by Jim Butcher
“Uh-oh,” I said. I held up the chemical light and started scanning the waters all around us.
“Harry?” Michael said. “What is it?”
“Feel that breeze?” I asked.
“Da,” Sanya said, confusion in his voice. “Is warm. So?”
Michael caught on. “Summer is on the way,” he said.
Rosanna shot a glance over her shoulder at us. “What?”
“Get us to shore,” I told her. “The things coming after me might not give a damn if they take you out along with me.”
She turned back to the wheel and turned the ignition. The boat’s engine stuttered and wheezed and didn’t turn over.
The breeze picked up. Instead of snowflakes, thick, slushy drops of half-frozen sleet began to fall. More ice began forming on the boat, thickening almost visibly in the green glow of my light. The waves began to grow steeper, rocking the boat more and more severely.
“Come on,” I heard myself saying. “Come on.”
“Look there!” Sanya called, pointing a finger down at the water beside the boat.
Something long, brown, fibrous, and slimy lashed up out of the water and wrapped around the Russian knight’s arm from wrist to elbow.
“Bozhe moi!”
Two more strands whipped up from different angles, one seizing Sanya’s upper arm, one wrapping around his face and skull, and jerked him halfway from the boat in the time it took me to shift my weight and reach for him. I managed to grab one of his boots before he could be pulled all the way over the side into the water. I planted one foot on the wall of the boat and hauled on Sanya’s leg for all I was worth. “Michael!”
The boat’s engine coughed, turned over, stuttered, and died.
“In nomine Dei Patri!” Michael roared as Amoracchius cleared its sheath. The broadsword flashed in a single sweeping slash, and severed the strands strangling Sanya. The edges of the slashed material burned away from the touch of Amoracchius’s steel like paper from an open flame.
I dragged Sanya back into the boat, and the big Russian whipped his saber from its sheath just in time to neatly sever another lashing brown tendril of animate fiber. “What is it?”
“Kelpies,” I growled. If they tangled up the blades of the engine our boat wasn’t going anywhere. I howled at Rosanna, “Come on!”
The boat suddenly rocked violently to the other side. I twisted my head to look over my shoulder and saw kelpies coming up over the sides. They were slimy, nebulous things, only vaguely humanoid in shape, made up of masses of wet weeds with gaping mouths and pinpoints of glittering silver light for eyes.
I turned and swept my arm in a slewing arc, unleashing my will as I cried out, “Forzare!”
Invisible force ripped the kelpies from the sides of the boat, leaving long strands of wet plant matter clinging limply to the fiberglass hull. They let out gurgling screams as they flew back and splashed into the water.
The boat’s engine caught and rose to a roar. The rear end of the boat sank, and its nose rose as it surged forward.
One of my feet flew out from underneath me. I went down, flailing my arms and legs, dimly aware that one of the kelpies had somehow gotten a limb tangled around my ankle. I got dragged to the back of the boat in a quick series of painful jerks and impacts, and had just enough time to realize that the boat was about to surge right out from under me, leaving me in the drink. Then it would just be a question of what killed me first—the icy water or the strangling embrace of the company within it.
Then there was a flash of scarlet and white, a whistle and a hissing sound, and a lance of fire on one of my feet. I went into free fall and bounced into the rear wall of the boat, then to the floor. Icy rain and freezing water splashed up against me, viciously cold. I looked down to find a strand of fibrous weed curling and blackening as it fell from my bleeding ankle. Sanya reached down and plucked the remains clear of my leg before tossing it over the rear of the boat and back into the water. My ankle was bleeding, my blood black in the green chemical light. More black stained the tip of Esperacchius.
I clutched at my ankle, hissing in pain. “Dammit, Sanya!”
Sanya peered out at the darkness behind the boat and then down at my leg. “Ah. Oops.”
