by Jim Butcher
“If he arrives,” Denton snarled.
“My spotters,” Marcone said, “tell me that the animals I sent out with them went mad with fear about two minutes ago, three miles west of here. I think it will not take him much longer to show up, Mr. Denton.” His smile widened, but his money-colored eyes grew harder. “Now. Shall we cease antagonizing one another and finish our business?” Marcone lowered the rifle and flicked the laser sight off.
Denton looked from me to Marcone, and I saw the blackness rise up in his eyes, gather behind them, and get ready to come rolling out. “Marcone,” I said. “Just shoot him now.”
“I think we’ve both had enough of your attempts to divide and conquer, Mr. Dresden,” Marcone said, his voice bored. “You’re beaten. Acknowledge it with grace.”
I watched a slow smile spread over Denton’s face as he kept the gun pointed at my head. My voice rose by a couple notes of alarm. “I mean it, John. I really do, I shit you not. This entire thing is about them killing you.”
“What a vulgar reassurance,” Marcone said. “Agent Denton, we have a few details to attend to. Lower your gun and let us be about them.”
“I don’t think so,” Denton said. And he pointed the gun at Hendricks and started pulling the trigger. The gun roared so many times, so quickly, that I couldn’t tell how often Denton fired.
Hendricks snapped back onto his heels and was driven flat onto his back by the force of the bullets slamming into him. He didn’t have time to twitch, much less scream, and he dropped like a felled tree. I felt it in the earth when his massive body hit the ground.
Marcone started to raise his gun, but Wilson and Harris hurtled at his back and dragged him to the ground, pounding on him with their fists. Marcone writhed like an eel and slipped away from them, but Denton stepped into his path and thrust the gun into Marcone’s face.
“That’s enough,” he said, his voice gone hoarse. “Get them all and take them to the pit. MacFinn will be here any moment.”
I took the moment to roll to my hands and knees and attempt to slip away unnoticed, but was brought up short by a pair of bare, muscular, feminine legs. My gaze followed the legs up, past the skirt, to a magnificently bare-breasted torso encircled by a wolf-pelt belt, and then to a face dominated by eyes made eerie by the lack of anything recognizably sentient in them. Benn smiled at me, set her foot against my wounded shoulder, and with a sadistic twist of her ankle and a shove of her muscled leg, sent searing pain screaming through my body, making me crumple to the ground in agony.
I remember them dragging me across the grounds. We passed into the ring of evergreens, and I remember thinking that any sounds originating in that circle of pines would be heavily muffled by their branches and needles, further muffled by the trees surrounding the property, as well as the high stone wall. Gunshots, for example, might not even be heard at all, off the property. It was the clearest thought I had while my shoulder exploded.
The next thing I remember was being shoved roughly forward. I fell, straight and hard in the dispassionate grip of gravity, and after long enough for me to start to suck in a breath, I hit water. It was only about six or eight inches deep, and beneath it was swirling, soft mud. I had a brief pang for my leather duster and then I sank down into the water, my hands slipping into the mud and getting stuck there. Cold water burbled around my face, and felt nice, for a moment, on my aching shoulder.
Someone grabbed me by the collar and hauled me out of the water, to sit on my butt. Hands steadied me, and I sat with my shoulder aching and my head whirling until I could squint up at who was there.
Murphy dropped to one knee in the water beside me and smoothed back my damp hair. “Dresden,” she said. “You okay?”
I took a look around me. I was at the bottom of an enormous pit, a square maybe twenty feet deep and twice that across. Muddy water, maybe from the rain, covered the bottom of the pit, and the moon tinted its surface silvery brown. Directly above the pit’s center, maybe forty feet above me, was a square made of wooden planks, maybe five by five. It was a hunter’s platform, suspended by ropes leading from the circle of evergreens that surrounded the pit. I could see the tops of the trees against the moon and the clouds.
“Dresden,” Murphy said again. “Are you all right?”
“I’m alive,” I said. I blinked at her for a second and then said, “I thought they killed you.”
