by Jim Butcher
“You mean you’ll kill them.”
Mavra shrugged, finally breaking her stillness. I thought I heard a faint crackling of tendons, as though they’d protested moving again. “One must eat, after all. And these little, dazzled morsels the Reds brought tonight are too sweet and insubstantial for my taste.”
I took a step back, and turned to Michael, speaking in a whisper. “If I get Susan out of here, can you take this bitch?”
“You might as well not whisper, Harry,” Michael said. “It can hear you.”
“Yes,” Mavra said. “It can.”
Way to go, Harry. Endear yourself to the monsters, why don’t you? “Well,” I asked Michael. “Can you?”
Michael looked at me for a moment, his lips pressed together. Then he said, “Take Susan and go. I’ll manage here.”
Mavra laughed, a dry and raspy sound. “So very noble. So pure. So self-sacrificing.”
Susan stepped around me, to close a triangle with Michael and me. As she did, I noticed that Mavra leaned back from her, just slightly. “Now just a minute,” Susan said. “I’m a big girl. I knew the risks when I came here.”
“I’m sorry, Miss Rodriguez,” Michael said, his tone apologetic. “But this is what I do.”
“Save me from chauvinist pigs,” Susan muttered. She turned her head around to me. “Excuse me. What do you think you’re doing?”
“Looking in your pick-a-nick basket,” I responded, as I flipped open one cover. I whistled. “You came armed for bear, Miss Rodriguez. Holy water. Garlic. Two crosses. Is that a thirty-eight?”
Susan sniffed. “A forty-five.”
“Garlic,” Michael mused.
Above us on the stairs, Mavra hissed.
I glanced up at her. “The Black Court was nearly wiped out, Thomas said. I wonder if that’s because they got a little too much publicity. Do you mind, Miss Rodriguez?” I reached into the basket and produced a nice, smelly clove of garlic, then idly flicked it through the air, toward Mavra.
The vampire didn’t retreat—she simply blurred, and then stood several steps higher than she had been a moment before. The garlic clove bounced against the stairs where she’d been, and tumbled back down toward us. I bent down and picked it up.
“I’d say that’s a big yes.” I looked up at Mavra. “Is that what happened, hmm? Stoker published the Big Book of Black Court Vampire Slaying?”
Those drowned-blue lips peeled back from her yellowed teeth. No fangs. “It matters little. You are beings of paper and cotton. I could tear apart a dozen score of your kind.”
“Unless they’d had an extra spicy pizza, I guess. Let’s get out of here, guys.” I started up the stairs.
Mavra spread her hands out to either side, and gathered darkness into her palms. That’s the only way I can explain it. She spread out her hands, and blackness rushed in to fill them, gathering there in a writhing mass that shrouded her hands to the wrists. “Try to force your way past me with that weapon, wizard, and I will take it as an attack upon my person. And defend myself appropriately.”
Cold washed over me. I extended my senses toward that darkness, warily. And it felt familiar. It felt like frozen chains and cruel twists of thorny wire. It felt empty and black, and like everything that magic isn’t.
Mavra was our girl.
“Michael,” I said, my voice strangled. Steel rasped as he drew one of his knives.
“Um,” Susan said. “Why are her hands doing that? Can vampires do that?”
“Wizards can,” I said. “Get behind me.”
They both did. I lifted my hand, my face creasing in concentration. I reached out and tried to call in my will, my power. It felt shaky, uncertain, like a pump that has lost its prime. It came to me in dribs and drabs, bit by bit, stuttering like a nervous yokel. But I gathered it around my upraised hand, in a crystalline azure glow, beautiful and fragile, casting harsh shadows over Mavra’s face.
Her dead man’s eyes looked down at me, and I had an abrupt understanding of why Michael had called her “it.” Mavra wasn’t a woman anymore. Whatever she was, she wasn’t a person. Not like I understood people, in any case. Those eyes pulled at mine, pulled at me with a kind of horrid fascination, the same sickly attraction that makes you want to see what’s under the blanket in the morgue, to turn over the dead animal and see the corruption beneath. I fought and kept my eyes away from hers.
