by Jim Butcher
There was just time to get my shield up, and the tombstone exploded into gravel against it.
By the time I lowered my hand and looked around again, shield bracelet still dribbling green-gold sparks, the twin was gone. So were the bodies of Yoshimo and Wild Bill.
I stumbled over to Ramirez’s side. We wrestled the stupidly powerful strength still left in the dead vampire’s hands, until I finally had to pit what felt like the strength of my whole body against the vampire’s fingers, one at a time. It wasn’t easy on Ramirez, who must have been suffering agonies, but we got it done.
I pulled him back as he cradled his shattered arm, and we watched the corpse thrash itself across the ground.
“They took them,” Ramirez muttered. “They’re going to . . .”
“Nothing we can do for them this second,” I said. I got into the first-aid pack on his belt. In the dark it was a sloppy mess, but I got a pressure bandage over his wrist and got it tightly covered. It had to have hurt like hell on the broken arm, but we had to stop the bleeding. Ramirez clenched his jaw and hissed but gave no other sign of discomfort. I finished and rose. “Come on. We need to back up River and Listens-to-Wind.”
He looked up at me, his face pale, his eyes too shiny and hard. But he grimaced and nodded and lifted his good hand.
I hauled him up, and the two of us had just turned toward where I’d last seen the Senior Councilman and River Shoulders when the same pair walked out of the fog. River’s chest was rising and falling harshly. He sounded like a racehorse and moved as if his entire body was one enormous bruise. He was carrying an unconscious teenage girl in the crook of one arm like an infant—the victim Drakul and company had been preparing to sacrifice. Listens-to-Wind looked unutterably weary, but unhurt.
“What happened?” I asked.
“He left before we could get hurt too bad,” River Shoulders said, his voice pained.
Listens-to-Wind grimaced and reached way, way up to thump a hand against River Shoulders’ shoulder. “Creature like that, you don’t beat it. You win by surviving. We won.”
“Not all of us,” Ramirez said in a harsh voice.
“Drakul sent Chandler through some kind of gate,” I said. “It didn’t look like the usual passage to the Nevernever. It was all neat and symmetrical.” Which meant that Chandler could have wound up anywhere. Or, worse, nowhere. I leaned into the Winter. My voice sounded steady and rational. “No idea of his status. Meyers and Yoshimo are dead. Probably turned.”
The pain was still there. Shock and the Winter mantle might have been numbing it. I didn’t have a whole ton of friends. Losing three of them at once was going to hurt like hell, later. Even thinking about that made my guts quiver and my heart burn with rage.
Listens-to-Wind seemed to shrink a little and closed his eyes. “I think . . . Ah. This wasn’t an alliance for Drakul. Merely a profitable ploy. If we did not arrive in sufficient strength to stop the sacrifice, the enemy has an army at our backs, the city is overrun, and I daresay Drakul would have his choice of potential recruits in the chaos. If we did send those of sufficient power to stop him, Drakul need not go hunting for potent new servants—they have voluntarily identified themselves.”
“He left because he’d gotten what he’d come for,” I said.
Listens-to-Wind opened his eyes and nodded. “And because he doesn’t care about what’s happening here today.”
“What’s happening here today is going to affect everyone,” I said.
“Not him,” the old wizard said, his voice certain. “He’s got a different set of priorities.”
“Because he’s starborn,” I guessed.
Listens-to-Wind looked at me sharply.
“Hey,” I said brightly. “What are the stars and stones?”
The old man’s eyes narrowed. He traded a long look with River Shoulders.
“We should get back to the others,” Listens-to-Wind said, and turned to start walking back the way we’d come.
I took a long step and got in his way.
“I asked you a question, Senior Councilman,” I said quietly but firmly.
River Shoulders shook his head tiredly. “Hoss Dresden. We got a lot on our plates right now. There’s plenty that you don’t know yet. And maybe this story isn’t mine to tell.”
“Seriously?” I asked. “That’s your excuse? You don’t want to spoiler me?”
He regarded me levelly. “I’ve said what I’m going to, Hoss Dresden. It ain’t time yet.”
I shook my head impatiently. “I’m getting some damned answers. My whole life I’ve . . . No. Since my parents died, my life has been one person after another trying to get something out of me. Wanting me to make deals. Give them my loyalty. And there’s this whole starborn thing.” My voice dropped. “My whole life, I’ve had to figure it out on my own. I’m getting a damned answer. I’ve put myself at risk over and over for the Council. I’ve lost fr—” I swallowed. “I’ve paid for it. You owe me.”
The old man looked away and wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“We owe you,” he confirmed. “But it ain’t about debt. There’s some secrets that do worse than get you killed. A whole hell of a lot worse.” He eyed me. “You need to trust us.”
I barked out a laugh. It sounded weird in the graveyard. “Pull the other one.”
The old man sighed. Then he said, “Make you a deal.”
“What?”
“You get through tonight,” Listens-to-Wind said, “you give me a little time. I’ll be your advocate. I’ll speak on your behalf to the others.”
“Or you could just tell me yourself.”
