by Butcher, Jim
Sure, Harry. What cat ever expects the mouse to come after it?
I stuffed my numb right hand in my duster pocket, tried to ignore the bone-deep ache of unspent power racking my body and the limb-weakening tremors of raw terror radiating through my guts, and stalked silently forward to sucker punch some Fallen angels.
Chapter Thirty-one
I’ve read that dolphins are as smart as people. I’ve even read one article by a researcher who claimed that her results indicated that the dolphins she’d been working with had been throwing the tests, and it had taken us years to realize it—that in fact, they might be smarter than us. I’d read other positions that said that they were quite a bit dumber than that. Being as how I’d never really sat down for a game of checkers with a dolphin, my own personal meter for such things, I didn’t really have an opinion until that day in the Shedd.
That was when those ugly little dolphins swam by me in perfect silence, except for the swish of their dorsal fins breaking the surface to get my attention—and then raised holy hell seventy feet farther down the path beside the pool, around the curve and out of my sight, splashing and chattering and squeaking for all they were worth.
I stared stupidly for about half a second before the message got through: Bad guys sighted, and close. Evidently the aquatic Americans had decided that I was on the home team. As quickly as the chattering had begun it ended, the dolphins vanishing beneath the surface.
I heard a creaking, skittering sound, and instinct drew my face up. Shadows moved on the snow-covered glass roof of the Oceanarium.
More of Nicodemus’s plan in delaying me became clear. He’d needed time to let his people get into position within and atop the building, once he’d been able to determine generally where the Archive was within the Aquarium.
I threw myself into the heavy ferns planted next to the footpath beside the outer pools, crouching down in the thickest bunch of greenery I could find. I held on hard to the power I’d drawn into me and hoped I could make my sucker punch last for more than a single hit.
A breath later, glass shattered and fell. Dark, inhuman forms dropped silently from overhead.
I picked the outermost of the invading Denarians, the one farthest from the center of action and attention, pointed my staff at him from my hiding spot amidst the green, and snarled, “Forzare!” unleashing a moderate effort of will. Invisible force caught the shapeshifted fiend as he was falling. I never got much of a look at him, beyond the fact that he had a lot of muscle and a ridge of leathery plates running down his spine.
Muscle doesn’t do you any good in free fall, no matter how many Fallen angels you’ve got inside you. Unless you’ve got some wings to put it to use, you’re in the hands of Mother Earth and Sir Isaac Newton.
I wasn’t trying to smash him into the middle of the lake. I applied just enough force to alter his trajectory, shoving the falling Denarian thirty feet off course, and he landed in one of those beams of titanic energy.
There was a flash of white light, a brief shadow of a human skeleton burned onto my vision, and then a white-hot something went spinning out from the beam. It landed in one of the pools in an angry gush of steam. The dolphins darted away from it.
Then I froze, not moving.
Denarians fell like rain, more than a dozen of them, landing with heavy-sounding thumps and a couple of splashes…
…and a splat. One of them, a lizard-looking thing, had fallen into the foliage behind me and not five feet from my hiding spot, with about two-thirds of its head simply missing from its shoulders. It twitched wildly for several seconds, pumping very human-looking blood all over the place before it slowly went still and simply started draining.
My eyes tracked up to the roof and found a darkened corner.
Kincaid hung in it like a spider, suspended from some sort of harness and perfectly still, and I realized that he’d had the same idea I had: Remove them before they’d realized that the battle was well and truly begun, while they were still holding back all their power to unleash in concentration. He gave me a grim little smile, moved his head in an “after you” sort of gesture, and raised a rifle sporting a heavy, outsized silencer to his cheek.
Kincaid had once informed me, quite calmly, that if he ever wanted to kill me, it would be with a rifle from more than a mile away. This was more like a hundred feet, maybe less, but Kincaid had dropped the Denarian with a shot to the head, maybe more than one, while it fell to the ground amidst a shower of broken glass. He was deadly as hell, and he could just as easily be coming after me as my enemies, but somehow my terror had dwindled to something familiar—and ferocious.
