by Butcher, Jim
The gruff only stared at me for a long moment, but when he spoke I could have sworn that his voice sounded pensive. Maybe even troubled. “It is not my place to know such things—or to ask.”
“The gruffs are Summer’s champion in this matter, aren’t they?” I demanded. “If not you, then who?”
“What of thee, wizard?” the gruff countered. “Hast thou asked why the wicked Queen of Winter would wish thee to prevent Marcone from being taken by those servants of the darkest shadow? Why she who embodies destruction and death would wish to protect and preserve the Archive?”
“I have, actually,” I said.
“And what answers hast thou found?”
“Gruff,” I said, “I find myself largely clueless about why mortal women do what they do. It will take a wiser man than me to understand what’s in a fae woman’s mind.”
Eldest Gruff stared at me blankly for a second. Then he threw back his head and made a sound that…well, more than anything it sounded like a donkey. Hee-haw, hee-haw, hee-haw.
He was laughing.
I laughed, too. I couldn’t help it. The whole day had just been too much, and the laugh just felt too good. I laughed until my stomach hurt, and when the gruff saw me laughing, it only made him laugh harder—and more like a donkey—and that set me off in turn.
It was a good two or three minutes before we settled down.
“They tell children stories about you guys, you know,” I said.
“Still?” he said.
I nodded. “Stories about clever little billy goats outsmarting big mean trolls until their bigger, stronger brothers come along and put the trolls in their place.”
The gruff grunted. He said, “We hear tales of thee, young wizard.”
I blinked. “You, uh?”
“We too like stories about…” His eyes searched his memory for a moment before he smiled, pleased. The gesture looked pleasantly nonviolent on his face. “Underdogs.”
I snorted. “Well. I guess this is another one.”
The gruff ’s smile faded. “I dislike being cast as the troll.”
“So change the role,” I said.
The gruff shook his head. “That I cannot do. I serve Summer. I serve my Queen.”
“But it’s over,” I said. “Marcone is already free. So’s Ivy.”
“But thou art still here, upon the field of conflict,” the gruff said gently. “As am I. And so the matter is not closed. And so I must fulfill my obligations—to my great regret, wizard. I have only admiration for thee, in a personal sense.”
I tilted my head and stared hard at him. “You say that you serve Summer and the Queen. In that order?”
The gruff mirrored my gesture, his eyes questioning.
I fumbled in my pocket and came out with the other thing I had grabbed back at my apartment—the little silver oak leaf pin Mister had been batting all over Little Chicago. I’d figured that they’d stopped using it to chase me, once they’d gotten tired of Mister having his catnipped way with them.
The gruff ’s eyes widened. “The confounding enchantment thou didst employ upon our tracking spell was most efficacious. I had hoped to ask thee how it was done.”
“Trade secret,” I said. “But you know what came with this pin.”
“Indeed,” he said. “You were made an Esquire of Summer, and granted a boon, but…” He shook his head. “A boon can be a matter of importance, but not one this grave. Thou canst not ask me to yield to thee in a matter of conflict between the Courts themselves.”
“I won’t,” I said. “But just so we’re clear. Once both of us have left this island, the matter is closed?”
“Once thou art safe again in Chicago, aye, it would be.”
“Then I ask for Summer to honor its pledge to me, and the debt it incurred to me when I struck at Winter’s heart on its behalf.”
The gruff ’s ears stood up, facing me. “Aye?”
“I want you,” I said, “to get me a doughnut. A real, genuine, Chicago doughnut. Not some glamoured doughnut. An actual one. Freshly made.”
The gruff ’s teeth began to show as he smiled again.
“Of course,” I said, “you could deny me the boon I rightfully earned in blood and fire and kill me instead, thus ensuring that Summer would renege on a debt and never be able to make good on it. But I don’t think that would be very good for Summer and its honor. Do you?”
“Indeed not, wizard,” the gruff said. “Indeed it would not be.” He bowed his head to me. “Likest thou jelly within thy doughnut?”
