by Butcher, Jim
Molly folded her hands in her lap, looked down at them, and said in a small voice, “If it’s given, freely offered, you can’t really take it away. All you’re doing is accepting a gift.”
Part of me felt like something had torn in my chest, so deep was the ache I felt at the hope, the uncertainty in the grasshopper’s voice.
And another part of me wanted to howl and attack her. Take her. Now. It didn’t even want to wait to stop the car. If I went purely by the numbers, there was no reason at all not to give in to that urge—except for the car crashing, I mean. Molly was an adult woman now. She was exceptionally attractive. I’d seen her naked once, and she was really good at it. She was willing—eager, even. And I trusted her. I’d taught her a lot over the years, and some of that had been extremely intimate. Master-apprentice relationships were hardly unheard-of in wizarding circles. Some wizards even favored that situation, because on the spooky side, sex can be a whole hell of a lot more dangerous than recreational. They regarded the teaching of physical intimacy as something as inextricably intertwined with magic as it is with life.
It’s possible that, from a standpoint of pure, unadulterated reason, they might even have a point.
But there was more to it than reason. I’d known Molly when she was wearing a training bra. I’d hung out in her tree house with her after she’d come home from high school. She was the daughter of the man I respected most in this world and the woman whom I least wanted to cross. I believed that people in positions of authority and influence, especially those in the role of mentor and teacher, had a mountainous level of responsibility to maintain in order to balance out that influence over less experienced individuals.
But mostly, I couldn’t do it because Molly had been crushing on me since she was about fourteen years old. She was in love with me, or at least thought she was—and I didn’t feel it back. It wouldn’t be fair to her to rip her heart out that way. And I would never, ever forgive myself for hurting her.
“It’s okay,” she almost-whispered. “Really.”
There wasn’t anything much to say. So I reached over, took her hand, and squeezed gently. After a while, I said, “Molly, I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. But if it ever does, the first time damned well isn’t going to be like that. You deserve better. So do I.”
Then I put both hands back on the wheel and kept on driving. I had someone else to pick up before I gave the Redcap my version of a hostage crisis.
* * *
We got to Chez Carpenter around five, and I parked the Munstermobile on the street. It was the single gaudiest object for five miles in every direction, and it blended in with the residential neighborhood about as well as a goose in a crowd of puffer fish. I turned off the engine and listened to it clicking. I didn’t look at the house.
I got out of the car, shut the door, and leaned back against it, still not looking at the house. I didn’t need to. I’d seen it often enough. It was a gorgeous Colonial home, complete with manicured landscaping, a pretty green lawn, and a white picket fence.
The grasshopper got out of the car and came around to stand beside me. “Dad’s at work. The sandcrawler is gone,” Molly noted, nodding toward the driveway where her mother always parked their minivan. “I think Mom was going to take the Jawas trick-or-treating at the Botanic Gardens this afternoon. So the little ones won’t be home.”
Which was Molly’s way of telling me that I didn’t have to face my daughter right now, and I could stop being a coward.
“Just go get him,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”
“Sure,” she said.
Molly went up to the front door and knocked. About two seconds after she did that, something huge slammed against the other side of the door. The heavy door jumped in its frame. Dust fell from the roof over the porch, dislodged by the impact. Molly stiffened and backed away. A second later, there was another thump, and another, and the sound of the frantic scratching of claws on the door. Then more thumping.
I hurriedly crossed the street to stand beside Molly on the lawn, facing the front door.
The door wiggled, then opened unsteadily, as if being manipulated by someone with his hands full. Then the storm door flew open and something grey and shaggy and enormous shot out onto the porch. It cleared the porch railing in a single bound, hurtled across the ground and the little picket fence, and hit me in the chest like a battering ram.
