by Butcher, Jim
“So noted,” I said, “but the only real weapon I have against them is knowledge. Someone needs to get it, and I’m the only one who isn’t susceptible to lead poisoning. I’m the logical choice.”
“Assume you get the information and manage to survive the dawn,” the shade said. “Then what will you do?”
“I give it to Murphy, who uses it to rip the bad guys’ tongues out through their belly buttons.”
Sir Stuart blinked. “That . . . is certainly a vivid image.”
“It’s a gift,” I said modestly.
He shook his head and sighed. “I admire your spirit, man, but this is foolish.”
“Yeah. But I’ve gotta be me,” I said.
Sir Stuart put both hands behind his back and tapped a toe on the ground a few times. Then he gave me a resigned nod. “Good hunting,” he said. “If you have a problem with wraiths again, vanish. They won’t be able to keep up.”
“Thank you,” I said, and offered him my hand.
We traded grips, and he turned on a heel and started marching back toward Murphy’s place.
I watched him for a moment, then turned around and hurried after the snow-blurred forms of the gunmen, wondering exactly how much time I had left before the sunrise obliterated me.
Chapter Thirteen
The bad guys started hoofing it, and I followed them.
“Over here,” said one of them. He was youthfully scrawny, his skin bronze enough to look Native American, though his tangled red hair and pug nose argued otherwise. His eyes were an odd shade of brown, so light as to be nearly golden.
“What, Fitz?” one of the other gunmen said.
“Shut up,” Fitz said. “Give me your piece.”
The other handed over his gun, and Fitz promptly removed the magazine, ejected a round from the chamber, and pitched it into the snowbank, along with the weapon he was carrying.
“What the fuck?” said the disarmed gunman, and struck Fitz lightly in the chest.
Fitz slammed a fist into the other man’s face with speed and violence enough to impress even me—and I’ve seen some fast things in action. The other gunman went to his ass in the snow and sat there, hands lifted to cradle his freshly broken nose.
“No time for stupid,” Fitz said. “Everyone, give me your guns. Or do you want to explain to him why you tried to get us all thrown in jail?”
The others didn’t look happy about it, but they passed over the weapons. Fitz unloaded them and threw them all into the snowbank. Then, at his direction, they started patting snow into the hole the weapons had made, concealing them.
“Stupid, man,” said one of the young men. “One of those wolves gets on our trail, we got nothing to defend ourselves.”
“One of the wolves follows us back, we’ll have the Rag Lady on our asses, and guns will be useless,” Fitz snapped. “Pack it in tighter. Smooth it.” Then he turned to the man he’d struck and piled some of the fresher snow into the man’s hands. “Put that on your nose. Stop it from bleeding. You don’t want to leave any blood behind if you have a choice.”
The seated young man looked frightened, and did as Fitz told him.
“What are we doing?” asked another of the gunmen. He was smaller than the others, and his tone wasn’t challenging—it was a question.
“The truck’s stolen. They can’t trace it to us,” Fitz explained, dusting snow off his hands. “Even if the winter breaks tomorrow, it’ll be days before this melts and they find the weapons. With luck, they’ll never connect the two.”
“That’s long-term,” the little one said. “I sort of want to survive the night.”
Fitz almost smiled. “You want to walk down the streets of fucking Chicago with assault weapons in your hands? We could keep them out of sight in the truck. Not out here.”
The little guy nodded. “I can keep the knife, right?”
“Out of sight,” Fitz said, and lifted his head, listening and frowning. Sirens were a common sound in nighttime Chicago, but they had shifted from background noise to something louder, nearer. “Get moving, people.”
Fitz jammed his hands into the pockets of his rather light coat and started walking. The others hurried to keep up with him.
I walked next to Fitz, studying him. I was more impressed with the young man in the lousy attack’s aftermath than I had been during the drive-by. Any idiot can point a gun and squeeze a trigger. Not everyone can keep themselves calm and rational in the wake of an automobile collision, weigh the liabilities of the situation, and make—and enforce—their decisions in the face of opposition. Though the attack had been amateurish, it had not been stupid, and Fitz’s actions in response to the sudden hitch Sir Stuart had thrown into his plans were probably as ideal as the situation allowed.
