by Butcher, Jim
Well. I couldn’t argue with that, but the words made Anastasia’s eyes narrow dangerously.
Lara leaned the heels of her hands on her desk and faced me, her words clipped and precise. “You think you can simply walk into my home and issue commands and threats as it pleases you? The world is changing, Wardens. The Council isn’t changing with it. It’s only a matter of time before it collapses under its own obsolescent weight. This kind of high-handed arrogance will only—”
She broke off suddenly, turning toward the window, her head tilted slightly to one side.
I blinked and traded a glance with Anastasia.
An instant later, the lights went out.
Red emergency lights snapped on immediately, though they weren’t needed in the office. A few seconds after that, a rapid, steady chiming sound filled the room, coming from speakers on the wall.
I looked down from the speaker to find Lara staring intently at me.
“What’s happening?” I asked her.
Her eyes widened slightly. “You don’t know?”
“How the hell should I know?” I demanded, exasperated. “It’s your stupid alarm system!”
“Then this isn’t your doing.” She gritted her teeth. “Bloody hell.”
Her head whipped toward the window again and this time I heard it—the sound of a man screaming in high-pitched, shameless agony.
And then I felt it: a nauseating quiver of wrongness in the air, a hideous sense of the presence of something ancient and vile.
The skinwalker.
“We’re under attack,” Lara snarled. “Come with me.”
Chapter Twenty-five
Justine knocked and entered the room, her eyes wide. “Ms. Raith?” “Security status?” Lara asked in a calm voice.
“Unknown,” Justine said. She was breathing a little too fast. “The alarm went off and I called Mr. Jones, but the radios cut out.”
“Most of your electronics are probably gone. You’ve been hexed,” I said. “It’s a skinwalker.”
Lara turned and stared hard at me. “Are you sure?”
Anastasia nodded and drew the sword from her hip. “I feel it, too.”
Lara nodded. “What can it do?”
“Everything I can, only better,” I said. “And it’s a shapeshifter. Very fast, very strong.”
“Can it be killed?”
“Yeah,” I said. “But it’s probably smarter to run.”
Lara narrowed her eyes. “This thing has invaded my home and hurt my people. Like hell.” She turned, drove her fist with moderate force into a wooden wall panel and dislodged it completely. In the empty space behind the panel was a rack hung with a belt bearing two wavy-bladed swords and a machine pistol, like a baby Uzi. She kicked out of her expensive shoes, shrugged out of her coat, and began strapping on weapons. “Justine, how many of the blood are in the house?”
“Four, counting you,” Justine replied immediately. “Your sisters, Elisa and Natalia, and your cousin Madeline.”
She nodded. “Wardens,” she said. “If you would not mind delaying our argument for a time, I would take it as a personal favor.”
“Hell with that,” I said. “This thing killed one of my friends.”
Lara glanced at the two of us. “I propose a temporary alliance against this invader.”
“Concur,” Anastasia said sharply.
“Doesn’t look like there’s any way to get out of it,” I said.
Gunfire erupted somewhere in the halls—multiple automatic weapons all going off at the same time.
Then there were more screams.
“Justine,” I said, holding out my hand. “Get behind me.”
The young woman hurried to comply, her expression strained but controlled.
Anastasia took up position on my right and Lara slid up next to me on the left. Her perfume was exquisite, and the surge of lust that hit me as I breathed it nearly had me turning to take a bite out of her, she smelled so good.
“It’s fast and tough,” I said. “And smart. But not invulnerable. We hit it from several directions at once and ran it off.”
A shotgun boomed, much closer to us than the earlier gunfire had been. It was immediately followed by the sounds of something heavy being slammed several times into the walls and floor.
The psychic stench of the skinwalker abruptly thickened and I said, “Here it comes!”
By the time I got to “it,” the skinwalker was already through the door to the outer office, seemingly moving faster than the splinters that flew off the door when the creature shattered it. Covered in a veil, it was just a flickering blur in the air.
I brought my shield up, focused far forward, filling the doorway to Lara’s office with invisible force. The skinwalker hit the barrier with all of its strength and speed. The shield held—barely—but so much energy had gone into the impact that wisps of smoke began curling up from the bracelet, and the skin on my wrist got singed. So much force surged into my shield that it physically drove me back across a foot of carpet.
As it hit, the energies of the skinwalker’s veil came into conflict with those in my shield, each canceling out the other, and for a second the creature was visible as an immensely tall, lean, shaggy, vaguely humanoid thing with matted yellow hair and overlong forelimbs tipped in long, almost delicate claws.
As the shield fell, Anastasia pointed a finger at the thing and hissed a word, and a blindingly bright beam of light no thicker than a hair flashed out from her finger. It was fire magic not unlike my own, but infinitely more intense and focused and far more energy efficient. The beam swept past the skinwalker, intersecting with its upper left arm, and where it touched fur burned away and flesh boiled and bubbled and blackened.
The skinwalker flashed to one side of the doorway and vanished, leaving nothing behind but a view of the smoking pinprick hole in the expensive paneling of the outer office.
