by Butcher, Jim
The kid looked awful. His eyes were glazed. He wasn’t moving with Connie so much as his body was randomly shaking in independent spasms. His head lolled from one side to the other, and his mouth was open. A strand of drool ran from his mouth to the floor.
Barrowill had righted the fallen chair. He sat upon it with one ankle resting on his other knee, his arms folded. His expression was detached, clinical, as he watched his daughter killing the young man she loved.
“Barrowill,” I said. My voice came out hoarse and rough. “Stop this.”
The vampire directed his gaze to me and shook his head. “It’s after midnight, Dresden. It’s time for Cinderella to return to her real life.”
“You son of a bitch,” I snarled. “She’s killing him.”
A small smile touched one corner of his mouth. “Yes. Beautifully. Her Hunger is quite strong.” He made a vague gesture with one hand. “Does he seem upset about it? He’s a mortal. And mortals are all born to die. The only question is how and in how much pain.”
“There’s this life thing that happens in between,” I snarled.
“And many more where his came from.” Barrowill’s eyes went chill. “His. And yours.”
“What do you mean?”
“When she’s finished, we leave. You’re dessert.”
A lump of ice settled in my stomach, and I swallowed. All things considered, I was becoming a little worried about the outcome of this situation. Talk, Harry. Keep him talking. You’ve never met a vampire who didn’t love the sound of his own voice. Something could change the situation if you play for time.
“Why not do it before I woke up?” I asked.
“This way is more efficient,” Barrowill said. “If a young athlete takes Ecstasy, and his heart fails, there may be a candlelight vigil, but there won’t be an investigation. Two dead men? One of them a private investigator? There will be questions.” He shrugged a shoulder. “And I don’t care for you to bequest me your death curse, wizard. But once Connie has you, you won’t have enough left of your mind to speak your own name, much less utter a curse.”
“The Raiths are going to kill you if you drag the Court and the Council into direct opposition,” I said.
“The Raiths will never know. I own twenty ghouls, Dresden, and they’re always hungry. What they leave of your corpse won’t fill a moist sponge.”
Connie suddenly ceased moving altogether. Her skin had become pure ivory white. She shuddered, her breaths coming in ragged gasps. She tilted her head back and a low, throaty moan came out of her throat. I’ve had sex that wasn’t as good as Connie sounded.
Dammit, Dresden. Focus.
I was out of time.
“The Council will find out, Chuck. They’re wizards. Finding unfindable information is what they do.”
He smirked. “I think we both know that their reputation is very well constructed.”
We did both know that. Dammit. “You think nobody’s going to miss me?” I asked. “I have friends, you know.”
Barrowill suddenly leaned forward, focusing on Connie, his eyes becoming a few shades lighter. “Perhaps, Dresden. But your friends are not here.”
Then there was a crash so loud that it shook the building. Barrowill’s sleek, black Lincoln Town Car came crashing through the dorm room’s door, taking a sizable portion of the wall with it. The ghouls holding me down were scattered by the debris, and fine dust filled the air.
I started coughing at once, but I could see what had happened. The car had come through from the far side of this wing of the dorm, smashing through the room where Barrowill had waited in ambush. The car had crossed the hall and wound up with its bumper and front tires resting inside Irwin’s room. It had smashed a massive hole in the outer brick wall of the building, leaving it gaping open to the night.
That got everyone’s attention. For an instant, the room was perfectly silent and perfectly still. The ghoul chauffeur still sat in the driver’s seat—only his head wobbled loosely, leaning at a right angle to the rest of his neck.
“Hah,” I cackled, wheezing. “Hah, hah. Heh hah, hah, hah. Moron.”
A large figure leapt up to the hole in the exterior wall and landed in the room across the hall, hitting with a crunch only slightly less massive than the car had made. I swear to you, if I’d heard that sound effect they used to use when Steve Austin jumped somewhere, I would not have been shocked. The other room was unlit, and the newcomer was a massive, threatening shadow.
