by Jim Butcher
The resulting cannonball of blazing force struck the Scarecrow head-on while it was twenty feet away, exploding into a column of searing red flame, an inferno of heat and light that went off with enough force to throw the thing halfway across Lake Michigan.
Imagine my surprise when the Scarecrow stepped through my spell as if it had not existed. Its eyes regarded me with far too much awareness, and its arm moved, striking-snake fast.
Fingers as thick and tough as pumpkin vines suddenly closed around my throat, and in a rush of sudden, terrifying understanding, I realized that this phage was stronger than the little one I’d beaten at the hotel. This creature was far older, larger, stronger, more dangerous.
My vision darkened to a star-spangled tunnel as the Scarecrow wrapped its other hand around my left thigh, lifted me to the horizontal over its head, and started to rip me in half.
Chapter Twenty-nine
“Harry!” Thomas shouted. I heard a rasp of steel, and saw Thomas draw an old U.S. Cavalry saber from inside my duster. He tossed the shotgun to the wounded Rawlins and rushed forward.
Mouse beat him there. The big dog snarled and threw himself at the Scarecrow, obliging the creature to release my leg so that it could swing a spindly arm and fist at my dog. The Scarecrow was strong. It struck Mouse in midleap and batted him into the corrugated steel wall of the Full Moon Garage like he was a tennis ball. There was a crash, and Mouse bounced off the wall and landed heavily on his side, leaving a dent in the steel where he’d hit. He thrashed his legs and managed to rise to a wobbly stand.
Mouse had given Thomas an opening, and my brother leapt to the top of an old metal trash bin, then bounded fifteen feet through the air, whipping the sword down on the wrist of the arm that held me in choke. Thomas was never weak, but he was tapping into his powers as a vampire of the White Court as he attacked, and his skin was a luminous white, his eyes metallic silver. The blow parted the Scarecrow’s hand from its arm, and dropped me a good five or six feet to the ground.
Even as I fell, I knew I had to move away from the creature, and fast. I managed to have my balance more or less in place when I hit, and I fell into a roll, using the momentum to help me rise to a running start. But a problem developed.
That damned Scarecrow’s hand had not ceased choking me, and had not lost any of its strength. My headlong retreat turned into a drunken stumble as my air ran out, and I clutched at the tough vine-fingers crushing my windpipe shut. I went to my knees and one hand, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Rawlins lift the shotgun and begin pumping rounds into the oncoming Scarecrow from where he sat on the ground. The rounds slowed the oncoming creature, but they did nothing to harm it.
My throat was on fire, and I knew I had only seconds of consciousness left. In pure desperation, I took my staff and, in a dizzying gesture, dragged it through a complete circle in the gravel at my feet. I touched my hand to the circle, willing power into it, and felt the field of magic that it formed spring up around me in a silent, invisible column.
The circle’s power cut the Scarecrow’s severed hand off from the main body of the creature, and like the phage in the hallway of the hotel, it abruptly transformed into transparent jelly that splattered down onto the gravel beneath my chin and soaked my shirt in sticky goo.
I sucked in a breath of pure euphoria, and though I was on my knees, I turned to face the Scarecrow and did not retreat. So long as the circle around me maintained its integrity, there was no way for the phage to get to me. It should buy me a little time, to get the air back into my lungs and to work out my next attack.
The Scarecrow let out an angry hissing sound and swung its stump of an arm down at Rawlins. The veteran cop saw it coming and rolled out of the way as though he were an agile young man, barely avoiding the blow. Thomas used an old metal oil drum as a platform for another leap, this time driving his heels into the Scarecrow’s back, at what would have been the base of its spine on a human. The impact sent the Scarecrow to the ground, but as it landed it kicked a long leg at Thomas and struck his saber arm, breaking it with a wet snap of bone.
Thomas howled, scrambling back, leaving his fallen sword on the ground. The Scarecrow whirled back to me, eyes blazing with an alien rage, and I could swear that I saw recognition in them. It looked from me to Rawlins, and then with a hissing cackle it went after the cop.
