by Jim Butcher
“Ow,” I complained. I keep my complaints succinct.
Michael took the handle of his sword and drew it out of the flames, shaking his head. “The city is burning.”
“Thank you, Sir Obvious.”
He smiled. “Can the flames hurt us?”
“Yes,” I said, emphatic. “Time to go.”
Together, we headed back to the rift at a quick trot. At one point, Michael shouldered me out of the way of a tumbling chimney, and we had to skirt around the pile of shattered bricks and blazing timbers.
“Wait,” I said suddenly. “Wait. Do you hear that?”
Michael kept me hustling over the ground, toward the rift. “Hear what? I don’t hear anything.”
“Yeah.” I coughed. “No more hounds howling.”
A very tall, slender, inhumanly beautiful woman stepped out of the smoke. Reddish hair curled down past her hips in a riotous cascade, complementing her flawless skin, high cheekbones, and lush, full, bloodred lips. Her face was ageless, and her golden eyes had vertical slits instead of pupils, like a cat. Her gown was a flowing affair of deep green.
“Hello, my son,” Lea purred, evidently unaffected by the smoke and unconcerned about the fire. Three great shapes, like mastiffs built from shadows and soot, crouched about her feet, watching us with flat, black eyes. They stood between us and the rift that led back home.
I swallowed and forced down a sudden feeling of childlike panic that started gibbering down in my belly and threatened to come dancing up out of my throat. I stepped forward, between the faerie and Michael and said, in a rough voice, “Hello, Godmother.”
Chapter Six
My godmother looked around at the inferno and smiled. “It reminds me of times gone by. Doesn’t it remind you, my sweet?” She idly reached down and stroked the head of one of the hounds at her side.
“However did you find me so quickly, Godmother?” I asked.
She gave the hellhound a benign smile. “Mmmm. I have my little secrets, sweet. I only wanted to greet my long-estranged godson.”
“All right. Hi, good to see you, have to do it again sometime,” I said. Smoke curled up into my mouth and I started coughing. “We’re kind of in a hurry here, so—”
Lea laughed, a sound like bells just a shade out of tune. “Always in such a rush, you mortals. But we haven’t seen each other in ages, Harry.” She walked closer, her body moving with a lithe, sensuous grace that might have been mesmerizing in other circumstances. The hounds spread out silently behind her. “We should spend some time together.”
Michael lifted his sword again, and said, calmly, “Madame, step from our path, if you please.”
“It does not please me,” she spat, sudden and vicious. Those rich lips peeled back from dainty, sharp canines, and at the same time the three shadowy hounds let out bubbling growls. Her golden eyes swept past Michael and back to me. “He is mine, sir Knight, by blood right, by Law, and by his own broken word. He has made a compact with me. You have no power over that.”
“Harry?” Michael shot me a quick look. “Is what she says true?”
I licked my lips, and gripped my staff. “I was a lot younger, then. And a lot more stupid.”
“Harry, if you have made a covenant with her of your own free will, then she is right—there is little I can do to stop her.”
Another building fell with a roar. The fires gathered around us, and it got hot. Really, really hot. The rift wavered, growing smaller. We didn’t have much time left.
“Come, Harry,” Lea purred, her voice gone, pardon the pun, smoky again. “Let the good Knight of the White God pass on his way. And let me take you to waters that will soothe your hurts and balm your ills.”
It sounded like a good idea. It sounded really good. Her own magic saw to that. I felt my feet moving toward her in a slow, leaden shuffling.
“Dresden,” Michael said, sharply. “Good Lord, man! What are you doing?”
“Go home, Michael,” I said. My voice came out thick, dull, as though I’d been drinking. I saw Lea’s mouth, her soft, lovely mouth, curl upward in a triumphant smirk. I didn’t try to fight the pull of the magic. I wouldn’t have been able to stop my legs in any case. Lea’d had my number for years, and as far as I could tell she always would. I hadn’t a prayer of taking control back for more than a few seconds. The air grew cooler as I got closer to her, and I could smell her—her body, her hair, like wildflowers and musky earth, intoxicating. “There isn’t much time before the rift closes. Go home.”
