by Butcher, Jim
“Harry!” Bob gulped as we worked. “There’s, a, um. A seriously badass toad-demon coming down the ladder.”
“I know that, Bob.” I heaved a bunch of empty cardboard boxes aside as Susan frantically tossed some papers away, exposing the entirety of the copper ring, about three feet across. I took her hand and stepped into the circle, drawing her close to me.
“What’s happening?” Susan asked, her expression bewildered and terrified.
“Just stay close,” I told her. She clung tightly to me.
“It sees you, Harry,” Bob reported. “It’s going to spit something at you, I think.”
I didn’t have time to see if Bob was right. I leaned down, touched the circle with the tip of my staff, and willed power into it, to shut the creature out. The circle sprang up around us, a silent and invisible tension in the air.
Something splattered and hissed against the air a few inches from my face. I looked up to see dark, sputtering acid slithering off the invisible shield the circle’s power provided us. Half a second earlier and it would have eaten my face off. Cheery thought.
I tried to catch my breath, stand straight, and not let any part of me extend outside the circle, which would break its circuit and negate its power. My arms were shaking and my legs felt weak. Susan, too, was visibly trembling.
The demon stalked over to us. I could see it clearly in the light of my staff, and I wished that I couldn’t. It was horribly ugly, misshapen, foul, heavily muscled, and I compared it to a toad only because I knew of nothing else that even remotely approached a description of it. It glared at us and drove a fist at the circle’s shield. It rebounded in a shower of blue sparks, and the thing hissed, a horrible and windy sound.
Outside, the storm continued to rumble and growl, muffled by the thick walls of the subbasement.
Susan was holding close to me, and almost crying. “Why isn’t it killing us? Why isn’t it getting us?”
“It can’t,” I said, gently. “It can’t get through, and it can’t do anything to break the circle. So long as neither of us crosses that line, we’ll be safe.”
“Oh, God,” Susan said. “How long do we have to stand here?”
“Dawn,” I said. “Until dawn. When the sun rises, it has to go.”
“There’s no sun down here,” she said.
“Doesn’t work that way. It’s got a sort of power cord stretching back to whoever summoned it. A fuel line. As soon as the sun comes up, that line gets cut, and he goes away, like a balloon with no air.”
“When does the sun come up?” she asked.
“Oh, well. About ten more hours.”
“Oh,” she said. She laid her head against my bare chest and closed her eyes.
The toad-demon paced in a slow circuit around the circle, searching for a weakness in the shield. It would find none. I closed my eyes and tried to think.
“Uh, Harry,” Bob began.
“Not now, Bob.”
“But Harry—” Bob tried again.
“Dammit, Bob. I’m trying to think. If you want to be really useful, you could try to figure out why that escape potion you were so confident of didn’t work for Susan.”
“Harry,” Bob protested, “that’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
Susan murmured, against my chest, “Is it getting warm in here? Or is it just me?”
A terrible suspicion struck me. I looked down at Susan and got a sinking feeling. Surely not. No. It couldn’t be.
She looked up at me, her dark eyes smoky. “We’re going to die, aren’t we, Harry? Have you ever thought you’d want to die making love?”
She kissed my chest, almost absently.
It felt nice. Really, really nice. I tried not to notice all the bare, lovely back that was naked underneath my hand.
“I’ve thought that, many times,” she said, against my skin.
“Bob,” I began, my voice getting furious.
“I tried to tell you,” Bob wailed. “I did! She grabbed the wrong potion and just chugged it down.” Bob’s skull turned toward me a bit, and the lights brightened. “You’ve got to admit, though. The love potion works great.”
Susan was kissing my chest and rubbing her body up against me in a fashion that was unladylike and extremely pleasant and distracting. “Bob, I swear, I am going to lock you in a wall safe for the next two hundred years.”
“It’s not my fault!” Bob protested.
