by Butcher, Jim
His mouth was spread in a wide, manic grin. He held a short silvery tube in one hand, and as my eyes found his face, he touched two fingertips of his other hand to his lips, blew me a kiss, and plummeted back off of the fence and out of sight.
I whirled toward him and brought up my shield, then spun around and angled it that way, then jittered about, rubbernecking everywhere at once. But that was it. Assuming the Sidhe weren’t simply undetectable to my senses, they were gone.
A slow burning sensation began to spread from the wound in my leg.
A cold shiver oozed down my spine. I tugged the dart out of my calf. It hadn’t done much—the slender spear of wood had penetrated maybe a quarter inch into my skin—but when I rolled up my pant leg to look, I found an inordinately large trickle of blood coming from the tiny wound.
And that burning sensation became an almost infinitesimally greater presence with each heartbeat.
This hadn’t been a hostage crisis at all.
It had been an assassination. Or . . . or something.
“Goddammit!” I snarled. “I just got played again! I am so sick and tired of this backstabby bullshit!”
I more or less stormed into the warehouse, shoving open the office door and stalking out onto the main floor. The place was just as empty as I remembered, give or take the leavings of several apparent transients between the present and the past. Molly was at the very rear of the warehouse, near the door. She was helping Justine to sit up. Mac was there, too, and he and Butters were between them helping a wobbly-looking Andi to remain on her feet. Mouse was standing guard between the group and the front of the warehouse, and he started wagging his tail when he saw me.
“Clear,” I called out to them, hurrying over. “Or at least clearish. What happened?”
“They were under a sleeping enchantment,” Molly reported. “Pretty standard stuff. I woke them up.”
“Everyone okay?”
“Andi got hit on the head when they took her,” she said. “Other than that, I think we’re good.”
When she spoke, Molly’s voice never quavered, but her eyes flickered uncertainly toward Mac. I took a closer look at everyone. Andi, Butters, and Justine had all been bound. Justine was only now getting the ropes cut off of her wrists, and as Molly sawed them away with a pocketknife, I could see the deep red marks they’d left on Justine’s slender wrists. Butters and Andi had them, too, visible even in the dimness of the warehouse.
Mac didn’t.
That was interesting. Why hadn’t Mac been tied up? Or if he had, how come there wasn’t a mark to show for it? Either way, that was odd.
My first instinct was to grab him and demand answers—but the direct approach hadn’t gotten me anything but more confused as I went through this stupid day. I might have been a better thug than at any point in my life, but that wouldn’t matter if I couldn’t figure out where to apply my muscle. And I was damned tired of being sneaked up on. So it was time to get sneaky.
I ground my teeth and pretended that Molly hadn’t clued me into anything. “All right, people,” I said. “Let’s move. I think they’re gone but they could be back.”
“That’s it?” Molly asked. “I was expecting more trouble than th—” She broke off, staring at the floor behind me.
My leg throbbed and burned a little more, and I glanced down at it in irritation. To my shock, I saw a long line of small smears of my blood on the tile floor. The little wound had continued bleeding, soaked through my sock and my shoe, and dribbled down onto my heel.
“What happened?” Molly asked.
“It was another stupid trick,” I said. “The point wasn’t to hold them for ransom. It was to get me here, under pressure, and too keyed up to defend myself from every direction.” I held up the dart. “We’d better find out what this thing is and what kind of poison is on it.”
“Oh, my God,” Molly breathed.
“I’ll take whatever help I can get,” I said. “Let’s g—”
But before I could finish the sentence, there was a loud crunching whoomp of a sound, and the entire warehouse shook. I barely had time to think demolition charges before there was a deafening crack, and the floor tilted.
And then the back twenty feet of the warehouse, including all of us, fell right off of the street and into the cold, dark water of Lake Michigan.
Chapter
Thirty-eight
We didn’t drop straight down. Instead, there was a scream of shearing bolts, and our part of the building lurched drunkenly and then plunged into the water at an oblique angle.
The confusion of it was the worst part. The loud noise, the disorientation inherent in the uneven motion, and then the short surge of terror as gravity took over all served to create a panic reaction in my head—and I’m not a guy who panics easily.
That’s what most people don’t understand about situations like this one. People are just built to freak out when something goes wrong. It doesn’t matter if you’re a kindergarten teacher or a Special Forces operator—when life-threatening stuff happens, you get scared. You freak out. That’s just what happens. When it’s because you’ve woken up to a hungry bear in your camp, that’s usually a pretty good mechanism.
But being dropped into black water in an enclosed area is not a place where panicked adrenaline is going to help you out. That’s when you have to somehow set that fear aside and force yourself to use your rational mind to guide you out of the situation. There are two ways to get yourself into that terrified-but-rational state of mind. First is training, where you drill a reaction into yourself so hard and so many times that it becomes a form of reflex you can perform without even thinking. And the other way you get there is to have enough experience to have learned what you need to do.
So the first thing I did as the cold water swallowed me was to close my eyes for a second and focus, just as I would if I were preparing a spell, relaxing my limbs and letting them float loosely in the water. I gathered my thoughts and laid out my options.
