by Butcher, Jim
I ran through those thoughts a couple of times, found them impeccably logical, morally unassailable, and still wanted to slug Kincaid. Which implied all kinds of things I didn’t have time to think about.
I heard them speaking quietly to each other a moment later. Murphy was describing the explosive, and Kincaid was giving her instructions.
In the darkness beyond the last chemical light, I heard something move.
I shifted my weight, reaching into my belt pouch for my own chemical light sticks. I pressed them against the floor to break the layer separating the two chemicals and shook them until they started to emit their own soft green fire. I threw them down the hall, where they landed in the room beyond. The lights revealed little beyond more stone floor and some drywall. Bob had reported that the room was essentially a storage chamber, with several smaller chambers defined by recently installed drywall that could be used for storage, emergency shelters during the odd tornado warning, or additional rooms for those in need of a place to spend the night. But all I could see was half of a door, a couple of stacks of cardboard boxes, a dressmaker’s dummy, and the glowing sticks of emerald light.
And then something large and four-legged moved in front of one of the lights for a second or two. The darkhound was a large and rangy animal, maybe a large Alsatian, and it deliberately stayed in place for a moment before vanishing into the shadows once more.
I kept the riot gun aimed down the hall and wished that Inari hadn’t broken my damned blasting rod. I would far rather have had it than the gun. Without the blasting rod to help me focus and contain the destructive energies of flame I preferred, I didn’t dare start blasting away at the bad guys with magic, especially in such tight quarters as the shelter. But then, maybe it was just as well. I had already met my quota for burning down public institutions this week.
I couldn’t see anything else, but I knew there was something there. So I lowered my eyelids almost all the way and focused my attention, Listening. There was the faint sound of something breathing, but nothing more.
It wasn’t enough. I lowered the gun a bit, relaxing my shoulders, and poured more of my focus into it, Listening more deeply than I ever had before. The sound of breathing became louder, and I picked out several other faint sources of it. A moment later I began to hear a dull throbbing, which I realized was a beating heart. More heartbeats joined it, a confused chorus of drumming beats, but I was able to identify individual rhythms into a pair of groups. One was a bit faster, lighter—smaller hearts, probably the darkhounds. There were four of them. The other group was human, and there were five hearts beating in an eager, savage cadence—pressed up against the walls on either side of the doorway, out of sight but less than twenty feet away.
And from the back of the room I heard footsteps, slow and deliberate. They slid quietly across the stone floor, and the wasted outline of an emaciated female form appeared in front of one of the glow sticks.
And no heartbeat accompanied it.
Mavra.
The darkhounds appeared, vague shapes, and paced restlessly through the shadows around the vampire. My heart lurched in sudden apprehension, and I released my attention from the Listening. I raised the gun, got to my feet, and backed away.
Again, that soft, mocking laugh drifted through the basement.
“Trouble,” I said over my shoulder. “Five Renfields, four darkhounds at least, and Mavra’s awake.”
“Indeed,” came Mavra’s dry, dusty voice. “I’ve been waiting for you, Dresden. There’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you.”
“Oh?” I said. I looked over my shoulder at Kincaid and mouthed, How long?
Kincaid had crouched and taken up his spear again. He glanced back and said, “Thirty seconds.”
“We take the kids and run,” I whispered.
“I’ve been admiring you for some time now, Dresden,” came Mavra’s voice. “I’ve seen you stop bullets with your power. I’ve seen you stop knives and claws and fangs.” She made a gesture with her hand. “And so I simply must know how well you will fare against your own weapon of choice.”
And two Renfields stepped out into the doorway, blocking my view of Mavra. Each of them held a long metal device in their hands, and each of them wore something that bulged out above their shoulders, gleaming shapes of rounded metal. A blue starter flame flickered at the end of the devices they held, and it hit me all at once what was happening.
Both of the Renfields lifted their flamethrowers and filled the cramped little hallway with fire.
