by Butcher, Jim
I lifted my eyebrows and traded a speculative look with Thomas. Oaths and promises have a certain kind of power all their own—that was one reason they were so highly regarded among the beings of the supernatural community. Whenever someone breaks a promise, some of the energy that went into making it feeds back on the promise breaker. For most people that isn’t a really big deal. Maybe it shows up as a little bad luck, or a cold or a headache or something.
But when a more powerful being or a wizard swears an oath by his own power, the effect is magnified significantly. Too many broken oaths and promises can cripple a wizard’s use of magic, or even destroy the ability entirely. I’ve never seen or heard of a wizard breaking an oath sworn by his own power. It was one of the constants of the preternatural world.
“And by my own power, I swear in return to abide by the terms of the agreement,” I said.
“Harry,” Thomas hissed. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Saving our collective ass, I hope,” I said.
“You don’t actually think he’ll abide by it, do you?” Thomas whispered.
“He will,” I said, and as I said it I realized how confident I was that I was right. “If he wants to survive, he doesn’t have much choice. Grevane’s entire purpose here is gaining power. He won’t jeopardize that now by breaking an oath sworn by his magic.”
“You hope.”
“Even if he decides to screw us, it’s good to keep him talking. The longer we delay, the more likely it is the cops are going to show up. He’ll back off before he faces that.”
“But if the cops don’t show, you’re giving him what he needs to make himself into a freaking nightmare,” Thomas said.
I shook my head. “Might not be a bad thing. I can’t beat him. Corpsetaker, either. Throwing Grevane into the mix is going to make it harder for either of them to concentrate on me.”
Thomas exhaled slowly. “It’s a hell of a risk.”
“Oh, no. A risk,” I said. “Well, we wouldn’t want that, now, would we?”
“No one likes a wiseass, Harry.”
“Butters is counting on me,” I said. “Right now, I’m all he’s got. Do you have any better ideas?”
Thomas grimaced and shook his head.
“Very well,” Grevane called. “How shall we proceed?”
“Pull your zombies back,” I said. As I did, I found a pen and a piece of paper, pulled out the folded piece of paper from my pocket, and made a copy of the numbers. “You go with them. Liver Spots and Butters wait by the car. We all get in and drive off. Once I’m a few blocks away, I’ll drop Liver Spots off with the numbers, unharmed.”
“Agreed,” Grevane said.
We waited for a minute, and then Thomas said, “You hear anything?”
I went to the door and Listened. I could hear someone breathing fast and heavy. Butters. Nothing else. I shook my head and glanced at Thomas.
He came over to the door, sword still in hand. He opened it slowly. The pounding it had taken had warped it, and he had to haul hard on the door to get it unstuck from its frame. Thomas looked out for a moment. There were a couple of still-twitching pieces of zombie on the stairs, but other than that it was empty. He paced slowly up the stairs, looking around him as he went. My staff still lay at a slant on the floor before the door. Thomas nudged it back into the apartment with his foot. “Looks clear.”
I grabbed the shotgun and picked up the staff, holding both awkwardly with my good hand. Mouse fell into place at my side, his hackles still stiff, a low, almost subsonic growl rumbling in his chest every few moments. I hobbled out and up the stairs.
Cold rain fell, light but steady. It was dark. Really dark. No lights were on anywhere in sight. Grevane must have hexed this entire portion of the city power grid when the attack began. I didn’t make use of electricity in my apartment, so it hadn’t been noticeable to me inside.
I got a sick, sinking little feeling. If the lights were all out and the phones were all down, then there might not be any cops on the way. By the time the wards had begun to make noise, the phones were already dead. Without lights, there was an excellent chance that no one had seen anything unusual in the dark, and the rain would have muffled sounds considerably. People tended to stay home in comfortable surroundings in such situations—and if someone had seen or heard a crime going on but had no way to notify the authorities about it, it was unlikely that they would do anything but stay at home and keep their heads down.
