by Jim Butcher
On the far side of the room one of the Denarians started screaming, a wail of agony. My eyes snapped up to Kincaid’s position. He was gone. A rope now dangled down over the foliage below where he’d hung, but he’d abandoned the exposed shooting position after taking down one more enemy, it would seem.
I found myself grinning. Fine. If that was the game, I could play too. Ready or not, here I come.
I pressed on through the ferns, angling over toward the amphitheater seats, and dropped into a sudden crouch as the low mutter of voices came to me.
“Where is she?” demanded a heavy, thick-sounding man’s voice.
I couldn’t see the source of the voices from amidst the fake wilderness until I glanced up. Light and shadow played together in the room and conspired to create a reflective surface for me upon one of the panels of glass on the ceiling. Three of the Denarians had gathered on the bleacher seats. The one who spoke looked like nothing so much as a big, leathery gorilla, except for the goat’s horns and heavy claws.
“Shut up, Magog,” snarled Mantis Girl. “I can’t think with you running your stupid mouth.”
“We’re nearly out of time,” Magog growled.
“She knows that,” snapped a third Denarian. I recognized this one, which looked like a woman, except for the reverse-jointed legs ending in panther claws, the bright red skin, and the mass of metallic, ten-foot-long, independently moving blades in place of hair. Deirdre, Nicodemus’s darling daughter. She turned back to Tessa. “But Magog has a point, Mother. Scent tracking has been useless.” She held up a small pink sock. “Bits of clothing with her scent on them have been scattered everywhere.”
“That’s the Hellhound’s work,” Magog spat, bright green eyes glowing brightly over dull, animalistic brown ones. “He’s fought us before.”
“He hunts us,” Deirdre said, “while she forces us to focus on piercing a veil. They work too well together. He’s killed two of us. Three if you count Urumviel.”
Tessa bounced the silver coin in her palm. “Urumviel’s vessel may have been killed by his own idiocy,” she said. Her insectoid eyes seemed to narrow. “Or perhaps the wizard managed to return before the Sign was raised.”
“You think that pathetic sot bested Father?” Deirdre said with scorn.
I bristled.
“He wouldn’t need to best him, you moron,” Tessa said. “Only to run faster. And it would explain why Thorned Namshiel hasn’t appeared as well.”
Yeah. If Spinyboy ever woke up, it would be with one hell of a Dresden hangover. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Deedee.
“The wizard is nothing,” Magog growled. “If the girl is not found, and swiftly, none of this will matter to us.”
Tessa snapped her fingers and once again did that disgusting little trick where the mouth of the mantis form opened and the head of a pretty young girl emerged, smiling. “Of course,” she said, looking at Deirdre. “I should have thought of it sooner.”
Deirdre tilted her head. Blades whispered murderously against one another at the gesture. “Of what?”
“The entire strength of this plan is predicated upon attacking the child, not the Archive,” Tessa said, her smile turning vicious. “Ignore the girl. Bring me the Hellhound.”
Chapter Thirty-two
It took me about a second to see what Mantis Bitch had in mind, and half that long to hate her for it.
Ivy didn’t have a family. Until I’d given one to her, she hadn’t even had a name. She’d just been “the Archive.” What she had was a world of power and responsibility and knowledge and danger—and Kincaid. While the Archive would know that the proper decision would be to allow Kincaid to die in order to protect the sanctity of the Archive, Ivy wouldn’t be making the decision with the same detached calm. Kincaid was the closest thing she had to family. She wouldn’t let them hurt him. She couldn’t.
Damn them, to take a little girl’s loneliness and use it against her like that.
Grand schemes and sweeping plans to bring doom and darkness are all fine and scary, but they at least have the advantage of being impersonal. This was simple, calculated, cruel malice deliberately aimed at a child—a child—and it pissed me off.
Deirdre was closest. Fine.
I stepped out of the ferns, swept my staff in a broad backhanded swing, and unleashed some of the power I’d been painfully holding back, snarling, “Ventas servitas!”
