by Butcher, Jim
He let out a snarl and snatched at my left hand. He tore my glove from it, and then twisted my hand to show me my own horribly scarred palm, and the name-sigil of the demon Lasciel upon it, the only skin that wasn’t layered in scar tissue. “You have it,” he spat. “And it is mine.”
I took a deep breath and tried to embrace an optimistic conviction in the moral rectitude of my cause; to think positive.
Hey, hideous torture would draw things out. It wasn’t the way I would have chosen to stall Cassius, but again, I wasn’t spoiled for choice.
“I’m telling you the truth,” I said. “Besides, you wouldn’t have made it quick, even if I did give it to you.”
He smiled. It looked grandfatherly. “Probably,” he agreed. He reached into the duffel bag again and pulled out a three-foot length of heavy chain, the kind they used to use for bicycle locks. He held it in one hand while he moved my wrists, lifting them so that I lay flat on my back, my arms outstretched over my head. “I’m a winner either way.”
I wasn’t strong enough to move them. The damned manacles made me weaker than a newborn kitten.
“Surrender your coin,” Cassius said pleasantly. Then he gave me a hard kick in the ribs.
It drove the breath from me and hurt like hell. I managed to choke out the words, “Don’t have it.”
“Surrender your coin,” he said again. And this time he swung the chain and lashed it down hard over my stomach. My duster was open and the chain tore through my shirt and ripped at the flesh of my belly. My vision went red with a sudden haze of agony. “I d-ddon’t…” I began.
“Surrender your coin,” he purred. And he hit me again with the chain.
Rinse and repeat. I don’t know how many times.
An eternity later, Cassius touched his tongue to some of the blood on the chain and regarded me thoughtfully. “I hope you aren’t too impatient for me to get the bat,” he said. “You see, my balance is quite unsteady these days. I’m told it’s a result of all the damage to my knees and ankles.”
I lay there hurting. My belly and chest were on fire. Blood from one of the snakebites had trickled into my left eye, and had crusted my eyelashes together so that I couldn’t open it again.
“You see, I’ve only got this one good hand to swing the bat with. My other was badly broken by multiple blunt-impact traumas. One-handed, I’m afraid it’s difficult to aim properly or judge the power of my swing.”
I tried to look around me, but I couldn’t get my right eye to move properly.
“As a result,” Cassius continued, “once I start paying you back for what you did to me, I’m afraid it’s quite likely that I might hit you too hard and too many times. And I want to savor this.”
Where was Michael? Where was…anyone?
Cassius leaned down and said, “And when I start, Dresden, I want to be free to indulge myself. To really let go and live the moment. I’m sure you understand.”
No one is coming to save you, Harry.
I rasped, “I told you.”
He paused, eyebrows lifted, and rolled a hand. “Pray continue.”
“Told you,” I said, and it was marred with a groan. “Told you if I ever saw you again I would kill you.”
He let out a low, amused little chuckle and put the chain down.
He picked up the linoleum knife. Then he knelt stiffly down beside me, and calmly cut my shirt open and spread it and my duster away from my abdomen. “I remember,” he said. “One should never make promises one cannot keep.”
“I didn’t,” I told him quietly.
“Best you hurry then,” he told me. “I can’t imagine you have more than a few moments to make good.” He prodded my belly with his finger, drawing a gasp of pain from me. “Mmmm. Nice and tender now. The better to cut through.”
I watched the knife move, slow and bright and beautiful. Time seemed to slow down as it did.
Dammit, I was not going to die. I was not going to let this murderous bastard kill me. I was going to survive. I didn’t know how I would do it, but my will locked onto the notion and I found myself grinding my teeth. I had shown him mercy before. He’d had his chance to walk away. I was going to live. And I was going to kill him.
The knife bit into the muscle of my stomach. He moved it very slowly, staring at the inner edge of the hooked blade as he drew it toward my groin in a gradually deepening incision. It hurt almost as much as the chain, but it left me with enough breath to scream.
