The Ultimate Dresden Omnibus, 0-15

by Butcher, Jim

  I stumbled out, wrapped a towel around my waist, seized my blasting rod—just in case what was needed was more explosions—and went running into the living room. The trapdoor leading down to the lab in my subbasement was open, and pink and blue smoke was roiling up out of it in a thick, noxious plume.

  “Hell’s bells,” I choked out, coughing. “Molly!?”

  “Here,” she called back through her own thick coughing. “I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  I opened a couple of the sunken windows, on opposite sides of the room, and the breeze began to thin out the smoke. “What about my lab?”

  “I had it contained when it blew,” she responded more clearly now. “Um. Just … just let me clean up a bit.”

  I eyed the trapdoor. “Molly,” I said warningly.

  “Don’t come down!” she said, her voice near panic. “I’ll have it cleaned up in a second. Okay?”

  I thought about storming down there with a good hard lecture about the importance of not busting up your mentor’s irreplaceable collection of gear, but I took a deep breath instead. If anything had been destroyed, the lecture wouldn’t fix it. And I had only fifteen minutes to make myself look like a human being and find some way to get rid of the smell of Molly’s alchemical misadventure. So I decided to go finish shaving.

  Am I easygoing or what?

  No sooner had I gotten bits of paper stuck to the spots on my face where I’d been in a hurry than someone began hammering on the front door.

  “For crying out loud,” I muttered. “It’s my day off.” I stomped out to the living room and found the smoke mostly gone, if not the smell. Mouse paced along beside me on the way to the door. I unlocked it and wrenched it open, careful to open it only an inch or three, then peered outside.

  Andi and Kirby crouched on the other side of my door. Both of them were dirty, haggard, and entirely covered with scratches. I could tell, because both were also entirely naked.

  Kirby lowered his arm and stared warily at me. Then he let out a low growling sound, which I realized a second later had been meant to be my name. “Harry.”

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I said. “Today?”

  “Harry,” Andi said, her eyes brimming. “Please. I don’t know who else we can turn to.”

  “Dammit!” I snarled. “Dammit, dammit, dammit!” I wrenched the door the rest of the way open and muttered my wards down. “Come in. Hurry up, before someone sees you.”

  Kirby’s nostrils flared as he entered, and his face twisted up in revulsion.

  “Oh,” Andi said as I shut the door. “That smells terrible.”

  “Tell me about it,” I said. “You two look …” Well, I would have used different adjectives for Kirby than for Andi. “A little thrashed. What’s up? You two get in a fight with a barbed wire golem or something?”

  “N-no,” Andi said. “Nothing like that. We’ve had … Kirby and I have … fleas.”

  I blinked.

  Kirby nodded somber agreement and growled something unintelligible.

  I checked the fireplace, which Molly had lit and which was crackling quietly. My coffeepot hung on a swinging arm near the fire, close enough to stay warm without boiling. I went to the pot and checked. She’d put my cup of expensive Starbucks elixir in there to stay warm. If I’d been preparing to murder her, that single act of compassion would have been reason enough to spare her life.

  I poured the coffee into the mug Molly had left on the mantel and slugged some of it back. “Okay, okay,” I said. “Start from the top. Fleas?”

  “I don’t know what else to call them,” Andi said. “When we shift, they’re there, in our fur. Biting and itching. It was just annoying at first, but now … it’s just awful.” She shuddered and began running her fingertips over her shoulders and ribs. “I can feel them right now. Chewing at me. Biting and digging into me.” She shook her head and, with an almost visible effort, forced her hands to be still. “It’s getting hard to th-think straight. To talk. Every time we ch-change, it gets worse.”

  I gulped down a bit of coffee, frowning. That did sound serious. I glanced down at the towel around my waist, and noted, idly, that I was the most heavily clothed person in the room. “All right, let me get dressed,” I said. “I guess at least one of us should have clothes on.”

  Andi looked at me blankly. “What?”

  “Clothes. You’re naked, Andi.”

  She looked down at herself, and then back up at me. “Oh.” A smile spread over her lips, and the angle of her hips shifted slightly and very noticeably. “Maybe you should do something about that.”