Her blue eyes sparkled briefly. Her hair was a mess, and her jeans and flannel shirt were rumpled and soaked with muddy water. She was shivering from the cold. “I thought they had, too. But they stopped as soon as Denton took you out, and tossed me down here. I can’t figure why they didn’t do the deed themselves, instead of leaving it to MacFinn.”
I grimaced. “Trying to cover their tracks from the White Council,” I said. “Denton wants MacFinn to take the fall for all the deaths. I think he’s lost it.”
“I always wind up in the nicest places when I hang with you, Dresden.”
“You were tied up,” I said. “How’d you get loose?”
“She had help,” someone said in a slurred, heavy voice. “For all the good it will do her.” I turned my head to see a naked and dirty Tera West, sitting with her back against another wall of mud. There were five soggy, motionless forms lying around her, the Alphas in their wolf-shapes. Tera held their heads upon her lap, up out of the water. She looked bedraggled and anguished, touching each of them in turn, very gently. Her amber eyes were dull.
“I don’t get it,” I said. “Why did they stick us down here? Marcone just keeps a pit trap dug in his yard?”
“He was planning on trapping MacFinn down here until morning,” Tera said. “When he would be vulnerable.”
“Whoa, whoa,” Murphy said, face pensive. “You’re saying Denton was responsible for the deaths? All of them?”
“One way or another. Yeah.” I gave Murphy the rundown on Denton. The way he’d gotten the belts for him and his people, lost control of the power they’d given him, and set up the Streetwolves and then MacFinn to take the blame.
Murphy broke out into acidic swearing. “That was the angle I was missing. Dammit. No wonder Denton was so hot to keep you off of the case and out of the way, and why he wanted to find you so bad after the scene at MacFinn’s place. That’s how he kept showing up everywhere so fast, too—he already knew that someone was dead.”
There were shouts from above, and we looked up to see Marcone swing out from the edge of the pit. He hung limply from a rope. His eyes were closed. I watched as he was drawn up in a series of short jerks until his bowed head bumped the bottom of the hunter’s platform above and then was left there.
“What the hell?” Murphy said, her voice soft.
“Bait,” I replied. I closed my eyes for a moment. “Denton’s stringing him up as bait for MacFinn. The loup-garou comes in, jumps up to get Marcone, then Denton cuts the rope and drops MacFinn down in here.”
“With us,” Murphy said quietly. I felt her shivers grow a little more severe. “They’re going to drop that thing into this pit with us. Oh, God, Harry.”
“Denton or one of his people must have gotten some silver bullets made,” I said. “They’ll just let MacFinn slaughter us, then shoot him from up there.” I squinted up at the edge of the pit. “Pretty good plan.”
“What can we do?” Murphy asked. She hugged herself, hard.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Nothing,” Tera said quietly. Murphy and I turned to look at her. One of the Alphas was stirring, Billy maybe, and wobbled and fell when he tried to sit up. But at least he could hold his head up out of the water. “Nothing,” she repeated. “We are beaten.”
I closed my eyes and tried to order my thoughts, to push the pain and fatigue back down and put together some sort of plan. Murphy settled beside me, a shivering spot against my side. The cast on her arm pressed against my ribs. I opened my coat, more a polite gesture than anything else, given that it, too, was soaked, and slipped the edge
of it around her shoulders with my arm. Her back stiffened and she flashed me a look of indignation, but after a second just pressed as far under the coat as she could.
After a moment, she spoke. Her voice came out quiet, uncertain—a far cry from her normal, brisk tones. “I’ve done some thinking, Dresden. I’ve decided that there’s a reasonable chance you aren’t involved with the killings.”
I smiled a little. “That’s real big of you, Murph. Doesn’t what Denton did to you sort of prove I’m not involved?”
She half smiled and shook her head. “No, Harry. It just means that he wants to kill you and me both. It doesn’t mean that I trust everything you’re saying.”
“He wants me dead, Murph. That should mean something in my favor, shouldn’t it?”
“Not really,” she said, and squinted up at the top of the pit. “From what I can tell, Denton wants pretty much everybody dead. And you could still be lying to me.”
