by Jim Butcher
“Harry?” he said. “Harry?”
His face appeared at the end of a little black tunnel.
“Oh, lad,” he said, tears in his eyes. “Oh, lad. Didn’t think you were going to come at me again. Didn’t think it would trigger.”
I could feel his hands on my face, distantly.
“That’s why you were so big on teaching me control,” I slurred dully. “You’re barely holding it together yourself.”
“I’m a hotheaded fool,” he said. “I’m trying to help you.”
“You knew you were losing it,” I said weakly. “And you kept going anyway. You could have backed me up.” Blood came out of the hole in my chest in rhythmic little spurts. “And instead it ends like this.”
Shame touched his eyes.
And he looked away from mine.
The pain we feel in life always grows. When we’re little, little pains hurt us. When we get bigger, we learn to handle more and more pain and carry on regardless.
Old people are the hands-down champions of enduring pain.
And my grandfather was centuries old.
This pain, though.
This hurt him.
This broke him.
He bowed his head. His tears fell to the dock.
Then he paused.
Then his expression changed.
He looked up at me. His eyes widened, and then his face twisted into rage and disbelief. “Why, you sneaky—”
“Good talk,” I said, “Wizard McCoy.”
And I let go of the Winter glamour Lady Molly had crafted for me.
I felt my consciousness retreating back down that black tunnel, down to where I had laid Molly’s opal pinky ring on the dock, while I felt the ultimate construct of glamour, my doppelgänger, collapsing and deflating into ectoplasm behind me. My awareness rushed into the stone in the ring, found the thread of my consciousness I’d bound to it, and then went rushing swiftly back toward my body.
My eyes flew open and I was on the deck of the Water Beetle, on the far side of the cabin from where Ebenezar had been, where I’d taken cover after dropping the ring and beginning the illusion. Once I’d activated the ring, the veil around me had let me slip aboard the Water Beetle, take cover, and then project my consciousness back into the construct.
I’d blown up my relationship with my grandfather by remote control.
But at least I hadn’t taken a comet to the lung.
As I came all the way back into my body, I was gripped by a weariness so intense that it was its own entirely new form of pain. I could feel myself thrashing in spasms. Murphy had one of those face masks with a rubber pump over my mouth and was forcing air in. Freydis was trying to hold me down.
I fought for control of my body and eventually reasserted it, sagging down to the deck in utter weariness. Freydis lay half across me, panting. Murphy, all business, peeled back one of my eyelids and shone a light on my eye. “Harry? Can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” I said, and brushed the mask off my face. “Ugh.”
“Od’s bodkin, seidermadr,” Freydis breathed. She rose off me wearily. “You cut that one close.”
“What the hell is she talking about?” Murphy asked.
“A construct,” I said. “For the illusion. Um. Molly made a really, really good ectoplasmic body for me, stored the pattern for it in the ring, and linked it to me. Everything you need to drop a fake double of yourself in place as a decoy and simultaneously make yourself unseen. Then I … kind of possessed the construct. Projected my awareness into it. Sent all that energy into it, all the way from here, which is exhausting as hell. Had a wonderful chat with McCoy.”
Murphy helped me sit up, staring at my face intently. “What happened?” she asked.
I looked at her and said in a lifeless voice, “I won.”
“Oh my God,” she said. “Is he …”
“Pissed,” I said, with drawn-out, heavy emphasis.
She frowned and touched my temple with one hand for a moment. “He hurt you.”
I closed my eyes. “You should see the other guy.”
“You two are just precious,” the Valkyrie quipped.
“Freydis,” Murphy said, not unkindly, “fuck off.”
Freydis looked back and forth between us, frowned, and said, “Fucking off, ma’am.” And she left us as much privacy as she could on the little ship as the Water Beetle chugged forward.
“Harry,” Murph said gently.
I kept my eyes closed. They were overflowing anyway.
“He’s … he’s not …”
“Not quite the hero you thought he was?”
I pressed my lips together.
“Yeah,” she said. She leaned down and lifted my head into her lap. “He’s human. What a shock.”
“I told him,” I said. “About Thomas.”
“Seems like he reacted a little,” she said.
“He killed me,” I said quietly. “The fake me, I mean. If the fake me had been me me, I would now be dead me. He didn’t mean to do it. But it happened. And he’s not who I thought he was. He was out of control.”
My voice kind of choked on the last sentence. My chest felt like it should have had knives sticking out of it. I leaned my shoulders back against the bulkhead of the wheelhouse and clamped my left hand over my eyes while I sat on the deck. “He was out of control.”
“Oh God, Harry,” Murphy said, her voice full of pain.
“It hurts,” I said quietly. “Oh God. It hurts.”
She put her hand on my forehead, stroking. I lowered my hand and leaned down toward her. And I cried.
That went on until it was quiet.
Then she said, “I heard the beginning of the conversation. And you’re both wrong about each other, you know. You don’t really know who he is. Not yet. And he doesn’t know you. And you both hurt each other terribly, because you’re family. Because what you say and do matters so much more than anyone else.” She leaned down and put her cheek against my forehead. “Listen to me. I know it hurts right now. But the reason it hurts so much is because you care about each other so much. And that pain will eventually fade. But you’ll both still care.”
