by Butcher, Jim
“Careful,” Meyers said. He had the rural drawl that seems largely common to any town west of the Mississippi located more than an hour or so from a major city, though he was himself a Texan. “I ain’t searched them, and they don’t ’pear to understand English.”
“What?” Ramirez said. “That’s stupid. Who bothers to sneak ghouls into the country as covert muscle if they can’t pass as locals?”
“Someone who doesn’t have to worry about customs or border guards or witnesses or cops,” I said quietly. “Someone who takes them through the Nevernever straight here from wherever the hell they came from.” I glanced back at Ramirez. “How else do you think they got past the outer wards and sentries and right up to the camp?”
Ramirez grunted. “I thought we had those approaches warded, too.”
“Nevernever’s a tricksy kind of place,” I said. “Tough to know it all. Somebody was sneakier than us.”
“Vampires?” Ramirez asked.
I very carefully said nothing about a Black Council. “Who else would it be?”
Ramirez said something to them in Spanish.
“Shoot,” Meyers drawled. “You think I didn’t try that already?”
“Hey,” I said. I stepped closer to the unwounded ghoul and nudged him with one foot. “What language do you speak?”
The not-quite-human-looking man shot a quick, furtive glance at me, and then at his companion. He sputtered something quick and liquid-sounding. His companion snarled something back through its muzzle and fangs that sounded vaguely similar.
Seconds were ticking by, and we had a pair of kids in the hands of one of these things. I directed my thoughts inward, to the corner of my brain where Lasciel’s shadow lived, and asked, You get any of that?
Lasciel’s presence promptly responded. The first asked the second if he understood anything we were saying. The second replied that he hadn’t, and you were probably deciding which one of us would kill them.
I need to talk to them, I said. Can you translate for me?
There was a sudden sense of someone standing close to me—an almost tangible physical sensation of someone slim and feminine pressed against my back, arms casually around my waist, soft breath and lips moving near my ear. It was odd, but not at all unpleasant. I caught myself enjoying it, and firmly reminded myself of the danger of allowing the demon to do that.
With your permission, you need only speak to them in English, my host, Lasciel said. I will translate it between mind and mouth, and they will hear their tongue from your lips.
I so did not need any image involving their tongues and my lips, I responded.
Lasciel let out a delighted laugh that bubbled through my mind, and I was smiling a little when I faced the ghoul and said, “Okay, asshole. I’ve got two kids missing, and the only chance you have of getting out of this alive is if I get them back. Do you understand me?”
Both ghouls looked up at me, surprise evident even on the inhuman one’s face. I got a similar look from Ramirez and Meyers.
“Do you understand me?” I asked the ghouls quietly.
“Yes,” stammered the wounded ghoul, apparently in English.
Ramirez’s dark, heavy eyebrows tried to climb up under his bush hat.
I had to remind myself that this was not very cool. I was using a dangerous tool that would one day turn on me. No matter how savvy and tough it made me look in front of the other Wardens.
Kids, Harry. Focus on the kids.
“Why did you take those children?” I demanded of the ghoul.
“They must have wandered too close to Murzhek’s position,” the mostly human ghoul said. “We did not come here for hostages. This was to be a raid. We were to hit you, then fade away.”
“Fade to where?”
The ghouls froze, and looked at each other.
I drew back one of my hiking boots and kicked the mostly human ghoul in the face. He let out a high-pitched squeal—not a snarl of rage and pain, but a sound a dog makes when it’s trying to submit beneath an attacker.
“Where?” I demanded.
“Our lives,” hissed the wounded ghoul. “Promise us our lives and freedom, great one. Give us your word of truth.”
“You gave up your freedom the moment you spilled our blood,” I snarled. “But if I get the kids back, you keep your life,” I said. “My word is given.”
The ghouls looked at each other, and then the more human of the pair said, “The deep caves above this dwelling. The first deep shaft from the light of the sun. In the stones near it is a way to the Realm of Shadows.”
I shot a thought toward my interpreter. Does he mean the Nevernever?