My dog, Mouse, is a temple dog of Tibet, a Foo dog of a powerful supernatural bloodline, though he could have passed for an exceptionally large Tibetan mastiff. Mouse can take on demons and monsters without batting an eye, and he checks in at about two fifty. He knocked me down as easily as a bowling ball does the first pin. And, superdog though he may be, he’s still a dog. Once I was down, he planted his front paws on either side of my head and proceeded to give me slobbery dog kisses on the face and neck and chin, making happy little sounds the whole time.
“Ack!” I said, as I always did. “My lips touched dog lips! Get me some mouthwash! Get me some iodine!” I shoved at his chest, grinning, and managed to lever myself out from underneath him and stand.
That didn’t diminish Mouse’s enthusiasm in the least. He cut loose with a series of joyous barks so loud that they set off a car alarm on a vehicle a hundred feet away. Then he sprinted in a tight circle, came back to my feet, and barked some more. He did that over and over for about a minute, his tail wagging so hard that it sounded like a helicopter might have been passing in the distance, whup-whup-whup-whup-whup.
“All right,” I said. “Enough. Come on, it’s not like I died or anything, boy.”
He quieted, his jaws parted in a canine grin, tail still wagging so hard that it pulled his hindquarters left and right with it. I knelt down and put my arms around him. If I’d been an inch or two shorter, I doubt I could have done it. Damn pooch is huge, and built like a barrel. He laid his chin on my shoulder and panted happily as I hugged him.
“Yeah,” I said quietly. “I missed you, too, buddy.” I nodded toward the house. “Anyone home?”
He tilted his head to one side slightly, one ear cocked at a slightly different angle from the other.
“He says no,” Molly said.
I blinked at her. “First Sherlock, now Dolittle?”
She blushed slightly and looked embarrassed. “It’s just something I picked up. A dog’s thoughts and emotions are a lot more direct and less conflicted than a human’s. It’s easier to listen for them. It isn’t a big deal.”
Mouse came over to greet Molly by walking back and forth against her legs, nearly knocking her down. He stopped and looked fondly up at her, tail wagging, and made a little woofing sound.
“You’re welcome,” she said, and scratched his ears.
“I need your help, boy,” I said. “Bad guys took Butters, Andi, and Justine.”
Mouse shook his head vigorously and half sneezed.
“Mouse thinks Andi should be locked in the garage at night, until she learns not to get abducted.”
“Once we get her back, we’ll start calling her Danger-prone Daphne,” I promised him. “She’s even got the hair for it. You in, Scoob?”
In answer, Mouse hurried to the street, looked both ways, then crossed it to sit down at the back door of the Munstermobile. Then he looked at me, as if asking me why I wasn’t opening it for him.
“Of course he’s in,” Molly translated, smiling.
“Good thing you’re here,” I said. “He’s tough to read.”
Chapter
Thirty-seven
We used the spinning needle in the bowl of water like a compass, driving north to south first, to let us triangulate on our friends’ location. As tracking spells went, this one was a little clumsier than most. We had to pull over the Munstermobile and let the water settle to use it—but hey, nothing’s perfect.
We tracked our friends, and presumably the Redcap and company, to the waterfront. The sun was setting behind us, and had briefly appeared from behind the clo
uds. The city’s skyline cast deep, cold shadows over us.
“Harry,” Molly said. “You know that this—”
“Is a trap,” I said. “Yep. The Redcap knew exactly what I would do with those bits of hair.”
Molly looked a little relieved. “Okay. Then what’s the plan?”
“Once we are sure where they are,” I said, “I’m going to go in the front door.”
“That’s the plan?”
“I’m going to be very, very noisy,” I said. “Meanwhile, you and Supermutt are going to sneak in the back, all sneaky-like, neutralize any guards that aren’t watching me, and get our crew out.”
“Oh,” Molly said. “Are you sure you don’t want me to be the distraction?”
It was a fair question. Molly’s One-woman Rave spell could get more attention than a crash at an airshow. “The Sidhe know all about veils,” I said. “Mine aren’t good enough to get anywhere near them. Yours are. It’s that simple.”
“Right,” she said, and swallowed. “So we’re . . . going to depend on me for the important part. Saving people.”