I did. I howled at him at the top of my lungs. I shrieked profanities at him. I even managed to twitch my body a little, and I began calling up my will again, bringing fresh agony from the manacles.
He finished his first long, shallow, almost delicate cut, lifted the knife from my flesh, and repositioned it beside the first. The whole while I never stopped ranting at the top of my lungs. I doubted it was coherent enough to understand—but it described my feelings perfectly. I screamed and I kept on screaming.
And because I did, Cassius never heard Mouse’s claws on the marble floor.
The air suddenly shook with a bellowing, damned near leonine roar. Cassius’s head whipped around in time to see my dog leap from twenty feet away and hurtle forward like a grey-furred wrecking ball.
Mouse’s front paws hit Cassius squarely on the sternum, and a bloodcurdling snarl exploded from the huge dog’s chest as they both went down. Mouse snapped his jaws at Cassius’s throat, but he had too much momentum remaining from his charge. His paws slid on the smooth floor, carrying him past Cassius before his teeth could do more than lightly rip at one shoulder.
Cassius screamed in rage, crouching, and flicked his hand at Mouse. There was a surge of dark magic, a shimmering blur, and suddenly a serpent coalesced from the shadows lying upon the gallery. It reared up for a second, and I could see the deadly outline of a cobra’s hood rising a good five feet from the floor. Then the serpent launched itself at Mouse.
My dog saw it coming, sprang back from the serpent’s first strike, and then leapt forward, jaws trying to latch on behind the shadow serpent’s head. Lashing loops of reptilian darkness whipped into coils that tried to trap the big dog, and the pair of them rolled along the floor, each seeking to grasp and kill the other.
Cassius stared at Mouse for a second, eyes wide, and then turned to me. There was actual, literal foam at the corner of his mouth, and his face was stretched into a grotesque grimace of fury. He lurched over to my side, speaking a language I didn’t recognize in a half-hysterical shriek. Then he seized my hair, jerked my head back to bare my throat, and swept the knife down toward my jugular.
Before his arm was halfway down, there was a thin, high-pitched, tinny-sounding wail. Butters threw himself onto Cassius’s back, carrying them both over me and to the floor. The knife missed me entirely, and went skittering away on impact.
Cassius snarled another oath and tried to crawl for the knife. Butters tried to pull Cassius away, his face deathly pale. The little guy had all the fighting prowess of a leatherback turtle, but he got his arms and legs around Cassius’s torso and clung like a wild-haired monkey.
Cassius’s body may have been weakened, but he’d had more than a millennium to learn about infighting. He twisted his shoulders and then slammed the side of his head into Butters’s nose with a crunching sound of impact. Butters reeled from the blow, and blood spattered his face and upper lip.
Cassius then twisted again and escaped Butters’s grip. He heaved himself toward the knife.
“Butters!” I screamed, helpless to move and furious and terrified. “Don’t let him get the weapon!”
The little medical examiner shook his head once, then let out that tinny wail of challenge again and threw himself at Cassius. Butters caught him around one leg. Cassius kicked at his face, but Butters ducked his head down and the blows rolled off his shoulders. Cassius pushed himself a little closer to the knife.
Butters lifted his head with a squeak of defiance and sank his teeth into Cassius’s leg.
The former Denarian howled in sudden, startled pain.
Another bellowing roar shook the gallery, and I looked up to see Mouse gripping the shadow serpent’s neck in his heavy jaws. Mouse shook his head violently. There was a burst of crunching sounds, and suddenly the shadow serpent stiffened and then abruptly dissolved into gallons and gallons of translucent, gelatinous ectoplasm.
Butters yelped and I looked up to see Cassius holding the knife, sweeping it clumsily at his opponent. Butters skittered away from the knife, eyes wide with terror.
But he skittered directly between Cassius and me.
And held his ground.
Mouse didn’t skip a beat after killing the serpent. This time he rushed forward low, his snarls in chorus with the growling of thunder outside. He hit Cassius at the knees with the full power of his body, and Cassius went down like a tenpin before a bowling ball.