Zombie scrap parts littered the top of the stairs, the gravel parking lot, and the little lawn. Some of them looked burned, while others seemed to have melted like wax in the summer sun. There were a number of blank, black spots burned into the ground. I couldn’t easily count how many zombies had been destroyed, but there had to have been almost as many down as I had seen in the opening moments of the attack.
Grevane had brought more. The rain almost hid them, but I could see the zombies at the limit of my sight, standing in silence, motionless. There were dozens of them. Hell’s bells. If we’d made that run for the car, we wouldn’t have had a prayer. That big, booming stereo bass rumbled steadily in the background.
Near the Beetle stood Liver Spots. He wore the same coat, the same broad-brimmed hat, the same sour expression on his wrinkled, spotted face. His fine white hair drifted around in every tiny bit of moving air wherever it wasn’t wet from the rain. I studied him for a minute. He was a good two or three inches under average height. His features seemed familiar, I was certain, but I couldn’t place them. It bothered me—a lot—but this was no time to start entertaining uncertainties.
Butters lay curled in a fetal position on the muddy, wet gravel at Liver Spots’s feet. He was breathing hard and fast, and his eyes stared sightlessly forward.
Liver Spots gestured curtly at Butters. In reply I held up the copy of the numbers, then slipped it back in my pocket. “Put him in the car,” I told Liver Spots.
“Do it yourself,” the man responded, his voice rough, harsh.
Mouse focused on Liver Spots and let out a low, rumbling growl.
I narrowed my eyes at him, but said, “Thomas.”
Thomas sheathed the sword and picked up Butters like a small child, his eyes on Liver Spots. He came back to the car, and Mouse and I watched Liver Spots closely the whole while.
“Put him in the back,” I said.
Thomas opened the door and set Butters in the backseat. The little guy leaned his head against the wall and sat all curled up. You could have fit him into a paper grocery sack.
“Mouse,” I said. “In.”
Mouse prowled into the backseat and sat leaning against Butters, serious dark eyes never leaving Liver Spots.
“All right,” I said, passing the shotgun to Thomas. “It works like this. Thomas, you get in the back. Spots, you’re riding shotgun. And when I say riding shotgun, I mean that Thomas is going to shove it up your ass and pull the trigger if you try anything funny.”
He stared at me, eyes flat.
“Do you understand me?” I said.
He nodded, eyes narrowed.
“Say it,” I told him.
Raw hatred dripped from his words. “I understand you.”
“Good,” I said. “Get in.”
Liver Spots walked toward the car. He had to step around me to get to the passenger’s-side door, and when he drew even with me he suddenly stopped and stared at me. There was a puzzled frown on his face. He stayed that way for a second, looking at me from soles to scalp.
“What?” I demanded.
“Where is it?” he said. He sounded as if he was speaking for his own benefit rather than for mine. “Why isn’t it here?”
“I’ve had a long day,” I told him. “Shut your mouth and get in the car.”
For a second I saw his eyes, and at my words they suddenly burned with a manic loathing and scorn. I could see, quite clearly, that Liver Spots wanted me dead. There wasn’t anything rational or calm about it. He wanted to hurt me, and he wante
d me to die. It was written in his eyes so strongly that it might as well have been tattooed across his face. I needed no soulgaze, no magic, to recognize murderous hate when I saw it.
And he still looked familiar, though for the life of me—maybe literally—I couldn’t remember from where.
I avoided his eyes in time to avert a soulgaze of my own and said, “Get into the car.”
He said, “I’m going to kill you. Perhaps not tonight. But soon. I’m going to see you die.”
“You’ll have to wait in line, Spots,” I told him. “I hear the only tickets left are in general admission.”
He narrowed his eyes and began to speak.
Mouse let out a sudden, warning snarl.
I tensed, watching Liver Spots, but he did the same thing I did. He flinched and then looked warily around. When his eyes got to a spot behind me, they widened.
Thomas had the shotgun on him, so I turned from Liver Spots and looked for myself.
From the rain and the dark came a rising cloud of light. It drew nearer with unsettling speed, and after only a few speeding heartbeats I could see what made the light.
