by Butcher, Jim
Raith watched her for a long moment, and then his head abruptly snapped up toward the exit of the cave.
Bodyguard Barbie came to attention like a dog who has noticed its master taking a package of bacon out of the fridge.
“Sirens,” Raith said, his voice harsh.
“Police?” asked Barbie.
“Ambulance. What happened? Who called them?”
Barbie shook her head. Maybe the questions were too complex for her to handle.
“Gee, Raith,” I said. “I wonder why the EMTs have shown up. I wonder if the police are coming along, too. Don’t you wonder that?”
The lord of the White Court glared at me, then turned to walk toward the ridiculously elaborate throne. “I suppose it doesn’t matter one way or the other.”
“Probably not,” I agreed. “Unless Inari is involved.”
He stopped, frozen in his tracks.
“But what are the chances?” I asked. “I mean, I’m sure the odds are way against her being hurt. Riding a long way in the back of the ambulance with some young med tech. I’m sure daddy’s little girl is not going to vamp out for the very first time on an EMT or a doctor or a nurse or a cop, kill them in front of God and everybody, and start off her adult life with a trip to prison, where I’m sure lots of other unfortunate deaths would put her away for good.”
Raith didn’t turn. “What have you done to my child?”
“Did something happen to your child?” I asked. I probably said that in as insulting a fashion as I possibly could. “I hope everything is all right. But how will we know? You should just get on with the cursing, I guess.”
Raith turned to Madge and said, “Continue. I’ll be back in a moment.” Then to the bodyguard he said, “Keep your gun aimed at Dresden. Shoot him if he tries to escape.” The bodyguard drew her weapon. Raith turned and darted from the room, faster than humanly possible.
Madge continued her twisty chant.
“Heya, Thomas,” I said.
“Mmmph,” he said through the gag.
“I’m gonna get you out of here.”
Thomas lifted his head from the ground and blinked at me.
“Don’t space out on me, man. Stay with us here.”
He stared at me for a second more and then groaned and dropped his head back onto the ground. I wasn’t sure if that was an affirmative or not.
“Murph?” I called.
She looked up at me, then down again.
“Murph, don’t fall apart on me. He’s the bad guy and he’s way sexy while he does it. That’s his bag. He’s supposed to be able to get to you.”
“I couldn’t stop him,” she said in a numb voice.
“That’s okay.”
“I couldn’t stop myself either.” She met my eyes for a second and then slumped to the floor. “Leave me alone, Mister Dresden.”
“Right,” I muttered. I focused on the bodyguard. “Hey there. Look, uh. I don’t know your name. . . .”
She just stared at me down the length of her gun.
“Yeah, okay, that’s hostile,” I said. “But look, you’re a person. You’re human. I’m human. We should be working together here against the vampires, right?”
Nothing. I get more conversation from Mister.
“Hey!” I shouted. “You! You demented U.S. Army surplus blow-up doll! I’m talking to you. So say something!”
She didn’t, but her eyes glittered with annoyance, the first emotion I’d seen there. What can I say, inspiring anger is my gift. I have a responsibility to use it wisely.
“Excuse me!” I shouted as loudly as I could. “Did you hear me, bitch? At this rate I’m gonna have to blow you up too, just like I did the Bodyguard Kens and your twin.”
Now real fury filled her eyes. She cocked her gun and opened her mouth as if she were going to actually speak to me, but I never got to hear what she was going to say.
Murphy made a soundless, barefooted run, leapt, and drove a flying side kick into the back of Bodyguard Barbie’s neck. Whiplash was far too mild a word to describe what happened to the woman’s head. Whiplash happens in friendly, healthy things like automobile accidents. Murphy meant the kick to be lethal, and that made it worse than just about any car wreck.
There was a crackling sound and Barbie dropped to the floor. The gun never went off.
Murphy knelt and searched the woman, taking her gun, a couple of extra clips, a knife, and a set of keys. She stood up and started trying keys on my manacles.
