by Butcher, Jim
Several wicked faeries had been struck down by Michael’s sword.
They were the lucky ones.
Many more—dozens that I could see—had fallen too far away for Michael to have reached them with the blade. Those were simply lumps of smoldering charcoal spewing columns of greasy smoke, their meat flash-cooked away from bone. Some of the soon-to-be-former hobs were still thrashing as they burned.
Hell’s bells.
I don’t call him the Fist of God as a pet name, folks.
I followed Michael, alert for any dimming of the Sword’s light. If any of the sprinklers in the building were a different model from the one I’d used to focus my spell, it wouldn’t have been able to heat them and trigger them. If Michael wound up plunging back into the myrk, then the hobs, afforded a measure of protection from the light, would gang up on him—and fast.
But as luck (or maybe fate, or maybe God, but probably a cheap city contractor) would have it, it looked like they’d all been the same. Water came down everywhere, washing away the myrk as if it had been a layer of mud, replacing it with thousands upon thousands of fractured rainbows as the pure illumination of Amoracchius shone through the artificial downpour.
For the hobs, there was nowhere to hide.
I followed the trail of smitten fiends. Smiten fiends? Smited fiends? Smoted fiends? Don’t look at me. I never finished high school. Maybe learning the various conjugations of to smite had been in senior-year English. It sure as hell hadn’t been on my GED test.
I stopped and peered around as best I could through the blinding light and steady fall of water from the sprinklers, trying to get an idea of where Michael was headed.
I felt a sudden, swift vibration that rose through the soles of my shoes, and then a heavy thud accompanying a second such tremor. I whirled to face the front of the building as glass and brick and stone exploded from the entry door. Behind it was a vague flicker of haze in the air, but as whatever was behind the veil entered the glare of Amoracchius and my impromptu thundershower, the spell faltered and vanished.
Twenty feet and four or five tons of Big Brother Gruff erupted from the veil.
He wore armor made of some kind of translucent crystal, and the sword in his hand was longer than my freaking car. His mouth opened, and I felt his battle roar rather than hearing it over the cacophony of combat, a sound so deep and loud that it should have been made by a freaking whale.
“Oh, yeah,” I muttered. “Today just keeps getting better and better.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Anybody with an ounce of sense knows that fighting someone with a significant advantage in size, weight, and reach is difficult. If your opponent has you by fifty pounds, winning a fight against him is a dubious proposition, at best.
If your opponent has you by eight thousand and fifty pounds, you’ve left the realm of combat and enrolled yourself in Road-kill 101. Or possibly in a Tom and Jerry cartoon.
My body was already in motion, apparently having decided that waiting on my brain to work things through was counterproductive to survival. It was thinking that the cat-and-mouse analogy was a pretty good one. While I was nimbler and could accelerate more swiftly than the huge gruff, he could build up more speed on a straightaway. Physically speaking, I had almost no chance of seriously harming him, while even a love tap from him would probably collapse my rib cage—another similarity.
Jerry wins on television, but in real life Tom would rarely end up with the short end of the stick. I don’t remember Mister ever coming home nursing mouse-inflicted wounds. For that matter, he hardly ever came home from one of his rambles hungry. Playing cat and mouse is generally only fun for the cat.
My body, meanwhile, had flung itself to one side, forcing Tiny to turn as he pursued me, limiting his speed and buying me a precious second or three—time enough for me to sprint toward a section of floor marked off by a pair of yellow caution signs, where Joe the janitor had been waxing the floor. I crossed the wet, slick floor at a sprint and prayed that I wouldn’t trip. If I went down it would take only one stomp of one of those enormous hooves to slice me in half.
Footgear like that isn’t so hot for slippery terrain, though. As soon as I crossed to the other side of the waxed floor I juked left as sharply as I could, changing direction. Tiny tried to compensate and his legs went out from under him.
That isn’t a big deal, by itself. Sometimes when you run something happens and you trip and you fall down. You get a skinned knee or two, maybe scuff up your hands, and very rarely you’ll do something worse, like sprain an ankle.
