Brief Cases

by Jim Butcher

  “Your enemy has captives?” I asked. “Right now?”

  She nodded and said, “On the ship, belowdecks. While they are captive, there will be no tribute.”

  “Well, then,” I said. I exchanged a glance with Carlos. He gave me a wolfish grin and nodded. I nodded back and said to Aluki, “The Warden and I are going to go get them out of there.”

  She lifted her chin. “You can do this?”

  “I can,” I said. “I will.”

  There was a low thrum in the air as I spoke the words, and I felt something go click somewhere in my head. I had just made a promise.

  And Winter kept its promises.

  Aluki stared at me for a moment, then sagged, bowed her head, and nodded. “Very well.”

  “Your people who were taken,” I said, “how will I know them?”

  Nauja bared her teeth and spoke with her jaw clenched. “They took our children.”

  “GOD, I LOVE hero work,” Carlos said as we stepped back out into the storm. “No murky grey area, no anguished questions, no conflicting morality. Bad guys took some kids, and we’re gonna go get ’em out.”

  “Right?” I asked him, and nodded. “This must be what my dad felt, all the time.”

  “Knights of the Cross never have any missions they question?” Carlos asked.

  “I think they get a different kind of question,” I said. “For Dad, it was always about saving everyone. Not just the victims. He had to try for the monsters, too.”

  “Weird,” Carlos said.

  “Not so weird,” I said. “Maybe if someone had offered a hand to the monsters, they wouldn’t have become monsters in the first place. You know?”

  “I don’t,” Carlos said. “Maybe I’ve seen too many monsters.” He settled his weapons belt a little more comfortably on his hips and wrapped himself up in his cloak again. “Or too many victims. I don’t know.”

  Our steps crunched in the sleet, and between that and the rattle of more sleet and the crash of waves on the shore, I almost didn’t hear his next words.

  “About six months into the war,” he said, “I was carrying pliers with me, so that I could take vampire teeth as trophies. That was how much I hated them.”

  I didn’t say anything. Carlos, like a lot of the other young Wardens of the Council, had been baptized in fire. Harry had spoken of it once while doing his best to shield me from the war. He’d felt horrible leading a team of children, as he saw it, into a vicious conflict between the White Council and the Red Court:

  I feel like I’m putting them through a meat grinder. Even if they come home in one piece.

  “You hated them. And then they were gone,” I said.

  “Poof,” Carlos said. “War over.” He shook his head. “Odium interruptus. And then it was supposed to be back to business as usual again. Just supposed to move on. Only I never quite figured out how. And half the bunks in the barracks were empty.”

  “Part of you misses it,” I said.

  His lips tightened, though it wasn’t a smile. “I miss the certainty,” he said. “I miss how tight I was with the squad. The rest I can mostly do without.” He glanced at me and then away. “The Wardens’ job isn’t always simple. Or clean. I’ve done things I’m not proud of.”

  “Haven’t we all?” I said.

  We walked in silence for a few steps. Then he said, “Once we get these kids clear, I want to kiss you again.”

  My tummy did a little happy cartwheel, and my heart sped up to keep it company. “Oh yeah? What if I don’t want to?”

  He gave me a very direct, very intense look. His eyes were dark and hot and bold.

  “You want to,” he said.

  He wasn’t wrong.

  WE STOLE UP to the Betsy Lee under my best veil, moving quickly and quietly. We’d already worked out the plan. Carlos was going in first and was going to raise a hell of a racket and attract everyone’s attention. My job was to stay veiled, grab the kids, and get them off the ship.

  Then we’d kill things.

  But halfway across the deck toward the door leading below, Carlos paused. He tilted his head to one side and narrowed his eyes. He glanced at me, lifting his brows in an unspoken question.

  I paused, frowned at him, and then looked carefully around the deck. It was empty. The boat rolled and pitched with the waves, but there was no other motion. It was still and silent as a tomb. In fact …

  It just felt empty, like an apartment with no furniture, like a school playground on the weekend.

