by Jim Butcher
I shuddered visibly. “You are an extremely creepy man,” I said. I looked back at Nicodemus. “I can see a possible problem.”
“Yes?”
“Marcone is not a dummy,” I said. “He’s gone up against supernatural powers more than once. He knows that sooner or later, he and I are going to get into it. He doesn’t make mistakes often, and he never fails to learn from them. He’ll have supernatural precautions as well as physical ones.”
“Such as?” Nicodemus asked.
“If I was him,” I said, “I’d have something rigged to shut down all the electronic gizmos and close off the vault as soon as the building’s power got disrupted—which just might happen when Ascher and I start throwing magic around. In fact, I’d set it up to happen as soon as any amount of magic started flying.”
“It would be smart,” Binder said in agreement. “Don’t think it’d be too hard to fix, either. Have circuits set up around the place, something delicate that would go out without too much trouble.”
“Like the ones in cell phones or something,” I added. “Those things go to pieces if a wizard looks at them funny.”
“Yeah,” Binder said, nodding. “I can use one, but only just. Had to start keeping it powered off when I took up with Ash, here.”
“Assuming such a . . . wizard alarm, I suppose, exists,” Nicodemus said, “how shall we defeat it?”
“Not a problem for me,” Binder said. “It wouldn’t even blink. These two, though, we’d have to . . .”
I eyed Binder sourly and rubbed at the itch on my neck again.
“Sorry, mate,” he said. He sounded genuine about it. “Thorn manacles,” he said to Nicodemus. “You know the ones?”
“I have some in stock,” Nicodemus said. “Though mine are svartalf make, not faerie. Steel. I suppose they’ll keep the talent of you and Miss Ascher suppressed as much as possible. Simpler than keeping running water flowing over you both, in any case.”
He gave me a small smirk when he said it. He’d once had me chained up under a freezing-cold stream to prevent me from using my talents to escape or make mischief. If another good man hadn’t given himself in exchange for me, I might have died there. Thorn manacles were uncommon but by no means unattainable magical bindings that accomplished the same thing, dampening a wizard’s powers to the point of uselessness.
And they hurt like a son of a bitch. In fact, if he had some that worked the same way but were made of steel, they were going to hurt me to an outstanding degree, given how they functioned.
I returned Nicodemus’s smirk with a wintry smile.
Binder continued, either ignoring or not noticing the look between Nicodemus and me. “Once the two of them are inside, get them into a circle before the manacles come off,” Binder said. “That will contain the excess energy when they work their mojo. It should help.”
“Mmm,” Nicodemus mused. “We’ll have to change the entry plan. Dresden won’t be able to provide a distraction. We’ll have to use more”—he glanced toward the Genoskwa—“overt means.”
In the darkness, a faint gleam of yellow appeared beneath the Genoskwa’s eyes.
Hell’s bells, the thing was smiling.
Karrin shot me a look. She was thinking the same thing I was: The Genoskwa wasn’t going to distract anything, except by ripping its head off. Depending on when we went in, God only knew how many people might be in that bank—people with absolutely no knowledge of its provenance. Even the building’s security forces wouldn’t necessarily know they worked for the outfit. And hell, when you got right down to it, I wasn’t willing to feed even a mobster to something like the Genoskwa at Nicodemus’s behest.
I rubbed at my neck again and said, “Nah, I got it still.”
“Excuse me?” Nicodemus said.
“Noisy distraction? I’ll handle it. No sense showing our secret weapon early if we don’t have to do it, right?”
Nicodemus smiled faintly. “What, wizard? Without your talents?”
“I hadn’t planned on using them anyway,” I said. “Could be someone was going to get hurt during this. The White Council takes a pretty dim view of magic used for that kind of thing—and I have to think about my future. You want loud and obvious? Not a problem.”
The Genoskwa’s voice came rumbling from the shadows. “He’s soft.”