“I’m not, Murph,” I said, my voice soft. “Cross my heart.”
“I can’t just take your word on it, Harry,” she whispered. “There are too many people dead. My men. My people. Civilians, the ones I’m supposed to protect. The only way to be sure is to take you all, everyone involved, and sort things out with you behind bars.”
“No,” I said. “There’s more to it than what you can prove, Murph, more than what’s going to stand up in court. Come on. You and me, we’ve known each other for years. You should be able to trust me by now, right?”
“I should be able to,” Murphy agreed. “But after what I’ve seen, all the blood and death . . .” She shook her head. “No, Harry. I can’t trust anyone anymore.” She half smiled and said, “I still like you, Dresden. But I can’t trust you.”
I tried to match her smile, but my feelings were in too much turmoil. Pain, mostly. Physical pain, and a deeper heart hurt, both for Murphy’s sake and for the sake of our friendship. She was so alone. I wanted to go to the rescue, somehow, to make her hurting go away.
She’d have spit in my face if I’d tried. Murphy wasn’t the sort of person who wanted to be rescued, from anything. That she accepted as much comfort as my wet coat offered her came as a surprise to me.
I looked around the pit again intently. The other Alphas were recovering, enough to sit up, but apparently not enough to move. Tera just sat with her back against the wall, defeated and exhausted. Marcone swung from the platform high above me, not moving, though I thought I might have heard a moan from him at one point. I felt a pang of sympathy for him. However much of a heartless bastard he might be, no one deserved to dangle like bait from a hook.
The Alphas, Tera, Marcone, Murphy. They were all where they were because of me. It was my fault we were there, my doing that we were all about to die. Carmichael, the poor jerk, was dead, also because of me. So were other good cops. So was Hendricks.
I had to do something about it.
“I need to get out of here,” I told Murphy. “Get me out of here, and maybe I can do something.”
Murphy turned her head toward me. “You mean . . . ?” She waved the fingers of her unbroken arm in a vaguely mystic gesture.
I nodded. I still had my ace in the hole. “Something like that.”
“Right. So how do we get you out of here?”
“You going to trust me, Murph?”
Her jaw clenched. “It doesn’t look as though I have much choice, does it?”
I smiled back at her, and rose to my feet, sloshing around in the water. “Maybe we could dig into the walls a bit. Make climbing holes.”
“You’ll probably get shot once you get to the top,” Murphy said.
“No,” I said, “I don’t think they’ll want to hang around the pit with MacFinn coming. They’re bloodthirsty, but not stupid.”
“So,” Murphy said. “All we need to do is get you up to the top of the pit, and then you’re going to go one-on-four with a bunch of armed FBI agents-cum-werewolves and beat them in time to go up against the loup-garou that we couldn’t stop before with all of your magical gizmos and a building full of police officers.”
“Essentially,” I answered.
Murphy looked up at me and then shrugged and let out a short, defiant laugh. She stood up too, flicked her hair back from her eyes with a toss of her head, and said, “I guess it could be worse.”
There was a soft sound from above and behind me. Murphy froze, staring upward, her eyes becoming almost impossibly wide.
I turned my head very slowly.
The loup-garou crouched up at the lip of the pit, huge and gnarled and muscled and deadly. Its foaming jaws were open, showing the rows of killing teeth. Its eyes gleamed with scarlet flames in the moonlight, and they were fastened on the dangling figure of Gentleman Johnny Marcone. I quivered, and the motion made a slight sound against the water. The beast turned its head down, and when it saw me its eyes narrowed to glowing slits, and it let out a harsh, low growl. Its claws dug into the earth at the edges of the pit, tearing through it like sand.
It remembered me.
My heart started ripping a staccato rhythm in my chest. That same raw, sharp, primitive fear I’d felt before, the fear of simply being jumped on and eaten, returned in full force and for a moment swept away all thoughts and plans.
“You had to say that,” I said to Murphy, my voice wan and pale. “Happy? It’s worse.”
Chapter Thirty-two
"Okay,” I said, fear making my voice weak. "This is bad.
