by Butcher, Jim
It took her a couple of minutes, but Rosanna coaxed the old boat’s engines to life and turned us away from the lights of the city and out into the darkness of the great lake.
It was eerie how swiftly the world became pitch-black. That strange faerie-light of the night under a heavy snow vanished out on the waters of the lake, where the snow simply sank into the depths. The low overcast gave us a little light, for a time, reflecting the glow of the city, but as the boat continued skimming out into the center of the lake, even that faded away until I could barely distinguish the outline of the boat and its occupants against the water all around.
I wasn’t sure how long we went on like that in the dark. It seemed like an hour, but it couldn’t have been more than half that. The boat bounced across waves, whump, whump, whump, throwing up splashes of spray that coated the bow in a shining crust of ice. My stomach got a little queasy as I tried to anticipate the motion in the darkness and failed.
At length, the rumble of the boat’s engine died away, and then stopped altogether. The silence was disorienting. I’ve lived my entire adult life in Chicago. I’m used to the city, to its rhythms, its music. The hum and hiss of traffic, the clatter of elevated trains, the blaring radios, the beeping horns, cell phones, sirens, music, animals, and people, people, people.
But out here, in the center of the vast, empty cold of the lake, there was nothing. No heartbeat of the city, no voices, no nothing, except the glug and slap of water hitting the hull of the boat.
I waited for a couple of minutes while the boat was rocked by the waves of the lake. Now that we weren’t moving under power, I thought that they were rocking the boat to a really alarming degree, but I wasn’t going to be the one to start whimpering.
“Well?” Sanya demanded, about five seconds before I would have cracked. “What are we waiting for?”
“A signal,” Rosanna murmured. “I would as soon not tear out the boat’s bottom on rocks and drown us all, dear animal.”
I reached into my duster pocket and took out a chemical light. I tore it out of its package, snapped it, and shook it to life. Up sprang a greenish glow that lit up the immediate area well enough, considering how dark it had been for the past half an hour or so.
Rosanna turned to look at the light. Sometime during the trip her human form had changed, vanishing back into the shape of the scarlet-skinned, goat-legged, bat-winged demoness I had seen at the Aquarium. Her eyes, both the brown ones and the glowing green pair, focused on the chemical light, and she smiled, revealing white, delicately pointed fangs. “No magic, wizard? Are you so fearful about husbanding your strength?”
Out this far from shore, floating over this much water, it would have been difficult to put together a spell of any complexity—but I was sure Rosanna knew that as well as I did, if the flames I’d seen her tossing around back at the Shedd were any indication. It would have been a waste of energy I might need later. But I reminded myself about the ice water alleged to be in my veins.
“Mostly I just think the glow lights are fun,” I said. “Did you know that they used these things for the blood of the Predator in that movie with Arnold Schwarzenegger?”
The smile faltered. “What are you talking about?”
“That’s the problem with you nearly immortal types,” I said. “You couldn’t spot a pop culture reference if it skittered up and implanted an embryo down your esophagus.”
At the back of the boat, Sanya started coughing.
Rosanna stared at him for a moment, her eyes unreadable. Then the barest shadow of something mournful touched her features, and she turned away from him. She walked to the front of the boat and stood facing east into the darkness, her arms folded across her body in a posture of tightly closed insecurity, her wings wrapping around her like a blanket.
Sanya didn’t miss it. He’d been forcing himself to conceal a grin, but it faded into uneasy discomfort at Rosanna’s reaction. He looked like he was about to say something, then frowned and shook his head. He turned his face to stare out over the water. Large flakes of snow continued to drift down, flickers of crystalline green in the glow light. Michael started humming contentedly—“Amazing Grace.” He must have learned the song from some Baptists somewhere. He had a nice voice, rich and steady.
I stepped up next to Rosanna and said in a quiet voice, “Tell me something. This maiden-of-sorrow thing you’ve got going—how many Knights have you killed with it?”