“Come, wizard,” Mavra whispered, her face utterly without expression. “Let us test one another, thou and I.”
I hardened the energy I held. I wouldn’t have enough juice to take two shots at her. I’d have to take her out the first time or not at all. Cold radiated off of her, little wisps of steam curling up as ice crystals formed on the steps at her feet.
“But you won’t take the first shot, will you.” I didn’t realize I’d spoken my thoughts aloud until after I had. “Because then you’d be breaking the truce.”
I saw an emotion in that face, finally. Anger. “Strike, wizard. Or do not strike. And I will take the mortal of your choice from you. You cannot claim the protection of hospitality to them both.”
“Get out of the way, Mavra. Or don’t get out of the way. If you try to stop us from leaving, if you try to hurt anyone under my protection, you’ll be dealing with a Wizard of the Council, a Knight of the Sword and a girl with a basket full of garlic and holy water. I don’t care how big, bad, and ugly you are, there won’t be anything left of you but a greasy spot on the floor.”
“You dare,” she whispered. She blurred and came at me. I took a breath, but she’d caught me on the exhale, and I had no time to unleash the crystalline blast I’d prepared.
Michael and Susan moved at the same time, hands thrusting past me. She held a wooden cross, simple and dark, while he clutched his dagger by its blade, the crusader-style hilt turned up into a cross as well. Both wood and steel flared with a cold white light as Mavra closed, and she slammed into that light as if it were a solid wall, the shadows in her hand scattering and falling away like sand between her fingers. We stood facing her, my azure power and two blazing crosses, which burned with a kind of purity and quiet power I had never seen before.
“Blood of the Dragon, that old Serpent,” Michael said, quietly. “You and yours have no power here. Your threats are hollow, your words are empty of truth, just as your heart is empty of love, your body of life. Cease this now, before you tempt the wrath of the Almighty.” He glanced aside at me and added, probably for my benefit, “Or before my friend Harry turns you into a greasy spot on the floor.”
Mavra walked slowly back up the steps, tendons creaking. She bent and gathered up the skull she’d dropped at some point during the discussion. Then turned back to us, looking down with a quiet smile. “No matter,” she said. “The hour is up.”
“Hour?” Susan asked me, in a tight whisper. “What hour is she talking about, Dresden?”
“The hour of socialization,” Mavra whispered back. She continued up to the top of the stairs, and gently shut the doors leading out. They closed with an ominous boom.
All the lights went out. All but the blue nimbus around my hand, and the faded glory of the two crosses.
“Great,” I muttered.
Susan looked frightened, her expression hard and tightly controlled. “What happens now?” she whispered, her eyes sweeping around in the dark.
Laughter, gentle and mocking, quiet, hissing, thick with something wet and bubbling, came from all around us. When it comes to spooky laughter, it’s tough to beat vampires. You’re going to have to trust me on this one. They know it well.
Something glimmered in the dark, and Thomas and Justine appeared in the glow of the power gathered in my hand. He lifted both hands at once, and said, “Would you mind terribly if I stood with you?”
I glanced at Michael, who frowned. Then at Susan, who was looking at Thomas in all his next-to-naked glory . . . somewhat intently. I nudged her with my hip and she blinked and looked at me. “Oh. No, not at all. I guess.”
Thomas took Justine’s hand, and the two of them stood off to my right, where Michael kept a wary eye on them. “Thank you, wizard. I’m afraid I’m not well loved here.”
I glanced over at him. There was a mark on his neck, black and angry red, like a brand, in the shape of lovely, feminine lips. I would have thought it lipstick, but I sensed a faint odor of burnt meat in the air.
“What happened to your neck?”
His face paled a few shades. “Your godmother gave me a kiss.”
“Damn,” I said.
“Well put. Are you ready?”
“Ready for what?”
“For Court to be held. To be given our gifts.”
