by Butcher, Jim
She’d been alone in a city, different from everyone around, struggling to survive and to build a life and a home.
So I added in all the pains I’d learned. Cooking blunders I’d had to eat anyway. Equipment and property constantly breaking down, needing repairs and attention. Tax insanity, and rushing around trying to hack a path through a jungle of numbers. Late bills. Unpleasant jobs that gave you horribly aching feet. Odd looks from people who didn’t know you, when something less than utterly normal happened. The occasional night when the loneliness ached so badly that it made you weep. The occasional gathering during which you wanted to escape to your empty apartment so badly you were willing to go out the bathroom window. Muscle pulls and aches you never had when you were younger, the annoyance as the price of gas kept going up to some ridiculous degree, the irritation with unruly neighbors, brainless media personalities, and various politicians who all seemed to fall on a spectrum somewhere between the extremes of “crook” and “moron.”
You know.
Life.
And the image of her in my mind deepened, sharpened, took on personality. There’s no simple way to describe it, but you know it when you see it, and the great artists can do it, can slip in the shades of meaning and thought and truth into something as simple as a girl named Mona’s smile, even if they can’t tell you precisely how they managed it.
The image of Elaine gained shadows, flaws, character, and strength. I didn’t know the specifics of what she’d been through—not all of them, anyway—but I knew enough, and could make good guesses about plenty more. That image in my mind drew me in as I focused on it, just as I once had focused on that younger image of Elaine unrealized. I reached out with my thoughts and touched that image, breathing gentle life into it as I whispered her True Name, freely given to me when we were young, within the vaults of my mind.
Elaine Lilian Mallory.
And the image came to life.
Elaine’s face bowed forward, her hair falling around it, not quite hiding the expression of bone-deep weariness and despair.
Elaine, I whispered to her. Can you hear me?
Her thoughts came to me in an echoing blur, like when they want to confuse you at the movies and they muck around with a voice-over. …believe I could make a difference. One person doesn’t. One person can’t ever make a difference. Not in the real world. God, what arrogance. And they paid for it.
I put more will into my thoughts. Elaine!
She glanced up for a moment, looking dully around the room. The image of her was filling in, slowly. She was in well-lit room without many features. Most of it seemed to be white. Then her head bowed again.
Trusting me to keep them safe. I might as well pull the trigger myself. Too cowardly for that, though. I just sit here. Set things up so that I don’t have to fail. I don’t have to try. I don’t have to worry about being nothing. All I have to do is sit.
I didn’t like the sound of that at all. Within the senseless vaults of my mind, I screamed, Elaine!
She looked up again, blinking her eyes slowly. Her mouth began moving in time with her audible thoughts. “Don’t know what I thought I could do. One woman. One woman who spent her whole life running away. Being broken. I would have served them better to end it before I ever left, rather than dragging them down with me.”
Her lips stopped moving, but, very faintly, I heard her thoughts call, Harry?
And suddenly I could hear a difference in the other thoughts.
“Just sit,” she mumbled. “Almost over now. I won’t be useless anymore. Just sit and wait and I won’t have to hurt anymore. Won’t fail anyone else. It will all be over and I can rest.”
It didn’t sound like Elaine’s voice. There were subtle differences. It sounded…like someone doing an impersonation. It was close, but it wasn’t her. There were too many small inconsistencies.
Then I got it.
That was the Skavis, whispering thoughts of despair and grief into her mind, just as the Raiths would whisper of lust and need.
She was under attack.
Elaine Lilian Mallory! I called, and in my head, my voice rumbled like thunder. I am Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, and I bid thee hear me! Hear my voice, Elaine!
There was a shocked silence, and then Elaine’s thought-voice said, more clearly, Harry?
And her lips moved, and the not-Elaine voice said, “What the hell?”
Elaine’s eyes snapped to mine, suddenly meeting them, and the room around her clarified into crystalline relief.
