by Jim Butcher
“Ouch,” Lara said, her tone annoyed. Then she glanced up at me and her expression became suddenly pleased. “Oh. You and the policewoman? Congratulations, wizard.”
“My relationships are none of your beeswax,” I responded in a grumpy tone.
Lara nodded at the old privy shaft. “We’re both about to crawl down that together, so I’d say I have a minor need to know if I’m going to receive second- and third-degree burns for bumping into you.” She regarded the space gravely. “Small. Are you going to fit?”
“Stop setting me up for dirty jokes,” I complained. “I’ll manage. Are you sure you can handle the guard?”
Lara turned her head slightly toward me, her eyes down, and caught her lip between her teeth, before slowly looking up at me. Suddenly the light fled from the room, except where it touched the pale perfection of her skin.
I just about started howling and pounding my chest, I suddenly wanted her so badly. It took me a good long breath to get control of myself and force myself to avert my eyes.
“I’ll manage,” Lara murmured, and the painful pressure of my desire was abruptly mitigated.
I gritted my teeth and said, through them, “I meant the details. Are you sure he isn’t going to see or hear anything else?”
“Give me sixty seconds,” Lara said. “Once I get close enough, he’s not going to notice anything else, even if you walked by him playing a trumpet and pounding drums. And even if he noticed, he’d not remember it.”
“Sixty seconds,” Freydis sighed. She was knotting towels together with mechanical precision. “Men.”
Lara turned her eyes to Freydis, who suddenly caught her breath, her cheeks flushing with color.
“Darling, this isn’t the same thing at all,” Lara purred. “It’s a pity your contract was so specific, or I’d demonstrate for you sometime.”
Freydis let out a deep sigh and then went back to knotting towels without looking up.
Lara gave me an impish smile, held out her hands, and said, “Help me up, Harry.”
“You don’t need any help from me,” I said, a little thickly. Even when she wasn’t shining the come-hither flashlight right in my face, Lara Raith still left me feeling a little bit dazzled.
The de facto monarch of the White Court responded with an amused laugh and entered the shaft like a diver, silently vanishing down into the darkness.
“Sixty seconds,” I muttered. “Going to take me twice that just to climb down.”
“Going to lose my mind on this damned job,” Freydis noted. “I’ll have the rope ready in five.”
“Cover,” I said.
“Oh, right.” She shook her head, dipped a hand into her dress, and took out a little wooden plaque. “If my head wasn’t attached. I’ve never worked for a client this distracting.”
She picked up my suit coat and Lara’s dress and dropped them into the boxing ring. Then she touched the plaque to them, muttered something, and snapped the wood in her fingers. There was an eye-searing flash of light that left a Norse rune shaped like a lightning bolt burned on my retina in purple, and suddenly there I was, on top of Lara in the boxing ring, making out furiously.
As illusions went, it was excellent. Just really … detailed. Maybe too much so. I turned away, a little embarrassed.
“She likes you, you know,” Freydis said, watching the illusion with amusement.
“From what I can tell, Lara mostly likes Lara,” I said.
“Maybe. But she treats you differently than she does others.”
I grunted and said, “Wonderful. Just the attention I need in my life.”
And then I shoved my shoulders and head into a narrow, lightless, handleless stone shaft and started wriggling down it in my underwear.
26
Going headfirst down a three-story shaft in complete darkness isn’t ever going to do well as a recreational business. I was completely reliant on keeping pressure against the walls to prevent me from falling. In that, the limited space was actually useful—it meant more of my body’s surface area could be pressed against the walls, and less strain being placed on any one spot.
Unless the hand-cut stone shaft narrowed along the line and I got stuck, in which case I was just screwed. Or if it got a lot wider, in which case, also screwed. I might be kind of tough, but a three-story fall onto my head wasn’t going to end well.
I started shimmying down. It was tough work, but I’d been doing a lot of cardio.
