by Jim Butcher
“Right, dummy,” I growled at myself. “You’re already dead.” I got up and ran after the elder shade.
The living were all kissing hardwood floor as I plunged into the wall of the house. I wasn’t worried about the wards keeping me in—no one ever designed their wards so that bad things couldn’t leave, only so that they couldn’t enter. Besides, I’d had an invitation to come in, which technically made me a friendly—but I found out that “friendly” wards operated on much the same principle as “friendly” fire. Going out through the warded wall didn’t just tingle unpleasantly. I felt like I’d just plunged naked down a waterslide lined with steel wool.
“Aaaaaaaagh!” I screamed, emerging from the wards and onto Murphy’s front lawn, chock-full of new insight as to why ghosts are always moaning or wailing when they come popping out of somebody’s wall or floor. Not much mystery there—it freaking hurts.
I staggered for several steps and looked up in time to see the drive-by still in progress. They were in a pickup truck. Someone in the passenger’s compartment had the barrel of a shotgun sticking out the window, and four figures in dark clothing crouched in the truck’s cargo bed, pointing what looked like assault weapons and submachine guns at Murphy’s house. They were cutting loose with them, too, flashes of thunder and lightning too bright and loud to be real, seemingly magnified by the quiet, still air between the snow and the streetlights.
These guys weren’t real pros. I’d seen true professional gunmen in action, and these jokers didn’t look anything like them. They just pointed the business end more or less in a general direction and sprayed bullets. It wasn’t the disciplined fire of true professionals, but if you throw out enough bullets, you’re bound to hit something.
Bullets went through me, half a dozen flashes of tingling discomfort too brief to be more than an annoyance, and I suddenly found myself sprinting toward the truck beside Sir Stuart, exhilarated. Being bulletproof is kind of a rush.
“What are we doing?” I shouted at him. “I mean, what are we accomplishing here? We can’t do anything to them. Can we?”
“Watch and learn, lad!” Sir Stuart called, his teeth bared in a wolfish grin. “On three, be on the truck!”
“What!? Uh, I think—”
“Don’t think,” the shade shouted. “Just do it! Let your instincts guide you! Be on the truck! One, two . . .” The shade’s feet struck the ground hard twice, like a long jumper at the end of his approach. I followed Sir Stuart’s example on little more than reflex.
A sudden memory flashed into my head—a school playground from my childhood, where mock Olympic Games were being run, students competing against one another. The sun was hot above us, making the petroleum smell of warm asphalt rise from the surface of the playground. I had been competing in the running long jump, and it hadn’t been going well. I forget exactly why I was so desperate to win, but I was fixated on it as only a child could be. I remembered willing myself to win, to run faster, to jump farther, as I sprinted down the lane toward the pink-chalk jump line.
It was the first time I used magic.
I had no idea at the time, naturally. But I remembered the feeling of utter elation that flooded through me, along with an invisible force that pushed against my back as I leapt, and for just an instant I thought I had spontaneously learned to fly like Superman.
Reality reasserted itself in rapid order. I fell, out of control, my arms spinning like a windmill. I went down on the blacktop and left generous patches of skin on its surface. I remember how much it hurt—and how I didn’t care because I’d won.
I broke the Iowa state high school long-jump record by more than a foot. It didn’t stick, though. They disqualified me. I hadn’t even gotten serious about puberty yet. Clearly, something irregular had happened, mistakes had been made, and surely the best thing was to ignore the anomalous leap.
It was a vivid recollection, silly and a little sad—and it was my first time.
It was a powerful memory.
“Three!” Sir Stuart cried, and leapt.
So did I, my eyes and will locked on the retreating pickup full of gunmen.
There was a twisting, dizzying sensation that reminded me very strongly of a potion Bob had helped me mix up when I’d tangled with the Shadowman. It was that same experience: a feeling of flying apart into zillions of pieces, rushing forward at a speed too great to be measured, only to abruptly coalesce again.
