The Ultimate Dresden Omnibus, 0-15

by Butcher, Jim

  “That’s a lie,” I said, quiet. “I didn’t make you rope Mavra into working for you. I didn’t make you order her to torture those poor ghosts, stir up the Nevernever and bring Kravos’s pet demon back across to send after a bunch of innocents while you tried to get to me.”

  Her smile widened. “Is that what you think happened? Oh, my, Mister Dresden. You have an unpleasant surprise awaiting you.”

  Anger made me lift my eyes to meet her gaze, gave me the strength not to get pulled in by it—no mistaking. She had grown stronger in the past couple of years. “Can we just get this over with.”

  “Anything worth doing is worth doing slowly,” she murmured, but she reached out a hand and tugged on the dark red cloth, uncovering the object there. “For you, Mister Dresden. With all of my most fervent sincerities.”

  The cloth slid away from a white marble tombstone, set with a pentacle of gold in its center. Block letters carved into it read HERE LIES HARRY DRESDEN, above the pentacle. Below it, they read HE DIED DOING THE RIGHT THING. An envelope had been taped to the side of the tombstone.

  “Do you like it?” Bianca purred. “It comes complete with your own plot at Graceland, near to dear little Inez. I’m sure you’ll have ever so much to talk about. When your time comes, of course.”

  I looked from the tombstone back up to her. “Go ahead,” I said. “Make your move.”

  She laughed, a rich sound that spilled back down into the crowd below. “Oh, Mister Dresden,” she said, lowering her voice. “You really don’t understand, do you. I can’t openly strike you down. Regardless of what you may have done to me. But I can defend myself. I can stand by while my guests defend themselves. I can watch you die. And if things are hectic and confusing enough, and a few others die along with you, well. That’s hardly to be blamed upon me.”

  “Thomas,” I said.

  “And his little whore. And the Knight, and your reporter friend. I’m going to enjoy the rest of the evening, Harry.”

  “My friends call me Harry,” I said. “Not you.”

  She smiled, and said, “Revenge is like sex, Mister Dresden. It’s best when it comes on slow, quiet, until it all seems inexorable.”

  “You know what they say about revenge. I hope you got a second tombstone, Bianca. For the other grave.”

  My words stung her, and she stiffened. Then she beckoned the attendants forward, to lift my tombstone in their gloved hands and carry it back. “I’ll have it delivered to Graceland, Mister Dresden. They’ll have your bed all ready for you, before the sun rises.” She flicked her wrist at me, curt dismissal.

  I bowed my head, a bare, stark motion, cold. “We’ll see.” How’s that for a comeback? Then I turned and descended the stairs, my legs shaking a little, my back rigid and straight.

  “Harry,” Michael said, as I drew close. “What happened?”

  I held up my hand and shook my head, trying to think. The trap was already closing around me. I could feel that much. But if I could figure out Bianca’s plan, see it coming, maybe I could think my way out ahead of her.

  I trusted Michael and the others to keep an eye out for trouble while I furiously pondered, tried to work through Bianca’s logic. My godmother glided forward at Bianca’s bidding, and I paused for a moment, to glance up to the dais.

  Bianca presented her with a small black case. Lea opened it, and a slow tremble ran down her body, made her flame-red hair shift and glisten. My godmother closed it again and said, “A princely gift. Happily, as is the custom of my people, I have brought a matter of equal worth, to exchange with you.”

  Lea beckoned the attendant forward, and was given a long, dark case. She opened it, displaying it for a moment to Bianca, and then turned, showing it to the gathered Court.

  Amoracchius. Michael’s sword. It lay gleaming in the dark box, casting back the ruddy light with a pure, argent radiance. Michael went stiff beside me, stifling a shout.

  A murmur went up from the assembled vampires and sundry creatures. They recognized the sword as well. Lea basked in it for a moment, until she folded the case closed and passed it over to Bianca. Bianca settled it across her lap, and smiled down at me and, I thought, at Michael.

  “A worthy reply to my gift,” Bianca said. “I thank you, Lady Leanandsidhe. Let Mavra of the Black Court come forward.”