I looked up and watched Madge as she did. The sorceress remained on her knees in the circle, her chant flowing smoothly from her mouth in an unbroken stream. The ritual required it. Had she broken her chant, shouted a warning to the bodyguard, or moved outside the circle it would have disrupted the ritual—and that kind of thing can draw some awfully lethal feedback for showing disrespect to whatever power is behind the ritual. She was at least as trapped as I was.
“Took you long enough,” I said to Murphy. “I was going to run out of actual sentences and just start screaming incoherently.”
“That’s what happens when your vocabulary count is lower than your bowling average.”
“Me not like woman with smart mouth,” I said. “Woman shut smart mouth and get me free or no wild monkey love for you.” She found the right key and got the shackles off me. My wrists and ankles ached. “You had me scared,” I said. “Until you called me Mister Dresden, I almost believed he’d gotten to you.”
Murphy bit her lip. “Between you and me, I’m not sure he didn’t.” She shivered. “I wasn’t doing much acting, Harry. You made a good call. He underestimated me. But it was too close. Let’s leave.”
“Steady. Just a little longer.”
Murphy frowned, but she didn’t run. “You want me to keep Madge covered? What if she does that magic-superglop thing on our faces too?”
I shook my head. “She can’t. Not until the ritual is complete.”
“Why not?”
“Because if she makes a mistake in the ritual there’s going to be some backlash. Maybe it wouldn’t touch us, or maybe it would—but it sure as hell would kill everyone in the circle.”
“Thomas,” Murphy breathed.
“Yeah.”
“Can we mess up the rite?”
“Could. But to quote Kincaid, thus kablowie, thus death. If we interrupt the ritual or if she screws it up, things go south.”
“But if we don’t stop her, she kills Thomas.”
“Well. Yeah.”
“Then what do we do?” Murphy asked.
“We jump Raith,” I said, and nodded back to the wall where she had crouched. “Get back to where he threw you. When he comes in again, we take him down and trade him for Thomas.”
“Won’t breaking the circle screw up the ritual?” Murphy asked.
“Not the outer circle,” I said. “The circle is mostly there to help her have the juice for the ritual. Madge’s got some talent. And a survival instinct. She can hold it together if we break it.”
Murphy’s eyes widened. “But breaking the triangle. That will screw up the ritual.”
I regarded Madge steadily and said, loud enough to be sure she heard, “Yep. And kill her. But we aren’t going to break the triangle yet.”
“Why not?” Murphy demanded.
“Because we’re going to offer Madge a chance to survive the evening. By letting her kill Raith in Thomas’s place and let the curse go to waste. So long as someone dies on schedule, whatever is behind the ritual shouldn’t mind.” I walked over to stand directly outside the circle. “Otherwise, all I have to do is kick one of these candles over or smudge the lines of the triangle then back up to watch her die. And I think Madge is a survivor. She walks, Thomas is fine, and Raith isn’t giving anyone any more trouble.”
“She’ll run,” Murphy said.
“Let her. She can run from the Wardens, but she can’t hide. The White Council is going to have some things to say to her about killing people with magic. Pointed things
. Cutting things.”
“Taunting the spellslinger must be a really fun game, since people like you and Raith keep playing it,” Murphy said, “But don’t you think he’s going to notice that you aren’t being held with a gun on you anymore?”
I looked down at the bodyguard’s body and grimaced. “Yeah. The corpse is gonna be a giveaway, isn’t it.”
We looked at each other and then both bent down and grabbed an arm. We dragged the remains of the final Bodyguard Barbie over to the edge of the yawning chasm and dropped her in. After that I reached for my sword cane, still clipped to my belt, and loosened the blade in its sheath.
“Can’t believe Raith let you keep that,” Murphy said.
“The guard didn’t seem to be very good at employing her initiative, and he didn’t specifically mention my losing the cane. Don’t think he noticed it. He was pretty busy gloating, and I was chained up and all.”
“He’s like a movie villain,” Murphy said.
“No. Hollywood wouldn’t allow that much cliché.” I shook my head. “And I don’t think he’s thinking very clearly right now. He’s pretty worked up about beating my mom’s death curse.”