First, I had time, but not much of it. I had gotten a good breath before I went under. The others might or might not have done the same. So I had about two minutes to act before people started trying to breathe Lake Michigan. Two minutes doesn’t sound like long, but it was enough time to spend a few seconds thinking.
Second, we were surrounded by steel siding. I wasn’t getting through that with anything short of a full-power blast, and that wasn’t going to happen while I was surrounded by water. Water tends to disperse and ground out magical energies just by being nearby. When water is all around you, it’s all but impossible to direct any energy out of your body without it spreading out and diluting to uselessness.
The edges of the building might or might not have grounded themselves into the mud at the bottom of the lake, trapping us all like bugs under a shoe box lid. There wasn’t time to search through them systematically, not before people started drowning. That meant that we had to go out through the only way I could be sure was available—the back door.
Except that everyone was spread out in the blackness now, and at least one person, Andi, was already disoriented from the blow to her head. It was possible others had been hurt in the fall, or would get hurt as they struggled to get out. There seemed to be very little chance that I could find the door, then find all of them in the dark, then get them pointed at the door and out. It seemed just as unlikely that everyone would stop to think and come to the same conclusion I had. There was a very real chance that one or more of my friends might be left behind.
But what other options did I have? It wasn’t as though I could lift the entire thing out of the water—
No. I couldn’t.
But Winter could.
I opened my eyes into the darkness, made a best guess for down, and swam that way. I found mud within a few feet. I thrust my right hand into the mud, thrashing rather awkwardly to get it done. Then I went limp again, floating a bit weirdly, tethered by my hand in the mud, and focused my mind.
I wasn’t going to try to lift the freaking building. That was just insane. I’d known things that might have been able to pull it off, but I was certain I wasn’t one of them, not even with the power of the Winter Knight’s mantle.
Besides, why do it the stupid way?
I felt myself smiling, maybe smiling a little too widely, in the dark water, and unleashed the cold of winter directly into the ground beneath me, through my right hand. I poured it on, holding nothing back, reaching deep into me, to the source of cold power inside me, and sending it out into the muck of the lake bottom.
Lake Michigan is a deep lake, and only its upper layers ever really warm up. Beyond a few feet of the surface, the cold is a constant, an absolute, and the mud at the bottom of what I was guessing to be fifteen or twenty feet of water, at the most, was clammy. As the power poured out of me, the water did what it always did with magic—it began to diffuse it, to spread it out.
Which was exactly what I was going for.
Ice formed around my hand and spread into a circle several feet wide in the first instant, conducted more easily through the mud than through the water. I poured more effort in, and the circle widened, more ice forming, spreading out. I kept up the cold, and the water touching the bottom began to freeze as well.
My heart began to beat harder, and there was a roaring sound in my ears. I didn’t give up, sending more and more cold into the lake around me, building up layer after layer of ice across the entire bottom of the lake beneath the collapsed warehouse. At sixty seconds, the ice was three feet deep, and forming around my arm and shoulder. At ninety seconds, it had engulfed my head and upper body, and had to have been five or six feet deep. And when my internal count reached a hundred and ten, the entire mass of ice tore loose from the lake’s bottom with a groan and began to rise.
I never let up on it, building it into a miniature iceberg, and the steel beams and walls of the warehouse moaned and squealed as the ice began to lift them free. I felt it when my feet came out of the water, though most of the rest of me was still stuck in the ice. I tore and twisted and seemed to know exactly where to apply pressure and torque without being told. The ice crackled away and I slipped out of it with a minimum of fuss. When I pulled my head out (go ahead; make a joke), I was sitting in dim light atop a sheet of ice floating several inches out of the waters of the lake.
I was still in the rear section of the warehouse. The back door was open, straight above my head, and was letting in most of the light. The broken ends of the room, the floor, and the two walls had been embedded in ice, but crookedly. The ragged edge of the ceiling was a couple of feet out of the water.
Several very startled-looking people and one fur-plastered dog were shivering on the ice. I took a quick head count. Everyone was there.
I sagged down onto the ice in relief, fatigue making my body feel like it weighed an extra ton, and just lay there for a moment as the wreckage bobbed gently in the water. After a few seconds, I became aware of eyes on me, and I looked up.
My friends were all sitting or kneeling on the ice, damp and shivering, and staring at me with wide eyes. Molly’s eyes were bright and intense, the expression on her face unreadable. Justine’s mouth hung slightly open, and her big dark eyes looked afraid. Butters stared first at me and then down at the ice, his eyes flicking around, the wheels clearly churning in his head as he calculated how much ice there was and how much energy it would have taken to freeze it. Mac regarded me impassively, still supporting the dazed Andi.
Sweetly curved Andi was the most vulnerable. If I could isolate her from the herd, things could get interesting. I’d just saved her life, after all. She owed me. I could think of a few ways that she could express her gratitude.
I pushed the predator thought out of my head and took a deep breath. When I exhaled, it condensed into a thick, foggy vapor, more so than it ever would have naturally, even on the coldest days. I looked down at my hands and they were covered in frost, and my fingertips and nails were turning blue. I put a hand to my face and had to brush away a thin layer of frost.