He slapped a hand the size of a big cookie tray on the floor and let out a low, rumbling sound like nothing I’d ever heard this side of an amplified bass guitar. It was music. You couldn’t have written it in musical notation, any more than you could write the music of a thunderstorm, or write lyrics to the song of a running stream. But it was music nonetheless.
Power like nothing I had ever encountered surged out from that impact, a deep, shuddering wave that passed visibly through the dust in the air. The ceiling and the walls and the floor sang in resonance with the note and impact alike, and Barrowill’s psychic assault was swept away like a sand castle before the tide. Connie’s eyes flooded with color, changing from pure, empty whiteness back to a rich blue as deep and rich as a glacial lake, and the humanity came flooding back into her features. The sense of wild panic in the air suddenly vanished, and for another timeless instant, everything, everything in that night went utterly silent and still.
Holy.
Crap.
I’ve worked with magic for decades, and take it from me, it really isn’t very different from anything else in life. When you work with magic, you rapidly realize that it is far easier to disrupt than to create, far more difficult to mend than to destroy. Throw a stone into a glass-smooth lake, and ripples will wash over the whole thing. Making waves with magic instead of a rock would have been easy.
But if you can make that lake smooth again—that’s one hell of a trick.
That surge of energy didn’t attack anything or anybody. It didn’t destroy Barrowill’s assault.
It made the water smooth again.
Strength-of-a-River-in-his-Shoulders opened his eyes, and his fury made them burn like coals in the shadows—but he simply crouched, doing nothing.
All of Barrowill’s goons remained still, wide eyes flicking from River to Barrowill and back.
“Back off, Chuck,” I said. “He’s giving you a chance to walk away. Take him up on it.”
The vampire’s expression was completely blank as he stood among the debris. He stared at River Shoulders for maybe three seconds—and then I saw movement behind River Shoulders.
Clawed hands began to grip the edges of the hole behind River. Wicked, bulging red eyes appeared. Monstrous-looking things in the same general shape as a human appeared in complete silence.
Ghouls.
Barrowill didn’t have six goons with him.
He’d brought them all.
Barrowill spat toward River, bared his teeth and screamed, “Kill it!”
And it was on.
Everything went completely insane. The human-shaped ghouls in the room bounded forward, their faces and limbs contorting, tearing their way out of their cheap suits as they assumed their true forms. More ghouls poured in through the hole in the wall like a swarm of panicked roaches. I couldn’t get an accurate count of the enemy—the action was too fast. But twenty sounded about right. Twenty flesh-rending, superhumanly strong and durable predators flung themselves onto River Shoulders in an overwhelming wave. He vanished beneath a couple of tons of hungry ghoul. It was not a fair fight.
Barrowill should have brought more goons.
There was an enormous bellow, a sound that could only have been made by a truly massive set of lungs, and ghouls exploded outward from River Shoulders like so much hideous shrapnel. Several were flung back out of the building. Others slammed into walls with so much force that they shattered the drywall. One of them went through the ceiling, then fell limply back down into the room—only to be caught
by the neck in one of River Shoulders’s massive hands. He squeezed, crushing the ghoul’s neck like soft clay, and there was an audible pop. The ghoul spasmed once, then River flung the corpse into the nearest batch of monsters.
After that, it was clobbering time.
Barrowill moved fast, seizing Connie and darting out the door. I looked around frantically and spotted one of the knives the goons had been holding before they transformed. My hands and ankles had been bound in those plastic restraining strips, and I could barely feel my fingers, but I managed to pick up the knife and cut my legs free. Then I put it on the front bumper of the Lincoln, stepped on it with one foot to hold it in place, and after a few moments managed to cut my hands loose as well.
The dorm sounded like a medley of pay-per-view wrestling and the Island of Doctor Moreau. Ghouls shrieked. River Shoulders roared. Very, very disoriented students screamed. The walls and floor shook with impact again and again as River Shoulders flung ghouls around like so many softballs. Ghoulish blood spattered the walls and the ceiling, green-brown and putrid-smelling, and as strong as he was, River Shoulders wasn’t pitching a shutout. The ghouls’ claws and fangs had sunk into him, covering him in punctures and lacerations, and his scarlet blood mixed with theirs on the various surfaces.