“Nay, but prithee, with sprinkles ’pon it instead,” I said solemnly, “and frosting of white.”
“It could take some time to locate such a pastry,” the gruff said seriously.
I bowed my head to him. “I trust in the honor of Summer’s champions that it will arrive in good time.”
He bowed his head in reply. “Understand, young wizard, I may not aid thee further.”
“You’re pushing the rules enough already,” I said dryly. “Believe me. I know how that is.”
Eldest Gruff ’s golden eyes glittered. Then he lifted the staff and thumped it quietly onto the floorboards. Once again there was a pulse of green light and a surge of gentle thunder—and he was simply gone.
So was the silver oak leaf pin. Just gone from my fingers, and I hadn’t felt a thing. Give it up for the fae; they can do disappearing like nobody’s business.
Maybe I should have taken some lessons. It might have helped me get out of this mess alive.
I made my way carefully back across the creaking floor to the body of the young man. He looked relaxed in death, peaceful. I had the impression that whatever Eldest Gruff had done to him, it had been painless. It seemed like the sort of thing the old faerie would do. I reached down with my gloved left hand and grasped the tag containing the blackened denarius of Magog. I jerked it sharply, pulling it off the collar, and pocketed it, careful not to let it touch skin. I was getting to be kind of blasé about handling these coins, but it was difficult to keep getting terrified over and over again, especially given the circumstances. The risk of once more exposing my immortal soul to a fiendish presence seemed only a moderate danger, compared to what still stalked the night outside the old building.
Speaking of which…I took a deep breath and made my way quietly back out to the street. I could still hear shouting from farther up the hillside. I heard the sound of a boat’s engine on the far side of the island. There must have been other vessels docked elsewhere along the shore.
Well, I’d known about only the one, and it was close. I slipped back out of the cannery and hurried down the street as quickly and quietly as I could.
Down past the bottom of the rough stone staircase the boat still floated, tied beside the broken stump of an old wooden column. I restrained the urge to let out a whoop, and settled for hustling down the frozen stones as fast as I could without breaking my neck. The water was viciously cold, but I still wasn’t feeling it—which probably wasn’t a good thing. There was going to be hell to pay in afterthought pain when this was over. But compared to the other problems I’d had recently, that one was a joy to think about.
I got to the boat, tossed my staff in, and clambered aboard. I heard a shout up the hillside and froze. A flashlight swept back and forth up in the trees, but then moved off in another direction. I hadn’t been seen. I grinned like a fool and crept up to the driver’s seat. Once I got the engine started it would attract attention, but all I had to do was drive west as fast as I could until I hit ground. The whole western shoreline hereabouts was heavily occupied, and it should be no problem to get to a spot public enough to avoid any further molestation.
I eased into the driver’s seat and reached for the ignition key.
But it was gone.
I felt around for it. Rosanna had left it in the ignition. I specifically remembered that she had done so.
The shadows rippled away from the passenger seat opposite the driver’s seat, reveali
ng Nicodemus. He sat calmly in his black silk shirt and dark trousers, the grey noose worn like a tie around his throat, a naked sword across his lap, his left elbow resting on his left knee. In the fingertips of his left hand he held a key ring, dangling the grease-smeared ignition key of the boat.
“Good evening, Dresden,” he said. “Looking for this?”
Chapter Forty-five
The sleet had stopped coming down in favor of large, wet flakes of snow again. The boat rocked gently on the troubled waters of the lake. Water slapped against the sides and gurgled around the curve of the hull. Ice had begun to form all along the sides and front of the boat. I think there are boat words for all the pieces that were being covered, like prow and gunwale, but I’m only vaguely aware of them.
“Harry Dresden speechless,” Nicodemus said. “I can’t imagine this happens every day.”
I just stared at him.
“In the event that you hadn’t worked it out for yourself yet,” Nicodemus said, “this is endgame, Dresden.” The fingers of his right hand stroked the hilt of his sword. “Can you puzzle out the next part, or must I explain it to you?”
“You want the coins, the sword, the girl, the money, and the keys to the Monte Carlo,” I said. “Or you shoot me and drop me over the side.”