The demon watched what was happening in the circle with froggy eyes and kicked a section of floor clear enough of debris for it to squat down on its haunches and stare, restless and ready as a cat waiting for a mouse to stick its head out of its hole. Susan stared up at me with sultry eyes and tried to wrench me to the floor, and consequently out of the circle’s protective power. Bob continued to wail his innocence.
Who says I don’t know how to show a lady a good time?
Chapter Fourteen
Susan tugged at my neck and jerked my head down to hers for a kiss. As kisses went, well. It was, um, extremely interesting. Perfectly passionate, abandoned, not a trace of self-consciousness or hesitation to it. Or at any rate not from her. I came up for air a minute later, my lips itching with the intensity of it, and she stared up at me with burning eyes. “Take me, Harry. I need you.”
“Uh, Susan. That’s not really a good idea right now,” I said. The potion had taken hold of her hard. No wonder she had recovered from her terror enough to come back up the stairs and fire my gun at the demon. It had lowered her inhibitions to a sufficient degree that it must also have dulled her fears.
Susan’s fingers wandered, and her eyes sparkled. “Your mouth says no,” she purred, “but this says yes.”
I went up on my toes, and swallowed, trying to keep my balance and get her hand off me at the same time. “That thing is always saying something stupid,” I told her. She was beyond reason. The potion had kicked her libido into suicidal overdrive. “Bob, help me out here!”
“I’m stuck in the skull,” Bob said. “If you don’t let me out, I can’t do much of anything, Harry.”
Susan stood up on tiptoe to gnaw at my ear, wrapped her shapely thigh around one of mine, and started whimpering and pulling me toward the floor. My balance wavered. A three-foot circle was not enough to perform wrestling or gymnastics or…anything else in, without leaving something sticking out for the waiting demon to chew on.
“Is the other potion still there?” I asked.
“Sure,” Bob said. “I can see it where it fell on the floor. Could throw it to you, too.”
“Okay,” I said, growing excited—well. More excited. I might yet get out of this basement alive. “I’m going to let you out for five minutes. I want you to help me by throwing me the potion.”
“No, boss,” Bob said, his voice maddeningly cheerful.
“No? No?!”
“I get a twenty-four-hour leave, or nothing.”
“Dammit, Bob! I’m responsible for what you do if I let you out! You know that!”
Susan whispered, into my ear, “I’m not wearing any underwear,” and tried something approximating a pro-wrestling takedown to drop me to the floor. I wavered in balance and barely managed to stave her off. The demon’s frog-eyes narrowed, and it came to its feet, ready to leap on us.
“Bob!” I yelled. “You slimy jerk!”
“You try living in a bony old skull for a few hundred years, Harry! You’d want to get a night off once in a while, too!”
“Fine!” I shouted, my heart leaping into my throat as my balance wavered again. “Fine! Just make sure you get me the potion! You have twenty-four hours.”
“Just make sure you catch it,” Bob replied. And then a flood of orangish lights flowed out of both of the skull’s eye sockets and into the room. The lights swooped down in an elongated cloud over the potion bottle that lay on the floor at the far side of the lab, gathered it up, and hurled it through the air toward me. I reached up with my spare hand and caught it, bobbled it for a minute, and then sec
ured it again.
The orange lights that were Bob’s spirit-form danced a little jig, then whizzed up the ladder and out of the lab, vanishing.
“What’s that?” Susan murmured, eyes dazed.
“Another drink,” I said. “Drink this with me. I think I can cover us both in the focus department, get us out of here.”
“Harry,” she said. “I’m not thirsty.” Her eyes smoldered. “I’m hungry.”
I hit upon an idea. “Once we drink this, I’ll be ready, and we can go to bed.”
She looked up at me hazily and smiled, wicked and delighted. “Oh, Harry. Bottoms up.” Her hands made a sort of silent commentary on her words, and I jumped, almost dropping the bottle. More shampoo from my hair trailed down my already burning eyes, and I squeezed them closed.
I slugged away about half the potion, trying to ignore the flat-cola taste, and quickly passed the rest to Susan. She smiled lazily and drank it down, licking her lips.