She was right. I did hurt. The kind of pain a magical mantle can’t do jack about. The real pain, of the heart, the kind that can kill you in about a million ways.
Damn the stubborn old fool.
“I know this is hard, Harry. I remember when I first realized my dad was just human,” she said. “When he shot himself.”
She let that hang in the air for a while.
Then she straightened, framed my face with her hands, and stared out over the darkened lake, her eyes filled with tears. “You can still talk to him, Harry. Something I never got to do. I want you to promise me, for my sake, that you’ll talk to him when tempers have cooled.”
“Karrin,” I said.
She gave one of my cheeks a little slap, annoyed. “Did that sound like a request? Do it. If my advice means a goddamned thing, do it right now. That’s how important this is.”
“What if …” I swallowed. “What if that’s me, one day? What if that’s what I’m like?”
“There’s a difference between you and him,” Murph said.
“Yeah?”
She moved a bit, leaned down, and kissed my forehead. “Yeah. You’ve got me.”
And … something little and warm kindled in my heart. It didn’t stop the pain. Oh God, did it not stop the pain.
But it told me the pain wouldn’t be there forever.
“Fine,” I said. “I’ll talk to him.”
I made a weary X over my heart.
She patted my cheek approvingly and said, “Good man.”
And I reached for her hand, closed my eyes, and spent a few minutes with tears less bitter.
33
I pulled myself together after a bit. There was a cabinet in the wheelhouse where I kept a bunch of long-term-storage snacks. Nuts and beef jerky, mostly, plus bottled water. Nothing fancy, but projecting
your consciousness was an exhausting activity, and my body needed the calories so badly that the stale nuts and dried jerky tasted freaking delicious. I chomped and guzzled.
It took most of an hour to get to the island on a normal trip, but I opened the throttle all the way, so we would get there in slightly less than most of an hour.
Murphy limped into the boathouse and kept me company in steady silence, watching my face. After about ten minutes of that, she said, “You’re scared.”
I shot her a glance. Shrugged a shoulder.
“That bad?”
I thought about it for a moment, while trying not to think about how sick I felt, how worried. Then I said, “I can do things. You know? I can burn down buildings if I want to. I can blow up cars. Call up things from the Nevernever.”
She nodded.
“Right now, right under my feet, my brother is dying. And maybe the people who want to kill him are already on the way and we won’t even get him to the island. And what’s about to start happening back in town …” I didn’t quite manage to suppress a shudder. “I feel very small.”
Murphy looked at me evenly for a moment. And then her face twisted and she choked down chortling laughter.
“ You … you …” She shook her head and slammed her shoulder gently against me, still laughing.
“What?” I asked.
“Welcome to the club,” she said. “Tiny.”
“I mean it,” I said. “This is bad stuff.”
“Right now,” she said, “every precinct in Chicago is scrambling to round up every officer it can get. They’ll be doing everything they can to get ahead of the chaos that’s going to come from the blackout. Firefighters, too, for all the good it will do them.” She shook her head. “They don’t feel too big, either. And they don’t even have a magic island.”
I thought about footprints on a beach.
“Maybe they’re about to feel a whole lot smaller,” I said. “Maybe we all are.”
Karrin frowned at that. She folded her coat closed around her a little more tightly and leaned against me. I put my arm around her.
“Just how bad are we talking, here?” she asked me.
“The Fomor think they can wipe out the city, whether we know they’re coming or not,” I said. “They seem sincere.”
“Wipe out,” Murphy said.
“Old-school. Think Attila. Genghis Khan.”
“Jesus Christ,” she breathed, and leaned against me. “The radio’s out. So is the Internet, in town. How do we warn them?”
“If only we’d put out the word to be on guard already,” I said wryly. “The Paranetters are used to surviving the big kids slugging it out. They’ll get together at their safe houses, Mac’s, places like that.”
“And everyone else?” Murphy asked.
“Hey, everybody,” I said, “mythological monsters are coming to kill you. Please evacuate.”
She pressed her lips together in frustration but acknowledged the point. “So what do we do?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“What’s going to happen?
I stared out at the darkness ahead of us, tracking the location of the island as surely as I would the progress of an ant across my arm, and pushed emotion away from things, thought through the matter as I would any mathematical problem.
“What makes this different,” I said, “is Ethniu. And this weapon she has. The Eye of Balor.”
“Yeah,” Murphy said. “What’s up with that thing?”
I blew out a breath. “Hell of a lot of variants in Celtic traditional folklore. It’s hard to say. Balor was kind of an equivalent to a Greek Titan, up in Celt territory. He had this eye that could be used to wither the world, to destroy everything it saw, to set it on fire. He kept it covered behind a bunch of eye patches and veils, and he could remove a few of them at a time to get different kinds of destructive effects, from making things rot to setting them on fire to blasting them to dust.”
“Kind of like gradually reducing the shielding around a radioactive core,” Murphy noted.