Her eyes, both pairs, flicked aside to glance at me for a second, then back out at the night. “What do you mean?”
“You know. You’ve got that beautiful sad aura going. You look mournful and tragic and pretty. Radiate that ‘save me, save me’ vibe. Probably get all kinds of young men who want to carry you off on a white horse.”
“Is that what you think of me?” she asked.
“Lady,” I said, “a year or three ago, I’d have been the first in line. Hell, if I thought you were serious about getting out, I’d probably still help you. But I don’t think you want out. I think that if you were all that pathetic, you wouldn’t be controlling your Fallen—it would be controlling you. I think you’re Tessa’s trusted lieutenant for a reason. Which means that either this tragic, trapped-lady routine is a bunch of crocodile tears, or else it’s hypocrisy on such an epic scale that it probably qualifies as some kind of psychological dysfunction.”
She stared out into darkness and said nothing.
“You never did answer my question,” I said.
“Why not say it louder?” she asked me in a bitter undertone. “If that is what you think of me, then your friends need to be forewarned of my treachery.”
“Right,” I said. “I do that, and then your eyes well up with tears, and you turn away from me. You let them see one tear fall down your cheek, then turn your head enough to let the wind carry your hair over the rest. Maybe let your shoulders shake once. Then it’s the big bad suspicious wizard, who doesn’t forgive and doesn’t understand, picking on the poor little girl who is trapped in her bad situation and really just wants to be loved. Give me some credit, Rosanna. I’m not going to help you set them up.”
The glowing green eyes turned to examine me, and Rosanna’s mouth moved, speaking in an entirely different, feminine voice. “Lasciel taught you something of us.”
“You might say that,” I replied.
Ahead of us and slightly to the right a light flared up in the darkness—a bonfire, I thought. I couldn’t tell how far away it was, given the night and the falling snow.
“There,” Rosanna murmured. “That way. If you would excuse me.”
As she walked back to the wheel of the boat, a breath of wind sighed over the lake. In itself that wasn’t anything new. Wind had been blowing all the way through the snowstorm. Something about this breeze, though, caught my attention. It wasn’t right.
It took me another three or four seconds to realize what was wrong.
This was a south wind. And it was warm.
“Uh-oh,” I said. I held up the chemical light and started scanning the waters all around us.
“Harry?” Michael said. “What is it?”
“Feel that breeze?” I asked.
“Da,” Sanya said, confusion in his voice. “Is warm. So?”
Michael caught on. “Summer is on the way,” he said.
Rosanna shot a glance over her shoulder at us. “What?”
“Get us to shore,” I told her. “The things coming after me might not give a damn if they take you out along with me.”
She turned back to the wheel and turned the ignition. The boat’s engine stuttered and wheezed and didn’t turn over.
The breeze picked up. Instead of snowflakes, thick, slushy drops of half-frozen sleet began to fall. More ice began forming on the boat, thickening almost visibly in the green glow of my light. The waves began to grow steeper, rocking the boat more and more severely.
“Come on,” I heard myself saying. “Come on.”
“Look there!” San
ya called, pointing a finger down at the water beside the boat.
Something long, brown, fibrous, and slimy lashed up out of the water and wrapped around the Russian knight’s arm from wrist to elbow.
“Bozhe moi!”
Two more strands whipped up from different angles, one seizing Sanya’s upper arm, one wrapping around his face and skull, and jerked him halfway from the boat in the time it took me to shift my weight and reach for him. I managed to grab one of his boots before he could be pulled all the way over the side into the water. I planted one foot on the wall of the boat and hauled on Sanya’s leg for all I was worth. “Michael!”
The boat’s engine coughed, turned over, stuttered, and died.
“In nomine Dei Patri!” Michael roared as Amoracchius cleared its sheath. The broadsword flashed in a single sweeping slash, and severed the strands strangling Sanya. The edges of the slashed material burned away from the touch of Amoracchius’s steel like paper from an open flame.
