by Jim Butcher
“Wardens!” Ebenezar said. “On me!” The old man broke into a woodsman’s lope, a shuffle-footed, loose-kneed gait that managed unpredictable terrain well and covered ground with deceptive speed. The four remaining Wardens fell into a wedge shape behind him and they moved out heading south, back toward the docks and the confrontation with whoever had come forth from the Nevernever with his own army.
Lara turned to me and nodded her head once, gesturing me to lead. I tried to fix Binder’s presence firmly in mind, and was certain he was ahead of us and to the north, probably trying to circle widely around the scene of the battle with his minions. I started out through the woods again, pushing myself to move faster.
This time, Lara stayed close behind me. She mimicked my movements, down to the length of my stride, taking advantage of my instinctive knowledge of Demonreach.
“I have little interest in this mercenary,” she said to me as we ran. She wasn’t even breathing hard. “Do with him as you would. But Madeline is mine.”
“She might know something,” I said.
“I can’t believe anyone with half a mind would entrust her with knowledge of any importance.”
“And I can’t believe the treacherous bitch wouldn’t steal every bit of information she could find to use against whoever she’s working with,” I replied, glancing back.
Lara didn’t dispute the statement, but her eyes hardened like silver mirrors, reflecting the dancing flames that were still burning here and there as we moved through the site of the battle and out the other side. “Madeline has betrayed me, my House, and my Court. She is mine. I prefer you remained a living, breathing ally. You will not interfere.”
What do you say to something like that? I shut my mouth and concentrated on finding Binder.
It took us about five minutes to reach the piece of shoreline where Binder and his companion had come ashore. A pair of Jet Skis lay discarded on the beach. So that’s how they’d done it. The tiny craft would have no problems at all skimming over the stone reefs surrounding the island, though they would have been hellish to ride in the rough water.
We swung past the discarded equipment and up a little ridgeline, running along a deer trail. I knew we were getting close, and suddenly Lara accelerated past me, supernaturally fleet of foot on the even ground.
I don’t know what triggered the explosion. It might have been a tripwire stretched across the trail. It’s possible that it was detonated manually, too. There was a flash of light, and something hit me in the chest hard enough to knock me down. An ugly asymmetrical shape was burned into my vision as I lay on my back, trying to sort out what had just happened.
Then my body tingled, and Madeline Raith appeared over me. I realized that she was straddling me. There was a fire burning somewhere close by, illuminating her. She was wearing a black surfer’s wet suit with short arms and legs, unzipped past her navel. She held a mostly empty bottle of tequila in one hand. Her eyes were wide and shining with a disorienting riot of colors as she leaned down and kissed me on the forehead and . . .
And Hell’s freaking bells.
The pleasure that surged through me from that simple touch was delicious to the point of pain. Every nerve ending in my entire body lit up, as though someone had run up the wattage on my pleasure centers, or injected their engines with nitrous. I felt my body arch up and shudder, a purely sexual reaction to a physical bliss that went far beyond sexuality. I stayed that way, locked into a quivering arch of ecstasy. It took maybe ten or fifteen seconds to subside.
From a kiss on the forehead.
God. No wonder people came back to the vampires for more.
I could barely register what was happening around me. So I only dimly noticed when Madeline produced a gun of her own, the other favorite model of those with more than human strength—a Desert Eagle.
“Good night, sweet wizard,” Madeline purred, her hips grinding a slow rhythm against mine. She drew the half-inch-wide mouth of the gun over my cheek as she took a slug of tequila and then rested the gun’s barrel gently on the spot she’d just kissed. It felt obscenely good, like a caress on skin that has just been shaved smooth but hasn’t yet been touched. I knew that she was about to kill me, but I couldn’t stop thinking how good it felt. “And flights of angels,” she panted, her breath coming faster, her eyes alight with excitement, “sing thee to thy rest.”