“Something like that,” he said. “The coins, Dresden.”
I reached into the pocket of my duster and…
“What the hell,” I said.
The Crown Royal bag was gone.
I checked my other pockets, careful of the coin I’d taken from Magog—and careful not to reveal its presence to Nicodemus. No bag. “It’s gone.”
“Dresden, don’t even try such a pathetic lie on m—”
“It’s gone!” I told him with considerable heat, none of it feigned. Eleven coins. Eleven freaking cursed coins. The last time I remembered definitely having them had been up at the tower, when I’d jingled them for Nicodemus.
He stared at me for a moment, his eyes searching, and then murmured something under his breath. Whispers rolled from the shadows around him. I didn’t recognize the language, but I did recognize the tone. I wondered if the angelic tongue had swear words, or if they just said nice words backward or something. Doog! Teews doog!
Nicodemus’s sword came up as swiftly as a flickering snake’s tongue and came to rest against my throat. I didn’t have time to flinch; it was that fast. I sucked in a quick breath and held very, very still.
“These marks,” he murmured. “Thorned Namshiel’s strangler spell.” His eyes drew a line from the last apparent mark on my neck down to the duster pocket that the bag of coins had been in. “Ah. The strangulation was the distraction. He picked your pocket with one of the other wires before he was incapacitated. He did that to Saint…someone-or-other, in Glasgow in the thirteenth century.”
There’s nothing like getting taken with an old trick, I guess. But that meant that Namshiel had been working together with someone else—someone else who had to have been hanging around to collect the coins after he’d taken them from my pocket and tossed them off to the side in the confusion. Someone who hadn’t been pulling a fade after all.
“Tessa and Rosanna,” I said quietly. “They got their collection of thugs back. They bailed at just the right moment to ruin your plan, too.”
“Deceitful bitches,” Nicodemus murmured. “One of them is our own Judas; I was sure of it.”
I lifted my eyebrows. “What?”
“That’s why I let them handle the more, shall we say, memorable aspects of the Archive’s initiation to our world,” Nicodemus said. “I suppose now that the child is free, she’ll have some rather unpleasant associations with those two.”
“And you’re telling me this why?”
He shrugged a shoulder. “It’s somewhat ironic, Dresden, that I can talk to you about this particular aspect of family business. You’re the only one that I’m sure hasn’t gone over to this new force—this Black Council of yours.”
“How can you be so sure about me?” I asked him.
“Please. No one so obstreperous has been corrupted by anything but his own pure muleheadedness.” Nicodemus shook his head, never taking his eyes off me. “Still. My time here has not been wasted. The Knights carried away Namshiel’s coin, so Tessa has lost her sorcery teacher. I heard Magog’s bellow end quite abruptly a few moments ago, just before you walked out of the same building, so with any luck Tessa’s heaviest bruiser is out of the game for a time as well, eh?” Nicodemus smiled cheerily at me. “Perhaps his collar is in one of your pockets. And I have Fidelacchius. Removal of one of the Three is profit enough for one operation, even if I did lose this chance at gaining control of the Archive.”
“What makes you think,” I said, “that you have Fidelacchius?”
“I told you,” Nicodemus said. “This is endgame. No more playing.” The pitch and intonation of his voice changed, and though he still spoke in my direction, it was clear that he was no longer speaking to me. “Shadow, if you would, disable Dresden. We’ll talk some sense into him later, in a quieter setting.”
He was talking to Lasciel’s shadow.
Hell, wizards didn’t have a monopoly on arrogance.
Neither did the Knights of the Cross.
I stiffened in place, my mouth half-open. Then I fell over sideways, body resting against the boat’s steering wheel, my spine ramrod straight. I didn’t move, not one little twitch.
Nicodemus sighed and shook his head. “Dresden, I truly regret this necessity, but time is growing short. I must act, and your talents could prove useful. You’ll see. Once we’ve cleared some of these well-intentioned idiots out of our way…” He reached for Fidelacchius.
And I punched him in the neck.