I pointed my staff at the door and Lara did the same thing with the gun.
For maybe ten seconds, everything was silent.
“Where is it?” Lara hissed.
“Gone?” Justine suggested. “Maybe it got scared when Warden Luccio hurt it.”
“No, it didn’t,” I said. “It’s smart. Right now it’s looking for a better way to get to us.”
I looked around the office, trying to think like the enemy. “Let’s see,” I said. “If I was a shapeshifting killing machine, how would I get in here?”
The options were limited. There was the door in front of us and the window behind us. I turned to face the window, still looking. Silence reigned, except for the sigh of the air-conditioning, billowing steadily into the office from the—
From the vents.
I turned and thrust my staff toward a large air vent, covered with the usual slatted steel contraption, drew forth my will, and screamed, “Fulminos!”
Chapter Twenty-six
Here’s something a lot of people don’t know: being choked unconscious hurts.
There’s this horrible, crushing pain on your neck, followed by an almost instant surge of terrible pressure that feels like it’s going to blow your head to tiny pieces from the inside. That’s the blood that’s being trapped in your brain. The pain surges and ebbs in time with your heartbeat, which is probably racing.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a waifish supermodel or a steroid-popping professional wrestler, because it isn’t an issue of strength or willpower—it’s simple physiology. If you’re human and you need to breathe, you’re going down. A properly applied choke will take you from feisty to unconscious in four or five seconds.
Of course, if the choker wants to make the victim hurt more, they can be sloppy about the choke, make it take longer.
I’ll let you guess which the skinwalker preferred.
I struggled, but I might as well have saved myself the effort. I couldn’t break the grip on my neck. The pile of rubble shifted and surged, and then the skinwalker sat up out of the wreckage, sloughing it off as easi
ly as an arctic wolf emerging from a bed beneath the snow. The skinwalker’s nightmarishly long arms hung below its knees, so as it began moving down the hallway, I was able to get my hands and knees underneath me, at least part of the time, preventing my neck from snapping under the strain of supporting my own weight.
I heard boots hitting hardwood. The skinwalker let out a chuckling little growl and casually slammed my head against the wall. Stars and fresh pain flooded my perceptions. Then I felt myself falling through the air and landing in a tumble of arms and legs that only seemed to be connected to me in the technical sense.
I lifted dazed eyes to see the security guy from the entrance hall come around the corner, that little machine gun held to his shoulder, his cheek resting against the stock so that the barrel pointed wherever his eyes were focused. When he saw the skinwalker, uncovered from its veil, he stopped in his tracks. To his credit, he couldn’t have hesitated for more than a fraction of a second before he opened fire.
Bullets zipped down the hall, so close that I could have reached out a hand and touched them. The skinwalker flung itself to one side, a golden-furred blur, and rebounded off the wall toward the gunman, its form changing. Then it leapt into the air, flipping its body as it did, and suddenly a spider the size of a subcompact car was racing along the ceiling toward the security guy.
At that point, he impressed me again. He turned and ran, sprinting around a corner with the skinwalker coming hard behind.
“Now!” someone called, as the skinwalker reached the intersection of the two hallways, and a sudden howl of thunder filled the hallways with noise and light. Bullets ripped into the floor, the wall, and the ceiling, coming from some point out of sight around the corner, filling the air with splinters of shattered hardwood.
The skinwalker let out a deafening caterwaul of pain and boundless fury. The gunfire reached a thunderous, frantic crescendo.
Then men began screaming.
I tried to push myself to my feet, but someone had set the hallway on tumble dry, and I fell down again. I kept trying. Whoever had made the hall start acting like a Laundromat dryer had to run out of quarters eventually. By using the wall, I managed to make it to my knees.
I heard a soft sound behind me. I turned my head blearily toward the source of the noise and saw three pale, lithe forms drop silently from the floors above through the hole that the skinwalker had made. The first was Lara Raith. She’d torn her skirt up one side, almost all the way to her hip, and when she landed in a silent crouch, she looked cold and feral and dangerous with her sword in one hand and her machine pistol in the other.
The other two women were vampires as well, their pale skin shining with eerie beauty, their eyes glittering like polished silver coins—the sisters Justine had mentioned, I presumed. I guess I’d arrived in the middle of the night, vampire time, and gotten some people out of bed. The first sister wore nothing but weapons and silver body piercings, which gleamed on one eyebrow, one nostril, her lower lip, and her nipples. Her dark hair had been cropped close to her head except for where her bangs fell to veil one of her eyes, and she carried a pair of wavy-bladed swords like Lara’s.
The second seemed to be taller and more muscular than the other two. She wore what looked like a man’s shirt, closed with only a single button. Her long hair was a mess, still tousled from sleep, and she held an exotic-looking axe in her hands, its blade honed along a concave edge instead of the more conventional convex one.
