The Ultimate Dresden Omnibus, 0-15

by Butcher, Jim

  I snarled, and rolled my wrist, flipping my hand toward them in a gesture wholly unfamiliar to me. Words spilled from my lips in thundering syllables, “Satharak, na-kadum!” That scarlet, furious power I had stolen from Kravos flashed over me, following the gesture of my right hand, lashing out in a blaze of scarlet light that spun around the maddened vampires. The scarlet blaze whirled about them, winding too swiftly to be seen, a ribbon of flame that cocooned them both, burned brighter and hotter, the spell enfolding them in fire.

  They screamed as they died, sounds like metal sheets tearing, and somehow also like terrified children. Heat thrummed back against us, almost singeing the exposed hairs on my legs, my chest. Greasy black smoke started to spread over the floor, and it stank.

  I watched as they burned, though I could see nothing beneath the blazing flame-cocoon. Part of me wanted to dance in malicious glee, to throw my arms up in the air and crow my defiance and scorn to my enemies while they died, and to roll through their ashes when they’d cooled.

  More of me grew sickened. I stared at the spell I had wrought and couldn’t believe it had come from me—whether or not I’d taken the power, maybe even some primal knowledge of this spell, from Kravos’s devoured spirit, the magic had come from me. I had killed them, as swiftly and as efficiently as with as little forethought as one gives to crushing an ant.

  They were vampires, some part of me said. They had it coming. They were monsters.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  I lifted my left hand before me, pouring energy into the shield bracelet, and shouted, “Riflettum!”

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  I regard it as one last sadistic gibe of whatever power had decided to make my life a living hell that the burn ward was full, and I was given a room to share with Charity Carpenter. She had recovered in spirit, if not in body, and she started in on me the moment I awoke. The woman’s tongue was sharper than any sword. Even Amoracchius. I smiled through most of it. Michael would have been proud.

  The baby, I learned, had taken an abrupt turn for the better in the hours before dawn the morning Bianca’s house had burned. I thought that maybe Kravos had taken a bite of the little guy, and I had gotten it back for him. Michael thought God had simply decreed the morning to be a day of good things. Whatever. The results were what counted.

  “We’ve decided,” Michael said, stretching a strong arm around Charity, “to name him Harry.”

  Charity glowered at me, but remained silent.

  “Harry?” I asked. “Harry Carpenter? Michael, what did that poor kid ever do to you?”

  But it made me feel good. And they kept the name.

  Charity got out of the hospital three days before me. Michael or Father Forthill remained with me for the rest of my stay. No one ever said anything, but Michael had the sword with him, and Forthill kept a crucifix handy. Just in case I had some nasty visitors.

  One night when I couldn’t sleep, I mentioned to Michael that I was worried about the repercussions of my workings, the harmful magic I had dished out. I worried that it was going to come back to haunt me.

  “I’m not a philosopher, Harry,” he said. “But here’s something for you to think about, at least. What goes around comes around. And sometimes you get what’s coming around.” He paused for a moment, frowning faintly, pursing his lips. “And sometimes you are what’s coming around. You see what I mean?”

  I did. I was able to get back to sleep.

  Michael explained that he and Thomas had escaped the fight at the bridge only a few moments after it had begun. But time had stretched oddly, between the Nevernever and Chicago, and they hadn’t emerged until two o’clock the following afternoon.

  “Thomas brought us out into this flesh pit,” Michael said.

  “I’m not a wizard,” Thomas pointed out. “I can only get in and out of the Nevernever at points close to my heart.”

  “A house of sin!” Michael said, his expression stern.

  “A gentlemen’s club,” Thomas protested. “And one of the nicest ones in town.”

  I kept my mouth shut. Who says I never grow any wiser?

  Murphy came out of the sleeping spell a couple days later. I had to go in a wheelchair, but I went to Kravos’s funeral with her. She pushed me through a drizzling rain to the grave site. There was a city official there, who signed off on some papers and left. Then it was just us and the grave diggers, shovels whispering on earth.

  Murphy watched the proceedings in complete silence, her eyes sunken, the blue faded out until they seemed almost grey. I didn’t push, and she didn’t talk until the hole was half filled in.

  “I couldn’t stop him,” she said, then. “I tried.”

  “But we beat him. That’s why we’re here and he’s there.”

  “You beat him,” Murphy said. “A lot of good I did you.”

  “He sucker punched you. Even if you’d been a wizard, he’d have gotten to you—like he damn near did me.” I shivered, remembered agony making the muscles of my belly tight. “Karrin, you can’t blame yourself for that.”

  “I know,” she said, but she didn’t sound like she meant it. She was quiet for a long time, and I finally figured out that she wasn’t talking because I’d hear the tears in her voice, the ones the rain hid from me. She didn’t bow her head though, and she didn’t look away from the grave.

  I reached out and found her hand with mine. I squeezed. She squeezed back, silent and tight. We stayed there, in the rain, until the last bit of earth had been thrown over Kravos’s coffin.

  On the way out, Murphy stopped my wheelchair, frowning at a white headstone next to a waiting plot. “He died doing the right thing,” she read. She looked down at me.

