by Jim Butcher
“My factor in Zurich—”
“Do you think I’m an idiot? This job has already cost us more than any of us bargained for. Clear off the bloody radio and contact me when you have something worth saying or I’ll destroy the bloody thing and leave.”
“Wait,” Marcone said. There was tension in his voice. “You can’t—”
“Can’t I?” Valmont answered. “Don’t fuck with me, Yank. And add another million to the bill for telling me my job. I’m calling off the deal if the money isn’t there in ten minutes. Out.”
I came up to the grate and found it sitting not quite squarely in its frame. Valmont must have entered the hotel and moved around through the air shafts. I peered out through the grate. Valmont had set up in a storage room of some kind. The only light in the room was a dim green shimmer that rose up from what must have been a palmtop computer. Valmont muttered something to herself beneath her breath, her eyes on the screen. She was wearing a lot of tight-fitting black clothing and a black baseball cap. She wasn’t wearing my coat, dammit, but I guess I couldn’t have expected to find everything wrapped up in a nice package.
I checked the duck, setting it down facing toward me. It immediately walked in a little circle and pointed toward Anna Valmont.
The thief paced the room like a restless cat, eyes on the palmtop. My eyes adjusted to the dimness over the course of a few minutes of waiting, and I saw that Valmont was pacing back and forth around a tube with a carrying strap. The tube wasn’t more than five or six feet from me.
I watched Valmont pace until her expression and steps froze, eyes locking hard on the palmtop. “Great Jupiter’s balls,” she said quietly. “He paid it.”
Now or never. I put my hands on the grate and pushed it as gently as I could. It slid soundlessly from the wall and I set it to one side. Valmont was focused entirely on her little computer. If the prospect of payment distracted Valmont for a moment more, I’d be able to slip away with the Shroud, which would be very James Bond of me. Hopefully the tuxedo would help out with that. I needed only a few seconds to creep out, nip the Shroud, and get back into the vents.
I almost died when Valmont’s radio crackled again and Marcone’s voice said, “There. As agreed, plus your additional fee. Will that be sufficient?”
“Quite. You will find your merchandise in a storage closet in the basement.”
Marcone’s voice gained an edge. “Please be more specific.”
I slipped out of the vents, thinking silent thoughts. A long stretch put my fingertips on the tube’s carrying strap.
“If you wish,” Valmont replied. “The article is in a locked room, in a courier’s tube. The tube itself is outfitted with an incendiary. A radio transmitter in my possession has the capacity to disarm or to trigger the device. Once I am safely on my way from the city, I will disarm the device and notify you via telephone. Until that time, I suggest you do not try to open it.”
I jerked my fingers away from the tube.
“Again you have altered our agreement,” Marcone said. He said it in a voice as smooth and cold as the inside wall of a refrigerator.
“It does seem to be a seller’s market.”
“There are very few people able to speak about taking advantage of me.”
Valmont let out a quiet, bitter little laugh. “Come, now. This is nothing more than an entirely reasonable piece of insurance,” Valmont said. “Be a good boy and your precious cloth is in no danger. Attempt to betray me, and you’ll have nothing.”
“And if the authorities find you on their own?” Marcone asked.
“You’ll need a broom and a dustpan when you come for the article. I should think you would be wise to do whatever you can to clear the path for me.” She turned the radio off.
I bit my lip, thinking furiously. Even if I took the Shroud now, Marcone would be upset when he didn’t get his hands on it. If he didn’t have Valmont killed, he’d at least tip off the police to her. Valmont, in turn, would destroy the Shroud. If I took it, I would have to move fast to get the Shroud away from the device. I couldn’t count on simply blowing the device out with magic. It was as likely to malfunction and explode as it was to just go dead.
I would need the transmitter too, and there was only one way to get it.
I stepped up behind Valmont and pressed the bill of the plastic duck against her spine. “Don’t move,” I said. “I’ll shoot.”
She stiffened. “Dresden?”
“Let me see your hands,” I said. She held them up, the green light of the palmtop showing columns of numbers. “Where’s the transmitter?”