“How tough is this guy?” Murphy asked.
“Very tough. Ebenezar says my magic can’t touch him.”
“How’s about I shoot him?”
“Can’t hurt,” I said. “You might get lucky and solve our problem. But only a really critical shot will drop him, and even then it’s iffy whether or not you’ll get him. White Court vamps don’t soak up gunshots as well as Red Court vampires do, or ignore them like the Black Court, but they can get over them in a hurry.”
“How?”
“They have a kind of reserve of stolen life-energy. They tap into it to be stronger or faster, to recover from injuries, forcibly manipulate the sensations of police lieutenants, that kind of thing. They don’t run around being as tough as the Black Court all the time, but they can rev the engine when they need to do it. It’s probably safe to assume that Lord Raith has a great big honking tank of reserve energy.”
“We’d have to run him out of gas in order to get to him long-term.”
“Yep.”
“Can we do that?”
“Don’t think so,” I said. “But we can force him to push himself pretty hard.”
“So we almost beat him. That’s the plan?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s not a very good plan, Harry,” Murphy said.
“It’s a wascally-wabbit plan,” I said.
“Actually, it qualifies as a crazy plan.”
“Crazy like a fox,” I said. I put my hands on her shoulders. “There’s no time to argue, Murph. Trust me?”
She flipped her hands up in a helpless little gesture (slightly mitigated by the fact that she had a gun in one and a knife in the other) and turned to stalk back to the cushions where Raith had initially thrown her. “We’re going to die.”
I grinned and stepped back to the ring where Raith had me chained up. I stood there in the same pose as when I’d been prisoner, and held the shackles behind my back as if they might still be attached.
I had barely settled into position when there was the sound of one, two, three gazelle-like bounds on the sloped tunnel floor, and Raith shot into the cavern, scowling. “What idiocy!” he snarled toward Madge. “That stupid buck from Arturo’s studio nearly slaughtered my daughter by sheer incompetence. The medical teams are taking them now.”
He stopped talking abruptly. “Guard?” he snapped. “Madge, where did she go?”
Madge widened her eyes, still continuing the twisting, slippery words of the chant, and gave Murphy a significant look.
Raith turned, back stiffening in apprehension, to face Murphy.
Madge should have warned Raith about me. If he’d blown off old Ebenezar’s lethal magic, he had defenses out the wazoo. I didn’t even try to blast away at him with power.
Instead I swung the shackles once over my head and brought the flying steel down on Raith’s right ear with every ounce of strength in my body. The steel cuffs bit into his flesh with vicious strength and laid him out on the floor. He let out a snarl of shock and surprise. He turned to glare at me, his eyes burning a bright, metallic silver, his torn ear already knitting itself whole again.
I dropped the chains, drew my sword cane, and drove the blade straight at Raith’s left eye. The White lord moved his hand in a blur of motion, batting the scalpel-slender blade aside. I drew a sharp cut across his hand, but it didn’t keep him from kicking my ankles out from underneath me with a sweep of his leg. He rose almost before I was through falling, and picked up the bloodied shackles, his features set in wrath. I went flat and covered my neck with my hands.
Murphy shot Raith in the back. The first bullet came out the left side of his chest, and must have left a hole in his lung. The second exploded out from between two ribs on the other side of his body.
It had taken less than a second for the two shots to hit, but Raith reversed direction, flashing to one side like a darting bat, and two more shots seemed to miss him. The motion was odd to watch, and vaguely disturbing. Raith almost flowed across the room, looking as if he were being lazy, but moving with unnerving speed. He vanished behind an elaborate Oriental-style screen.
And the cave’s lights went out.
The only source of light left in the cavern came from the three black candles at the points of the ritual’s triangle, way the hell at the back of the chamber. Madge’s voice continued its rippling, liquid chant, an edge of smug contempt somehow conveyed in it, her attention focused on the ritual. Thomas’s bruised body twitched as he looked around, eyes wide behind the gag in his mouth. I saw his shoulders tighten as he tested the chains. They didn’t seem to give way for him any more than mine had for me.