“You’ve been playing Batman for a while now, kid,” I said. “I think you’ve got this.”
“Mostly I was the only one in danger if I screwed up,” Molly said. “Are you sure this is the right plan?”
“If you think you can handle it,” I said. “Or if you don’t.”
“Oh.”
I put a hand on her shoulder. “We don’t have time to dance around on this one. So we go dirt simple. When it starts, if someone gets in your way, I want you to hit them with everything you’ve got, right in the face. Mouse will be with you as muscle.”
“Shouldn’t he be with you? I mean, if you’re going to fight . . .”
“I’m not going to fight,” I said. “No time to prepare, no plan, I’d lose a fight. I’m going to be a big noisy distraction.”
“But what if you get in trouble?”
“That’s my part. You do your part. Keep focused on your objective. Get in, get them, get out, signal. Then we all run away. Got it?”
She nodded tightly. “Got it.”
“Woof,” said Mouse.
* * *
“Huh,” I said a few moments later. We had triangulated with the tracking spell and narrowed down their location to one building, and we now lurked in an alley across the street. “I’ve actually been in there before.”
“You have?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Client had lost a kid or something to some half-assed wannabe warlock. He had the cheesy dialogue and everything, was gonna sacrifice the kid with this big cheap, spiky knife.”
“How did it turn out?”
“If I remember it right, I got beat up,” I said. “Didn’t make much money on it, either. The bad guy ran away, and the client walked out threatening a lawsuit. Except she left the kid. Turns out, she wasn’t even his mom, and his real parents tried to have me arrested. Never heard from her again. No clue what it was about. Chalk.”
Molly reached into her bag and came out with a stick of chalk, which she passed to me. I crouched and quickly sketched a diagram of the rectangular warehouse. “Here’s the front door. Office door. Back door. There’re some windows up high, but you’d have to be a bird to get there. The rear of the warehouse actually protrudes over the water, but there’s a wooden deck around the back. That’s where you’ll go in, at the back door. Watch for trip wires. Mouse can help with that. Trust him. We’re basically blind and deaf by comparison.”
“Right,” Molly said, nodding. “Okay.”
“Don’t get hung up on what could happen if it goes wrong,” I said. “Focus, concentrate, just like we do for a spell. Get in. Get them. Get out.”
“Let’s just do it,” she said, “before I throw up.”
“I’ll give you five minutes to get into position. Don’t go in until I get noisy.”
“Right,” Molly said. “Come on, Mouse.”
The big dog came up beside Molly, and she didn’t even have to bend to slip the fingers of one hand through his collar. “Stay this close to me, okay?” she said to Mouse.
He looked up at her and wagged his tail.
She gave him a shaky smile, nodded at me, then spoke a word and vanished.
I started counting to three hundred and briefly wondered why I kept running into repeat uses of various locations around town. This wasn’t the first time I’d dealt with the bad guys choosing to reuse a location different bad guys had used before them. Maybe there was a Villainous Time-share Association. Maybe my life was actually a basic-cable television show, and they couldn’t afford to spend money on new sets all the time.
Or—and this seemed more likely—maybe there was a reason for it. Maybe the particular vibe of certain spots just felt more like home to predators. Predators like to lair in a place with multiple ways in and out, isolated from casual entry, near supplies of whatever it was they like to eat. Supernatural predators would also have some level of awareness of the nature of the Nevernever that abutted any given part of our reality, even if it was only an instinct. It would make sense that they would be more at ease in places that joined parts of the Nevernever where they would be comfortable. I mean, everyone likes to eat somewhere that feels like home.
If I lived through the next day or so, I needed to start keeping track of where these jokers liked to get their bloodthirsty freak on. It might give me an edge someday. Or at least a list of places that could use a nice burning down. I hadn’t burned down a building in ages.
Two ninety-nine. Three hundred.
“Ready or not,” I muttered, “here I come.”
