.
Time. We didn’t have much time. If even the gutted and mangled ghouls could get back up again, there was no way the vampires were winning this one. The best they could hope for was to run—and when more vamps ran, more ghouls would be free to overwhelm us. Or possibly they’d do something even more disgusting than they already had, and we’d all puke ourselves to death.
“This just can’t get much more disturbing,” I muttered. “Follow me.”
I gripped my staff in both hands and charged ahead, into the mass of maddened vampires and ghouls, to save one monster from another.
Chapter Forty
I sprinted toward the little knot of struggling vampires around the White King, while dozens of über-ghouls ripped into the leading families of the White Court. I slipped on some slimy ichor, but didn’t fall on my ass. For me, that’s actually pretty good.
I noted more details on the way, and started trying to think ahead of the next few seconds. Assuming we got to the White King in one piece and convinced Lara to team up and follow us, then what? What was the next step?
At least a dozen ghouls bounded out the tunnel, heading up that long slope to the cave’s entrance. They’d be in a good position to stop Lara’s mortal security forces from pushing through the tunnel to rescue the King. Stopping a charge over open ground with firearms is one thing. Using a gun to charge a large, deadly, powerful predator in close quarters is a different proposition entirely—and not a winning one.
Naturally, the ghouls in the tunnel would also be in position to intercept anyone who tried to flee, which meant that we had to leave through the gate, which meant that if Ramirez and Marcone’s men lost it, we were screwed. And that meant that if Cowl was over there and saw what was going on, he would hardly sit by doing nothing.
I might be able to counter him if I were defending the gate. My skills aren’t fine, but I’m pretty strong, and I’m good at adapting them on the fly. Cowl had cleaned my clock in two fights already, but slowing and delaying him wasn’t the same as trying to wipe the walls with him. Even if I couldn’t be a real threat to him, personally, I could tie him up long enough to hold the gate until we could skedaddle.
Ramirez couldn’t. He was a dangerous combat wizard, but his skills just weren’t strong enough or broad enough to pose a significant obstacle to Cowl. If Cowl—or Vitto, for that matter—saw what was going on, and the ghouls concentrated on the gate…
The shrieks and roars of the struggle on our right suddenly got louder, and I saw the resistance around Lord Skavis and his henchmen suddenly buckle. The horrible glee of the ghouls rushing into the opening was almost more terrifying than the carnage that followed. I caught a glimpse of Vitto Malvora in the middle of the mess, shoving a ghoul toward a wounded vampire, snarling at others, giving orders. The largest of the ghouls were with Vitto.
“That vampire has the strongest and largest of those creatures with him!” Marcone called to me as we ran. “He’ll hit any pockets of resistance with them, use them as a hammer.”
“I can see that,” I snapped. “Murphy, Marcone, cover our right. Hendricks, Thomas, get ready to go in.”
“Go in where?” Hendricks asked.
I took my staff in hand, focused on the fight raging around the White King, and called up my will and Hellfire. “In the hole I’m about to make,” I growled. “Get them out.”
“They’re mostly…eating now. But the second we start to break them free,” Marcone cautioned from behind me, “these others are going to come after us.”
“I know,” I said. “I’ll handle it.”
I fel
t something warm press up against my lower back—Murphy’s shoulders. “We’ll make sure that—” Her voice broke off suddenly, and that boxy little submachine gun chattered in three quick bursts, punctuated by a single throaty roar from Marcone’s shotgun. “Holy crap, that was close.”
“Another,” Marcone warned, and the shotgun blasted again.
The air horn in Justine’s hand started blaring more desperately.
“Harry!” Thomas shouted.
“Go!” I shouted at Thomas and Hendricks. Then I leveled the staff at the nearest clump of the enormous ghouls and shouted, “Forzare!”
My will lashed out, leashed to Lasciel’s Hellfire, and rushed upon the ghouls, exploding in a sphere of raw force that blazed with flickers of sulfurous flame. It blew them up and outward like extras on the set of The A-Team, flying in high arcs. Some of them flew right through the falling curtain of water behind the throne and into the abyssal depths below. Others slammed hard into the nearest wall, and still others fell among the frenzied ghouls now finishing off Lord Skavis and his retainers.