Lara had evidently left the dumbwaiter door open behind her, because there was dim light coming through, showing me a lumpy mass of white towels at the bottom of the shaft, as well as the shape of the walls. Once I had an idea of distance, it was possible to move more quickly—I could just relax a little and half slide down.
I paid with a little skin, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The stones of the castle were ancient. Time (and I didn’t want to think too closely about what else) had worn off many of the rough edges. As long as I didn’t start bleeding and making the walls slippery, I should be fine.
Fine. I felt like a wad of paper trying not to be blown through a straw, but other than that, everything was super.
I went down carefully, moving only one limb at a time, like the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Except that I couldn’t actually stick to walls. And if I slipped, I didn’t have any webbing to save myself with, and I’d fall and break my neck.
“ ‘Friendly neighborhood Spider Man,’ ” I sang under my breath, and inched lower.
My shoulders stuck.
My heart started beating a lot faster.
Not because I was scared or anything. This was just cardio.
It’s not like I was experiencing claustrophobia. I was a wizard of the White Council. We don’t let our emotions control us.
I forced myself to breathe slowly, to stop moving, to think. I was stuck because my muscles were contracted, holding me against the walls of the shaft. I had to relax. But if I relaxed, I would fall and die and that would be counterproductive, too. So the trick was going to be to relax part of me while keeping the rest of me tense.
I stretched out an arm, trying to get my shoulders unsquared to the walls, but it didn’t work. I felt myself wedge in further, and my breathing increased. I strained harder and felt the pressure on my joints increase.
“ ‘Can he swing, from a thread?’ ” I gasped.
Wait.
Stop, Harry. Think. Use your brain.
“ ‘Take a look overhead,’ ” my brain kept on muttering.
Right. Overhead.
This was a Chinese finger-trap problem. The harder I tried to work directly against it, the more impossible it would be to escape it.
So I tensed and pushed myself back, upward. It was difficult, but I’d been working out a lot of late. Fighting the Winter mantle’s pull had reaped me some physical benefits. I was able to back up several inches, readjust my shoulders, and slither past the close spot.
“ ‘Hey there!’ ” I breathed, “ ‘There goes the Spider-Man.’ ”
I kept going down, trying not to think of how hard it was to get my breath, or how I was trapped with my hands up over my head, and how if one of those giant spiders (they have those; I’ve seen them) started coming down the shaft after me, there wouldn’t be a damned thing I could do about it.
Thanks, imagination. I didn’t have enough problems, so I really appreciate you making up another one just to keep me on my toes.
I tried to keep my puffing as quiet as I could as I reached the bottom of the shaft and found a pile of sweaty towels and enough dim light to see them.
Well. There wasn’t going to be a way to get out of this gracefully. I stuck my arms out through the door and started wiggling out after them, bending my neck to take my weight on my shoulders as I came out.
I finally shimmied my head out of the bottom of the shaft and into a wall of absolute lust.
Seriously. It was like suddenly being fifteen again, with my hormones exploding and me having no idea at all
of how to deal with them. My skin turned hypersensitive, and I was suddenly, acutely aware of the sensation of stone against my back and legs, and that I’d gotten covered in dirt and dust on the way down. The pains of my body came rushing back onto me: soreness of muscle that should have been severely limiting my mobility, old injuries pounding with a steady ache, and the more recent damage to my hands throbbing insistently, all of which were normally muted by the Winter mantle.
Evidently, when a powerful vampire of the White Court wants you to pay attention to how your body feels, you do it. Period.
I turned my head and found my muscles responding only slowly, sluggishly.
The shaft had come out into a dim hallway, with the only lighting coming from a lamp on a desk, placed across one side of the hallway next to a heavy plastic frame that looked like some kind of metal detector.
One of the Einherjaren was standing in front of the desk. The man was at least as tall as me, only built with seventy or eighty more pounds of muscle, with a short buzz of black hair and a bristling black beard. He was standing in front of the desk, holding a heavy rifle, one of those ARs modified for anti-matériel rounds, at his shoulder, aiming down the barrel.