Hell’s bells. What did I look like, to make my friends stare at me like that?
Time for mirrors later.
I stood up, my feet sure even on the wet ice, and found the nearest point of the shoreline. I extended a hand, murmured, “Infriga,” and froze a ten-foot-long bridge from my improvised iceberg to land.
“Come on,” I said, as I started walking toward the shore. My voice sounded strange, rough. “We don’t have much time.”
* * *
The sun had slipped below the cloud cover, and the sky was a bank of hot coals, slowly burning down toward ember and ash when we got back to Molly’s apartment.
Thomas and Karrin were waiting outside. The two of them were leaning against the wall near the security checkpoint. Thomas had a tall coffee cup in one hand and a bagel in the other. Karrin was staring down at a smartphone, her thumbs flicking over its surface.
Thomas took note of the car as it pulled up, and nudged Karrin. She looked up, then did a double take at the Munstermobile. She rolled her eyes, then apparently turned the phone off and slipped it into a case on her belt.
I stopped the car and rolled down the window.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Karrin said, eyeing the car. “This?”
“I think it’s a company car,” I said.
Karrin leaned down and looked at everyone in the back. “What happened?”
“Inside—I’ll explain.”
We got parked and everyone made their way to Molly’s place, some of them more slowly than others.
“You’re limping,” Thomas noted, walking beside me. “And bleeding.”
“No, I’m . . .” I began. Then I sighed. “Yeah. Redcap shot me with some kind of dinky dart. Maybe poisoned. Or something.”
Thomas made a low growling sound in his chest. “I’m just about done with that clown.”
“Tell me about it.”
Molly opened the door, and the moment I stepped in, Lacuna came zipping over to me. The little armored faerie hovered in the air near my face, her dark hair flying wildly in the turbulence of her own beating wings. “You can’t do it!” she cried. “You can’t just give them all that pizza! Do you have any idea how much harm you’re doing? Can I please fight now?”
“Whoa,” I said, leaning back and holding up my hands.
“Hey, shortcake,” my brother snapped. “Back off.”
“You aren’t important,” Lacuna declared to Thomas, evidently dismissing him entirely as she turned back to me. “I wrote down everything just like you said and now they’re going to get that awful pizza all over themselves without the least regard for properly protecting themselves, and I’m going to fight them for the pizza!”
“In the first place, that is not a fight you are going to win,” I said, “and in the second place—they found something?”
“And I wrote it down like you said and now I want to duel them!”
“No duels!” I said, and headed for the dining table. Sure enough, Lacuna had drawn precise little Xs at all of the sites marked on the map. Most of them had been done with a green pen, but two locations were marked in red. One of them was next to one of the primary sites I’d marked earlier, on this side of the lake, north of town. The next was at one of the secondary sites, a little farther inland and on the far side of the lake.
“Lacuna, were they sure that ritual preparation was under way at both of these locations?”
“And the others were clear,” the little faerie replied impatiently. “Yes, yes, yes.”
“Crap,” I muttered. “Molly, time?”
“Twenty-five minutes to sundown, more or less,” she replied. She came to the table with a first-aid kit in her hands. “Waldo, can you take a look at this?”
“The minute I’m sure Andi isn’t bleeding into her brain,” Butters snapped.
“I’ve already sent for an ambulance,” Molly said back in a calm, iron tone that sounded cr
eepily like her mother. “Andi will die with all of the rest of us if Harry doesn’t stop things from going boom, so get over here and see to him.”
Butters turned toward Molly with absolute murder in his eyes. But then he looked at me, and back to the dazed Andi in her chair. Mac was supporting her. The bartender looked up at Butters and nodded.
“I hate this,” Butters said, his voice boiling with anger. But he came over to the table, grabbed the kit, and said, “Try to hold still, Harry.”
I planted my foot and kept standing still as he started cutting away my jeans at the knee. “Okay,” I said. Karrin was already standing beside me, and Thomas joined us across the table. “What’s the word from Marcone’s Vikings?”
“Strike team standing by,” Murphy said, “waiting for my word.”
I grunted. “Thomas?”
“Lara’s team is ready, too,” he said.
“Butters, what do we have from the Paranet?”
“Dammit, Dresden, I’m a medical examiner, not an intelligence analyst.” He gave the little wound a prod with something and a white-hot needle went up my leg to the hip.
“Nngh,” I said. “Nothing?”
He took a wipe to the wound, and that didn’t feel very good either. “About half a dozen sightings of the Little Folk all over.”
“Aren’t those yours?” Murphy asked.
“Some, probably,” I said. “But I think they’re the rest of Ace’s crew.”
Murphy grunted. “I thought the prisoner wouldn’t tell you anything about him.”
I shrugged. “I figure it was Ace who threw the explosives at the Munstermobile last night, when the Little Folk jumped me afterward. He showed up right when Lacuna ambushed me at the Botanic Gardens. Then when I go to get my friends back from his dad, something else blows up.”