“He’s smart,” I said in harsh rejoinder. “The harder you hit things on the way in, the harder Marcone’s going to be ready to hit back on the way out. Hell, if you make a big enough stink, you’ll have the cops there, too. There are only about thirteen thousand of those guys running around Chicago, but I’m sure the eight of us can handle them. Right?”
The Genoskwa let out a low growl. “I am not afraid of them.”
“Sure you aren’t,” I said. “That’s why you cruised all over the place invisible the past two days, because you didn’t care if you were spotted.”
“Gentlemen,” Nicodemus said, his voice raised and slightly tense. And then he paused, frowning, his head cocked partly to one side, as if trying to identify a distant sound.
Ascher suddenly looked up, frozen in the act of scratching her arm again, and said, “Dresden? Do you feel that?”
The itching on the back of my neck resolved itself into a full-on creepy sensation, the awareness of someone watching me. I closed my eyes and extended my other senses, reaching out with my talent to feel for magic in the air around me—and found the eavesdropping spell almost at once.
Ascher had already given us away with her comment, so there was no point in being cute about it. “Someone’s listening in on us,” I breathed, coming to my feet.
“Where?” Nicodemus spat.
Ascher pointed to the far end of the slaughterhouse. “There, not far. Just outside, I think.”
The sensation abruptly vanished as the spell winked out of existence—but not before I’d found the spell’s focus—the thaumaturgic version of the bug that had been planted so that the eavesdropper could hear us.
“Binder,” Nicodemus said at once.
Binder had already produced a hoop of wire from his suit coat’s pocket. He moved to a clear space of floor, gave it a toss with a flick of his wrist, and the wire unreeled and unfolded into a circle almost three feet across. It landed on the floor even as Binder spoke a few words, and filled with amber light.
Binder was a chump sorcerer, but he had one trick that he could do really, really well—summoning a small army of creatures from the Nevernever that he had somehow bound to his will. It took him less than two seconds to whistle up the first of his suits—humanoid figures dressed in something that resembled a badly fitted suit, their proportions and features looking almost normal, until one looked at them a little more closely. The demonic servitor flung itself up out of the circle like an acrobat emerging from a trapdoor in the stage, and Binder tapped his foot down onto the circle of wire in perfect time, releasing the suit from the circle’s confinement as it tumbled clear. Then he lifted his foot and dropped it down again in metronomic time as a second suit emerged from the Nevernever, and a third, and a fourth, and so on.
“Spell’s gone,” Ascher reported. “He heard us. He’s running.”
“He’s heard too much,” Nicodemus said, and turned to Binder. “Can your associates track him?”
“Like bloodhounds,” Binder confirmed.
Nicodemus nodded. “Kill him.”
Binder let out a short whistle and cocked a finger in the direction Ascher had indicated. The suits needed no more indication than that. They bounded off in that direction with greater than human agility.
I jerked my head at Karrin and stalked away from the table.
“What?” she hissed.
In answer, I dug into the bandages over my arm until I found the object, hidden from me until I had finally focused my attention on it—a rounded, black Pente stone th
at had been worked into the bandages when they had been reapplied. There were a number of familiar runes painted over its dark surface in metallic gold. I’d used the exact same spell design myself more than once, back in the day, when I’d been learning how it worked.
“What’s that?” Karrin asked.
“The bug,” I hissed quietly. “The one the listener was using to hear us. It got put in the bandages over my arm when it was reset.”
Her eyes widened. “But . . .”
“Yeah,” I said, and watched as more of the suited servitors poured forth from the Nevernever to streak into the night in pursuit. “It’s Butters. They’re going to kill him.”
Twenty-seven
“Go,” Karrin said. “I’ll catch up.”
“How are you going to find me?”
She gave me a quick roll of her eyes. “Harry, please.”
Right. Karrin had been a Chicago cop for twenty years. She’d find me whether I wanted her to or not. I touched her shoulder, called upon Winter, and took off at a sprint, staff clenched in my right hand.