“I …” I blinked. “Ugh. That’s unpleasant to consider. But yes. I don’t know how accurate the folklore is, and I haven’t talked to anyone with direct knowledge yet. But it’s safe to assume that the Eye is a weapon of mass destruction,” I said. “There’s a city-killer coming to our town.”
“How will they do it?” she asked.
“Come in from the lake,” I said. “After that, it’s old-school.”
“Kill everyone they see,” she said.
“And use the Eye to blow away any points of hard resistance,” I said, nodding. “They’ll kill or take anyone they can, while the mortal authorities flounder in the blackout. Do their worst with the Eye, and I have no idea how bad that could be. Then they’ll be gone before the National Guard can get there.”
“The people,” Murphy said quietly. “Tonight. There’s no one to protect them.”
“The hell there isn’t,” I said, and coaxed a little more speed out of the old engine. “I’ll be back before they get here.”
“You, huh,” Murphy said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “Against a protogod with a pocket nuke and an army of monsters.”
“Not just me,” I said. “But if it had to be just me, yeah. I’d be good with that. It’s home. You gotta die somehow. Standing up to a monster at the door isn’t a bad way to do it.”
She was quiet for a moment before she said, “I feel you.”
I squeezed her against me a little harder. “Here I am, getting all dramatic. How are you holding up?”
She shrugged one shoulder. Her voice was heavy and tired. “Everything hurts. But I can move some.”
“Maybe you should take shelter,” I said. “The Paranetters are going to head for Mac’s place. They’ll need someone to keep a cool head and a sharp watch.”
She snorted. “You think I can’t handle myself?”
“Don’t,” I said quietly. “I was ready to take you with me into literal Hell and you know it. Every warrior gets hurt. Has limits. There’s no shame in acknowledging that.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then she asked, “If you were hurt, would you sit this one out?”
I said nothing.
“It’s my home, too, Harry.”
I clenched my teeth.
“And,” she said, leaning her cheek against my biceps, “if you try to strand me on that damned island to keep me safe, I swear to God I will shoot you in the leg.”
I stiffened and gave her a quick guilty glance.
She smiled wanly in the green chemical light, widened her eyes, and said in a dramatic impersonation of my voice, “I’ll be back in time.” She snorted. “Get over yourself. You are who you are. And mostly I like it. But let’s treat each other like grown-ups. Promise me.”
I felt sick.
Karrin was smart, tough, and capable. She was also hurt. She was also right. And what was coming would give her no special consideration whatsoever.
But she was who she was. Karrin Murphy could no more have sat quietly by while Chicago burned than she could grow wings and fly. She would fight for her home. She would die for it.
Some part of me made whimpering animal sounds, way down deep inside.
At the end of the day, people have to be who they are. If you try to take that from them, you diminish them. You reduce them to children, unable to make decisions for themselves. There’s no way to poison your relationship with someone else faster.
I didn’t want to lose her.
If she fought, she might well be taken from me.
If I tried to keep her from fighting, I would lose her for sure.
So while my heart and some enormous portion of my soul quailed in terror, my mouth said, “I promise.”
I felt her arm go around my lower back and she squeezed gently for a moment. “Thank you.”
“Promise me you’ll fight smart,” I said.
She bumped her head against my arm and said, �
�How would you know if I did?”
I huffed out part of a laugh. And we stood together.
34
The little cheap plastic compass swung and bobbed as the boat did, but I didn’t need it. Now that I had acquainted myself with the island’s arcane functions, I had my own personal compass, a subtle, tiny sensation in my head that always told me where I could find the place.
That was part and parcel of being the Warden of Demonreach.
I felt it when the Water Beetle hit the outer ring of defenses, about a mile out from the island. With a few words and an effort of will, I could have had the island causing treacherous currents, frigid vortexes that would pull intruders down to sharp rocks below. The lake would have boiled like a sea under a storm.
I could tell that Karrin felt the island’s influence as well, a subtle presence that caused unease in all who entered. It prevented casual visitors: No one who came into these waters would feel at ease until they’d changed course to go around the island. Hell, planes didn’t fly directly overhead; that’s how powerful the island’s influence was.
That wasn’t a planned defense, exactly. It was simply the natural presence of the things held prisoner there—a menagerie of supernatural terrors that started with some of the foulest beings I’d ever faced and progressed down into the depths of nightmare from there. Demonreach was the Alcatraz of the supernatural world—and I was the guy holding all the keys.
I could have found that place blindfolded and in the dark. Hell, I was finding it in the dark, piloting the ship without much need to turn the wheel until the looming mass of the island rose above us.
We’d prepared for arriving at night—the floating dock my brother and I had built, the Whatsup Dock, had been lined with luminescent marine tape. I cut the throttle and came in slow and careful. Even without the possibility of aquatic bad guys, operating a boat was a damned dangerous occupation for fools, so I had to be extra cautious.
I saw Freydis move up to the prow of the ship as we approached the dock, skin glowing in the green chemical light. She rubbed her arms a few times as the shadow of the island fell over her, as if the place chilled her. Beside me, Karrin shifted restlessly.
“It’s that bad?” I asked her.