by Jim Butcher
“What have you done? What is this place?” growled not-Alice, looking furious but a little uncertain. I’d managed to throw the creature for a loop. She appeared as a strange double image now, the possessive devil visible as a kind of dark twin right behind her.
“You’re in my house now.” I reached under the bed, pulled out my longsword and pointed it at her. “Talk. What are you doing in Alice’s body?”
“Useful. It has magic,” the devil replied.
“For what?”
“To bring Mother here.”
“And why does your mother want to be here?”
“Souls,” the devil hissed wistfully. “So many delicious souls.”
I sighed. That’s all devils ever seemed to want. Human souls were apparently the popcorn shrimp of the spiritual world. I kept hoping a devil would tell me it was here for gambling, or to drink all the whiskey and download a bunch of porn, or steal the secret recipe for Coca-Cola. No such luck. It was all souls, all the time.
“Let Alice go and I’ll be as nice as I possibly can,” I said.
The devil shrieked and lunged at me. I spun aside like a matador and grabbed the darkness clinging to Alice with my left hand. She/it fought me, clawing at my arms, but I held on, wrestled them both down to the floor.
Ignoring the stinging blows she was landing on my face, I tightened my grip and yanked as hard as I could. The darkness ripped clean away from her with a scream that could have shattered glass. Alice tumbled forward, jerking in the throes of a seizure. I was left gripping a dark, squirming mass that reminded me of an enormous liver fluke.
“I get it. You’re still just a baby and you don’t understand,” I told it as it struggled to break free. It was clammy, frigid through and through. Devils tend to be creatures of heat or cold. I was glad that this one was cold, because I worked better with fire.
“This is my place.” I stared at the wall and willed a blast furnace into existence. Mount Doom didn’t burn half as hot. “I don’t need to do magic here. This is my magic.”
I flung the boneless devil into the boiling metal. The thing writhed, shrieking and jerking and steaming. It tried to haul itself out of the inferno, but I slammed the grate on it. The furnace shook as it struggled, but I held fast. Through the bars I watched it burn. Watched it die. When I was satisfied it was nothing but ash, I erased the furnace and knelt beside Alice to see how she was doing.
She was pale, breathing shallowly. Clearly suffering from shock. Exorcisms take time for a reason. It’s a trauma to your system to have another entity take over your mind and body, but it’s even worse to have that control suddenly torn away.
“You’re lucky you didn’t stroke out and die.” I brushed a sweaty strand of hair out of one of her wide-staring blue eyes. She really was lovely; I could see why Kai had fallen for her. A tiny little thing, thin and pale and maybe just over five feet tall. So vulnerable, especially here in my hell. I could do whatever I wanted in here. I could tie her down and slowly pull her guts out and listen to her scream. . . .
“Jesus!” I jerked back, suddenly aware of how hideous my thoughts had turned.
Not my thoughts. Those can’t be my thoughts. I stared around at the room; suddenly all the replicas of my toys seemed to be silently mocking me.
Magic always had a cost. And the cost to me in this place was my humanity and sanity. I couldn’t stay, or I’d become just like the devils I’d killed.
I quickly gathered up Alice, carried her to the big red portal door in the corner and took us back to the real world.
When we rematerialized in the basement, I saw that Pal in his grizzly form had decapitated the remaining zombies and mauled the ganglers. The uncanny pair lay in pieces scattered across the concrete, molasses-thick ichor pooling around their torn limbs. Definitely not human.
“What are they?” I asked Pal.
Some kind of sidhe, I think. Hired minions, regardless.
Kai hurried over, sweaty and spattered with blood and ichor. “Oh, god. Is she okay?”
At the sound of his voice, Alice’s eyes fluttered, and she began coughing and gagging. I quickly set her down on the concrete and turned her head to the side. She started vomiting up the dead hatchling. It looked much as it had in my hell, though thankfully it was much smaller.
“Oh, god!” Kai looked like he might start puking himself.
