by Jim Butcher
There wasn’t time enough to help both groups, and even less to waste over the moral dilemma of a difficult choice.
I turned the rod on the beastie chasing Charity and let it have it. The blast hit it in the small of its back and knocked it from its hooves. It flew sideways, slamming into the wall of the workshop, and Charity dashed through the door with her daughter.
I turned my blasting rod back to the other creature, but I already knew that I wouldn’t be in time. The creature lowered its horns and closed on Molly and her siblings before I could line up for another shot.
“Molly!” I screamed.
My apprentice seized Alicia’s and Matthew’s hands, gasped out a word, and all three of them abruptly vanished.
The creature’s charge carried it past the space they’d been in, though something I couldn’t see struck its hoof and sent it staggering. It wheeled around at full speed, kicking up snow as it did, and I felt a sudden, fierce surge of exaltation and pride. The grasshopper might not be able to put up a decent shield, but she could do veils like they were going out of style, and she’d kept her focus and her wits about her.
The creature slowed, head sweeping, and then it saw the snow being disturbed by invisible feet, moving toward the house. It bawled out another unworldly cry and went after them, and I didn’t dare risk another blast of flame—not with the Carpenters’ house in the line of fire. So instead I lifted my right hand, triggered one of the triple-layered rings on it with my will, and sent a burst of raw force at the whatsit.
The unseen energy struck it in the knees, throwing its legs out from under it with such strength that its head slammed into the snow. The disturbance in the snow rushed around toward the front door of the house. Molly must have realized that the deformation of the security door would make it difficult, if not impossible, to open, and once again I felt fierce approval.
But it faded rather rapidly when the whatsit that had been playing possum behind me slammed into the small of my back like a sulfur-and-rotten-egg-driven locomotive.
The horns hit hard and it hurt like hell, but the defensive magic on my long black leather duster kept them from impaling me. The impact knocked the wind out of me, snapped my head back sharply, and flung me to the snow. Everything got confusing for a second, and then I realized that it was standing over me, ripping at the back of my neck with its claws. I hunched my shoulders and rolled, only to be kicked in the nose by a cloven hoof, and an utterly gratuitous amount of pain came with a side order of whirling stars.
I kept trying to get away, but my motions were sluggish, and the whatsit was faster than me.
Charity stepped out of the workshop with a steel-hafted ball-peen hammer in her left hand, and a heavy-duty contractor’s nail gun in her right.
She lifted the nail gun from ten feet away and started pulling the trigger as she walked forward. It made phut-phut-phut sounds, and the already seared whatsit started screaming in pain. It leapt up wildly, twisting in agonized gyrations in midair, and fell to the snow, thrashing. I saw heavy nails sticking up out of its back, and the smoking wounds were bleeding green-white fire.
It tried to run, but I managed to kick its hooves out from under it before it could regain its footing.
Charity whirled the hammer in a vertical stroke, letting out a sharp cry as she did, and the steel head of the tool smashed open the whatsit’s skull. The wound erupted with greyish matter and more green-white fire, and the creature twitched once before it went still, its body being consumed by the eerie flame.
I stood up, blasting rod still in hand, and found the remaining beasties wounded but mobile, their yellow, rectangular-pupiled eyes glaring in hate and hunger.
I ditched the blasting rod and picked up a steel-headed snow shovel that had been left lying next to one of the children’s snow forts. Charity raised her nail gun, and we began walking toward them.
Whatever these things were, they didn’t have the stomach for a fight against mortals armed with cold steel. They shuddered as if they had been a single being, then turned and bounded away into the night.
I stood there, panting and peering around me. I had to spit blood out of my mouth every few breaths. My nose felt like someone had superglued a couple of live coals to it. Little silver wires of pain ran all through my neck, from the whiplash of getting hit from behind, and the small of my back felt like one enormous bruise.
“Are you all right?” Charity asked.
“Faeries,” I muttered. “Why did it have to be faeries?”
Chapter Two
“Well,” Charity said, “it’s broken.”
“You think?” I asked. The light touch of her fingers on my nose was less than pleasant, but I didn’t twitch or make any sounds of discomfort while she examined me. It’s a guy thing.
“At least it isn’t out of place,” Michael said, knocking snow off of his boots. “Getting it set back is the sort of thing you don’t mind forgetting.”
“Find anything?” I asked him.
The big man nodded his head and set a sheathed broadsword in a corner against the wall. Michael was only a couple of inches shorter than me, and a lot more muscular. He had dark hair and a short beard, both of them peppered with silver, and wore blue jeans, work boots, and a blue-and-white flannel shirt. “That corpse is still there. It’s mostly a burned mess, but it didn’t dissolve.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Faeries aren’t wholly beings of the spirit world. They leave corpses behind.”
Michael grunted. “Other than that there were footprints, but that’s about it. No sign that these goat-things were still around.” He glanced into the dining room, where the Carpenter children were gathered at the table, talking excitedly and munching the pizza their father had been out picking up when the attack occurred. “The neighbors think the light show must have come from a blown transformer.”
“That’s as good an excuse as any,” I said.
