by Jim Butcher
Maeve stepped back from me, watching me, her exotic eyes opaque.
Silence fell within the little privacy spell.
Well, crap.
That was pretty much that.
Neither of the Ladies could speak a direct lie. I hadn’t left them any room to dance around the truth. They were serious. I guess it was possible that they might have been mistaken, but they were damned well sincere.
“Neither of us can stop her,” Lily said into that silence. “Even working together, we do not have anything like the power needed to overcome Mab’s defenses, and she would never lower her guard for either of us.”
“But for you,” Maeve said.
“Her knight,” Lily said, “her champion.”
“She might not be quite so guarded,” Maeve said, her eyes shining fever-bright. “You have power enough to smite her, if you strike when she is unprepared.”
“What?” I blurted.
“What we ask you is not fair,” Lily said. “We know tha . . .” She glanced at Maeve. “Well. I know that. But we have no other options.”
“Uh, yes, you do,” I said. “What about Titania? The Queen of Summer is an equal opposite, isn’t she? Mab’s mirror?”
The two Ladies exchanged a guarded look.
“Out with it,” I said. “We’re way past word games here.”
Lily nodded. “She . . . refuses to act. I do not know why.”
“Because she’s terrified she’ll be infected, too, obviously,” Maeve snapped.
“Guys,” I said. “I have seen what Mab is. Even if I catch her off guard, I don’t have the kind of clout it takes to drop someone in her league.”
Lily blinked at me several times. “But . . . but you do. You have Winter.”
“Which is meaningful because . . . ?”
“Because she is Winter,” Maeve said. “The Winter within you is Mab and she is it. The one thing you can never protect yourself against is yourself. You of all people should know this, wizard.”
I shuddered. I did.
“The Winter Knight is a useful weapon,” Maeve said. “But it has ever been one with two edges. Mab stands no mightier than any of the Sidhe against your hand, Sir Knight.”
I narrowed my eyes at Maeve. “Wait a minute,” I said. “Why in the hell should I think you’re trying to help me? Since when have you cared about the mortal world, Maeve?”
Her smile widened. “Since I realized that should my mother fall, I will have a very large and very exclusive chair to sit upon back at Arctis Tor, wizard. Do not think for a moment that I do it from the kindness of my heart. I want the throne.”
Now, that was a scary thought. Mab was a force of nature, sure, but she also acted a lot like one. She rarely took things personally, she didn’t play favorites, and she was generally speaking equally dangerous to everyone. Maeve, though. That bitch was just not right. The thought of her with Mab’s mantle of power was something terrifying to anyone with half a brain—especially the guy who would be her personal champion.
“I don’t dig the idea of serving you, Maeve,” I said.
At that, the lazy sex-kitten look came back into her eyes. “I haven’t yet begun to persuade you, wizard. But be assured that I would never, ever throw away a tool so useful as you would be, should you succeed.”
“Even if it might slice into you next?” I asked.
Maeve laughed. “Oh, I am going to love playing games with you, Sir Knight. But first things first. You have no choice but to act. If you do not, millions of your fellow mortals will perish. In the end, you will act to protect them. That is what you are.”
“Lady Maeve has a point,” Lily said, with evident reluctance. “There is very little time. I understand your trepidation about the consequences of Mab’s . . . passing . . . but we have little choice. She is simply too dangerous to be allowed to continue.”
I made a low growling sound. “This is insane.”
“Fun,” Maeve said, her nose wrinkling, “isn’t it?”
I eyed both of them. “What are you holding back from me?”
Lily twitched again, and looked displeased at the question. “No one must realize that you know of the contagion,” she said. “You cannot know which of your allies or associates it has already taken. If you demonstrate awareness, anyone infected will either remove you or infect you.”
“Anything else?” I asked her.
“I will speak to Fix,” Lily said. “Otherwise, no.”
I nodded at her. Then I eyed Maeve. “What about you? Holding anything back?”
“I want to take you to my bower, wizard,” Maeve said, and licked her lips. “I want to do things to you that give you such pleasure your brain bleeds.”
“Uh,” I said.
Her foxlike smile sharpened. “Also,” she said, “my people are about to attempt to kill you.”
Lily’s eyes snapped toward Maeve, widening.
“I promised him nothing,” Maeve said with a sniff. “And there are appearances to keep up, after all. I am certain my mother has eyes watching his every move. He can hardly meet peaceably with me without making her suspicious.”
“Ah,” Lily said, nodding. “Oh, dear.”
Maeve leaned toward me, taking a confidential tone. “They don’t know of the contagion either, wizard. So their attempts will be quite sincere. I advise you to resist. Strenuously.”
Seven figures stepped around a corner of the garden on the far side of the bridge and began striding purposefully toward our little gathering. Sidhe. The Redcap strode along in the center.
“Hell’s bells,” I snarled, taking an involuntary step back. “Right here? Now? You could have given me a couple of minutes to get clear, dammit.”
“And what fun would that be?” Maeve asked, pushing out her lower lip in a pout. “I am who I am, too. I love violence. I love treachery. I love your pain—and the best part, the part I love most, is that I am doing it for your own good.” Her eyes gleamed white all the way around her irises. “This is me being one of the good guys.”