Without any visible signal, they all started prowling forward at the same time—and it was a prowl, an atavistic, feline motion that carried what were very clearly predators forward in total silence. Lara paused when she reached me, glanced over my injuries with cold silver eyes and whispered, “Stay down.”
No problem, I thought dully. Down is easy.
Chapter Twenty-seven
Lara took charge of the aftermath.
A dozen security guards were dead, another dozen maimed and crippled. The walls in the hallway where the guards had sprung their ambush were so covered in blood that it looked like they had been painted red. At least a dozen more personnel hadn’t been able to reach the battle before it was over, it had all happened so swiftly—which meant that there was someone available to help stabilize the wounded and clean up the bodies.
The skinwalker’s hex had effectively destroyed every radio and cell phone in the Château, but the land lines, based on much older, simpler technology, were still up. Lara called in a small army of other employees, including the medical staff that the Raiths kept on retainer.
I sat with my back against the wall while all this happened, a little apart from the activity. It seemed appropriate. My head hurt. When scratching an itch, I noticed that there was a wide stripe of mostly dried blood covering my left ear and spreading down my neck. Must have been a scalp wound. They bleed like crazy.
After some indeterminately fuzzy length of time, I looked up to see Lara supervising the movement of her two wounded relatives. The two vampires were liberally smeared with their own blood, and both were senseless. When they were carried off in stretchers, the medics began helping wounded security guards, and Lara walked over to me.
She knelt down in front of me, her pale grey eyes concealing whatever thought was behind them. “Can you stand, wizard?”
“Can,” I said. “Don’t want to.”
She lifted her chin slightly and looked down at me, one hand on her hip. “What have you gotten my little brother involved in?”
“Wish I knew,” I said. “I’m still trying to figure out where the bullets are coming from.”
She folded her arms. “The doomed warrior. The skinwalker meant the fugitive Warden, I presume.”
“It’s one way to interpret that.”
Lara studied me intently and suddenly smiled, showing neat white teeth. “You have him. He came to you for help.”
“Why the hell would you think that?” I asked.
“Because people in hopeless situations come to you for help on a regular basis. And you help them. It’s what you do.” She tapped her chin with one finger. “Now, to decide what is more advantageous. To play along with the skinwalker’s demands. Or to write Thomas off as a loss, take the Warden from you, and turn him into fresh political capital for those who are hunting him. There is a rather substantial reward for his capture or death.”
I eyed her dully. “You’re going to play along. You’re hoping that you’ll be able to act reluctant and get some concessions from me in exchange for your cooperation, but you’re going to give it to me anyway.”
“And why should I do that?” Lara asked.
“Because after the coup attempt in the Deeps, Thomas is a White Court celebrity. If you let some big bad shagnasty come along and kill him after it openly defies you in your own home, you look weak. We both know you can’t live with that.”
“And by giving in to his demands, I avoid the appearance of weakness?” she asked skeptically. “No, Dresden.”
“Damn right, no,” I said. “You’re going to play along, set Shagnasty up, and then take him out in the true, treacherous tradition of the White Court. You get Thomas back. You lay low a heavyweight. You gain status among your own folk.”
She narrowed her eyes at me, her expression giving me no hint to the direction of her thoughts. Then she said, “And when that is done, what if I should take the Warden and turn him over to the White Council myself? It would be a formidable bargaining chip to bring to the table with your folk in the future.”
“Sure it would. But you won’t do that.”
“Won’t I?” Lara asked. “What’s stopping me?”
“I am.”
“I always enjoy dealing with a man possessing a well-developed sense of self-worth.”
It was my turn to show my teeth in a smile. “Slugging matches aren’t your style, Lara. If you play this situation right, it will further your reputation and influence. Why jeopardize that by throwing down with me?”
“Mmmm,” s
he said, her eyes wandering over me. She idly smoothed her skirt with one hand, instantly drawing my eyes to the pale length of thigh showing through the torn seam. Trickles of blood from her wounds slithered lovingly over smooth flesh. “I wonder, occasionally, what it might be like to throw down with you Dresden. To go to the mat. I wonder what might happen.”
I licked my lips and jerked my eyes away with an effort, incapable of speech.
“Do you know how to really control someone, Harry?” she asked, her voice a low purr.
I cleared my throat and rasped, “How?”
Her pale grey eyes were huge and deep. “Give them what they want. Give them what they need. Give them what no one else can give. If you can do that, they’ll come back to you again and again.” She leaned down close and whispered in my ear, “I know what I can give you, Harry. Shall I tell you?”
I swallowed and nodded, not daring to look at her.
“Surcease,” she breathed into my ear. “I can make it stop hurting, wizard. I can take away the pains of the body. Of the mind. Of the heart. For a little time, I could give you something no one else can—freedom from your burdens of responsibility and conscience.” She leaned even closer, until I could feel the coolness of the air around her lips. “Sweet Dresden. I could give you peace. Imagine closing your eyes with no worries, no pain, no fears, no regrets, no appetites, and no guilt. Only quiet and darkness and stillness and my flesh against yours.”
I shivered. I couldn’t stop myself.