As I ran, I could feel the power of the Winter mantle infusing my body, my senses, and my thoughts. Binder’s suits were hounding after the prey in a pack, moving in instinctive coordination, their leaders slowing the pace slightly until a few of the ones with a later start could catch up, the better to bring down the prey together.
I caught up to the rearmost suits and passed them before I’d even exited the slaughterhouse, which sent a rush of elation through me. Slowpokes. But they were necessary. I couldn’t hunt Butters down by mys—
I faltered for a few steps, and forced multiplication tables to start running through my head. I wasn’t hunting down Butters. I was keeping them from hunting him down. And I had to figure out a way to do it without overtly turning on Nicodemus and company and shaming Mab.
That particular line of reason seemed to interfere mightily with the flow of energy from the Winter mantle, as if it simply didn’t understand why it was going to all this trouble for so incomprehensible a goal.
Butters is one of mine, I snarled at it, and we’re not letting these chumps kill him unless that’s what I decide should happen.
Territory and power—those were things that Winter could sink its teeth into. I regained my stride as we exploded from the exit of the slaughterhouse and into the near-silent mix of sleet, rain, and frozen, slippery cold that was a Midwest ice storm.
The ground outside the slaughterhouse was already freezing over; not in a uniform sheet, but in treacherous patches of various consistencies of nearly transparent slush, invisible ice, and wet concrete, with very few visible cues to differentiate between them. The streetlights gleamed off of all of them with benevolent cheer, and the suits started slipping at random, further slowing them. I adjusted my pace only enough to be sure of putting my feet on the least slippery option available at every stride, trusting the instincts of the mantle to guide me.
Butters was sprinting across the small gravel parking lot, maybe seventy yards ahead of his pursuers. I could recognize his build and his shock of dark hair from where I was, though he was wearing a long, billowing overcoat and a rather bulgy-looking backpack and moving more slowly than he should have been. In the lowering skies, the mixed rain and lumpy snow, the sounds seemed muffled and close, as if everything was happening indoors. I could hear Butters’s quick, clean breaths, his pants of effort as he slowed, nearing the street.
I hoped he was about to throw himself into a getaway car. Instead, he fumbled at his backpack and spun in a comical circle trying to pull something off of it. As he whirled beneath the yellow cone of illumination cast by a streetlight, I saw him take a wide-looking skateboard off where it had been fastened to the pack and slam it to the concrete.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered. “A freaking skateboard?”
The suits saw it and surged ahead. I’d seen them move before, and they could pounce like mountain lions. They’d be within a long leap of him in seconds.
Butters threw a glance over his shoulder, his face pale, his eyes huge behind his glasses, and stepped hard onto the skateboard, setting it into motion. He fumbled at a short strap on the front of the board, crouching and taking hold of it with the same intensity as a water-skier about to be launched into motion.
“Go, go, go!” he screamed.
And then a small inferno of orange sparks erupted from the wheels of the skateboard, and the damned thing took off down the empty street at the speed of a motorcycle.
I felt my jaw drop open for a second—and then a bubbling chuckle rolled up out of my chest. Butters, it seemed, had been using more of my old artifice spells, doubtless learned from Bob the Skull. That particular one looked an awful lot like the one I’d put together in my one ill-advised attempt to create a wizardly classic: a flying broomstick. The experiment had damned near killed me, and scared me enough that I abandoned its use until I had a better understanding of the aerodynamics involved, but I’d never even considered applying it to something that wouldn’t necessarily flip me upside down while in motion and carry me into buildings at suicidal speeds. Why had I never applied the same magic to a freaking bicycle?
Or to a skateboard.
Butters didn’t have the kind of power it took to be even a serious sorcerer—but the little guy had knocked together a number of useful magical tools over the past couple of years, also with Bob’s help, and it looked like those exercises had developed into a real gift for creating magical artifices. But how the hell was he powering the damned things? Wizardly tools like that were like toys that needed batteries to work, but Butters didn’t have the strength to power any but the simplest toys. So what was he using as a battery?
