by Jim Butcher
Micky Malone glanced up at the moon and shifted the shotgun in both hands—he was the only person relying upon raw, shredding firepower. Hey, the guy had a point. “All right,” he said. “We go in and then what?”
“Here’s the plan,” Murphy said. “Harry thinks that the killer’s followers will be drugged out and dozing. We round them up, cuff them up, and move on.” Murphy grimaced, her blue eyes sparkling in the silver light. “Tell them what’s next, Harry.”
I kept my voice quiet. “The guy we’re after is a sorcerer. It’s sort of like being a wizard, only he spends all his energy doing things that are mostly destructive. He isn’t good at doing anything that doesn’t fuck someone up.”
“Which makes him a badass as far as we’re concerned,” Malone growled.
“Pretty much,” I confirmed. “The guy’s got power, but no class. I’m going to go in and lock down his magic. We think he might have a demon on a string—that’s what the murders have been for. They’re part of his payment to get the demon to work for him.”
“Demon,” breathed Rudolph. “Jesus, can you believe this shit?”
“Jesus did believe in demons,” Michael said, his voice quiet. “If the creature is there, do not get close to it. Don’t shoot at it. Leave it to me. If it gets past me, throw your holy water at the thing and run while it screams.”
“That’s pretty much the plan,” I confirmed. “Keep any human flunkies with knives from giving them to me or Michael. I’ll take Kravos’s powers out, and you guys grab him as soon as we’re sure the demon won’t eat us. I deal with any other supernatural stuff. Questions?”
Murphy shook her head. “Let’s go.” She leaned out and pumped her arm in the air, signaling the rest of the S.I. team, and we headed into the warehouse.
Everything went according to plan. In the front of the warehouse, a dozen young people, all with that lost, lonely look to them, lay dozing amidst fumes that made me dizzy. The remnants of a serious party lay all over the place—beer cans, clothes, roaches, empty needles, you name it. The cops fell on the kids in a dark-clad swarm and had them cuffed and hauled out into a waiting wagon in under ninety seconds.
Michael and I moved forward, toward the back of the warehouse, through stacks of boxes and shipping crates. Murphy, Rudy, and Malone followed hard on our heels. I cracked the door at the back wall and peered through it.
I saw a circle of black, smoking candles, a red-lit figure dressed in feathers and blood kneeling beside it, and something dark and horrible crouching within.
“Bingo,” I whispered. I turned to Michael. “He’s got the demon in there with him.”
The Knight simply nodded, and loosened his sword in its sheath.
I drew the doll out of my duster’s pocket. It was a Ken doll, naked, and not anatomically correct, but it would work. The single hair that forensics had recovered from the last victim’s crime scene had been carefully Scotch-taped to the doll’s head, and I had attired Ken in the general garb of someone delving into black magic—reversed pentagrams, some feathers, and some blood (from a hapless mouse Mister had nabbed).
“Murphy,” I hissed. “Are you absolutely sure about this hair? That it belongs to Kravos?” If it didn’t, the doll wouldn’t do diddly to the sorcerer, unless I managed to throw it into his eye.
“We’re reasonably sure,” she whispered, “yes.”
“Reasonably sure. Great.” But I knelt down, and marked out the circle around me, then another around the Ken doll, and wrought my spell.
The hair was Kravos’s. He became aware of the spell taking effect a few seconds before it could close off his power altogether—and with those few seconds he had, he reached out and broke the circle around the demon with his will and his hand, then in a screaming rage compelled it to attack.
The demon leapt toward us, all writhing darkness and shadows and glowing red eyes. Michael stepped into the doorway and drew Amoracchius, the sudden blaze of light and magical fury like a gale in that darkness.
In real life, I had completed the spell and shut Kravos away from his powers. Michael had carved the demon into chutney. Kravos had made a run for it, but Malone, at fairly long range, had fired his shotgun at the ground and at Kravos’s feet, and done it perfectly, sweeping the man’s legs out from beneath him and leaving him writhing, bleeding, but alive. Murphy had wrestled the knife out of the sorcerer’s hands, and the good guys had won the day.
