by Butcher, Jim
“Never!” answered another piping voice from within the helmet, and Hook produced a pair of toothpick-slender daggers. He made a scissor shape of them and caught Toot’s next attack in it, flicking the table knife aside and whipping his dagger at Toot’s throat. Toot recoiled, but took a long cut across his chest, the knife shearing through his armor just as the flamberge had done.
My major general screamed in pain, recoiling.
It was the opening I’d needed, and I twisted my leaf blower around to slam into Hook. It caught the little fae as he was starting to move toward Toot-toot, sending him tumbling into the side of a building, while the back blast of wind actually threw Toot clear. He managed to recover in midair, wings blurring, and shot unsteadily toward me. I caught him in my free hand, drawing him in close against my side, and turned partly away from Hook, sheltering Toot.
The cloud of hostile fae was still swirling and wobbling around. They obviously lacked any kind of leadership, and were still disordered by the gale-force winds with which I’d hit them—but I was almost out of energy, and about two seconds after they got their act together, I was a dead man.
“Feets don’t fail me now,” I muttered.
I kept the leaf blower on Hook, who I suspected was their leader, and strode forward, toward the car. I checked it with several quick glances. The gasoline smell wasn’t coming from the Caddy, but from a half-smashed car that had been close to the exploding duffel bag.
I gave the leaf blower one last surge of power and lunged into the Caddy, slamming the door behind me. I dumped Toot down next to Bob as gently as I could.
“What’s happening?” Bob shouted blearily from where he’d landed, sideways, in the well of the passenger seat.
“I’m getting my ass kicked by tiny faeries!” I shouted back, fumbling to start the car. “They’ve got my freaking number!”
There was a loud pop, and a slender miniature steel dagger slammed through the passenger window, transforming it into a broken webwork, as difficult to see through as a stained-glass window.
“Ack!” I said.
Bob started laughing hysterically.
The dagger vanished and then the same thing happened on the driver’s side.
Holy crap, Hook was way too bright for someone the size of a Tickle Me Elmo. He was blinding me.
I got the Caddy into reverse and rumbled back off the sidewalk onto the street, shedding bricks and debris as I went. Just as I bounced down onto the street proper, the front windshield exploded into a web of cracks, too, so I just kept driving backward, turning to look over my shoulder. That went well for a few seconds, and then the rear window broke, too.
I gritted my teeth. Under normal circumstances, the next move would be to roll down the window and stick my head out of it. Tonight, I was pretty sure I’d get a miniature dagger in the eye if I tried.
Sometimes you have to choose between doing something stupid and doing something suicidal. So I kept driving blind and backward through the middle of Chicago while Bob chortled his bony ass off.
“Tiny faeries!” He giggled, rolling a bit as the Caddy weaved and jounced. “Tiny faeries!”
My plan worked for about ten seconds—and then I slammed into a parked car. I was lucky that it wasn’t a large one. I mean, I couldn’t see it, but it bounced off the Caddy like a billiard ball struck by the cue ball. It also knocked the wheel out of my hands, wrenching it from my fingers and sending the Caddy onto another sidewalk. It smashed through a metal railing and then the back tires bounced down into a sunken stairwell.
I struggled to get the Caddy clear, but there was nothing for the tires to grab onto.
End of the line.
I let out a heartfelt curse and slammed a fist against the steering wheel. Then I made myself close my eyes and think. Think, think, don’t react in panic. Keep your head, Dresden.
“Major General,” I said. “You okay?”
“It’s not bad, my lord.” He gasped. “I’ve had worse.”
“We’ve got to move,” I said.
“Run away!” Bob giggled. “Run away! Tiny faeries!”
I growled in frustration and popped the Redcap’s hat down over Bob. “Stop being a jerk. This is serious.”
Bob’s voice was only barely muffled. It sounded like he couldn’t breathe. “Serious! Tiny! Faeries! The m-m-mighty wizard Dresden!”
“You are not as funny as you think you are,” I said severely. “Toot, you got any ideas?”