Fitz was smart under pressure, he was a natural leader, and I had a bad feeling that he was the sort of person who never made the same mistake twice. He had just done his best to kill several people I cared a great deal for. Brains plus resolve equals dangerous. I’d have to see to it that he was neutralized at the first opportunity.
I followed them through cold I no longer felt and practiced vanishing. I’d jump ahead of them, behind them, onto ledges above them—all the while trying not to notice that the sky was getting lighter.
Something bothered me about the redheaded kid.
With the cops on the way, the store alarm ringing, his associates bleeding and dazed around him . . . why take a few extra, vital seconds to empty the guns? It had cost him about half a minute of time he certainly couldn’t afford to lose. Why do it?
I asked myself why I might do something similar. And the only answer I could come up with involved preventing whoever found the weapons from getting hurt. Fitz was willing to riddle a small Chicago house—and potentially the houses behind it, given the power of the weapons in question—with bullets, but he got all safety conscious when disposing of weapons? It was a contradiction.
Interesting.
Even more interesting was the fact that I’d cared enough to notice. Generally, if someone took a swing at my friends, I’d cheerfully designate him a target and proceed to make his world a noisy and dangerous place until he wasn’t a threat anymore. I didn’t lose a lot of sleep over it, either.
But I couldn’t just throw myself into the fight now, dammit. And, unlike before, those who threatened my friends could not also threaten me. I was safe from Fitz and his crew, unless they planned to keep walking until sunrise, and I was similarly no danger to them. Normally, I’d be fuming at the presence of people who had tried to kill my friends. But now. . .
We were absolutely no threat to one another. That made it sort of hard to keep my inner kettle of outrage bubbling along at maximum boil.
Fitz kept them all moving through the snowbound streets, stopping only once to check on the bleeder’s nose. Packing it in snow had stopped the blood loss, but the young man was disoriented from the wreck and the pain. There were other small injuries among his crew, and he stopped at a little convenience store, emerging with a bottle of water and an economy-sized bottle of painkillers. He passed them off to the short, inquisitive kid, and told him to double-dose everyone—and to keep moving.
It took them most of an hour of steady trudging through the cold to clear Bucktown and head for the South Side. A lot of people think of the South Side as a sort of economic desert crossed with a gang-warfare demilitarized zone. It isn’t like that—or at least, it isn’t like that everywhere. There are neighborhoods you don’t want to walk through wearing certain colors, or being a certain color, but they’re more exception than rule. The rest of the South Side varies pretty widely, with plenty of it zoned for industry, and Fitz and his group of battered pedestrians headed into an area on the fringe of an industrial park to a manufacturing facility that had been closed and abandoned for several years.
It took up a block all by itself, a big building only a couple of stories high that covered acres of ground. The plows had piled snow higher and higher ar
ound it, like a fortress wall, with no need to create an opening for the unoccupied building. Fitz and his crew went over the wall of snow at a spot that had evidently been worked with shovels to form narrow, if slippery, stairs. There was a foot and a half of snow covering the building’s parking lot, with a single pathway shoveled out of it. They followed it in single file, to doors that looked as if they’d been solidly chained shut—but Fitz rattled the chains and nudged one of the doors open wide enough for the crew of youngsters, all of them still skinny, to squeeze through.
I went through the doors ghost style and tried to ignore the discomfort, the way Sir Stuart did. It hurt anyway—not enough to make me howl in agony or anything, but way too much to simply lose track of. Maybe it just took time for your “skin” to toughen. At least there hadn’t been a threshold, which would have stopped me cold. This place had never been meant to be anyone’s home, and evidently nobody who lived there thought of it as anything special. The exact process that formed a threshold had never been fully explained or documented, but it might be a good idea for me to get a better idea of the exact why and how, given my circumstances.