Dammit. I waited until the last second and then broke the circle with a sweep of my foot, snatching up Thomas’s sword. I charged forward.
The Scarecrow whirled the moment the circle went down, sweeping out a great fist that could have broken my neck, but it hadn’t expected me to charge, and I was inside its reach before it realized what I had done. I let out a shout and struck at one of the Scarecrow’s legs, but it was quicker than I thought, and the saber’s blade barely clipped the thick, sturdy, viny limb. The Scarecrow let out a hiss loud and sharp enough to hurt my ears and tried to kick me, but I slipped to one side just in time, and the blow intended for me instead scattered several stacks of tires.
Madrigal Raith rose up from among the fallen tires only a couple of feet away from me, shrieking with fear. The Scarecrow’s eyes blazed into painfully bright flames when it saw Madrigal, and it started for him.
“Get to the van!” I shouted, hopping back to stand beside Madrigal. “We need wheels if we’re going to get away from this-”
Without so much as a second’s hesitation, Madrigal stuck out his hand and shoved me between himself and the monster, sending me into a sprawl at the Scarecrow’s feet while he turned to flee in the opposite direction.
Before I hit the ground, I was already calling power into my shield bracelet and I twisted to land on my right side, holding my left hand and its shield up. If I’d been half a second slower, the Scarecrow would have stomped its foot down onto my skull. Instead, it hit the half sphere of my sorcerous shield with so much force that the shield sent off a flare of light and heat, so that it looked like an enormous blue-white bowl above me.
Furious, the Scarecrow seized an empty barrel and hurled it down at my shield. I hardened my will as it struck, and turned the force of the throw, sending the barrel bouncing over the gravel, but it had gotten closer to me than the first blow. A second later, its fist hammered down, and then it found a bent aluminum ladder in a pile of junk and slammed it down at me.
I managed to block the attacks, but each one came a little closer to my hide. I didn’t dare to let up my concentration for a moment in an effort to move away. The damned thing was so strong. I wouldn’t survive a mistake. A single blow from one of its limbs or improvised weapons would probably kill me outright. But if I didn’t get away, the creature would hammer through the shield anyway.
Mouse charged in again, on three legs this time, bellowing an almost leonine battle roar as he did so. The Scarecrow struck out at Mouse, but the dog’s attack had been a feint, and he avoided the blow while remaining just out of the Scarecrow’s reach. The Scarecrow turned back to me, but Mouse rushed it again, forcing the Scarecrow to abandon its attack lest Mouse close in from behind.
I rolled clear of the Scarecrow’s reach and regained my feet, sword in my right hand, shining blue shield blazing on my left. I’d been throwing an awful lot of magic around tonight, and I was feeling it. My legs trembled, and I wasn’t sure how much more I could do.
Mouse and I circled the monster opposite one another, playing wolf pack to the Scarecrow’s bear, each of us menacing the creature’s flanks when it turned to the other. We held our own for maybe a minute, but it was a losing bet, long-term. Mouse was moving on three legs and tiring swiftly. I wasn’t much better off. The second one of us slipped or moved too slowly, the Scarecrow would drive us into the ground like a fence post. A wet, red, squishy fence post.
Light shone abruptly on my back, an engine roared, and a car horn blared. I hopped to one side. Madrigal’s rental van shot past me and slammed into the Scarecrow. It knocked the creature sprawling all the way across the parking lot to the edge of
the street.
Thomas leaned his head out the window and shouted, “Get in!”
I hurried to oblige him, snatching up my staff on the way, and Mouse was hard on my heels. We piled into the van, where I found Rawlins unconscious in the back. I slammed the side door shut. Thomas threw up a cloud of gravel whirling the van around, banged over the concrete median between the gravel lot and the street, and shot off down the road.
A wailing, whistling shriek of rage and frustration split the air behind us. I checked out the window, and found the Scarecrow pursuing us. When Thomas reached an intersection and turned, the Scarecrow cut across the corner, bounding over a phone booth with ease, and slammed into the back quarter of the van. The noise was horrible and the van wobbled, tires screeching and slithering while Thomas fought to control the slide.