But that’s at human mass. Increase the mass to Tiny’s size, and a fall becomes another animal entirely, especially if there’s a lot of velocity involved. That’s one reason why elephants don’t ever actually run—they aren’t capable of it, of lifting their weight from the ground in a full running stride. If they fell at their size, the damage could be extreme, and evidently nature had selected out all those elephant wind sprinters. That much weight moving at that much speed carries a tremendous amount of energy—enough to easily snap bones, to drive objects deep into flesh, to scrape the ground hard enough to strip a body to the bone.
Tiny must have weighed twice what an elephant does. Five tons of flesh and bone came down all along one side of his body and landed hard—then slid, carrying so much momentum that Tiny more resembled a freight train than any kind of living being. He slid across the floor and slammed into the wall of a rental car kiosk, shattering it to splinters—and went right on through it, hardly even slowing down.
Tiny dug at the floor with the yellow nails of one huge hand, but they didn’t do anything but peel up curls of wax as he went sliding past me.
I slammed on the brakes and tried to judge where Tiny looked like he’d coast to a halt. Then I drew in my will.
It was difficult as hell in the falling water, but I didn’t need a lot of it. When it comes to intentionally screwing up technology, I’ve always had a gift.
I focused on the lights above the entire section of the station Tiny slid into, lifted my right hand, and snarled, “Hexus!” Some of them actually exploded in showers of golden sparks. Some of them let out little puffs of smoke—but every single one of them went out.
Michael had advanced down the concourse far behind me, and the light of Amoracchius was now shielded by the station’s interior walls. When I took out the electric lights, it created a genuine swath of heavy shadows.
The sudden island of darkness drew hobs like corpses draw flies: burned, terrified, furious hobs whose tidbit-filled night on the town had suddenly turned into a nightmare. They didn’t have eyes, but they found their way to the dark easily enough, and I saw more than a dozen rush in, one of them passing within a couple of feet of me without ever slowing down or taking note of my presence.
Tiny started bellowing a second later, his huge voice blending with the vengeful howls of angry hobs.
“Ain’t so big now,” I panted, “are you?”
But as it turned out, Tiny was just as big.
A crushed hob flew out of the shadows and splattered the floor maybe twenty feet away. I don’t mean that he was just rag-doll limp. He was crushed, crushed like a beer can, where Tiny’s huge fist had simply seized the hob, squeezed it hard enough to empty it of various internal liquids, and then thrown it away.
Light flashed in the shadows, a long streak of sparks, like flint drawn along a long, long strip of steel, and suddenly low blue flames surrounded the blade of Tiny’s sword. They were guttering, barely able to stay alight beneath the falling water, but they cast enough light to let me see what was happening.
The hobs had gone mad with hate.
It had been inevitable, I suppose. The minions of Winter and those of Summer do not play well with one another, and the denizens of Faerie do not behave like human beings. Their natures are far more primal, more immutable. They are what they are. Predators are swift to attack prey that has fallen and is vulnerable. Winter fae hate the champ
ions of Summer. The hobs were both.
Several of them threw themselves at Tiny’s head, while the others just started hacking with their crude weapons or biting with their sharklike teeth. Tiny’s armor served him well in that mess, defending the most critical areas, and as hobs went for his throat the gruff started throwing his head back and forth. I thought it was panic for a second, until he slammed one of his horns into a hob with such power that it broke the wicked faerie’s skull. His sword slewed back and forth in two quick, precise motions, and half a dozen hobs fell, dead and burning.
The others let out shrieks of terror and bounded away, their hatred insufficient to the task of withstanding the fallen gruff. Tiny rolled to his knees and began to push himself up, and though his expression was contorted with pain his inhuman eyes swept around until they spotted me.
Oh, crap.
I didn’t wait for him to get up and kill me. I ran.