It started in my guts—a sort of fluttery, wobbly feeling that moved out, up through my lungs and out along my shoulders, down my arms. It also went down, over my hips and into my legs. I began to shake and quiver uncontrollably.
And then I just flew apart into a cloud of a million billion tiny pieces of Harry, each one with its own perspective and view. The room wasn’t just a square, cluttered basement to me, but a pattern of energies, grouped into specific shapes and uses. Even the demon was only a cloud of particles, slow and dense. I flowed around that cloud, up through the opening in the ceiling pattern, and outside of the apartment and into the raging nonpattern of the storm.
It took maybe five seconds, and then the power of the potion faded. I felt all the little pieces of me abruptly rush back together and slam into one another at unthinkable speed. It hurt, and made me nauseous, a sort of heavy-duty thump of impact that didn’t come from any one direction, but from every direction at once. I staggered, planted my staff on the ground, and felt the rain wash down over me.
Susan appeared next to me a heartbeat later, and promptly sat down on her butt on the ground, in the rain. “Oh, God. I feel terrible.”
Inside the apartment, the demon screamed, a raging, voiceless hiss. I could hear it madly rampaging around inside. “Come on,” I told her. “We’ve got to get out of here before it gets smart and starts looking outside for us.”
“I’m sick,” she said. “I’m not sure I can walk.”
“The mixed potions,” I said. “They can do that to you. But we have to go now. Come on, Susan. Up and at ’em.” I bent down and got her up on her feet and moving away from my apartment.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“Do you have your car keys?”
She patted the dress, as if looking for pockets, and then shook her head dazedly. “They were in my coat pocket.”
“We walk, then.”
“Walk where?”
“Over to Reading Road. It always floods when there’s this much rain. It’ll be enough water to ground that thing if it tries to follow us.” It was only a couple of blocks away. The cold rain came down in buckets. I was shaking, shivering, and naked, and more soap was getting into my eyes. But hey. At least I was clean.
“Wha?” she mumbled. “What will the rain do to it?”
“Not rain. Running water. It kills him if he tries to go over it after us,” I explained to her, patiently. I hoped the potions mixing together in her stomach hadn’t done anything irreversible. There had been accidents before. We were moving at good speed, all things considered, and had covered maybe forty yards in the pouring rain. Not much farther to go.
“Oh. Oh, that’s good,” she said. And then she convulsed and pitched to the ground. I tried to hold her, but I was just too tired, my arms too weak. I nearly went down with her. She rolled to her side and lay that way, retching horribly, vomiting herself empty.
Thunder and lightning raged around us again, and I heard the sharp crack of the storm’s power touching a tree nearby. I saw a bright flash of contact and then the subdued glow of burning branches. I looked in the direction we had been heading. The flooding Reading Road, safety from the demon, was still thirty yards away.
“I didn’t think you’d last this long,” someone said.
I almost jumped out of my skin. I picked my staff up in both hands and turned in a slow circle, searching for the source of the voice. “Who’s there?” There, to one side, a spot of cold—not physical cold, but something deeper and darker that my other senses detected. A pooling of shadows, an illusion in the darkness between lights, gone when lightning flashed and back again when it had passed.
“Do you expect me to give you my name?” the shadows scorned. “Suffice to say that I am the one who has killed you.”
“You’re an underachiever,” I shot back, still turning, eyes searching. “The job’s not done.”
In the darkness underneath a broken streetlight, then, maybe twenty feet away, I could make out the shape of a person. Man or woman, I couldn’t tell, nor could I distinguish from the voice. “Soon,” the shape said. “You can’t last much longer. My demon will finish you before another ten minutes have passed.” The voice was supremely confident.
“You called that demon here?”
“Indeed,” the shadowy shape confirmed.
“Are you crazy?” I demanded, stunned. “Don’t you know what could happen to you if that thing gets loose?”
“It won’t,” the shape assured me. “It is mine to control.”