They were ghosts.
Surrounded in a sickly greenish glow, a company of Civil War–era cavalry rushed toward us, dozens of them. There should have been a rumble of thundering hooves accompanying them, but there was only a distant and pale sound of a running herd. The riders wore broad-brimmed Union hats and jackets that looked black rather than blue in the sickly light, and bore pistols and sabers in their semitransparent hands. One of the lead riders lifted a trumpet to his lips as he rode, and ghostly strains of the cavalry charge drifted through the night air.
Behind them, mounted on phantom horses that looked as if they’d been drowned, were Li Xian and the Corpsetaker. The ghoul wore a tom-tom drum at his side, held in place by a heavy leather belt draped sideways from one shoulder. While he rode, he beat out a staccato military rhythm on it with one hand, and it sounded somehow primitive and wild. The Corpsetaker had changed into clothes made of heavy biker leather, complete with a chain gaunt-let and spiked fighting bracers on her forearms. She wore a curved sword on her belt, a heavy tulwar that looked ugly and murderous. As she came closer, she sent her ghostly steed racing to the head of the troop and drew her blade. She spun it over her head, laughing in wild abandon, and bore straight down upon us.
“Treachery!” howled Liver Spots. “We are betrayed!”
Grevane appeared in the mist from among the motionless zombies. He stared at the oncoming Corpsetaker and let out a howl of rage. He raised his hands, and every zombie in sight abruptly stiffened and then broke into a charge.
“Kill them!” Grevane howled. Actual, literal foam formed at the corners of his mouth, and his eyes burned beneath the brim of the fedora. “Kill them all!”
Liver Spots whirled toward me, producing a tiny pistol from somewhere in his sleeve, a derringer. From the size of it, it couldn’t have held a very heavy bullet, but he wouldn’t need it to be heavy to kill me at this range. I dove back and to my right, trying to get the car between Liver Spots and me. There was a startling popping sound and a flash of light. I hit the muddy gravel hard. Liver Spots came around the car after me, evidently determined to use the second bullet in the pistol.
Thomas didn’t have time to get out of the car. There was a sudden explosion and my windshield blew outward in a cloud of shot and shattered glass. Both tore into Liver Spots, and he stumbled and went down.
I lifted my staff in my good hand and brought it down hard on his wrist. There was a brittle, snapping sound, and the little gun flew from his grasp.
He went into an utter rage.
Before I knew what was happening, Liver Spots had thrown himself on top of me and had both of his hands fastened on my throat. I felt him shut off my airway, and struggled against him. It didn’t do much good. The old man seemed filled with maddened strength.
“It’s mine!” he screamed at me. He shook me on each word, slamming my head back against the gravel in precise, separate detonations of pain and bright stars in my vision. “Give it to me! Mine!”
A zombie landed on the gravel near us in a crouch and turned toward me. Its dead eyes regarded me without passion or thought as it formed a fist and drove it at my head.
Before it could land, a flickering saber from one of the spectral cavalry whispered through the night and the rain and struck the zombie on the neck. The corpse’s head flew from its shoulders, dribbling a line of sludgy black ichor, and landed with its empty eyes staring into mine.
Thomas screamed, “Down!”
I stopped struggling to get up, and tried to press myself as flat to the ground as I could.
The driver’s-side door to the Beetle flew open, swept just over the end of my nose, and struck Liver Spots in the face. He flew back from me.
Thomas leaned out of the driver’s side to grab at me, but a second ghostly horseman swept by, sword hissing. Thomas ducked in time to save his neck, but took part of the slash across his temple and ear and scalp, and that side of his head and shoulder was almost immediately covered in a sheet of blood a few shades too pale to be human.
Thomas recovered his balance and pulled me grimly into the car. I fumbled with the keys and shoved them into place. I twisted the key in desperate haste, mashing on the gas as I did. The engine turned over once and then stalled.
“Dammit!” Thomas cried in frustration. A streak of faint green light appeared in the air over the car’s hood. A second later another went by, this time ending at the hood. There was a startling sound of impact and the frame of the car rattled. A bullet hole appeared in the hood.
