by Jim Butcher
Nicodemus delivered a swift jab to my right kidney and I lost my breath. “Be silent,” he said. He focused his attention on Shiro and inclined his head slowly. “Twenty-four hours. Agreed.”
Shiro mirrored the gesture. “Now. Let him go.”
“Very well,” Nicodemus said. “As soon as you release my daughter and lay down your sword, the wizard will go free. I swear it.”
The old knight only smiled. “I know the value of your promises. And you know the value of mine.”
I felt an eager tension in my captor. He leaned forward and said, “Swear it.”
“I do,” Shiro said. And as he did, he placed his palm lightly along the base of his sword’s blade. He lifted it to show a straight cut on his hand, already dribbling blood. “Set him free. I will take his place as you demand.”
Nicodemus’s shadow writhed and boiled on the ground at my feet, bits of it lashing hungrily toward Shiro. The Denarian let out a harsh laugh, and the knife left my neck. He made a couple of quick movements, cutting the rope holding my wrists.
Without the support of my bonds, I fell. My body screamed in pain. It hurt so much that I didn’t notice him cutting my feet free until it was done. I didn’t make any noise. Partly because I was too proud to let Nicodemus know how bad I felt. Partly because I didn’t have enough breath to whimper anyway.
“Harry,” Shiro said. “Get up.”
I tried. My legs and feet were numb.
Shiro’s voice changed, carrying a quiet note of authority and command. “Get up.”
I did it, barely. The wound on my leg felt hot and painful, and the muscle around it twitched and clenched involuntarily.
“Foolishness,” Nicodemus commented.
“Courage,” Shiro said. “Harry, come over here. Get behind me.”
I managed to lurch to Shiro’s side. The old man never looked away from Nicodemus. My head spun a bit and I almost lost my balance. My legs felt like dead wood from the knees down, and my back had started cramping. I ground my teeth and said, “I don’t know how far I can walk.”
“You must,” Shiro said. He knelt down by Deirdre, rested his knee on her spine, and wrapped one arm around her throat. She began to move, but the old man applied pressure, and Deirdre went still again with a whimper of discomfort. That done, Shiro gave Fidelacchius a flick, and the beads of blood upon it sprinkled against one wall. He sheathed the blade in a liquid movement, drew the cane-sheath from his belt, and then passed the hilt of the sword back toward me. “Take it.”
“Uh,” I said. “I don’t have a real good record with handling these things.”
“Take it.”
“Michael and Sanya might not be too happy with me if I do.”
Shiro was quiet for a moment before he said, “They will understand. Take it now.”
I swallowed and did. The wooden hilt of the sword felt too warm for the room, and I could sense a buzz of energy emanating from it in rippling waves. I made sure I had a good grip on it.
Shiro said quietly, “They will come for you. Go. Second right. Ladder up.”
Nicodemus watched me as I fell back through the doorway into the dimness of the hall beyond it. I stared at Shiro for a moment. He knelt on the floor, still holding Deirdre’s neck at the breaking point, his eyes on Nicodemus. From the back, I could see the wrinkled skin on the back of his neck, the age spots on his freshly shaved scalp. Nicodemus’s shadow had grown to the size of a movie screen, and it covered the back wall and part of the floor, twitching and writhing slowly closer to Shiro.
I turned and headed down the tunnel as quickly as I could. Behind me, I heard Nicodemus say, “Keep your word, Japan. Release my daughter.”
I looked back. Shiro released the girl and stood up. She flung herself away from him, and as she did Nicodemus’s shadow rolled forward like an ocean wave and crashed over the old Knight. One moment, he was there. The next, the room where he stood went totally black, filled with the rasping, seething mass of Nicodemus’s demon shadow.
“Kill the wizard,” Nicodemus snarled. “Get the sword.”
Deirdre let out wild, primal scream from somewhere inside the darkness. I heard ripping, tearing sounds. I heard popping noises that might have been bones breaking or joints being dislocated. Then I heard the steely, slithery rasp of Deirdre’s hairdo, and half a dozen metallic strands whipped toward me from the darkness.