A burst of wind gathered underneath Deirdre, lifting her out of the amphitheater seats and throwing her out over the pool like a dart shot from a child’s air gun. I’d thrown her at the nearest section of the pentagram’s beam, but the instant she’d gone airborne those snakelike strips of her hair had fanned out like a tattered parachute and begun thrashing at the air, slowing her and changing her course.
I didn’t stop to watch where she landed. Magog spun before Deirdre’s feet were more than a yard off the ground and broke into one of those diagonal simian charges, coming right up the bleachers as smoothly as if they’d been level ground. Forget what I’d said about not reacting quickly. Magog’s reaction time had been nothing, if not a little less. He had to have checked in at seven or eight hundred pounds, and he covered the forty feet between us in the space of a couple of seconds, the acceleration incredible.
Of course, reacting quickly isn’t always the same thing as reacting intelligently. Magog looked like he was used to being an unstoppable force.
I brought up my shield bracelet, slamming my will through it, pushing most of the painful load of power still remaining to me into the barrier that sprang to life. I shouted out in wordless challenge, my voice thin and strained beside the deep-chested bellow that Magog unleashed in answer. Normally my shield manifests as a shimmering dome of mixed blue and silver light.
This time I left it transparent, on the theory that what Magog didn’t know would hurt him. The shapeshifted Denarian slammed into the invisible barrier in an explosion of silver sparks and found it as immovable as the side of a mountain. The force of the gorilla-thing’s charge was not simply physical, though, and ugly red light clung to the silver power of my defenses. Excess energy bled through my bracelet as heat, scalding my skin—but the barrier held, and Magog staggered back, stunned.
“Hey,” I said as I let the shield fall. “Where’s an eight-hundred-pound gorilla sit?” I took a step forward and kicked him as hard as I could, right in the coconuts, then followed up with a stomping kick to the neck. Magog shrieked in agony and went tumbling back down the bleachers. “Somewhere with lots of extra cushions, I guess, eh, Monkeyboy?”
My instincts screamed a warning at me, and I threw myself down behind the last row of bleacher seats just as Mantis Bitch pointed a finger at me and screamed, “Amal-bijal!” There was a crash of thunder, a flash of light, a wash of heat, and a cloud of glowing splinters flew up a few feet away, where a section of seating had been a second before.
Hell’s bells. A sorceress. A damned dangerous one, too.
I readied my shield, already acutely aware of how little energy remained to me. I kept it small, maybe three feet across, and had started to rise when I saw a shape flit into my peripheral vision above me: Tessa, in the middle of an airborne leap. She cried out again, and I yelped and pulled into a tight fetal curl behind my shield as another bolt of lightning ripped through the air.
Pressure slammed my shoulders against concrete floor. Light blinded me, and sound deafened me, leaving my world nothing but one long white tone. My lungs forgot their job for a couple of seconds, but my legs were on the ball, scrambling to get beneath me.
I had just managed to sort out where I was when another deafening flash and crack hit somewhere close and flung me to the ground again. And then a third. I tried to keep my shield up, but I couldn’t see anything but yellow spots, and there wasn’t anything left to put into it, anyway. It was like walking along and suddenly finding myself without any floor—which happened more literally a second later, when I tripped over a bleacher seat and fell a
couple of rows down, banging myself up pretty well in the process.
Some dazed part of me realized that I’d made a mistake in my assumptions. Tessa wasn’t trying to take me out. She was just trying to keep me dazed and disoriented long enough for her people to arrive. That same part of me realized, even more belatedly, that I’d let myself be goaded into attacking by their words, let my heart rule my decision instead of playing it smart.
Something slapped my staff out of my hand. I went for my gun, only to be slammed to the ground by another terrific physical force. Then something like an iron bar slammed across my throat.