In my dream, it didn’t happen that way.
I felt the fabric of the spell closing around Kravos start to slip. One minute, he was there, in the weaving I was spinning around him—the next, he was simply gone, the spell collapsing of its own unsupported weight.
Michael screamed. I looked up, to see him lifted high in the air, his sword sweeping through the shadows and darkness before him in impotent futility. Dark hands, fingers nightmarishly long, grabbed Michael’s head, covering his face. There was a twist, a wet, crackling sound, and the Knight’s neck broke cleanly. His body jerked, then went limp. Amoracchius’s light died out. The demon screamed, a tinny, high-pitched sound, and let the body fall to the ground.
Murphy shouted and hurled her jar of holy water at the demon. The liquid flared into silver light as it struck something in that writhing darkness that was the demon. The shape turned toward us. Claws flashed out, and Murphy stumbled back, her eyes wide with shock where the talons had carved through her kevlar jacket, her shirt, her skin, leaving her belly torn open. Blood and worse rushed out, and she let out a weak gasp, pressing both hands against her own ruined side.
Malone started pumping rounds out of the shotgun. The demon-darkness turned toward him, a red-fanged leer spreading over it, and waited until the gun clicked empty. Then it simply laughed, grabbed the end of the shotgun, and slammed Malone against a wall, shoving the hardwood stock against the man’s belly until he screamed, until the flesh began to rip, until ribs started crackling, and then shoved harder, until I could clearly hear, even above the sound of Malone’s retching, the bones in his spine start to splinter and break. Malone, too, fell to the ground, dying.
Rudolph screamed, pasty-faced and white, and ran away.
Leaving me alone with the demon.
My heart rushed with terror and I shook like a leaf before the creature. I was still inside of the circle. I still had the circle protecting me. I struggled to reach out for my power, to summon a strike that would annihilate this thing.
And found something in my way. A wall. The same spell I’d meant to lay on Kravos.
The demon stalked over to me and, as though my circle wasn’t even there, reached out and backhanded me into the air. I landed with a thud upon the ground.
“No,” I stammered, and tried to struggle back from the thing. “No, this isn’t happening. This isn’t the way it happened!”
The demon’s red eyes glowed. I lifted my blasting rod toward it, pointed, and shouted, “Fuego!”
There was no stirring of heat. No fitful crackling of energy. Nothing.
The demon laughed again, reaching down toward me, and I felt myself lifted into the air.
“This is a dream!” I shouted. With that awareness, I started struggling to reach out to the fabric of the dream, to alter it—but I’d made no preparations before I’d slept, and was already too panicked, too distracted to focus. “This is a dream! This isn’t the way it happened!”
“That was then,” the demon purred, its voice silken. “This is now.” Then its maw opened up and closed over my belly, horrible fangs sinking in, worrying me, stretching my guts. It shook its head, and I exploded, shreds of meat flying out of me, into it, my blood rushing out while I strained and struggled helplessly, screaming.
And then a grey tabby with a bobtail bounded out of nowhere and whipped one paw at me, lashing it across my nose, claws slashing like fire.
I screamed again and found myself in the far corner of my bedroom, back in my apartment, curled into a fetal ball. I had been puking my guts out. Mister hovered over me
and then, almost judiciously, delivered another scratch to my cheek. I heard myself cry out and flinch from the blow.
Something rippled along my skin. Something cold and dark and nauseating. I sat up, blinking sleep from my eyes, struggling through the remnants of the vampire’s poison and sleep to focus on the presence—but it was gone.
I shook, violently. I was terrified. Not frightened, not apprehensive—viciously and unremittingly terrified. Mindless, brain-stem terror, the kind that quite simply bypasses rational thought and heads straight for your soul. I felt horribly violated, somehow, used. Helpless. Weak.
I crawled down to my lab, fumbling in the dark. Dimly, I was aware of Mister coming along behind me. It was dark down here, dark and cold. I stumbled across the room, knocking things down left and right, to the summoning circle built into the floor. I threw myself into it, sobbing, fumbled with tingling fingers at the floor until I located the ring. Then I willed the circle closed. It struggled, resisted, and I pushed harder, forced myself on it harder, until finally I felt it snap shut around me in an invisible wall.
