by Jim Butcher
He lifted his eyebrows as I came closer, then rose and bowed politely from the waist. I realized that he wasn’t seven feet tall. He was more like seven foot four or five.
“Good evening,” he said. His basso rumble was unmistakable. This was the person I had spoken to earlier.
I stopped in front of him and put a hand on my hip, eyeing him as if I wasn’t much impressed. “As long as you brought the money, it will be,” I drawled.
He reached into a cavernous pocket in his pants and drew out a brick wrapped in plastic. He tossed it to me. “Half.”
I caught it and tore open the plastic with my teeth. Then I started counting the money, all of it in nonsequential Ben Franklins.
A trace of impatience entered my contact’s voice. “It’s all there.”
“Talking to me is just going to make me lose count and start over,” I said. “What am I supposed to call you?”
“Nothing,” he said. “No one. I am nothing to you.”
“Nothing it is,” I replied. The bills were bound in groups of fifty. I counted one out and compared its thickness to that of the others, then flipped through just to be sure Nothing wasn’t trying to short me by throwing some twenties into the middle of the stack. Then I stuck the money in my jacket pocket and said, “We’re in business.”
Nothing inclined his head a bit. “The merchandise?”
“Come with me,” I said, injecting my voice with breezy confidence. I turned to stomp back toward the garage parking lot, and Nothing paced along beside me.
Already, this wasn’t going well. This guy was huge. I was good, but training and practice can get you only so far. The old saying is that a good big man will beat a good little man. Which is sexist as all get-out, but no less true. Levels of skill being equal, whoever has the size and weight advantage damn near always wins. Nothing probably outweighed all three of us together, and I already had a sense, from the way he held himself and moved, that he was a person accustomed to violence. He was good.
I could shoot him (probably), but I didn’t need a dead trafficker on my hands. I needed one who could talk—which meant I was going to have to let Will and Marcy be taken.
“How long you fellas setting up shop?” I asked him as we walked. “Might be able to come up with another one, if the price is right.”
Nothing looked at me for a moment before speaking. “If you cannot do it by dawn, do not bother.”
“Maybe. We’ll see how this plays out.”
Nothing shrugged and kept on walking. I caught sight of our reflection in a passing window—Biker Barbie and Bigfoot. I tried to keep out of his reach as we walked, but there was only so much sidewalk, and Nothing’s arms looked long enough to slap me from the middle of the street.
As we walked, I noticed the smell. The man just smelled wrong. I wasn’t sure what it was—something . . . musty, vaguely like the scent of stagnant water and rotting fish. It hung in the air around him.
“You aren’t really human, are you,” I noted as we walked into the parking garage—and away from any potential witnesses.
“Not anymore,” he replied.
As he spoke, the collar of the turtleneck . . . stirred. It rippled, as if something had moved beneath it.
“Well, I am,” I said. “Completely worthless for whatever you’re doing collecting specials. So don’t be thinking you can get three for the price of two.”
Nothing looked down at me with those unsettling eyes. “You are pathetic.”
I put a little extra swagger into my step. “Careful what you say there, big guy. You’ll turn me on.”
Nothing made a small, quiet sound of disgust and shook his head. It was hard not to smile as I watched him pigeonhole me into “scum, treacherous, decadent.”
“It’s right up here.”
“Before we approach the vehicle,” he said, “you should know that if you have associates waiting in ambuscade, I will break their necks—and yours.”
I lifted my hands. “Jesus. Show a little trust, will you? We’re all capitalists here.” I pointed the fob at the SUV and disarmed the alarm with a little electronic chirp. The lights flashed once. I tossed him the keys. “That one. I’ll stay back here if you like.”
“Acceptable,” he said, and strode to the SUV. Watching him bend down to look in was like a scene from Jurassic Park. He opened the rear hatch and then lifted his hands to his neck for a moment. He tugged the turtleneck down a little.