I tried to think unobtrusive thoughts, stayed low, and went to Irwin. He still looked awful, but he was breathing hard and steady, and he’d already begun blinking and trying to focus his eyes.
“Irwin!” I shouted. “Irwin! Where’s her purse?”
“Whuzza?” Irwin mumbled.
“Connie’s purse! I’ve got to help Connie! Where is her purse?”
Irwin’s eyes almost focused. “Connie?”
“Oh never mind.” I started ransacking the dorm room until I found Connie’s handbag. She had a brush in it. The brush was liberally festooned with her blond hairs.
I swept a circle into the dust on the floor, tied the hair around my pentacle amulet and invested the circle with a whisper of will. Then I quickly worked the tracking spell that was generally my bread and butter when I was doing investigator stuff. When I released the magic, it rushed down into Connie’s borrowed hair, and my amulet lurched sharply out of plumb and held itself steady at a thirty- or forty-degree angle. Connie went thataway.
I ducked a flying ghoul, leapt over a dying ghoul, and staggered down the hall at my best speed while the blood went back into my feet.
I had gone down one whole flight of stairs without falling when the angle on the amulet changed again. Barrowill had gone down one floor, then taken off down one of the residential hallways toward the fire escape at the far end. He’d bypassed security by ripping the door off its hinges, then flinging it into the opposite wall. Kids were scattering out of the hallway, looking either horrified or disappointed. Some both. Barrowill had reached the far end, carrying his daughter over one shoulder, and was headed for the fire door.
Barrowill had been savvy enough to divest me of my accoutrements, but I was still a wizard, dammit, blasting rod or no. I drew up my will, aimed low, and snarled, “Forzare!”
Pure kinetic force lashed invisibly through the air and caught Barrowill at the ankles. It kicked both of his feet up into the air, and he took a pratfall onto the floor. Connie landed with a grunt and bounced to one side. She lay there dazed and blinking.
Barrowill slithered back up to his feet, spinning toward me, and producing a pistol in one hand. I lurched back out of the line of fire as the gun barked twice, and bullets went by me with a double hiss. I went to my knees and bobbed my head out into the hall again for a quick peek, jerking it back immediately. Barrowill was picking Connie up. His bullet went through the air where my head would have been if I’d been standing.
“Don’t be a moron, Harry,” I said. “You came for the kid. He’s safe. That’s all you were obligated to do. Let it g—oh who am I kidding. There’s a girl.”
I didn’t have to beat the vampire—I just had to slow him down long enough for River Shoulders to catch up to him … assuming River did pursue.
I took note of which wing Barrowill was fleeing through and rushed down the stairs to the ground floor. Then I left the building and sprinted to the far end of that wing.
Barrowill slammed the emergency exit open and emerged from the building. He was moving fast, but he also had his daughter to carry, and she’d begun to resist him, kicking and thrashing, slowing him down. She tugged him off balance just as he shot at me again, and it went wide. I slashed at him with another surge of force, but this time I wasn’t aiming for his feet—I went for the gun. The weapon leapt out of his hands and went spinning away, shattering against the bricks of the dorm’s outer wall. Another blast knocked Connie off his shoulder, and she let out a little shriek. Barrowill staggered, then let out a snarl of frustration and charged me at a speed worthy of the Flash’s understudy.
I flung more force at him, but Barrowill bobbed to one side, evading the blast. I threw myself away from the vampire and managed to roll with the punch he sent at my head. He caught me an inch or two over one eyebrow, the hardest and most impact-resistant portion of the human skull. That and the fact that I’d managed to rob it of a little of its power meant that he only sent me spinning wildly away, my vision completely obscured by pain and little silver stars. He was furious, his power rolling over me like a sudden deluge of ice water, to the point where crystals of frost formed on my clothing.
