by Jim Butcher
One of the ghouls ripped the door off its hinges, the metal shrieking behind me. One of the ghouls bounded through, snarling, the pitch and tenor of its voice changing as it came. It was changing form, growing less human and more dangerous as it ran down its prey.
I rounded a corner and ran toward a tall figure in a dark coat at the end of a hall, lit by a green luminescence—and realized within a few steps that the figure my tracking spell had taken me after was not my brother.
I drew the Desert Eagle from under my coat and opened fire. The form crouched, lifting an arm, and bullets bounced off something and began skittering around the concrete of the hallway. A magical defense—the Stygian. A hand lifted, and a sphere of light flashed toward me. I dove under it, but the incoming spell matched my movement and fell to meet me.
There was a flash of brighter light, and an instant of heat that I expected to become agony. Instead, there was just a whirl of confusing dizziness, and then I was back on my feet—just as the first ghoul, its arms now half again as long as they were, and ending in grotesque claws, its face distended into a gaping, fanged muzzle, rounded the corner and leapt at me.
I’d brought the kukri. It’s a weapon that’s served the Gurkhas well for a couple of centuries, and with good reason. The bent-bladed knife, the size of a small sword, carries a tremendous amount of striking power along its inner edge when wielded properly, enough to strike limbs and heads from bodies, even when used by relatively small and less powerful mortals.
In the hands of a vampire, it’s the kind of thing that Jabberwocks get twitchy about.
The first ghoul led with a claw that was fast, but not fast enough. I left it on the floor of the hallway, hamstrung it on the back-stroke, and emptied the Desert Eagle into its back as it tried to flee, shattering its spine. It’s one of a couple of ways to put a ghoul down fast and for keeps.
The second ghoul came at me a breath later, and hesitated for maybe a quarter of a second upon seeing what was left of the first ghoul. That isn’t a long time in human terms. When you play in my league, the ghoul might as well have put a bullet through its own head. It would have amounted to the same thing.
I threw the kukri, hard, my demon lending me strength and precision, and the knife split the ghoul’s skull open like rotten fruit—the other way to put ghouls down fast.
I slapped a new clip into the Desert Eagle and had it trained on the far end of the hall when the dark figure reappeared, lit by a faintly glowing green crystal she carried in her left hand. Her dark hair was tied back from her perfectly expressionless, motionless face, and her eyes were unreadably reptilian.
The Stygian.
“Balera, isn’t it?” I asked her. The second ghoul’s momentum had carried it to the ground beside me, and it lay there on his back, the handle of my knife sticking out of the center of its face, the interior of his skull open to view. One of his legs was still quivering. “Or are you Janera?”
“It matters little to us,” she replied. Her voice was hollow, empty of something vital. It sounded about as much like a human voice as the old sixties electric pianos did like actual pianos. “You cannot win, Venator. The Lexicon Malos will be renewed. Depart now. Live to fight another day.”
I leaned down and jerked my gore-soaked knife out of the dead ghoul. Then I started a steady, deliberate walk toward her. “That’s what the other two members of the Stygian Sisterhood I’ve met have said. So far, it hasn’t worked out that way.” I started planning my shot. Every schmuck who can conjure up a shield that bounces bullets thinks he’s hot stuff. But it takes concentration to do it, and the shields aren’t omnidirectional. A ricochet shot can bounce right around a conjured shield—and besides, if I could get her focused on the gun, she might not realize I was using the knife on her until it was too late.
There was a nice, smooth, polished metal surface behind her, the cover to what must have been a heating unit or a lighting control panel or something. The steel looked heavy enough to suit my purpose. If I could put part of a shot into her back, even just a few fragments from a shattered bullet, it should be distraction enough to let me put her down. “Let’s make this simple,” I told her. “Hold still, smile pretty, and your sisters can have an open-casket service.”
Her lower lip twitched down away from her teeth in a gesture that looked like something that had never been human attempting a smile. “But yours,” she said, her voice suddenly a purr, “will never know you.”