Butters rushed forward and kicked at Cassius’s knife hand. The weapon skittered away again, over the edge of the gallery and into the great hall below. Cassius kicked at Butters and got him in the shins, sending Butters to the floor.
Cassius got out from under Mouse and lurched for me, his eyes mad, his hands outstretched in strangling claws.
Mouse landed on his back, and the huge dog’s jaws closed on the man’s neck.
Cassius froze in place in sudden terror, his eyes very wide. He stared at me.
For a second there was total silence.
“I gave you a chance,” I told him, my voice quiet.
Quintus Cassius’s liver-spotted face went pale with horrified comprehension. “Wait.”
“Mouse,” I said. “Kill him.”
I had only one open eye with which to watch Cassius meet his end. But in that final second, rage and terror and horrified realization flashed through his eyes. And just as Mouse’s jaws crushed the delicate bones of his neck, there was a flare of ugly energies, a flash of unholy purplish light around him, and he spoke words that rang in echoes totally out of proportion to their volume.
“DIE ALONE,” he spat.
A flood of power hit me and my vision went black.
The last thing I heard was the snapping of bone.
Chapter
Thirty-eight
I didn’t wake up.
It was more like I felt myself putting together some kind of awareness, the way a stagehand constructs a set. Evidently I was a minimalist, because the reality I awoke to was a bare black floor, a single hanging lamp overhead, and three chairs.
I walked forward into the light and stared at the chairs.
In one sat Lasciel, again in her angelic, blond, wholesome form. She wasn’t wearing the white tunic, though. Instead, she was clothed in an Illinois Department of Corrections prison jumpsuit. The orange suited her hair and complexion quite well. She wore prison shackles, wrists and feet, and sat primly in her chair.
In the second chair was me. Well. It was a version of me, some kind of subconscious alter ego of mine. His hair was clipped shorter and neater than mine, and he wore a dark beard that was kept in similar fastidious order. He wore a black silk shirt, black trousers, and his hands (both of them) were unmarred, his finger-tips held together in a steeple that rested on his chin.
“Another dream,” I said, and sighed. I slumped down into the third chair. I looked more or less as I had when I woke up that morning. My shirt was slashed open, though there wasn’t any blood on my torso, and my skin hadn’t been pounded and ripped with a chain. Wishful thinking.
“Not precisely a dream,” the subconscious me said. “Call it a meeting of the minds.”
Lasciel smiled, very slightly.
“No,” I said, and pointed at Lasciel. “I’ve said everything I intend to say to her.” I turned to my alter ego—though on thinking about it, maybe alter id was more accurate. “As for you, you’re sort of a jerk. And the whole look you’ve got going there says ‘evil wizard,’ which I am now professionally opposed to.”
Alterna-Harry sighed. “I’ve told you before. I’m not some sort of dark demon. I’m simply the more primal essence of yourself. The one most concerned with such matters as food. Survival.” His dark eyes flickered idly over Lasciel. “Mating,” he said, a lazy growl to the tone. He looked back to me. “The important things in life.”
“That I am even having this dream probably means that I need a good therapist,” I said. I stared at my other self and said, “It was you, wasn’t it? You wanted to pick up the coin.”
“Make sure you remember that I am a part of you before you point any fingers,” he said. “And yes. The potential for power in an alliance with Lasciel”—he inclined his head to her, a courtly, gentlemanly gesture, damn his chivalrous eyes—“was too great to simply ignore. There are too many things out there determined to kill you. So long as you keep Lasciel’s coin, you both have the option to seek more power if necessary to protect yourself or others, and you prevent the coin from being used by unscrupulous sorts like Cassius.”
I grimaced. “So?”
“So,” he said. “This is a time to consider employing a portion of that power.”
I stared at him and said, “You’ve been talking to her behind my back.”
“For months,” he said calmly. “It was only polite. After all, you wanted nothing to do with her.”