Barrowill followed up, his eyes murderous—and then Bigfoot Irwin bellowed, “Connie!” and slammed into Barrowill at the hip, using his body as a living spear. Barrowill was flung to one side, and Irwin pressed his advantage, still screaming, coming down atop the vampire and pounding him with both fists in elemental violence, his sunken eyes mad with rage. “Connie! Connie!”
I tried to rise but couldn’t seem to make it past one knee. So all I could do was watch as the furious scion of River Shoulders unleashed everything he had on a ranking noble of the White Court. Barrowill could have been much stronger than a human being if he’d had the gas in the tank—but he’d spent his energy on his psychic assault, and it had drained him. He still thrashed powerfully, but he was no match for the enraged young man. Irwin slammed Barrowill’s nose flat against his face. I saw one of the vampire’s teeth go flying into the night air. Slightly-too-pale blood began to splash against Irwin’s fists.
Christ. If the kid killed Barrowill, the White Court would consider it an act of war. All kinds of horrible things could unfold. “Irwin!” I shouted. “Irwin, stop!”
Kid Bigfoot didn’t listen to me.
I lurched closer to him but only made it about six inches before my head whirled so badly that I fell onto my side. “Irwin, stop!” I looked around and saw Connie staring dazedly at the struggle. “Connie!” I said. “Stop him! Stop him!”
Meanwhile, Irwin had beaten Barrowill to within an inch of his life—and now he raised his joined hands over his head, preparing for a sledgehammer blow to Barrowill’s skull.
A small, pretty hand touched his wrist.
“Irwin,” Connie said gently. “Irwin, no.”
“He tried,” Irwin panted. “Tried. Hurt you.”
“This isn’t the way,” Connie said.
“Bad man,” Irwin growled.
“But you aren’t,” Connie said, her voice very soft. “Irwin. He’s still my daddy.”
Connie couldn’t have physically stopped Irwin—but she didn’t need to. The kid blinked several times, then looked at her. He slowly lowered his hands, and Connie leaned down to kiss his forehead gently. “Shhhh,” she said. “Shhhh. I’m still here. It’s over, baby. It’s over.”
“Connie,” Irwin said, and leaned against her.
I let out a huge sigh of relief and sank back onto the ground.
My head hurt.
* * *
Officer Dean stared at me for a while. He chewed on a toothpick and squinted at me. “Got some holes.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “Like what?”
“You walked in on them while they were all still trying to put their clothes back on. After flinging themselves into random sex with whoever happened to be close to them. They’re all denying that this ever happened right now.”
“Hngh,” Dean said. “What about the ghoul corpses?”
“After Irwin dragged their boss up to the fight, the ghouls quit when they saw him. River Shoulders told them all to get out of his sight and take their dead with them. They did.”
Dean squinted and consulted a list. “Pounder is gone. So is Connie Barrowill. Not officially missing, or nothing. Not yet. But where are they?”
I looked at Dean and shrugged.
* * *
I’d seen ghouls in all kinds of situations before—but I’d never seen them whipped into submission. Ghouls fought to the grisly, messy end. That was what they did. But River Shoulders had been more than their match. He’d left several of them alive when he could have killed them to the last, and he’d found their breaking point when Irwin had dragged Barrowill in by his hair. Ghouls could take a huge beating, but River Shoulders had given them one like I’d never seen, and when he ordered them to take their master and their dead and never to return, they’d snapped to it.
“Thanks, Connie,” I groaned as she settled me onto a section of convenient rubble. I was freezing. The frost on my clothes was rapidly melting away, but the chill had settled inward.
The girl looked acutely embarrassed, but that wasn’t in short supply in that dorm. That hallway was empty of other students for the moment, though. We had the place to ourselves, though I judged that the authorities would arrive in some form before long.
Irwin came over with a dust-covered blanket and wrapped it around her. He’d scrounged a ragged towel for himself though it did more to emphasize his physique than to hide it. The kid was ripped.
“Thank you, Irwin,” she said.