“What transmitter?”
I pushed the duck against her a little harder. “I’ve had a long day too, Miss Valmont. The one you just told Marcone about.”
She let out a small sound of discomfort. “If you take it, Marcone will kill me.”
“Yeah, he takes his image seriously. You’d be smart to come with me and get protection from the authorities. Now where is the transmitter?”
Her shoulders slumped and she bowed her head forward for a moment. I felt a twinge of guilt. She had planned on being here with friends. They’d been killed. She was a young woman, alone in a strange land, and regardless of what happened, she wasn’t likely to come out of this situation ahead of the game. And here I was holding a duck to her back. I felt like a bully.
“My left jacket pocket,” Valmont said, her tone quiet. I reminded myself that I was a professional and reached into her pocket to get the transmitter.
She clobbered me.
One second, I was holding the duck to her back and reaching into her pocket. The next, I was falling to the ground with a bruise shaped like one of her elbows forming on my jaw. The light from the palmtop clicked out. A small red-tinted flashlight came on, and Valmont kicked the duck out of my hand. The beam of the flashlight followed the duck for a silent second, and then she laughed.
“A duck,” she said. She dipped a hand into her pocket and came out with a small silver semiautomatic. “I was fairly certain you wouldn’t shoot, but that goes a step beyond ridiculous.”
I’ve got to get a concealed-carry permit. “You won’t shoot either,” I said, and started to get up. “So you might as well put the gun d—”
She pointed the gun at my leg and pulled the trigger. Pain flashed through my leg and I let out an involuntary shout. I grabbed at my thigh as the red flashlight settled on me.
I pawed at my leg. I had a couple of smallish cuts, but I hadn’t been shot. The bullet had hit the concrete floor next to me and gouged a bite out of the concrete. A flying chip or two must have cut my leg.
“Terribly sorry,” Valmont said. “Were you saying something?”
“Nothing important,” I responded.
“Ah,” Valmont said. “Well, it would be bad etiquette to leave a corpse here for my buyer to clean up, so it seems as though I’ll be hand-delivering to Marcone after all. We can’t have you running off with what everyone is so excited over.”
“Marcone is the least of your worries,” I said.
“No, actually, he’s quite prominent among them.”
“Marcone isn’t going to sprout horns and claws and start tearing you apart,” I said. “Or at least, I don’t think he is. There’s another group after that Shroud. Like the thing from the ship this morning.”
I couldn’t see her face from the other end of the red flashlight, but her voice sounded a little shaky. “What was it?”
“A demon.”
“A real demon?” There was a strained tone in her voice, as though she couldn’t decide whether to laugh or sob. I’d heard it before. “You expect me to believe it was a literal demon?”
“Yeah.”
“And you’re some sort of angel, I suppose.”
“Hell, no,” I said. “I’m just working for them. Sort of. Look, I know people who can protect you from those things. People who won’t hurt you. They’ll help.”
“I don’t need help,” Valmont said. “They
’re dead, they’re both dead. Gaston, Francisca. My friends. Whoever these people, these things are, they can’t hurt me any more.”
The locked door of the storeroom screamed as something tore it off its hinges and out into the hall. The hallway lights poured in through the gap in a blinding flood, and I had to shield my eyes against them for a second.
I could see dim shapes, shadows in front of the light. One was lean and crouched, with shadowy tendrils of razor-edged hair slithering around it in a writhing cloud. One was sinuous and strong-looking, like a man who had traded its legs in on the scaled body of an enormous snake. Between them stood a shape that looked human, like a man in an overcoat, his hands in his pockets—but the shadows the shape cast writhed and boiled madly, making the lights flicker and swim in a nauseating fashion.
“Cannot hurt you any more,” said the central shape in a quietly amused, male voice. “No matter how many times I hear that one, it’s always a fresh challenge.”