“She needs a healer,” I told him. “But at least she’s alive.”
“So does this fellow.” Pal was peering down at the crucified man. “I think he’s one of the Governing Circle agents. I think I remember seeing him at the meeting we had with Riviera.”
“He’s still alive? Wow.” I pulled out my cell phone. No service.
“Guys, I’m going upstairs to call Mother Karen,” I told them. “She’ll know what to do.”
I ran up the stairs, out of the house and onto the front lawn and had just lifted my phone to my ear when the wind kicked up and I heard an ominous rumbling.
Oh, shit.
The sky opened, a bright lightning gash in the black firmament, and a creature that looked like an enormous crystalline replica of some alien solar system cruised through. A vast cloud of fiery plasma in which a dozen jewel organs circled a glowing magma heart. A Virtus, one of the prime enforcer spirits of the Virtus Regnum.
I stood there very still, feeling like an inchworm seeing the sole of a giant boot coming down. At first I felt nothing but gut-churning terror: I was so, so dead. So incredibly dead. And so were my friends, if the Virtus spotted them. I prayed Kai would stay put in the basement.
But then I felt hope: maybe if I did some first-class fast talking, it would leave Kai and Pal and Alice alone? Then came a squelch of despair: mercy was not part of the Regnum’s program, and I damn well knew that. I was the worst kind of idiot to think for even a moment that it might care the teensiest, most minuscule bit that I’d just stopped an invasion of soul-devouring devils. This creature respected only the letter of the law, and the rule book wasn’t on my side.
And that’s when frustration and anger started skipping in circles through my mind. Goddammit, I was so close to making things right here. Why did the Virtus have to show up and screw up everything? Dammit. Dammit, dammit, dammit!
I mightily resisted the urge to scream and flip double birds at the spirit in the sky. And that moment of self-restraint was a mistake. I’d let my adrenaline ebb just a little, and suddenly complete exhaustion flooded through me, suffocating my rage and will to fight and everything else. My bones suddenly felt like they’d turned to concrete. I was completely beat. And probably the Virtus knew it.
Its icy diamond eyes fixed on me, beholding me like an exterminator sizing up a fire-ant nest. It had probably been shadowing me for a long time. Probably it had hoped that the devil would do its job for it and it wouldn’t have to bother with killing me itself.
“You have disobeyed the law,” it boomed. The ground shook. “You have violated the prohibition against grand necromancy. You have murdered. You shall be destroyed.”
I’d heard it all before, but this time I didn’t have the power to defend myself. When I killed my first Virtus, I was flush with the magical energy of a very powerful devil. And, frankly, I’d had more than my share of blind shithouse luck that day. I couldn’t jump up and drag this new Virtus into my hell, and even if I did, I wasn’t sure the power I wielded there would be enough. And I couldn’t run back into the house; the Virtus would just burn it all to ashes and consider it a job cleanly done.
So I did the only thing that seemed reasonable to my exhausted self: I fell to my knees on the grass, shut my eyes and waited to die.
“Stop!” I heard a woman shout.
I opened my eyes. Riviera Jordan stood by the curb, looking fashionably stern in a dark designer suit a lawyer might wear to some big trial, backlit in the headlights of a big gray SUV, her
short silver hair a bright halo around her face.
“I have authority here!” She held up an ivory tablet inscribed with some kind of ancient runes. “You may not harm Miss Shimmer. She’s under my protection. Leave now!”
The Virtus glared at Riviera. “If you deny me my duty, we will not return to Columbus. Your city will be without the protection of the Virtus Regnum. Do you truly want that?”
“I think we need her more than we need you,” Riviera drawled in her upper-crust Southern accent. “And you lot weren’t doing much to protect us anyhow.”
“Insolence,” the Virtus grumbled, but it disappeared back into the night sky, the lightning gash sealing behind it, leaving behind only the smell of ozone and a faintly glowing ring of smoke in the air.
I slowly climbed to my feet. “Two people in the basement need a healer. One is your guy. They were gonna use him as a sacrifice in a portal-opening ritual. He’s in bad shape.”