  Carlos suddenly moved faster, gliding to the stairs. He held up a hand, telling me to wait, and went down them in a rush. He reappeared within a minute.

  “Empty,” he reported. “There’s no one down there.”

  “Dammit, something must have tipped them off,” I said.

  He nodded. “They’ve got eyes somewhere, all right.”

  I went back to the dock and then to where it met dry land. I couldn’t see very well, but I murmured, “Akari,” flicked my wrist, and created an orb of glacial green light in the air over my right shoulder. Green was a good color for this kind of work. The mortal eye can detect more shades of green than any other color on the spectrum.

  I cast back and forth, but it took only a few seconds to find what I was after: a depression in the accumulating sleet, the marks of the passage of many feet. “Carlos,” I said, and pointed at the ground. “Tracks.”

  He came over and squinted down. “Aren’t these from when they came back to the boat the first time?”

  “Can’t be,” I said. “Our tracks from an hour ago are gone. These were made after we left.”

  He lifted his eyebrows. “Seriously, Aragorn? Where’d you learn this stuff?”

  “Mom taught me. She was scoutmaster for my brothers.”

  “And to think I wasted my youth learning magic,” Carlos said. “Can you tell if the kids were with them?”

  “Dammit, man. I’m a Faerie Princess, not a forensic analyst.” I jerked my head to tell him to follow me, and we set out after our quarry.

  THE TRAIL ENDED at a church.

  It was a Russian Orthodox church, complete with a couple of onion domes, and the sign out front read HOLY ASCENSION OF OUR LORD CATHEDRAL. It was also creepy and ominous as hell in the freezing night. Odd blue-green light glowed within the windows of the sanctuary. I thought I saw a shadow move past a window, sinuous and smooth, like a cruising shark.

  “Oh,” Carlos said, stopping short. I could see calculations and connections forming behind his eyes. “Uh-oh.”

  “What-oh?”

  “This just got worse.”

  “Why?”

  He licked his lips nervously. “Uh. How much Lovecraft have you read?”

  “I haven’t kept track,” I said. “Somewhere between zero and none. Should I have?”

  “Probably,” he said. “It’s always the last thing a formally trained apprentice learns about.”

  “I have a funny feeling my training wasn’t formal,” I said.

  “Yeah. Neither was Harry’s. Have you heard of the Old Ones?”

  “I don’t think it’s a very kind nickname for the Rolling Stones. They still put on a great show.”

  He nodded and squinted at me. “I kind of need you to put on your serious face now.”

  “That bad?” I asked.

  “Maybe,” he said. “They’re … kind of a collection of entities. Really old, really powerful entities.”

  “What, like gods?” I asked.

  “Like the things gods have nightmares about,” he said.

  “Outsiders.”

  He nodded. “Only they aren’t outside. They’re here. Caged, bound, and sleeping, but they’re here.”

  “That seems kind of dangerous.”

  “Yes and no,” he said. “They feed on psychic energy. On fear. On the collective subconscious awareness of them that exists within humanity.”

  I squinted at him. “Meaning what?”

  “The more people who know about them and
fear them, the more awake and more powerful they become,” he said. “That’s why the people who know about them don’t talk about them much.”

  “What’s that got to do with the price of beer in Unalaska?”

  “One of the Old Ones is known as the Sleeper. It’s said his tomb is somewhere under the Pacific. And that goddamned moron Lovecraft published stories and easy-to-remember rhymes about the thing.” He shook his head. “The signal boost gave the Sleeper enough power to influence the world. It has a number of cults. People get … infested, I guess. Slowly go insane. Lose their humanity. Turn into something else.”

  I remembered the captain’s open mouth and writhing tentacles and shivered. “So you think that’s what is happening here? A Sleeper cult?”

  “It’s the Holy Ascension of Our Lord Cathedral,” he pointed out. “That means something way different to a Sleeper cultist than it does to most folks. They aren’t exactly making it difficult to suss out.”

  “Okay. So, how does that change anything about what we have to do tonight?”