There was a sudden cold wind against my face and I staggered, nearly falling off the roof of the pickup as it continued to slowly accelerate down the street.
“Holy crap!” I said, as a huge smile stretched my face. “That was cool. First Shadowcat, now Nightcrawler!”
I turned to find Sir Stuart standing on the bed of the truck, looking up at me with a disapproving eyebrow lifted. One of the shooters’ backs was in the same space as the shade’s right leg.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” I asked him, nodding to his leg.
“Hmmm?” Sir Stuart said. He glanced down and saw what I was talking about. “Oh. I suppose, yes. I stopped noticing it after seventy or eighty years. Now. If you don’t mind, Dresden, might we proceed?”
“To do what?” I asked.
“To teach you what are obviously badly needed lessons,” Sir Stuart said, “and to stop these pirates.” He spat the last word with a startling amount of venom.
I frowned and eyed the gunmen, who were all reloading, having emptied their weapons in sheer, nervous excitement. They weren’t particularly good at reloading, either.
“Hell, one man with a handgun could take them all right now,” I said. “Too bad neither of us has one.”
“We cannot touch flesh,” Sir Stuart said. “And while it is possible for a shade to, for example, move an object, it is impractical. With practice, you could push a penny across a table over the course of a couple of minutes.”
“Too bad neither of us has a penny,” I said.
He ignored me entirely. “That’s because we can put forth only minuscule physical force. You couldn’t lift the coin into the air against the pull of gravity.”
I frowned. This sounded a lot like a basic lesson most young wizards received. Most of the time, when you wanted to move something around, you didn’t have the kind of energy you needed stored inside you. That didn’t mean you couldn’t move it, though. It just meant you had to get the energy to do so from another source. “But . . . you can co-opt energy from elsewhere?”
The big man pointed an index finger at me, a smile stretching his mouth. “Excellent. We cannot interact with something being moved by a living creature. We can’t even touch an object that is being carried too closely to a living body. But . . .” He glanced up at me, inviting me to finish the thought.
I blinked twice, mind racing, and said, “Machines. We can work with machines.”
Sir Stuart nodded. “As long as they are in motion. And there is an enormous amount of energy and motion passing through a nonliving, mechanical engine.”
Without another word, he paced forward, through the back wall of the cab, sat on the passenger’s seat, and leaned to his left. I couldn’t see what he was doing, so I dropped to all fours, took a deep breath, and stuck my face through the roof of the cab. It tingled and hurt, but I had literally spent a lifetime learning to cope with pain. I pushed it to the back of my mind, gritted my teeth, and watched.
Sir Stuart had pushed his hand into the steering wheel of the truck. He pushed the other forward, leaning partly through the dashboard to do it, and waited patiently, watching the road ahead of us. It didn’t take long for the truck to hit a hummock in the ice coating the streets, and the truck bounced, shocks squealing. Just as it did, the shade’s eyes fluttered closed, and he gave a peculiar jerking twist of his arm.
The truck’s air bag exploded out of the steering wheel.
It struck the driver, smacking him back into the driver’s seat, and the man panicked. His arms tightened in surprise as he was hit, and he turned the steerin
g wheel several degrees to one side. Then he broke the cardinal rule of driving on ice and stomped his foot on the brake.
The slight turn and the sudden braking motion put the car into a slide. The driver was trying to push the air bag out of his face, and he didn’t compensate and turn into the slide. The slide became a spin.
Sir Stuart watched in satisfaction, looked up at me, and said, “Not much different from spooking a horse, really.”
The gunmen in the back were screaming in confusion as the car spun through three ponderous circles, somehow putting forth the illusion of grace. They bounced off the snow piled high on one side of the street, and then slid into an intersection, up over a sidewalk, and through the front windows of a small grocery store. The sounds of shattering glass and brick, screaming metal crumpling through its zones, and cracking snow and ice were shockingly loud.
The steadily ringing bell of the store’s security alarm sounded like my old Mickey Mouse alarm clock, in comparison.
