by Butcher, Jim
“A lighthouse,” I murmured. “Or what’s left of one.”
It might have been a fifty-foot tower at one time, but it had been broken off perhaps twenty feet up as if snapped by a giant’s hand. Beacon towers dotted the shorelines and islands of all of the Great Lakes, and like all such structures they had accumulated more than their due of strange stories. I hadn’t heard any stories about this one—but staring up at the rough grey stones, I got the impression that it might have had something to do with the fact that in order for strange stories to spread, someone has to survive a dark encounter in order to start the tale.
This entire creepy place was giving me the idea that I wasn’t merely walking on haunted ground—but that I was walking on major-league haunted ground, the kind of place that had never bowed its head to the advance of progress and civilization, to science and reason, that had no more regard for those children of human intellect than it did for their progenitors. The island seemed almost alive, aware of my presence in a sense that I couldn’t really tangibly define—aware of it and sullenly, spitefully hostile to it.
But that wasn’t the creepy part.
The creepy part was that it felt familiar.
Walking up those stone steps, my legs settled into a steady pattern of motion, as if they’d already walked up that path a thousand times. I swerved slightly on one step, for no reason that I could see, only to hear Michael, behind me, continue walking in a straight line and slip as the stone he stepped on shifted beneath his foot. I found myself counting silently to myself, backward, and when I hit zero we mounted the last step and reached the summit of the hill.
Somehow I knew, even before I saw it, that one side of the old lighthouse would be torn open to the sky, revealing an interior that was as hollowed-out and empty as the inside of a rifle barrel. I knew that the little stone cottage built against the base of the tower would still be reasonably intact, though about half of the slate-tile roof had collapsed inward and would need repairs. I knew that it had been made from the stones of the collapsed lighthouse. I knew that the front door rattled when you opened it, and that the back door, which wasn’t in sight from here, would swell up during a rain and get stuck in its frame, much like the door at…
…at home.
I also knew that as freaking weird as all of that was, I couldn’t afford to let any of it matter right now.
Nicodemus and company were waiting for us.
The sleeting rain was starting to cover everything in a thin layer of ice, but the bonfire laid on the ground before the opening in the wall of the tower was large enough to ignore it. The flames leapt ten or twelve feet in the air, and burned with an eerie, violet-tinged light, and the ice forming everywhere created the illusion of a purple haze that clung to anything inanimate.
Beside the bonfire stones had been piled up into something that resembled the throne of some ancient pagan king. Nicodemus sat atop them, of course. Tessa stood at his right hand, entirely in human form for the first time since I had seen her. She was a little slip of a girl who barely looked old enough to hold a driver’s license, and was dressed in something black and skintight. Deirdre knelt at Nicodemus’s feet, and with the three of them together like that, I could see the blending of the parents’ features in their daughter. Especially around the eyes. Deirdre’s showed a full measure of both Nicodemus’s soulless calculation and Tessa’s heartless selfishness.
Magog crouched at the base of the pile of stones, apelike and enormous, sullen eyes burning with bloodlust. The spined Denarian I had beaten down with the silver construct-hand lay reclining on the ground beside Magog, his face twisted with hate, one hand twisting and clenching—but his maimed body was otherwise motionless.
My heart sped up in sudden excitement. There were still six of them. They hadn’t broken Ivy yet.
I held up a hand. We came to a stop, while Rosanna lightly mounted the steps to kneel down at Tessa’s right hand.
“Wow,” I drawled. “That isn’t a contrived tableau or anything. Are you here to do business, or did you get lost on your way to auditions for Family Feud?”
“Gunman in the cottage,” Sanya murmured, very quietly.
“Beasts in the shadows behind the tower,” Michael whispered.
I kept myself from looking. If my friends said there were bad guys there, they were there, end of story.
“Good evening, Dresden,” Nicodemus said. “Have you brought the merchandise?”
