by Jim Butcher
“Lara,” he said again. I saw her sway a little as he spoke. “Let me talk to you.”
Evidently the sway was induced more by the evening breeze and those high heels than it was by Thomas’s voice. “I’m afraid all you need say is good-bye, little brother.” Lara thumbed back the hammer on both guns, her features calm and remote. “And you’d best say it for wizard as well.”
Chapter Sixteen
I’d been in hairier situations than this one. Actually, it’s sort of depressing, thinking how many times I’d been in them. But if experience had taught me anything, it was this:
No matter how screwed up things are, they can get a whole lot worse.
Case in point: our little standoff with Supertart.
Thomas shouted and darted to his left, across my view of Lara. As he went, I reached for the pistol tucked into the back of his jeans. Judging by the grip, it was a semiautomatic, maybe one of those fancy German models that are as tiny as they are deadly. I grabbed it, and felt pretty slick to be doing the teamwork thing—but Thomas’s damned jeans were so tight that the gun didn’t come loose. I leaned too far in the effort and wound up sprawling on my side. All I got for my oh-so-clever maneuver was scraped fingertips and a good view of Lara Raith in gunfighting mode.
I heard a shot go past, a kind of humming buzz in the air that provided an accent to the mild, barking report of the pistol. There were several shots in the space of a second or three. Two of them hit Thomas with ugly sounds of impact, one in the leg, and a second in the chest.
At the same time he hurled a small ring of keys at Lara, and it probably saved my life. She swatted them aside with the gun that had been trained on me. It gave me a precious second or two, and it was time enough to bring up my blasting rod and loose a panicked strike at her. It was sloppy as hell, even with the blasting rod to help me focus my will, and instead of a wrist-thick beam of semicoherent flame, it came out in a cone of fire maybe thirty feet across.
That made big noise—a thunderous thumping explosion as the heat displaced cool night air. Lara Raith had the reflexes that were depressingly common in all of those vampire types, and she darted out of the way of the flames. She leveled both guns at me as she did, blazing away like in those Hong Kong action movies. But evidently even Lara’s superhuman skill wasn’t enough to overcome surprise, lateral movement, a firestorm, and the spike heels. God bless the fashion industry and the blind luck that protects fools and wizards; she missed.
I shook out my shield bracelet and hardened my will into a wall of unseen but solid force in front of me. The last few shots from Lara’s guns actually struck the shield, illuminating it in a flash of blue-and-white energy. I held the shield firmly in place and readied the blasting rod again, and faced Lara squarely.
The vampire slipped into the shadows between the nearest building and a pair of huge industrial tanks and vanished from sight.
I padded forward to Thomas, keeping the shield up and in the general direction of where Lara had disappeared. “Thomas,” I hissed. “Thomas, are you all right?”
It was a long beat before he replied, his voice weak and shaking. “I don’t know. It hurts.”
“You’ve been shot. It’s supposed to hurt.” I kept my eyes on the shadows, warily extending my senses as much as I could. “Can you walk?”
“Don’t know,” he panted. “Can’t get my breath. Can’t feel my leg.”
I flicked my eyes down to him and back out again. Thomas’s black T-shirt, was plastered to his chest on one side. He’d taken a hit in the lung, at least. If a major blood vessel had been struck, he was in trouble, vampire or not. The White Court were a resilient bunch, but in some ways they were just as fragile as the human beings they fed upon. He could heal up fast—I’d seen Thomas recover from broken ribs in a matter of hours—but if he bled out from a severed artery, he’d die like anyone else.
“Just hold still,” I said. “Don’t try to move until we know where she is.”
“That’ll get her,” Thomas panted. “The old sitting-duck ploy.”
“Give me your gun,” I said.
“Why?”
“So that the next time you start talking I can shoot your wise ass.”
He started to laugh, but it broke into agonized, wet coughing.
“Dammit,” I muttered, and crouched down beside him. I set my blasting rod aside and slipped my right arm and one knee behind his back, trying to hold him vertical from the waist up.