The tenuous hold I had on the power faltered, and I lowered my trembling hand, let go of the tension gently, before I lost control of it. The last light flickered and went out, leaving us in a darkness I wouldn’t have believed possible.
And then the darkness was shattered by light—the spotlights again, shining up on the dais, upon the throne there, and Bianca in her flaming dress upon it. Her mouth and throat and the rounded slopes of her breasts were smeared in streaks of fresh blood, her lips stained scarlet as she smiled, down at the darkness, at the dozens of pairs of glowing eyes in it, gazing up at the dais in adoration, or terror, or lust, or all three.
“All rise,” I whispered, as soft whispers and moans, rustled up out of the darkness around us, not at all human. “Vampire Court is now in session.”
Chapter Twenty-nine
Fear has a lot of flavors and textures. There’s a sharp, silver fear that runs like lightning through your arms and legs, galvanizes you into action, power, motion. There’s heavy, leaden fear that comes in ingots, piling up in your belly during the empty hours between midnight and morning, when everything is dark, every problem grows larger, and every wound and illness grows worse.
And there is coppery fear, drawn tight as the strings of a violin, quavering on one single note that cannot possibly be sustained for a single second longer—but goes on and on and on, the tension before the crash of cymbals, the brassy challenge of the horns, the threatening rumble of the kettledrums.
That’s the kind of fear I felt. Horrible, clutching tension that left the coppery flavor of blood on my tongue. Fear of the creatures in the darkness around me, of my own weakness, the stolen power the Nightmare had torn from me. And fear for those around me, for the folk who didn’t have the power I had. For Susan. For Michael. For all the young people now lying in the darkness, drugged and dying, or dead already, too stupid or too reckless to have avoided this night.
I knew what these things could do to them. They were predators, vicious destroyers. And they scared the living hell out of me.
Fear and anger always come hand in hand. Anger is my hiding place from fear, my shield and my sword against it. I waited for the anger to harden my resolve, put steel into my spine. I waited for the rush of outrage and strength, to feel the power of it coalesce around me like a cloud.
It never came. Just a hollow, fluttering sensation, beneath my belt buckle. For a moment, I felt the fangs of the shadow demon from my dream once again. I started shaking.
I looked around me. All around, the large courtyard was surrounded by high hedges, cut with crenelated squares, in imitation of castle walls. Trees rose up at the corners, trimmed to form the shapes of the guard towers. Small openings in the hedge led out into the darkness of the house’s grounds, but were closed with iron-barred doors. The only other way out that I saw was at the head of the stairs, where Mavra leaned against the doors leading back into the manor and out front. She looked at me with those corpse-milk eyes and her lips cracked as she gave me a small, chill smile.
I gripped my cane with both hands. A sword cane, of course—one made in merry old Jack the Ripper England, not a knockoff from one of those men’s magazines that sells lava lamps and laser pointers. Real steel. Clutching it didn’t do much to make me feel better. I still shook.
Reason. Reason was my next line of defense. Fear is bred from ignorance. So knowledge is a weapon against it, and reason is the tool of knowledge. I turned back to the front as Bianca started speaking to the crowd, some vainglorious bullshit I didn’t pay any attention to. Reason. Facts.
Fact one: Someone had engineered the uprising of the dead, the torment of the restless souls. Most likely Mavra had been the one to actually work the magic. The spiritual turbulence had allowed the Nightmare, the ghost of a demon Michael and I had slain, to cross over and come after me.
Fact two: The Nightmare was out to get me and Michael, personally, by taking shots at us and all of our friends. Mavra might even have been directing it, controlling it, using it as a cat’s-paw. Optionally, Bianca could have been learning from Mavra, and used it herself. Either way, the results had been the same.
Fact three: It hadn’t come after us at sundown, the way we’d half expected.
Fact four: I was surrounded by monsters, with only the strength of a centuries-old tradition keeping them from tearing my throat out. Still, it seemed to be holding. For now.
Unless . . .
“Hell’s bells,” I swore. “I hate it when I don’t figure out the mystery that it’s too late.”