“Harry!” Michael shouted.
Lea placed one long-fingered, slender hand upon my cheek. A wash of tingling pleasure went through me. My body reacted to her, helpless and demanding at the same time, and I had to fight to keep thoughts of her beauty from preoccupying me altogether.
“Yes, my sweet man,” Lea whispered, golden eyes bright with glee. “Sweet, sweet, sweet. Now, lay aside your rod and staff.”
I watched dully, as my fingers released both. They clattered to the ground. The flames grew closer, but I didn’t feel them. The rift glowed and shrank, almost closed. I narrowed my eyes, gathering my will.
“Will you complete your bargain now, sweet mortal child?” Lea murmured, sliding her hands over my chest and then over my shoulders.
“I will go with you,” I answered, letting my voice come out thick, slow. Her eyes lit with malicious glee, and she threw her head back and laughed, revealing creamy, delicious expanses of throat and bosom.
“When Hell freezes over,” I added, and drew out the little sack of ghost dust for the last time. I dumped it all over and down the previously mentioned bosom. There isn’t much lore about faeries and depleted uranium, yet, but there’s a ton about faeries and cold iron. They don’t like it, and the iron content of the dust’s formula was pretty high.
Lea’s flawless complexion immediately split into fiery scarlet welts, the skin drying and cracking before my eyes. Lea’s triumphant laugh turned into an agonized scream, and she released me, tearing her silken gown away from her chest in a panic, revealing more gorgeous flesh being riven by the cold iron.
“Michael,” I shouted, “now!” I gave my godmother a stiff shove, scooped up my staff and rod, and dove for the rift. I heard a snarl, and something fastened around one of my boots, dragging me to the ground. I thrust my staff down at one of the hellhounds, and the wood struck it in one of its eyes. It roared in rage, and its two pack mates came rushing toward me.
Michael stepped in the way and swept his sword at one of them. The true iron struck the faerie beast, and blood and white fire erupted from the wound. The second one leapt upon Michael and fastened its fangs onto his thigh, ripping and jerking.
I brought my staff down hard on the beast’s skull, driving it off Michael’s leg, and started dragging my friend back toward the swiftly vanishing line of the rift. More hellhounds appeared, rushing from the burning ruins around us. “Come on!” I shouted. “There’s no time!”
“Treachery!” spat my godmother. She rose up from the ground, blackened and burned, her fine dress in tatters about her waist, her body and limbs stretched, knobby, and inhuman. She clenched her hands into fists at her sides, and the fire from the building around us seemed to rush down, gathering in her grasp in a pair of blazing points of violet and emerald light. “Treasonous, poisonous child! You are mine as your mother swore unto me! As you swore!”
“You shouldn’t make contracts with a minor!” I shouted back, and shoved Michael forward, into the rift. He wavered for a moment on the narrow opening, and then fell through and vanished back into the real world.
“If you will not give me your life, serpent child, then I will have your blood!” Lea took two huge strides toward me and hurled both hands forward. A thunderbolt of braided emerald and violet power rushed at my face.
I hurled myself backwards, at the rift, and prayed that it was still open enough to let me fall through. I extended my staff toward my godmother and threw up whatever weak shield I could. The fa
erie fire hammered into the shield, hurling me back into the rift like a straw before a tornado. I felt my staff smolder and burst into flames in my hand as I went sailing through.
I landed on the floor of the nursery back in Cook County Hospital, my leather duster trailing with it a shroud of smoke that swiftly converted itself to a thin, disgusting coating of residual ectoplasm, while my staff burned with weird green and purple fire. Babies, in their little glass cribs, screamed lustily all around me. Confused voices babbled from the next room.
Then the rift closed, and we were left back in the real world, surrounded by crying babies. The fluorescent lights all came back up, and we could hear more worried words from the nurses back at the duty station. I beat out the fires on my staff, and then sat there, panting and hurting. None of the matter of the Nevernever may have come back to the real world—but the injuries gained there were very real.
