by Butcher, Jim
I was about to loose a strike against the demon when it swooped down with another fireball in its hand and flung it at the car.
“Look out!” I screamed.
Thomas must have seen it coming in the mirror. The Beetle swerved wildly, and the fireball hit the asphalt, bursting into a roar of flame and concussion that broke windows on both sides of the street. Thomas dodged a car parked on the curb by roaring up onto the sidewalk, bounced gracelessly, and nearly went out of control. The bounce threw me from my perch on the closed door. I was wondering what the odds were against finding a soft place to land when I felt Thomas grab my ankle. He held on to me and drew me back into the car with a strength that would have been shocking to anyone who didn’t know that he wasn’t human.
He braced me with his hold on my leg, and as the huge demon dove down again, I pointed my blasting rod at it and snarled, “Fuego!”
A lance of white-hot fire streaked from the tip of my blasting rod into the late-night air, illuminating the street like a flash of lightning. Bouncing along on the car like that, I expected to miss. But I beat the odds and the burst of flame took Kongtron right in the belly. It screamed and faltered, plummeting to earth. Thomas swerved back out onto the street.
The demon started to get up. “Stop the car!” I screamed.
Thomas mashed down the brakes and I nearly got reduced to sidewalk pizza again. I hung on as hard as I could, but by the time I had my balance, the demon had hauled itself to its feet.
I growled in frustration, readied another blast, and aimed carefully.
“What are you doing?” Thomas shouted. “You lamed him; let’s run!”
“No,” I snapped back. “If we leave it here, it’s going to take things out on whoever it can find.”
“But it won’t be us!”
I tuned Thomas out and readied another strike, pouring my will into the blasting rod until wisps of smoke began emerging from the length of its surface.
Then I let Kong have it right between its black beady eyes.
The fire hit it like a wrecking ball, right on the chin. The demon’s head exploded into a cloud of luminous purple vapor and sparkles of scarlet light, which I have to admit looked really neat.
Demons who come into the mortal world don’t have bodies as such. They create them, like a suit of clothes, and as long as the demon’s awareness inhabits the construct-body, it’s as good as real. Having its head blown up was too much damage for even the demon’s life energy to support. The body flopped around on the ground for a few seconds, and then the Kong-demon’s earthly form stopped moving and dissolved into a lumpy looking mass of translucent gelatin—ectoplasm, matter from the Nevernever.
A surge of relief made me feel a little dizzy, and I slid bonelessly back into the Beetle.
“Allow me to reiterate,” Thomas panted a minute later. “What. The hell. Was that.”
I settled down onto the seat, breathing hard. I buckled up, and checked that the puppies and their box were both intact. They were, and I closed my eyes with a sigh. “Shen,” I said. “Chinese spirit creatures. Demons. Shapeshifters.”
“Christ, Dresden! You almost got me killed!”
“Don’t be a baby. You’re fine.”
Thomas frowned at me. “You at least could have told me!”
“I did tell you,” I said. “I told you at Mac’s that I’d give you a ride home, but that I had to run an errand first.”
Thomas scowled. “An errand is getting a tank of gas or picking up a carton of milk or something. It is not getting chased by flying purple pyromaniac gorillas hurling incendiary poo.”
“Next time take the El.”
He glared at me. “Where are we going?”
“O’Hare.”
“Why?”
I waved vaguely at the backseat. “Returning stolen property to my client. He wants to get it back to Tibet, pronto.”
“Anything else you’re neglecting to tell me? Ninja wombats or something?”
“I wanted you to see how it feels,” I said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Come on, Thomas. You never go to Mac’s place to hang out and chum around. You’re wealthy, you’ve got connections, and you’re a freaking vampire. You didn’t need me to give you a ride home. You could have taken a cab, called for a limo, or talked some woman into taking you.”
Thomas’s scowl faded away, replaced by a careful, expressionless mask. “Oh? Then why am I here?”