I dragged Sanya back into the boat, and the big Russian whipped his saber from its sheath just in time to neatly sever another lashing brown tendril of animate fiber. “What is it?”
“Kelpies,” I growled. If they tangled up the blades of the engine our boat wasn’t going anywhere. I howled at Rosanna, “Come on!”
The boat suddenly rocked violently to the other side. I twisted my head to look over my shoulder and saw kelpies coming up over the sides. They were slimy, nebulous things, only vaguely humanoid in shape, made up of masses of wet weeds with gaping mouths and pinpoints of glittering silver light for eyes.
I turned and swept my arm in a slewing arc, unleashing my will as I cried out, “Forzare!”
Invisible force ripped the kelpies from the sides of the boat, leaving long strands of wet plant matter clinging limply to the fiberglass hull. They let out gurgling screams as they flew back and splashed into the water.
The boat’s engine caught and rose to a roar. The rear end of the boat sank, and its nose rose as it surged forward.
One of my feet flew out from underneath me. I went down, flailing my arms and legs, dimly aware that one of the kelpies had somehow gotten a limb tangled around my ankle. I got dragged to the back of the boat in a quick series of painful jerks and impacts, and had just enough time to realize that the boat was about to surge right out from under me, leaving me in the drink. Then it would just be a question of what killed me first—the icy water or the strangling embrace of the company within it.
Then there was a flash of scarlet and white, a whistle and a hissing sound, and a lance of fire on one of my feet. I went into free fall and bounced into the rear wall of the boat, then to the floor. Icy rain and freezing water splashed up against me, viciously cold. I looked down to find a strand of fibrous weed curling and blackening as it fell from my bleeding ankle. Sanya reached down and plucked the remains clear of my leg before tossing it over the rear of the boat and back into the water. My ankle was bleeding, my blood black in the green chemical light. More black stained the tip of Esperacchius.
I clutched at my ankle, hissing in pain. “Dammit, Sanya!”
Sanya peered out at the darkness behind the boat and then down at my leg. “Ah. Oops.”
Michael came back to kneel beside me and hunkered down over my foot. “Harry, hold still.” He poked at my ankle, and it hurt enough to make me snarl something about his parentage. “It isn’t bad. Long but shallow.” He opened a leather case on his sword belt, opposite the sheath of Amoracchius, and withdrew a small medical kit. Sanya’s sword had already slashed open my jeans, but Michael tore them a little more to get them out of the way of the cut. Then he cleaned the injury with some kind of disposable wipe, smeared it with something from a plastic tube, covered it with a thick white absorbent bandage, and wrapped it in tape. It took him all of two or three minutes, his hands quick and sure, which was just as well. By the time he was done the shock of the injury had worn off, and the hurt had started up.
“Not much to be done about the pain,” he said. “Sorry, Harry.”
“Pain I can live with,” I said, wincing. “Just give me a minute.”
“I am sorry, Dresden,” Sanya said.
“Yeah. Don’t you dare save my life ever again,” I told him. Then I lifted my leg onto one of the benches in the back of the boat to elevate it, and closed my eyes. There were a lot of ways to manage pain besides drugs. Granted, most of them wouldn’t help you much, unless you’d had several years of training in focus and concentration, but fortunately I had. Lasciel’s shadow had shown me a mental technique for blocking pain so effective that it was a little scary—when I’d used it before, I’d pushed myself until my body had collapsed, because I hadn’t been aware of exactly how bad my condition was. I could have died as a result.
Body or mind, heart or soul, we’re all human, and we’re supposed to feel pain. You cut yourself off from it at your own risk.
That said, given what was ahead of us and coming up behind us, I could hardly put myself in any more danger, relatively speaking, and I couldn’t afford any distractions. So I closed my eyes, controlled my breathing, focused my mind, and began to methodically wall away the pain of my new injury, my broken nose, my aching body. It took me a couple of minutes, and by the time I was done the pitch of the boat’s engine had changed, dropping from a roar to a lower growl.