“You’d better get moving. I’ll manage.”
“Would you shut up?” I demanded. I tried to ascertain the extent of his injuries with my free hand, but I’m no doctor. I found the hole in his chest, felt the blood coming out. The edges of the wound puckered and gripped at my hand. “Well,” I told him. “Your wound sucks. Here.” I took his right hand and pressed it hard against the hole. “Keep your hand there, man. Keep the pressure on. I can’t hold it and carry you out too.”
“Forget carrying me,” he rasped. “Don’t be an idiot. She’ll kill us both.”
“I can hold the shield,” I said.
“If you can’t return fire, it won’t do you much good. Get clear, call the cops, then come back for me.”
“You’re delirious,” I said. If I left him there alone, Lara would finish him. I got my right shoulder under his left arm and hauled him to his feet. He wasn’t as heavy as I would have expected, but dragging him up like that had to have hurt him. The pain locked the breath in his throat. “Come on,” I growled. “You’ve got a good leg. Help me.”
His voice had become hollow, somehow ghostly, barely more than a whisper. “Just go. I can’t.”
“You can. Shut up and help me.”
I started walking as fast as I could back toward the street end of the industrial park. I kept my shield bracelet up, focusing my will into a barrier all around us. It wasn’t as strong as a more limited directional shield, but my eyes couldn’t be everywhere, and a smart opponent would shoot me in the back.
Thomas would have been screaming if he could have gotten his breath. Over the next minute or two, his face went white—I mean, even more so than usual. He’d always been pale, but his skin took on the grey tone of a corpse, sooty hollows forming under his eyes. Even so, he managed to help me. Not much, but enough that I could keep us both moving without stumbling.
I started to think that we were going to make it back safely, when I heard running footsteps and a woman rounded the corner ahead of us, her pale skin glowing in the dimness.
I cursed, pushing more will into the shield, and crouched down, letting Thomas collapse ungraciously onto the gravel parking lot. I fumbled for his gun, found it, and whipped the weapon up. I flicked off the safety with my thumb, took a half second to aim, and pulled the trigger.
“No,” Thomas gasped at the last possible instant. He leaned hard against me just as the gun went off, the barrel wavered, and the shot kicked up sparks on a concrete retaining wall fifty feet away. Panicked, I lined up the weapon again, though I knew it would be a useless gesture. I might have taken her out with a surprise shot, but there was no chance at all that I could outshoot Lara Raith in a direct confrontation.
But it wasn’t Lara. I couldn’t see very far in the dimness, but Inari stumbled to a halt only a few feet shy of me, her eyes wide and her mouth open. “Oh, my God,” she cried. “Thomas! What happened? What have you done to him?”
“Nothing!” I said. “He’s been hurt. For the love of Pete, help me.”
She hesitated for a second, her eyes wide, and then rushed forward to Thomas. “Oh, my God. There’s blood! He’s b-bleeding!”
I shoved my blasting rod at her. “Hold this,” I snapped.
“What did you do to him?” she demanded. She had begun weeping. “Oh, Thomas.”
I felt like screaming in frustration, and I tried to look at every possible place Lara might be, all at the same time. My instincts screamed that she was getting closer, and I wanted nothing more than to run away. “I told you, not
hing! Just get moving and open the doors for me. We have to get back inside and call nine-one-one.”
I bent down to pick up Thomas again.
Inari Raith screamed in grief and rage. Then she used my blasting rod with both hands to clout me on the back of the neck with so much force that it snapped in half. Stars exploded over my vision and I didn’t even feel it when my face hit the gravel.
Everything got real confused for a minute or two, and when I finally started stirring I heard Inari crying. “Lara, I don’t know what happened. He tried to shoot me, and Thomas isn’t awake. He might be dead.”
I heard footsteps on the gravel, and Lara said, “Give me the gun.”
“What do we do?” Inari said. She was still crying.
Lara worked the slide on the gun with a couple of quiet clicks, checking the chamber. “Get inside,” she said, her tone firm and confident. “Call emergency services and the police. Now.”