This is very, very bad.”
"Wish I had my pistol,” Murphy said, her tone resolute. "I wish we’d had some more time to talk things out, Harry.”
I glanced over at Tera. One of the Alphas, the mouse-haired girl in her wolf-shape, was leaning against her and whimpering. “Close your eyes,” Tera said softly and covered the little wolf’s eyes with her hand. Her amber eyes met mine, without hope, without any sparkle of life.
They were going to die because of me. Dammit all, it wasn’t fair. I hadn’t done anything grossly stupid. It wasn’t fair to have come so far, sacrificed so much, and to buy it down here in the mud, like some kind of burrowing bug. I searched the pit again desperately, but it was a fiendishly simple and complete trap. There were no options down here.
My eyes went up. Straight up.
“Marcone!” I shouted. “John Marcone! Can you hear me?”
The limp figure suspended above me stirred weakly. “What do you want, Mr. Dresden?”
“Can you move?” I asked. The loup-garou growled, low, and started pacing a circuit of the pit, glowing eyes flashing between us down at the bottom and Marcone, trying to decide who to rip apart first.
“An arm,” Marcone confirmed a few seconds later.
"Do you still keep that knife on you? The one I saw at the garage?”
“Denton and his associates searched me and found it, I am afraid,” came Marcone’s voice.
“Dammit all. You’re a miserable, stupid bastard for making a deal with Denton, Marcone. Now do you believe he wanted to kill you all along?”
The figure above me wiggled and writhed, swinging from the ropes that held him trussed up there. “Yes, do tell me that you told me so with your last breath, Mr. Dresden. I was already rather acutely aware of that,” Marcone said, his voice dry. “But perhaps I’ll yet have a chance to make amends.”
“What are you doing?” I asked. I kept my eyes on the loup-garou, as it circled the pit, and kept myself opposite the creature, where I could see it.
“Reaching for the knife they didn’t find,” Marcone replied. He grunted, and then I saw a flicker of light on something shiny up above me.
“Forget it,” Murphy said quietly, stepping close to my side as she watched Marcone. “He’s just going to cut himself loose and leave us to rot here.”
“We won’t get the chance to rot,” I pointed out. But I thought she was right.
Marcone started to spin slowly on his rope, wriggling around until his whole body was rotating on the end of it.
He began to speak, his voice calm. “Ironic, isn’t it? I’d planned to wait for the creature on the platform and tempt it into the pit. There are some nets ready to drop on it, after that. I would have held it until morning.”
“You do know that it’s right beneath you now, don’t you, John?” I asked.
“Mr. Dresden,” Marcone said crossly. “I’ve asked you not to call me that.”
“Whatever,” I said, but I had to admire the raw courage of the man to banter while dangling up there like a ripe peach.
“I use this place to conduct noisy business,” Marcone said. “The trees muffle the sound, you see. You can barely hear even shotgun blasts on the other side of the wall.” He continued to spin on the rope, slow and lazy, a shadow against the moon and the stars.
“Well. That’s nice,” I said, “and despicable.” The loup-garou looked down at me and snarled, and I took an involuntary step back from it. The mud wall of the pit stopped me.
“Oh, quite,” Marcone agreed. “But necessary.”
“Is there anything you’re not shameless about, Marcone?” I asked.
“Of course. But you don’t think I’m going to tell you, do you? Now, be quiet if you please. I don’t need the distraction.” And then I saw Marcone’s arm curl in and straighten outward. There was a flutter of metallic motion in the air, and a snapping sound from the base of on eof the ropes that held the platform suspended, at its far end where it was secured to one of the pine trees.
The rope abruptly sagged, and the platform—and Marcone with it—swayed drunkenly. Marcone grunted, and bounced against his ropes a few times, making the whole affair of ropes lurch about—and then the damaged line snapped and came entirely free. It whipped out toward Marcone, lost momentum, and then fell through the evening air.
Straight down into the pit in front of me. One end was still attached to the platform above, now off center from the pit and listing to one side.
I blinked at it for a moment, and Murphy said, “Holy shit. He did it.”