Murphy’s voice slid through the darkness a moment later, sounding sharp against the steady, liquid chant of the entropy curse. “Harry? Where is he?”
“I have no idea,” I said, keeping the point of the sword low.
“Can he see in the dark?”
“Um. Tell you in a minute.”
“Oh,” she said. “Crap.”
Chapter Forty-one
Raith’s voice drifted out of the darkness. “I can indeed see you, wizard,” he said. “I must admit, a brute attack was not what I expected of you.”
I tried to orient to the sound of Raith’s voice, but the Deeps had the acoustics of, well, a cave. “You really don’t have a very good idea about what kind of man I am, do you?”
“I had assumed that White Council training would mold you a bit more predictably,” he admitted. “I was certain you’d have some kind of complex magical means of dealing with me without bloodshed.”
I thought I heard something really close to me and swept my slender sword left and right. It whistled as it cut the air. “Blood washes out with enough soda water,” I said. “I’ve got no trouble with the thought of spilling more of yours. It’s sort of pink anyway.”
Murphy was not talking, which meant that she was acting. Either she was using the sound of my voice to get close to me so that we could team up or she had gotten a better idea than I of Raith’s location, and she was stalking close enough to drill him in the dark. Either way, it was to our advantage for the conversation to continue.
“Maybe we can make a deal, Raith,” I said.
He laughed, low and lazy and confident. “Oh?”
“You don’t want to push this all the way,” I said. “You’ve already eaten one death curse. There’s no reason for you to take another if you don’t have to.”
He laughed gently. “What do you propose?”
“I want Thomas,” I said. “And I want Madge. You stop these attacks and leave Arturo alone.”
“Tempting,” he said. “You want me to allow one of my most dangerous foes to live, you want me to surrender a competent ally, and then you would like me to permit the erosion of my power base to continue. And in exchange, what do I rece
ive?”
“You get to live,” I said.
“My, such a generous offer,” Raith said. “I can only assume this is some sort of clumsy ploy, Dresden, unless you are entirely deluded. I’ll counter your offer. Run, wizard. Or I won’t kill the pretty officer. I’ll keep her. After I kill you, of course.”
“Heh,” I said. “You aren’t in good enough shape for that to be so easy,” I said. “Or you wouldn’t have let me stall you while we batted bullshit back and forth.”
In answer, Raith said absolutely nothing.
The bottom dropped out of my stomach.
And, better and better, the chant rolling from Madge’s lips rose to a ringing crescendo. A wild, whirling wind rose within the center of the circle, catching her hair and spreading it in a cloud of dark-and-silver strands. As that happened, the tempo of her words shifted, and they shifted from that other tongue into English. “While here we wait, O hunter of the shadows! We who yearn for your shadow to fall upon our enemy! We who cry out in need for thy strength, O Lord of Slowest Terror! May your right arm come to us! Send unto us your captain of destruction! Mastercraftsman of death! Let now our need become the traveler’s road, the vessel for He Who Walks Behind!”
The rest of my stomach promptly followed the bottom, and for a second I thought my sense of logic and reason had vanished with them.
He Who Walks Behind.
Hell’s holy stars and freaking stones shit bells.
He Who Walks Behind was a demon. Well. Not really a demon. The Walker was to a demon what one of those hockey-masked movie serial killers was to the grade-school bully who had tried to shake me down once for lunch money. Justin DuMorne had sent the Walker after me when we’d had our falling-out, and I’d barely managed to survive the encounter. I’d torn apart He Who Walks Behind, but even so he’d left me with some unnerving scars.
And the ritual Madge was using was calling that thing back.
Madge picked up the sacrificial knife and the silver bowl. The whirling wind gathered into a miniature thunderstorm hovering slowly over the triangle where Thomas was bound. “See here our offering to flow into your strength! Flesh and blood, taken unwilling from one who yearns to live! Bless this plea for help! Accept this offering of power! Make known to us your hand that we might dispatch him against our mutual foe—Harry Dresden!”