Inari got up and started to run off, leaving Thomas and me alone with the woman who had already half killed him. I tried to get up, but it was difficult. Everything kept spinning around.
I managed to get to one knee just as a cold, slithery feeling washed down my spine.
The three vampires of the Black Court did not announce their presence. They simply appeared as though formed from the shadows.
One of them was the one-eared vamp I had smacked with the holy-water balloon. On either side of him stood two more Black Court vamps, both male, both dressed in funeral finery, and both of teenage proportions. They hadn’t been living corpses for very long—there were lividity marks on the arms and fingers of the first, and their faces hardly looked skeletal at all. Like the maimed vampire, they had long, dirty fingernails. Dried blood stained their faces and throats. And their eyes were filmy, stagnant pools.
Inari screamed a horror-movie scream and stumbled back to Lara. Lara sucked in a sharp breath, bringing the gun into point-down firing stance, spinning in a slow circle to watch each of the Black Court vamps in turn.
“Well, well,” rasped the maimed vampire. “What luck. The wizard and three Whites to boot. This will be entertaining.”
At which point I felt another, stronger slither of vile and deadly magical energy.
The malocchio. It was forming again, more powerfully than before—and I sensed that the deadly spell was already near and gathering more vicious power as it headed my way. Still dazed, I couldn’t do a damned thing about it.
“Kill them,” the Black Court vampire whispered. “Kill them all.”
See what I mean? It’s just like I said.
Things can always get worse.
Chapter Seventeen
I’m not hopeless at hand-to-hand, but I’m not particularly talented, either. I’ve been beaten senseless once or twice. Well. A lot. It isn’t as unlikely as it sounds—a lot of the things that started pummeling me could bench-press a professional basketball team, whereas I was only human. In my neck of the woods, that meant that I was slightly tougher than a ceramic teacup.
I’d managed to survive the beatings thanks to good luck, determined friends, and an evil faerie godmother, but I figured that sooner or later my luck would run out, and I’d find myself alone, in danger, and at the limits of my endurance. Tonight had proved me right.
So it was a good thing I’d planned ahead.
I reached for my new belt buckle, with its carved design of a bear. The buckle was cast from silver, and the bear design was my own hand-carved work. It took me months to make it, though it wasn’t particularly beautiful or inspirational, but I hadn’t been trying for artistic accomplishment when I’d been creating it.
I’d been trying to prepare myself for, in the words of Foghorn Leghorn, just such an emergency.
I touched my left hand to my belt buckle and whispered, “Fortius.”
Power rushed into the pit of my stomach, a sudden tide of hot, living energy, nitrous for the body, mind, and soul. Raw life radiated out into my bones, running riot through my limbs. My confusion and weariness and pain vanished as swiftly as darkness before the sunrise.
This was no simple adrenaline boost, either, though that was a part of it. Call it chi or mana or one of thousand other names for it—it was pure magic, the very essence of life energy itself. It poured into me from the reservoir I’d created in the silver of the buckle. My heart suddenly overflowed with excitement, my thoughts with hope, confidence, and eager anticipation, and if I had a personal soundtrack to my life it would have been playing Ode to Joy while a stadium of Harry fans did the wave. It was all I could do to stop myself from bursting into laughter or song. The pain was still there, but I shrugged off the recent blows and exertions and suddenly felt ready to fight.
Even when magic is involved, there ain’t no free lunch. I knew that the pain would catch up to me. But I had to focus. Survive now; worry about the backlash later.
“Lara,” I said. “I realize that you’re kind of invested in killing me, but from where I’m standing the situation has changed.”
The succubus shot a glance at the vampires and then at Inari. “I concur, Dresden.”
“Rearrange teams and get the girl out?”
“Can you move?”
I pushed myself up, feeling pretty peppy, all things considered. Lara had her back more or less to me, and was trying to keep her eyes on all three Black Courters. The vampires, in turn, simply stood there with only the flicker of something hungry stirring in their dead, eyes to proclaim them something other than lifeless corpses. “Yeah, I’m good to go.”