I shuffled back, and the blades fell short of me. I turned around and started hobbling away. I didn’t want to leave Shiro there, but if I’d stayed, I only would have died with him. My shame dug at me like a knife.
More blades emerged from the dark, presumably while Deirdre was still transforming into her demonic aspect. It couldn’t be long before she finished and came flashing down the hallway after me. If I couldn’t get myself clear, I’d be done for.
So once again I ran like hell. And hated myself for doing it.
Chapter Twenty-three
The shrieks died off more quickly than I would have thought, and I did my best to keep moving in a straight line. It was mostly dark. I was aware of a couple of doorways passing on my left, and I stumbled along until I found the second one on my right. I took it, and found a ladder that led up some kind of pipe or shaft, with a light shining down from about seven hundred miles above.
I got a couple of rungs off the floor when something hit me at knee level, grabbed my legs, and twisted. I fell off the ladder, the cane clattering onto the floor. I had a brief impression of a man’s face, and then my attacker let out a wordless snarl and hit me hard on my left eye.
I ducked and rolled with the punch. The good news was that it didn’t tear my face off or anything, which meant that the person throwing the punch was probably another mortal. The bad news was that he was built more heavily than me and probably had a lot more muscle. He piled atop me, trying to grasp my throat.
I hunched my shoulders and ducked my head as much as I could, and kept him from squeezing my head off. He threw another punch at me, but it’s tough to throw a good punch when you’re rolling around on the floor in the dark. He missed, and I started fighting dirty. I reached up and raked my nails across his eyes. I got one of them and he yelled, flinching away.
I managed to wriggle out from under him, giving him a hard shove that added to the momentum of the flinch. He fell, rolled, and started to rise.
I kicked him in the head with my rented formal shoes. My shoe went flying off, which I was pretty sure never happened to James Bond. The goon faltered, wobbling, so I kicked him with the other foot. He was tough. He started coming back from that one too. I bent over and slammed my fist down sledgehammer style at the back of his neck, several times. I was shouting as I did it, and the edges of my vision burned with a film of red.
The rabbit punches dropped him, and he fell limp to the ground.
“Son of a bitch.” I panted, feeling around until I found Shiro’s cane. “I didn’t get my ass kicked.”
“Good day to get that lottery ticket,” Susan said. She came down the last several feet of ladder, dressed again in the black leather pants, the dark coat. She checked to make sure the goon wasn’t faking it. Where’s Shiro?”
I shook my head. “He isn’t coming.”
Susan took a breath and then nodded. “Can you climb?”
“Think so,” I said, eyeing the ladder. I held out the cane. “Take this for me?”
Susan reached out to take the blade. There was a flicker of silver static and she hissed, jerking her fingers back. “What the hell is that?”
“Magic sword.”
“Well, it sucks,” Susan said. “Go ahead; I’ll come up behind you.”
I fumbled around with the cane, slipping it as best I could through the tux’s cummerbund. I started up the ladder and once again Deirdre shrieked, this time her voice wholly demonic, echoing weirdly through the stone corridors.
“Wasn’t that—” Susan asked, shaking her fingers.
“Yeah. Climb,” I said. “Climb fast.”
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The action and adrenaline had done something to thaw me out, or at least it felt that way. My fingers tingled, but they were functional, and I gained speed as I climbed. “How’d you find me?”
“Shiro,” Susan responded. “We went to Michael’s house for help. He seemed to know where to go. Like instinct.”
“I saw Michael do that once,” I said, panting. “He told me he knew how to find where he was needed. How long is this freaking ladder?”
“Another twenty or thirty feet,” Susan said. “Comes out in the basement of an empty building south of the Loop. Martin’s waiting with the car.”
“Why did that guy talk about a Fellowship when he saw you back at the auction?” I asked. “What Fellowship?”
“It’s a long story.”
“Condense it.”
“Later.”
“But—”
I didn’t get to protest any further, because I slipped and nearly fell when I reached the top of the ladder. I recovered my balance and scrambled up into a completely dark room. I looked back over my shoulder and saw Susan outlined, a dim shadow against a faint green-gold light.