A region of it, yes, my host.
“Remain here,” I told them. “Do not move. Make no attempt to escape. At the first sign of disobedience or treachery, you will die.”
“Great one,” both of them said, and began pressing their faces into the grey dust and the sandy, rocky soil beneath. “Great one.”
“They’ve been taken to the mine,” I told Ramirez. “We go there.” I turned to the other Warden. “Meyers, they’ve surrendered. Don’t take your eyes off them for a second, and if they twitch funny, kill them. Otherwise, leave them be.”
“Right,” he said. “Let me get some of the trainees in here. I’ll go with y’all.”
“They’re trainees,” Ramirez said, his tone hard. “You’re the Warden.”
Meyers blinked at him, but then let out a gusty exhalation and nodded. “All right. Watch your ass, ’Los.”
“Come on,” I said to Ramirez, and the two of us ducked out of the ruins and ran for our tent. We recovered our gear from it—staves, Ramirez’s silver sword and grey cape, my revolver and blasting rod and duster. Then I took off up the hill at the fastest pace I thought I could hold.
Ramirez was built like an athlete, but he was more naturally inclined to sprints and bursts of strength. He probably lifted weights at the expense of doing as much running as I did. He was blowing pretty hard by the time we’d gotten halfway to the mine, and he was fifty yards behind me by the time I got there. My own lungs were tight and heaving, I could feel the beginnings of a good hard puking revving up in my belly, and my legs felt like someone had poured a gallon of isopropyl over them and ignited it, but there wasn’t time to waste on recovering from the effort.
The ghouls hadn’t been there to take prisoners. This one might be smart enough to have kept the kids alive to use as hostages, but I’d never found ghouls to be particularly brilliant, and the one unwavering constant I’d observed among them was an inability to restrain their appetites for any length of time.
I banged my staff hurriedly against the earth, calling up my will and reinforcing it with Hellfire, a mystical source of energy Lasciel’s presence gave me the ability to utilize. I was already tired enough from my clumsy fire spell earlier and all the running that I didn’t have much choice but to draw on the brimstone-scented energy and hope for the best.
The runes in my staff blazed into light, and with a little effort of will I increased the effect, until the smoldering scarlet glow spilled out in a wide circle around me. The entrance to the mine was choked with brush, low, and not ten feet in one of the supports had collapsed, all but closing the place off from the outside. I had to slide in sideways, and once I was in, the dim light from the entrance and the scarlet glow pouring from my staff were the only illumination.
I hurried forward, knowing Ramirez would be coming soon, but not willing to wait for him. The air turned cold within a dozen strides, and my panting breaths formed into tiny clouds as they left my mouth. The tunnel widened and then sloped sharply downhill. I kept my left side against the wall, my right hand holding forth my staff, both to provide me enough light to see and to make sure I had the weapon ready to interpose itself between me and anything that should come slobbering out of the shadows.
A tunnel opened on my left, and as I went by it, I heard a snarling hiss come drifting and echoing from far down its length.
I turned and hurried down it, coming upon an old track built into the floor, where ore carts would have trundled back and forth, carrying out the ore from where it was brought up a shaft from lower in the mine. The sounds grew louder as I continued, a broader variety of the same snarling hisses.
And maybe a very soft whimper.
I probably should have been cagey at that point. I probably should have gone still, doused my light, and sneaked up to see what I could find out about things. I considered a nice, cautious recon for maybe a quarter of second.
Screw that. There were kids in danger.
I went through the remains of a wooden partition at a full charge. The ghoul, wholly inhuman and wearing the same sand-colored robes the others had been, had his back to me and was clawing at a section of rough tunnel wall with both hands. They were dark with his own blood, and a couple of his claws had broken. He was uttering snarls between desperate gasps, and Lasciel was evidently still on the job. “Betrayed,” the ghoul snarled. “Betrayed. Reckoning, oh, yes…balance of the scales…let me in!”
Everything slowed down, thoughts burning through my mind at tremendous speed. I saw everything clearly, what was in front of me, what was in my peripheral vision, and everything seemed as bright and organized as a third grader’s desk on the first day of school.