Sure, I might be outnumbered, but I was no longer at all certain that I was outclassed. When the Fallen were calling the shots they were arrogant to the extreme, and they weren’t at all used to playing it by ear and adjusting to changes in the tempo. When the coin bearers were running things, they could be more dangerous—but no more so than anyone else I had crossed metaphorical swords with.
Nicodemus, then, was dangerous because he was Nicodemus—not because of a Fallen angel or a lack of one. And while I would be a fool to think him anything less than a deadly threat, I had survived him once, and seen the trap coming this time, even if it had been at the last minute.
I spared a glance for the splattered, twitching remains of the decapitated Denarian in the ferns. These creeps might have scary angels looking over their shoulders—but for the next couple of minutes, at least, so did I.
It didn’t make them any less dangerous. It just made me see that I had a chance of standing up to them.
No flash and thunder, then. I had no energy to spare for them. No wasted time, either. I rose and stole through the ferns toward where I thought the next-nearest Denarian had come down, up a steep hillside that was murder to move over silently. The Denarian who had landed hadn’t stayed immobile, though. I found the spread talon prints in the earth where it had touched down, like those of a turkey, but larger.
I froze as water splashed off to my right. From the corner of my eye I saw a Denarian haul herself out of the water of the dolphin pool—Mantis Girl, Tessa. She pulled herself over the pedestrian guardrail, moving fast and warily. I saw a flash of silver in the talons of one hand. She’d recovered the coin of the Denarian I’d shoved into the beam. She knew they weren’t alone. I didn’t have much in the way of cover between her and me, but I didn’t move, and I didn’t think she spotted me.
Mantis Girl landed on the concrete and vanished down the path and out of my sight. Something let out a chittering, monkeylike sound from somewhere in the vast room, but other than that everything remained silent.
I ghosted forward again, straining to hear. Where was the drama? Where were the explosions, the howling screams, the deafening sound track? This was just one big, eerie game of hide-and-seek.
Which, I suddenly realized, must have been the Archive’s counterstrategy. The energy output of the enormous symbol was too high to maintain for long. If she could simply remain hidden from her enemies until the symbol could no longer be maintained, she could depart at will. There would then be no need for her to burn through her precious little available energy in a last-ditch, desperate effort to defend herself—provided she could stay calm and focused enough to maintain a veil under these circumstances, of course. It would force the Denarians to hunt Ivy—expending their efforts on trying to pierce her veil, while Kincaid concentrated on isolating them and killing them while they were distracted. It was a deucedly clever countertactic.
On the far side of the room one of the Denarians started screaming, a wail of agony. My eyes snapped up to Kincaid’s position. He was gone. A rope now dangled down over the foliage below where he’d hung, but he’d abandoned the exposed shooting position after taking down one more enemy, it would seem.
I found myself grinning. Fine. If that was the game, I could play too. Ready or not, here I come.
I pressed on through the ferns, angling over toward the amphitheater seats, and drop
ped into a sudden crouch as the low mutter of voices came to me.
“Where is she?” demanded a heavy, thick-sounding man’s voice.
I couldn’t see the source of the voices from amidst the fake wilderness until I glanced up. Light and shadow played together in the room and conspired to create a reflective surface for me upon one of the panels of glass on the ceiling. Three of the Denarians had gathered on the bleacher seats. The one who spoke looked like nothing so much as a big, leathery gorilla, except for the goat’s horns and heavy claws.
“Shut up, Magog,” snarled Mantis Girl. “I can’t think with you running your stupid mouth.”
“We’re nearly out of time,” Magog growled.
“She knows that,” snapped a third Denarian. I recognized this one, which looked like a woman, except for the reverse-jointed legs ending in panther claws, the bright red skin, and the mass of metallic, ten-foot-long, independently moving blades in place of hair. Deirdre, Nicodemus’s darling daughter. She turned back to Tessa. “But Magog has a point, Mother. Scent tracking has been useless.” She held up a small pink sock. “Bits of clothing with her scent on them have been scattered everywhere.”