“What’s that light?” I asked.
“Eyes,” Susan said. Her voice was a little thready. “Coming up. Move over.”
I did. Susan slid onto the floor as the green-gold light grew brighter, and I heard the steely rasping sound of Deirdre’s hair moving below. Susan turned and drew something from her jacket pocket. There was a clinking, clicking sound. Then she whispered, “One, one thousand, two, one thousand, three, one thousand, four, one thousand,” and dropped something down the ladder.
She turned to me, and I felt her fingers cover my eyes, pushing me away from the ladder. I got it then, and leaned away from the shaft the ladder had come up just before there was a hellishly loud noise and a flash of light, scarlet through Susan’s fingertips.
My ears rang and my balance wavered. Susan helped me to my feet and started moving out through the darkness, her steps swift and certain. From the shaft, I could dimly hear the demon-girl shrieking in fury. I asked, “Was that a grenade?”
“Just a stunner,” Susan said. “Lots of light and noise.”
“And you had it in your pocket,” I said.
“No. Martin did. I borrowed it.”
I tripped over something faintly yielding in the darkness, a limp form. “Whoa, what is that?”
“I don’t know. Some kind of guard animal. Shiro killed it.”
My next step squished in something damp and faintly warm that soaked through my sock. “Perfect.”
Susan slammed a door open onto nighttime Chicago, and I could see again. We left the building behind us and went down a flight of concrete steps to the sidewalk. I didn’t recognize the neighborhood offhand, but it wasn’t a good one. It had that wary, hard-core feel that made The Jungle seem like Mary Poppins by comparison. There was dim light in the sky—evidently dawn was not far away.
Susan looked up and down the street and cursed quietly. “Where is he?”
I turned and looked at Susan. The dark swirls and spikes of her tattoo still stood out dark against her skin. Her face looked leaner than I remembered.
Another shrieking scream came from inside the building. “This is a really bad time for him to be late,” I said.
“I know,” she said, flexing her fingers. “Harry, I don’t know if I can handle that demon bitch if she comes at us again.” She looked down at her own hand, where the dark tattoos swirled and curved. “I’m almost out.”
“Out?” I asked. “Of what?”
Her lip lifted into a quiet snarl and she swept dark eyes up and down the street. “Control.”
“Ooooookay,” I said. “We can’t just stand here. We need to move.”
Just then, an engine growled, and a dark green rental sedan came screeching around the corner of the block. It swerved across to the wrong side of the street and came up on the curb before sliding to a stop.
Martin threw open the back door. There was a cut on his left temple and a streak of blood had dried dark on his jaw. Tattoos like Susan’s, but thicker, framed one eye and the left side of his face. “They’re behind me,” he said. “Hurry.”
He didn’t have to tell either of us twice. Susan shoved me into the back of the car and piled in after me. Martin had the car moving again before she’d shut the door, and I looked back to see another sedan after us. Before we’d gone a block, a second car slid in behind the first, and the two accelerated, coming after us.
“Dammit,” Martin said, glaring at his rearview mirror. “What did you do to these people, Dresden?”
“I turned down their recruiting officer,” I said.
Martin nodded, and snapped the car around a corner. “I’d say they don’t handle rejection well. Where’s the old man?”
“Gone.”
He exhaled through his nose. “These idiots are going to land us all in jail if this keeps up. How bad do they want you?”
“More than most.”
Martin nodded. “Do you have a safe house?”
“My place. I’ve got some emergency wards I can set off. They could keep out a mail-order record club.” I bobbed my eyebrows at Susan. “For a while, anyway.”
Martin juked the car around another corner. “It isn’t far. You can jump out. We’ll draw them off.”
“He can’t,” Susan objected. “He can barely move. He’s been hurt, and he could go into shock. He isn’t like us, Martin.”
Martin frowned. “What did you have in mind?”
“I’ll go with him.”
He stared up at the rearview mirror for a moment, at Susan. “It’s a bad idea.”