Of all the times to do without my jacket and staff. For crying out loud, what had I been thinking? That I had Summer so thoroughly outwitted that I wouldn’t need them? That life just hadn’t been challenging enough until now? Stupid, Harry. Stupid, stupid. I swore that if I lived through this, I’d make up dummy copies of my gear for when I needed Thomas to play stalking horse.
The ground started shaking as Tiny took up the chase behind me.
My options were limited. To my right was the exterior wall of the building, and I couldn’t go outside into the deepening snow. My imagination treated me to a dandy image of me floundering in hip-deep snow while Tiny, with his far greater height and mass, cruised effortlessly up behind me and beer-canned me. Ahead of me was an empty hallway leading to another wall, and on my left were nothing but rows and rows of……storage lockers.
I fumbled in my pocket again as I ran through the water sheeting the floor, and started trying to get a look at the numbers on the lockers. I spotted the one corresponding to Gard’s key, and I skidded to a halt on the watery floor. I jammed the key in the lock frantically as Tiny, running with a limp but still running, closed the last dozen yards between us.
I had to time it perfectly. I raised my right hand, aimed at the hoof on his wounded leg, and waited for all of his weight to come forward onto it before triggering every energy ring on my right hand, unleashing a rushing column of force that hit him with the power of a speeding car.
The gruff ’s hoof went out from under him again on the wet floor, and he pitched forward with a roar of frustration. He dropped his blade and reached for me with both hands as he fell.
I waited until the last second to jump back, ripping open the door to Gard’s locker as I went.
I could only describe what happened next as a bolt of lightning. It wasn’t lightning—not really. Real lightning did not have the raw, savage intensity of this…thing, and I realized with a startled flash of insight that this energy, whatever it was, was alive. White-hot power tinged with flashes of scarlet streaked out of the locker like a hundred hyperkinetic serpents, zigzagging with impossible speed. That living lightning ripped into Tiny, cutting through his crystalline armor as if it had been made of soft wax. It burned and slashed and pounded the flesh beneath in a long line from Tiny’s shoulder to his lower leg, letting out a screaming buzz of sound unlike anything I had ever heard before.
In the last fraction of a second before it vanished, the energy snapped back and forth like the tip of a whip, and Tiny’s left leg came off at the knee.
The gruff screamed. Whatever that thing had been, it had taken the fight out of Tiny.
Hell’s bells.
I stared at the maimed Summer champion and then at the open, innocent-looking locker. Then I walked slowly forward.
Tiny had only one eye open, and it didn’t look like it would focus on anything. His breathing was rough, quick, and ragged, which translated into a seething, oat-scented breeze anywhere within ten or fifteen feet of his head.
Tiny blinked his other eye open, and though they still wouldn’t focus he let out a weak-sounding grunt. “Mortal,” he rasped, “I am bested.” One of his ears flicked once and he exhaled in a sigh. “Finish it.”
I walked past the fallen gruff without stopping, noting as I did that the stroke of energy that had severed his leg had cauterized it shut, too. He wasn’t going to bleed to death.
I peered cautiously into the locker.
It was empty except for a single, flat wooden box about the size of a big backgammon kit. The back wall of the locker sported something else—the blackened outline of some sort of rune. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen Gard employing some kind of rune-based magic, but I’d be damned if I knew how it was done. I reached out with my wizard’s senses cautiously, but felt nothing. Whatever energy had been stored there was gone now.
What the hell? I reached in and grabbed the box. Nothing ripped me into quivering shreds.
I scowled suspiciously and slowly withdrew the box, but nothing else happened. Evidently Gard had considered her security measures to be adequate for dealing with a thief. Or a dinosaur. Whichever.
Once I had the case, I turned back to the gruff.
“Mortal,” Tiny wheezed, “finish it.”
“I try not to kill anything unless it’s absolutely necessary,” I replied, “and I’ve got no need to kill you today. This wasn’t a personal matter. It’s done. That’s the end of it.”
The gruff focused his eyes and just stared at me for a startled moment. “Mercy? From a Winterbound?”
