by Jim Butcher
“I’m fine,” I said.
“You’re a lousy liar. Word is that the Reds are bringing more muscle into town. That they’re offering their groupies full vampirehood if one of them brings you down.”
“Hell’s bells,” I muttered. My head started to ache.
“It isn’t a good time for you to be outside by yourself. Even during daylight.”
“I don’t need a baby-sitter, Billy.”
“Harry, I know you better than most. I know you can do stuff that other people can’t—but that doesn’t make you Superman. Everyone needs help sometimes.”
“Not me. Not now.” I stuffed the toad into my sack and picked up another. “I don’t have time for it.”
“Oh, that reminds me.” Billy drew a folded piece of paper out of the pocket of his sweats and read it. “You’ve got an appointment with a client at three.”
I blinked at him. “What?”
“I dropped by your office and checked your messages. A Ms. Sommerset was trying to reach you, so I called her and set up the appointment for you.”
I felt my temper rising again. “You did what?”
His expression turned annoyed. “I checked your mail, too. The landlord for the office dropped off your eviction notice. If you don’t have him paid off in a week, he’s booting you out.”
“What the hell gives you the right to go poking around in my office, Billy? Or calling my clients?”
He took a step in front of me, glaring. I had to focus on his nose to avoid the risk of looking at his eyes. “Get off the high horse, Harry. I’m your freaking friend. You’ve been spending all your time hiding in your apartment. You should be happy I’m helping you save your business.”
“You’re damned right it’s my business,” I spat. The shopping cart lady circled past in my peripheral vision, cart wheels squeaking as she walked behind me. “Mine. As in none of yours.”
He thrust out his jaw. “Fine. How about you just crawl back into your cave until they evict you from that, too?” He spread his hands. “Good God, man. I don’t need to be a wizard to see when someone’s in a downward spiral. You’re hurting. You need help.”
I jabbed a finger into his chest. “No, Billy. I don’t need morehelp . I don’t need to be baby-sitting a bunch of kids who think that because they’ve learned one trick they’re ready to be the Lone Ranger with fangs and a tail. I don’t need to be worrying about the vamps targeting the people around me when they can’t get to me. I don’t need to be second-guessing myself, wondering whoelse is going to get hurt because I dropped the ball.” I reached down and snatched up a toad, jerking the cloth bag from Billy’s hands on the way back up. “I don’t needyou .”
Naturally, the hit went down right then.
It wasn’t subtle, as attempted assassinations go. An engine roared and a black compact pickup truck jumped the curb into the park fifty yards away. It jounced and slewed to one side, tires digging up furrows in the sunbaked grass. A pair of men clung to a roll bar in the back of the truck. They were dressed all in black, complete with black sunglasses over black ski masks, and their guns matched—automatic weapons in the mini-Uzi tradition.
“Get back!” I shouted. With my right hand, I grabbed at Billy and shoved him behind me. With my left, I shook out the bracelet on my wrist, hung with a row of tiny, medieval-style shields. I lifted my left hand toward the truck and drew in my will, focusing it with the bracelet into a sudden, transparent, shimmering half-globe that spread out between me and the oncoming truck.
The truck ground to a halt. The two gunmen didn’t wait for it to settle. With all the fire discipline of an action-movie extra, they pointed their guns more or less at me and emptied their clips in one roaring burst.
Sparks flew from the shield in front of me, and bullets whined and hissed in every direction as they ricocheted. My bracelet grew uncomfortably warm within a second or two, the energy of the shield taxing the focus to its limit. I tried to angle the shield to deflect the shots up into the air as much as possible. God only knew where all those bullets were going—I just hoped that they wouldn’t bounce through a nearby car or some other passerby.
The guns clicked empty. With jerky, unprofessional motions, both gunmen began to reload.
“Harry!” Billy shouted.
“Not now!”