  Kirby looked up from where he’d settled down by the fireplace, pure murder in his eyes.

  “Uh,” I said, looking back and forth between them. No question about it—the kids were definitely operating under the influence of something. “I’ll be right back.”

  I threw on some clothes, including my shield bracelet, in case the murderous look on Kirby’s face got upgraded to a murderous lunge, and went back out into the living room. Kirby and Andi were both in front of the fireplace. They were … Well, nuzzling is both polite and generally accurate, even if it doesn’t quite convey the blush factor the two were inspiring, I mean, they’d have been asked to leave any halfway reputable club for that kind of thing.

  I lifted my hand to my eyes for a moment, concentrated, and opened up my Third Eye, my wizard’s Sight. That was always a dicey move. The Sight showed you what truly was, all the patterns of magic and life that existed in the universe, as they truly were—but you got them in permanent ink. You didn’t ever get to forget what you saw, no matter how bad it was. Still, if something was chewing up my friends, I needed to know about it. They were worth the risk.

  I opened my eyes and immediately saw the thick bands of power that I’d laid into the very walls of my apartment when I’d built up its magical defenses. Further layers of power surrounded my lab in a second shell of insulating magic, beneath my feet. From his perch atop one of my bookshelves, Mister, the cat, appeared exactly as he always did, evidently beyond the reach of such petty concerns as the mere forces that created the universe, though my dog, Mouse, was surrounded by a calm, steady aurora of silver and blue light.

  More to the point, Kirby and Andi were both engulfed in a number of different shimmering energies—the flame-colored tinges of lust and passion foremost among them, for obvious reason, but those weren’t the only energies at play. Greenish energy that struck me as something primal and wild, that essence of the instinct of the wolf they’d been taught by the genuine article, maybe, remained strong all around them, as did an undercurrent of pink-purple fear. Whatever was happening to them, it was scaring the hell out of both of them, even if they weren’t able to do anything about it, at the moment.

  The golden lightning of a practitioner at work also flickered through their auras—which shouldn’t have been happening. Oh, the Alphas all had a lot more talent than Darth Wannabe and his playmates. That went without saying. But they had become extremely focused upon a single use of their magic—shapeshifting into a wolf, which is a lot more complicated and difficult and useful than it looks or sounds. But that kind of activity should only have been working if they were actually in the process of changing shape—and they weren’t.

  I stepped closer, peering intently, and saw something I rather wouldn’t have.

  Creatures clung to both of them—tiny, tiny things, dozens of them. To my Sight, they looked something like tiny crabs, hard-shelled little things with oversized pincers that ripped and tore into their spiritual flesh—tearing out tiny pieces that each contained a single glowing mote of both green and gold energy.

  “Ah!” I said. “Aha! You’ve got psychophagic mites!”

  Andi and Kirby both jumped in shock. I guess they hadn’t noticed me coming closer, being fully occupied with … Oh, wow. They’d sort of segued into NC-17 activities.

  “Wh-what?” Andi managed to say.

  “Psychophagic …” I shook my head,
dismissing my Sight with an effort of will. “Psychic parasites. They’ve latched onto you from the Nevernever. They’re exerting an influence on you both, pushing you to indulge your, um, more basic and primitive behavior patterns, and feeding on the energy of them.”

  Andi dragged lust-glazed eyes from Kirby to me. “Primitive … ?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I nodded to them. “Hence the two of you, um. And I imagine they make you want to change form.”

  Andi’s eyelids fluttered. “Yes. Yes, that sounds lovely.” She shook her head slightly and came to her feet, her eyes suddenly glimmering with tears. “Is it … Can you make them go away?”

  I put a reassuring hand on her shoulder. “I can’t figure out how they would have gotten there in the first place. I mean, these things are only attracted to very specific kinds of energy. And you’d only be vulnerable to them when you were actually drawing upon the matter of the Nevernever—when you were shifted. And”—I blinked and then rubbed at my forehead—“Andi. Please don’t tell me that you and Kirby have been getting down while you were fuzzy.”