“I’m so sorry, Harry,” Lily said. “I didn’t want this. I think you should go. . . .” She turned aside to Maeve. “So that the Winter Lady can introduce me to her vassals. This is the first time we’ve met.”
Maeve blinked, and her expression darkened into a scowl. “Oh. Oh, you prissy bint.”
Lily said, with utmost sincerity, “I regret that this inconveniences your enjoyment, Lady, but protocol is quite clear.”
Maeve stomped one foot on the bridge, scowled at me, and then seized Lily by the wrist. She started dragging the Summer Lady toward her oncoming entourage.
Lily gave me a quick wink, the expression as pleasant as the warmth from a cup of hot chocolate, and I started backing off. Once I was off the bridge, I turned and began to run. There was no telling how long Lily’s tactic would stall the Redcap and his buddies, and I wanted to be in the truck and gone before introductions were made.
That plan was going pretty well, right up until I passed a huge wall of thick evergreen plants of some kind. Then something small and blurry shot out of the brush about half a step ahead of me. I got a flash impression of Captain Hook in his miniature armor, trailing some kind of heavy cord, and then my feet were tangled in it and down I went.
I tried to be cool and roll into the fall and come back up on my feet, but that works a lot better when you don’t have one of your legs abruptly jerked out from beneath you. So mostly I hit the ground in a clumsy sprawl, then slid several feet forward on the damp concrete with my weight on my chest and my cheek.
Ow.
I got back onto my feet, moving as fast as I could. I didn’t feel like getting stabbed with more of those steel nails, and my eyes went up to the open sky, scanning quickly for any incoming hostile Little Folk as I got moving again.
So I wasn’t as ready as I should have been when a man in biker leathers emerged from the brush at my side and slammed a baseball bat into the base of my skull. My legs turned to jelly an
d I went down hard, landing on my chin.
I sort of flopped over onto my back, dazed, lifting my hands in a vague and useless defensive gesture. I took the tip of a motorcycle boot directly to the testicles, and my whole world went bright with confusion and pain.
“Yeah,” snarled the man. He was of medium height, and had curly dark hair and a short goatee. “That’s right, bitch. Who’s crawling on the ground now?”
Asking the question seemed to infuriate him. He slammed a kick into my ribs, then another right into the breadbasket, and I curled around myself gasping.
I had to move. The Redcap was coming. I hadn’t made any noise to tip Thomas off that I was in trouble—but even as heavily boosted as I was, it wasn’t enough to instantly overcome the stunning pain of those blows. Shots like that mess around with your nervous system, disrupting the machinery that sends signals around your body. I wasn’t going anywhere for a few more seconds.
“Nail him,” the man spat, and those frozen spikes of raw agony I’d felt before blossomed into my body from my right arm, my left calf, and somewhere in my lower back. I heard the buzz of little wings as my attackers zipped past me, driving nails in like harpoons into a floundering whale. It hurt so much that I could barely open my eyes and look up at my attacker.
I recognized him.
Ace, a changeling, one of his parents mortal, the other fae. He was the onetime victim of Lloyd Slate, the onetime betrayer of Fix and Lily and a girl named Meryl. He stared down at me with hate-filled eyes and bounced an aluminum baseball bat a few times in his hand. “I’ve been waiting years for this.”
And then he started clubbing me over the head.
Chapter Twenty-six
Taking a beating well is not for amateurs.
You have to get started early, maybe by getting beaten up a lot as a child in school. Then you refine your raw talent by taking more beatings as you get older. Generally, you can seek out almost any crew of athletic types, and you’ll find several willing to oblige you, under one guise or another. True craftsmen then seek out gifted individuals with a particular skill set to deliver the most skilled and professional beatings.
That’s how you learn to fight, really. You take beatings, and you get tougher, and if you don’t start avoiding all the fights, you continue taking beatings until you learn how it’s done. Or they kill you.
Some guys are born lucky, with mad natural fighting skills, and they hardly ever take a beating—but that’s never been me. I’ve had to learn the hard way.
Like every other kind of pain, beatings are educational.
Ace started swinging the aluminum bat, and I learned two things about him right away. First, he wasn’t any stronger than any other guy about his size—don’t get me wrong; that was plenty strong enough to kill me at the moment. But he wasn’t going to deliver the coup de grâce by dropping a forklift on my head. Second, he was emotionally invested.
See, beatings have only a couple of purposes. You are either deterring someone from something—flirting with your girl, stealing your wallet, strangling you, whatever—in which case the point of the beating is to convey a very simple message: Stop it. The second “reason” to deliver a beating is to simply inflict pain. There’s no actual reason involved, of course. It’s all an emotional drive, a need to make someone hurt. Sometimes that kind of drive is well justified. Sometimes it’s misdirected rage. And sometimes, maybe more often than we really want to believe, people just enjoy making someone else feel pain.
The third motivation for a beating is to kill someone. There’s some bleedover, ah hah, between the second reason and the third.
Ace was handing me a beating of the second kind. He wasn’t thinking. He had a need to make me feel pain. And I was obliging the hell out of him.