  My godmother retreated. Mavra glided out of the night and onto the dais.

  “Mavra, you have been a most gracious and honorable guest in my house,” Bianca said. “And I trust that you have found your treatment here fair and equitable.”

  Mavra bowed to Bianca, silent, her rheumy eyes gleaming, glancing down towards Michael.

  “Oh, Jesus,” I whispered. “Son of a bitch.”

  “He didn’t mean it, Lord,” Michael said. “Harry? What did you mean?”

  I clenched my teeth, eyes flickering around. Everyone was watching me, all the vampires, Mister Ferro, everyone. They all knew what was coming. “The tombstone. It was written on my damned tombstone.”

  Bianca watched the realization come over me, still smiling. “Then please, Mavra, accept these minor tokens of my goodwill, and with them my hopes that vengeance and prosperity will belong to you and yours.” She offered forth the case, containing the sword, which Mavra accepted. Bianca then beckoned to the background, and the attendants brought out another covered bundle.

  The attendants jerked the cover off of the bundle—Lydia. Her dark, tousled hair had been trimmed into an elegant cut, and she wore a halter and shorts of black Lycra that emphasized her hips, the beauty of her pale limbs. Her eyes stared into the lights, glazed, drugged, and she sagged helplessly between the attendants.

  “My God,” Susan said. “What are they going to do with that girl?”

  Mavra turned to Lydia, reaching into the case as she did. “Sweet,” her hissing voice rasped. Her eyes went to Michael again. “Now to open my gift. It may tarnish the steel a bit, but I’m sure I’ll get over it.”

  Michael drew in a sudden breath.

  “What’s going on?” Susan blurted.

  “The blood of innocents,” he snarled. “The Sword is vulnerable. She means to unmake it. Harry, we cannot allow it.”

  All around me, vampires dropped their wineglasses, slid out of their jackets, bared their scarlet-smeared fangs in slow smiles to me. Bianca started laughing, up above me, as Mavra opened the case and withdrew Amoracchius. The sword seemed to almost chime with an angry sound as the vampire touched it, but Mavra only sneered down at the blade as she lifted the sword.

  Thomas moved closer to us, pushing Justine behind him as he drew his sword. “Dresden,” he hissed. “Dresden, don’t be a fool. It’s only one life—one girl’s life and a sword balanced against all of us. If you act now, you condemn us all.”

  “Harry?” Susan asked, her voice shaking.

  Michael too turned to look at me, his expression grim. “Faith, Dresden. Not all is lost.”

  All looked pretty damned lost to me. But I didn’t have to do anything. I didn’t have to lift a finger. All I had to do, to get out of here alive, was to sit still. To do nothing. All I had to do was stand here and watch while they murdered a girl who had come to me a few days before, begging me for protection. All I had to do was ignore her screams as Mavra gutted her. All I had to do was let the monsters destroy one of the major bastions standing against them. All I had to do was let Michael go to his death, claim the protection of the laws of hospitality upon Susan, and I could walk away.

  Michael nodded at me, then drew both knives and turned toward the dais.

  I closed my eyes. God forgive me for what I’m about to do.

  Chapter Thirty

  In games and history books and military science lectures, teachers and old warhorses and other scholarly types lay out diagrams and stand-up models in neat lines and rows. They show you, in a methodical order, how this division forced a hole in that line, or how these troops held their ground when all others broke.

  But that’s an illu
sion. A real struggle between combatants, whether they number dozens or thousands, is something inherently messy, fluid, difficult to follow. The illusion can show you the outcome, but it doesn’t impress upon you the surge and press of bodies, the screams, the fear, the faltering rushes forward or away. Within the battle, everything is wild motion and sound and a blur of impressions that flash by almost before they have time to register. Instinct and reflex rule everything—there isn’t time to think, and if there’s a spare second or two, the only thought in your head is “How do I stay alive?” You’re intensely aware of what is happening around you. It’s an obscure kind of torture, an acute and temporary hell—because one way or another, it doesn’t last long.