The skin of Nothing’s neck was deformed with narrow flaps of skin, somehow, and it took me a few seconds to realize what I was looking at.
Gills.
The man had gills. And he was breathing through them. They opened and closed in a rhythm not far removed from a dog’s sniffing.
“Werewolves,” he said. “Valuable.”
“They make good pets?” I asked.
He reached in and seized Will, lifting him with one hand. The young man remained limp, his eyes closed.
“Their blood has unique properties. What did you use to subdue them?”
“Roofies. The way my dating life has been going, I keep some on hand.”
He made a dissatisfied sound and tugged his collar up again. “The drug might lower their value.”
“I hope not,” I said. “This has been such a nice conversation. I’d hate for it to end in a gunshot.”
Nothing turned his head slightly and gave me a very cold little smile.
I felt threatened enough to produce my gun without even consciously thinking about it. I held it in two hands, pointed at the ground near his feet. We stayed that way, facing off for several seconds. Then he shrugged a shoulder. He produced another brick of bills and threw it to me, along with the truck keys. Then he gathered up Marcy and tossed her over one shoulder, and Will over the other.
He turned to the entrance of the garage and made several sharp, popping clicks as he went, producing with an odd quiver of his chest and throat a sound that was somehow familiar. They must have been a signal. A moment later, a van with rental-agency plates pulled up to the curb and stopped.
A man dressed identically to Nothing rolled open the side door. Nothing put the two werewolves inside, then followed them, somehow compressing his bulk enough to get into the van. The driver pulled back into traffic a second later. The entire pickup had taken less than ten seconds.
I got back onto my motorcycle and rolled out of the garage with my lights off before their van had gotten to the end of the block. Then, settling in to follow them from several car lengths back, I tried to make like a hole in the air.
Nothing and his driver headed for the docks, which was hardly unanticipated. Chicago supports an enormous amount of shipping traffic that travels through the Great Lakes, and offloads cargo to be transferred to railroads or trucking companies for shipment throughout the United States. Such ships remain one of the best means for moving illegal goods without being discovered.
There are plenty of storage buildings down by the docks, and Nothing went to one of the seedier, more run-down warehouses on the waterfront. I noted the location and went on by without stopping. Then I circled around, killed the engine with the bike still in motion, and came coasting back over the cracked old asphalt, the whisper of my tires lost in the susurrus of city sounds and water lapping the lakeshore.
There wasn’t much to see. The warehouse had a single set of standard doors, and several large steel doors that would roll up to allow crates and shipping containers to be brought inside. They were all closed. A single guard, a man in a watch cap and a squall coat, wandered aimlessly around outside the building, smoking cigarettes and looking bored.
I got rid of the damn clunky Munster boots and pulled on the black slippers I always wore on the practice mat. I pulled weapons and gear out of the bike’s saddlebags, attached the items to the tactical harness under my coat, and slipped closer. I stayed where it was dark, using the shadows to hide my approach. Then I found a particularly deep patch of darkness and waited.
It
took a seemingly endless five minutes for the guard to get close enough for me to shoot him with a Taser.
Darts leapt out and plunged into his chest, trailing shining wires, and I pulled the trigger while he jerked and twitched and fell to the ground. I wasn’t sure if this guy was human or not, but I wasn’t taking chances. I kept the juice on him until I was sure he was down for the count. When I let up, he just lay there on his side, curled up halfway into a fetal position, quivering and twitching while drool rolled out of his mouth.
Actually, he sort of reminded me of my second husband in the morning.
I jerked the darts out of him and shoved the Taser and the trailing wire into my jacket pocket. It would take too much time to reset it for use, and I had a bad feeling that the electronic device wouldn’t do me much good inside the warehouse. I could have slapped some heavy restraining ties on him—but I would be happier if anyone who found the downed man had no idea what had happened to him.
So much for the easy part.