“But—”
I lowered the shield and lifted my right hand—the side that projects energy. The silver ring I wore on my index finger had been enchanted to save back a little kinetic energy whenever my arm moved. I hadn’t used the ring in months, and it had a whale of a kick to it—one I hardly dared to use on the gunmen. That much force could kill one of them, and that would be basically the same as letting them fill me full of bullets. It would just take a little longer to set in. The White Council did not take kindly to anyone violating the First Law of Magic: Thou Shalt Not Kill. I’d slipped it once on a technicality, but it wouldn’t happen again.
I gritted my teeth, focused my shot just to one side of the gunmen, and triggered the ring. Raw force, unseen but tangible, lashed through the air and caught the first gunman with a glancing blow across his upper body. His automatic slammed against his chest, and the impact tore the sunglasses off his head and shredded bits of his clothes even as it flung him back and out of the pickup, to land somewhere on the ground on the other side.
The second gunman got less of the blast. What did hit him struck against his shoulder and head. He held on to his gun but lost the sunglasses, and they took the ski mask with them, revealing him to be a plain-looking boy who couldn’t have been old enough to vote. He blinked against the sudden light and then resumed his fumbling reload.
“Kids,” I snarled, lifting my shield again. “They’re sending kids after me. Hell’s bells.”
And then something made the hairs on the back of my neck try to lift me off the ground. As the kid with the gun started shooting again, I glanced back over my shoulder.
The old lady with her shopping basket had stopped maybe fifteen feet behind me. I saw now that she wasn’t as old as I had thought. I caught a flicker of cool, dark eyes beneath age makeup. Her hands were young and smooth. From the depths of the shopping basket she pulled out a sawed-off shotgun, and swung it toward me.
Bullets from the chattering automatic slammed against my shield, and it was all I could do to hold it in place. If I brought any magic to bear against the third attacker, I would lose my concentration and the shield with it—and inexpert or not, the gunman on the truck was spraying around enough lead that sooner or later he wouldn’t miss.
On the other hand, if the disguised assassin got a chance to fire that shotgun from five yards away, no one would bother taking me to the hospital. I’d go straight to the morgue.
Bullets hammered into my shield, and I couldn’t do anything but watch the third attacker bring the shotgun to bear. I was screwed, and probably Billy was along with me.
Billy moved. He had already gotten out of his T-shirt, and he had enough muscle to ripple—flat, hard muscle, athlete’s muscle, not the carefully sculpted build of weight lifters. He dove forward, toward the woman with the shotgun, and stripped out of his sweatpants on the fly. He was naked beneath.
I felt the surge of magic that Billy used then—sharp, precise, focused. There was no sense of ritual in what he did, no slow gathering of power building to release. He blurred as he moved, and between one breath and the next, Billy-the-Naked was gone and Billy-the-Wolf slammed into the assailant, a dark-furred beast the size of a Great Dane, fangs slashing at the hand that gripped the forward stock of the shotgun.
The woman cried out, jerking her hand back, scarlet blood on her fingers, and swept the gun at Billy like a club. He twisted and caught the blow on his shoulders, a snarl exploding from him. He went after the woman’s other hand, faster than I could easily see, and the shotgun tumbled to the ground.
The woman screamed again and drew back her hand.
She wasn’t human.
Her han
ds distended, lengthening, as did her shoulders and her jaw. Her nails became ugly, ragged talons, and she raked them down at Billy, striking him across the jaw, this time eliciting a pained yelp mixed with a snarl. He rolled to one side and came up on his feet, circling in order to force the woman-thing’s back to me.
The gunman in the truck clicked on empty again. I dropped the shield and hurled myself forward, diving to grip the shotgun. I came up with it and shouted, “Billy, move!”
The wolf darted to one side, and the woman whipped around to face me, her distorted features furious, mouth drooling around tusklike fangs.
I pointed the gun at her belly and pulled the trigger.
The gun roared and bucked, slamming hard against my shoulder. Ten-gauge, maybe, or slug rounds. The woman doubled over, letting out a shriek, and stumbled backward and to the ground. She wasn’t down long. She almost bounced back to her feet, scarlet splashed all over her rag of a dress, her face wholly inhuman now. She sprinted past me to the truck and leapt up into the back. The gunman hauled his partner back into the truck with him, and the driver gunned the engine. The truck threw out some turf before it dug in, jounced back onto the street, and whipped away into traffic.