I stepped forward, ready to shoot, and caught a flicker of my own reflection in the metal behind the Stygian.
It wasn’t me.
The man facing me wasn’t me.
He looked older, rough faced, with shaggy greying hair and a scruff of a beard. His jaws were slightly distended, as were his lips, and I pegged him at once as a ghoul who had not quite managed to completely hide its true nature under a human outer appearance.
I lifted my left hand, and the knife in it, and the ghoul in the reflection did the same thing.
The Stygian gave me another not-smile and vanished around the corner.
It took me a second to recover and go running after her—but I needn’t have bothered. A heavy door clanged shut as I rounded the corner, and flickering motes of greenish light danced over its surface before leaving me in total darkness. I’m not a member of the elite when it comes to the use of magic, but I knew better than to try to force that door against whatever energies the Stygian had laid across it in her wake.
I cursed savagely.
The entire affair had been an ambush, and I had walked right into it.
This was the difference between Harry’s use of magic and mine. The link between our amulets was strong enough that his more sophisticated spells would never have been deceived. The Stygian must have used some kind of masking enchantment to trick my own grade-school version of a tracking spell, and then employed an illusion to give herself the appearance of my brother once she had lured me into position to . . . do whatever it was she had done to me.
Why change my face? The members of the Stygian Sisterhood were no amateurs when it came to dangerous, even lethal magic. Why had she done that instead of, for example, setting my intestines on fire? Even if my demon had been fully fed and at peak strength, I doubted I could have survived something like that.
Now that the actual fighting was over, I began to feel the fear. Had the Stygian wished it, I would be dead right now, and the knowledge was sobering, frightening. Harry had occasionally accused me of being reckless and overconfident—which is, believe me, hypocrisy of a staggering magnitude. But in this instance, he was probably right.
And after expending so much energy on running, fighting, and bending steel with my bare hands, I was hungry. The park outside this building was just brimming over with happy, oblivious kine. It would be so easy to cut one out of the herd, some tender little doe, and—
I had to focus and concentrate. I wasn’t working with a safety net. Another stupid mistake could kill me.
“Get your game face on, Thomas,” I snarled to myself. “Get your head together.”
The darkness of the building was almost complete, but my demon let me see clearly enough. The ghouls were already rotting away. They’d be nothing but a stinking mess of sludge in a few hours. We were far enough into the building that I doubted the sound of the shots had carried out of it—but the cops on patrol in the park would notice the door the ghouls had torn off the building, probably sooner rather than later. I couldn’t stay there.
I found another way out of the building and hurried back toward my truck. I couldn’t trust my tracking spell, obviously, which meant that I had to find Harry another way. Karrin Murphy of Chicago PD might be able to find out if anyone had seen his car, but I had no way of knowing Harry would be in it, or even nearby. And even if I did find him, it was going to be hell convincing him of anything when a stranger walked up, told Harry that he was his brother, and asked him to abandon a case.
First things first, I decided. I
had to find him, or none of the rest of it would matter.
I knew someone who could help.
4
Harry is one of the top wizards on the planet, and he lives in a basement.
His boardinghouse is a little run-down, but roomy. I guess the rent is cheap. His basement apartment is tiny, but the neighbors are elderly and quiet. He seems to like it. I’ve known him for years, and I still can’t quite believe that he really keeps on living there.
Personally, I think that’s why he hasn’t had more trouble at home—I don’t think his enemies can bring themselves to believe it, either. Maybe they figure it’s a decoy he’s constructed solely to give them somewhere obvious to attack, where he can lure them to their deaths. Certainly, the ones who show up don’t like the welcome they receive. The defensive spells around his home could charbroil a herd of charging buffalo.
I used the crystal he’d given me to disarm his wards, and the key he’d given me to unlock his door and let myself in. His apartment was spotlessly clean, as usual—he’d turned into a neat freak a few years ago, for some reason, though he’d never talked about why.