“That’s the Hellhound’s work,” Magog spat, bright green eyes glowing brightly over dull, animalistic brown ones. “He’s fought us before.”
“He hunts us,” Deirdre said, “while she forces us to focus on piercing a veil. They work too well together. He’s killed two of us. Three if you count Urumviel.”
Tessa bounced the silver coin in her palm. “Urumviel’s vessel may have been killed by his own idiocy,” she said. Her insectoid eyes seemed to narrow. “Or perhaps the wizard managed to return before the Sign was raised.”
“You think that pathetic sot bested Father?” Deirdre said with scorn.
I bristled.
“He wouldn’t need to best him, you moron,” Tessa said. “Only to run faster. And it would explain why Thorned Namshiel hasn’t appeared as well.”
Yeah. If Spinyboy ever woke up, it would be with one hell of a Dresden hangover. Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Deedee.
“The wizard is nothing,” Magog growled. “If the girl is not found, and swiftly, none of this will matter to us.”
Tessa snapped her fingers and once again did that disgusting little trick where the mouth of the mantis form opened and the head of a pretty young girl emerged, smiling. “Of course,” she said, looking at Deirdre. “I should have thought of it sooner.”
Deirdre tilted her head. Blades whispered murderously against one another at the gesture. “Of what?”
“The entire strength of this plan is predicated upon attacking the child, not the Archive,” Tessa said, her smile turning vicious. “Ignore the girl. Bring me the Hellhound.”
Chapter Thirty-two
It took me about a second to see what Mantis Bitch had in mind, and half that long to hate her for it.
Ivy didn’t have a family. Until I’d given one to her, she hadn’t even had a name. She’d just been “the Archive.” What she had was a world of power and responsibility and knowledge and danger—and Kincaid. While the Archive would know that the proper decision would be to allow Kincaid to die in order to protect the sanctity of the Archive, Ivy wouldn’t be making the decision with the same detached calm. Kincaid was the closest thing she had to family. She wouldn’t let them hurt him. She couldn’t.
Damn them, to take a little girl’s loneliness and use it against her like that.
Grand schemes and sweeping plans to bring doom and darkness are all fine and scary, but they at least have the advantage of being impersonal. This was simple, calculated, cruel malice deliberately aimed at a child—a child—and it pissed me off.
Deirdre was closest. Fine.
I stepped out of the ferns, swept my staff in a broad backhanded swing, and unleashed some of the power I’d been painfully holding back, snarling, “Ventas servitas!”
A burst of wind gathered underneath Deirdre, lifting her out of the amphitheater seats and throwing her out over the pool like a dart shot from a child’s air gun. I’d thrown her at the nearest section of the pentagram’s beam, but the instant she’d gone airborne those snakelike strips of her hair had fanned out like a tattered parachute and begun thrashing at the air, slowing her and changing her course.
I didn’t stop to watch where she landed. Magog spun before Deirdre’s feet were more than a yard off the ground and broke into one of those diagonal simian charges, coming right up the bleachers as smoothly as if they’d been level ground. Forget what I’d said about not reacting quickly. Magog’s reaction time had been nothing, if not a little less. He had to have checked in at seven or eight hundred pounds, and he covered the forty feet between us in the space of a couple of seconds, the acceleration incredible.
Of course, reacting quickly isn’t always the same thing as reacting intelligently. Magog looked like he was used to being an unstoppable force.
I brought up my shield bracelet, slamming my will through it, pushing most of the painful load of power still remaining to me into the barrier that sprang to life. I shouted out in wordless challenge, my voice thin and strained beside the deep-chested bellow that Magog unleashed in answer. Normally my shield manifests as a shimmering dome of mixed blue and silver light.
This time I left it transparent, on the theory that what Magog didn’t know would hurt him. The shapeshifted Denarian slammed into the invisible barrier in an explosion of silver sparks and found it as immovable as the side of a mountain. The force of the gorilla-thing’s charge was not simply physical, though, and ugly red light clung to the silver power of my defenses. Excess energy bled through my bracelet as heat, scalding my skin—but the barrier held, and Magog staggered back, stunned.