“I thank God no one was hurt,” he said. For him it wasn’t just an expression. He meant it literally. It came of being a devout Catholic, and maybe from toting around a holy sword with one of the nails from the Crucifixion wrought into the blade. He shook himself and gave me a short smile. “And you, of course, Harry.”
“Thank Daniel, Molly, and Charity,” I said. “I just kept our visitors busy. Your family’s who got the little ones to safety. And Charity did all the actual smiting.”
Michael’s eyebrows went up, and he turned his gaze on his wife. “Did she now?”
Charity’s cheeks turned pink. She briskly swept up the various tissues and cloths I’d bloodied, and carried them out of the room to be burned in the lit fireplace in the living room. In my business, you don’t ever want samples of your blood, your hair, or your fingernail clippings lying around for someone else to find. I gave Michael the rundown of the fight while she was gone.
“My nail gun?” he asked, grinning, as Charity came back into the kitchen. “How did you know it was a faerie?”
“I didn’t,” she said. “I just grabbed what was at hand.”
“We got lucky,” I said.
Michael arched an eyebrow at me.
I scowled at him. “Not every good thing that happens is divine intervention, Michael.”
“True,” Michael said, “but I prefer to give Him the credit unless I have a good reason to believe otherwise. It seems more polite than the other way around.”
Charity came to stand at her husband’s side. Though they were both smiling and speaking lightly about the attack, I noticed that they were holding hands very tightly, and Charity’s eyes kept drifting over toward the children, as if to reassure herself that they were still there and safe.
I suddenly felt like an intruder.
“Well,” I said, rising, “looks like I’ve got a new project.”
Michael nodded. “Do you know the motive for the attack?”
“That’s the project,” I said. I pulled my duster on, wincing as the motion made me move my stiffening neck. “I thin
k they were after me. The attack on the kids was a diversion to give the one in the tree a shot at my back.”
“Are you sure about that?” Charity asked quietly.
“No,” I admitted. “It’s possible that they’re holding a grudge about that business at Arctis Tor.”
Charity’s eyes narrowed and went steely. Arctis Tor was the heart of the Winter Court, the fortress and sanctum sanctorum of Queen Mab herself. Some nasty customers from Winter had stolen Molly, and Charity and I, with a little help, had stormed the tower and taken Molly back by main force. The whole mess had been noisy as hell, and we’d pissed off an entire nation of wicked fae in the process of making it.
“Keep your eyes open, just in case,” I told her. “And let Molly know that I’d like her to stay here for the time being.”
Michael quirked an eyebrow at me. “You think she needs our protection?”
“No,” I said. “I think you might need hers.”
Michael blinked. Charity frowned quietly, but did not dispute me.
I nodded to both of them and left. Molly wasn’t rebelling against everything I told her to do purely upon reflex these days, but fait accompli remained the best way of avoiding arguments with her.
I shut the door to the Carpenter household behind me, cutting off the scent of hot pizza and the sound of loudly animated children’s voices, raucous after the excitement.
The November night was silent. And very cold.
I fought off an urge to shiver and hurried to my car, a beat-up old Volkswagen Beetle that had originally been powder blue, but was now a mix of red, blue, green, white, yellow, and now primer grey on the new hood my mechanic had scrounged up. Some anonymous joker who had seen too many Disney movies had spray-painted the number 53 inside a circle on the hood, but the car’s name was the Blue Beetle, and it was going to stay that way.
I sat looking at the warm golden light coming from the house for a moment.
Then I coaxed the Beetle to life and headed for home.
Chapter Three
“And you’re sure they were faeries?” Bob the skull asked.
I scowled. “How many other things get their blood set on fire when it touches iron and steel, Bob? Yes, I think I know a faerie when I get my nose broken by one.”
I was down in my lab, which was accessed by means of a trapdoor in my basement apartment’s living room and a folding wooden stepladder. It’s a concrete box of a room, deep enough under the rest of the boardinghouse I live in to be perpetually cool. In the summer that’s nice. Come winter, not so much.
The lab consisted of a wooden table running down the center of the room, and was surrounded on three sides by tables and workbenches against the outer wall of the room, leaving a narrow walkway around the table. The workbenches were littered with the tools of the trade, and I’d installed those white wire shelving units you can get pretty cheap at Wal-Mart on the walls above the benches, creating more storage space. The shelves were covered with an enormous variety of containers, from a lead-lined box to burlap bags, from Tupperware to a leather pouch made from the genital sac of, I kid you not, an actual African lion.
It was a gift. Don’t ask.
Candles burned around the room, giving it light and twinkling off the pewter miniature buildings on the center table, a scale model of the city of Chicago. I’d brought down a single writing desk for Molly—all the room I had to spare—and her own notebooks and slowly accumulating collection of gear managed to stay neatly organized despite the tiny space.
“Well, it looks like someone is holding Arctis Tor against you,” Bob said. The skull, its eye sockets glowing with orange flickers of light like candles you couldn’t quite see, sat on its own shelf on the uncluttered wall. Half a dozen paperback romance novels littered the shelf around it, and a seventh had fallen from the shelf and now lay on the floor, obscuring a portion of the silver summoning circle I’d installed there. “Faeries don’t ever forget a grudge, boss.”