The light spots began to clear away in time for me to see a Denarian I’d never seen before atop me, this one like an androgynous, naked, bald statue of obsidian, green eyes glowing above human eyes of bright blue. A second shapeshifted creature, this one covered in a shaggy coat of grey, dusty-looking feathers, its face a grey mass of fleshy, hanging tendrils, had my wrists pinned to the ground.
Tessa stood over me, watching something on the far side of the room, her eyes narrowed. “Don’t choke him out,” she snapped. “He can’t talk if he’s unconscious.”
The obsidian statue eased up the pressure on my neck a little.
“Report,” Tessa said.
“We think the Hellhound is hiding in the bathrooms,” came a strained-sounding, harsh woman’s voice.
“You think?”
“Varthiel and Ordiel are down and McKullen is dead. They were searching there. The exit is watched. There’s no way for him to escape the room.”
“Their coins?” Tessa asked.
“Recovered, my lady.”
“Thank you, Rosanna. Any other word?”
“We’ve found Thorned Namshiel, unconscious and gravely wounded. There was extensive damage all around the area in which he fell.”
“Yes. And yet it was done fairly quietly. It seems our intelligence on our young wizard thug was faulty.”
Someone, presumably Mantis Bitch, kicked me in the ribs. It hurt. There wasn’t much I could do about it other than try to suck in a breath.
“Very well,” Tessa said. “Take Magog and Deirdre for the Hellhound. Take him alive. Do it within the next five minutes.”
“Yes, my lady,” Rosanna rasped. What sounded like hooves clopped away.
Tessa stepped into view again, sweetly pretty face visible atop the monstrous body. She was smiling. “You’re all kinds of feisty, boy. It’s cute. The sort of thing my husband likes in his recruits.” She kicked me again. “I find it endlessly annoying, personally. But I’m willing to play nice, since we might work together in the future. I’ll give you this chance to cooperate. Tell me where the little girl is.”
“I wish I knew,” I panted. “That way I could exercise free will while telling you to go fuck yourself.”
She let out a playful little laugh and reached down to tweak my broken nose.
Okay.
Ow.
“They say to give a man three chances to say no,” she said.
“Save us both time and breath,” I said. “No, twice. That’s three.”
“Suit yourself,” Tessa said.
She reached into the pocket of my duster, withdrew my revolver, pointed it at my head, and pulled the trigger.
I had just enough time to gawk and think, Wait, wait, this isn’t right.
The muzzle flashed.
There was a loud noise.
I reached for power, tried to shield, but there was simply nothing there, nothing to use. The magic was gone.
So it had to be someone else’s spell that neatly intersected the bullet’s course and bounced it into the shaggy-feathered thing holding my arms.
My stomach sank as I realized what was happening.
Ivy must have been there all along, quietly sitting on the bleachers, hidden by her veil from everything that was going on. Now she stood perhaps ten feet away, just a young girl, her expression solemn—but her eyes and cheeks were bright with tears.
“Get away from him,” she said quietly. “All of you. I will not permit you to hurt him.”
I hadn’t really extended my line of thinking beyond Kincaid. But of all the people who had dealt with the Archive, I’d been one of the only ones to take any interest in her as anything but a font of knowledge. I’d been the one to inquire after her personally. I’d been the one to give her a name. Sad but true, I was the closest thing that little girl had to a friend.
She couldn’t have let anything happen to me, either.
I’d just handed her to the Denarians.
Tessa threw back her head and loosed a long, triumphant cry.
Chapter Thirty-three
“Ivy,” I said in that tone you use with children who are up past their bedtime. I’m better at it than you’d think, after so much time working with an apprentice. “Get that veil back up and get out of here.”
Tessa kicked me in the ribs again, hard enough to keep me from breathing much or talking at all. “When I want an opinion from you, Dresden,” she said, “I’ll read it in your entrails.”
Ivy took two steps forward at Tessa’s gesture and narrowed her blue eyes. “For the benefit of the slow, Polonius Lartessa, I will repeat myself. I will not allow you to harm him. Step away.”
Tessa’s eyes narrowed suddenly. “You know my name.”