“Devil or necromancer?” Riviera asked.
“Devil.” I stretched, and my spine popped.
“You kill it?” She pulled a pack of Marlboros from her suit jacket and tapped out a cigarette.
“Yes, ma’am!”
“Good girl.”
Riviera turned her head to call over her shoulder: “Rafé, Loretta, grab your kits and head down to the basement!”
Two Circle agents in dark suits with armbands bearing red crosses and white canvas shoulder bags piled out of the back of the SUV and hurried into the house.
“Thank you,” I said to Riviera. “I guess this means Pal and I get to stay in Columbus.”
She smiled and lit her cigarette. “Just don’t make me regret this.”
HUNTER, HEALER
by Jim C. Hines
Julia Chapel woke to the sound of cursing from the next room of her apartment. She checked the alarm clock and groaned. Not yet midnight. Hob had roused her early. It must be an emergency. “How bad is it?”
“Get yer cross-eyed tits out here and see for yourself.” Hob was a hearth fairy, and considered himself a poet of profanity. “And stop yelling. I’m trying to check this corpse-fucker’s vitals!”
Julia grabbed a worn terry-cloth robe from the floor. For almost two decades, she had lived in this crumbling building, healing anyone and anything that came to her door. Most patients arrived during the night, preferring to avoid notice. Recession had reduced Detroit’s human population in recent years, and other things had moved in to fill the void, meaning such interruptions to her sleep were more and more frequent.
Her second soul groaned, just as weary as Julia herself, but less reticent about complaining. “I know,” Julia said sympathetically. “But something needs our help.”
She donned a pair of old slippers and hurried into the living room. After so many years, few things could crack Julia’s composure, but the sight of a harvester bleeding over her carpet gave her pause. She shouldn’t even have been able to see the harvester so clearly. The mystical scavengers usually drifted in limbo, materializing only to feed on lingering magic from the dead. Who the hell had power enough to burn away the thing’s cloak of shadow and carve the lifeless flesh beneath?
“Temp’s thirty-four,” said Hob. “Cold as Jack Frost’s cerulean scrotum. You want the holy water?”
“Not for this. Get the rubbing alcohol.” She wasn’t certain what holy water would do to a harvester, but the alcohol shouldn’t be a problem for its undead nerves and tissues, and it would protect the dead flesh from infection.
She reached without looking to take the plastic bottle that had appeared in Hob’s outstretched hand, and squirted the contents onto the worst of the wounds, a deep puncture in the stomach.
Where the harvester was a mummified nightmare, Hob was anything but threatening: barely taller than a child, with sticklike limbs and an ill-fitting white fedora. A thick beard emphasized his jutting chin and oversized teeth. His left ear was missing, making his hat sit crookedly on his head. Julia had saved his life years ago, but the ear had been lost down the gullet of a hellhound.
“This is the creepiest uncle-fucker you’ve had in here since that soul-leech thing in ’oh-nine.”
“It doesn’t matter.” Every supernatural creature in the city knew her name and her rules. Julia Chapel would treat anyone and anything as long as they left their wars outside. Blood drinkers and demons, sewer witches and hunters—all were welcome unless they violated the peace of her home.
No healer for a thousand miles could match her power, and no one knew when they would next need her aid. Whatever fights raged across the city, they stopped at her doorway.
She had hoped this peace, this life, would also help her to heal herself. Her selves, rather.
It’s time, she commanded silently, dragging her second soul from its stubborn sleep.
A pair of flickering, spectral arms peeled away from Julia’s body to tug the shadows away from the harvester and give her a better look at the thing’s withered gray chest.
Her hands—her real hands—began to shake. She clasped them together and closed her eyes until she regained her calm. The harvester needed her help.
She cleansed the rest of the injuries as the spirit hands pulled threads of gold light through the gouge in the stomach. Most of the cuts were shallow. Tentative. And the pattern was familiar. . . .
