Proven Guilty df-8

by Jim Butcher

  He squinted at me. “You think there’s spooky afoot?”

  “I told the girl I’d look into it.”

  Rawlins frowned, but then shook his head. “Can’t let you in there.”

  “Could I just look?” I asked. “You open the door, and I don’t even go in. I just look. That couldn’t hurt anything, could it? And you’ve already been in there, the EMTs, maybe a detective. Am I right? I couldn’t contaminate it all that much just from looking in the door.”

  Rawlins gave me a long, level stare and then sighed. He grunted, and the front legs of his chair thunked down to the floor. He rose and said, “All right. Not one step inside.”

  “You’re an officer and a gentleman,” I told him. I used my elbow to nudge the restroom door open. It squealed ferociously. I leaned my head in, my chin just over the level of the top strip of tape, and looked around the bathroom.

  Standard stuff. A bathroom. White tile. Stalls, urinals, sinks, a long mirror.

  The blood wasn’t standard, of course.

  There was a large splotch of it on the floor, and it had been smeared around when it had been making the tile all slippery. There were a couple of different footmarks on the floor, outlined in blood, and more smears of it on one of the sinks, where the victim had apparently tried to pull himself up off the floor. It looked fairly gruesome, which wasn’t really a surprise. There wasn’t as much blood as there would have been at, say, a murder, but there was plenty all the same. Someone had laid into Clark Pell, the victim, with a will. I picked out small blood splatter on the mirror, high on the wall, and in a spot on the ceiling.

  “Jesus,” I muttered. “It was an unarmed assault? No knives or anything?”

  Rawlins grunted. “Old man had broken ribs, bruises, gashes from being slammed around. No cuts or stabs, though.”

  “No kid did this,” I said.

  “Wasn’t a professional, either. Crowded spot like this. Witness in the bathroom. Cop twenty feet away. Dumbest thug in Chicago wouldn’t open up that big a can of whoopass where he’d be seen and caught.”

  “Someone strong,” I muttered. “And really, really vicious. He had to have hit the old guy a few times after he went down.”

  Rawlins grunted again. “Sound like anyone you know?”

  I shook my head. I stared at the room for a second and then chewed on my lower lip for a second, coming to a decision. I closed my eyes, clearing my thoughts.

  “That’s enough,” Rawlins said. “Shut the door before people start to stare.”

  “One second,” I murmured. Then with an effort of focus and will, and a faint sense of illusory pressure on my forehead, I opened my wizard’s Sight.

  The Sight is something anyone born with enough talent has. It’s an extra sense, though when using it almost everyone experiences it as a kind of augmented vision. It shows you the primal nature of things, the true and emotional core of what they are. It also shows you the presence of magical energies that course through pretty much everything on the planet, showing you how that energy flowed and pulsed and swirled through the world. The Sight was especially useful for looking for any active magical constructs- that’s spells, for the newbie-and for cutting through illusions and spells meant to obfuscate what was true.

  I opened my Sight and it showed me what my physical eyes could not see about the room. It showed me something that, with as many bad things as I had seen in my life, still made me clench my fists and fight to keep from losing control of my stomach.

  The site of the attack, the blood, the brutality and pain inflicted upon the victim, had not been a simple matter of desire, conflict, and violence.

  It had been a deliberate, gleeful work of art.

  I could see patterns in the bloodstain, patterns that showed me the terrified face of an old man, pounded into a lumpy, unrecognizable mass by sledgehammer fists, each one a miniature portrait painted in the medium of terror and pain. When I looked at the smears on the sink, I could hear a short series of grunts meant to be desperate cries for help. And then the old man was hurled back down for another round of splatter portraits of pain.

  And just for a second, I saw a shadow on the wall-a brief glimpse, a form, a shape, something that left an outline of itself on the wall where it had absorbed the agonized energy of the old man’s suffering.