My P-90 hung easily from the tac harness, its stock high, its barrel hanging down the line of my body. I took a moment to screw a suppressor onto the end of the gun and lifted it to firing position against my shoulder. The little Belgian assault weapon was illegal for a civilian to own within city limits; the suppressor, too. If I got caught with them, I’d be in trouble. If I got caught using them, I’d do time. Both of those consequences were subordinate to the fact that if I didn’t go in armed for bear, I might not live to congratulate myself on my sterling citizenship.
Well, there’s no such thing as a perfect solution, is there.
I moved quietly back to the entry door, silenced weapon tight against my shoulder. I duckwalked, my steps quick and small and rolling, to keep my upper body level as it moved. I’d put a red dot sight on the P-90, and it floated in my vision as a translucent crosshair of red light. The sight made the weapon, to some degree, point and click. The idea was for the bullets to go wherever the crosshairs were centered. I had it sighted for short work. Even though I’d seen more action than practically any cop in the country—thanks to Dresden—I could count on one hand the number of times I’d used a weapon in earnest against a target more than seven or eight yards away.
Standing next to the entry door, I tested the knob. It turned freely. So, the folks inside had been relying on their guard to keep intruders out.
I thought of the first hissing voice I’d spoken to on the phone and shivered. They wouldn’t be relying on purely physical defenses. But I knew something about those, too. Harry’s defenses had been deadly dangerous—but to create them, apparently you had to use the energy of a threshold, which only grew up around an actual home. This old warehouse was a place of business and didn’t have a threshold. So, if a spell had been put up to guard the door, it would have to be fairly weak.
Of course, weak was a relative term in Dresden’s vocabulary. It might hit me only hard enough to break bones, instead of disintegrating me completely—if there was a spell there at all.
I hated this magic crap.
Screw it. I couldn’t just stand here all night.
I turned the doorknob slowly, keeping my body as far to one side as possible. Then I pushed in gently, and the door swung open by an inch or three. When nothing exploded or burst into wails of alarm, I eased up next to it and peeked into the building.
It was like looking into another world.
Green and blue light crawled and slithered up the walls and over the warehouse’s interior, eerie and subtly unsettling, each color moving in waves of differing widths and speeds. The strange scent of water and fish was strong inside. There were things on the wall—growths was all I could call them. Ugly patches of some kind of lumpy, rough substance I didn’t recognize were clumped all around the walls and ceiling of the warehouse in roughly circular patches about six feet across.
Cages were scattered all around the floor—a bunch of five-foot cubes made of heavy steel grid. People were locked up in several of them, the doors held shut by heavy chains. Most of them just sat, staring at nothing, or lay upon their sides doing the same thing, completely motionless. That wasn’t normal. Even someone who was drugged but conscious would show a little more animation than that. This meant magic was involved, some kind of invasive mental stuff, and a little voice in my head started screaming.
I’ve been subjected to that kind of invasion, more than once.
It’s bad.
My legs felt weak. My hands shook. The rippling colors of light on the walls became something sinister, disorienting, the beginnings of another attack on my mind. Jesus Christ, I wanted to turn around and scurry away, as swiftly and as meekly as possible. In fact, I tried to. My legs quivered as if preparing to move, but the motion drew my gaze across another row of cages, and I saw Georgia.
She was naked, kneeling, her hands wrapped gently around her swelling stomach, cradling her unborn child. Her head was bowed in a posture of meekness, and her sleek shoulders and neck were relaxed. But I saw her eyes, open and staring at the bottom of the cage, and I saw the defiance flickering in them.
Whatever held the others held Georgia as well—but she evidently had not been subdued as readily as they had. She was still fighting them.
Something deep inside me, something hard and fierce and furious, locked my legs into place. I stared at Georgia, and I knew I couldn’t run. I remembered that Will and Marcy were in there, waiting for me to announce that the moment was right to change form and fight. I remembered that nearly all of those people in the cages were young, even younger than the werewolves—including the youngest of all, in Georgia’s cage.
