by Butcher, Jim
“Matter of time, my lad,” Binder said, winking. He stooped and picked up a single piece of gravel. He bounced it thoughtfully on his palm and eyed us. “See, there’s a bit of competition for this contract, and it’s a fair bit of quid. So I’m willing to give you a chance to make my job easier in exchange for considerations.”
“What considerations?” I asked.
He held up the pebble between his thumb and forefinger. “I won’t pitch this into your circle and break it. That way, my lads won’t need to kill you both—and won’t that be nice?”
Behind Binder, down at the end of the row of storage units, the dust stirred. Something unseen moved across the gravel. Given how my life had been going, odds were good that it couldn’t be a good thing. Unless . . .
“Come on, Binder,” I said. “Don’t be a simp. What makes you think I won’t ask the lady here to put a bullet through that empty spot in your head where your brain’s supposed to go?”
“She does that, she lowers the circle, and my lads tear you apart,” Binder replied.
“That won’t be your problem, by then,” I said.
Binder grinned at me. “All of us go down in a blaze of gory, is it?”
Murphy calmly raised her gun and settled it on Binder’s face.
Binder faced her, his grin never fading. “Now, little lady. Don’t you be doing nothing you’ll regret. Without my, ah, personal guidance, my lads here will tear this good gentleman’s throat out right quick. But they’re considerably less, ah, professional with ladies.” His grin faded. “And you, miss, do not want to know what they’re like when they’re not professional.”
Fingers and slimy tongues and fangs continued pressing against the outer edge of the circle’s protective field.
Murphy didn’t let it show on her face, but I saw her shudder.
“Decision time, miss,” Binder said. “Either pull that trigger, right now, and live with what happens—or put it down like a proper lady and work through this politely.”
Murphy’s eyes narrowed at his comments. “For all I know, you’re about to toss that rock at us. I think I’ll keep the gun right where it is.”
“Bear something else in mind, Binder,” I said. “I know that you think you can just have your pets step in front of you and throw the rock from behind a wall of them, but think about what happens to you if you kill me.”
“Your death curse, is it?” he asked. Binder raised his hands and flattened his palms against his cheek in mock horror. “Oh no. A death curse. Whatever shall I do?”
I faced him with a chilly little smile. “You’ll spend the rest of your life unable to use magic, I think,” I said in a quiet, hopefully confident-sounding voice. “When I die, I take away your power. Forever. No more summoning. No more binding.”
Binder’s expression began to flatten out into neutrality.
“You ever had a job that you liked, Binder?” I asked him. “I’m betting you haven’t. I’ve read your file. You’re the kind who likes to sleep late, spend a lot of money impressing people. Always buys room service, always with the champagne. And you like the women the money gets you.” I shook my head. “How many bottles of champagne you think you’ll be able to afford when a paper hat becomes part of your professional wear? You’ve got enough talent to live a nice, long life, man. As a nobody.”
He stared at me in silence for a second. “You can’t do that,” Binder said. “Take away my talent. That isn’t possible.”
“I’m a wizard of the White Council, Binder. Not some stupid hack who spent his life using his gift to hurt people. Do you think we go around advertising everything we can do? If you knew half the things I’ve done that you think are impossible, you’d already be running.”
Binder faced me, beads of sweat suddenly standing out on his jowls.
“So I’d think real careful before I threw that rock, Binder. Real careful.”
A police siren sounded, from fairly nearby.
I smiled, showing teeth. “Hey, cops. This’ll get interesting.”
“You?” he asked, incredulously. “You’d bring the cops into a private matter?”
I pointed a finger sideways at Murphy, who produced her badge and tucked the back of its folder into her belt, so that the shield faced Binder.
“Already did,” Murphy said.
“Besides, the whole reason I picked this joint was how heavily the neighborhood was policed,” I said. “One gunshot and nobody reports anything. Half a dozen and people get nervous.”
Binder’s eyes narrowed, and he looked from us toward the front of the park.