I shrugged. “Doesn’t look like you showed up to bushwhack me. I guess you’re here to talk.”
“Razor intellect. You should be a private investigator or something.”
“You going to sit there insulting me, or are you going to talk?”
“Yeah,” Thomas said. “I need a favor.”
I snorted. “What favor? You do remember that technically we’re at war, right? Wizards versus vampires? Ring any bells?”
“If you like, you can pretend that I’m employing subversive tactics as part of a fiendishly elaborate ruse meant to manipulate you,” Thomas said.
“Good,” I said. “ ’Cause if I went to all the trouble of starting a war and you didn’t want to participate it would hurt my feelings.”
He grinned. “I bet you’re wondering whose side I’m on.”
“No.” I snorted. “You’re on Thomas’s side.”
The grin widened. Thomas has the kind of whiter-than-white boyish grin that makes women’s panties spontaneously evaporate. “Granted. But I’ve done you some favors over the past couple of years.”
I frowned. He had, though I didn’t know why. “Yeah. So?”
“So now it’s my turn,” he said. “I’ve helped you. Now I need payback.”
“Ah. What do you want me to do?”
“I want you to take a case for an acquaintance of mine. He needs your help.”
“I don’t really have time,” I said. “I have to make a living.”
Thomas flicked a piece of monkey flambé off the back of his hand and out the window. “You call this living?”
“Jobs are a part of life. Maybe you’ve heard of the concept. It’s called work? See, what happens is that you suffer through doing annoying and humiliating things until you get paid not enough money. Like those Japanese game shows, only without all the glory.”
“Plebe. I’m not asking you to go pro bono. He’ll pay your fee.”
“Bah,” I muttered. “What’s he need help with?”
Thomas frowned. “He thinks someone is trying to kill him. I think he’s right.”
“Why?”
“There have been a couple of suspicious deaths around him.”
“Like?”
“Two days ago he sent his driver, girl named Stacy Willis, out to the car with his golf clubs so he could get in a few holes before lunch. Willis opened the trunk and got stung to death by about twenty thousand bees who had somehow swarmed into the limo in the time it took her to walk up to the door and back.”
I nodded. “Ugh. Can’t argue there. Gruesomely suspicious.”
“The next morning his personal assistant, a young woman named Sheila Barks, was hit by a runaway car. Killed instantly.”
I pursed my lips. “That doesn’t sound so odd.”
“She was waterskiing at the time.”
I blinked. “How the hell did that happen?”
“Bridge over the reservoir was the way I heard it. Car jumped the rail, landed right on her.”
“Ugh,” I said. “Any idea who is behind it?”
“None. Think it’s an entropy curse?” Thomas asked.
“If so, it’s a sloppy one. But strong as hell. Those are some pretty melodramatic deaths.” I checked on the puppies. They had fallen together into one dusty lump and were sleeping. The notch-eared pup lay on top of the pile. He opened his eyes and gave me a sleepy little growl of warning. Then he went back to sleep.
Thomas glanced back at the box. “Cute little furballs. What’s their story?”
“Guardian dogs for some monastery in the Himalayas. Someone snatched them and came here. A couple of monks hired me to get them back.”
“What, they don’t have dog pounds in Tibet?”
I shrugged. “They believe these dogs have a foo heritage.”
“Is that like epilepsy or something?”
I snorted and put my hand palm-down out the window, waggling it back and forth to make an airfoil in the wind of the Beetle’s passage. “The monks think their great-grandcestor was a divine spirit-animal. Celestial guardian spirit. Foo dog. They believe it makes the bloodline special.”
“Is it?”
“How the hell should I know, man? I’m just the repo guy.”
“Some wizard you are.”
“It’s a big universe,” I said. “No one can know it all.”
Thomas fell quiet for a while, and the road whispered by. “Uh, do you mind if I ask what happened to your car?”