  A tide of vampires came toward us. They rushed in, animal-swift, a blur of twisted, bulging faces and staring black eyes. Their jaws hung too far open, fangs bared, hissing and howling. One of them held a long spear and shoved it toward Thomas’s pale belly. Justine screamed. Thomas swept the crystalline sword he bore down in an arc, parrying the spear’s tip aside and cutting through the haft.

  Undeterred, the spear-wielding vampire came on, and sank its fangs into Thomas’s forearm. Thomas shoved the vamp back, but it held firm. Thomas switched tactics, abruptly lifting the vampire up and clear of the ground, and then rolled the sword’s blade around its belly, splitting it open in a welter of gore. The vampire fell to the ground, a sound bubbling up from his throat that was one part fury and one part agony.

  “Their bellies!” Thomas shouted. “Without the blood they’re too weak to fight!”

  Michael caught a descending machete’s blade on the metal guard around his forearm, and whipped one of his knives across the belly of the vamp who held it. Blood splattered out of the vamp, and it went down in convulsions. “I know,” Michael snapped back, flashing Thomas an irritated look.

  And then he was buried in a swarm of red-clad bodies.

  “Michael!” I shouted. I tried to push toward him, but found myself jostled aside. I saw him struggle and drop to one knee, saw the vampires shoving knives at him, and fangs, teeth tearing and worrying, and if any of them were burning, like before, I couldn’t see it.

  Kyle Hamilton appeared, across the dogpile over the fallen knight. He bared his fangs at me, and lifted a semiautomatic, one of the expensive models. Gold-plated. “Fare thee well, Dresden.”

  I lifted the cane, its runes shimmering blue and white, and snapped. “Venteferro!”

  Chapter Thirty-one

  The darkness swallowed me and kept me for a long time. There was nothing but silence where I drifted, nothing but endless night. I wasn’t cold. I wasn’t warm. I wasn’t anything. No thought, no dreams, no anything.

  It was too good to last.

  The pain of the burns came to me first. Burns are the worst injuries in the world. I’d been scorched on my right arm and shoulder, and it throbbed with a dull persistence that dragged me out of the peace. All the other assorted scrapes and bruises and cuts came back to me. I felt like a collection of complaints and malfunctions. I ached everywhere.

  Memory came through the haze next. I started remembering what had happened. The Nightmare. The vampire ball. The kids who had been seduced into being there.

  And the fire.

  Oh, God. What had I done?

  I thought of the fire, towering up in walls of solid flame, reaching out with hungry arms to drag the vampires screaming back into the pyre I had made of the hedges and the trees.

  Stars and stones. Those children had been helpless in that. In the fire and the smoke that I’d needed a major sidhe sorceress’s assistance to escape. I had never stopped to think about that. I had never even considered the consequences of unleashing my power that way.

  I opened my eyes. I lay in my bed in my room. I stumbled out of the bed and into my bathroom. Someone must have fed me soup at some point, because when I started throwing up, there was something left to come out.

  Killed them. I killed those kids. My magic, the magic that was the energy of creation and life itself had reached out and burned them to death.

  I threw up until my belly ached with the violence of it, wild grief running rampant over me. I struggled, but I couldn’t force the images out of my head. Children burning. Justin burning. Magic defines a man. It comes from down deep inside you. You can’t accomplish anything with magic that isn’t in you, somewhere, to do.

  And I had burned those children alive.

  My power. My choice. My fault.

  I sobbed.

  I didn’t come to myself until Michael came into the bathroom. By the time he did, I lay on my side, curled up tight, the water of the shower pouring down over me, the cold making me shiver. Everything hurt, inside and out. My face ached, from being twisted up so tightly. My throat had closed almost completely as I wept.

  Michael picked me up as though I weighed no more than one of his children. He dried me with a towel and shoved me into my heavy robe. He had on clean clothes, a bandage on his wrist and another on his forehead. His eyes looked a little more sunken, as though short on sleep. But his hands were steady, his expression calm, confident.

  I gathered myself again, very slowly. By the time he was finished, I lifted my eyes to his.

  “How many?” I asked. “How many of them died?”