  He nodded toward the cathedral. “You feel that?”

  “It’s capital-C creepy,” I said, and nodded.

  “It’s worse than that,” he said. “It’s holy ground. Consecrated to the Sleeper. We go in there, we won’t be dealing with a bunch of ’roided-up fishermen with tentacle mouth. They’ll have power. It’s a nest of sorcerers in there.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Ouch.” I thought about it for a moment. “So, how does that change anything about what we have to do tonight?”

  He bared his teeth. “Guess it doesn’t.”

  “I guess it doesn’t,” I agreed.

  “You know,” he said, “I am pretty damned valorous.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “But I am not stupid. You’re a Faerie Queen now, right?”

  “Uh-huh, I guess,” I said.

  “Couldn’t you whistle up a squad of ogres or something to help make this happen?”

  I thought about it for a second and said, “Yeah, I could.”

  “Maybe something like that should happen?” he suggested.

  I was quiet for a second before I said, “No.”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, and nodded. “Why not?”

  “In the first place, it would take time to get them here. In the second, this is Miksani territory, and the ogres would have to arrange payment for intruding and observe customs, and it would take even longer. And in the third place …”

  I blinked. Oh. That’s what Mab meant.

  “What?” Carlos asked.

  “This is my first showing. Everyone in Winter, every wicked and predatory thing in Faerie, is going to pay attention to it, and will interact with me based off what I do here. First impressions matter, and I’m not going to be a child who screams for help the first time she hits a bump in the road. I’m going to be the predator who freaking takes you apart if you cross her. I’m going to make sure I don’t have to prove my strength to them over and over for the rest of this gig. So, you and I are going to go in there and handle it.”

  Carlos sniffed, then gave a short nod. “Right. Well. These people—they aren’t human anymore. Something else moved into their bodies. There’s nothing left to save. You get me?”

  I got him. He meant that I could play hardball without fear of running afoul of the White Council. I squinted at the cathedral and said, “Okay. New plan.”

  HARRY WAS A big believer in kicking in the teeth of whoever you planned to fight. Granted, those kinds of tactics played to his strengths, and it wasn’t always smart or possible—but it was always a way to seize the initiative and control the opening seconds of a conflict.

  Granted, Harry would have used fire. And I’m pretty sure he wouldn’t have pulled out a wand and prepared the One-Woman Rave spell I’d developed. And I’m absolutely certain that he wouldn’t have taken a moment to start up DJ Molly C’s Boom Box spell, which would play C& C Music Factory’s “Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)” loud enough to be heard in Anchorage.

  But I did. I wanted loud noise that was totally out of place and as weird as possible to whatever supernatural critters were riding around inside the fishermen—and the creatures of the supernatural world aren’t exactly pop-culture mavens. Plus, it was dance music from the ’90s. Nobody thinks that stuff is normal.

  Heavy bass and lead power chords started thumping against the windows. I turned loose the One-Woman Rave, and the air around me filled with a light-and-pyrotechnics show that would make Burning Man look like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. My heart started pounding in fear and excitement and something disturbingly like lust as I crossed the last few feet to the cathedral’s entrance.

  And then, just as the song screamed, “Everybody dance now!” I leaned back, drew the power of Winter into my body, and kicked the big double doors off their hinges as if they’d been made of balsa and Scotch tape.

  At which point I learned the real reason Harry keeps doing that.

  It. Is. Awesome.

  “Give me the music!” I screamed with the song, and walked straight in. I might have had some hip and shoulder action going in time with the beat.

  Look, I hadn’t been out dancing in a while, okay?

  I crossed the little vestibule in a couple of steps and passed into the sanctuary in a thundercloud of rave lights and showers of multicolored sparks, music shaking the air. I got a good look at the fishermen as I came in.

  All twenty of them were there, scattered around the sanctuary, though three, including the captain, were up on the altar, along with half a dozen Miksani children, aged about four through ten. Their wrists were bound together with one long length of rope, which cut cruelly into their wrists.