She seized the harvester’s left hand. The gash across the palm was just as she remembered from that day more than two decades before. “Who did this to you?”
The harvester couldn’t answer, but Julia didn’t need it to. She clenched her hands together and waited for her second soul to finish its work. Once they were done, Julia inspected the stitches and fed the harvester just enough of her own magic to sustain it before drawing the cloak back into place.
It left without a word. Julia pulled her spirit limbs back into her body and approached the sliding-glass door on the far side of the living room. She pulled the curtains aside, opened the door, and stepped out onto the small balcony. A single plastic chair sat to one side. A half-dead spider plant hung from a hooked nail she’d pounded into the underside of her upstairs neighbors’ balcony. She gripped the rusting iron rail with both hands and searched the parking lot until she found the man she’d known would be lingering in the darkness, waiting for her to respond to his message.
“I’m going out, Hob.”
Hob stared out through the bars of the railing. “Fuck a Smurf and call him Gimpy, is that who I think it is?”
“Yes.”
“Want me to come with you? I’ll fuck him up, down, and inside out. He’ll be pissing through his nose and shitting his own dick by the time I’m done with him.”
At any other time, the fairy’s bravado would have drawn a smile. “He’s a hunter. If he thinks you’re a threat, he won’t hesitate to put you down.”
“What about you?”
“He won’t kill me.” What he wanted from Julia was far worse.
No one would have recognized Terrence Chapel as Julia’s father. For one thing, he was white. He also looked forty years her senior, thanks to her unnaturally extended lifespan. Age had turned his close-cropped hair cotton white and added to the wrinkles rippling from his crooked nose, but his eyes were the same narrow brown pits of anger, determination, and disappointment she remembered from her youth.
His worn pea jacket was open, revealing a holstered automatic on his right hip and a double-edged dagger on the left. Doubtless the same knife he had used to stab and torture the harvester. The nearby streetlamp had burned out—probably his doing, to conceal them from passing traffic and curious neighbors.
“Good to see you both.” His lip was swollen. Black-edged blisters covered the right side of his face. The harvester had fought back, drying the life from his flesh. The dead skin cracked with every movement, but no pain made it into his voice or expression. “You k
now, if you hadn’t warded me out, I could’ve just knocked or texted you or something instead of going to all that trouble.”
“What do you want?”
He scratched the side of his jaw. “Truth is, I need your help.”
“No. Is there anything else?”
Her cell phone buzzed. She split her attention between Terrence and the new text message. Tell him he’s a cum-bloated, devil-buggered tick from an elephant’s moldy pubes!
Not for the first time, she wondered why she’d let Hob talk her into getting him a smartphone.
“I’ve missed that coldhearted attitude of yours,” he said. “Look. I’ve left you alone like you wanted. I’ve let you play doctor in peace while I was—”
“In peace?” Silver light flashed from Julia’s mouth as she spoke. “You attacked a harvester and sent its broken body staggering to my doorstep.”
“Didn’t kill it, though.” He paced along the edge of the parking lot. “You did a good job on these wards. I don’t suppose you’d show me how you got them to block not only me, but any attempt to get a message to you?”
When she didn’t respond, he shrugged. “You forced my hand. Nothing can stop a harvester. It’s in their nature, their role in the world. It’s the only way I could get your attention.”
Her fists tightened until the nails threatened to pierce flesh. “How long did it take you to match every cut?”
“Couple of hours. The real trick was catching the thing in the first place.”
“You should go. While you still can.”
He had sense enough to step back. “The man I’m hunting is like you. You and your sister.”
She stopped breathing.
“I can’t kill him alone. I need—”
“I know what you need,” she whispered. “I won’t do it. We won’t do it.”
“Then a lot of people are going to die, Jules.”
“Don’t call me that.”
“He calls himself Shard. He’s a nasty piece of work. Kills for pleasure. Started with ordinary humans, but then he discovered new prey. His being double-souled means he’s too strong for me to take down.”