I tried the car again and this time coaxed the old VW to life.
“Hail the mighty Beetle!” I crowed, and slapped the car into reverse. The wheels spun up gravel and mud, and I shot back straight into a crowd of zombies, slamming into them and sending them flying.
I whipped the car’s hood toward the street and shifted into drive. As I did, I got a look at the Corpsetaker bearing down on Grevane, tulwar raised. From somewhere in his coat, Grevane produced a length of chain, and as the sword swept toward him he held up the chain, his arms outstretched, and caught the blow on the links between them, sliding the deadly blade away from him.
Corpsetaker howled in fury and whirled the phantom mount around to charge him again, almost absently striking the head from a zombie as she passed it.
I flattened the gas pedal, and the Beetle lurched forward—straight toward a trio of ghostly cavalry troops. They bore down on us, not wavering.
“I hate playing chicken,” I muttered, and shifted into second.
Just before I would have hit them, the cavalry leapt, translucent horses and riders rising effortlessly into the air, over the car, to land on the ground behind me. I didn’t give them a chance to whirl and try it again. I bounced the Beetle out onto the street, turned left, and charged away at flank speed. I got a few blocks away, then slowed enough to roll down the window.
There were no screams or shrieks of battle. The rain muffled the sound, and in the heavy darkness I couldn’t see anything going on behind me. I could dimly hear the whumping bass drum that kept Grevane’s zombies going, still somewhere out there in the background. Beyond that, very quiet but getting nearer, I heard sirens.
“Everyone all right?” I asked.
“I’ll make it,” Thomas said. He had stripped out of his jacket and shirt, and had the latter pressed to the side of his bleeding head.
“Mouse?” I asked.
There was a wet, snuffling sound by my ear, and Mouse licked my cheek.
“Good,” I said. “Butters?”
There was silence.
Thomas looked at the backseat, frowning.
“Butters?” I repeated. “Heya, man. Earth to Butters.”
Silence.
“Butters?” I asked.
There was a long pause. Then a slow inhalation. Then he said, in a very weak voice, “Polka will never die.”
I felt my mouth stretch into a fierce grin. “Damn right it won’t,” I said.
“True.” Thomas sighed. “Where are we going?”
“We can’t go back there,” I said. “And with the wards torn down, it wouldn’t do us too much good anyway.”
“Where, then?” Thomas asked.
I stopped at a stop sign and patted at my pockets for a moment. I found one of the two things I was looking for.
Thomas frowned at me. “Harry? What’s wrong?”
“The copy of the numbers I made for Grevane,” I said. “It’s gone. Liver Spots must have grabbed it from me when we were tussling.”
“Damn,” Thomas said.
I found the key to Murphy’s house in another pocket. “Okay. I’ve got a place we can hole up for a while, until we can figure out our next move. How bad is the cut?”
“Bleeder,” Thomas said. “Looks worse than it is.”
“Keep pressure on it,” I said.
“Thank you, yes,” Thomas said, though he sounded more amused than annoyed.
I got the Beetle moving again, frowning out the windows. “Hey,” I said. “Do you guys notice something?”
Thomas peered around for a moment. “Not really. Too dark.”
Butters drew in a sharp breath. His voice still unsteady, he said, “That’s right. It’s too dark.” He pointed out one window. “That’s where the skyline should be.”
Thomas stared out. “It’s gone dark.”
“Lights are out,” I said quietly. “Do you see any anywhere?”
Thomas looked around for a moment, then reported, “Looks like a fire off that way. Some headlights. Some police lights. The rest are…” He shook his head.
“What happened?” Butters whispered.
“So that’s what Mab meant. They did this,” I said. “The heirs of Kemmler.”
“But why?” Thomas asked.
“They think that one of them is going to become a god tomorrow night. They’re creating fear. Chaos. Helplessness.”
“Why?”
“They’re preparing the way.”
Thomas didn’t say anything. None of us did.
I can’t speak for the others, but I was afraid.