Michael got up, and looked around at the babies, making sure that they were all in satisfactory condition. Then he sat down next to me, wiped the patina of ectoplasm from his brow, and started pressing the material of his cloak against the oozing gashes in his leg, where the hellhound’s fangs had sunk through his jeans. He gave me a pensive, frowning stare.
“What?” I asked him.
“Your godmother. You got away from her,” he said.
I laughed, weakly. “This time, yeah. So what’s bothering you?”
“You lied to her to do it.”
“I tricked her,” I countered. “Classic tactics with faeries.”
He blinked, and then used another section of his cloak to clean the ecto-gook off of Amoracchius. “I just thought you were an honest man, Harry,” he said, his expression injured. “I can’t believe you lied to her.”
I started to laugh, weakly, too exhausted to move. “You can’t believe I lied to her.”
“Well, no,” he said, his voice defensive. “That’s not the way we’re supposed to win. We’re the good guys, Harry.”
I laughed some more, and wiped a trickle of blood off of my face.
“Well, we are!”
Some kind of alarm started going off. One of the nurses stepped into the observation room, took one look at the pair of us, and ran out screaming.
“You know what bothers me?” I asked.
“What’s that?”
I set my scorched staff and rod aside. “I’m wondering how in the world my godmother happened to be right at hand, when I stepped through into Nevernever. It isn’t like the place is a small neighborhood. I wasn’t there five minutes before she showed up.”
Michael sheathed his sword and set it carefully aside, out of easy arm’s reach. Then unfastened his cloak, wincing. “Yes. It seems an unlikely coincidence.”
We both put our hands up on top of our heads, as a Chicago P.D. patrolman, his jacket and pants stained with spilled coffee, burst into the nursery, gun drawn. We both sat there with our hands on our head, and did our best to look friendly and nonthreatening.
“Don’t worry,” Michael said, quietly. “Just let me do the talking.”
Chapter Seven
Michael rested his chin in his hands and sighed. “I can’t believe we’re in jail.”
“Disturbing the peace,” I snorted, pacing the confines of the holding cell. “Trespass. Hah. They’d have seen disturbed peace if we hadn’t shown up.” I jerked a fistful of citations out of my pants pocket. “Look at this. Speeding, failure to obey traffic signs, dangerous and reckless operation of a motor vehicle. And here’s the best one. Illegal parking. I’m going to lose my license!”
“You can’t blame them, Harry. It isn’t as though we could explain what happened in terms that they would understand.”
I kicked at the bars in frustration. Pain lanced up my leg and I immediately regretted it—they’d taken away my boots when I’d been put through processing. Added to my aching ribs, the wounds on my head, and my stiffening fingers, it was too much. I sat down on the bench next to Michael with a whuff of expelled breath. “I get so sick of that,” I said. “People like you and me stand up to things that these jokers”—I made an all-encompassing gesture—“would never even dream existed. We don’t get paid for it, we hardly even get thanked for it.”
Michael’s tone was unruffled, philosophical. “It’s the nature of the beast, Harry.”
“I don’t mind it so much. I just hate it when something like this happens.” I stood up, frustrated again, and started pacing the interior of the cell. “What really galls me is that we still don’t know why the spirit world’s been so jumpy. This is big, Michael. If we don’t pin down what’s causing it—”
“Who’s causing it.”
“Right, who’s causing it—who knows what could happen?”
Michael half-smiled. “The Lord will never give you a burden bigger than your shoulders can bear, Harry. All we can do is face what comes and have faith.”
I gave him a sour glance. “I need to get myself some bigger shoulders, then. Someone in accounting must have made a mistake.”
Michael let out a rough, warm laugh, and shook his head, then lay back on the bench, crossing his arms beneath his head. “We did what was right. Isn’t that enough?”