Michael came back to kneel beside me and hunkered down over my foot. “Harry, hold still.” He poked at my ankle, and it hurt enough to make me snarl something about his parentage. “It isn’t bad. Long but shallow.” He opened a leather case on his sword belt, opposite the sheath of Amoracchius, and withdrew a small medical kit. Sanya’s sword had already slashed open my jeans, but Michael tore them a little more to get them out of the way of the cut. Then he cleaned the injury with some kind of disposable wipe, smeared it with something from a plastic tube, covered it with a thick white absorbent bandage, and wrapped it in tape. It took him all of two or three minutes, his hands quick and sure, which was just as well. By the time he was done the shock of the injury had worn off, and the hurt had started up.
“Not much to be done about the pain,” he said. “Sorry, Harry.”
“Pain I can live with,” I said, wincing. “Just give me a minute.”
“I am sorry, Dresden,” Sanya said.
“Yeah. Don’t you dare save my life ever again,” I told him. Then I lifted my leg onto one of the benches in the back of the boat to elevate it, and closed my eyes. There were a lot of ways to manage pain besides drugs. Granted, most of them wouldn’t help you much, unless you’d had several years of training in focus and concentration, but fortunately I had. Lasciel’s shadow had shown me a mental technique for blocking pain so effective that it was a little scary—when I’d used it before, I’d pushed myself until my body had collapsed, because I hadn’t been aware of exactly how bad my condition was. I could have died as a result.
Body or mind, heart or soul, we’re all human, and we’re supposed to feel pain. You cut yourself off from it at your own risk.
That said, given what was ahead of us and coming up behind us, I could hardly put myself in any more danger, relatively speaking, and I couldn’t afford any distractions. So I closed my eyes, controlled my breathing, focused my mind, and began to methodically wall away the pain of my new injury, my broken nose, my aching body. It took me a couple of minutes, and by the time I was done the pitch of the boat’s engine had changed, dropping from a roar to a lower growl.
I opened my eyes to find Sanya and Michael standing on either side of me, swords in hand, watching over me. Up at the front of the boat Rosanna cut the engine still more and turned her head to stare intently at me for a slow beat. The side of her mouth curved up in a slight, knowing smile. Then she turned to face front again, and I realized that there was light enough to see the outline of her delicately curling demon horns.
I rose and found myself staring at an island that rose from the increasingly turbulent waters of the lake. It was covered in the woods and brush of the midwestern United States—lots of trees less than a foot thick, with the space beneath them filled in with brush, thickets, and thorns to a depth of four or five feet. Snow lay over everything, and the light reflecting from it was what let me see Rosanna’s profile.
The shoreline was covered in what looked like an old Western ghost town—only one that had been abandoned for so long that the trees had come back to reclaim the space. Most of the buildings had fallen down. Trees rose out of most of the ones that hadn’t, and the sight reminded me, somehow, of an insect collection: empty shells pinned to a card. A sign, weathered beyond reading, hung from its only remaining link of rusting chain. It swung in the wind, aged metal squeaking. There was the skeleton of an old dock down at the shoreline, all broken wooden columns, standing up out of the water like the stumps of rotten teeth.
Looking at the place filled me with a sense of awareness of the attention of an empty, sterile malevolence. This place did not like me. It did not want me there. It did not have the least regard for me, and the corpse of the little town ahead of me was a silent declaration t
hat it had fought against folk like me before—and won.
“Gee,” I called to Rosanna. “Are you sure this is the right place?”
She pointed silently up. I followed the direction of her finger, up the slope of the island, and spotted the light I’d seen from farther out in the lake—definitely a bonfire, I saw now, up on a hill above the town, at what looked like the highest point on the island. Something stood starkly against the sky there, the dark shape of a building or tower, though I couldn’t make out any details.
Rosanna cut the engine completely, and the boat glided silently forward to the broken wooden post nearest the shore. She climbed into the front of the boat and was waiting with a rope when the prow of the vessel bumped the column. She tied the boat to the post, then hopped down into the water and waded the rest of the way ashore.
“Oh, good,” I muttered. “More wet.”