Lara shot a glance over her shoulder, her expression flickering with disbelief. “Impressive. Pax, then?”
I jerked my chin in a nod. “Twenty-four hours?”
“Done.”
“Groovy.”
“Their faces,” Inari wailed. “Their faces! My God, what are they?”
I blinked at the terrified girl and shot a glance at Lara. “She doesn’t know? You don’t tell her these things?”
The succubus shrugged a shoulder, keeping most of her attention on the nearest vampire and said, “It’s my father’s policy.”
“Your family is twisted, Lara. It really is.” I picked up the shattered halves of my blasting rod. The carvings and spells laid on the wood were difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to make. I’d had to replace maybe half a dozen rods over the years, and it was the labor of better than a fortnight to create a new one. The girl had broken mine, which annoyed the hell out of me, but the drought of positive energy still zinging through me pointed out the upside: I now had two handy shafts of wood with jagged, pointy ends. I stepped between Inari and the nearest vampire and passed her one broken half of the rod. “Here,” I said. “If you get the chance, make like Buffy.”
Inari blinked at me. “What? Is this a joke?”
“Do it,” said Lara. Her voice was laced with iron. “No questions, Inari.”
The steel in the succubus’s voice galvanized the young woman. She took the shard of wood without further hesitation, though her expression grew no less terrified.
Overhead, the dark energy of the curse swirled around and around, a constant, intimidating pressure on my scalp. I tried to block out all the distractions, focusing on the curse and on where it was going. I needed to know who its target was—not only for the sake of my investigation, but for my immediate survival.
That curse was several kinds of nasty. And as it happened, I had a constructive, life-affirming purpose for a boatload of nasty juju. I drew my silver pentacle from my neck and spoke a troubling thought aloud. “Why are they just standing there?”
“They’re communing with their master,” Lara stated.
“I hate getting put on call waiting,” I said, wrapping the chain of my pentacle around my fist. “Shouldn’t we hit them now?”
“No,” Lara said sharply. “They’re aware of us. Don’t move. It will only set them off, and time is our ally.”
A sudden wash of almost physical cold set the hairs o
n the back of my neck on end. The curse was about to land, and I still wasn’t sure who it was coming for. I glanced upward, hoping for a physical cue. “I wouldn’t be so sure about that, Miss Raith.”
One of the vampires, the smallest of the pair who had showed up with One-ear, suddenly shuddered. Its dead eyes flickered around until they landed on me, and then it spoke. You wouldn’t think there would be a whole lot of difference between the rasp of one dry, leathery dead larynx and another, but there was. This voice flowed out and it wasn’t the voice of the vampire whose lips were moving. It was an older voice. Older and colder and vicious, but somehow tinged with something feminine. “Dresden,” that voice said. “And Raith’s right hand. Raith’s bastard son. And the darling of his eye. This is a fortunate night.”
“Evening, Mavra,” I said. “If it’s all the same to you, can you stop playing sock puppet with the omega Nosferatu and move this along? I’ve got a big day tomorrow and I want to get to bed for it.”
“Christ, Harry,” came a choking voice. I looked back and saw Thomas on the ground, his eyes open. He looked like death, and he had trouble focusing on me, but at least he was lucid. “Are you drunk all of a sudden?”
I winked at him. “It’s the power of positive thinking.”
The puppet vampire hissed with Mavra’s anger, and its voice took on a quavering, modulated, half-echoing quality. “Tonight will balance many scales. Take them, my children. Kill them all.”
And a lot of things went down.
The vampires came for us. One-ear rushed at Lara. The sock puppet went for me, and the third one headed for Inari. It happened fast. My attacker may have been new to the game and clumsy, yet it moved at such a speed that it barely registered on my thoughts—but my body was still singing with the infusion of positive energy, and I reacted to the attack as if it had been the opening steps of a dance I already knew. I sidestepped the vampire’s rush and drove my half of the former blasting rod down at its back, Buffy-like.