I shook my head at the skull, scooped up the fallen book, and put it back on the shelf. “You ever heard of anything like these guys?”
“My knowledge of the faerie realms is mostly limited to the Winter end of things,” Bob said. “These guys don’t sound like anything I’ve run into.”
“Then why would they be holding the fight at Arctis Tor against me, Bob?” I asked. “Hell, we weren’t even the ones who really assaulted Winter’s capital. We just walked in on the aftermath and picked a fight with some of Winter’s errand boys who had swiped Molly.”
“Maybe some of the Winter Sidhe hired out the vengeance gig as contract labor. These could have been Wyldfae, you know. There’s a lot more Wyld than anything else. They could have been satyrs.” His eyelights brightened. “Did you see any nymphs? If there are satyrs, there’s bound to be a nymph or two somewhere close.”
“No, Bob.”
“Are you sure? Naked girl, drop-dead gorgeous, old enough to know better and young enough not to care?”
“I’d have remembered that if I’d seen it,” I said.
“Feh,” Bob said, his eyelights dwindling in disappointment. “You can’t do anything right, Harry.”
I rubbed my hand against the back of my neck. It didn’t make it hurt any less, but it gave me something to do. “I’ve seen these goat guys, or read about them before,” I said. “Or at least something close to them. Where did I put those texts on the near reaches of the Nevernever?”
“North wall, green plastic box under the workbench,” Bob provided immediately.
“Thanks,” I said. I dragged out the heavy plastic storage box. It was filled with books, most of them leather-bound, handwritten treatises on various supernatural topics. Except for one book that was a compilation of “Calvin and Hobbes” comic strips. How had that gotten in there?
I picked up several of the books, carried them to the part of the table that was modeled as Lake Michigan, and set them down. Then I pulled up my stool and started flipping through them.
“How was the trip to Dallas?” Bob asked.
“Hmmm? Oh, fine, fine. Someone was being stalked by a Black Dog.” I glanced up at the map of the United States hanging on the wall beneath Bob’s shelf on a thick piece of poster board. I absently plucked a green thumbtack from the board and poked it into Dallas, Texas, where it joined more than a dozen other green pins and a very few red ones, where the false alarms had been. “They contacted me through the Paranet, and I showed them how to give Fido the bum’s rush out of town.”
“This support network thing you and Elaine have going is really smart,” Bob said. “Teach the minnows how to gang up when a big fish shows up to eat them.”
“I prefer to think of it as teaching sparrows to band together and chase off hawks,” I said, returning to my seat.
“Either way, it means less exposure to danger and less work for you in the long run. Constructive cowardice. Very crafty. I approve.” His voice turned wistful. “I hear that they have some of the best strip clubs in the world in Dallas, Harry.”
I gave Bob a hard look. “If you’re not going to help me, at least don’t distract me.”
“Oh,” Bob said. “Check.” The romance I’d put back on the shelf quivered for a second and then flipped over and opened to the first page. The skull turned toward the book, the orange light from its eyes falling over the pages.
I went through one old text. Then two. Then three. Hell’s bells, I knew I’d seen or read something in one of these.
“Rip her dress off!” Bob shouted.
Bob the skull takes paperback romances very seriously. The next page turned so quickly that he tore the paper a little. Bob is even harder on books than I am.
“That’s what I’m talking about!” Bob hollered as more pages turned.
“They couldn’t have been satyrs,” I mumbled out loud, trying to draw my thoughts into order. My nose hurt like hell and my neck hurt like someplace in the same zip code. That kind of pain wears you down fast, even when you’re a wiz
ard who learned his basics while being violently bombarded with baseballs. “Satyrs have human faces. These things didn’t.”
“Weregoats?” Bob suggested. He flipped another page and kept reading. Bob is a spirit of intellect, and he multitasks better than, well, pretty much anybody. “Or maybe goatweres.”
I stopped for a moment and gave the skull an exasperated look. “I can’t believe I just heard that word.”
“What?” Bob asked brightly. “Weregoats?”
“Weregoats. I’m fairly sure I could have led a perfectly rich and satisfying life even if I hadn’t heard that word or enjoyed the mental images it conjures.”
Bob chortled. “Stars and stones, you’re easy, Harry.”
“Weregoats,” I muttered, and went back to reading. After finishing the fifth book, I went back for another armload. Bob shouted at his book, cheering during what were apparently the love scenes and heckling most of the rest, as if the characters had all been live performers on a stage.
Which would probably tell me something important about Bob, if I were an astute sort of person. After all, Bob himself was, essentially, a spiritual creature created from the energy of thought. The characters within a book were, from a certain point of view, identical on some fundamental level—there weren’t any images of them, no physical tangibility whatsoever. They were pictures in the reader’s head, constructs of imagination and ideas, given shape by the writer’s work and skill and the reader’s imagination. Parents, of a sort.
Did Bob, as he read his books and imagined their events, regard those constructed beings as…siblings, of some sort? Peers? Children? Could a being like Bob develop some kind of acquired taste for a family? It was entirely possible. It might explain his constant fascination with fictional subject matter dealing with the origins of a mortal family.