“Trap them all in a circle?” Toot suggested.
I sighed. Right. I’d just need to get them all to land in the same place at the same time, inside of a magic circle I had no means to create.
Toot’s a great little guy. Just . . . not really adviser material.
Orange light began to bathe the broken windows, highlighting the webwork of cracks in them. A lot of orange light.
“Crap,” I gasped. “I am not going to be known as the wizard who used his death curse thanks to a bunch of bitty nail guns.”
Then there was a very sinister sound.
Toward the rear of the Caddy, someone opened the lid to the fuel tank.
It wasn’t hard to work out what would happen next. Fire.
“Hell, no,” I said. I recovered the ball cap, turned a still-giggling Bob upside down, and then popped Toot into the skull. He sprawled in it, arms and legs sticking out, but he didn’t complain.
“Hey!” Bob protested.
“Serves you right, Giggles,” I snapped. I tucked the skull under my arm like a football.
I knew I didn’t have much of a chance of getting away from that swarm of fae piranha, but it was an infinitely larger chance than I would have if I stayed in the car and burned to death. Hell’s bells, what I wouldn’t give to have my shield bracelet. Or my old staff. I didn’t even have an umbrella.
I wasn’t sure how much more magic I had left in me, but I readied my shield spell, shaping it to surround me as I ran. I wouldn’t be able to hold it in place for long—but maybe if I got very, very lucky, I would survive the swarm long enough to find another option.
I took several sharp and completely not-panicked breaths, then piled out of the Cadillac, bringing my shield up with a shout of “Defendarius!”
The Little Folk started hitting my shield almost instantly. I once rode out a hailstorm in a dome-shaped Quonset hut made of corrugated steel. It sounded like that, only closer and a hell of a lot more lethal.
I went into a sprint. Between the still-present dust, the shroud of mist my leaf-blower spell had billowed forth, and the swarm of hostile fae, I could barely see. I picked a direction and ran. Ten steps. Twenty steps. The enemy continued pounding against the shield, and as I kept pouring my will into it to keep it in place, my body began to feel heavier and heavier.
Thirty steps—and I stepped into a small pothole in the sidewalk, stumbled, and fell.
Falling in a fight is generally bad. You tend not to get up again. I mean, there’s a reason that the phrase “He fell” was synonymous with death for a bunch of centuries.
I fell.
And then I heard the most beautiful sound of my life. Somewhere nearby, a cat let out an angry, hissing scream.
The Little Folk live in mortal dread of Felis domesticus. Cats are observant, curious, and fast enough to catch the little fae. Hell, the domestic cat can stalk, kill, and subsist upon more species than any other land predator in the world. They are peerless hunters and the Little Folk know it.
The effect of the scream was instantaneous. My attackers recoiled on pure reflex, immediately darting about twenty feet into the air—even Hook. I got a chance to look up and saw a large brindle tomcat leap from the top of a trash can onto the sidewalk beside me.
“No!” shouted Hook from inside his helmet. “Slay the beast! Slay them all!”
“What? What did I ever do to you?” Bob protested, indignant. “I’m not even supposed to be here today!”
The fae all looked at Hook and seemed to begin gathering thei
r courage again.
A second cat screamed nearby. And a third. And a fourth. Cats started prowling out of alleys and from beneath parked cars. Cats began pacing along building ledges twenty feet from the ground. Glowing eyes reflected light from the deep shadows between buildings.
Even Hook wasn’t willing to put up with that action, I guess. The little fae champion let out a frustrated scream, then turned and darted up, up, and away, vanishing into the night. The others followed Hook, flowing away in a ribbon of emberlight.
I lay there for a second, exhausted and panting. Then I sat up and looked around.
The cats were gone, vanished as if they’d never been there.
I heard someone walk out of the alley behind me, and my body went tense and tight, despite my weariness. Then a young woman’s voice said, in a passable British accent, “The Little Folk are easily startled, but they’ll soon be back. And in greater numbers.”
I sagged in sudden, exhausted relief. The bad guys hardly ever quote Star Wars.