Oh. Oh, no.
The suits let out howls of excitement and began lengthening their strides. They weren’t done, not by a long shot, and they started curling the path of their pursuit, bounding over the fence surrounding the property, leaping over the landscaping of nearby buildings. I went with them, leaping the same fences. One of the suits slipped and hit the chain link at better than thirty miles an hour, with moderately gruesome results.
Another suit might have accidentally caught the end of my quarterstaff in the teeth as we both leapt a six-foot hedge, and wound up slamming into the side of an office building at the same pace, but it was pretty dark, what with the rain and sleet and snow and all, and I just wasn’t entirely sure what happened. Heh.
By the time we hit the next cross street, I saw Butters fling out an arm. There was another glitter of orange sparks, this time in a long line, and I saw some kind of dark fiber whip out from his hand and wrap around a streetlight’s pole. He leaned into it with a high-pitched, half-panicked whoop of excitement, and used the line to carry the racing skateboard through a tight ninety-degree turn without slowing down. There was another sparkle of orange campfire sparks along the length of the line, and the thing evidently let go of the pole, as he kept sailing down the street, heading north.
Suits were letting out hunting cries at regular intervals by now, and running unimpeded on streets that were still warm enough from the day’s light to resist the ice. I knew that Binder could probably have forty or fifty of the damned things on the street by now, and that they were smart enough to communicate and work cooperatively. I had to hope that Butters would have the good sense to continue heading in one direction—every turn in the chase would give his more numerous pursuers a chance to maneuver, closing in around him, like hounds around a panicked rabbit.
He kept fleeing down the street, but the smooth surface that let him use his—and I can’t believe I’m going to use this phrase—enchanted skateboard also gave an advantage to his pursuers. The street was still warm enough from the sunlight of the day, and the passage of early-evening traffic meant that the falling precipitation had been given less time to settle, and consequently ice had not yet begun to clog i
t. The suits and I began to close the distance, and I couldn’t act to discourage them in the excellent lighting without risking observation.
Then came what I had feared might happen. A pair of suits, maybe a little leaner and faster than their companions, vectored in on the chase from a side street, using the cries of their companions to coordinate their attack. They bounded forward in a rush, and it was only because Butters had his left leg forward, and so was facing them as they came, that he saw them close on him.
I’ll give the little guy credit. He didn’t panic. Instead, he dropped his free hand into his coat, seized something and smashed it to the street in his wake, shouting a word as he did. There was a flash of light on some kind of glass globe, and then it shattered on the concrete, expanding into a cloud of thick grey mist, just in front of his pursuers.
The two suits hit the mist, unable to avoid it in their surge of closing speed and plunged into it and out the other side—where their steps abruptly slowed, and the pair of them stumbled to a halt, looking around them blearily as Butters and his orange-sparking skateboard whooshed on down the street.
As the rest of the pack passed the spot, the suits dodged around the cloud of grey mist, and the two who had stopped gave their packmates a startled, confused look and then took off in belated pursuit again, obviously straining to catch up. That was when I realized what I’d just seen, and I went by the cloud of mist cackling madly.
Mind fog. Better than ten years ago, a foe had used the enchanted mist to blanket an entire Wal-Mart store, rendering the memory of everyone inside it temporarily nonfunctional and effectively blurring the previous hour or so of experience beyond recall. Bob and I had worked out the specifics of how the spell must have operated in the aftermath of the case. Obviously, Butters and Bob had, between them, figured out how to can the stuff.
Butters rocketed on down the street, dodging around a couple of slow-moving cars, used his lightpole-lariat again twice in quick succession, and careened onto Michigan Avenue, heading into the heart of downtown, where the towers and lights of Chicago burned brightest in the freezing haze.