  I shrugged, and felt my mouth curl up on one side. “Not yet. Not today.”

  Michael and Forthill took care of Lydia for me. Her real name was Barbara something. They got her packed up and moved out of town. Apparently, the Church has some kind of equivalent of the Witness Protection Program, for getting people out of the reach of supernatural baddies. Forthill told me how the girl had fled the church because she’d been terrified that she would fall asleep, and gone out to find some uppers. The vampires had grabbed her while she was out, which was when I’d found them in that old building. She sent me a note that read, simply, “I’m sorry. Thank you for everything.”

  When I got out of the hospital, Thomas sent me a thank-you letter, for saving Justine. He sent it on a little note card attached to a bow, which was all Justine was wearing. I’ll let you guess where the bow was. I took the note, but not the girl. There was too much of an ick factor in sharing girls with a sex vampire. Justine was pretty enough, and sweet enough, when she wasn’t walking the razor’s edge of an organic emotional instability—but I couldn’t really hold that against her. Plenty of people have to take some kind of medication to keep stable. Lithium, supermodel sex vampires—whatever works, I guess.

  I had woman problems of my own.

  Susan sent me flowers and called me every day, in the hospital. But she didn’t ever talk to me for long. And she didn’t come to visit. When I got out, I went to her apartment. She didn’t live there anymore. I tried to call her at work, and never managed to catch her. Finally, I had to resort to magic. I used some hair of hers left on a brush at my apartment, and tracked her down on a beach along Lake Michigan, on one of the last warm days of the year.

  I found her lying in the sun wearing a white bikini that left maximum surface area bared to it. I sat down next to her, and her manner changed, subtly, a quiet tension that I didn’t miss, though I couldn’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses she wore.

  “The sun helps,” she said. “Sometimes it almost goes away for a while.”

  “I’ve been trying to find you,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

  “I know,” she said. “Harry. Things have changed for me. In the daylight, it’s not too bad. But at night.” She shivered. “I have to lock myself inside. I don’t trust myself around people
, Harry.”

  “I know,” I said. “You know what’s happening?”

  “I talked to Thomas,” she said. “And Justine. They were nice enough, I guess. They explained things to me.”

  I grimaced. “Look,” I said. “I’m going to help you. I’ll find some way to get you out of this. We can find a cure.” I reached out and took her hand. “Oh, Hell’s bells, Susan. I’m no good at this.” I just fumbled the ring onto it, clumsy as you please. “I don’t want you far away. Marry me.”

  She sat up, and stared at her hand, at the dinky ring I’d been able to afford. Then she leaned close to me and gave me a slow, heated kiss, her mouth melting-warm. Our tongues touched. Mine went numb. I got a little dizzy, as the slow throb of pleasure that I’d felt before coursed through me, a drug I’d craved without realizing it.

  She drew away from me slowly, her face expressionless behind the sunglasses. She said, “I can’t. You already made me ache for you, Harry. I couldn’t control myself, with you. I couldn’t sort out the hungers.” She pressed the ring into my hand and stood up, gathering her towel and a purse with her. “Don’t come to me again. I’ll call you.”

  And she left.

  I’d bragged to Kravos, at the end, that I’d been trained to demolish nightmares when I was younger. And to a certain extent it was true. If something came into my head for a fight, I could put up a good one. But now I had nightmares that were all my own. A part of me. And they were always the same: darkness, trapped, with the vampires all around me, laughing their hissing laughter.

  I’d wake up, screaming and crying. Mister, curled against my legs, would raise his head and rumble at me. But he wouldn’t pad away. He’d just settle down again, purring like a snowmobile’s engine. I found it a comfort. And I slept with a light always close.

  “Harry,” Bob said one night. “You haven’t been working. You’ve barely left your apartment. The rent was due last week. And this vampire research is going nowhere fast.”

  “Shut up, Bob,” I told him. “This unguent isn’t right. If we can find a way to convert it to a liquid, maybe we can work it into a supplement of some kind—”

  “Harry,” Bob said.

  I looked up at the skull.

  “Harry. The Council sent a notice to you today.”

  I stood up, slowly.

  “The vampires. The Council’s at war. I guess Paris and Berlin went into chaos almost a week ago. The Council is calling a meeting. Here.”

  “The White Council is coming to Chicago,” I mused.

  “Yeah. They’re going to want to know what the hell happened.”

  I shrugged. “I sent them my report. I only did what was right,” I said. “Or as close to it as I could manage. I couldn’t let them have her, Bob. I couldn’t.”

  The skull sighed. “I don’t know if that will hold up with them, Harry.”

  “It has to,” I said.

  There was a knock at my door. I climbed up from the lab. Murphy and Michael had shown up at my door with a care package: soup and charcoal and kerosene for me, as the weather got colder. Groceries. Fruit. Michael had, rather pointedly, included a razor.

  “How are you doing, Dresden?” Murphy asked me, her blue eyes serious.

  I stared at her for a moment. Then at Michael.

  “I could be worse,” I said. “Come in.”

  Friends. They make it easier.