“Molly,” I breathed.
A tall young woman dressed in rather shabby secondhand clothing crouched down next to me and smiled. “Hey, boss. Welcome home.”
Chapter
Thirteen
“Grasshopper,” I said, feeling myself smile. “Illusion. Very nice.”
Molly gave me a little bow of her head. “It’s what I do.”
“Also good timing,” I said. “Also, what the hell? How did you know I was . . . ?”
“Alive?”
“Here, but sure. How did you know?”
“Priorities, boss. Can you walk?”
“I’m good,” I said, and pushed myself to my feet. It wasn’t as hard as it really should have been, and I could feel my endurance rebuilding itself already, the energy coming back into me. I was still tired—don’t get me wrong—but I should have been falling-down dizzy and I wasn’t.
“You don’t look so good,” Molly said. “Was that a tux?”
“Briefly,” I said. I eyed the car. “Feel like driving?”
“Sure,” she said. “But . . . that’s pretty stuck, Harry, unless you brought a crane.”
I grunted, faintly irritated by her tone. “Just get in, start it, and give it gas gently.”
Molly looked like she wanted to argue, but then she looked down abruptly. A second later, I heard sirens. She frowned, shook her head, and got into the car. The motor rumbled to life a second later.
I went down the stairwell where the car’s tires were stuck, set down Bob’s skull, and found a good spot beneath the rear frame. Then I set my feet, put the heels of my hands against the underside of the Caddy, and pushed.
It was hard. I mean, it was really, really gut-bustingly hard—but the Caddy groaned and then shifted and then slowly rose. I was lifting with my legs as much as my arms, putting my whole body into it, and everything in me gave off a dull burn of effort. My breath escaped my lungs in a slow groan, but then the tires were up out of the stairwell, and turning, and they caught on the sidewalk and the Caddy pulled itself the rest of the way.
I grabbed the skull, still with the mostly limp Toot-toot inside it, staggered back up out of the stairwell and into the passenger side of the car. I lifted my hand and sent a surge of will down through it, muttering, “Forzare,” and the overstrained windshield groaned and gave way, tearing itself free of the frame and clearing Molly’s vision.
“Go,” I grated.
Molly went, driving carefully. The emergency vehicles were rolling in past us, and she pulled over and drove slowly to let them by. I sat there breathing hard, and realized that the real effort of moving that much weight didn’t hit you while you were actually moving it—it came in the moments after, when your muscles recovered enough to demand oxygen, right the hell now. I leaned my head against the window, panting.
“How’s it going, buddy?” I asked a moment later.
“It hurts.” Toot sighed. “But I’ll be okay, my lord. The armor held off some of the blow.”
I checked the skull. The eyelights were gone. Bob had dummied up the moment Molly was around, as per my standing orders, which had been in place since she had first become my apprentice. Bob had almost unlimited knowledge of magic. Molly had a calculated disregard for self-limitation when she thought it justified. They would have made a really scary pair, and I’d kept them carefully separate during her training.
“We need to get off the street,” I said. “Someplace quiet and secure.”
“I know a place just like that,” Molly said. “What happened?”
“Someone tossed a gym bag full of explosives at my car,” I growled. “And followed it up with the freaking pixie death squadron from hell.”
“You mean they picked this car out of all the other traffic?” she asked, her tone dry. “What are the odds?”
I grunted. “One more reason to get off the street, pronto.”
“Relax,” she said. “I started veiling the car as soon as we passed the police. If someone was following you before, they aren’t now. Catch your breath, Harry. We’ll be there soon.”
I blinked, impressed. Veils were not simple spells. Granted, they were sort of a specialty of Molly’s, but this was taking it up a notch. I didn’t know whether I could have covered the entire Caddy with a veil while driving alertly and carrying on a conversation. In fact, I was pretty sure I couldn’t.
Grasshopper was growing up on me.