I stared after it for a second, panting. I lowered the shotgun, realizing as I did that I had somehow managed to keep hold of the toad I had picked up in my left hand. It wriggled and struggled in a fashion that suggested I had been close to crushing it, and I tried to ease up on my grip without losing it.
I turned to look for Billy. The wolf paced back over to his discarded sweatpants, shimmered for a second, and became once more the naked young man. There were two long cuts on his face, parallel with his jaw. Blood ran down over his throat in a fine sheet. He carried himself tensely, but it was the only indication he gave of the pain.
“You all right?” I asked him.
He nodded and jerked on his pants, his shirt. “Yeah. What the hell was that?”
“Ghoul,” I told him. “Probably one of the LaChaise clan. They’re working with the Red Court, and they don’t much like me.”
“Why don’t they like you?”
“I’ve given them headaches a few times.”
Billy lifted a corner of his shirt to hold against the cuts on his face. “I didn’t expect the claws.”
“They’re sneaky that way.”
“Ghoul, huh. Is it dead?”
I shook my head. “They’re like cockroaches. They recover from just about anything. Can you walk?”
“Yeah.”
“Good. Let’s get out of here.” We headed toward the Beetle. I picked up the cloth sack of toads on the way and started shaking them back out onto the ground. I put the toad I’d nearly squished down with them, then wiped my hand off on the grass.
Billy squinted at me. “Why are you letting them go?”
“Because they’re real.”
“How do you know?”
“The one I was holding crapped on my hand.”
I let Billy into the Blue Beetle and got in the other side. I fetched the first aid kit from under my seat and passed it over to him. Billy pressed a cloth against his face, looking out at the toads. “So that means things are in a bad way?”
“Yeah,” I confirmed, “things are in a bad way.” I was silent for a minute, then said, “You saved my life.”
He shrugged. He didn’t look at me.
“So you set up the appointment for three o’clock, right? What was the name? Sommerset?”
He glanced at me and kept the smile from his mouth—but not from his eyes. “Yeah.”
I scratched at my beard and nodded. “I’ve been distracted lately. Maybe I should clean up first.”
“Might be good,” Billy agreed.
I sighed. “I’m an ass sometimes.”
Billy laughed. “Sometimes. You’re human like the rest of us.”
I started up the Beetle. It wheezed a little, but I coaxed it to life.
Just then something hit my hood with a hard, heavy thump. Then again. Another heavy blow, on the roof.
A feeling of dizziness swept over me, a nausea that came so suddenly and violently that I clutched the steering wheel in a simple effort not to collapse. Distantly, I could hear Billy asking me if I was all right. I wasn’t. Power moved and stirred in the air outside—hectic disruption, the forces of magic, usually moving in smooth and quiet patterns, suddenly cast into tumult, disruptive, maddening chaos.
I tried to push the sensations away from me, and labored to open my eyes. Toads were raining down. Not occasionally plopping, but raining down so thick and hard that they darkened the sky. No gentle laundry-chute drop for these poor things, either. They fell like hailstones, splattering on concrete, on the hood of the Beetle. One of them fell hard enough to send a spiderweb of cracks through my windshield, and I dropped into gear and scooted down the street. After a few hundred yards we got away from the otherworldly rain.
Both of us were breathing too fast. Billy had been right. The rain of toads meant something serious was going on, magically speaking. The White Council was coming to town tonight to discuss the war. I had a client to meet, and the vampires had evidently upped the stakes (no pun intended), striking at me more openly than they had dared to before.
I flipped on the windshield wipers. Amphibian blood left scarlet streaks on the cracked glass.
“Good Lord,” Billy breathed.
“Yeah.” I said. “It never rains, it pours.”