I strode out of the alley across from the warehouse, gathering my will into a shield around my left hand, and readied a lance of force in my right. Hell’s bells, I missed my equipment. Mab had forced me to learn how to do without, but that didn’t mean I could do it as well. I missed my shield bracelet. I missed my blasting rod. I missed my spell-armored coat. With that gear, this would be pretty simple. I could protect myself better from every direction and have a lot more range on my spells to make the bad guys keep their heads down. But it would take me weeks to build new ones, and I had to work with what I had—which was pretty much just me.
My shields would be as strong, but I couldn’t sustain them for as much time, or in every direction—so I couldn’t walk in with a nice comfortable bubble of force around me. Without the bracelet or a tool like it, I could protect myself only from the front, and only for a few seconds at a time. My offensive spells would hit just as hard, but they’d have a shorter range, and they would take a few more crucial fractions of a second to enact.
Man, I missed my toys.
The warehouse had a little fence covered in plastic sheeting and topped with barbed wire. There was a gated area in front of the main entryway, though the gate had been blasted off its hinges by some deranged ruffian who did not look like me, no matter what the witnesses said, and apparently no one had replaced it since.
Awful lot of open space out there. I’d be a really juicy target. Which was sort of the point: Make myself so attractively vulnerable that no one was watching the back door. It wasn’t the best idea in the world to walk out into that, but Halloween night was maybe an hour away, and there wasn’t time to be smart.
That said, there’s a difference between being reckless and being insane. I didn’t especially like the idea of stumbling over a trip line tied to, let’s say, an antipersonnel mine, so before I went in, I flung my right arm forward in a large sweeping underhand motion, as if I were trying to throw a bowling ball at the pins two lanes over from where I was standing. I muttered, “Forzare!” as I threw the spell, focusing on shaping the force I’d released into what I needed.
Energy rippled across the ground in a shock wave that threw up dust and bits of gravel and irregular chunks of broken asphalt. It rippled across the ground to the warehouse and landed against its front doorway with a giant, hollow boom.
“Say, ‘Who’s there!�
��” I shouted at the warehouse, already walking forward rapidly, while the dust still hung in the air—it would make it more possible, if not likely, to spot any of the Redcap’s Sidhe buddies who might be hiding under a veil inside it. “I dare you! I double-dog dare you!”
I hurled another blast of force at the big loading doors in the front of the warehouse, something meant to make a lot of noise, not to tear them down. It succeeded. A second enormous concussion made the building’s steel girders and metal walls ring like some vast, dark bell.
“The furious wizard, that’s who!” I shouted. “You’ve got ten seconds to free my friends, unharmed, or I’m going to fucking smite every last mother’s son of you!”
I had maybe half a second’s warning, and then a streaking black form dived down from above me and raked at my eyes with its talons. I snapped my head back out of the way, only to see a hawk beating back up out of the nadir of its dive. It rolled in the air, and as it did it shimmered, and in an instant the hawk was gone and one of the Sidhe was there in its place, arcing through the air in free fall, holding a bow and an arrow in his hands. He drew and shot in the same instant he shifted, and I barely caught the arrow on my shield. Before he could begin to fall, he completed the roll and shifted again, back into hawk form, then beat his wings and continued rising into the sky.
Hell’s bells. That looked awesome. It took a serious mastery of shape-shifting to bring equipment and clothes and things with you when you changed form, but that guy had made it look as easy as breathing.
I mean, say what you will about the faeries, but they’ve got style. Not so much style that I didn’t hurl another bolt of force after the flying archer, but I missed him and he winged away with a mocking shriek.
Then I felt a small, sharp pain in my left leg.
I looked down to see a little wooden dart sticking out of the back of my calf. It was carved, perfectly smooth and round, and fletched with a few tiny slivers of scarlet feather. I snapped my gaze around behind me, and caught a single glimpse of the Redcap poised in a crouch atop the fence surrounding the warehouse, balancing his weight with apparent effortless ease along a strand of barbed wire that had to have been a sixteenth of an inch wide.