Chapter Thirty-three
The riot gun went off, though I’m not sure if it was because I’d instinctively decided to use the weapon or if I’d just convulsed in surprise. The bad guys were twenty feet away, which was plenty of distance for the shot from the riot gun to spread. If I’d had it aimed well, it would almost certainly have put one of them down. As it was, the largest force of the blast went between them, though from the way they jerked and twisted, either the sheer roaring volume of the weapon was enough to intimidate them or they’d caught a little shot as it went past. Fire coughed uncertainly from the mouths of the flamethrowers, spattering the hall along the floors, walls, and ceiling, where it clung in globs of what had to be a mix of gasoline or some other accelerant, and petroleum jelly—homemade napalm. The air went from cold to roasting-hot, even from the aborted discharge of fire, sucking the wind from my lungs.
Both men, unassuming-looking types in ragged clothing, their eyes wide and fanatical, hesitated for a second before planting their feet again and taking aim once more. It was only a second, but it was enough to save my life. I dropped the gun, tossed my staff into my right hand, and shook out my shield bracelet. I rammed panicked will into the focus and spread it in a wall of energy before me.
The Renfields cut loose this time, flame as thick as spray from a breached hydrant roaring down the hall. I caught it on the shield, but I had never intended it to stop heat. It was primarily a defense against kinetic energy, and while I had used it to handle everything from bullets to runaway elevator cars in my career as a wizard, it just wasn’t all that good at stopping the transfer of intense heat. The napalm-jelly splattered against the invisible shield, gallons of it, and the fire clung to it in white-hot glee. Its mindless fury seeped through the shield and flowed onto me.
It hurt. Oh, God, it hurt. The fingers of my left hand were the first to feel it, and then my palm and wrist, all in the space of a second. If you’ve never been burned, you can’t imagine the pain. And my fingers, where millions of tactile nerves were able to send panicked damage-messages to my brain, felt as if they had simply exploded and been replaced with howling agony.
I jerked my hand back, and felt my focus waver, the shield start to fade. I gritted my teeth, and somehow managed to dig up the strength to extend my hand again, hardening the shield and my will. I backed away in shuffling half steps, my mind almost drowning in pain, desperately keeping the shield up.
“Ten seconds!” Kincaid shouted.
I saw blisters rising on my left hand. I felt my fingers curling into a claw. They looked thinner, as if made of melting wax, and I could see the shadows of my bones beneath the flesh. The shield grew weaker yet. The pain got worse. I stood now at the bottom of the stairs, and as the shield faltered, the empty space between me and the doorway behind me might as well have been a mile.
I didn’t have ten seconds.
I reached into myself, into the horrible red pain, and drew forth more power yet. I focused it on my staff, and the sigils and runes carved along its surface became suddenly suffused with eye-searing scarlet light. My nose filled with the smell of charring wood, and as the shield wavered out of existence, I screamed, “Ventas servitas!”
The power I’d gathered in my staff shot out of it, an invisible serpent of energy. The shield fell just as a shrieking gale of wind shot down the stairs. The column of air howled against me, throwing my duster forward around me like a flag, and caught the blazing napalm like a t
ub of Jell-O, hurling the fire back the way it had come and providing it with air enough to treble its size.
The fire went mad. It seared mortar from rough stone, and chewed cracks into the rock floor, the damp stone coughing and popping as water within expanded.
For an instant I could see the two Renfields, still spraying fire toward me. They started screaming, but they obeyed Mavra’s raspy howls to stand fast, and it killed them. The napalm molded itself to them and the flame embraced them.
What hit the ground as they fell could not have been easily identified as human remains.
I kept my will on the wind, the carved runes on my staff blazing ember-orange, and it spread the flames into the far room in a deadly river of searing light and charred black ash. For agonized seconds I held the winds and spread the flames, and then my will faltered, the runes on the staff dimming. Pain overcame me for a second, and it hurt so much that I literally could not see.
“Wizard!” howled Mavra’s voice, the words sounding like dusty scales and cold, reptilian fury. “Wizard! The wizard! Kill, kill, kill everything!”