An enormous, shaggy grey dog, two hundred pounds of muscle and fur and white, sharp fangs, appeared from the little kitchen-equipped alcove and growled at me.
“Whoa,” I said, holding up my hands. “Mouse, it’s me. Thomas.”
Mouse’s growl cut off suddenly. His ears twitched back and forth, and he tilted his head one way and then the other, peering at me, his nose twitching as he sniffed.
“Someone laid an illusion over me,” I said. Harry had told me his dog was special and could understand human speech. I still wasn’t sure whether he’d been pulling my leg when he said it. Harry’s got a weird sense of humor, sometimes. But speaking quietly to animals when they appear nervous is always a good idea, and I did not want Mouse deciding that I was a threat. He was a Foo dog, and I’d seen him take on things no mortal animal could survive, much less overcome. “Look, boy, I think Harry might be in trouble. I need to talk to the skull.”
Mouse came over to me and sniffed at me carefully. Then he made a chuffing sound, padded over to one of the throw rugs on the apartment’s floor, and dragged it to one side, revealing the lift-up trapdoor that led down to the subbasement.
I paced over to it and ruffled the dog’s ears. “Thanks, boy.”
Mouse wagged his tail at me.
A folding stepladder led down into my brother’s laboratory, which I always pronounced with five syllables, just to give him a hard time. I unfolded it and went down, stopping as soon as I could see the whole place.
You don’t just wander around a wizard’s lab. It’s a bad idea.
The place was piled high with god only knows what kind of horribly disturbing, rare, expensive, and inane junk. There was a lead box on one shelf in which he kept dust made from depleted uranium, for crying out loud. There was also an eight-foot-long scale model of the heart of the Chicago skyline on a table in the center of the room. It’s obsessively detailed, down to models of trees that actually look like the trees they represent, and one of the downtown buildings that was recently demolished.
It’s a little bit creepy, actually. My brother’s got a voodoo doll of the entire town.
He also has a human skull that sits on its own wooden shelf, between a pair of candles that have been burned down and replaced so many times that little volcano lumps of colored wax have formed at either end. There are romance paperbacks stacked up on either side of the skull, along with an old issue of Playboy from the seventies, with Bo Derek on the cover, and a long strip of scarlet ribbon.
“Hey,” I said. “Skull. Bob, isn’t it?”
The skull didn’t move.
I was going to feel really stupid if it turned out that Harry had been pulling my leg about the skull the whole time. My brother, the ventriloquist. “Hey,” I said. “Skull. Look, it’s me, Thomas. I know I don’t look like Thomas, but it’s me. Harry’s in trouble, and I need your help to go get him out of it.”
There was a tiny flicker of orange lights in one of the eye sockets of the skull. Then the flicker grew brighter, and was joined by a second in the other socket. The skull twitched on the shelf, turning a little toward me, and said, “Holy Clay Face, Batman. What happened to you?”
I chewed on my bottom lip for a second, debating on what to tell the skull. I knew that Bob was Harry’s lab assistant and technical adviser in matters magical, that he was some sort of spirit who resided inside the skull, and not a mortal being in his own right. All the same, he was beholden to Harry, and whatever Bob knew, Harry could potentially learn.
“There isn’t much I can tell you,” I said. “Harry’s new client isn’t what she appears to be. I was trying to warn him. She tricked me into following her and did this to my face. I think she did it to make it harder for me to warn Harry about her.”
“Uh-huh,” Bob said. “What do you want from me?”
“Help me get this thing off my face. Then help me find Harry so I can get him off this case before he gets hurt.”
Bob snorted. “Yeah, right.”
I frowned. “What? You think I’m lying to you?”
“Look, Thomas,” the skull said, its tone patently patronizing. “I acknowledge you’re cool beyond cool. You’re good-looking, you get all the girls, and you send naked chicks to Harry’s apartment dressed only in bits of red ribbon, all of which I admire in a person—but, uh. You’re still kind of a vampire. From a house of vampires famous for being mind benders, no less.”