“I’m not bound,” I snapped. “This is purely temp work.” I squinted around. “I think the hobs have mostly cleared out. Can you leave on your own, or do you need me to send for someone?”
The gruff shuddered and shook his huge head. “Not necessary. I will go.” He spread the fingers of one hand on the ground and started sinking into it as if it were quicksand. As portals to Faerie went, that was a new one for me.
“This is a onetime offer,” I told him just before he was completely gone. “Don’t come back.”
“I shan’t,” he rumbled, his eyes sagging closed in weariness. “But mark you this, wizard.”
I frowned at him. “What?”
“My elder brother,” he growled, “is going to kill thee.”
Then Tiny sank into the floor and was gone.
“Another one?” I demanded of the floor. “You’ve got to be kidding me!”
I leaned against the lockers, banging my head gently against the steel for a moment. Then I pushed myself back onto my feet and started jogging back toward where I had parted with Michael. Just because the hobs were gone from this part of the station didn’t mean that there wasn’t still a fight going on. Michael might need my help.
I picked up the trail of body parts again, though by this time most of them were mounds of dark powder, like charcoal dust, pounded to a gooey paste by the building’s sprinklers. The patches of gunk got thicker as I continued in the direction I thought Michael had gone.
I followed the trail to the base of a ridiculously broad flight of stone stairs—the one that actually had been in The Untouchables. The parts were still recognizable as parts here. These hobs hadn’t been dead for long. They lay in a carpet of motionless, burning corpses on the stairs. Judging by the way they’d fallen they had been facing up the stairs when they died.
Several fallen hobs bore wounds that indicated that Michael had hewed his way through them from behind. White knight he might be, but once that sword comes out, Michael puts his game face on, and he plays as hard as almost anyone I’ve ever seen.
Not that I could blame him. Not all the remains I’d passed had been those of hobs.
Three security guards were down, one maybe ten feet from the stairs, the other two on the stairway itself. They had fallen separately in the darkness.
I’d passed several other bloodstains that had almost certainly been fatal to their donors, unless the falling water had made them look more extensive than they actually were. I’d never encountered hobs face-to-face before
, but I knew enough about them to hope that whoever had spilled that blood was dead.
Hobs had a habit of hauling victims back into their lightless tunnels.
I shuddered. I’d give the troubleshooters from Summer that much: All the gruffs wanted to do was kill me, clean, and that would be the end of it. I’d been carried into the darkness by monsters before. It isn’t something I’d wish on anyone. Ever.
You don’t really live through it, even if you survive. It changes you.
I pushed away bad memories and tried to ignore them while I thought. Some of the hobs had obviously taken their victims and run. According to the books it was their modus operandi. Though this entire attack seemed to indicate a higher level of organization than the average rampage, obviously whoever was behind it wasn’t in complete control. Faeries share one universal trait—their essential natures are actively contrary, and they are notoriously difficult to command.
The hobs on the stairs were different from the ones I’d had to contend with at the front of the station. These all bore more advanced cutlery, probably made of bronze, and wore armor made of some kind of hide. To be clustered this thickly on the stairs, they had to have been at least a little organized, fighting in ranks, too.
Something had compelled these hobs to attack in unison. Hell, if the numbers of fallen hobs in front of me were any indication, the gang that came after Michael and me were probably stragglers who had gone haring off on their own, looking for a little carryout to take home.
So what had been the purpose of the attack? What the hell had drawn them all to the stairway?
Whatever was at the top, obviously.
Above me the light of the holy Sword flickered and began to fade. I chugged up the stairs as it did, still holding my fingers up to shield my eyes until the light dwindled, and caught up to Michael. He was breathing hard, Sword still raised over his head in a high guard and ready to come sweeping down. I noted, idly, that the stench of stagnant water had vanished, replaced by the quiet, strong scent of roses. I lifted my face again and felt cool, clean, rose-scented water fall on my face. Falling through the light of the holy Sword had improved it, it would seem.