I opened my eyes to find Sanya and Michael standing on either side of me, swords in hand, watching over me. Up at the front of the boat Rosanna cut the engine still more and turned her head to stare intently at me for a slow beat. The side of her mouth curved up in a slight, knowing smile. Then she turned to face front again, and I realized that there was light enough to see the outline of her delicately curling demon horns.
I rose and found myself staring at an island that rose from the increasingly turbulent waters of the lake. It was covered in the woods and brush of the midwestern United States—lots of trees less than a foot thick, with the space beneath them filled in with brush, thickets, and thorns to a depth of four or five feet. Snow lay over everything, and the light reflecting from it was what let me see Rosanna’s profile.
The shoreline was covered in what looked like an old Western ghost town—only one that had been abandoned for so long that the trees had come back to reclaim the space. Most of the buildings had fallen down. Trees rose out of most of the ones that hadn’t, and the sight reminded me, somehow, of an insect collection: empty shells pinned to a card. A sign, weathered beyond reading, hung from its only remaining link of rusting chain. It swung in the wind, aged metal squeaking. There was the skeleton of an old dock down at the shoreline, all broken wooden columns, standing up out of the water like the stumps of rotten teeth.
Looking at the place filled me with a sense of awareness of the attention of an empty, sterile malevolence. This place did not like me. It did not want me there. It did not have the least regard for me, and the corpse of the little town ahead of me was a silent declaration that it had fought against folk like me before—and won.
“Gee,” I called to Rosanna. “Are you sure this is the right place?”
She pointed silently up. I followed the direction of her finger, up the slope of the island, and spotted the light I’d seen from farther out in the lake—definitely a bonfire, I saw now, up on a hill above the town, at what looked like the highest point on the island. Something stood starkly against the sky there, the dark shape of a building or tower, though I couldn’t make out any details.
Rosanna cut the engine completely, and the boat glided silently forward to the broken wooden post nearest the shore. She climbed into the front of the boat and was waiting with a rope when the prow of the vessel bumped the column. She tied the boat to the post, then hopped down into the water and waded the rest of the way ashore.
“Oh, good,” I muttered. “More wet.”
From back behind us, the still-rising wind carried forward a gurgling, warbling cry. I’d been up north a few times, and it might have been the call
of a loon—but all of us there knew better. Summer was still on our trail.
“We aren’t going to make it any drier by waiting here,” Michael said quietly.
“There are men in those trees,” Sanya murmured, sheathing his sword and taking up the Kalashnikov again. “Thirty yards up, there, and over there. Those are machine-gun positions.”
I grunted. “Let’s get moving. Before they get bored and decide to start making like this is Normandy.”
“God go with us,” Michael prayed quietly.
I unlimbered my shotgun and said, “Amen.”
Chapter Forty-two
Michael had planned ahead. He had a dozen chemical heat bags with him, the kind made for hunters to slip inside the wristbands of their coats. He passed them around to us, and we put them inside our socks after we waded ashore. Otherwise I don’t know if we would have made it through the snow up that hill, not with our pants soaked to the knees.
Rosanna, of course, wasn’t having any issues with the weather. With her wings draped around her like a cloak, the demonic form she wore seemed inured to the cold, and her cloven hooves moved along the frozen, stony hillside as nimbly as a mountain goat’s, her barb-tipped tail lashing back and forth dramatically as she went. Sanya walked along behind her, then me, and Michael brought up the rear. It wasn’t a long walk, but it fit in a lot of unpleasantness into a little bit of time. The little town had been a company town, built up around what looked like an old cannery—a long building, falling to pieces now, at the very end of the ruined street.
Partway up the hill we ran across a trail that had obviously been in use over the past several days. Someone had kept it clear of snow, exposing a path that had been cut into the rock of the hillside, including stone stairs that led up to its summit. As we went up the stairs the shape at the top of the hill became clearer, as light from the large fire beside it revealed it more clearly.