She was in the bathroom of the hotel, in the tub, naked in the bath.
The air was thick with steam. She was bleeding from a broad cut across one wrist. The water was red. Her face was god-awful pale, but her eyes weren’t fogged over and hazed out. Not yet.
Elaine! I thundered. You are under a psychic attack! Priscilla is the Skavis!
Elaine’s eyes widened.
Someone slapped me hard on the face and screamed, “Harry!”
The world flew sideways and expanded in a rush of motion and sound as my denied senses came crashing back in upon me. The Beetle was sitting sideways across several parking spaces in the motel’s little lot, both doors open, and Murphy, gun in one hand, had a hold of my duster with the other and was shaking me hard. “Harry! Get up!”
“Oh,” I said. “We’re here.”
I stumbled out of the car, getting my bearings. Behind me, Molly scrambled behind the wheel.
“Well?” Murphy demanded. “Did you get through?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could, every light in sight suddenly went dim. I don’t mean they went out. They didn’t. They just…dwindled, the way a lantern’s flame does if you close off the glass. Or, I thought, struck with a sudden impression, the way a fire might dim if something nearby had just drawn the air away. Something big enough to dim nearby flame as it inhaled.
Something big taking a deep breath.
And then a voice that rang with silvery rage rolled through the air, kicking up a layer of dust from the ground in a broad wave in the wake of its passing as it rang out in an echoing clarion call, “FULMINARIS!”
There was a flash of green-white light so bright that it came to my reawakened senses as a physical pain, a roar of sound loud enough to drown out a spring break band, and the entire front wall of the first-floor hotel room we’d rented earlier that day was blown off the freaking building and into the street.
I had my shield up overhead before the debris started raining down, protecting Murphy, me, the windshield of the Beetle, and the girl staring wide-eyed through it. I squinted through the flying bits of building and furniture and rock, and a second later managed to spot a broken human form lying with its head in the street, its feet still up on the curb. Priscilla’s turtleneck was on fire, and her hair stood straight out and was blackened and burned off within three or four inches of her skull. She ripped the turtleneck away in a kind of wobbly, disoriented panic—and revealed a bra and falsies. Those got ripped off too, and what was left, while slender and hairless, was also obviously the upper torso of a very pale, rather effeminate-looking man.
There was motion in the gaping maw of ruin that had been Elaine’s hotel room, and a woman appeared in it. She was dressed in the cheap plastic curtain that had been hanging over the tub. She had a thick-linked chain wrapped tightly around her left arm a couple of inches above her bloodied, slashed wrist, tied in an improvised tourniquet. She was quite dry, and her hair floated out and around her head, crackling with little flashes of static electricity as she moved. She slid herself slowly, carefully across the debris-strewn floor, and she held a short length of carved wood that looked like nothing so much as an enormous thorn of some kind in her right hand, its sharp tip pointing at the man in the parking lot. Tiny slivers of green lightning danced around its tip, occasionally flickering out to touch upon nearby objects with snapping, popping sounds as she passed.
Elaine kept that deadly little wand pointed at the
Skavis, eyes narrowed, and said, her voice rough and raw, “Who’s useless now, bitch?”
I just stared at Elaine for a long minute. Then I traded a glance with Murphy, who looked just as startled and impressed as I felt. “Murph,” I said, “I think I got through.”
The Skavis agent came to his feet and bounded at us, quick as thinking.
I raised my staff and unleashed a burst of raw force. He might be strong as hell, but once off the ground, with nothing to push against, he was just mass times acceleration. The blow from the staff swatted him out of the air to the concrete not far from the Beetle. I immediately used another blow to throw him back across the parking lot, creating clear space around him.
“Thank you, Harry,” Elaine said, her rough voice prim. Then she lifted the wand and snapped, “Fulminaris!”
There was another blinding flash of light, another crack of homemade thunder, and a green-white globe of light enclosed the vampire. There was a scream, and then his limp form fell to the concrete, one shoulder and most of his chest blackened. It smelled disturbingly like burned bacon.