Thomas and Hendricks charged forward. My brother had slipped his shotgun into a sheath over one shoulder, and now wielded his saber in one hand and that inward-bent knife in the other. The first ghoul he reached was still staggered from the blast that had sent his companions flying, and Thomas never gave him a chance to recover. The saber removed its arm, and a scything, upward-sweeping slash of the crooked knife struck its head from its shoulders. A vicious kick to the small of its back crunched into its spine and sent the maimed, beheaded creature flying into the next in the line.
Hendricks came in at Thomas’s side. The big man could not possibly overpower one of the ghouls, despite all the muscle, but he did have an important factor on his side: mass. Hendricks was a huge man, three hundred pounds and more, and once I saw him hit the ghouls, I no longer had any doubts about whether he had played football. He hit an unbalanced ghoul in the back, knocking the creature sprawling, slammed the stock of the huge gun into the neck of a ghoul who turned to follow Thomas’s motion, then ducked a shoulder and slammed it into the stunned creature’s flank, sending it sprawling.
Thomas hacked down another ghoul, Hendricks powered through a single creature who never had the chance to set itself against his locomotive rush, and we were suddenly faced with a line of savage goddesses bathed in black blood.
Lara stood in the center, her white robes pressed against her skin, soaked in the dark fluids leaking from crushed and broken ghouls, and it left absolutely nothing to the imagination. Her hair, too, had been soaked flat to her skull, and it clung to the skin of her black-spattered cheek and to the lines of her dark-stained throat. In each hand she held a long, wavy-bladed knife, long enough to qualify as a small sword, though God only knew where she’d concealed the weapons before. Her eyes were chrome silver, wide and triumphant, and I jerked my gaze away from them as I felt a mad desire just to stare and see what happened.
In that moment, Lara was more than simply a vampire of the White Court, a succubus, pale and deadly. She was a reminder of days gone by, when mankind paid homage to blood-soaked goddesses of war and death, revered the dark side of the protective maternal spirit, the savage core of the strength that still allowed tiny women to lift cars off of their children, or to turn upon their tormentors with newfound power. Lara’s power, at that moment, hovered around her, deadly in its primal seduction, its sheer strength.
On either side of her stood two of her sisters, all of them tall, all of them beautiful, all of them gorgeous and soaked in gore, all of them armed with those wavy-bladed short swords. I didn’t know any of them, but they stared at me with ravenous energy, with maddeningly seductive destruction spattered all over them, and it took me two or three seconds to remember what the hell was going on.
Lara swayed a step toward me, all the motion in her thighs and hips, her eyes brilliant and steady, focused on me, and I felt a sudden urge to kneel that vibrated in my brain and…elsewhere. I mean, how bad could that be? Just think of the view from down there. And it had been a long time since a woman had…
I dimly heard Murphy’s gun chattering again, and Marcone’s, and I shook my head and kept my feet. Then I scowled at Lara and croaked, “We don’t have time for this. Do you want out or not?”
“Thomas!” Justine cried. She appeared from behind Lara and the Raith sisters and threw herself bodily upon my brother. Thomas wrapped an arm around her without releasing his grip on his knife, and pressed her hard against him. I could see his profile as she held him back, and his face…was transported, I suppose. Thomas always had a certain look. Whether he was making a joke, working out, or giving me a hard time about something, the sense of him was always the same: self-contained, confident, pleased with himself and unimpressed with the world around him.
In Justine’s arms he looked like a man in mourning. But he bent his whole body to her, holding her with every fiber and sinew, not merely his arm, and every line of his face became softer, somehow, gentler, as though he had been suddenly relieved of an intolerable agony I had never realized he felt—though I noticed that neither he nor Justine touched each other’s skin.
“Ah,” Lara said. Her voice was a quavering, silvery thing, utterly fascinating and completely inhuman. “True love.”