I ground my teeth. “You think someone’s controlled me into doing this?”
“I think that generally speaking, you don’t have secrets from your brother, man,” Bob said, yawning. “And besides, once Harry gets onto a case for a client, he doesn’t come off it. He’s like a tick, only his head doesn’t come off quite as easy, and there’s less chance of his giving you an infection.”
“This is important, Bob,” I told him.
“So is finding lost children,” Bob said. “Or at least it is to Harry. I thought it might be because then their mother would be all appreciative and jump into bed with him, but apparently it’s one of those morality things. Finding kids hits some kind of good-versus-evil hot button in his head.”
That was what Lara had meant when she said the Stygian had taken a child. Crap. Now I could see the Stygian Sisterhood’s plan.
And if I didn’t stop them—stop Harry—the Oblivion War could be lost in a night.
“Dammit,” I growled. “Bob, I need the help. I need you to do this.”
“Sorry, chief,” Bob said. “Don’t work for you. Harry tells me different, that’s a different story.”
“But he’s in trouble,” I said.
“So you say. But you aren’t offering me any details, which makes it sound fishy.”
“Because if I gave you any details, they might get back to Harry, and he might be in even more trouble than he is right now.”
Bob stared at me for a second. Then he said, “I hereby promote you from mackerel to tuna fish.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking. Bob was a spirit. Such beings were bound by their words and promises, by the contracts they made with mortals. “Okay, look. You serve Harry, right?”
“Yep.”
“If I give you this information,” I said, “and if in your judgment his possession of this information could prove detrimental to his well-being, I want you to swear to me that you will keep it from him or anyone else who asks you about it.”
“Okay,” Bob said, drawing out the word with tremendous skepticism.
“If you do that,” I said, “I’ll tell you. If you can’t, I won’t. And bad things are going to happen.”
The skull’s eyelights brightened with what looked surprisingly like curiosity. “Okay, okay. I’ll bite. You have a bargain. I do so swear it to you, Vampire.”
I took a deep breath and glanced around. If another Venator knew what I was doing, they’d put a bullet in my
head without thinking twice.
“Have you ever heard of the Oblivion War?”
“No,” the skull said promptly.
“For a reason,” I said. “Because it’s a war being waged for the memory of mankind.”
“Uh,” Bob said. “What?”
I sighed and brushed my gloved hand back over my hair. “Look. You know that for the most part, the old gods have grown less powerful over the years, or have changed as they were incorporated into other beliefs.”
“Sure,” Bob said. “There hasn’t been a First Church of Marduk for a while now. But Tiamat got an illustration in the Monster Manual and had that role in that cartoon, so she’s probably better off.”
“Uh, okay,” I said. “I’m not sure exactly what you’re talking about, but generally speaking, you’re right. Beings like Tiamat needed a certain amount of mortal belief to connect them to the mortal world.”
The eyelights brightened. “Ah!” the skull said. “I get it! If no one remembers some has-been god, there’s no connection left! It can’t remain in the mortal world!”
“Right,” I said quietly. “And we’re not just talking about pagan gods. We’re talking about things that people of today have no words for, no concept to adequately define. Demons of such appetites and fury that the only way mortals in some parts of the world survived them at all was with the help of some of those early gods. Demons who had to be stopped, permanently.”
“You can’t destroy a primal spiritual entity,” Bob mused. “Even if you disperse it, it will just re-form in time.”
“But you can forget them,” I said. “Shut them away. Leave them forever lost, outside the mortal world and unable to do harm. You can consign them to Oblivion.”
Bob made a whistling sound.
What the hell? How? He doesn’t have any lips.
“Ballsy,” Bob admitted. “I mean, fighting a war like that . . . The more people you brought in to fight on your side, the more the information would spread, and the stronger a hold these demons would have. So you’d have to control who had the information. You’d have to lock that down hard.”