Chapter Two
I dropped Billy off at his apartment near campus. I didn’t think the ghoul would be filing a police report, but I wiped down the shotgun anyway. Billy wrapped it in a towel I had in the backseat of the Beetle and took it with him, promising to dispose of the weapon. His girlfriend, Georgia, a willowy girl a foot taller than him, waited on the apartment’s balcony in dark shorts and a scarlet bikini top, displaying a generous amount of impressively sun-bronzed skin in a manner far more confident and appealing than I would have guessed from her a year before. My, how the kids had grown.
The moment Billy got out of the car, Georgia looked up sharply from her book and her nostrils flared. She headed into the house and met him at the door with a first aid kit. She glanced at the car, her expression worried, and nodded to me. I waved back, trying to look friendly. From Georgia’s expression, I hadn’t managed better than surly. They went into the apartment, and I pulled away before anyone could come out to socialize with me.
After a minute I pulled over, killed the engine, and squinted up at myself in the rearview mirror of the Beetle.
It came as a shock to me. I know, that sounds stupid, but I don’t keep mirrors in my home. Too many things can use mirrors as windows, even doors, and it was a risk I preferred to skip entirely. I hadn’t glanced at a mirror in weeks.
I looked like a train wreck.
More so than usual, I mean.
My features are usually kind of long, lean, all sharp angles. I’ve got almost-black hair to go with the dark eyes. Now I had grey and purplish circles under them. Deep ones. The lines of my face, where they weren’t covered by several months of untrimmed beard, looked as sharp as the edges of a business card.
My hair had grown out long and shaggy—not in that sexy-young-rock-star kind of way but in that time-to-take-Rover-to-the-groomer kind of way. It didn’t even have the advantage of being symmetrical, since a big chunk had been burned short in one spot when a small incendiary had been smuggled to me in a pizza delivery box, back when I could still afford to order pizza. My skin was pale. Pasty, even. I looked like Death warmed over, provided someone had made Death run the Boston Marathon. I looked tired. Burned out. Used up.
I sat back in my seat.
I hate it when I’m wrong. But it looked like maybe Billy and the werewolves (stars and stones, they sounded like a bad rock band) had a point. I tried to think of the last time I’d gotten a haircut, a shave. I’d had a shower last week. Hadn’t I?
I mopped at my face with my shaking hands. T
he days and nights had been blurring lately. I spent my time in the lab under my apartment, researching twenty-four seven. The lab was in the subbasement, all damp stone and no windows. Circadian rhythms, bah. I’d pretty much dispensed with day and night. There was too much to think about to pay attention to such trivial details.
About nine months before, I’d gotten my girlfriend nearly killed. Maybe more than killed.
Susan Rodriguez had been a reporter for a yellow journal called theMidwestern Arcane when we met. She was one of the few people around who were willing to accept the idea of the supernatural as a factual reality. She’d clawed for every detail, every story, every ounce of proof she could dig up so that she could try to raise the public consciousness on the matter. To that end, she’d followed me to a vampire shindig.
And the monsters got her.
Billy had been right about that, too. The vampires, the Red Court, had changed her. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say that they infected her. Though she was still human, technically, she’d been given their macabre thirst. If she ever sated it, she would turn all the way into one of them. Some part of her would die, and she would be one of the monsters, body and soul.
That’s why the research. I’d been looking for some way to help her. To create a vaccine, or to purge her body. Something. Anything.
I’d asked her to marry me. She told me no. Then she left town. I read her syndicated column in theArcane . She must have been mailing them in to her editor, so at least I knew she was alive. She’d asked me not to follow her and I hadn’t. I wouldn’t, until I could figure out a way to get her out of the mess I’d gotten her into. Therehad to be something I could do.
Had to be. There had to be.
I bowed my head, suddenly grimacing so hard that the muscles of my face cramped, ached, and smoldered. My chest felt tight, and my body seemed to burn with useless, impotent flame. I’m a wizard. I should have been able to protect Susan. Should have been able to save her. Should have been able to help her. Should have been smarter, should have been faster, should have been better.