I extended my senses toward the shape, and found that what I had suspected was true. It wasn’t a real person, or an illusion masking a real person. It was only the seeming of one, a phantasm of shape and sound, a hologram that could see and hear and speak for its creator, wherever he or she was.
“What are you doing?” it demanded. It must have sensed me feeling it out.
“Checking your credentials,” I said, and sent some of my remaining will toward it, the sorcerous equivalent of a slap in the face.
The image cried out in surprise and reeled back. “How did you do that?” it snarled.
“I went to school.”
The hologram growled, then raised up its voice, calling out in rolling syllables. I tried to hear what had been said, but another peal of thunder blocked out the middle half of what was undoubtedly the demon’s name.
From within my apartment, the distant, faint sound of the demon’s smashing ruckus came to an abrupt halt.
“Now,” the image said, a sneer to its voice. “Now you will pay.”
“Why are you doing this?” I demanded.
“You’re in my way.”
“Let the woman go.”
“Sorry,” the image said. “She’s seen too much. She’s in the way, too, now. My demon will kill you both.”
“You bastard,” I snarled.
It laughed at me.
I looked over my shoulder, back toward the apartment. Through the rain I heard a dry and raspy hiss, underlaid with a sort of clicking growl. Blue frog-eyes, reflecting the storm’s lightning, came up the stairs from my basement apartment. It focused on me immediately and started forward. The back fender of Susan’s car, which she had parked outside my apartment, got in its way, and with the pad-tipped fingers of one skinny, soft-looking hand, it picked up the back end of the car and tossed it to one side, where it landed with a heavy crunch.
I tried not to think about those fingers around my throat.
“You see?” the image said. “Mine to call. Time for you to die, Mr. Dresden.”
Another flash of lightning showed the demon falling to all fours and scrambling toward me like an overweight lizard scuttling across hot sand to shade, in an exaggerated wagging motion that looked ridiculous but brought it closer and closer at deceptive speed.
“Deposit another quarter to continue your call, asshole,” I said. I thrust my staff toward the shadowy image, this time, focusing my will into a full-fledged attack. “Stregallum finitas.”
Scarlet l
ight abruptly flooded over it, devouring its edges and moving inward.
The image snarled, then gasped in pain. “Dresden! My demon will roll in your bones!” And then it broke off into a scream of anguish as my counterspell began to tear the image-sending apart. I was better than whoever had made the image, and they couldn’t hold the spell in the face of my counter. The image and the scream alike faded slowly into the distance until both were gone. I allowed myself the smallest touch of satisfaction, and then turned to the woman on the ground.
“Susan,” I said, crouching by her, keeping my eyes on the onrushing demon. “Susan, get up. We have to go.”
“I can’t,” she sobbed. “Oh, God,” she said, and she threw up some more. She tried to rise but collapsed back to the ground, moaning piteously.
I looked back at the water, gauging the thing’s speed. It was coming, fast, but not quite as fast as a man could run. I could still escape it, if I ran, full out. I could get across the water. I could be safe.
But I couldn’t carry Susan there. I’d never make it, with her slowing me down. But if I didn’t go, both of us would die. Wouldn’t it be better for one of us, at least, to live?
I looked back at the demon. I was exhausted, and it had caught me unprepared. The heavy rain would keep fire, man’s ancient weapon against the darkness and the things it hid, from being effective in holding it back. And I didn’t have enough left in me to do anything else. It would be as good as suicide to stand against it.
Susan sobbed on the ground, helpless in the rain, sick from my potions, unable to rise.
I leaned my head back and let the rain wash the last traces of shampoo from my eyes, my hair. Then I turned, took a step toward the oncoming demon. I couldn’t leave Susan to that thing. Not even if it meant dying. I’d never be able to live with myself afterward.
The demon squalled something at me in its hissing, toady voice, and raised both its hands toward me, coming up onto its hind legs. Lightning flashed overhead, blinding bright. Thunder came hard on its heels, deep enough to shake the street beneath my bare feet.
Thunder.
Lightning.