  The bombshell blushed, from the roots of her hair to the tips of her … toes.

  “God, that’s just … so wrong.” I shook my head. “But to answer your question, yes, I think that—”

  “Harry?” Molly called from the lab. “Um. Do you have a fire extinguisher?”

  “What!?”

  “I mean, if I needed one!” she amended, her voice quavering. “Hypothetically speaking!”

  “Hypothetically speaking?” I half shouted. “Molly! Did you set my lab on fire?!”

  Andi, a distracted expression on her face, idly lifted my hand from her shoulder and slid my index finger between her lips, suckling gently. A pleasant flicker of lightning shot up my arm, and I felt it all the way to the bottoms of my feet.

  “Oh, hey, ho-ho-ho! Hold on there,” I said, pulling my finger away. It came out of her mouth with another intriguing sensation and a soft popping sound. “Andi. Ahem. We really need to focus, here.”

  Kirby let out a raw snarl and hit me with a right cross that sent me tumbling back across the room and into one of my bookshelves. I rebounded off it, fell on my ass, and sat there stunned for a second as copies of the Black Company novels fell from the shelf and bounced off my head.

  I looked up to see Kirby seize Andi by the wrist and jerk her back behind him, placing his body between her and me in a gesture of raw possession. Then he balled up his hands into fists, snarled, and took a step toward me.

  Mouse loomed up beside me then, two hundred pounds of shaggy grey muscle. He didn’t growl at Kirby, or so much as bare his teeth. He did, however, stand directly in Kirby’s path and face him without backing down.

  Without blinking, Kirby’s body seemed to shimmer and flow, and suddenly a black wolf nearly Mouse’s size, but leaner and swifter looking, crouched across the apartment, white teeth bared, amber eyes glowing with rage.

  Holy crap. Kirby was about half a second from losing it, and he had the skill and experience to cause some real mayhem. I mean, taking on an animal is one thing. Taking on an animal directed by a human intelligence with years of experience in battling the supernatural is a challenge at least an order of magnitude greater. If it came down to a fight, a real fight, between me and Kirby, I was sure I could beat him, but to do it I’d have to hit him fast and hard, without pulling any punches.

  I was not at all confident that I could beat him without killing him.

  “Kirby,” I said, trying to keep my voice as low and steady as I could. “Kirby, man, think about this for a minute. It’s Harry. Listen, man, this is Harry, and you’ve just blown your willpower check, like, completely. You need to take a deep breath and get some perspective here. You’re my friend, you’re under the influence, and I’m trying to help you.”

  “Harry?” Molly called out, her voice higher-pitched than ever. “Acid doesn’t eat through concrete, right?”

  I blinked at the trapdoor and screamed in frustration, “Hell’s bells, what are you doing down there?!”

  Kirby took another pace forward, wolf eyes bright, jaws slavering, head held low and ready for a fight. Behind him, Andi was watching the whole thing with a wide-eyed look that mixed terror, lust, excitement, and rage in equal parts, her impressive chest heaving. Her hands and lower arms had already begun to slowly change, sprouting curling russet fur, her nails lengthening into dark claws. Her eyes traveled to me and her mouth dropped open, revealing fangs that were already beginning to grow.

  Super. In a fight against Kirby, I was worried about him not surviving. Against Kirby and Andi, in these quarters, it would be me who was running against long odds.

  But I try to be an optimist: At least things weren’t going to get any worse.

  Above and behind me, a window broke.

  A length of lead pipe, maybe a foot long, capped at both ends with plastic, landed on a rug five feet away from me. Cheap, Mardi Gras- style beads were wrapped around it.

  A lit fuse sparked and fizzed at one end of the pipe.

  It was maybe half an inch away from vanishing into the cap.

  “But this is my day off!” I howled.

  I know things looked bad. But I honestly think I could have handled it if Mister hadn’t picked that exact moment to leap down from his perch and go streaking across the room, acting upon some feline imperative unknown and unknowable to mere mortals.

  Kirby, already on the edge of a feral frenzy, did what any canine would do—he let out a snarl and gave immediate chase.