Chapter Twenty
My eyes adjusted enough to make out some details. The demonic female with the Joan Jett hair, two sets of eyes, a glowing sigil, and vicious claws was the same Denarian who had attacked at the harbor that morning. The second demonic being was covered in dark grey scales flecked with bits of rust red. From shoulders to waist, he looked more or less human. From the neck up and the waist down, he looked like some kind of flattened serpent. No legs. Coils slithered out behind him, scales rasping over the floor. He too had the double pair of eyes, one set golden and serpentine, the other, inside the first, glowing faintly blue-green, matching the pulsing symbol of the same light that seemed to dance in the gleam of the scales of the snake’s head.
One little, two little, three little Denarians, or so I judged the last of them. Of the three, he was the only one that looked human. He wore a tan trench coat, casually open. His clothes were tailor-fit to him and looked expensive. A slender grey tie hung loosely around his throat. He was a man of medium height and build, with short, dark hair streaked through with an off-center blaze of silver. His expression was mild, amused, and his dark eyes were half-closed and sleepy-looking. He spoke English with a faint British accent. “Well, well. What have we here? Our bold thief and her—”
I got the impression that he would have been glad to begin one of those trademark bantering conversations all the urbane bad guys seem to be such big fans of, but before he could finish the sentence Anna Valmont turned with her little pistol and shot him three times in the chest. I saw him jerk and twist. Blood abruptly stained his shirt and coat. She’d hit the heart or an artery.
The man blinked and stared at Valmont in shock, as more red spread over his shirt. He opened his coat a bit, and looked down at the spreading scarlet. I noted that the tie he wore wasn’t a tie, as such. It looked like a piece of old grey rope, and though he wore it as apparent ornamentation, it was tied in a hangman’s noose.
“I do not appreciate being interrupted,” the man said in a sharp and ugly tone. “I hadn’t even gotten around to the introductions. There are proprieties to observe, young woman.”
A girl after my own heart, Anna Valmont had a quick reply. She shot him some more.
He wasn’t five feet away. The blond thief aimed for the center of mass and didn’t miss him once. The man folded his arms as bullets hit him, tearing new wounds that bled freely. He rolled his eyes after the fourth shot, and made a rolling “move this along” gesture with his left hand until Valmont’s gun clicked empty, the slide open.
“Where was I,” he said.
“Proprieties,” purred the feminine demon with the wild hair. The word came out a little mangled, due to the heavy canines that dimpled her lips as she spoke. “Proprieties, Father.”
“There seems little point,” the man said. “Thief, you have stolen something I have an interest in. Give it to me at once and you are free to go your own way. Refuse me, and I will become annoyed with you.”
Anna Valmont’s upper lip had beaded with sweat, and she looked from her empty gun to the man in the trench coat with wide, wild eyes, frozen in confusion and obvious terror.
The gunshots would bring people running. I needed to buy a little time. I leaned up, fished a hand into Valmont’s jacket pocket, and drew out a small box of black plastic that looked vaguely like a remote control to a VCR. I held up the transmitter, put my thumb on it as if I knew what I was doing, and said to the man in the trench coat, “Hey, Bogart. You and the wonder twins back off or the bedsheet gets it.”
The man lifted his eyebrows. “Excuse me?”
I waggled the remote. “Click. Boom. No more Shroud.”
The snakeman hissed, body twisting in restless, lithe motion, and the demon-girl parted her lips in a snarl. The man between them stared at me for a moment, his eyes flat and empty, before he said, “You’re bluffing.”
“Like the bedsheet matters to me,” I said.
The man stared at me without moving. But his shadow did. It writhed and undulated, and the motion made me feel vaguely carsick. His eyes went from me to Valmont to the courier’s message tube on the floor. “A remote detonator, I take it. You do realize you are standing next to the device?”
I realized it. I had no idea how big the incendiary was. But that was all right, since I had no idea which button to push to set it off, either. “Yup.”
“You would kill yourself rather than surrender the Shroud?”
“Rather than letting you kill me.”
“Who said I would kill anyone?”
I glared at him and at the demon-girl and said, “Francisca Garcia mentioned it.”
The man’s shadow boiled but he watched me with flat, calculating eyes. “Perhaps we can reach an arrangement.”