I looked around at the Beetle’s interior. It wasn’t Volkswagen-standard anymore. The seat covers were gone. So was the padding underneath. So was the interior carpet, and big chunks of the dashboard that had been made out of wood. There was a little vinyl left, and some of the plastic, and anything made out of metal, but everything else had been stripped completely away.
I’d done some makeshift repairs with several one-by-sixes, some hanger wire, some cheap padding from the camping section at Wal-Mart, and a lot of duct tape. It gave the car a real postmodern look: By which I meant that it looked like something fashioned from the wreckage after a major nuclear exchange.
On the other hand, the Beetle’s interior was very, very clean. My glasses are half-full, dammit.
“Mold demons,” I said.
“Mold demons ate your car?”
“Sort of. They were called out of the decay in the car’s interior, and used anything organic they could find to make bodies for themselves.”
“You called them?”
“Oh, hell, no. They were a present from the guest villain a few months ago.”
“I hadn’t heard there was any action this summer.”
“I have a life, man. And my life isn’t all about feuding demigods and nations at war and solving a mystery before it kills me.”
Thomas lifted an eyebrow. “It’s also about mold demons and flaming monkey poo?”
“What can I say? I put the ‘ick’ in ‘magic.” ’
“I see. Hey, Harry, can I ask you something?”
“I guess.”
“Did you really save the world? I mean, like the last two years in a row?”
I shrugged. “Sort of.”
“Word is you capped a faerie princess and headed off a war between Winter and Summer,” Thomas said.
“Mostly I was saving my own ass. Just happened that the world was in the same spot.”
“There’s an image that will give me nightmares,” Thomas said. “What about those demon Hell guys last year?”
I shook my head. “They’d have let loose a nasty plague, but it wouldn’t have lasted very long. They were hoping it would escalate into a nice apocalypse. They knew there wasn’t much chance of it, but they were doing it anyway.”
“Like the Lotto,” Thomas said.
“Yeah, I guess. The genocide Lotto.”
“And you stopped them.”
“I helped do it and lived to walk away. But there was an unhappy ending.”
“What?”
“I didn’t get paid. For either case. I make more money from flaming demon monkey crap. That’s just wrong.”
Thomas laughed a little and shook his head. “I don’t get it.”
“Don’t get what?”
“Why you do it.”
“Do what?”
He slouched down in the driver’s seat. “The Lone Ranger impersonation. You get pounded to scrap every time you turn around and you barely get by on the gumshoe work. You live in that dank little cave of an apartment. Alone. You’ve got no woman, no friends, and you drive this piece of crap. Your life is kind of pathetic.”
“Is that what you think?” I asked.
“Call them like I see them.”
I laughed. “Why do you think I do it?”
He shrugged. “All I can figure is that either you’re nursing a deep and sadistic self-hatred or else you’re insane. I gave you the benefit of the doubt and left monumental stupidity off the list.”
I kept on smiling. “Thomas, you don’t really know me. Not at all.”
“I think I do. I’ve seen you under pressure.”
I shrugged. “Yeah, but you see me, what? Maybe a day or two each year? Usually when something’s been warming up to kill me by beating the tar out of me.”
“So?”
“So that doesn’t cover what my life is like the other three hundred and sixty-three days,” I said. “You don’t know everything about me. My life isn’t completely about magical mayhem and creative pyromania in Chicago.”
“Oh, that’s right. I heard you went to exotic Oklahoma a few months back. Something about a tornado and the National Severe Storms Lab.”
“I was doing the new Summer Lady a favor, running down a rogue storm sylph. Got to go all over the place in those tornado-chaser geekmobiles. You should have seen the look on the driver’s face when he realized that the tornado was chasing us.”
“It’s a nice story, Harry, but what’s the point?” Thomas asked.
“My point is that there’s a lot of my life you haven’t seen. I have friends.”
“Monster hunters, werewolves, and a talking skull.”
I shook my head. “More than that. I like my apartment. Hell, for that matter I like my car.”