“No, it is not a good idea. Focus, Dresden,” I muttered. “The idea is for you to take care of business so you never have to learn all about the environmental factors of long-term ghostosity.”
Fitz stopped long enough to do a head count, out loud, as the ragged troop of would-be gangsters moved deeper into the building. It was an industrial structure and it had been built for economy, not beauty. There weren’t a lot of windows, and it was definitely on the shady side—even with dawn almost here and the lights of the city and sky reflecting from fresh snow. Cold, too, judging from the way the breath was congealing into fog every time the young men exhaled.
Fitz broke out a camping light and flicked it on. It was a red one, and didn’t so much light the way as clarify the difference between utter darkness and not-quite darkness. It was enough for them to move by.
“I wonder,” I mused aloud. After all, I was immaterial. Ghosts and the material universe didn’t seem to have a completely one-way relationship, the way mortals and physics did. I didn’t actually have pupils to dilate anymore. Hell, for that matter, light apparently passed right through me—how else was I invisible to everyone, otherwise? Which meant that, whatever it might seem like, I wasn’t really seeing the world, in the traditional sense. My perceptions were something different, something more than light reflecting onto a chemically sensitive surface in my eyes.
“There’s no real reason I should need the light to see, is there?” I asked myself.
“No,” I said. “No, there isn’t.”
I closed my eyes for a few steps and focused on a simple memory—when, as a kid in a foster home, I’d first found myself in a dark room when a storm knocked out the power. It was a new place, and I had fumbled around blindly, searching for a flashlight or matches or a lighter, or any other source of light, for almost ten minutes before I found something—a decorative snow globe commemorating the Olympics at Lake Placid. A small switch turned on a light that made the red, white, and blue snowflakes drifting in the liquid gleam in sudden brilliance.
The panic in my chest had eased as the room became something I could navigate safely again, my fear fading. I could see.
And when I opened my ghostly eyes, I could see the hallway through which we walked with perfect clarity, as plainly as if the long-dead fluorescents overhead had been humming along at full glow.
A quick, pleased laugh escaped me. Now I could see in the dark. “Just like . . . uhhh . . . I can’t think of an X-Man who I’m sure could see in the dark. Or was that a Nightcrawler thing . . . ? Whatever. It’s still another superpower. There is no spoon. I am completely spoonless over here.”
Fitz stopped in his tracks, turning suddenly, and lifted the camping light in my direction, his eyes wide. He suddenly sucked in a deep breath.
I stopped and blinked at him.
Everyone around Fitz had gone quiet and completely still, reacting to his obvious fear with the instant, instinctive stillness of someone who had good reason to fear predators. Fitz stared down the hall uncertainly, moving the light as if it might help him see a few inches farther.
“Hell’s bells,” I said. “Hey, kid. Can you hear me?”
Fitz reacted, his body twitching a little, his head cocked to one side, then the other, as if trying to trace a faint whisper of sound.
“Fitz?” whispered the little kid with the knife.
“Quiet,” Fitz said, still staring.
I cupped my hands over my mouth and shouted. “Hey! Kid! Can you hear me?”
The color had already drained out of his face, but the second call to him got another reaction. He licked his lips, turned away quickly, and said, “Thought I heard something, that’s all. It’s nothing. Come on.”
Interestinger and interestinger. I stuck my hands in the pockets of my duster and paced along beside Fitz, studying him.
He was maybe an inch under six feet tall, but taller than all the others with him. He couldn’t have been seventeen, but his eyes were decades older. He must have been surviving on his own for a while to have had so much composure at his age. And he’d known at least a little about the way a practitioner could use blood to send all kinds of mischief and mayhem at his enemies.
He had scars at the corner of his left eye, like a boxer—except boxers collected them on both eyes, and they were spread out, scattered around. These were all in a relatively tiny space. Someone right-handed had punched him in the same spot irregularly, repeatedly. I’d seen Fitz’s speed. He hadn’t tried to get out of the way.