  He understood. I saw the pain in his eyes. “After I got the pair of you out, I called the fire department and let them know that people needed a rescue. They got there pretty quickly, but—”

  “How many, Michael?”

  He drew in a slow breath. “Eleven bodies.”

  “Susan?” My voice shook.

  He hesitated. “We don’t know. Eleven was all they found. They’re checking dental records. They said the heat was so intense that the bones hardly look human.”

  I let out a bitter laugh. “Hardly human. There were more kids than that there—”

  “I know. But that’s all they found. And they rescued a dozen more, alive.”

  “It’s something, at least. What about the ones unaccounted for?”

  “They were gone. Missing. They’re . . . they’re presumed dead.”

  I closed my eyes. Fire had to burn hot to reduce bones to ash. Had my spell been that powerful? Had it hidden most of the dead?

  “I can’t believe it,” I said. “I can’t believe I was so stupid.”

  “Harry,” Michael said. He put his hand on my shoulder. “We’ve no way to know. We just don’t. They could have been dead before the fires came. The vampires were feeding from them indiscriminately, where we couldn’t see.”

  “I know,” I said. “I know. God, I was so arrogant. Such an idiot to go walking in there like that.”

  “Harry—”

  “And those poor, stupid kids paid the price. Dammit, Michael.”

  “A lot of the vampires didn’t make it out, either, Harry.”

  “It isn’t worth it. Not if it wiped out all the vamps in Chicago.”

  Michael fell quiet. We sat that way for a long time.

  Finally, I asked him, “How long have I been out?”

  “More than a day. You slept through last night and yesterday and most of tonight. The sun will rise soon.”

  “God,” I said. I rubbed at my face.

  I could hear Michael’s frown. “I thought we’d lost you for a while. You wouldn’t wake up. I was afraid to take you to the hospital. Any place where there’d be a record of you. The vampires could trace it.”

  “We need to call Murphy and tell her—”

  “Murphy’s still sleeping, Harry. I called Sergeant Stallings, last night, when I called the fire department. S.I. tried to take over the investigation, but someone up the line called the police department off of it altogether. Bianca has contacts in City Hall, I guess.”

  “They can’t stop the missing persons investigations that are going to start cropping up as soon as people start missing those kids. But they can stick a bunch of things in the way of it. Crap.”

  “I know,”
Michael said. “I tried to find Susan, the girl Justine, and the sword, after. Nothing.”

  “We almost pulled it off. Sword and captives and all.”

  “I know.”

  I shook my head. “How’s Charity? The baby?”

  He looked down. “The baby—they still don’t know about him. They can’t find out what’s wrong. They don’t have any idea why he is getting weaker.”

  “I’m sorry. Is Charity—?”

  “She’s stuck in bed for a while, but she’ll be fine. I called her yesterday.”

  “Called. You didn’t go see her?”

  “I guarded you,” Michael said. “Father Forthill was with my family. And there are others who can watch them, when I’m away.”

  I winced. “She didn’t like that, did she. That you stayed with me.”

  “She’s not speaking to me.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  He nodded. “So am I.”

  “Help me up. I’m thirsty.”

  He did, and I only swayed a little as I stood. I tottered out into the living area of my apartment. “What about Lydia?” I asked.

  Michael remained silent, and my eyes answered my own question a few seconds later. Lydia lay on the couch in my living room, under a ton and a half of blankets, curled up, her eyes closed and her mouth a little open.

  “I recognize her,” Michael said.

  I frowned. “From where?”

  “Kravos’s lair. She was one of the kids they hauled away, early on.”

  I whistled. “She must have known him. Known what he was going to do, somehow.”

  “Try not to wake her up,” Michael said, his voice soft. “She wouldn’t sleep. I think they’d drugged her. She was panicky, gabbling. I just got her quieted down half an hour ago.”

  I frowned a little and went into the tiny kitchen. Michael followed. I got a Coke out of the icebox, thought better of it with my stomach the way it was, and fetched a glass of water instead. I drank unsteadily. “I’ve got hell to pay now, Michael.”