From back behind us, the still-rising wind carried forward a gurgling, warbling cry. I’d been up north a few times, and it might have been the call of a loon—but all of us there knew better. Summer was still on our trail.
“We aren’t going to make it any drier by waiting here,” Michael said quietly.
“There are men in those trees,” Sanya murmured, sheathing his sword and taking up the Kalashnikov again. “Thirty yards up, there, and over there. Those are machine-gun positions.”
I grunted. “Let’s get moving. Before they get bored and decide to start making like this is Normandy.”
“God go with us,” Michael prayed quietly.
I unlimbered my shotgun and said, “Amen.”
Chapter Forty-two
Michael had planned ahead. He had a dozen chemical heat bags with him, the kind made for hunters to slip inside the wristbands of their coats. He passed them around to us, and we put them inside our socks after we waded ashore. Otherwise I don’t know if we would have made it through the snow up that hill, not with our pants soaked to the knees.
Rosanna, of course, wasn’t having any issues with the weather. With her wings draped around her like a cloak, the demonic form she wore seemed inured to the cold, and her cloven hooves moved along the frozen, stony hillside as nimbly as a mountain goat’s, her barb-tipped tail lashing back and forth dramatically as she went. Sanya walked along behind her, then me, and Michael brought up the rear. It wasn’t a long walk, but it fit in a lot of unpleasantness into a little bit of time. The little town had been a company town, built up around what looked like an old cannery—a long building, falling to pieces now, at the very end of the ruined street.
Partway up the hill we ran across a trail that had obviously been in use over the past several days. Someone had kept it clear of snow, exposing a path that had been cut into the rock of the hillside, including stone stairs that led up to its summit. As we went up the stairs the shape at the top of the hill became clearer, as light from the large fire beside it revealed it more clearly.
“A lighthouse,” I murmured. “Or what’s left of one.”
It might have been a fifty-foot tower at one time, but it had been broken off perhaps twenty feet up as if snapped by a giant’s hand. Beacon towers dotted the shorelines and islands of all of the Great Lakes, and like all such structures they had accumulated more than their due of strange stories. I hadn’t heard any stories about this one—but staring up at the rough grey stones, I got the impression that it might have had something to do with the fact that in order for strange stories to spread, someone has to survive a dark encounter in order to start the tale.
This entire creepy place was giving me the idea that I wasn’t merely walking on haunted ground—but that I was walking on major-league haunted ground, the kind of place that had never bowed its head to the advance of progress and civilization, to science and reason, that had no more regard for those children of human intellect than it did for their progenitors. The island seemed almost alive, aware of my presence in a sense that I couldn’t really tangibly define—aware of it and sullenly, spitefully hostile to it.
But that wasn’t the creepy part.
The creepy part was that it felt familiar.
Walking up those stone steps, my legs settled into a steady pattern of motion, as if they’d already walked up that path a thousand times. I swerved slightly on one step, for no reason that I could see, only to hear Michael, behind me, continue walking in a straight line and slip as the stone he stepped on shifted beneath his foot. I found myself counting silently to myself, backward, and when I hit zero we mounted the last step and reached the summit of the hill.
Somehow I knew, even before I saw it, that one side of the old lighthouse would be torn open to the sky, revealing an interior that was as hollowed-out and empty as the inside of a rifle barrel. I knew that the little stone cottage built against the base of the tower would still be reasonably intact, though about half of the slate-tile roof had collapsed inward and would need repairs. I knew that it had been made from the stones of the collapsed lighthouse. I knew that the front door rattled when you opened it, and that the back door, which wasn’t in sight from here, would swell up during a rain and get stuck in its frame, much like the door at…
…at home.
I also knew that as freaking weird as all of that was, I couldn’t afford to let any of it matter right now.
Nicodemus and company were waiting for us.
The sleeting rain was starting to cover everything in a thin layer of ice, but the bonfire laid on the ground before the opening in the wall of the tower was large enough to ignore it. The flames leapt ten or twelve feet in the air, and burned with an eerie, violet-tinged light, and the ice forming everywhere created the illusion of a purple haze that clung to anything inanimate.