“Get him!” Kincaid snarled. I felt Murphy get her arms under mine, and she started hauling me back with surprising power. I started seeing through the blinding agony in time to see a charred, inhuman-looking man wielding an ax leap at Kincaid. The mercenary rammed his spear full into the man’s chest, stopping him in his tracks. A second man appeared from the smoke behind the first, this one holding a shotgun. There was a roaring sound, and fire tore through the impaled Renfield, then struck the second one full in the face with hideous, searing results. Kincaid jerked the spear clean of the corpse of the first Renfield, even as the second flailed around wildly, then pointed the shotgun in more or less the right direction.
Kincaid whirled the spear into a reverse grip, slammed it into the second Reinfield’s chest and the second incendiary round blasted out from the housing at the butt end of the spear, and drove the remaining life from the man. A burning corpse hit the floor a second later.
A gun roared from the smoke. Kincaid grunted and staggered. The spear fell from his hands, but he didn’t fall. He drew a gun in either hand and backed unsteadily away, the semiautomatic barking out shots as swiftly as he could send them into the choking smoke down the hall.
More Renfields, roasted but functional, came through the smoke, shooting. Darkhounds bounded around them, the naked and bloody shells of dogs, but filled with horrible rage. Behind them I saw Mavra’s slender, deadly form, lit for the first time. She was wearing the same clothing I’d seen her in the last time—a tattered number from the Renaissance, all of black. Hamlet would have been happy to wear it. I saw her filmy dead eyes focus on me, and she lifted an ax in one hand.
The first two darkhounds reached Kincaid, and he went down under them before I could even cry out. One of the Renfields brought a sledgehammer down on him, while the other simply emptied a handgun into the pile as two more darkhounds threw themselves into it.
“No!” I shouted.
Murphy hauled me into the closet and out of the line of fire, just as Mavra threw. Her ax came tumbling end over end down the hall, and struck the stone wall at the back of the closet with such force that the head buried itself to the eye in the rock and the wooden handle shattered into splinters. Two of the children, still chained underneath where the ax hit, let out wails of pain and terror as splinters tore at them.
“Oh, God,” Murphy said. “Your hand, oh, God.” But she never stopped moving. She shoved me by main force into the back corner of the closet, picked up her gun, leaned into the doorway, and sent eight or nine measured shots down the hall, her face set in grim concentration. Her pale legs were a startling contrast against the black of her Kevlar vest. “Harry?” she shouted. “There’s smoke, I can’t see anything, but they’re at the foot of the stairs. What do we do?”
I stared at a black box up on the wall, near the ceiling. Presumably Kincaid’s antipersonnel mine. He’d been right. It was set up to open and spew its deadly projectiles diagonally down, so that they would bounce and fill both closet and hall with death.
“Harry!” Murphy shouted.
I barely had breath enough to answer. “Can you hook up the mine again?”
She looked over her shoulder at me, eyes wide. “You mean we can’t get out?”
“Can you do it?” I barked.
She nodded, once.
“Wait for my signal, then arm it and get low.”
She spun and leapt up onto a wooden chair near the mine, either something she had dragged there or something the bad guys had used too. She hooked up two alligator clips and held up a third, looking over her shoulder at me, her face pale. The children wept and screamed below her.
I dragged myself over to kneel in front of the children, facing down the hallway. I lifted my left hand, and stared at it in shock for a second. I always thought I looked good in red and black, but as a rule I preferred that to be my clothes. Not my limbs. My hand was a blackened, twisted claw of badly cooked meat, burned dark wherever it wasn’t bloodred. My silver shield bracelet dangled beneath it, the charm-shields heat-warped, gleaming and bright.
I raised my other hand to signal Murphy, but then I heard a scream from down the hall, snarling and vicious and hardly human. The smoke swirled and cleared for a second, and I saw Kincaid, dragging one leg, his back against the wall. He had one hand clenched hard to his leg, and a gun in the other. He shot at a target I couldn’t see until the gun started clicking.