“Which would be?”
He drew a heavy-caliber handgun from his pocket and pointed it at Anna Valmont. “Give me the remote and I won’t kill this young woman.”
“The demon groupie headman uses a gun? You’ve got to be kidding me,” I said.
“Call me Nicodemus.” He glanced at the revolver. “Trendy, I know, but one can only watch so many dismemberments before they become predictable.” He pointed the gun at the terror-stricken Valmont and said, “Shall I count to three?”
I threw on a puppet’s Transylvanian accent. “Count as high as you vant, but you von’t get one, one detonator, ah, ah, ah.”
“One,” Nicodemus said.
“Do you expect me to hand it over on reflex or something?”
“You’ve done such things repeatedly when there was a woman in danger, Harry Dresden. Two.”
This Nicodemus knew me. And he’d picked a pressure tactic that wasn’t going to take long, however it turned out, so he knew I was stalling for time. Crap. I wasn’t going to be able to bluff him. “Hold on,” I said.
He thumbed back the hammer of the revolver and aimed at Valmont’s head. “Thr—”
So much for cleverness. “All right,” I snapped, and I tossed the remote to him underhand. “Here you go.”
Nicodemus lowered the gun, turning to catch the remote in his left hand. I waited until his eyes flicked from Valmont to the remote.
And then I pulled up every bit of power I could muster in that instant, hurled my right hand forward, and snarled, “Fuego!”
Fire rose up from the floor in a wave as wide as the doorway and rolled forward in a surge of super-heated air. It expanded as it lashed out, and slammed into Nicodemus’s bloodied chest. The force of it threw him back across the hallway and into the wall on the opposite side. He didn’t quite go through the wall, but only because there must have been a stud lined up with his spine. The drywall crumpled in from his shoulders to his hips, and his head snapped back in a whiplash of impact. It almost seemed that his shadow was thrown back with him, slapping wetly against the wall around him like blobs of tar.
The snakeman moved with blinding speed, slithering to one side of the blast. The demon-girl shrieked, and her bladed tresses gathered together in an effort to shield her as t
he fire and concussion threw her back and away from the door.
The heat was unbearable, an oven-hot flash that sucked the air from my lungs. Backwash from the explosion drove me back across the floor, rolling until I hit the wall myself. I cowered and shielded my face as the scarlet flames went out, replaced with a sudden cloud of ugly black smoke. My ears rang, and I couldn’t hear anything but the hammering of my own heart.
The fire spell had been something I wouldn’t have done if I’d had an option. That’s why I had made a blasting rod. Down-and-dirty fast magic was difficult, dangerous, and likely to run out of control. The blasting rod helped me focus that kind of magic, contain it. It helped me avoid explosions that left heat burns on my lungs.
I fumbled around in the blinding smoke, unable to breathe and unable to see. I found a feminine wrist with one hand, followed it up to a shoulder, and found Anna Valmont. I hauled on her with one hand, found the courier’s tube with the other, and crawled for the ventilation duct, hauling them both behind me.
There was air in the ventilation shaft, and Valmont coughed and stirred as I dragged her into it. Enough of the storage room had caught on fire that I had light enough to see. One of Valmont’s eyebrows was gone, and one side of her face was red and blistered. I screamed, “Move!” at her as loudly as I could. Her eyes blinked with dull comprehension as I pushed her past me and toward the opening in the laundry room, and she started moving stiffly in front of me.
Valmont didn’t crawl as quickly as I wanted her to, but then she wasn’t the one closest to the fire and the monsters. My heart hammered in my ears and the shaft felt oppressively small. I knew that the demonic forms of the Denarians were tougher than either me or Anna Valmont. Unless I’d gotten lethally lucky, they’d recover from the blast, and it wouldn’t be long before they came after us. If we couldn’t shake them or get into a car, and fast, they’d catch us, plain and simple. I shoved at Valmont, growing more frantic as my imagination turned up images of whipping tendrils cutting my legs to shreds, or venomous serpent fangs sinking into my calves as scaled hands dragged me backward by my ankles.