Hell’s bells. We’d just been hit by Oliver Twist.
It took Fitz and the gang about five minutes to make it to what had once been a shop floor. It was open to the thirty-foot ceiling. There were skylights—translucent panels on the roof, really—and the place looked like something out of an apocalypse movie.
Equipment sat neglected everywhere. The motorized assembly line was still. Cobwebs stretched out, covering everything, coated in dust. Empty racks and shelves gave no clue as to what was made there, but several steel half barrels were scattered around an open area halfway down the shop floor. They had been filled with flammable scraps, mostly doors, trim, and shelves that must have been scavenged from other parts of the building. Ragged old sleeping bags were scattered among the fire sources, along with trash sacks of what I guessed were meager personal belongings.
One of the low barrels had a metal grate over it—a makeshift grill. There was a man crouched over it. He was thin, practically skeletal, and wore only a pair of close-fitting jeans. His skin was pasty and white. His smooth head was covered with crude-looking tattoos—symbols of protection and concealment from multiple traditions of magical practice, completely encircling his skull. He needed to shave. His patchy beard was growing out in uneven lumps of brown and black and grey.
There were several cans of beans and chili sitting on the grill, presumably being prepared for Fitz’s gang, who looked painfully interested in them. The bald man didn’t give any indication that he knew Fitz had arrived until the group had been standing silently for a full five minutes. Then he asked, “Is it done?”
“No,” Fitz said.
“And where are the guns?”
“We had to ditch them.”
The bald man’s shoulders clenched, suddenly stiff. “Excuse me?”
Fitz lifted a hand to touch his fingertips to his left eye, a gesture that struck me as unconscious, instinctive. He lowered it again quickly.
“There was an accident. The police were coming. We had to walk out and we couldn’t carry the guns with us.”
The bald man stood up and turned to face Fitz. His eyes were dark, deep-set, and burning. “You lost. The guns. The guns I paid so much for.”
“The guns were already lost,” Fitz said, his eyes on the floor. “There wasn’t any sense in all of us going to jail, too.”
The bald
man’s eyes blazed and a scream exploded from his chest. There was a horrible, rushing, bass-thrumming sound in the air, and an invisible force struck Fitz full in the chest, knocking him back ten feet before he hit the concrete floor and tumbled another ten.
“Sense?!” the bald man screamed. “Sense? You don’t have any sense! Do you know what the consequences of your idiocy could be? Do you know how many groups precisely like this one have been wiped out by the Fomor? By the Rag Lady? Idiot!”
Fitz lay on the floor, body curled defensively, and didn’t even try to lift his head. He was staying down, hoping not to provoke Baldy any further, his expression resigned to the fact that he was probably going to suffer more pain in short order—and that there was nothing he could do about it.
“It was simple!” Baldy continued, stalking toward the young man. “I gave you a task that men with their veins and noses full of drugs execute routinely. And it proved too great a challenge? Is that what you are telling me?”
Fitz’s voice was too steady to be sincere. He was used to hiding his fear, his vulnerability. “I’m sorry. The Rag Lady was there. We couldn’t have gotten any closer. She’d have taken us. We had to hit them and run.”
Baldy’s rage vanished abruptly. He stared down at the young man with no expression on his face and spoke in a gentle voice. “If there is some reason you believe you should be allowed to keep breathing, you should share it with the class now, Fitz.”
Fitz had a good poker face, but it had been a long night for him. He started breathing jerkily. “The idea wasn’t to kill them, you told me. The idea was to make sure that no one pushes us. That we push back. We showed them that. We accomplished the mission.”
Baldy stared at him and did not move.
I saw a bead of sweat on his brow. “It isn’t . . . It’s not . . . Look, I can get the guns back. I can. I marked where we buried them. I can go get them.”
Baldy glowered down at the young man and kicked him in the belly. The blow was offhand, absentminded, almost an afterthought. He seemed to reach a conclusion, and turned around to go back to the grill.