“You like this piece of . . . junk?”
“She may not look like much, but she’s got it where it counts, kid.”
Thomas slouched down in his seat, his expression skeptical. “Now you’ve forced me to reconsider the monumentally stupid explanation.”
I shrugged. “Me and the Blue Beetle kick ass. In a four-cylinder kind of way, but it still gets kicked.”
Thomas’s face lost all expression. “What about Susan?”
When I get angry, I’d like to be able to pull off a great stone face like that, but I don’t do it so well. “What about her?”
“You cared about her. You got her involved in your life. She got torn up because of you. She got attention from all kinds of nasties and she nearly died.” He kept staring ahead. “How do you live with that?”
I started to get angry, but I had a rare flash of insight and my ire evaporated before it could fully condense. I studied Thomas’s profile at a stoplight and saw him working hard to look distant, like nothing was touching him. Which would mean that something was touching him. He was thinking of someone important to him. I had a pretty good idea who it was.
“How’s Justine?” I asked.
His features grew colder. “It isn’t important.”
“Okay. But how is Justine?”
“I’m a vampire, Harry.” The words were cold and distant, but not steady. “She’s my girlfri—” His voice stumbled on the word, and he tried to cover it with a low cough. “She’s my lover. She’s food. That’s how she is.”
“Ah,” I said. “I like her, you know. Ever since she blackmailed me into helping you at Bianca’s masquerade. That took guts.”
“Yeah,” he said. “She’s got that.”
“How long have you been seeing her now?”
“Four years,” Thomas said. “Almost five.”
“Anyone else?”
“No.”
“Burger King,” I said.
Thomas blinked at me. “What?”
“Burger King,” I said. “I like to eat at Burger King. But even if I could afford to do it, I wouldn’t eat my meals there every day for almost five years.”
“What’s your point?” Thomas asked.
“My point is that it’s pretty clear that Justine isn’t just food to you, Thomas.”
<
br /> He turned his head and stared at me for a moment, his expression empty and his eyes inhumanly blank. “She is. She has to be.”
“Why don’t I believe you?” I said.
Thomas stared at me, his eyes growing even colder. “Drop the subject. Right now.”
I decided not to push. He was working hard not to give anything away, so I knew he was full of crap. But if he didn’t want to discuss it, I couldn’t force him.
Hell, for that matter, I didn’t want to. Thomas was an annoying wiseass who tended to make everyone he met want to kill him, and when I have that much in common with someone, I can’t help but like him a little. It wouldn’t hurt to give him some space.
On the other hand, it was easy for me to forget what he was, and I couldn’t afford that. Thomas was a vampire of the White Court. They didn’t drink blood. They fed on emotions, on feelings, drawing the life energy from their prey through them. The way I understood it, it was usually during sex, and rumor had it that their kind could seduce a saint. I’d seen Thomas start to feed once, and whatever it was that made him not quite human had completely taken control of him. It left him a cold, beautiful, marble-white being of naked hunger. It was an acutely uncomfortable memory.
The Whites weren’t as physically formidable or aggressively organized as the Red Court, and they didn’t have the raw, terrifying power of the Black Court, but they didn’t have all the usual vampire weaknesses, either. Sunlight wasn’t a problem for Thomas, and from what I’d seen, crosses and other holy articles didn’t bother him either. But just because they weren’t as inhuman as the other Courts didn’t make the Whites less dangerous. In fact, the way I saw it, it made them more of a threat in some ways. I know how to handle it when some slime-covered horror from the pits of Hell jumps up in my face. But it would be easy to let down my guard for someone nearly human.
Speaking of which, I told myself, I was agreeing to help him and taking a job, just as though Thomas were any other client. It probably wasn’t the smartest thing I’d ever done. It had the potential to lead to lethally unhealthy decisions.
He fell silent again. Now that I wasn’t running and screaming and such, the car started to get uncomfortably cold. I rolled up the window, shutting out the early-autumn air.