The Scarecrow shrieked and slammed the van again. The wounded Mouse added his battle roar to the din.
“Do something!” Thomas shouted.
“Like what?” I screamed. “It’s immune to my fire!”
Another crunch blasted my ears, rocked the van, and sent me sprawling over Rawlins.
“We’re going to find traffic in a minute!” Thomas called. “Figure something out!”
I looked frantically around the van’s interior, trying to think of something. There was little enough there: Glau’s briefcase, an overnight bag containing, presumably, Glau’s shower kit and foot powder, and two flats of expensive spring water in plastic bottles.
I could hear the Scarecrow’s heavy footsteps outside the van, now, and a motion in the corner of my eye made me look up to see its blazing, terrifying eyes gazing into the van’s window.
“Left!” I howled at Thomas. The van rocked, tires protesting. The Scarecrow drove its arm through the van’s side window, and its long fingers missed me by an inch.
Do something. I had to do something. Fire couldn’t hurt the thing. I could summon wind, but it was large enough to resist anything but my largest gale, and I didn’t have the magical muscle to manage that, exhausted as I was. It would have to be something small. Something limited. Something clever.
I stared at the bottled water, then thought of something and shouted, “Get ready for a U-turn!” I shouted.
“What?” Thomas yelled.
I picked up both flats of bottles and shoved them out the broken window. They vanished, and I checked out the rear window to see them tumbling along in our wake, still held together by heavy plastic wrapping. I took up my blasting rod, pointed it at them, and called up the smallest and most intense point of heat I knew how, releasing it with a whispered, “Fuego.”
The rear window glass flashed; a hole the size of a peanut suddenly appeared, the glass dribbling down, molten. Bottles exploded as their contents heated to boiling in under a second, spattering that whole section of road with a thin and expensive layer of water.
“Now!” I hollered. “U-turn!”
Thomas promptly did something that made the tires howl and almost threw me out the broken window. I got an up-close look at the Scarecrow as the van slewed into a bootlegger reverse. It reached for me, but its claws only raked down the van’s quarter panel, squealing as they ripped through the paint. The Scarecrow, though swift and strong, was also very tall and ungainly, and we reversed directions more quickly than it could, giving us a couple of seconds’ worth of a lead.
I gripped my blasting rod so hard that my knuckles turned white, and struggled to work out an evocation on the fly. I’m not much of an evocator. That’s, the whole reason I used tools like my staff and blasting rod to help me control and focus my energy. The very thought of spontaneously trying out a new evocation was enough to make sweat bead on my forehead, and I tried to remind myself that it wasn’t a new evocation. It was just a very, very, very skewed application of an old one.
I leaned out the broken window, blasting rod in hand, watching behind us until the Scarecrow’s steps carried it into the clump of empty plastic bottles in a shallow puddle.
Then I gritted my teeth, pointed my blasting rod at the sky, and reached out for fire. Instead of drawing the power wholly from within myself, I reached out into the environment around me-into the oppressive summer air, the burning heat of the van’s engine, from Mouse, from Rawlins, from the blazing streetlights.
And from the water I’d spread in front of the Scarecrow.
“Fuego!” I howled.
Flame shot up into the Chicago sky like a geyser, and the explosion of sudden heat broke some windows in the nearest buildings. The van’s engine stuttered in protest, and the temperature inside the van dropped dramatically. Lights flickered out on the street, the abrupt temperature change destroying their fragile filaments as my spell sucked some of the heat out of everything within a hundred yards.
And the expensive puddle of water instantly froze into a sheet of glittering ice.
The Scarecrow’s leading foot hit the ice and slid out from under its body. Its too-long limbs thrashed wildly, and then the Scarecrow went down, awkward limbs flailing. Its speed and size now worked against it, throwing it down the concrete like a tumbleweed until it smacked hard into a municipal bus stop shelter.
“Go, go, go!” I screamed.