I remembered blood splattered on the weathered cabin of a boat—and that there was no one but me coming to help those kids.
The fear changed form on me. It disguised itself as reason. Don’t go in, it told me. Know your limits. Send for help.
But the only serious help I could get would be SI—and they would be putting their own careers, as well as their lives, on the line if they came to my aid. I could send for the regular police, drop in an anonymous call, but in this part of town it might take half an hour for them to show up. Even when they did arrive, they’d be lambs to the slaughter. Most of the force had no idea what really went on in the city’s darkest shadows.
You could go get the Sword, said my fear. You know where it is. You know how strong it makes you.
Not many people could honestly say they’d wielded a magic sword against the forces of darkness, but I’m one of them. Fidelacchius, the Sword of Faith, lay waiting for the hand of someone worthy to wield it against the powers of darkness. In the final battle with the Red Court, that hand had been mine. In the darkest moment of that fight, when all seemed lost, it had been my hand upon Fidelacchius that had tipped the balance, enabling Dresden to prevail. And I had felt a Power greater than I supporting me, guiding my movements, and, for a single, swift moment, entering into me and making use of my lips and tongue to pronounce sentence upon the murderous creatures surrounding us.
I could go for the Sword. Odds were it would be of some help.
But I knew that if I did, I would have taken the easy path. I would have turned away from a source of terror for the most excellent, rational of reasons. And the next time I faced the same kind of fear, it would be a little easier to turn away, a little easier to find good reasons not to act.
The Sword was a source of incredible power—but it was nothing but cool, motionless steel without the hand that could grip it, the muscles that would move it, the eyes and the mind that would guide it. Without them, the Sword was nothing.
I stopped and stared down at my shaking hand. Without my hand, my mind, my will, the Sword was nothing. And if that was true, then it must also be true that my hand was what mattered. That it had been my hand, my will that had made the difference.
And my hand was right here. In fact, I had two of them.
My breathing steadied and slowed. Sword or no Sword, I had sworn to serve and protect th
e people of this city. And if I turned away from that oath now, if I gave in to my fear, even for the most seductively logical of reasons, then I had no right to take up the Sword of Faith in any case.
My hands stopped shaking and my breathing slowed and steadied, bringing the terror under control. I whispered a quick, almost entirely mental prayer to St. Jude, the patron of lost causes and policemen. It sounded something like, “OhGodohGodohGod. Help.”
I nudged the door open a few more inches, then slid into the warehouse, moving with as much speed and silence as I possessed, my gun at the level and ready.
I MOVED DOWN the length of the warehouse, mostly hidden behind a shelving unit more than twenty feet high. It was stacked with pallets, loading gear, storage bins, and the occasional barrel or box of unknown provenance. The shifting, constantly wavering light made an excellent cover for motion, and I timed my steps to move in rhythm with the dancing illumination.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and it felt like every inch of my skin was covered in gooseflesh. I’d been in the presence of dangerous magic often enough to know the feeling of dark power in motion. It had been like this at Chichen Itza, and in the waters off the island of Demonreach, and in the Raith Deeps, and at Arctis Tor, and in the nest of Black Court vampires, and at . . .
You get the point. This wasn’t my first rodeo.
The most important thing would be to take out Nothing’s presumptive boss, and fast—preferably before anyone knew I was here at all. The warehouse reeked of magic, and if a mortal goes into a fair fight against a wizard, the mortal loses. Period. They have power that is literally almost unimaginable, and if the bad guy got a chance to defend himself, the only uncertainty remaining would be how much creativity he put into killing me.
At the end of the shelving unit, there was a rolling ladder, one made to run all the way up and down the shelves and provide easy access. The warehouse was darker up near the ceiling than at floor level. I didn’t even slow down. I went up the ladder to the top of the shelving unit and froze in place, getting a good, clear look at the enemy for the first time.