I jingled the Crown Royal bag and bumped the hilt of Shiro’s sword, hanging over my shoulder, with the side of my head. “Yep. But you knew that already, or Rosie, there, wouldn’t have brought us this far. So let’s skip the small talk. Show me the girl.”
“By all means,” Nicodemus said. He gestured with one hand, and the shadows—his shadow, I should say—suddenly fell away from the interior of the ruined lighthouse tower.
Red light filled that space, pouring up from the sigils and glyphs of the most elaborate greater circle I had ever seen—and I’d seen one made of silver, gold, and precious stones. This one incorporated all of those things plus art—grotesque pieces, mostly—sound, ringing forth in gentle, steady waves from upright tuning forks and tubular bells; and light, focused through prisms and crystals, refracted into dozens of colors that split and bent into perfectly geometric shapes in the air around the circle.
Ivy was trapped inside.
I’ve seen some fairly extreme abuse in my time, but it never gets easier to see more of it. Nick’s people had gone with most of the classics for breaking someone down, and then added in a few twists that wouldn’t be available to regular folks. They’d taken Ivy’s clothes, for starters, which in this weather was sadistic on multiple levels. They’d shaved her hair away, leaving her bald, except for a couple of sad, ragged little tufts of gold. She was curled up into a fetal position, and she floated in the air, spinning slowly and apparently at random. Her eyes were tightly closed, her face pale with disorientation, terrified.
Outside the circle they had chained a number of those hideous hunting beasts, hairless creatures that resembled nothing in the animal kingdom but fell somewhere between a big panther and a wolf. The creatures looked hungry, and stared intently at the floating morsel. One of them snarled and threw itself to the end of its chain in an effort to snap its fanged maw closed upon the girl’s vulnerable flesh. It couldn’t reach her, but Ivy twitched and let out a thready whimper.
As she spun and twirled—a deliberate echo of what she’d done to Magog at the Aquarium, I felt certain—the motion revealed dozens of tiny scratches and bruises, evidence of a small legion of petty cruelties. They would, however, seem nightmarish enough to a child who had never experienced real pain of her own. All of this—the pain, the helplessness, the indignity, all of it—would be that much more horrific and terrifying to Ivy for its novelty. Say what I would about pain being a part of the human condition, when it comes to seeing it inflicted on children, I’m as hypocritical as the day is long.
Some things just shouldn’t happen.
“There, you see?” the lord of the Denarians said. “Safe and sound, as agreed.”
I turned my gaze back to Nicodemus, who was about ten seconds from an ass kicking—
—and caught a little glimmer of something approximating satisfaction in his eyes that made my combat-readying reflexes cool off almost instantly.
Ivy’s treatment hadn’t been only about putting her in the proper frame of mind to manipulate her.
It had also been about manipulating me. It wasn’t even all that tough to understand why. After all, I’d been in a situation something like this before.
It wasn’t enough for the Denarians to simply acquire the Sword. They couldn’t break or smash or melt Fidelacchius, any more than the Church could smash or melt the thirty silver coins. The power of the Sword was more than merely physical, and as long as it was wielded by those of pure heart and intent, it would take more than mere physical means to undo it.
Of course, if
you handed the Sword to, for example, a wizard who was known for playing it shady once in a while, and who was known for having a bad temper, and who was known for occasionally losing it, and maybe for burning down a building or two when he got angry, that could change the situation entirely. Put him in an intense situation, give him a really good reason to be angry, give him a mighty magical weapon near at hand, and he might well seize it and use it out of sheer outrage—despite the fact that he wouldn’t exactly be acting from entirely pure motives by doing so. After all, I had come here, ostensibly in peace, to offer up the Sword as a sacrifice for the life of a child. If I then took up that same weapon and used it to strike at Nicodemus and company instead, I, its rightful bearer, would be employing Fidelacchius, the Sword of Faith, in an act of treachery.
Once I’d done that, then the Sword would just be a sword, an object of steel and wood. Once I’d done that, then Nicodemus and his insane little family could destroy the weapon. They needed someone to make that mistake, someone to make that choice, in order to unmake the weapon, just as any bearer of a coin had to make the choice to give it up to be free of the Fallen inside. They needed someone with a right to the Sword to choose to abuse that right.