Chapter Forty-three
I was still sorting things out after the titanic wallop the explosion had given the inside of my skull, when a dark-furred wolf emerged from the shadows of the night and slammed into Madeline Raith like a loaded armored car. I heard bones breaking under the impact, and she was ripped off me by the force of the dark wolf’s rush.
Will didn’t stop there. He’d already hammered her once, and he knew better than to try his strength infighting with a vampire, even if the members of the White Court were physically the weakest of the breed. He hit the ground and bounded away into the dark.
Madeline screamed in surprised rage, and her gun went off several times, but I’m not sure you could call it shooting. She was on her knees, firing that big old Desert Eagle with one delicate hand and holding the now-broken tequila bottle in the other when a sandy brown wolf swept by on silent paws and ripped at Madeline’s weapon hand with her fangs. The rip went deep into the muscles and tendons of Madeline’s forearm, an almost surgically precise attack. The gun tumbled from her fingers, and she whirled to swing the broken bottle at Georgia, but she was no more eager for a fair fight than Will had been, and by the time Madeline turned, Georgia was already bounding away—and Will, unnoticed, was on his way back in again.
Fangs flashed. Pale Raith blood flowed. The two wolves rushed back and forth in perfect rhythm, never giving the vampire a chance to pin one of them down. When Madeline finally realized how they were working her, she attempted to reverse herself suddenly the same instant Georgia began to retreat, to meet Will’s rush squarely—but Will and Georgia had learned their trade from a real wolf, and they’d had eight years of what amounted to low-intensity but deadly earnest combat duty, defending several square blocks around the University from the depredations of both supernatural and mortal predators. They knew when the reverse was coming, and Georgia simply pirouetted on her paws and blindsided Madeline again.
The vampire screamed in frustrated rage. She was furious—and she was slowing down. The members of the White Court were flesh and blood beings. They bled. Bleed them enough, and they would die.
I forced myself to start using my head again, finally shaking off the effects of both Madeline’s psychotically delicious kiss and the concussion of whatever had exploded. I realized that I was covered with small cuts and scratches, that I was otherwise fine, and that Binder was less than twenty feet away.
“Will, Georgia!” I screamed. “Gun!”
The wolves leapt out of sight and vanished into the forest with barely a leaf disturbed by their movements, half a second before Binder came out of the woods, a semiautomatic assault shotgun pressed against his shoulder. The mercenary was dressed in a wet suit as well, though he’d put on a combat jacket and equipment harness over it, and wore combat boots on his feet.
Binder aimed the weapon after Will and Georgia and started rapidly hammering the woods with shells, more or less at random.
Everyone thinks that shotgun pellets spread out to some ridiculous degree, and that if you aim a shotgun at a garage door and pull the trigger, you’ll be able to drive a car through the resulting hole. That isn’t so, even when a shotgun has a very, very short barrel, which allows the load of pellets to spread out more. A longer-barreled weapon, like Binder’s, will only spread the pellets out to about the size of my spread fingers at a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards. Odds were good that he hadn’t hit a damned thing, and given his experience he probably knew it. He must have kept up the salvo to increase the intimidation factor and force the wolves to stay on the run.
In the heat and adrenaline of a battle, gunshots
can be hard to count, but I knew he fired eight times. I knew because through Demonreach, I could feel the eight brass and plastic shell casings lying on the ground around him. He stood protectively over Madeline as he reached into his pockets, presumably to reload the weapon with fresh shells.
I didn’t give him the chance. I pulled my .44 out of my duster pocket, sat up, and tried to stop wobbling. I sighted on his center mass and pulled the trigger.
The revolver roared, and Binder’s left leg flew out from beneath him as if someone had hit it with a twenty-pound mallet. He let out a yelp of what sounded more like surprise than pain and hit the ground hard. In the odd little beat of heavy silence that came after the shot, I almost felt sorry for the guy. He’d had a tough couple of days. I heard him suck in a quick breath and clench his teeth over a howl of pain.