“Hey,” I said as I let the shield fall. “Where’s an eight-hundred-pound gorilla sit?” I took a step forward and kicked him as hard as I could, right in the coconuts, then followed up with a stomping kick to the neck. Magog shrieked in agony and went tumbling back down the bleachers. “Somewhere with lots of extra cushions, I guess, eh, Monkeyboy?”
My instincts screamed a warning at me, and I threw myself down behind the last row of bleacher seats just as Mantis Bitch pointed a finger at me and screamed, “Amal-bijal!” There was a crash of thunder, a flash of light, a wash of heat, and a cloud of glowing splinters flew up a few feet away, where a section of seating had been a second before.
Hell’s bells. A sorceress. A damned dangerous one, too.
I readied my shield, already acutely aware of how little energy remained to me. I kept it small, maybe three feet across, and had started to rise when I saw a shape flit into my peripheral vision above me: Tessa, in the middle of an airborne leap. She cried out again, and I yelped and pulled into a tight fetal curl behind my shield as another bolt of lightning ripped through the air.
Pressure slammed my shoulders against concrete floor. Light blinded me, and sound deafened me, leaving my world nothing but one long white tone. My lungs forgot their job for a couple of seconds, but my legs were on the ball, scrambling to get beneath me.
I had just managed to sort out where I was when another deafening flash and crack hit somewhere close and flung me to the ground again. And then a third. I tried to keep my shield up, but I couldn’t see anything but yellow spots, and there wasn’t anything left to put into it, anyway. It was like walking along and suddenly finding myself without any floor—which happened more literally a second later, when I tripped over a bleacher seat and fell a couple of rows down, banging myself up pretty well in the process.
Some dazed part of me realized that I’d made a mistake in my assumptions. Tessa wasn’t trying to take me out. She was just trying to keep me dazed and disoriented long enough for her people to arrive. That same part of me realized, even more belatedly, that I’d let myself be goaded into attacking by their words, let my heart rule my decision instead of playing it smart.
Something slapped my staff out of my hand. I went for my gun, o
nly to be slammed to the ground by another terrific physical force. Then something like an iron bar slammed across my throat.
The light spots began to clear away in time for me to see a Denarian I’d never seen before atop me, this one like an androgynous, naked, bald statue of obsidian, green eyes glowing above human eyes of bright blue. A second shapeshifted creature, this one covered in a shaggy coat of grey, dusty-looking feathers, its face a grey mass of fleshy, hanging tendrils, had my wrists pinned to the ground.
Tessa stood over me, watching something on the far side of the room, her eyes narrowed. “Don’t choke him out,” she snapped. “He can’t talk if he’s unconscious.”
The obsidian statue eased up the pressure on my neck a little.
“Report,” Tessa said.
“We think the Hellhound is hiding in the bathrooms,” came a strained-sounding, harsh woman’s voice.
“You think?”
“Varthiel and Ordiel are down and McKullen is dead. They were searching there. The exit is watched. There’s no way for him to escape the room.”
“Their coins?” Tessa asked.
“Recovered, my lady.”
“Thank you, Rosanna. Any other word?”
“We’ve found Thorned Namshiel, unconscious and gravely wounded. There was extensive damage all around the area in which he fell.”
“Yes. And yet it was done fairly quietly. It seems our intelligence on our young wizard thug was faulty.”
Someone, presumably Mantis Bitch, kicked me in the ribs. It hurt. There wasn’t much I could do about it other than try to suck in a breath.
“Very well,” Tessa said. “Take Magog and Deirdre for the Hellhound. Take him alive. Do it within the next five minutes.”
“Yes, my lady,” Rosanna rasped. What sounded like hooves clopped away.
Tessa stepped into view again, sweetly pretty face visible atop the monstrous body. She was smiling. “You’re all kinds of feisty, boy. It’s cute. The sort of thing my husband likes in his recruits.” She kicked me again. “I find it endlessly annoying, personally. But I’m willing to play nice, since we might work together in the future. I’ll give you this chance to cooperate. Tell me where the little girl is.”