The Trailman twins were fraternal, not identical. Terry, the brother, was a couple of inches shorter than his nominally younger sister, but he stuck so far out of his shirt and pants that he had seemed well on the way to reversing that situation. He’d never get to. His body was on the floor of the cave, his face covered in a mask of blood and torn flesh. The ghoul had ripped open his throat. He’d also gotten the femoral artery on Terry’s thigh. The kid’s mouth was open, and I could see the ghoul’s disgusting blood clinging to Terry’s teeth. His knuckles were ripped open, too. The kid had died fighting.
Two feet farther on was the source of his motivation. Tina Trailman lay on the stone, staring upward with glazed eyes. She was naked from the waist down. Her throat and trapezius muscles were mostly gone, ripped away, as were her modest breasts. The quadriceps muscle of her right leg was gone, the skin around it showing the roughly torn gouges of ghoul fangs. There was blood everywhere, a sticky pool forming around her.
I saw her shudder a little. A tiny sound escaped her unmoving form. She was dead already—I knew that. I’ve seen it more than once. Her heart was still laboring, but whatever time she had left was a mere formality.
My vision went red with rage. Or maybe that was the Hellfire. I called upon still more of the dark energy in midleap, staff gripped in both hands, and rammed the tip into the small of the ghoul’s back as I snarled, “Fuego!”
The blow, with all my weight and power and speed behind it, probably broke a couple of the ghoul’s vertebrae all by itself. The fire spell came rushing out at the same time, filling the tunnel with thunder and light.
Tremendous heat blossomed before me, rushed into the ghoul, and tore him in half at the waist.
The same thermal bloom washed into the stone wall behind the creature and rebounded. I got an arm up to shield my face, and I dropped the staff so that I could draw my hands into my duster’s sleeves. I managed to keep much skin from being directly exposed, but it hurt like hell all the same. I remembered that, later. At the time, I didn’t give a flying fuck.
I kicked the ghoul’s wildly thrashing lower body into the blackness of the mine shaft. Then I turned to the upper half.
The ghoul’s blood wasn’t red, so he burned black and brown, like a burger that fell into the barbecue just as it was finished cooking. He thrashed and screamed and somehow managed to flip himself onto his back. He held up his arms, fingers spread in desperation, and cried, “Mercy, great one! Mercy!”
Sixteen years old.
Jesus Christ.
I stared down for a second. I didn’t want to kill the ghoul. That wasn’t nearly enough to cover the debt of its sins. I wanted to rip it to pieces. I wanted to eat its heart. I wanted to pin it to the floor and push my thumbs through its beady eyes and all the way into its brain. I wanted to tear it apart with my fingernails and my teeth, and spit mouthfuls of its own pustuled flesh into its face as it died in slow and terrible agony.
The quality of mercy was not Harry.
I called up the Hellfire again, and with a snarl cast out the simple spell I use to light candles. Backed by Hellfire, directed by my fury, it lashed out at the ghoul, plunged beneath its skin, and there it set fat and nerves and sinews alight. They burned, burned using the ghoul for tallow, and the thing went mad with the pain.
I reached down to the ghoul, caught him by the remains of his robes, and hauled him up to my eye level, ignoring the little runnels of flame that occasionally licked up from the inferno beneath the ghoul’s skin. I stared into its face. Then forced it to look at the bodies. Then I turned it back to me, and my voice came out in a snarl so inhuman that I barely understood it myself.
“Never,” I told it. “Never again.”
Then I threw it down the shaft.
It burst into open flame a second later, the rush of its fall feeding the fires in its flesh. I watched it plummet, heard it wailing in terror and pain. Then, far below, it struck something. The flame flowered and brightened for a second. Then it began to slowly die away. I couldn’t make out any details of the ghoul, but nothing moved.
I looked up in time to see Ramirez come through the ruins of the wooden partition. He stared at me for a second, where I stood over the mine shaft, dark smoke rising from the surface of my duster, red light shining up from far below, the stench of brimstone heavy in the air.