Dozens of gleaming red eyes turned toward me. Susan jabbed her elbow into my ribs. “Shut up, Dresden,” she hissed. “You’re making them look at us.”
“Harry?” Michael whispered.
“That’s their game,” I said, quietly. “We’ve been set up.”
Michael grunted. “What?”
“This whole thing,” I said. The facts started falling into place, about two hours too late. “It’s been a setup from the very beginning. The ghosts. The Nightmare demon. The attacks on our family and friends. All of it.”
“For what?” Michael whispered. “What’s it a setup for?”
“She meant to force us to show here from the very beginning. She’s getting set to take a lesson from history,” I said. “We have to get out of here.”
“A lesson from history?” Michael said.
“Yeah. Remember what Vlad Tepesh did at his inauguration?”
“Oh Lord,” Michael breathed. “Lord preserve us.”
“I don’t get it,” Susan said, voice quiet. “What did this guy do?”
“He invited all of his political and personal enemies to a feast. Then he locked them in and burned them all alive. He wanted to start off his administration on a high note.”
“I see,” Susan said “And you think this is what Bianca’s doing?”
“Lord preserve us,” Michael murmured again.
“I’m told that He helps those who help themselves,” I said. “We’ve got to get out of here.”
Michael’s armor clinked as he looked around. “They’ve blocked the exits.”
“I know. How many of them can you handle without the Sword?”
“If it was only a question of holding them off . . .”
“But it isn’t. We may have to punch a hole through them.”
Michael shook his head. “I’m not sure. Maybe two or three, Lord willing.”
I grimaced. Only one vampire guarded each way out, but there were another two or three dozen in the courtyard—not to mention my godmother or any of the other guests, like Mavra.
“We’ll head for that gate,” Michael said, nodding toward one of the gates in the hedges.
I shook my head. “We’d never make it.”
“You will,” he said. “I think I can manage that much.”
“Ixnay on that upidstay anplay,” I said. “We need an idea that gets us all out alive.”
“No, Harry. I’m supposed to stand between people and the harm things like these offer. Even if it kills me. It’s my job.”
“You’re supposed to have the Sword to help. It’s my fault that it’s gone, so until I get it back for you, ease off on the martyr throttle. I don’t need anyone else on my conscience.” Or, I thought, a vengeful Charity coming after me for getting her child
ren’s father killed. “There’s got to be a way out of this.”
“Let me get this straight,” Susan said, quietly, as Bianca’s speech went on. “We can’t leave now because it would be an insult to the vampires.”
“And all the excuse they would need to call for instant satisfaction.”
“Instant satisfaction,” Susan said. “What’s that?”
“A duel to the death. Which means that one of them would tear my arms off and watch me bleed to death,” I said. “If I’m lucky.”
Susan swallowed. “I see. And what happens if we just wait around?”
“Bianca or one of the others finds a way to make us cross the line and throw the first punch. Then they kill us.”
“And if we don’t throw the first punch?” Susan asked.
“I figure she’ll have a backup plan to wipe us out with, just in case.”
“Us?” Susan asked.
“I’m afraid so.” I looked at Michael. “We need a distraction. Something that will get them all looking the other way.”
He nodded and said, “You might be better for that than me, Harry.”
I took a breath and looked around to see what I had to work with. We didn’t have much time. Bianca was bringing her speech to a close.
“And so,” Bianca said, her voice carrying ably, “we stand at the dawn of a new age for our kind, the first acknowledged Court this far into the United States. No longer need we fear the wrath of our enemies. No longer shall we meekly bow our heads and offer our throats to those who claim power over us.” At this point, her dark eyes fastened directly upon me. “Finally, with the strength of the entire Court behind us, with the Lords of the Outer Night to empower us, we will face our enemies. And bring them to their knees.” Her smile widened, curving fangs, bloodred.
She trailed a fingertip across her throat, then lifted the blood to her mouth to suckle it from her finger. She shivered. “My dear subjects. Tonight, we have guests among us. Guests brought here to witness our ascension to real power. Please, my friends. Help me welcome them.”