I curled on my side, keeping every part of myself within that circle, and wept.
Mister prowled around the circle, a rumbling, reassuring purr in his throat. Then I heard the big grey cat hop up onto the worktable, and over to one of the shelves. His dim shadow curled up by the pale bone of the skull. Orange light began to glide out of his mouth, into the skull’s eye sockets, until Bob’s candleflame eyes blinked, and the skull turned to focus on me.
“Harry,” Bob said, his voice quiet, solemn. “Harry, can you hear me?”
Shaking, I looked up, desperately grateful to hear a familiar voice.
“Harry,” Bob said gently. “I saw it, Harry. I think I know what went after Malone and the others. I think I know how it did it. I tried to help you, but you wouldn’t wake up.”
My mind whirled, confused. “What?” I asked. My voice came out a whimper. “What are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry, Harry.” The skull paused, and though its expression couldn’t really change, it somehow looked troubled. “I think I know what just tried to eat you.”
Chapter Eighteen
“Eat me,” I whispered. “I don’t . . . I don’t understand.”
“This thing you’ve been chasing, I think. The Nightmare. I think it was here.”
“Nightmare,” I said. I lowered my head and closed my eyes. “Bob, I can’t . . . I can’t think straight. What’s going on?”
“Well. You came in about five hours ago drugged to the gills on vampire spit, and muttering like a madman. I think you didn’t realize that I was inside Mister. Do you remember that part?”
“Yeah. Sort of.”
“What happened?”
I relayed my experience with Kyle and Kelly Hamilton to Bob. Speaking seemed to help things stop spinning, my guts to settle. My heartbeat slowly eased down to something less than that of a terrified rabbit.
“Sounds weird,” Bob said. “Got to be something important to make them risk going out in daylight like that. Even in a specially equipped van.”
“I realize that, Bob,” I said, and mopped at my face with one hand.
“You any steadier?”
“I . . . I guess.”
“I think you got torn up pretty good, spirit-wise. It’s lucky you started screaming. I came as quick as I could, but you didn’t want to wake up. The poison, I think.”
I sat up, cross-legged, staying inside the circle. “I remember that I had a dream. God, it was a terrible dream.” I felt my guts turn to water, and I started shaking again. “I tried to change it, but I wasn’t ready. I couldn’t.”
“A dream,” Bob said. “Yeah, that figures.”
“Figures?” I asked.
“Sure,” Bob said.
I shook my head, rested my elbows on my knees, and put my face in my hands. I did not want to be doing this. Someone else could do it. I should go, leave town. “It was a spirit that jumped me?”
“Yeah.”
I shook my head. “That doesn’t make any sense. How did it get past the threshold?”
“Your threshold isn’t so hot to begin with, Bachelor Man.”
I worked up enough courage to scowl at Bob. “The wards, then. I’ve got all the doors and windows warded. And I don’t have any mirrors it could have used.”
If Bob had any hands, he would have been rubbing them together. “Exactly,” he said. “Yes, exactly.”
My stomach quailed again, and a fresh burst of shuddering made me put my hands in my lap. I felt like sprawling somewhere, crying my eyes out, puking up whatever shreds of dignity remained in my stomach, and then crawling into a hole and pulling it in after me. I swallowed. “It . . . it never came in to me, then, is what you’re saying. It never had to cross those boundaries.”
Bob nodded, eyes burning brightly. “Exactly. You went out to it.”
“When I was dreaming?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” Bob bubbled. “It makes sense now—don’t you see?”
“Not really.”
“Dreams,” the skull said. “When a mortal dreams, all kinds of strange things can happen. When a wizard dreams, it can be even weirder. Sometimes, dreams can be intense enough to create a little, temporary world of their own. Kind of a bubble in the Nevernever. Remember how you told me Agatha Hagglethorn was a strong enough ghost to have had her own demesne in the Nevernever?”
“Yeah. It looked kind of like old Chicago.”