“You asshole,” I said. “The whole reason I wasn’t talking was that I didn’t want the temptation.”
“I did,” my subconscious said. “Honestly, you should listen to me more often. If you’d taken my advice about Murphy, she wouldn’t be in Hawaii. In bed with Kincaid.”
Lasciel coughed gently and said, “Gentlemen. If I might offer a suggest—”
Both I and my alternative self said, at the same time and in exactly the same voice, “Shut up.”
Lasciel blinked, but did.
My double and I eyed each other, and I nodded slowly. “We’re in agreement, then, that her presence and her influence are dangerous.”
“We are,” my double said. “She must not be allowed to dictate actions or to direct our choices through suggestion or manipulation.” My double looked at her and said, “But she can and should be used as a resource, under careful control. She can offer us enormous amounts of information.” He eyed her again and said, “And amusement.”
Lasciel left her eyes down and smiled, very slightly.
“No,” I said. “I’ve got Bob when I want information. And if I want sex, I’ll…figure out something.”
“You don’t have Bob now,” my double said. “And you’ve wanted sex since about twenty minutes after the last time you had it.”
“That’s beside the point,” I told him sullenly. “I’m not quite insane enough to let a fallen angel give me virtual nooky, just for kicks.”
“Listen to me,” he said, and his voice became sharp, commanding. “Here’s the cold truth. You are determined to take us into battle against forces you cannot possibly overcome through main strength. Not only that, but your source of assistance, the Wardens, may also turn against you if they learn the truth about what you’re attempting. You are wounded. You are out of contact with your other allies.”
“It’s the right thing to do,” I said, setting my jaw.
My double rolled his eyes. “Tell me, is it morally necessary for you to die in the process?”
I glowered at him.
“This meeting is just a formality, you know,” he said. “You are already planning on asking Lasciel’s shadow for her help. That’s why you read through the book as you did before it was taken from you. You wanted it to go through your mind so that she could see it, and provide you with the text as she did for the summoning of the Erlking.”
I lifted a finger. “I only did that in case I wasn’t able to pry enough out of Grevane to figure out exactly what Kemmler’s disciples are doing.”
My double arched a brow. “How’d that work out for you?”
“Don’t be a wiseass,” I said.
“The point,” he said,
“is that you have little or no chance to prevail if you blindly rush in. You must know how they intend to manipulate these energies. You must know if there is a weak time or place at which to assault them. You must know the details of the Darkhallow, or you might as well cut your own wrists.”
“Don’t have to,” I told him. “I could just sit and wait for the Erlking to come by.”
“Six of one, half a dozen of another,” my double agreed. “In addition, your body is in no condition to do anything at the moment.” He leaned forward. “Free her to help us.”
I inhaled slowly and stared at Lasciel for a moment. Then I said, “After I killed Justin and got my head together at Ebenezar’s place, I promised myself something. I promised that I would live my life on my own terms. That I knew the difference between right and wrong and that I wouldn’t cross the line. I wouldn’t allow myself to become like Justin DuMorne.”
“Don’t you want to survive?” my double asked.
I rose from the chair and started walking into the darkness outside the light. “Of course I do. But some things are more important than survival.”
“Yeah,” my double said. “Like the people who are going to get killed when you die and don’t stop Kemmler’s disciples.”
I froze at the edge of the darkness.
“Take the high road if you want to,” my double said. “Choose to walk away from this strength in the name of principle. But after your noble death, everyone you no longer protect, everyone who might one day have come to you for help, everyone who is killed in the aftermath of the Darkhallow—every life you might have protected in the future will be on your head.”
I stared at the darkness and then closed my eyes.
“Regardless of where it came from, Lasciel offers you the power of knowledge. If you turn aside from that power—power only you can take up—then you abandon your commitment to protect and defend those who are not strong enough to do it themselves.”
“No,” I said. “That isn’t…that isn’t my responsibility.”
“Of course it is,” my subconscious said, voice clear and sharp. “You coward.”