Madeline whirled toward me, her dark hair gone stringy and flat in the rain. Her eyes burned pure white, as the hunger, the demon inside her, fed her more and more of its power and asserted more and more control. Her wet suit had been torn open in several places, and paler-than-human blood smeared her paler-than-human flesh. She wasn’t moving as well as she should have been, but she stalked toward me in a hunter’s crouch, deliberate and steady.
My bells were still ringing hard, and I didn’t think I had time or focus to pull together a spell. And besides, my gun was already right there. It seemed like it would be a waste not to use it.
I sighted on the spot where Madeline’s heart should have been and shot her in the belly, which wasn’t terrible marksmanship under the circumstances. She cried out and staggered to one knee. Then she looked up, her empty white eyes furious, and stood up, continuing toward me.
I shot again and missed, then repeated myself. I gripped the gun with both hands, clenching my teeth as I did, knowing I only had two more rounds. The next shot ripped a piece of meat the size of a racquetball out of one of her biceps, sending her down to one knee and drawing another scream.
Before she could start moving again, I aimed and fired the last round.
It hit her in the sternum, almost exactly between her wet suit- contoured breasts. She jerked, her breath exploding from her in a little huff of surprise. She swayed, her eyelids fluttering, and I thought she was about to fall.
But she didn’t.
The vampire’s empty white eyes focused on me, and her mouth spread into a maniac’s sneer. She reached down and picked up her own fallen weapon. She had to do it left-handed. The right was covered in a sheet of blood and flopped limply.
Running low on options, I threw my empty gun at her face. She bat-ted my revolver aside with the Desert Eagle.
“You,” Madeline said, her voice hollow and wheezing, “are a bad case of herpes, wizard. You’re inconvenient, embarrassing, no real threat, and you simply will not go away.”
“Bitch,” I replied, wittily. I still hadn’t gotten my head back together. Everything’s relative, right?
“Don’t kill him,” Binder rasped.
Madeline shot him a look that could freeze vodka. “What?”
Binder was sitting on the ground. His shotgun was farther away than he could reach. He must have tossed it there, because when he had fallen it was still in his hands. Binder had realized precisely how badly the fight had gone for his side, that he had been lamed and therefore probably could not escape, and he was making damned sure that he didn’t look armed and dangerous. “Death curse,” he said, breathing hard. “He could level the island with it.”
I drew in my breath, lifted my chin, and tried to keep my eyes from slipping out of focus. “Boom,” I said solemnly.
Madeline looked bad. One of the bullets might have opened an artery. It was hard to tell in the near-darkness. “Perhaps you’re right, Binder,” she said. “If he was a better shot, I suppose I might be in trouble. As it is, I’m inconvenienced.” Her eyes widened slightly, and her tongue lashed quickly over her lips. “And I need to feed if I’m to repair it.” She lowered the gun as if it had suddenly become too heavy to keep supporting. “Don’t worry, Binder,” she said. “When he’s screaming my name he won’t be cursing anyone. And even if he tries it . . .” She shivered. “I’ll bet it will taste incredible.”
She came closer, all pale skin and mangled flesh, and my body suddenly went insane with lust. Stupid body. It had a lot more clout at the moment than it usually did, with my mind still reeling from the blast.
I aimed a punch at Madeline’s face. She caught my hand as the weak blow came in, and kissed the inside of my wrist. Sweet silver lightning exploded up my arm and down my spine. Whatever was left of my brain went away, and the next thing I knew she was pressing her chest against mine, her mouth against mine, slowly, sensuously overbearing me.
And then a burned corpse came out of the woods.
That was all I could think of to describe it. Half the body was blacker than a hamburger that had fallen through the bars of a charcoal grill. The rest was red and purple and swollen with bruises and bloody blisters, with very, very occasional strips of pale white skin. A few wisps of dark hair were attached to her skull. I say her because technically the corpse was female, though that hardly mattered amongst all the burned and pulverized meat that smelled slightly of tequila.
The only things I really recognized were the cold silver eyes.
Lara Raith’s eyes were bright with an insane rage and a terrible hunger as she snaked her bruised, swollen left arm around Madeline’s wind-pipe, and tightened it with a horrible strength.