But he didn’t matter.
The only thing that mattered was Lara Raith.
She stood maybe three feet from the Einherjar, balanced on her toes as one lovely leg slowly, slowly shifted, sliding forward. The motion made muscles stretch and bunch, and shadows rippled over her body in ways that should not have been possible, much less maddeningly arousing.
I forgot what I was doing on the floor of the castle.
That didn’t matter.
Lara mattered.
I found myself just staring at her, at the most vibrant, dangerous, glorious woman I’d ever seen, only a few feet away, naked and pulsing with erotic energy. I didn’t care about the smudges of dirt on that pale, perfect skin. I didn’t care that my own body was smudged with filth. I didn’t care about the mission, or the nightmare spider shaft I’d just slithered down, or the now-unfamiliar aches and pains, just so long as I didn’t have to stop looking at the most incredible sight any man could ever s—
I sneezed, out of nowhere, hard, five or six times.
Magic surged out of me, energy pouring out with each involuntary contraction.
Lara’s head whipped around toward me, her silver-blue eyes wide like a cat’s.
Black widow spiders with bodies the size of basketballs came boiling out of the shaft behind me—five or six of them.
The Einherjar’s glazed stare abruptly snapped into focus, and his cold grey eyes snapped from Lara to me to the spiders. His finger moved from ready position along the receiver to the trigger of the rifle.
Lara blurred.
She was inside the Einherjar’s guard before I had fully realized she had begun to move, dipping down and coming up inside the circle of his arms, between the man and the rifle, her back to his chest. Before he’d begun to do much more than twitch in reaction, she had ahold of the weapon and had knocked his hand away from the trigger. The two struggled over the rifle. The Einherjar gave up trying to recover the rifle and clamped his huge right hand down on Lara’s throat. Muscle and tendon in his forearms stood out like cord as he began to crush her neck.
Meanwhile, the spiders chittered and hissed and leapt toward the nearest target, which happened to be me.
“Glah!” I shouted. In a very manly fashion.
Look, big bugs are like a thing. I mean, imagine you looked down the length of your underwear-only-clad body and saw giant Alaskan crabs charging up it, pincers waving. You’d have shouted in a manly fashion as well, to prepare yourself for battle.
There wasn’t much light, and even less time. I kicked frantically at one enormous spider and knocked it aside like a flabby kickball full of peanut butter. I shoved a second creature out of the air as it came at my face and then felt horrible puncture wounds happening as the other four bit into me. When teeth pierce your flesh, you don’t feel much for a second or two—until whatever bit you starts worrying you, thrashing back and forth while tearing. Then it’s like electricity flowing into you, lightning bolts of sharp silver sensation that surge up and down whatever limb is being bitten. Fangs pierced. Venom seared. My heart rate skyrocketed.
The other two widows rebounded from where I’d knocked them away and joined in.
And then, frantic breaths later, the forms of the spiders just wobbled and suddenly collapsed into translucent goo. One second, dozens of hard, tiny spider feet were poking into me everywhere while spider fangs sent pain scorching through me. The next, I was covered in ectoplasm and small wounds, having thoroughly slimed myself.
Goddamned conjuritis.
I would just have to hope that there weren’t any negative interactions with ectoplasm being injected into my bloodstream—because whatever the venom had been, it was definitely reduced to ectoplasm now.
I flopped like a landed fish, ectogoo making the floor more slippery than your average waterslide, eventually thrashing until I could see Lara again.
She still stood with her back to the Einherjar. They’d dropped the gun in the struggle, and the man had both hands on her throat now. Her face was bright pink, her lips an ugly greyish color. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t fighting back until I saw her hands, behind her, at the small of her back.
She wasn’t trying to fight off his hold on her. She was going for the kill.
Lara arched, twisting and struggling, and the poor bastard hung on to her neck. He thought he was winning the fight.