Ramirez is rarely at a loss for words.
He stared for a moment. Then his eyes tracked over to the dead kids. His breath escaped him in a short, hard jerk. His shoulders sagged. He dropped to one knee, turning his head away from the sight. “Dios.”
I picked up my staff and started walking back to the camp.
Ramirez caught up with me a few paces later. “Dresden,” he said.
I ignored him.
“Harry!”
“Sixteen, Carlos,” I said. “Sixteen. It had them for less than eight minutes.”
“Harry, wait.”
“What the hell was I thinking?” I snarled, stepping out into the sunlight. “Staff and blasting rod and most of my gear in the damned tent. We’re at war.”
“There was security in place,” Ramirez said. “We’ve been here for two days. There was no way you could know this was coming.”
“We’re Wardens, Carlos. We’re supposed to protect people. I could have done more to be ready.”
He got in front of me and planted his feet. I stopped and narrowed my eyes at him.
“You’re right,” he said. “This is a war. Bad things happen to people, even if no one makes any mistakes.”
I don’t remember consciously doing it, but the runes of my staff began to burn with Hellfire again.
“Carlos,” I said quietly. “Get out of my way.”
He ground his teeth, but his eyes flickered away from me. He didn’t actually turn, but when I brushed past him, he didn’t try to stop me.
At the camp, I caught one brief glimpse of Luccio as she helped carry a wounded trainee on a stretcher. She stepped into a glowing line of light in the air, an opened way to the Nevernever, and vanished. Reinforcements had arrived. There were Wardens with medical kits, stretchers, the works, trying to stabilize the wounded and get them to better help. The trainees looked shocked, numb, staring around them—and at two silent shapes lying close together over to one side, covered from their heads to their knees by an unzipped sleeping bag.
I stormed into the smithy and snarled, “Forzare!” putting all my rage and will into a lashing column of force directed at the captured ghouls.
The spell blew the remaining wall of the smithy and the two ghouls fifty feet through the air and onto a relatively flat area of the street. I walked after them. I didn’t hurry. In fact
, I picked up a jug of orange juice off one of the breakfast tables, and drank some of it as I went.
The mountainside was completely silent.
Once I reached them, another blast opened up a six-foot crater in the sandy earth. I kicked the mostly human ghoul into it, and with several more such blasts collapsed the crater in on him, burying him to the neck.
Then I called fire and melted the sand around the ghoul’s exposed head into a sheet of glass.
It screamed and screamed, which did not matter to me in the least. The sheer heat of the molten sand burned away its features, its eyes, its lips and tongue, even as the trauma forced the ghoul into its true form. I upended the jug of juice. Some of it splashed on the ghoul’s head. Some of it sizzled on the narrow band of glass around it. I walked calmly, pouring orange juice on the ground in a steady line until, ten feet later, I reached the enormous nest of fire ants one of the trainees had stumbled into on our first day at Camp Kaboom.
Presently, the first scouts started following the trail back to the ghoul.
I turned on the second ghoul.
It cringed away from me, holding completely still. The only sound was the raw whisper-screams of the other ghoul.
“I’m not going to kill you,” I told the ghoul in a very quiet voice. “You get to carry word to your kind.” I thrust the end of my staff against its chest and stared down. Wisps of sulfurous smoke trickled down the length of the wooden shaft and over the maimed ghoul. “Tell them this.” I leaned closer. “Never again. Tell them that. Never again. Or Hell itself will not hide you from me.”
The ghoul groveled. “Great one. Great one.”
I roared again and started kicking the ghoul as hard as I could. I kept it up until it floundered away from me, heading for the open desert with only one leg and one arm, the movements freakish and terrified.
I watched until the maimed ghoul was gone.
By then, the ants had found his buddy. I stood over it for a time and beheld what I had wrought without looking away.
I felt Ramirez’s presence behind me. “Dios,” he whispered.
I said nothing.
Moments later, Ramirez said, “What happened to not hating them?”