Then I seized the noose and jerked it tight. I hung on, pulling it tighter. The noose, another leftover from Judas’s field, made Nicodemus more or less invulnerable to harm—from everything but itself. Nicodemus had worn the thing for centuries. As far as I knew,
I was the only one who had worked out how to hurt him. I was the only one who had truly terrified him.
He met my eyes for a panicked second.
“Lasciel’s shadow,” I told him, “doesn’t live here anymore. The Fallen have no power over me. And neither do you.”
I jerked the noose a little tighter.
Nicodemus would have screamed if he could have. He thrashed uselessly, reaching for his sword. I kicked it out of reach. He reached up and raked at my eyes, but I hunched my head down and hung on, and his motions were more panicked than practiced. His shadow rose up in a wave of darkness and fury—but as it plunged down to engulf me, white light shone forth from the slits in the wooden cane sheath of the holy sword on my back, and the shadow itself let out a hissing, leathery scream, flinching away from the light.
I was no Knight, but the sword did for me what it had always done for them—it leveled the field, stripping away all the supernatural trappings and leaving only a struggle of mind versus mind and will versus will, one man against another. Nicodemus and I fought for the sword and our lives.
He threw savage kicks into my wounded leg, and even through the blocks Lash had taught me to build, I felt them. I had a great handle on his neck, so in reply I slammed my forehead against Nicodemus’s nose. It broke with really satisfying crunching sounds. He hammered punches into my short ribs, and he knew how to make them hurt.
Unfortunately for him, I knew how to be hurt. I knew how to be hurt with the best of them. It was going to take a whole hell of a lot more pain than this loser could dish out in the time he had left to put me down, and I knew it. I knew it. I tightened my grip on that ancient rope and I hung on.
I took more blows to the body as his face turned red. He got one of my knees with a vicious kick as his face turned purple. I was screaming with the pain of it when the purple started looking more like black—and he collapsed, body loosening and then going completely limp.
A lot of people let up when that
happens, when their opponent drops unconscious. But it could have been a trick.
Even if it hadn’t been I’d been planning to hang on.
I’m not a Knight.
In fact, I squeezed harder.
I wasn’t sure how much longer I’d had him down. Might have been thirty seconds. Might have been a minute and a half. But I saw a flash of furious green light and looked up to see Deirdre coming down the hillside toward me on her hair and three limbs, one leg bound up in white bandages. She had twenty or thirty tongueless soldier types with her, and her glowing eyes burned with verdant fury, like a pair of spotlights. She focused on me for half a second, hissed like a furious alley cat, and screamed, “Father!”
Crap.
I grabbed Nicodemus by the shirt and pitched him over the side, into the black waters of the lake. He went down with hardly a splash, his dark clothing making him all but invisible an instant after he hit the water.
I scanned the bottom of the boat frantically. There, the key. I scooped it up and jammed it into the ignition.
“Don’t shoot!” Deirdre screamed. “You might hit my father!” She bounded into the air, all that writhing hair folding back into a single, sharklike swimming tail as she dove, and hit the water with barely a splash.
I turned the key. The old boat’s engine coughed and wheezed.
“Come on,” I breathed. “Come on.”
If I didn’t get this boat moving before Deirdre found her daddy, game over. She’d order her soldiers to open fire. I’d have to raise a shield to stop the bullets, and once I did that the already wonky engine would sure as hell never get moving. I’d be stuck, and it would only be a matter of time before a combination of weariness, mounting pain, number of attackers, and wrathful daughter took me down.
Deirdre surfaced, cast a glance around to orient herself, and dove into the featureless darkness again.
The engine caught, and then turned over drunkenly.
“Boo-ya!” I screamed.
Then I remembered that I hadn’t untied the boat.
I lunged awkwardly up to the front and untied the rope, very much aware of all the guns pointing at me. The boat came free. I pushed off the pole, and the vessel began to sluggishly turn. I hobbled back to the steering wheel, cranked it around, and gave the engine some power. The boat throbbed and then roared and began to gather speed.