“Well, people can do the same, at times.”
“But I’m not a ghost, Bob.”
“No,” he said. “You’re not. But you’ve got everything it takes to make a ghost inside you except for the right set of circumstances. Ghosts are only frozen images of people, Harry, last impressions made by a personality.” Bob paused, reflectively. “People are almost always more trouble than anything you run into on the Other Side.”
“I hadn’t noticed,” I said. “All right. So you’re saying that any time I dream, it creates my own little rent-by-the-hour demesne in the Nevernever.”
“Not every time,” Bob said. “In fact, not even most times. Only really intense dreams, I suspect, bring the necessary energy out of people. But, with the border being so turbulent and easy to get through . . .”
“More people’s dreams are making bubbles on the other side. That must have been how it got to poor Micky Malone, then. While he was sleeping. His wife said he’d had insomnia that night. So the thing hangs around outside his house waiting for him to fall asleep and starts killing fuzzy animals to fill up the time.”
“Could be,” Bob said. “Do you remember your dream?”
I shuddered. “Yeah. I . . . I remember it.”
“The Nightmare must have got inside with you.”
“While my spirit was in the Nevernever?” I asked. “It should have ripped me to shreds.”
“Not so,” Bob beamed. “Your spirit’s demesne, remember? Even if only a temporary one. Means you have the home field advantage. It didn’t help, since it got the drop on you, but you had it.”
“Oh.”
“Do you remember anything in particular, any figure or character in the dream that wouldn’t have been acting the way you thought it should have?”
“Yeah,” I said. My shaking hands went to my belly, feeling for tooth marks. “Hell’s bells, yeah. I was dreaming of that bust a couple of months back. When we nailed Kravos.”
“That sorcerer,” Bob mused. “Okay. This could be important. What happened?”
I swallowed, trying not to throw up. “Um. Everything went wrong. That demon he’d called. It was stronger than it had been in life.”
“The demon was?”
I blinked. “Bob. Is it possible for something like a demon to leave a ghost?”
“Oh, uh,” Bob said, “I don’t think so—unless it had actually died there. Eternally perished, I mean, not just had its vessel dispersed.”
“Michael killed it with Amoracchius,�
� I said.
Bob’s skull shuddered. “Ow,” he said. “Amoracchius. I’m not sure, then. I don’t know. That sword might be able to kill a demon, even through a physical shell. That whole faith-magic thing is awfully strong.”
“Okay, so. We could be dealing with the ghost of a demon, here,” I said. “A demon that died while it was all fired up for a fight. Maybe that’s what makes it so . . . so vicious.”
“Could be,” Bob agreed, cheerily.
I shook my head. “But that doesn’t explain the barbed-wire spells we’ve been finding on those ghosts and people.” I grabbed onto the problem, the tangled facts, with a silent kind of desperation, like a man about to drown who has no breath to waste on screaming. It helped to keep me moving.
“Maybe the spells are someone else’s work,” Bob offered.
“Bianca,” I said, suddenly. “She and her lackeys are all messed up in this somehow—remember that they put the snatch on Lydia? And they were waiting for me, that first night, when I came back from being arrested.”
“I didn’t think she was that big time a practitioner,” Bob said.
I shrugged. “She’s not, horribly. But she just got promoted, too. Maybe she’s been studying up. She’s always had a little more than her share of freaky vampire tricks—and if she was over in the Nevernever when she did it, it would have made her stronger.”
Bob whistled through his teeth. “Yeah, that could work. Bianca stirs things up by torturing a bunch of spirits, gets all the turbulence going so that she can prod this Nightmare toward you. Then she lets it loose, sits back, and enjoys the fun. She got a motive?”
“Regret,” I said, remembering a note I’d read more than a year ago. “She blames me for the death of one of her people. Rachel. She wants to make me regret it.”
“Neat,” Bob said. “And she could have been everywhere in question?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Yeah, she could have been.”
“Means, opportunity, motive.”
“Damn shaky logic, though. Nothing I could justify to the Council in order to get their backup, either. I don’t have any proof.”