Then his fatigue pants came loose. Lara’s lips twisted into a triumphant snarl. There was a surge of bodies, and then the Einherjar let out a startled huffing sound. His eyes went wide and unfocused.
The struggle stopped. A slow smile spread over Lara’s half-strangled face. She slid her hands up the Einherjar’s arms and tugged gently at his fingers. His hands came away at once, sliding down her shoulders to her breasts. She coughed once, then let out a low purring sound, and her hips began to move in slow rhythm.
The Einherjar staggered. He sank back against his desk, balance wavering. Lara stayed with him, and though the motion should have been awkward, Lara moved smoothly and nimbly to match him, somewhere between a dance partner, a lover, and a hungry spider wrapping up its prey for the feast.
She looked back at her victim, teeth showing, and then looked at me. Her eyes were liquid silver, like mirrors. Deep pink finger marks on her neck promised bruises to come, but even as I stared at her, they were fading—as the Einherjar’s breathing became heavier and more desperate.
“What the hell was that?” she demanded. Her voice was quiet and rough, as if she’d somehow spent ten years drinking whiskey. “Giant spiders? Dammit, Dresden.”
I found myself just staring for a second. She wasn’t putting out the same kind of aura she had before, but she was still one of the most erotic, terrifying sights I had looked upon. Her allure drew me, calling to my purely human hormones—and, needless to say, the Winter mantle was going absolutely insane with lust for her. It wanted nothing so much as to challenge the Einherjar, beat him to death, and then claim Lara as a prize of conquest.
But that wasn’t me. Not the real me. That was just the mantle and the meat, wanting what they wanted. I pushed back against them both with my mind, with my will, until I remembered my purpose.
Thomas.
Save my brother.
I came to my sock feet, soaked with ectoplasm though they might be, and padded forward squishily.
“Don’t kill him,” I hissed intently, trying not to look at her. “All of this trouble is for nothing if you kill him.”
“Don’t be long,” she countered, her voice throaty, sensual, a hint of a moan in every word. Her eyes had become almost completely white at this point, pupils like beads of black in their centers. Her eyes looked utterly inhuman—and exactly like those of the demon Hunger I’d observed with my wizard senses in my brother, years ago.
“He’s stronger than he looks. Hurt me badly. I’m still healing.”
The Einherjar just remained locked where he was, his eyes blank, his expression one of a man in torment, moving only as needed to match Lara’s motion. She was a tiny thing compared to his sheer muscular mass—and he clearly didn’t have a chance in the world against her at this point. A man dedicated for centuries to his profession, and it meant nothing in the face of her power. There was no dignity to it.
Do we all look that goofy and clumsy during the act?
Yeah. Probably. Even when there wasn’t a succubus involved.
I pushed past the vampire and her victim and tried to figure out exactly when I’d started taking the field beside the things that go bump in the night instead of against them.
And then I pushed those thoughts away, grabbed an armload of towels, and went looking for my brother.
27
At the end of the hallway, I found a heavy trapdoor set in the floor.
I froze.
My heart started beating faster.
The door didn’t match the castle’s décor. It wasn’t lined up exactly right with the stones. It was old and made of heavy wood.
And there were scorch marks on it.
Because it was my door.
My door, mine, from my old apartment; the door to my subbasement lab. It still had the ring in it that I used to pull it up. And it had an additional bar on it that hadn’t been there before.
I shook myself out of the freeze and stretched out a shaking hand to slide back the bar and open the door. It came up easily; it even squeaked at the right spot and felt, dammit, exactly like it always had. My chest suddenly hurt and my eyes burned.
Hell’s bells, I wanted to feel like I was home again.
And instead, I was standing in Marcone’s house.
Something stirred in me, down deep. It wasn’t rage. It wasn’t anything as ephemeral and temporary as rage. It wasn’t predicated on my emotional pain. It felt older than that. Primordial. What was mine had been taken away.
It wasn’t right. And no one was going to do anything about it.