Beside the bonfire stones had been piled up into something that resembled the throne of some ancient pagan king. Nicodemus sat atop them, of course. Tessa stood at his right hand, entirely in human form for the first time since I had seen her. She was a little slip of a girl who barely looked old enough to hold a driver’s license, and was dressed in something black and skintight. Deirdre knelt at Nicodemus’s feet, and with the three of them together like that, I could see the blending of the parents’ features in their daughter. Especially around the eyes. Deirdre’s showed a full measure of both Nicodemus’s soulless calculation and Tessa’s heartless selfishness.
Magog crouched at the base of the pile of stones, apelike and enormous, sullen eyes burning with bloodlust. The spined Denarian I had beaten down with the silver construct-hand lay reclining on the ground beside Magog, his face twisted with hate, one hand twisting and clenching—but his maimed body was otherwise motionless.
My heart sped up in sudden excitement. There were still six of them. They hadn’t broken Ivy yet.
I held up a hand. We came to a stop, while Rosanna lightly mounted the steps to kneel down at Tessa’s right hand.
“Wow,” I drawled. “That isn’t a contrived tableau or anything. Are you here to do business, or did you get lost on your way to auditions for Family Feud?”
“Gunman in the cottage,” Sanya murmured, very quietly.
“Beasts in the shadows behind the tower,” Michael whispered.
I kept myself from looking. If my friends said there were bad guys there, they were there, end of story.
“Good evening, Dresden,” Nicodemus said. “Have you brought the merchandise?”
I jingled the Crown Royal bag and bumped the hilt of Shiro’s sword, hanging over my shoulder, with the side of my head. “Yep. But you knew that already, or Rosie, there, wouldn’t have brought us this far. So let’s skip the small talk. Show me the girl.”
“By all means,” Nicodemus said. He gestured with one hand, and the shadows—his shadow, I should say—suddenly fell away from the interior of the ruined lighthouse tower.
Red light filled that space, pouring up from the sigils and glyphs of the most elaborate greater circle I had ever seen—and I’d seen one made of silver, gold, and precious stones. This one incorporated al
l of those things plus art—grotesque pieces, mostly—sound, ringing forth in gentle, steady waves from upright tuning forks and tubular bells; and light, focused through prisms and crystals, refracted into dozens of colors that split and bent into perfectly geometric shapes in the air around the circle.
Ivy was trapped inside.
I’ve seen some fairly extreme abuse in my time, but it never gets easier to see more of it. Nick’s people had gone with most of the classics for breaking someone down, and then added in a few twists that wouldn’t be available to regular folks. They’d taken Ivy’s clothes, for starters, which in this weather was sadistic on multiple levels. They’d shaved her hair away, leaving her bald, except for a couple of sad, ragged little tufts of gold. She was curled up into a fetal position, and she floated in the air, spinning slowly and apparently at random. Her eyes were tightly closed, her face pale with disorientation, terrified.
Outside the circle they had chained a number of those hideous hunting beasts, hairless creatures that resembled nothing in the animal kingdom but fell somewhere between a big panther and a wolf. The creatures looked hungry, and stared intently at the floating morsel. One of them snarled and threw itself to the end of its chain in an effort to snap its fanged maw closed upon the girl’s vulnerable flesh. It couldn’t reach her, but Ivy twitched and let out a thready whimper.
As she spun and twirled—a deliberate echo of what she’d done to Magog at the Aquarium, I felt certain—the motion revealed dozens of tiny scratches and bruises, evidence of a small legion of petty cruelties. They would, however, seem nightmarish enough to a child who had never experienced real pain of her own. All of this—the pain, the helplessness, the indignity, all of it—would be that much more horrific and terrifying to Ivy for its novelty. Say what I would about pain being a part of the human condition, when it comes to seeing it inflicted on children, I’m as hypocritical as the day is long.
Some things just shouldn’t happen.
“There, you see?” the lord of the Denarians said. “Safe and sound, as agreed.”