The gunmen sat there doing nothing for a moment, clearly stunned, but then they began cursing and scrambling to get gone before the cops showed up.
Sir Stuart vanished and reappeared across the street. I made the same effort of will I had while jumping to the truck, reaching back for that memory once more. Again I flew apart and came back together, reappearing standing next to Sir Stuart, facing a brick wall.
“Next time turn around on the way,” he advised.
I snorted and looked back at the gunmen. “What about them?”
“What about them?”
“Can’t we . . . I don’t know, possess them and make them bang their heads into a wall or something?”
Sir Stuart barked out a harsh laugh. “We cannot enter unless the mortal is willing. That is the purview of demons, not shades.”
I scowled. “So . . . what? We stand here and watch them walk?”
He shrugged. “I’m not willing to leave Mortimer alone for so much time. You may also wish to consider, Dresden, that dawn is not far away. It will destroy you if you are not within a sanctum such as Mortimer’s residence.”
I frowned, looking up at the sky. City light had wiped away all but the brightest stars, but the sky to the east held only a hint of blue, low on the horizon. Dawn was hard on spirits and shades and magical spells alike. Not because one is inherently good and one inherently evil, but because dawn is a time of new beginnings, and the light of a new day tends to sweep away the supernatural litter from the day before. For spirit beings to survive sunrise, they had to be in a protected place—a sanctum. My trusty lab assistant, Bob, had a sanctum; in his case, a specially enchanted skull designed to protect him from dawn and daylight and to provide a home. A plain old threshold wouldn’t get it done, although my old apartment had probably qualified as a sanctum, given how many layers and layers of defense I’d put up around it.
But I didn’t have either of those things anymore.
“Go back to Mort,” I said. “It was fun playing Maximum Overdrive with these chowderheads, but that isn’t going to protect the people we care about. I’m going to follow the shooters back to their place and see what I can find out about them.”
Sir Stuart frowned at me and said, “The dawn is not something to take chances with, man. I strongly advise against your doing so.”
“So noted,” I said, “but the only real weapon I have against them is knowledge. Someone needs to get it, and I’m the only one who isn’t susceptible to lead poisoning. I’m the logical choice.”
“Assume you get the information and manage to survive the dawn,” the shade said. “Then what will you do?”
“I give it to Murphy, who uses it to rip the bad guys’ tongues out through their belly buttons.”
Sir Stuart blinked. “That . . . is certainly a vivid image.”
“It’s a gift,” I said modestly.
He shook his head and sighed. “I admire your spirit, man, but this is foolish.”
“Yeah. But I’ve gotta be me,” I said.
Sir Stuart put both hands behind his back and tapped a toe on the ground a few times. Then he gave me a resigned nod. “Good hunting,” he said. “If you have a problem with wraiths again, vanish. They won’t be able to keep up.”
“Thank you,” I said, and offered him my hand.
We traded grips, and he turned on a heel and started marching back toward Murphy’s place.
I watched him for a moment, then turned around and hurried after the snow-blurred forms of the gunmen, wondering exactly how much time I had left before the sunrise obliterated me.
Chapter Thirteen
The bad guys started hoofing it, and I followed them.
“Over here,” said one of them. He was youthfully scrawny, his skin bronze enough to look Native American, though his tangled red hair and pug nose argued otherwise. His eyes were an odd shade of brown, so light as to be nearly golden.
“What, Fitz?” one of the other gunmen said.
“Shut up,” Fitz said. “Give me your piece.”
The other handed over his gun, and Fitz promptly removed the magazine, ejected a round from the chamber, and pitched it into the snowbank, along with the weapon he was carrying.
“What the fuck?” said the disarmed gunman, and struck Fitz lightly in the chest.
Fitz slammed a fist into the other man’s face with speed and violence enough to impress even me—and I’ve seen some fast things in action. The other gunman went to his ass in the snow and sat there, hands lifted to cradle his freshly broken nose.