I’d made that mistake once already, on a stormy night much like this one, when Michael had asked me to carry Amoracchius for him. I’d used the Sword of Love to try to save my ass from the consequences of my own bad decisions and nearly gotten it destroyed as a result. It would have been unmade, in fact, if not for the intervention of my brother—even if I hadn’t known about our kinship at the time. Thomas had. He’d been looking out for his little brother even then.
Don’t get me wrong: At times I can be a little thick—particularly when there’s a woman involved. There’s just no way I’m stupid enough to make a mistake quite that enormous twice.
But…
Nicodemus didn’t know that I’d made it even once, now, did he?
Oh, he knew me pretty well. He knew how angry his actions had made me, how I would react to the sight of what they’d done to Ivy—and he was counting on me to react according to my nature, in order to help him unmake Fidelacchius.
This was going to be a dangerous game, going up against an opponent who had been around as long as Nick had, but I couldn’t win if I didn’t play—and I needed to buy a little more time and make sure that both of our prizes were on hand before we started the fireworks.
So I gave him what he wanted.
I slammed the end of my staff down onto the ground with my left hand, reached up to seize the hilt of Fidelacchius with my right, and snarled, “Get her the hell out of that thing, Nicodemus. Right now.”
They laughed at me, all of them together, relaxed and insulting. It would have sounded rehearsed if it were any less well coordinated. Instead, it came off like something they’d done so often over the years that it simply came naturally now. “Look at his face,” Tessa murmured, a little-girl giggle in her voice. “It’s all red.”
I clenched my jaw as hard as I could. It wasn’t much of a stretch to keep pretending to be angry, but I tried to go all Method actor on them. Eat your heart out, Sir Ian. I jerked the Sword a couple of inches from its sheath. “I’m warning you,” I said, trying to get a good look around. “Let the girl go before this gets ugly.”
I must have been doing a pretty good job with the acting. Michael’s voice, high-pitched with alarm, came from behind me. “Harry,” he said, urgently, “wait.”
I took two steps forward, ignoring Michael, and drew the Sword from its sheath. Fidelacchius was a classic, chisel-tipped katana, encased in what looked like an old wooden walking cane. I’d kept the blade clean and oiled while it was in my care. It came free of its casing without a sound and gleamed coldly in the violet light of the fire. “I brought the Sword,” I told Nicodemus, throwing some taunt into my tone. “See? You wanted this, right? In exchange for the girl?”
His eyes narrowed as he stared at the blade, and I noticed, for the first time, that he wore a sword of his own at his hip—as did Tessa, for that matter. Super. I made a mental note not to try fencing any of them. I’m tall and quick, and I’ve got a lunge that can hit from halfway across the county, but when it comes to deadly swordplay, I’m a piker compared to the serious swordsmen, like Michael—and Michael considered himself barely more than a mild challenge to Nicodemus.
“What on earth makes you think he’s going to go through with the deal, wizard?” Tessa asked me, her voice a purr. “Now that you’re here, the Sword is here, the coins are here?”
“Maybe it escaped your notice, bitch,” I snarled, “but the Sword is here. And the other two are as well. Maybe you want to think twice before making a fight of it.”
Thorned Namshiel let out a croaking laugh. “You think six of us fear facing two Knights?”
“I think there’s about five and a half of you, stumpy,” I shot back, taking another step toward them. I could see a little more of the tower’s interior from there. “And for all you know, you’re facing three Knights.”
Nicodemus smiled, showing teeth. “And for all Michael and Sanya know, Dresden, the two of them are facing seven Denarians, not six. You did lead them here, after all.”
“Harry,” Michael said again, his tone tense.
“Shut up!” I half screamed at Nicodemus, taking several steps closer. Almost.