I studied Molly’s profile while she drove. Stared, really. I’d first met her years ago, when she was a gawky little kid in a training bra. She’d grown up tall, five-ten or a little more. She had dark blond hair, although she had changed its color about fifty times since I’d met her. At the moment, it was in its natural shade and cut short, hanging in an even sheet to her chin. She was wearing minimal makeup. The girl was built like a particularly well-proportioned statue, but she wasn’t flaunting it in this outfit—khaki pants, a cream-colored shirt, and a chocolate brown jacket.
The last time I’d seen Molly, she’d been a starved-looking thing, dressed in rags and twitching at every sound and motion, like a feral cat—which was hardly surprising, given that she’d been fighting a covert war against a group called the Fomor while dodging the cops and the Wardens of the White Council. She was still lean and a little hyperalert, her eyes trying to watch the whole world at once, but that sense of overly coiled spring tension was much reduced.
She looked good. Noticing that made things stir under the surface, things that shouldn’t have been, and I abruptly looked away.
“Uh,” she said. “Harry?”
“You look better than the last time I saw you, kiddo,” I said.
She grinned, briefly. “Right back atcha.”
I snorted. “It’d be hard to look worse. For either of us, I guess.”
She glanced at me. “Yeah. I’m a lot better. I’m still not . . .” She shrugged. “I’m not exactly Little Miss Stability. At least, not yet. But I’m working on it.”
“Sometimes I think that’s where most of us are,” I said. “Fighting off the crazy as best we can. Trying to become something better than we were. It’s that second bit that’s important.”
She smiled, and didn’t say anything else. Within a few moments, she had turned the Caddy into a private parking lot.
“I don’t have any money for parking,” I said.
“Don’t need it.” She paused and rolled down the cracked window to wave at an attendant operating the gate. He glanced up from his book, smiled at her, and pushed a button. The gate opened, and Molly pulled the Caddy into the lot. She drove down the length of it, and pulled the car carefully into a covered parking spot. “Okay. Come on.”
We got out of the car, and Molly led me to a doorway leading into an adjacent apartment building. She opened the door with a key, but instead of moving to the elevators, she guided me to another doorway to one side of the entrance. She unlocked that one too, and went down two flights of stairs to a final door. I could sense magical
defenses on the doors and the stairs without even making an effort to open myself up to it. That was a serious bunch of security spells. Molly opened the second door and said, “Please come in.” She smiled at Toot. “And your crew with you, of course.”
“Thanks,” I said, and followed her inside.
Molly had an apartment.
She had an apartment big enough for Hugh Hefner’s birthday party.
The living room was the size of a basketball court, and it had eleven-foot ceilings. There was a little bar separating the kitchen from the rest of the open space. She had a fireplace with what looked like a handmade living room set around it in one corner of the room, and a second section of comfy chairs and a desk tucked into a nook lined with built-in bookshelves. She had a weight bench, too, along with an elliptical machine, both of them expensive European setups. The floors were hardwood, broken up by occasional carpets that probably cost more than the floor space they covered. A couple of doors led off from the main room. They were oak. Granite countertops. A six-burner gas stove. Recessed lighting.
“Hell’s bells,” I said. “Uh. Nice place.”
Molly shrugged out of her jacket and tossed it onto the back of a couch. “You like?” She walked into the kitchen, opened a cabinet door, and pulled out a first-aid kit.
“I like,” I said. “Uh. How?”
“The svartalves built it for me,” she said.
Svartalves. They were some serious customers in the supernatural scene. Peerless artisans, a very private and independent folk—and they tolerated absolutely no nonsense. No one wants to get on the bad side of a svartalf. They weren’t exactly known for their generosity, either. “You working for them?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “This is mine. I bought it from them.”
I blinked again. “With what?”
“Honor,” she said. She muttered something and flicked a hand at a chandelier hanging over the table in the little dining area. It began to glow with a pure white light as bright as any collection of incandescent bulbs. “Bring him over here, and we’ll see if we can’t help him.”
I did so, transferring Toot from the skull to the table as gently as possible. Molly leaned down over him, peering. “Right through the breastplate? What hit you, Toot-toot?”