Thomas gunned the engine, recovering its power, and shot down the street. He turned at the nearest corner, and when he did the Scarecrow had only begun to extricate its tangle of limbs from the impact. Thomas hardly slowed, took a couple more turns, and then found a ramp onto the freeway.
I watched behind us. Nothing followed.
I sagged down, breathing hard, and closed my eyes.
“Harry?” Thomas demanded, his voice worried. “Are you all right?”
I grunted. Even that much was an effort. It took me a minute to manage to say, “Just tired.” I recovered from that feat and added, “Madrigal pushed me into that thing and bugged out.”
Thomas winced. “Sorry I wasn’t there sooner,” he said. “I grabbed Rawlins. I figured you’d have told me to get him out anyway.”
“I would have,” I said.
He looked up at me in the rearview mirror, his eyes pale and worried. “You sure you’re all right?”
“We’re all alive. That’s what counts.”
Thomas said nothing more until we slid off the highway and he began to slow the van. I busied myself checking Rawlins. The cop had kept going in the face of severe pain and even more severe weirdness. Damned heroic, really. But even heroes are human, and human bodies have limits you can’t exceed. Everything had finally caught up to Rawlins. His breathing was steady, and his wounded foot had swollen up so badly that his own shoe held down the bleeding, but I don’t think a nuclear war could have woken him.
I ground my teeth at what I had to do next. I set my deformed left hand on the floor of the van at the angle Lasciel had shown me and let my weight fall suddenly onto it. There was an ugly pop, more pain, and then the agony subsided somewhat. It was a giddy feeling, and my hand looked human again, if bruised and swollen.
“So,” I said, after I had worked up the energy. “It was you following me around town.”
“I didn’t want to be seen openly with you,” he said. “I figured the Council might take it badly if they found out you had taken a White Court vampire on a Warden ride-along.”
“Probably,” I said. “I take it you followed them from the parking garage?”
“No, actually,” Thomas said. “I tried but I lost them. Mouse didn’t. I followed him. How the hell did they keep him away from you when they grabbed you?”
“They hit him with this van,” I said.
Thomas raised his eyebrows and glanced back at Mouse. “Seriously?” He shook his head. “Mouse led me to you. I was trying to figure out how to get into that garage without getting us shot. Then you made your move.”
“You stole my coat,” I said.
“Borrowed,” he corrected.
“They never talk about this kind of crap when they talk about brothers.”
“You weren’t wearing it,” he pointed out. “Hell, you think I’m going to walk into one of your patented Harry Dresden anarchy-gasms without all the protection I can get?”
I grunted. “You looked good tonight.”
“I always look good,” he said.
“You know what I mean,” I told him quietly. “Better. Stronger. Faster.”
“Like the Six Million Dollar Man,” Thomas said.
“Stop joking, Thomas,” I told him in an even tone. “You used a lot of energy tonight. You’re feeding again.”
He drove, eyes guarded, his face blank.
I chewed on my lip. “You want to talk about it?”
He ignored me, which I took as a “no.”
“How long have you been active?”
I was sure he was stonewalling when he said, in a very quiet voice, “Since last Halloween.”
I frowned. “When we took on those necromancers.”
“Yeah,” he said. “There’s… look, there’s something I didn’t tell you about that night.”
I tilted my head, watching his eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Remember, I said Murphy’s bike broke down?”
I did. I nodded.
“It wasn’t the bike,” Thomas said. He took a deep breath. “It was the Wild Hunt. They came across me while I was trying to catch up with you. Sort of filled up the rest of my evening.”
I arched my eyebrows. “You didn’t have to lie about something like that, man. I mean, everyone who won’t join the Hunt becomes its prey. So it’s not your fault the Hunt chased you around.” I scratched at my chin. Stubble. I needed a shave. “Hell, man, you should be damned proud. I doubt that more than five or six people in history have ever escaped the Hunt.”
He was quiet for a minute and then said, “I didn’t run from them, Harry.”
My shoulders twitched with sudden tension.