“I’m a wizard, Hoss. Which means I’m arrogant.” He smiled a little. “But not that arrogant. That’s how big this is, boy. I, a senior wizard of the White Council, don’t think I’m smart enough to make this call alone.”
I blinked.
That was not a sentiment I’d ever thought I might hear from a Senior Councilman.
“Oh,” I said. “Wow.”
“Best I can do,” he said.
“I’ll wait a month.”
He snorted through his nose. “The people I need to talk to? Make it a year.”
“Fuck that,” I said.
“Oh?” he asked. “Tell me. What’s your next best offer?”
The old man lifted his eyebrows and waited, visibly and politely.
“Fine,” I said sourly. “A year.”
He nodded. “Done.”
The would-be sacrificial girl on River Shoulders’ shoulder stirred, looked around at the Sasquatch, opened her mouth to scream in horror—and almost immediately fainted again.
River Shoulders looked mournful. “I lost my glasses in the fighting.”
“Not your fault, big guy,” I said. “Some people just don’t know good company when they see it. We’d better drop her off with the next group of cops we pass.”
“Agreed,” Listens-to-Wind said.
“You’re just going to keep going,” Ramirez said. His voice shook with intensity. “Those things took our people. They’re profaning them.”
Cold rage suffused me and I whirled on Carlos. “And they’re going to get theirs. But not now. There are eight million people who have no one else to defend them. Just us. So we’re going to take care of business. And once we’re done here, we’re going to settle up with Drakul and his peeps. Right now, there are more important things to handle. But they’re on our list, and we will check them off. Bank on it.”
Ramirez stared hard at me for a second. Then he raised his fist.
I answered.
We bumped knuckles, hard enough to draw blood.
Chapter
Fourteen
If there is anything “good” about a fight, it’s that they don’t tend to last very long. Especially not fights between a terror as absolute as vampires
of the Black Court and people slinging around the power of Creation itself. If we hurried, we might catch up with the rest of the group before they got to the front.
It’s easier to move faster with fewer people.
We left the cemetery behind and kept heading east, toward the shores of Lake Michigan. There were more people fleeing now, screams and shouts and hushed, forced whispers. River Shoulders strode openly down the street, carrying the unconscious young woman in one arm and Ramirez in the other. I jogged along, and Listens-to-Wind shook himself into the shape of a rangy old hound and loped easily along beside me.
At the junction of Montrose and Hazel, there was a large group of police officers waving people past them and instructing them to head west at their best speed. There was a little pub there that had a courtyard that had only one entrance, where customers could park their cars. Several cars had been pushed across that entrance as an improvised barricade, and police officers with assault rifles stood at the barricade, looking nervously out into the darkness.
Behind them was a triage area, where several EMTs were working frantically in battlefield conditions to save lives. There were maybe a dozen people back there. Several looked like refugees who had fallen or been hit by some kind of debris. But three of them were Einherjaren—trust me, they stand out like a biker at the Vatican—and they were clearly the worst off.
It was well lit enough by a large fire in a steel barrel and dozens of flares that you could see the walls around the courtyard all the way up to the roof. Three officers had positioned themselves to watch the roof at the head of each wall.
There were bloodstains up there. Something had evidently tried to come over it and been fought back. The light was a problem, really, in this situation. Standing in it meant that you had to stay in it, or else work blind in the dark while your eyes slowly adjusted. Of course, without the light the EMTs couldn’t do their work. It’s an imperfect world.
The gunfire was closer and heavier now. I could make out individual shots. And hear screams. Screams on a battlefield aren’t like the ones you hear on TV. They’re high-pitched, falsetto shrieks and choked, gasping exhalations. Not all of them could have been human, but from where I was standing, they all sounded pretty much the same.
I stopped before we walked into the radius of the light around the defensive position and said, “River, maybe instead of walking up to all the nice frightened officers holding assault rifles, you should let me take the girl over there.”
“Huh,” the Sasquatch said. “Well. I did lose my glasses. Might be simpler.”
I took the girl from him, carrying her in both arms. The old hound paced along lightly at my side, moving with the spring of a much younger creature. I walked forward into the light, holding the girl, and said, “Hey! CPD! I need to get this girl some help!”
Rifles swung to cover me, and I prayed that the officers had decent trigger discipline. I’d have hated to get accidentally shot.
“Don’t move!” shouted several cops at the barricades. I didn’t.
“Keep moving west, sir!” shouted several others at the same time.
“Which is it, guys?” I called back to them. “I can’t not move and go west.”
There was a commotion at the barricade. One of the officers stepped back, and a dark, scowling face under a tight cut of silver hair peered out at me. “Dresden?” he called. “That you?”
“Rawlins!” I said.
The old detective had spent a lot of time in Special Investigations. We’d worked together before. He was a burly man with a particularly expressive face and his knuckles were lumpy with ancient scars. He carried a shotgun like it was an additional limb, and I trusted him.
“What the hell, man?” I called. “I thought you retired.”
He grimaced and nodded toward the sound of gunfire. “Two more weeks.”
I nodded toward the girl. “I need to drop her off with someone. I got stuff to do. Can I come in?”
“Depends, man. What was the name you knew me by the first time we met?”