“Tick-tock,” I said, applying the pressure as hard as I could. “It’s just a matter of time, my lad.”
Binder looked around him again, then shook his head and sighed. “Balls. It’s always messy when I have to deal with the cops. Idiots dying by the truckload. Buckets of blood.” He gestured at his men. “Identical suspects fleeing in all directions. Everyone out chasing them, and more people dying when they manage to catch them.” He stared hard at me. “How about it, wizard? Cop? Maybe you’ve got stones enough to take it when I threaten you. I can admire that.”
My stomach got a little sinking feeling. I had been counting out seconds, hoping that my nerves didn’t make me rush. There should have been enough time by now.
“How about those policemen? You willing to have their deaths on your conscience?” He rolled his neck a little, like a prizefighter warming up. “Because I’ll tell you right now that they aren’t going to stop me.”
I put my hand out and touched Murphy’s wrist. She glanced aside at me, and then lowered the gun.
“That’s better,” Binder said. There was no hint of jocularity in his manner now. “All I want is the Warden. He’s a dead man already, and you know it. What does it matter who takes him?”
Something stirred at the end of the row, behind Binder, and I started smiling.
“I’ve got no quarrel with you or with this town,” Binder continued. “Tell me where he is, I’ll leave peaceful, and Bob’s your uncle.”
Murphy drew in a sharp breath.
“Okay,” I said. “He’s right behind you.”
Binder’s smile, this time, was positively vulpine. “Dresden. We have a bit of banter going between us. We’re both here in a moment where neither of us wants to act rashly. And that’s all good fun. It’s one of the little things that makes a day more enjoyable.” His voice hardened. “But don’t do me the incredibly insulting disservice of assuming that I’m a bloody moron.”
“I’m not,” I told him. “He’s about forty feet behind you. In a wheelchair.”
Binder gave me a gimlet stare. Then he rolled his eyes and shot a brief glance over his shoulder—then did a double take as his mouth dropped open.
Morgan sat in his wheelchair about forty feet away from Binder, my shotgun in his hands. Mouse stood beside the chair, focused intently upon Binder and his minions, his body tensed and ready to spring forward.
“Hello, Binder,” Morgan said in a flat, merciless tone of voice. “Now, Miss Carpenter.”
Molly appeared out of literally nowhere as she dropped the veil she’d been holding over herself since I’d first seen her moving at the beginning of the conversation with Binder. She was holding my spare blasting rod in her hand, its far end covered with pale dust from being dragged through the gravel. She knelt beside the long, lazy arc of the circle she’d drawn in the dust and touched her hand to it, frowning in concentration.
Circles of power are basic stuff, really. Practically anyone can make one if they know how to do it, and learning how to properly establish a circle is the first thing any apprentice is taught. Circles create boundaries that isolate the area inside from the magical energies of the world outside. That’s why Binder’s minions couldn’t cross the plane of the circle I’d drawn on the ground—their bodies were made up of ectoplasm, held into a solid form by magical energy. The circle cut off that energy when they tried to cross it.
As
it sprang to life at my apprentice’s will, Molly’s circle did the same thing as mine—only this time the grey suits were inside it. As the energy field rose up, it cut off the grey suits from the flow of energy they needed to maintain their solid forms.
And suddenly the next best thing to forty demonic thugs collapsed into splatters of transparent gook.
Binder let out a cry as it happened, spinning around desperately, mumbling some kind of incantation under his breath—but he should have saved himself the effort. If he wanted them back, he would have to get out of the isolating field of the enormous circle first, and then he would have to start from scratch.
“Ow, Binder,” I said in patently false empathy. “Didn’t see that one coming, did ya?”
“Ernest Armand Tinwhistle,” Morgan thundered in a tone of absolute authority, raising the shotgun to his shoulder. “Surrender yourself or face destruction, you worthless little weasel.”