“Now, Murphy!” I shouted. My voice thundered down the hall. “Kincaid! Bolshevik Muppet!”
The mercenary’s head whipped around toward me. He moved like hamstrung lightning, swift and lurching and grotesque. He dropped the gun, released his leg, and threw himself straight at me with his three unwounded limbs.
Again I raised my shield, and prayed that the mine’s infrared trip wire functioned.
Time slowed.
Kincaid flung himself through the doorway.
The mine beeped. There was a sharp, snapping click of metal.
Kincaid tumbled past me. I leaned aside to let him, and at the same instant brought every scrap of strength I had left to bear on the shield.
Lumpy metal spheres, maybe twenty or thirty of them, flew out into the air. I had angled my shield in a simple inclined plane, its base at the closet’s doorway, its summit at the back wall of the closet, about four feet off the ground. Several of the spheres hit the shield, but the slope of it sent them rebounding out into the hall.
The submunitions exploded in a ripple of thunder and light. Steel balls flew in deadly sprays, rattling off stone walls and tearing into flesh with savage efficiency. The sloped shield flared into azure incandescence, energy from the shrapnel being absorbed and shed as flashbulb-bright bursts of light. The sound was indescribable, almost loud enough to kill all on its own.
And then it was over.
Silence fell, broken only by the crackling of flames. Nothing moved but drifting smoke.
Murphy, Kincaid, the captive children, and I were all huddled together in an unorganized pile of frightened humanity. We all sat there stunned for a moment. Then I said, “Come on. We have to get moving before the fire spreads.” My voice sounded raw. “Let’s get these kids out. I might be able to break these chains.”
Kincaid reached up without speaking and took a key down from a high hook on the opposite wall. He settled back down to sit leaning against it, and tossed me the key.
“Or we could do that,” I said, and passed the key to Murphy. She started unlocking them. I was too tired to move. My hand didn’t hurt, which was a very bad sign, I knew. But I was too tired to care. I just sat there and stared at Kincaid.
He had his hand clamped down on his leg again. He was bleeding from it. There was more blood on his belly, on one hand, and his face was positively smothered with it, as if he’d been bobbing for apples in a slaughterhouse.
“You’re hurt,” I said.
“Yep,” he r
eplied. “Dog.”
“I saw you go down.”
“It got nasty,” he confirmed.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I lived.”
“Your chest is bleeding,” I said. “And there’s blood on your hand.”
“I know that.”
“And your face is drenched in it.”
He lifted an eyebrow and touched his free hand to his chin, then looked at the blood. “Oh. That isn’t mine.” He started fumbling at his belt.
I got enough energy together to go to him and help. He pulled a roll of black duct tape from a pouch on his belt and with sharp, jerking motions we wound the tape tightly around his wounded leg several times, layering the wound in adhesive, literally taping it closed. He used about a third of the roll, then grunted and tore it off. Then he said, “You’re going to lose that hand.”
“I was sending it back to the kitchen anyway. I ordered it medium well.”
Kincaid stared at me for a second and then started letting out soft, wobbly-sounding laughter, as if it were something he didn’t have a lot of practice at. He stood up, wheezing soft laughter, drew another gun and his own machete from his belt, and said, “Get them out. I’m going to dismember whatever is left.”
“Groovy,” I said.
“All that trouble we went to, and you just blew the place up. We could have done this to begin with, Dresden.”
Murphy got the kids loose and they started getting away from the wall. One of them, a girl no more than five years old, just collapsed against me crying. I held on to her for a moment, letting her cry, and said, “No, we couldn’t have.”
Kincaid regarded me, his expression unreadable. I thought I saw something wild and bloodthirsty and satisfied in his eyes for just a second. Then he said, “Maybe you’re right.”
He vanished into the smoke.
Murphy helped me to my feet. She had all the kids join hands, took the hand of the lead child herself, and led us all to the stairs. She bent and scooped up her jeans on the way. There wasn’t enough denim left to avoid public indecency, and she dropped them with a sigh.