“An Authority Figure,” I replied.
“Good enough for me,” he said. He nodded to the officers on the barricade. “Let him in.”
I carried the girl across the street and through a narrow gap in the cars that I had to turn sideways to navigate. Rawlins met me inside and led me back to the triage area.
It took me a second to realize that practically every cop there was staring at me. I overheard them speaking to one another. They must have fired enough rounds to make their ears ring, because their mutters were coming out at conversational volume.
“Is that him?” someone asked.
“The wizard, Dresden, yeah.”
“Is he for real?”
“Sure as hell hope so. Did you see those things?”
“Bullshit. He’s just a con man.”
“Eyes out!” Rawlins snapped, to all of them. “You think this is a goddamned circus?”
That did it, and they piped down and went back to watching the darkness.
Rawlins led me to an improvised bed made out of a folding table laid flat on the ground, with a layer of soft packing foam on top. I laid the girl down on it, and an EMT, his skin nearly as dark as Rawlins’s, bent over to examine her.
“Lamar,” I said. “Long time no see.”
“That’s because I don’t want nothing to do with you and your weird shit, Dresden,” Lamar said.
Lamar is one of the more sensible people I’ve ever met.
“Then what are you doing here?” I asked.
Lamar shrugged. “What I do.” He peeled back an eyelid on the girl, checked her pulse with a stethoscope, and rummaged in a medical kit beside him. “This your fault?”
“Not this time,” I said. “Honest.”
“Uh-huh,” he drawled, infusing both syllables with skepticism.
“It’s not always my fault,” I said.
“Sure,” he said. With even denser skepticism. He took out a small paper tube from the kit. He snapped it in half and waved the broken ends under the young woman’s nose. She shuddered and abruptly lurched, her eyes flying wide open. She started screaming.
“Back off, both of you,” Lamar said. “Let me work.”
I traded a glance with Rawlins and we backed off. He beckoned and walked over to an empty corner of the courtyard. I followed.
“The hell is happening?” Rawlins asked me intently under his breath once we were out of earshot. “Monsters on the walls with guns, guys with spears that shoot explosions, goddamned mercenaries with military-grade gear. What the hell is going on?”
I took a breath to try to think how best to condense it. “Bad guys from my side of the street have decided to destroy Chicago. And every monster and weirdo in Chicago has turned out to fight them.”
Rawlins stared at me for a moment before he said, “Shit.”
Rawlins was even better at condensing than me.
I glanced over at Lamar, who had gotten the girl to sit up. She was weeping and shuddering uncontrollably, and he was trying to get her to drink some water. “I gotta go, man,” I said. “Every minute I’m here is costing lives.”
“Where’s Karrie?”
Rawlins had been friends with Murphy’s dad, back in the day. He was the only person I knew who dared to call her by a diminutive nickname. “As safe as I could make her.”
He pursed his lips. “Oh. Bet she loved that.” He leaned over to ruffle the hound’s ears affectionately and glanced down at my hip as he did. “That coach gun legal?”
“No.”
He nodded. “Didn’t think so. You got enough ammo?”
“Tonight, there’s no such thing as enough ammo.”
Rawlins snorted. “Ain’t that the truth.” He leaned a little closer and said, very quietly, “Rudolph and his partner were in the middle of putting
out an APB on you when the grid blew out. Once it’s up again, I figure they’re gonna have the entire CPD looking for you.”
“Oh,” I sighed. “Joy.” I eyed him. “Why tell me?”
“Karrie likes you. And Rudolph is a prick.”
“Tough to argue with that.”
His teeth flashed very white when he smiled. “Good hunting, Dresden.”
I clasped his shoulder wordlessly for a second, then spun and headed back out of the courtyard to rejoin River and Ramirez.
“Two weeks,” Rawlins muttered as I left. “Gonna die of cliché poisoning.”
I walked back into the darkness and was promptly blinded to anything in it. I stumbled and faltered, but the hound stayed at my side, his shoulder against my leg, guiding me. I kept walking in the direction I knew they were, and tried not to gibber as I walked sightlessly forward.
“I’m just saying,” River Shoulders’ rumbling voice said, “you just draw two little lines from the corner of your mouth and then we have a public relations act. Humans love ventriloquists.”
Ramirez replied in an exhausted, bemused voice. “It might take more than that to establish relations between the Forest People and humanity at large.”
“Gotta start somewhere,” River Shoulders said.
“And the first place you went was a ventriloquist act?” Ramirez asked. “Maybe we should live through the night first. Then think it through for a while.”
“Mmmmm,” River Shoulders rumbled. “Probably smart.”
My eyes adjusted enough to make out dim shapes, and I said, “All right, folks. Let’s get a move on.”
The hound ran forward and leapt into the air, and a hawk soared away.
Man. I needed to learn how to do stuff like that one of these days.
“All right,” I said, “we—”
River Shoulders scooped me up in his other arm and bounded forward.
Now, I don’t know if you’ve ever been scooped up by a Sasquatch or not, but it isn’t the sort of thing you forget. I’m a pretty big guy. River lifted me as if I were a toddler. And when he ran . . .