Binder’s intense grey-green eyes went from Morgan to the two of us. Then he seemed to reach some kind of conclusion and charged us like a bull, his head down, his arms pumping.
Murphy’s gun tracked to him, but with a curse she jerked the barrel up and away from Binder. He slammed a shoulder into her chest, knocking her down, even as I received a stiff arm in the belly.
I threw a leg at his as he went by, but I was off balance from the shove, and although I wound up on my ass, I forced him to stumble for a step or three. Murphy took the impact with fluid grace, tumbled onto her back, rolled smoothly over one shoulder, and came back up on her feet.
“Get them out of here,” she snarled as she spun and took off at a sprint after Binder.
Mouse came pounding up to my side, staring after Murphy with worried doggy eyes, then glancing at me.
“No,” I told him. “Watch this.”
Binder was running as hard as he could, but I doubted he had been all that light on his feet when he was young, much less twenty years and forty pounds later. Murphy worked out practically every day.
She caught him about ten feet before the end of the row, timed her steps for a second, and then sharply kicked his rearmost leg just as he lifted it to take his next step. His foot got caught on the back of his own calf as a result, and he went down in a sprawl.
Binder came to his feet with an explosive snarl of rage and whirled on Murphy. He flung a handful of gravel at her face, and then waded in with heavy, looping punches.
Murph ducked her head down and kept the gravel out of her eyes, slipped aside from one punch, and then seized his wrist on the second. The two of them whirled in a brief half circle, Binder let out a yelp, and then his bald head slammed into the steel door of a storage unit. I had to give the guy credit for physical toughness. He rebounded from the door a little woozily, but drove an elbow back at Murphy’s head.
Murphy caught that arm and continued the motion, using her own body as a fulcrum in a classic hip throw—except that Binder was facing in the opposite direction than usual for that technique.
You could hear his arm come out of its socket fifty feet away.
And then he hit the gravel face-first.
Binder got extra points for brains in my book, after that: he lay still and didn’t put up a struggle as Murphy dragged his wrists behind his back and cuffed him.
I traded a glance with Mouse and said, wisely, “Hard-core.”
The police sirens were getting louder. Murphy looked up at them, and then down the row at me. She made an exasperated shooing motion.
“Come on,” I said to Mouse. The two of us hurried down the row to Morgan’s chair.
“I couldn’t shoot him with this scatter pipe with the two of you standing there,” Morgan complained as I approached. “Why didn’t you do it?”
“That’s why,” I said, nodding to the park entrance, where a patrol car was screeching to a halt, its blue bubbles flashing. “They get all funny about corpses with gunshot wounds in them.” I turned to scowl at Molly. “I told you to bug out at the first sign of danger.”
She took the handles of Morgan’s wheelchair and we all started back toward the storage unit and its portal. “We didn’t know what was going on until we heard them all start shrieking,” she protested. “And then Mouse went nuts, and started trying to dig his way through a metal door. I thought you might be in trouble. And you were.”
“That isn’t the point,” I said. I glanced at the circle drawn in the gravel as we crossed it, breaking it and releasing its power. “Whose idea was the circle?”
“Mine,” Morgan said calmly. “Circle traps are a standard tactic for dealing with rogue summoners.”
“I’m sorry it took so long to draw,” Molly said. “But I had to make it big enough to get them all.”
“Not a problem. He was happy to kill time running his mouth.” We all entered the storage bay, and I rolled the door closed behind us. “You did good, grasshopper.”
Molly beamed.
I looked around us and said, “Hey. Where’s Thomas?”
“The vampire?” Morgan asked.
“I had him watching the outside of the park, just in case,” I said.
Morgan gave me a disgusted look and rolled himself forward toward the prepared portal into the Nevernever. “The vampire goes missing just before a bounty hunter who couldn’t possibly know my location turns up. And you’re actually surprised, Dresden?”
“Thomas called me and told me there was trouble,” I said, my voice tight. “If he hadn’t, you’d have been drowning in grey suits by now.”