“I know.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“I know,” she said, voice tight. “There’s no choice, and no time to argue.”
Martin turned his eyes back to the road and said, “Are you sure?”
“Yeah.”
“God be with you both, then. Sixty seconds.”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “What are you both—”
Martin screeched around another corner and roared ahead at top speed. I bounced off the door on my side and flattened my cheek against the window. I recognized my neighborhood as I did. I glanced at the speedometer of the car and wished I hadn’t.
Susan reached across me to open the door and said, “We get out here.”
I stared at her and then motioned vaguely at the door.
She met my eyes and that same hard, delighted smile spread over her lips. “Trust me. This is kid stuff.”
“Cartoons are kid stuff. Petting zoos are kid stuff. Jumping out of a car is insane.”
“You did it before,” she accused me. “The lycanthropes.”
“That was different.”
“Yes. You left me in the car.” Susan crawled across my lap, which appreciated her. Especially in the tight leather pants. My eyes agreed with my lap wholeheartedly. Especially about the tight leather pants. Susan then crouched, one foot on the floorboards, one hand on the door, and offered her other hand to me. “Come on.”
Susan had changed in the last year. Or maybe she hadn’t. She had always been good at what she did. She’d just altered her focus to something other than reporting. She could take on demonic murderers in hand-to-hand combat now, rip home appliances from the wall and throw them with one hand, and use grenades in the dark. If she said she could jump out of a speeding car and keep us both from dying, I believed her. What the hell, I thought. It wasn’t like I hadn’t done this before—albeit at a fifth the speed.
But there was something deeper than that, something darker that Susan’s vulpine smile had stirred inside of me. Some wild, reckless, primal piece of me had always loved the danger, the adrenaline, had always loved testing myself against the various and sundry would-be lethalities that crossed my paths. There was an ecstasy in the knife edge of the struggle, a vital energy that couldn’t be found anywhere else, and part of me (a stupid, insane, but undeniabl
y powerful part) missed it when it was gone.
That wildness rose up in me, and gave me a smile that matched Susan’s.
I took her hand, and a second later we leapt from the car. I heard myself laughing like a madman as we did.
Chapter Twenty-four
As we went out the door, Susan pulled me hard against her. On general policy, I approved. She got one arm around the back of my head, shielding the base of my skull and the top of my neck. We hit the ground with Susan on the bottom, bounced up a bit, rolling, and hit the ground again. The impacts were jolting, but I was on the bottom only once. The rest of the time, the impact was something I felt only through my contact with Susan.
We wound up on the tiny patch of grass two doors down from my boardinghouse, in front of some cheap converted apartments. Several seconds later, the two pursuing cars went roaring by after Martin and his rented sedan. I kept my head down until they had passed, and then looked at Susan.
I was on top. Susan panted quietly beneath me. One of her legs was bent at the knee, half holding my thigh between hers. Her dark eyes glittered, and I felt her hips twitch in the kind of motion that brought a number of evenings (and mornings, and afternoons, and late nights) to mind.
I wanted to kiss her. A lot. I held off. “You all right?” I asked.
“You never complained,” she answered. Her voice was a little breathless. “Nothing too bad. You? Anything hurt?”
“My ego,” I said. “You’re embarrassing me with the superstrength and whatnot.” I rose, took her hand, and drew her to her feet. “How’s a guy supposed to assert his masculinity?”
“You’re a big boy. You’ll think of something.”
I looked around and nodded. “I think we’d better get off the street, pronto.”
“Is running and hiding assertively masculine?” We started for my apartment. “The part where we don’t die is.”
She nodded. “That’s practical, but I’m not sure it’s masculine.”
“Shut up.”
“There you go,” Susan said.
We went only a couple of steps before I felt the spell coming. It started as a low shiver on the back of my neck, and my eyes twitched almost of their own accord up to the roof of the apartment house we were walking by. I saw a couple of bricks from one of the chimneys fall free of their mortar. I grabbed Susan’s collar and sidestepped, pulling her with me. The bricks shattered into shards and red powder on the sidewalk a step from Susan’s feet.