  Mouse let out a sudden bellow of rage—for crying out loud, he hadn’t gotten that worked up over me being in danger—and launched himself after Kirby. Andi, upon seeing Mouse in pursuit of her fellow werewolf, shifted entirely to her own wolf shape and flung herself after Mouse.

  Mister rocketed around my tiny apartment, with several hundred pounds of furious canine in pursuit. Kirby bounded over and around furniture almost as nimbly as Mister. Mouse didn’t bother with nimble. He simply plowed through whatever was in the way, smashing my coffee table and one easy chair, knocking over another bookcase, and churning the throw rugs on the floor into hummocks of fabric and fiber.

  I leapt for the pipe bomb and picked it up, only to have my legs scythed out from beneath me by Kirby as he went by. Mouse accidently slammed a paw bearing his full weight down onto me as he rumbled past in pursuit, and got me right where the damn dog always gets a man. There was none of that delayed-reaction component to the pain, either. My testicles began reporting the damage instantly, loudly, and in nauseating intensity.

  I had no time for pain. I lunged for the pipe bomb and nearly wet my pants as another explosion shook the floor—only this one was followed an instant later by an absolute flood of bright green smoke that billowed up from the lab.

  I grabbed the pipe bomb and tried to pluck out the fuse, but it vanished into the cap and beyond the reach of my fingers. In a panic, I scrabbled across the floor to the door and ripped it open with terrified strength. I hauled back to throw the thing out and—

  There was a sharp burst of sound.

  My hand exploded into pins and needles.

  I fell limply to the floor, my head falling in such a way as to bring my gaze over to where my hand had been clutching the pipe bomb a few seconds before and—

  And I was still holding it now, unharmed. Heavy jets of scarlet and purple smoke were billowing wildly from both ends of the pipe, scented heavily with a familiar odor.

  Smoke bombs.

  The freaking thing had been loaded with something remarkably similar to Fourth of July smoke bombs, the kind kids play with. Bemused, I tugged one plastic cap off, and several little expended canisters fell out along with a note: The next time you interfere with me, more than smoke will interfere with you.

  More than smoke will interfere with you?

  Who talks like that?

  Mouse roared, snapping my focus back to the here and now, as he pounced onto Kirby’s back, smashin
g the werewolf to the floor by dint of sheer mass. Mister, sensing his opening, shot out the front door with a yowl of disapproval and vanished into the outdoors, seeking a safer environment, like maybe traffic.

  Andi leapt onto Mouse’s back, fangs ripping, but my dog held fast to Kirby—buying me a couple of precious seconds. I seized a bit of chalk from the basket by the door and, choking on smoke, ran in a circle around the embattled trio, drawing a line of chalk on the concrete floor. Then I willed the circle closed, and the magical construct snapped into existence, a silent and invisible field of energy that, among other things, completely severed the connection between the psychic parasites in the Nevernever and the werewolves whaling on my dog.

  The fight stopped abruptly. Kirby and Andi both blinked their eyes several times and hurriedly removed their fangs from Mouse’s hide. A few seconds later, they shimmered and resumed their human forms.

  “Don’t move!” I snapped at them, infuriated to no end. “Any of you! Don’t break the circle or you’ll go nuts again! Sit! Stay!”

  That last was for Mouse.

  Mostly.

  I couldn’t see what Molly had done to my lab, but the fumes down there were cloying and obviously dangerous. I hauled myself over to the trapdoor.

  Molly hadn’t made it up the folding staircase and just lay sprawled semiconscious against it. I had to grab her and haul her up the stairs. She was undressed from the waist up. I spotted her shirt and bra on the floor near the worktable, both of them riddled with acid-burned holes.

  I got her laid out on her back, elevated her feet on a stray cushion from the smashed easy chair, and checked her breathing. It didn’t take long, because she wasn’t, though she did still have a faint pulse. I started rescue breathing for her—which is a lot more demanding than people think. Especially when the air is still thick with the smell of God only knows what chemical combinations.

  I finally got her to cough, and my racing heartbeat subsided a little as she began breathing again, raggedly, and opened her eyes.