  I fought to push the Sight away from my perceptions again, and staggered. That was the drawback to using the Sight. The Sight could show you a lot of things, but everything you saw with it was there to stay. It wrote everything you perceived with it upon your memory in indelible ink, and those memories were always there, fresh and harsh when you went back to them, never blurring with the passage of time, never growing easier to endure. The little demonic diorama of bad vibes painted over the white tiles of that bathroom was going to make some appearances in my darker dreams.

  It looked like I’d found the black magic the Gatekeeper warned me about. Just as well that I hadn’t tried the dangerous spell with Little Chicago.

  I took a couple of steps away, shaking away the flickers of color and sparkles of light on my vision that remained for a time when the Sight was gone once more. Rawlins had a hand under one of my elbows.

  “You all right, man?” he rumbled a moment later, his voice very quiet.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Yeah. Thanks.”

  He looked from me to the closed door and back. “What did you see in there?”

  “I’m not sure yet,” I said. My voice sounded shaky. “Something bad.”

  Almost too quietly to be heard, he said, “This wasn’t just some thug, was it.”

  My stomach twisted again. In my mind’s eye, I could see a malicious smile reflected in the eyes of the old man, the memory absolutely crystalline. “Maybe not,” I mumbled. “It could have been a person, I think. Someone really sick. Or… maybe not. I don’t know.” More words struggled to bubble out of my mouth and I clamped my lips resolutely shut until I’d gotten my thoughts back under control.

  I looked around me and realized that the hairs on the back of my neck were not crawling around at the memory of the energy I’d just brushed.

  They were reacting to more of it drifting through the air. Now. Nearby.

  “Rawlins,” I said. “How many other cops are here?”

  “Just me now,” he said quietly. He took a look at my face and then peered around, his heavy-lidded eyes deceptively alert, his hand on his gun. “We got trouble?”

  “We got trouble,” I said quietly, shifting my staff into my right hand.

  The lights went out, all of them at once, plunging the hotel into pure blackness.

  And the screaming started.

  Chapter Twelve

  No more than two or three seconds went by before Rawlins had his flashlight out and he flicked it on. The light flashed white and clean for maybe half a second, and then it dimmed down, as though some kind of greasy soot had coated it, until the light, though still bright, was so vague and veiled that it accomplished little more than to cast a faint glow to maybe an arm’s length from Rawlins.

  “What the hell,” he said, and shook the light a few times. He had his hand on his gun, the restraining strap off, but he hadn’t drawn it yet. Good man. He knew as well as I did that the hotel was going to have far more panicked attendees than potential threats.

  “We’ll try mine,” I said, and got the silver pentacle on its chain from around my neck. A gentle whisper and an effort of will and the amulet began to emit a pure, silver-blue light that reached into the darkness around us, burning it away as swiftly as it pressed in, until we could see for maybe fifteen feet around us. Beyond that was just a murky vagueness- not so much a cloud or a mist as a simple lack of light.

  I gripped my staff in my right hand, and more of my will thrummed through it, setting the winding spirals of runes and sigils along its length to burning with a gentle, ember orange light.

  Rawlins stared at me for a second and then said, “What the hell is going on?”

 
; There were running footsteps and shouts and cries in the gloom. All of them sounded choked, muffled somehow. One of the two teenaged “vampires” stumbled into the circle of my azure wizard’s light, sobbing. Several young men blundered along a moment later, blindly, and all but trampled her. Rawlins grabbed the girl with a grunt of, “Excuse me, miss.” and hauled her from their path. He lifted her more or less by main strength and pushed her gently against the wall. He forced her to look at him and said, “Follow the wall that way to the door. Stay close to the wall until you get out.”

  She nodded, tears making her makeup run in a mascara mudslide, and stumbled off, following Rawlins directions.

  “Fire?” Rawlins blurted, turning back to me. “Is this smoke?”

  “No,” I said. “Believe me. I know burning buildings.”

  He gave me an odd look, grabbed an older woman who was passing blindly, and sent her off to follow the wall to the door out. He shivered then, and when he exhaled his breath came out in a long, frosty plume. The temperature had dropped maybe forty degrees in the space of a minute.