Madeline cried out as her head was jerked back sharply—and then she made no sound at all as the wind was trapped inside her lungs. The burned, blackened corpse that was Lara Raith dug one fire-ruined hip into Madeline’s upper back, using Madeline’s own spine as a fulcrum against her.
Lara spoke, and her voice was something straight from Hell. It was lower, smokier, but every bit as lovely as it ever was. “Madeline,” she purred, “I’ve wanted to do this with you since we were little girls.”
Lara’s burned black right hand, withered, it seemed, down to bones and sinew, reached slowly, sensually around Madeline’s straining abdomen. Slowly, very slowly, Lara sunk her fingertips into flesh, just beneath the floating rib on Madeline’s left flank. Madeline’s face contorted and she tried to scream.
Lara shuddered. Her shoulders twisted. And she ripped an open furrow as wide as her four fingers across Madeline’s stomach, pale flesh parting, as wet red and grey things slithered out.
Lara’s tongue emerged from her mouth, bright pink, and touched Madeline’s earlobe. “Listen to me,” she hissed. Her burned hand continued pulling things out of Madeline’s body, a hideous intimacy. “Listen to me.”
Power shuddered in those words. I felt an insane desire to rush toward Lara’s ruined flesh and give her my ears, ripped off with my own fingers, if necessary.
Madeline shuddered, the strength gone out of her body. Her mouth continued trying to move, but her eyes went unfocused at the power in Lara’s voice. “For once in your life,” Lara continued, kissing Madeline’s throat with her burned, broken lips, “you are going to be useful.”
Madeline’s eyes rolled back in her head, and her body sagged helplessly back against Lara.
My brain got back onto the clock. I pushed myself away from Lara and Madeline’s nauseating, horribly compelling embrace. Binder was sitting with his hands over his ears, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. I grabbed him under the arms and hauled him away from the entwined Raiths, maybe fifty yards downhill, through some thick brush and around the bole of a large old hickory tree. Binder was obviously in pain as I pulled him—and he was pushing with his unwounded leg, doing his best to assist me.
“Bloody hell,” he panted, as I set him down. “Bloody hell and brimstone.”
I staggered and sat down across from him, panting to get my breath back and to push the sight of Lara devouring Madeline out of my head. “No kidding.”
“Some of the bloody fools I’ve known,” Binder said. “Ca
n’t stop talking about how tragic they are. The poor lonely vampires. How they’re just like us. Bloody idiots.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice raw.
We sat there for a few seconds. From up the slope, there was a low, soft, and eager cry.
We shuddered and tried to look as if we hadn’t heard anything.
Binder stared at me for a moment, and then said, “Why?”
“Once Lara got going, she might not be able to stop. She’d have eaten you, too.”
“Too right,” Binder agreed fervently. “But that ain’t the question. Why?”
“Somebody has to be human.”
Binder looked at me as if I was speaking in a language he’d never been very good at, and hadn’t heard in years. Then he looked sharply down and away. He nodded, without looking up, and said, “Cheers, mate.”
“Fuck you,” I told him tiredly. “How bad are you hit?”
“Broke the bone, I think,” he said. “Didn’t come out. Didn’t hit anything too bad or I’d be gone by now.”
He’d already tied a strip of cloth tightly around the wound. His wet suit was probably aiding it in acting as a pressure bandage.
“Who was Madeline working for?” I asked.
He shook his head. “She didn’t tell me.”
“Think,” I said. “Think hard.”
“All I know,” he said, “is that it was some bloke with a lot of money. I never talked to him. When she was on the phone with him, they spoke English. He wasn’t a native speaker. Sounded like he’d learned it from a Continental.”
I frowned. Television has most people confident that they could identify the nationality of anyone speaking English, but in the real world, accents could be muddy as hell, especially when you learned from a non-native speaker. Try to imagine the results, for example, of a Polish man learning English from a German teaching at a Belgian university. The resulting accent would twist a linguist’s brain into knots.