Elaine lifted her chin, eyes glittering. She lowered the wand, and as she did, the lights came back up to full strength. She nodded once. Then she slipped and staggered to one side.
“Watch him!” I barked to Molly, pointing at the fallen vampire.
Murphy and I reached Elaine at about the same time, and we tried to catch her before she dropped. We succeeded in easing her down to the debris-littered concrete.
“Jesus,” Murphy said. “Harry, she needs a hospital.”
“They’ll be watching the—”
“Fuck ’em,” Murphy said, rising. “They can watch her through a wall of cops.” She stalked away, drawing out her phone.
I bit my lip as Elaine looked up at me and smiled faintly. She spoke, her words faintly slurred. “Dammit. Every time I come to Chicago, I’ve got to get rescued. Embarrassing as hell.”
“At least it wasn’t me that did the building this time,” I said.
She made a sound that might have been a laugh if she’d had more energy behind it. “Bastard had me dead to rights. Snuck it up on me. I didn’t realize.”
“That’s how the old psychic whammy works,” I said quietly. “Once you start thinking, ‘Gee, maybe that isn’t me thinking about suicide,’ it kind of falls apart.”
“Wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t warned me,” she said. She met my eyes again. “Thank you, Harry.”
I smiled at her, and checked her wrist. “This doesn’t look good. We’re gonna get you to a doctor. Okay?”
She shook her head. “The upstairs room. Abby, Olivia, the others. Make sure they’re all right.”
“I doubt they’ve lost as much blood as you have,” I said. Murphy, though, was way ahead of me, and was already on the stairs on the way up to the second level, then down to check the room.
“Okay. Time to wrap this up.” I picked Elaine up. I made sure the shower curtain didn’t fall off. “Come on. You can sit in the car until the EMTs get here. Maybe I can find something else to keep your arm tied off, huh?”
“If you can find my purse,” she said, her eyes closed now, a little smile on her mouth, “you can use my golden lariat.”
I turned to the car just as the horn started frantically beeping.
I whirled.
The Skavis agent was moving again. He got his knees underneath him.
“Dammit,” I said, and rushed the car. I got the passenger door open and dumped Elaine inside, even as the Skavis rose to his feet. “Murphy!”
Murphy called something I didn’t hear very well. The Skavis turned toward me. His face, all contorted with burns on one side, twisted up into a hideous grimace.
Murphy’s gun began barking in a steady, deliberate shooting rhythm. Sparks flew up from the concrete near his feet. At least one shot hit the Skavis, making his upper body jerk.
I rose, blasting rod in hand.
There was a roar more appropriate to a great cat than any dog, and the sound of shattering glass from the second level. Mouse flew over the safety railing, landed heavily on the ground, and lunged at the Skavis.
The dog wasn’t six inches behind the Skavis agent as it closed on me, its one remaining arm raised up to…well, hit me. But given how hard the blow was going to be, I upgraded the verb to smite. He was about to smite me.
Thomas came out of nowhere with that cavalry saber of his and took off the Skavis’s smiting arm at the shoulder.
He let out a scream that didn’t sound anything like human, and tried to bite me. I rolled out of his way, helping him along with a stiff shove to his back.
Mouse came down on top of him, and that was that.
I eyed Thomas as Mouse made sure that the remarkably resilient vampire wasn’t going to be getting up again for anything, ever. It had been a close call. The Skavis had timed his move just right. Another second, give or take, and he’d have broken my neck.
“Well,” I told Thomas, my breathing still quick. “It’s about time.”
“Better late than never,” Thomas replied. He glanced at the bleeding Elaine, licked his lips once, and said, “She needs help.”
“It’s on the way,” Murphy said. “Response is slow here, but give them a couple of minutes. Everyone’s okay up there, Harry.”
Thomas let out a breath of relief. “Thank God.”