  I struggled to ignore the sounds of frightened people in the dark and focused on my magical senses. I reached out to the cold and the gloom, and found it a vaguely familiar kind of spellworking, though I couldn’t remember precisely where I’d encountered it before.

  I spun in a slow circle with my eyes closed, and felt the murk grow deeper, darker as I faced back down the hall to the hotel’s front desk. I took a step that way, and the murk thickened marginally. The spell’s source had to be that way. I gritted my teeth and started forward.

  “Hey,” Rawlins said. “Where are you going?”

  “Our bad guy is this way,” I said. “Or something is. Maybe you’d better stay here, help get these people outside safely.”

  “Maybe you ought to shut your fool mouth,” Rawlins replied, his tone one of forced cheer. He looked scared, but he drew his gun and kept the barrel down, close to his side, and held his mostly useless flashlight in his other hand. “I’ll cover you.”

  I nodded once at him, turned, and plunged into the darkness, Rawlins at my back. Screams erupted around us, sometimes accompanied by the sight of stumbling, terrified people. Rawlins nudged them toward the walls, barked at them in a tone of pure paternal authority to stay near them, to move carefully for the exits. The gloom began to press in closer to me, and it became an effort of will to hold up the light in my amulet against it. A few steps more and the air grew even colder. Walking forward became an effort, like wading through waist-deep water. I had to lean against it, and I heard a grunt of effort come out of my mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” Rawlins asked, his voice tight.

  We passed under one of the hotel’s emergency light fixtures, its floodlights only dim orange rings in the murk until my amulet’s light burned the shadows away. “Dark magic,” I growled through clenched teeth. “A kind of ward. Trying to keep me from moving ahead.”

  He huffed out a breath and muttered, “Christ. Magic. That isn’t real.”

  I stopped and gave him a steady look over my shoulder. “Are you with me or not?”

  He swallowed, staring up at the dim circles of light that were all he could see of another set of emergency lights. “Crap,” he muttered, wiping a sudden beading of sweat from his brow despite the cold air. “You need me to push you or something?”

  I let out a bark of tense laughter, and forced my power harder against the gloomy ward, hacking at it with the machete of my will until I began to chop a path through the dark working, picking up speed. As I did, the sense of the spell became more clear to me. “It’s coming from up ahead of us,” I said. “The first conference room in this hall.”

  “They got it set up for movies,” Rawlins said. He seized a sobbing and terrified man in his middle years and deflected him bodily to the wall, snapping the same orders to him. “God, it was packed in there. If the crowd panicked-”

  He didn’t finish the sentence, and he didn’t need to. Chicago has seen more than a few deaths due to a sudden panic in a movie theater. I redoubled my efforts and broke into a heavy, labored jog that led us to a pair of doors leading into the first conference room. One of the doors was shut, and the other had been slammed open so hard that it had wrenched its way clear of one of the hinges.

  From inside the room came a sudden burst of terrified screams-not the canned screams you get in horror movies. Real screams. Screams of such base, feral intensity that you could hardly tell they had come from a human throat. Screams you only really hear when there are terrible things happening.

  Rawlins knew what they meant. He spat out a low curse, lifting his gun to a ready position, and we rushed forward to the room side by side.

  The murk began to do more than simply drag at me when I hit the doorway. The air almost seemed to congeal into a kind of gelatin, and it suddenly became a fight to keep my legs moving forward. I snarled in sudden frustration, and transformed it into more will that I sent coursing down through my silver pentacle amulet. The soft radiance emanating from the symbol became a white-and-cobalt floodlight, driving back the gloom, burning it from my path. It left the large room still coated in shadow, but it was no longer the total occlusion of the magical murk.

  It was a long room, about sixty feet, maybe half that wide. At the far end of the room was a very large projection screen. Chairs faced it in two columns. At one point in the aisle between them, a projector sat, running at such a frantic speed that smoke was rising from the reels of celluloid. The projected movie still appeared clearly on the screen, in a frantic fast-motion blur of faces and images from a classic horror film from the early eighties. The soundtrack could only be heard as a single, long, piercing howl.