Magog let out a snorting rumble and shuffled a yard closer to me, scraping at the ground with his feet and knuckles, shaking his shaggy, horned head threateningly.
I hefted the Sword and bared my teeth in a snarl. “Oh, you want some of this, Magilla?” I taunted, taking two more steps forward. “Come get some; I’ll show you what keeps happening to Kong.”
There! At the base of the tower wall, a crumpled human form, bloodied, bruised, half-frozen, but alive. He lifted his face as I came into sight and I met the gaze of Gentleman Johnnie Marcone.
They’d tied him to the wall with ropes—something of a mercy, since metal chains would probably have killed him, given the weather over the past few days. One side of his face was puffy with bruises, but both eyes were open. He had a lot of blood on one side of his head. In fact…
Hell’s bells. Something had ripped off the top half of his left ear. Not neatly, either. The flesh had been raggedly torn. The knuckles of his right hand were thickly crusted with blood. Marcone had torn them open on something before he’d been bound. He’d fought them.
I stopped talking trash and started backpedaling toward Michael and Sanya immediately.
Magog froze, his head tilted comically to one side, his expression confused.
Nicodemus sat up in place on the throne, sensing that the plan he’d thought was going along so swimmingly had begun to fall apart.
“Michael!” I said, and tossed Fidelacchius into the air behind me.
“Kill them!” Nicodemus snapped, his voice ringing over the hilltop. “Kill them now!”
Tessa let out a scream that sounded almost orgasmic, and sections of scarlet-and-black chitin seemed to simply rip their way out of her flesh, her body stretching and distending into her mantis shape. Deirdre hissed and arched her back in a kinetic echo of her mother, her hair lengthening into steely blades, her skin darkening. Rosanna howled, and called fire—specifically Hellfire—into her spread hands, while Thorned Namshiel lifted his hand into the air and gathered flickers of green lightning between his fingertips.
Magog simply bellowed and charged, and with howls of hunger and rage a dozen hairless beasts bounded from the shadows all around us and flung themselves at us with bloodthirsty disregard for their own lives. And, as if all of that weren’t enough, half a dozen points of brilliant red light, the emanations of laser sights of hidden gunmen, flashed at us through the mist and sleet.
Oh, yeah. Super plan, Harry.
I had them right where I wanted them.
Chapter Forty-three
I didn’t stop to see what happened to the sword I’d just thrown toward Michael. I
plunged my hand into my duster and came out with the sawed-off shotgun. I dropped my staff, lifted the gun in both hands, turned my face away, and shouted, “Fire in the hole!” a second before I pulled the trigger.
Once upon a time I’d seen Kincaid use Dragon’s Breath rounds against Red Court vampires in a fight at Wrigley Field. It had been impressive as hell watching those shotgun rounds belch out jets of flame forty feet long. Since then I’d done a bit of research on fun things you can fire out of a shotgun, and as it turns out, there’s all kinds of interesting stuff you can shoot at people. It’s astonishing, really, the creativity that goes into the design of all the different specialized ammunition available on the market today.
My personal favorite: a round known as the Fireball.
It fires out a spray of superheated particles of metal—tiny, tiny bits of metal blazing away at a temperature of over three thousand degrees. They spread out into an enormous cone of fire and light more than two hundred and fifty feet long, brighter and hotter than any fireworks you’ve ever seen. Forestry services use them to start backfires, and special weapons units use them to create enormous, eye-catching diversions.
I unleashed two Fireball rounds simultaneously, straight up into the air, and for an instant turned that weirdly firelit hilltop as bright as a midsummer noon.
Even with my eyes closed and my face turned away, the world turned bright pink through my eyelids. I heard gunfire from the direction of the cottage, and more from the tree line off to the left, but whatever gunmen Nicodemus had positioned there had been blinded by the flash, and it would take time for their night vision to recover.
That had been half the point of using the Fireball rounds, there in the dark. It wouldn’t give us much time to act, no more than a handful of seconds—but a lot can happen in a handful of seconds, if you’re willing to use them well.