  Everyone in the cathedral lifted a hand to shield their eyes as I came in. The cultists’ mouths gaped open and tendrils emerged to begin thrashing the air.

  I felt the surge of power coming, an ugly, greasy pressure in the air, and as it gathered, physical darkness swirled and surged around the fishermen. And then, like a stream of fouled water, it surged from each of the cultists to the captain, where his tentacles gathered it, whipping and writhing, and sent the enormous collective surge of negative energy flying directly at me.

  It came fast, too fast to dodge, too intense to be stopped by any magic I could manage, and struck my solar plexus like an enormous, deadly spear.

  Or, at least, that’s what it looked like to them. I was actually about ten feet to the left, hidden behind my best veil while maintaining a glamour of my image. The bolt struck my little illusion, and the conflict of energies, combined with the difficulty of running the Rave and the Boom Box, made it too much to hold together. The image popped like a soap bubble, and the dark bolt tore through the flooring and foundation in the vestibule like a backhoe.

  The captain froze for a second, unsure of what had just happened. I had no such moment of hesitation. I was already rushing down the leftmost aisle behind my veil, plastic-handled knife in hand. I reached the first of the tentacle-mouthed fishermen and, with a single flick, cut his throat.

  I could barely hear the creature’s sudden, high-pitched scream of pain over the thunder of the Boom Box, and I’d known it was coming. It didn’t register on the other fishermen in the chaos, and I didn’t slow down.

  I killed three of them with my knife before one of the cultists saw what was happening and screamed, pointing.

  Number four went down when he turned his head to look, but he writhed as he went down and I was splashed with blood.

  Magically speaking, blood is significant in all kinds of ways. It carries a charge of magical energy inside it, for example, and can be used to direct a spell at a specific person from hundreds or thousands of miles away. This blood was stronger than mortal stuff and carried a heavier charge. The power in it flared into sparks as the blood hit my veil, and then it ripped a huge hole in it, and I was suddenly visible to the entire cult.

  Another bolt of energy came my way, this one t
ossed by an individual cultist. It lacked the landscape-rearranging power of the first bolt, and I was lucky it did. I threw up a shield of enough strength to barely deflect it, and dove to the floor as others came winging my way, chewing chunks the size of my fist from the wall behind me.

  From the floor I couldn’t see much—but the cultists were howling and they had to be coming closer, sending their nearest members to rush me while the others kept me pinned down with their blasts of dark power. If I didn’t move, and fast, I would be swarmed. Winter Queen or not, that wouldn’t end well for me.

  I let go of the remnants of the veil, crystallized a new spell in my mind, and gave it life. Then I hopped up and ran for the exit.

  I also hopped up and ran down the nearest aisle of pews. I also hopped up and sprinted toward the altar. I also hopped up and started vaulting the pews diagonally, heading for the nearest fisherman. I also hopped up and backed up one step at a time, conjuring what looked like a heavy energy shield in front of me. I also hopped up and hurled a blast of deep blue energy at the captain. I also hopped up and …

  Look, you get the idea: Thirteen Mollies started running everywhere.

  Blasts of dark power ripped apart pews and tore holes in the walls and shattered panes of stained glass. Some of them struck home, disintegrating the images, but the others continued to move and duck and evade.

  Meanwhile, I stayed low and scramble-crawled twenty feet into the concealment of the confessional. I had done what I meant to do: entirely occupy the cult’s attention.

  Carlos made his entrance in perfect silence. The wall behind the altar was made of dark wood, but it just … fell apart into freaking grains of matter in an oval six feet high and three across, revealing the young Warden on the other side.

  Without ceremony, Carlos pointed at a cultist, muttered a word, and a beam of pale green light struck it in the back. The man-creature simply dissolved into a slurry of water and what looked like powdered charcoal. The young Warden didn’t miss a beat. Before the first cultist was done falling to the floor, he drew his sword and ran it smoothly into the nape of another cultist’s neck. The creature arched for a second and then dropped like a stone, his mouth moving in frantic, silent screaming motions.