  There were still about twenty people in the room. Immediately beside the door was an old woman, curled on her side on the ground, sobbing in pain. Nearby a wheelchair lay overturned, and a man with braces of some kind on his legs and hips had fallen into an awkward, painful-looking sprawl from which he could not arise. One of his arms was visibly broken, bone pushing at skin. Other people cringed against the walls and beneath chairs. When my wizard light flooded the place, they got up and started staggering away, still screaming in horror.

  Straight ahead of me were bodies and blood.

  I couldn’t see much of them. Three people were down. There was a lot of blood around. A fourth person, a young woman, crawled toward the door making frantic mewling sounds.

  A man stood over her. He was nearly seven feet tall and so thick with slabs of muscle that he almost seemed deformed-not pretty bodybuilder muscle, either, but the thick, dull slabs that come from endless physical labor. He wore overalls, a blue shirt, and a hockey mask, and there was a long, curved sickle in his right hand. As I watched, he took a pair of long steps forward, seized the whimpering girl by her hair, and jerked her body into a backward bow. He raised the sickle in his right hand.

  Rawlins didn’t bother to offer him a chance to surrender. He took a stance not ten feet away, aimed, and put three shots into the masked maniac’s head.

  The man jerked, twisting a bit, and released the girl’s hair abruptly, tossing her aside with a terrible, casual strength. She hit a row of chairs and let out a cry of pain.

  Then the maniac turned toward Rawlins and, even though the mask hid his features, the tilt of his head and the tension of his posture showed that he was furious. He went toward Rawlins. The cop shot him four more times, flashes of bright white burning the image of the maniac and the room onto my eyes.

  He brought the sickle down on Rawlins. The cop managed to catch the force of it upon his long flashlight. Sparks flew from the steel case, but the light held. The maniac twisted the sickle, so that the tip plowed a furrow across Rawlins’s forearm. The cop snarled. The flashlight spun to the ground. The maniac raised the sickle again.

  I braced myself, raised my staff and my will, and cried, “Forzare!”

  Unseen power lashed from my staff, pure kinetic energy that ripped
through the air and hit the maniac like a wrecking ball. The blow drove him back down the aisle, through the air. He hit the projector on its stand. It shattered. He went through it without slowing down. He kept going, the flight of his passage tearing through the large projection screen, and hit the back wall with a thunderous impact.

  I sagged in sudden exhaustion, the effort of the spell an enormous drain on me, and had to plant my staff on the ground to keep from falling over. My headache flared up with a vengeance, and the light of my amulet and staff both faded.

  There were a few more screams, the quick, light sound of frightened feet, and I whirled. I saw someone flee the room from the corner of my eye, but I didn’t get much of a look at them. A second later, the room returned to normal, the lights back, the broken projector still spinning one reel at reduced speed, a loose tongue of film slap-slap-slapping the broken casing.

  Rawlins advanced, gun still out, his eyes very wide, down to the far end of the room. He went past the screen and looked behind it, gun in firing position. He looked around for a second, then back at me, his expression baffled.

  “He’s not here,” Rawlins said. “Did you see him go that way?”

  I just didn’t have enough left in me to speak right at that moment. I shook my head.

  “There’s a dent in the wall,” he reported. “Covered in… I dunno what. Some kind of slime.”

  “He’s gone,” I grunted. Then I started forward, toward the downed people. Two of them were young men, the third a young woman. “Help me.”

  Rawlins holstered his weapon and did. One of the young men was dead. There was a crescent-shaped cut in his thigh that had opened an artery. Another lay mercifully unconscious, a bruise on his head, several hideous inches of bloody innards protruding from a slash across his belly. I was afraid that if we moved him, his guts might come popping out. The girl was alive, but the sickle’s tip had drawn a pair of long lines down her back along the spine, and the cuts had been vicious and deep. Bits of bone showed and she lay on her belly, her eyes open and blinking but utterly unfocused, either unwilling or unable to move.