  So, the vampires are out to get me, and every other wizard on the block. The little wizardlings of the city, the have-nots of magic, are making it a point not to go outside after dark. I don’t order pizza for delivery anymore. Not after the first guy almost got me with a bomb.

  The Council is going to be furious at me, but what else is new.

  Susan doesn’t call. Doesn’t visit. But I got a card from her, on my birthday, Halloween. She only wrote three words.

  I’ll let you guess what three.

  Author’s Note

  Step into the magical world of Harry Dresden . . .

  STORM FRONT

  FOOL MOON

  GRAVE PERIL

  Available from Roc Books

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  SUMMER KNIGHT: BOOK FOUR OF THE DRESDEN FILES

  ARoc Book / published by arrangement with the author

  All rights reserved.

  Copyright ©2002 byJim Butcher

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or part, by mimeograph or any other means, without permission. Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement and could subject the infringer to criminal and civil liability.

  For information address:

  The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  The Penguin Putnam Inc. World Wide Web site address ishttp://www.penguinputnam.com

  ISBN: 1-101-13394-5

  AROC BOOK®

  RocBooks first published by The Roc Publishing Group, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

  Rocand the “Roc” design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Putnam Inc.

  This book is for big sisters everywhere who have enough patience not to strangle their little brothers—and particularly for my own sisters, who had more than most. I owe you both so much.

  And for Mom, for reasons that are so obvious that they really don’t need to be said—but I thought I would make special mention of candy cane cookies and that rocking chair that creaked me to sleep.

  Contents

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The author (that’s me) wishes to thank all the people who should have been thanked in other books—Ricia and A.J., obviously, and the mighty Jen. Thank you to all the folks who have been so supportive of my work all along, including (but not limited to) Wil and Erin (who fed me great Chicago information and who I missed the first time around), Fred and Chris, Martina and Caroline and Debra and Cam and Jess and Monica and April.

  Thank you also to you mighty librarians who have tricked people into reading these books, and to the bookstore personnel (and lurkers) who have gone out of their way to help me get noticed. I admit to being somewhat baffled, but I’m very grateful to you all.

  I owe thanks to so many people that I probably am incapable of remembering everyone. If I missed someone, let Shannon know. She will club me on the head with a baseball bat and point out the mistake.

  (P.S. Shannon and J.J., as always, thank you. I’d promise to be less of a weirdo, but we all know how longthat one would last.)

  Chapter One

  It rained toads the day the White Council came to town.

  I got out of the Blue Beetle, my beat-up old Volkswagen bug, and squinted against the midsummer sunlight. Lake Meadow Park lies a bit south of Chicago’s Loop, a long sprint from Lake Michigan’s shores. Even in heat like we’d had lately, the park would normally be crowded with people. Today it was deserted but for an old lady with a shopping cart and a long coat, tottering around the park. It wasn’t yet noon, and my sweats and T-shirt were too hot for the weather.

  I squinted around the park for a moment, took a couple of steps onto the grass, and got hit on the head by something damp and squishy.

  I flinched and slapped at my hair. Something small fell past my face and onto the ground at my feet. A toad. Not a big one, as toads go—it could easily have sat in the palm of my hand. It wobbled for a few moments upon hitting the ground, then let out a bleary croak and started hopping drunkenly away.

  I looked around me and saw other toads on the ground. A lot of them. The sound of their croaking grew louder as I walked further into the park. Even as I watched, several more amphibians plopped out of the sky, as though the Almighty had dropped them down a laun
dry chute. Toads hopped around everywhere. They didn’t carpet the ground, but you couldn’t possibly miss them. Every moment or so, you would hear the thump of another one landing. Their croaking sounded vaguely like the speech-chatter of a crowded room.

  “Weird, huh?” said an eager voice. I looked up to see a short young man with broad shoulders and a confident walk coming toward me. Billy the Werewolf wore sweatpants and a plain dark T-shirt. A year or two ago the outfit would have concealed the forty or fifty extra pounds he’d been carrying. Now they concealed all the muscle he’d traded it in for. He stuck out his hand, smiling. “What did I tell you, Harry?”

  “Billy,” I responded. He crunched down hard as I shook his hand. Or maybe he was just that much stronger. “How’s the werewolf biz?”

  “Getting interesting,” he said. “We’ve run into a lot of odd things lately when we’ve been out patrolling. Like this.” He gestured at the park. Another toad fell from the sky several feet away. “That’s why we called the wizard.”

  Patrolling. Holy vigilantes, Batman. “Any of the normals been here?”

  “No, except for some meteorological guys from the university. They said that they were having tornadoes in Louisiana or something, that the storms must have thrown the toads here.”

  I snorted. “You’d think ‘it’s magic’ would be easier to swallow than that.”

  Billy grinned. “Don’t worry. I’m sure someone will come along and declare it a hoax before long.”

  “Uh-huh.” I turned back to the Beetle and popped the hood to rummage in the forward storage compartment. I came out with a nylon backpack and dragged a couple of small cloth sacks out of it. I threw one to Billy. “Grab a couple of toads and pitch them in there for me.”