“I know everything about you, Lartessa,” Ivy said, her tone flat, passionless. “It was all recorded, of course. Everything was, in Thessalonica in those days. Your father’s failing business. Your sale to the temple of Isis. If you like, I could draw you a cost-benefit analysis of your training versus your earnings in your first year at the temple, before Nicodemus came. I could use charts to make it easier for you to understand. And color them in with crayons. I enjoy crayons.”
I wasn’t certain, but it sounded like the kid was trying to give the bad guys some guff on my behalf. She needed to work on her technique, but it was the thought that counted. If I could breathe, I might have gotten a little choked up.
“Do you think I’m intimidated that you know where I come from, child?” Tessa snarled.
“I know more about you than you do,” Ivy replied, her voice steady. “I know far more precisely than you how many you’ve harmed. How many bad situations you’ve made worse. Cambodia, Colombia, and Rwanda most recently, but whether in this century, the Wars of the Roses or the Hundred Years’ War, your story is the same stupid little story, told over and over again. You learned your lessons when you were a child, and you’ve never swerved from them. You’re a vulture, Lartessa. A maggot. You survive on diseased flesh and rotting meat. Anything whole and healthy frightens you.”
The little girl didn’t see the Denarian that came creeping through the ferns behind her and flung itself at her back, several hundred pounds of scales and fangs.
“Ivy!” I choked out.
She had it covered. There was a flash of light, an overwhelming scent of ozone and fresh laundry, and a silver denarius rolled away from a mound of ash that fell to the ground without ever getting within three feet of the small form of the Archive. The coin rolled past her, on a straight line toward Tessa—but Ivy stomped on it with one small shoe, flattening it to the floor and preventing it from returning to Tessa’s grasp.
“Tiny,” I said, in an overblown imitation of Sanya’s Russian accent, unable to keep a crazed giggle out of my voice. “But fierce.”
Tessa regarded the fallen coin with a faint smile. “Costly. How many such spells do you think you can manage before you are out of energy, little one?”
Ivy shrugged. “How many minions can you throw away? How many will be willing to die for you?”
Tessa called out, “Around her, everyone. Make sure she knows where you are.”
And nightmarish forms rose around the little girl, huge beside her single, slender little form. Deirdre, soaked and smelling of dead fish and seawater, gave me a sullen glare as she mounted the steps beside her mother. The shaggy-feathered thing that still held my
hands bled quietly, keening under its breath. It was wounded, but it still kept my arms pinned. Magog came monkeying up over a bit of landscaping, grinning an evil grin, and I wondered where the hell Kincaid had wandered off to. The obsidian statue shifted its weight, keeping one hand resting on my chest—I had the feeling it could have shoved it right through to my spine if it wanted to.
There were half a dozen others. Rosanna proved to be a rather beautiful-looking woman, the classical demoness with scarlet skin and a goat’s legs, complete with leathery black wings and delicately curling horns—though her deep brown eyes were haunted beneath the demonic green glowing set. She had a bag slung on a strap over her shoulder, just like Spinyboy—Tessa had called him Thorned Namshiel—had carried with him. Most of the others just looked big and mean, in various unsettling flavors.
I guess even in Hell, it’s easier to find strong backs than strong brains.
Ivy faced them and lifted her arms into a pose that vaguely resembled a defensive martial arts stance. It wasn’t. She was preparing to manipulate defensive energies. I just hadn’t ever seen anyone getting ready to do two entirely separate spells in either hand at the same freaking time before.
Two questions occurred to me at that point. First, if the plan was for the Denarians to wear Ivy’s magic down and then take her by main force before their trap ran out of power, why weren’t they doing it already? And second…
What was that hissing sound?
It rose up around us, something I could just barely hear until I focused my senses on it, tuning out the musty reek and iron blood-scent of Shaggy Feathers and the cold solidity of Obsidian Statue’s hand.
A definite, steady hissing sound, like air escaping from a tire or…
Or hair spray issuing forth from a can.