“No time for stupid,” Fitz said. “Everyone, give me your guns. Or do you want to explain to him why you tried to get us all thrown in jail?”
The others didn’t look happy about it, but they passed over the weapons. Fitz unloaded them and threw them all into the snowbank. Then, at his direction, they started patting snow into the hole the weapons had made, concealing them.
“Stupid, man,” said one of the young men. “One of those wolves gets on our trail, we got nothing to defend ourselves.”
“One of the wolves follows us back, we’ll have the Rag Lady on our asses, and guns will be useless,” Fitz snapped. “Pack it in tighter. Smooth it.” Then he turned to the man he’d struck and piled some of the fresher snow into the man’s hands. “Put that on your nose. Stop it from bleeding. You don’t want to leave any blood behind if you have a choice.”
The seated young man looked frightened, and did as Fitz told him.
“What are we doing?” asked another of the gunmen. He was smaller than the others, and his tone wasn’t challenging—it was a question.
“The truck’s stolen. They can’t trace it to us,” Fitz explained, dusting snow off his hands. “Even if the winter breaks tomorrow, it’ll be days before this melts and they find the weapons. With luck, they’ll never connect the two.”
“That’s long-term,” the little one said. “I sort of want to survive the night.”
Fitz almost smiled. “You want to walk down the streets of fucking Chicago with assault weapons in your hands? We could keep them out of sight in the truck. Not out here.”
The little guy nodded. “I can keep the knife, right?”
“Out of sight,” Fitz said, and lifted his head, listening and frowning. Sirens were a common sound in nighttime Chicago, but they had shifted from background noise to something louder, nearer. “Get moving, people.”
Fitz jammed his hands into the pockets of his rather light coat and started walking. The others hurried to keep up with him.
I walked next to Fitz, studying him. I was more impressed with the young man in the lousy attack’s aftermath than I had been during the drive-by. Any idiot can point a gun and squeeze a trigger. Not everyone can keep themselves calm and rational in the wake of an automobile collision, weigh the liabilities of the situation, and make—and enforce—their decisions in the face of opposition. Though the attack had been amateurish, it had not been stupid, and Fitz’s actions in response to the sudden hitch Sir Stuart had
thrown into his plans were probably as ideal as the situation allowed.
Fitz was smart under pressure, he was a natural leader, and I had a bad feeling that he was the sort of person who never made the same mistake twice. He had just done his best to kill several people I cared a great deal for. Brains plus resolve equals dangerous. I’d have to see to it that he was neutralized at the first opportunity.
I followed them through cold I no longer felt and practiced vanishing. I’d jump ahead of them, behind them, onto ledges above them—all the while trying not to notice that the sky was getting lighter.
Something bothered me about the redheaded kid.
With the cops on the way, the store alarm ringing, his associates bleeding and dazed around him . . . why take a few extra, vital seconds to empty the guns? It had cost him about half a minute of time he certainly couldn’t afford to lose. Why do it?
I asked myself why I might do something similar. And the only answer I could come up with involved preventing whoever found the weapons from getting hurt. Fitz was willing to riddle a small Chicago house—and potentially the houses behind it, given the power of the weapons in question—with bullets, but he got all safety conscious when disposing of weapons? It was a contradiction.
Interesting.
Even more interesting was the fact that I’d cared enough to notice. Generally, if someone took a swing at my friends, I’d cheerfully designate him a target and proceed to make his world a noisy and dangerous place until he wasn’t a threat anymore. I didn’t lose a lot of sleep over it, either.
But I couldn’t just throw myself into the fight now, dammit. And, unlike before, those who threatened my friends could not also threaten me. I was safe from Fitz and his crew, unless they planned to keep walking until sunrise, and I was similarly no danger to them. Normally, I’d be fuming at the presence of people who had tried to kill my friends. But now. . .
We were absolutely no threat to one another. That made it sort of hard to keep my inner kettle of outrage bubbling along at maximum boil.