I thought of all those babies, snuffling and making cute, piteous little sounds as the nurses had rushed about, gathering them up and making sure that they were all right, carrying them off to their mommies. One, a fat little Gerber candidate, had simply let out an enormous burp and promptly fallen asleep on the nurse’s shoulder. About a dozen little lives, all told, with an open future laid out before them—a future that would have abruptly ended if I hadn’t acted.
I felt a stupid little smile playing at the corners of my mouth, and a very small, very concrete sense of satisfaction that my indignation hadn’t managed to erase. I turned away from Michael, so that he wouldn’t see the smile, and forced myself to sound resigned. “Is it enough? I guess it’s going to have to be.”
Michael laughed again. I flashed him a scowl, and it only drew more merry laughter, so I gave up trying, and just leaned against the bars. “How long before we get out of here, do you think?”
“I’ve never been bailed out of jail before,” Michael said. “You’d be a better judge.”
“Hey,” I protested, “what’s that supposed to mean?”
Michael’s smile faded. “Charity,” he predicted, “is not going to be very happy.”
I winced. Michael’s wife. “Yeah, well. All we can do is face what comes and have faith, right?”
Michael grunted, somehow making it wry. “I’ll say a prayer to Saint Jude.”
I leaned my head against the bars and closed my eyes. I ached in places I didn’t know could ache. I could have dozed off right there. “All I want,” I said, “is to get home, get clean, and go to sleep.”
An hour or so later, a uniformed officer appeared and opened the door, informing us that we’d made bail. I got a sickly little feeling in my stomach. Michael and I shuffled out of the holding area into the adjacent waiting room.
A woman in a roomy dress and a heavy cardigan stood waiting for us, her arms folded over her seventh or eighth month of pregnancy. She was tall, with gorgeous, silken blonde hair that fell to her waist in a shining curtain, timelessly lovely features, and dark eyes smoldering with contained anger. “Michael Joseph Patrick Carpenter,” she snapped, and stalked toward us. Well, actually she waddled, but the set of her shoulders and her determined expression made it seem like a stalk. “You’re a mess. This is what comes of taking up with bad company.”
“Hello, angel,” Michael rumbled, and leaned over to give the woman a kiss on the cheek.
She accepted it with all the loving tolerance of a Komodo dragon. “Don’t you hello angel me. Do you know what I had to go through to find a baby-sitter, get all the way out here, get the money together and then get the sword back for you?”
“Hi Charity,” I said brightly. “Gee, it’s good to see you, too. It’s been, what, three or four yea
rs since we’ve talked?”
“Five years, Mr. Dresden,” the woman said, shooting me a glare. “And the Good Lord willing it will be five more before I have to put up with your idiocy again.”
“But I—”
She thrusted her swollen stomach at me like the ram on a Greek warship. “Every time you come nosing around, you get Michael into some sort of trouble. And now into jail! What will the children think?”
“Look, Charity, it was really imp—”
“Missus Carpenter,” she snarled. “It’s always really important, Mr. Dresden. Well, my husband has engaged in many important activities without what I dubiously term your ‘help.’ But it’s only when you’re around that he seems to come back to me covered in blood.”
“Hey,” I protested. “I got hurt too!”
“Good,” she said. “Maybe it will make you more cautious in the future.”
I scowled down at the woman. “I’ll have you know—”
She grabbed the front of my shirt and dragged my face down to hers. She was surprisingly strong, and she could glare right at me without looking me square in the eyes. “I’ll have you know,” she said, voice steely, “that if you ever get my Michael into trouble so deep that he can’t come home to his family I will make you sorry for it.” Tears that had nothing to do with weakness made her eyes bright for a moment, and she shook with emotion. I have to admit, at that particular moment, her threat scared me, waddling pregnancy and all.
She finally released me and turned back to her husband, gently touching a dark scab on his face. Michael put his arms around her, and with a little cry she hugged him back, burying her face against his chest and weeping without making any sound. Michael held her very carefully, as if he were afraid of breaking her, and stroked her hair.