Molly chewed her lip worriedly and shook her head. “Harry . . . I haven’t seen him since he dropped us off.”
I glanced back toward the entrance of the park, clenching my teeth.
Where was he?
If he’d been able to do otherwise, Thomas would never have let Murphy and me fight alone against Binder’s minions. He would have been right in there beside us. Except he hadn’t been.
Why not? Had circumstances forced him to leave before I arrived? Or worse, had someone else involved in the current crisis decided to take measures against him? Psycho bitch Madeline came uncomfortably to mind. And the skinwalker had already demonstrated that it was happy to murder my allies instead of striking directly at me.
Or maybe he’d simply been overwhelmed by a crowd of grey-suited demons. Maybe his body was already cooling in some nook or cranny of the storage park. My mouth went dry at the thought.
Hell’s bells.
What had happened to my brother?
Morgan spoke a quiet word and opened a shimmering rectangular portal in the floor. Molly walked over to it and stared down, impressed.
“Dresden,” Morgan said. “We can’t afford to become entangled with the local authorities.”
I wanted to scream at him, but he was right. More sirens had closed in on the park. We had to leave. I grabbed the handles to Morgan’s chair, started for the portal, and said, “Let’s go, people.”
Dammit, Thomas, I snarled to myself. Where the hell are you?
Chapter Twenty
The portal in my hideaway opened three steps from the trail in the Nevernever, all right, but those three steps weren’t handicapped-accessible. Molly and I each had to get under one of Morgan’s arms and half carry him to the trail. I left Molly and Mouse with him, went back and got the wheelchair, and dragged it up the frozen slope to a path that was all but identical to the one I’d been on earlier.
We loaded Morgan into the wheelchair again. He was pale and shaking by the time we were finished. I laid a hand against his forehead. It was hot with fever.
Morgan jerked his head away from my fingers, scowling.
“What is it?” Molly asked. She had thought to grab both coats I’d had waiting, and had already put one of them on.
“He’s burning up,” I said quietly. “Butters said that could mean the wound had been infected.”
“I’m fine,” Morgan said, shivering.
Molly helped him into the second coat, looking
around at the frozen, haunted wood with nervous eyes. “Shouldn’t we get him out of the cold, then?”
“Yeah,” I said, buttoning my duster shut. “It’s maybe ten minutes from here to the downtown portal.”
“Does the vampire know about that, too?” Morgan growled.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“That you’d be walking into an obvious trap, Dresden.”
“All right, that’s it,” I snapped. “One more comment about Thomas and you’re going body sledding.”
“Thomas?” Morgan’s pale face turned a little darker as he raised his voice. “How many corpses is it going to take to make you come to your senses, Dresden?”
Molly swallowed. “Harry, um, excuse me.”
Both of us glared at her.
She flushed and avoided eye contact. “Isn’t this the Nevernever?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Obviously,” Morgan said at the same time.
We faced each other again, all but snarling.
“Okay,” Molly said. “Haven’t you told me that it’s sort of dangerous?” She took a deep breath and hurried her speech. “I mean, you know. Isn’t it sort of dumb to be standing here arguing in loud voices? All things considered?”
I suddenly felt somewhat foolish.
Morgan’s glower waned. He bowed his head wearily, folding his arms across his belly.
“Yeah,” I said, reining in my own temper. “Yeah, probably so.”
“Not least because anyone who comes through the Ways from Edinburgh to Chicago is going to walk right over us,” Morgan added.
Molly nodded. “Which would be sort of . . . awkward?”
I snorted quietly. I nodded my head in the proper direction, and started pushing the wheelchair down the trail. “This way.”
Molly followed, her eyes darting left and right at the sounds of movement in the faerie wood around us. Mouse fell into pace beside her, and she reached down to lay a hand on the dog’s back as she walked, an entirely unconscious gesture.
We moved at a steady pace and in almost complete silence for maybe five minutes before I said, “We need to know how they found out about you.”