Which was odd, coming from him, all things considered. I concurred with the sentiment, though.
Molly sat behind the wheel of the Beetle, breathing too quickly, her eyes very wide. She couldn’t quite see Mouse or his grisly chew toy from where she was sitting, but she stared as if she could see right through the Beetle’s hood to where my dog was finishing up his deadly, ugly work.
“So,” I asked Thomas. “How’d Lara get you to promise not to talk?”
My brother turned toward me and gave me a huge grin. Then he wiped it off his face and said, in the tone of a radio announcer on Prozac, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Warden Dresden.” He winked. “But hypothetically speaking, she might have told me that Justine was in danger and refused to divulge anything else until I promised to keep my mouth shut.”
“And you let her get away with that kind of crap?” I asked him.
Thomas shrugged and said, “She’s family.”
Molly suddenly lunged up out of the driver’s seat of the Beetle and was noisily sick.
“Seems a little fragile,” Thomas said.
“She’s adjusting,” I replied. “Madrigal and his Malvora buddy are still out there.”
“Yeah,” Thomas said. “So?”
“So that means that this was just a warm-up. They’re still a threat,” I said. “They’ve got enough bodies to lay the whole thing out to the White Court and make people like the Ordo look like a casino buffet. If that happens, it won’t just be one Skavis running around with a point to prove. It will be a quiet campaign. Thousands of people will die.”
Thomas grunted. “Yeah. There’s not a lot we can do about that, though.”
“Says who?” I replied.
He frowned at me and tilted his head.
“Thomas,” I said quietly, “by any chance, is there a gathering of the White Court anytime soon? Perhaps in relation to the proposed summit talks?”
“If there was a meeting of the most powerful hundred or so nobles of the Court scheduled to meet at the family estate the day after tomorrow, I couldn’t tell you about it,” Thomas said. “Because I gave my sister my word.”
“Your sister has guts,” I said. “And she sure as hell knows how to put on a show.” I glanced at the ruined hotel, and dropped my hand to scratch Mouse’s ears. They were about the only part of him not stained with too-pale blood. “Of course, I’ve been known to bring down the house once or twice, myself.”
Thomas folded his arms, waiting. His smile was positively vulpine.
“Call Lara,” I said. “Pass her a message for me.”
Thomas narro
wed his eyes. “What message?”
I bared my teeth in an answering smile.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Murphy might not have been officially in charge of Special Investigations, but I don’t think that made much difference to many of the other detectives there. She needed help, and when she called, they came. End of story.
For them, at least. For Murphy, it was the beginning of the story. She had to tell a lot of stories around police headquarters. It was a part of her job. Oh, no, those reports of vampire attacks were the results of hysterical drug-induced hallucinations. Troll? It was a large and ugly man, probably drunk or on drugs. He got away, investigation ongoing. Everyone buys it, because that’s what SI gets paid to do—explain away the bogeyman.
Murphy should be a novelist, she writes so much fiction.
We had a big mess here, but Murph and her fellow cops in SI would make it fit in the blanks. Terrorists were hot right now. This report would probably have terrorists in it. Scared religious nuts and terrorists who set off incendiary devices at an apartment building and in her car, and who also doubtless set the device that blew up an entire room at a cheap south-side motel. There weren’t any corpses to clean up—just one wounded woman who probably needed to see a shrink more than a jail cell. I debated with myself over whether or not to suggest she add in a bit with a dog. People love dogs. You can never go wrong adding a dog to the story.
“Right, Mouse?” I asked him.
Mouse looked unhappily up at me. Thomas had gotten the women and kids clear of the scene and handled what was left of the Skavis agent while I’d gone to a car wash and cleaned his blood off of my dog with the sprayer. Mouse’s fur keeps out just about everything, but when it finally gets wet, it soaks up about fifty gallons and stays that way for a long time. He doesn’t like it, and he was apparently feeling petulant about the entire process.