The nails were the worst, like frozen points of pure fire in my flesh. Beside that agony, the first couple of blows from the bat were a dull ache. I got my arms between my noggin and the bat, getting the meat of my forearms in the way wherever I could. Arm bones are considerably less robust than broomsticks, and a solid swing with a club will snap them. Get the muscle and soft tissue in the way, though, and it spreads out the impact, both in surface area and in duration. It disperses the force—and hurts like a son of a bitch.
He swung at me several times. I blocked some. One clipped my forehead. I wriggled out of the way of the rest, the bat throwing up chips from the concrete sidewalk. I kicked at his knees with my feet, though I was in a poor position to do it. That was the part of the conflict that was important to me.
Meanwhile, I gave Ace the part that was important to him. I screamed. It didn’t take a lot in the way of Method acting to make it convincing. The nails hurt so badly, I was pretty much going to start screaming anyway. So I screamed bloody murder, and he all but frothed at the mouth as he kept after me, swinging faster, more powerfully—and more erratically.
Swinging a club down at a struggling target is harder work than everyone thinks it is, and doing that and dodging clumsy kicks at the same time is the kind of aerobic workout you just don’t get at the gym. The longer it went on, the heavier he would be breathing, and the more intently he would be focused on me.
Screaming, howling, very noisy me.
See, surprises like this are exactly why you bring backup in the first place. I knew I couldn’t last more than a few seconds against Ace’s onslaught. I also knew how fast my brother could run.
But someone else got there first.
I heard a pair of light steps and then Ace grunted. I looked up through my impact-numbed arms and saw him swing the bat again, this time at a standing target.
The bat lashed out and never stopped moving in its arc, but suddenly there was a small figure rolling up close to Ace, coming between his chest and the bat in his extended arm. They whirled in a circle, following the spin of the bat, and Ace’s heels abruptly flipped up into the air over his head and he landed empty-handed on the concrete with a gasp of pain.
A woman stood over him. She was five nothing, and built with the kind of lithe, solid power that you’d expect in an Olympic gymnast who had stayed fit as she aged. Her blond hair was cut short, to finger-length. She’d had a pert upturned nose the last time I’d seen her. It had been broken since then, and while it had healed, I could see the slight bump the break had left. She had on jeans and a denim jacket, and her eyes were blue and blazing.
Ace started to get up, but a motorcycle boot much smaller than his own slammed down on his chest.
Karrin Murphy scowled at him, tossed the bat into the bushes, and said in a hard voice, “Stay down, creep. Only warning.”
It was difficult to translate frantic thought into verbalization through the pain of the cold iron piercing my skin, but I managed to gasp, “Incoming!”
Murphy’s eyes snapped around her, scanning in every direction including up, and she saw the first of the armored Little Folk diving down at her. Her hand snatched something out of her jacket pocket, and with a flick of her wrist she snapped out a small, collapsible baton. The Little Folk darted down upon her like a squad of angry wasps.
She didn’t try to evade them. She planted her feet and began snapping the little baton with sharp, precise motions. There wasn’t really time for her to aim at anything—she was running on pure reflex. Murphy’d been a martial arts practitioner since she was a child, mainly in aikido along with several others. Aikido included all kinds of fun areas of study, and one of them was learning how to handle a sword. I knew that she’d also been spending a lot of time training with a gang of ancient Einherjaren, postdead Norse warriors of Valhalla. I doubt any of her teachers had trained her for this situation.
But they’d come close enough.
That little baton was a blur as it moved in half a dozen quick, sharp strokes, batting away the incoming Little Folk one by one. There were several sounds of impact and then a sharp ping and then a miniature clatter as Captain Hook was struck from the air and went into a sprawling crash on the ground. There were
a series of high-pitched shrieks of panic, and the Little Folk vanished.
Beginning to end, that little fracas had lasted maybe five seconds.
I started fumbling at the nails still sticking out of me, but Ace and his baseball bat had left my fingers numb and useless. I managed to pull the one in my arm out with my teeth, which was unpleasant in a dimension I hardly knew existed. I spit out the nail and heard myself making short, desperate sounds of pain.
Murphy took several steps back until her heel bumped my shoulder. Then she stepped carefully over my body, never taking her eyes off the downed Ace. “How bad?”
I managed to grate out, “Nails.”
The bushes crashed and Thomas appeared from them, pistol in one hand, that insanely big Gurkha knife in the other. His gun tracked to Murphy, then snapped upward, and retrained upon the downed Ace. “Oh, hi, Karrin.”
“Thomas,” Murphy said shortly. She looked down at me. I tried to gesture at the nails still sticking in me, but given the state of my hands and arms, I managed only to flail around weakly. “Dammit, Harry, hold still.”
It didn’t take her long. Two quick tugs and the nails were free. The level of pain I was experiencing dropped to maybe a tenth of what it had been. I sagged in relief.
“How bad?” Thomas asked.
“One of these wounds is bleeding, not bad,” Murphy reported. “Jesus, his arms.”
“We need to get out,” I said. My voice sounded raw to me. “Trouble coming.”
“No,” said a beautiful Sidhe baritone. “Trouble is here.”