“Dresden!” Marcone shouted. Hendricks spun away from where he had been staring at the Raith sisters with much the same expression I must have had, and stomped past me. I shortly heard him adding the racket of his big gun to that of Marcone’s and Murphy’s.
“Raith!” I shouted. “I propose an alliance between yours and mine, until we get out of here alive.”
Lara stared at me with her empty silver eyes for a second. Then she blinked them once, and they turned, darkening by a few degrees. They went out of focus for a moment, and she tilted her head. Lord Raith abruptly stepped forward, appearing from behind his daughters. “Naturally, Dresden,” he said in a smooth tone. Unless you knew what you were looking for, you’d never have seen the glassy shine in his eyes, or heard the slightly stilted cadence of his words. He put on a good act, but I had to wonder just how much of his mind Lara had left him. “Though I regard myself as bound by honor to see to your protection in the face of this treachery, I can only be humbled by the nobility of you offering me your—”
“Yeah, yeah, whatever, all right,” I snapped, glaring past him at Lara. “Run away now, speeches later.”
Lara nodded, and looked quickly around her. Maybe twenty of the Raith clan had survived the fight. The remaining ghouls had sprung away during our unexpected assault, and now prowled in circles around us well out of arm’s reach, but close enough to rush back in if they saw a weakness. They were waiting for the others to finish off the last of the Skavis and Malvora. Once they got here, they’d overrun us easily.
Near the gate, Marcone’s soldiers had a steady line of white-robed thralls moving out of the cavern. There were rather more of them still alive than I had supposed there would be, until I saw that the circling ghouls were largely ignoring the passive thralls, focused instead on what they knew to be the real threat—the keepers of the mind-numbed herds.
“Dresden!” Marcone shouted. His shotgun boomed once more and then clicked empty. I heard him feeding new shells in as Murphy’s gun chattered. “They’re coming.”
I grunted acknowledgment and said to Lara, “Bring the thralls.”
“What?”
“Bring the bloody thralls!” I snarled. “Or you can damned well stay here!”
Lara gave me a look that might have made me a little nervous about getting killed if I weren’t such a stalwart guy, but then Lord Raith snapped to the vamps around him, “Bring them.”
I turned, drawing more Hellfire into the staff, and knew that I wasn’t going to be able to manage much more in the way of magic. I had just done too much, and I was on my last legs. I had to pull off one more spell if any of us were going to make it out. Murphy’s gun kept rattling away, as did Hend
ricks’s, and I could hear gunfire coming from the soldiers around the gate now, as well, as the ghouls on the opposite side of the cavern began to turn from the ruined remains of the leaders of House Skavis and Malvora.
“Go!” I said. “Go, go, go!”
We headed for my gate. The vampires seized thralls as they went, tossing them into the center of the group, forming a ring around them. Raith formed the core of the group, with his daughters and their swords around him—and the thralls forming a thick human shield around them, in turn. Trust Lara to turn what she had seen as a hindrance to her advantage. It was the way her mind worked.
We started out at a quick pace—and then an almost-human voice cried out, there was a surge of magic that flashed against my wizard’s senses, and the lights went out.
The cavern’s lighting had been of excellent quality. It had remained functional all through the duel, despite the magic Ramirez and I had been hurling around, and through the opening of not one, but two gates to the Nevernever. That implied that Raith had invested in lighting with a long track record of high performance and reliability, to continue functioning through so much—but there’s never been an electrical system a wizard couldn’t put down with a little direct effort, and this one was no exception.
Even as I lifted my staff to call up more light, my brain was paddling up the logic stream. Vittorio had seen us making a break for it—or Cowl had, though again, I had to remind myself that Cowl’s presence was still theoretical, however well supported by circumstantial evidence the theory might be. Killing the lights wasn’t going to be a hindrance to the vampires or to the ghouls, which meant that he was trying to hamper us people. Sinking the cavern into Stygian blackness would make Marcone’s troops almost impotent, hamper and slow any of the escaping thralls, therefore slowing the vampires apparently intent upon protecting them.
