by Jim Butcher
My hands stopped shaking and my breathing slowed and steadied, bringing the terror under control. I whispered a quick, almost entirely mental prayer to St. Jude, the patron of lost causes and policemen. It sounded something like, “OhGodohGodohGod. Help.”
I nudged the door open a few more inches, then slid into the warehouse, moving with as much speed and silence as I possessed, my gun at the level and ready.
I MOVED DOWN the length of the warehouse, mostly hidden behind a shelving unit more than twenty feet high. It was stacked with pallets, loading gear, storage bins, and the occasional barrel or box of unknown provenance. The shifting, constantly wavering light made an excellent cover for motion, and I timed my steps to move in rhythm with the dancing illumination.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and it felt like every inch of my skin was covered in gooseflesh. I’d been in the presence of dangerous magic often enough to know the feeling of dark power in motion. It had been like this at Chichen Itza, and in the waters off the island of Demonreach, and in the Raith Deeps, and at Arctis Tor, and in the nest of Black Court vampires, and at . . .
You get the point. This wasn’t my first rodeo.
The most important thing would be to take out Nothing’s presumptive boss, and fast—preferably before anyone knew I was here at all. The warehouse reeked of magic, and if a mortal goes into a fair fight against a wizard, the mortal loses. Period. They have power that is literally almost unimaginable, and if the bad guy got a chance to defend himself, the only uncertainty remaining would be how much creativity he put into killing me.
At the end of the shelving unit, there was a rolling ladder, one made to run all the way up and down the shelves and provide easy access. The warehouse was darker up near the ceiling than at floor level. I didn’t even slow down. I went up the ladder to the top of the shelving unit and froze in place, getting a good, clear look at the enemy for the first time.
There were half a dozen of them including Nothing, and they all shopped at the same store. Their outfits were conspicuous due to their uniformity, though some instinct made me think that they had been intended as disguises—that individuality, as a concept, wasn’t of any particular concern to Nothing and his crew. Nothing was, by far, the largest of the men, though none of them looked like featherweights.
They were loading cages into a railroad cargo container, a fairly common sight on large ships, some of which could carry hundreds of the metal boxes. The cages had been sized to stack exactly into the railroad car, two across and three high, with no consideration whatsoever for the human cargo. There were no blankets, no pads—nothing but metal cages and vulnerable skin.
I spotted Andi’s cage, not far from Georgia’s. The redheaded girl had evidently lacked some critical capacity to resist whatever had been done to her. She lay on her back, staring blankly up at the roof of her cage. The werewolf girl was a bombshell. Even lying in completely passive relaxation, her curves beckoned the eye—but the hollow despair of her expression was haunting.
Nothing was standing over Will and Marcy, who lay limp and motionless on the floor at his feet. A couple of turtlenecks were hauling an empty cage toward them. “How long will it take?” he was asking a third man.
“Without knowing the exact drug, several hours,” the man replied. His voice was plainly human, and sounded nothing like whoever it was I’d spoken to on the phone. “Perhaps more.”
Nothing frowned. “Can you make a determination of their viability by dawn?”
“If I am able to isolate the substance that incapacitated them before then,” he said. “I have no means of determining how many attempts will be required. It will take as long as it takes.”
“He will not be pleased,” Nothing said.
The man bowed his head. “My life for the master. I will do all in my power to serve him. Should he be disappointed in me, it is meet for him to take my life.”
Nothing nodded. “Be about it.”
The man turned and walked quickly away, holding two small vials of rich red blood in his hand—samples from Will and Marcy, I assumed.
By then, the empty cage had arrived. Nothing picked up Marcy and lifted her toward the waiting cage. I bit down on a curse. If I let him imprison her, a full third of my team would be neutralized, as helpless as the prisoners who had already been taken. But if I started the music early, I risked throwing away my sucker punch. Nothing’s master might show up at any time.
On the other hand, Nothing seemed to be large and in charge. Perhaps the hissing person I’d spoken to on the phone had left matters in Nothing’s shovellike hands. Or perhaps I’d read the situation incorrectly. What if one of the other turtlenecks had been the first speaker, and Nothing was really the boss?
I made up my mind and settled the P-90’s crosshair onto Nothing’s head, a little below the tip of his nose. The weapon was set for automatic fire, and while I could control the weapon fairly well, especially when it was loaded with subsonic rounds, the recoil would tend to carry the weapon’s muzzle higher after the first shot.
Against anything human, more than one round to the head would be overkill: When the merely mortal goes up against the supernatural, there’s no such thing as overkill.
I snuggled the gun in close and tight, took a deep breath in, let it halfway out, held it, and began to slowly squeeze the weapon’s trigger.
The instant before the trigger would have broken, there was a shimmering in the air and a man stepped out of it, appearing as if from nowhere.
I backed off the tension on my finger, feeling my heart surge with unspent adrenaline.
The man was of medium height, with sallow skin and greasy, straight black hair that hung past his shoulders. His lips were very thick and his mouth very wide, almost to the point of deformity. His large eyes were dark and watery and bulging, his nose sunken, as small as any I had ever seen. He was soaking wet and naked, his limbs scrawny and long, his hands very, very wide. Except for the hair, I couldn’t help but compare him to a frog—a sullen, vicious frog.
The man let out a sound somewhat like a muffled belch, then vomited water onto the floor. Flaps of skin at his neck flared in and out, spewing smaller sprays of water several times, until he drew in a breath through his mouth, evidently filling his lungs with air.
All of the turtlenecks turned to face the creature and fell to their knees, including Nothing, who calmly set Marcy aside and went into a full kowtow, his palms flat on the floor, his forehead pressed down onto his knuckles.
“Sssssso,” he hissed, “did the inssssolent creature deliver our prizesss?”
I recognized the voice from the telephone.
“Yes, my lord,” rumbled Nothing. “As promised and in plenty of time to move.”
“Did you sssstrike the bitch down?”
Nothing rocked back and then bowed again, somehow giving the impression that he was doing it more deeply. “She was clever enough to build safeguards into the meeting. I could not do so without attracting attention.”
Frogface hissed. “I will sssettle with the mortal another time,” he said. “Sssuch insssolence cannot be countenanced.”
“No, my lord.”
“Bring the new acquisitionsss. I will bind them.”
“They have been given drugs, my lord. The binding could damage them.”
Without looking particularly excited about it, Frogface kicked Nothing in the armpit. The blow was a more powerful one than Frogface’s frame would suggest he was capable of giving. It flung Nothing from his hands and knees and onto his side by main force.
“Bring them.”
“I obey,” wheezed Nothing. He rose unsteadily and went to pick up Will. He dropped the young werewolf onto the floor beside Marcy.
“Sssuch disgusssting thingsss, mortalsss,” Frogface murmured. His eyes lifted to Georgia in her cage. “She hasss not yet capitulated.”
“No, my lord,” Nothing muttered.
“Interesssting,” Frogface said, and a leer spread over
his broad mouth. “When we arrive, transport her to my chambers. We will sssee what is left of her ssstrength when the ssspawn is taken from her womb.”
Jesus, men can be assholes. Even when they’re barely human. Frogface was officially elected.
Georgia shuddered. She lifted her head, very slowly, as if it had been held down with vast weights—and the glare she turned on Frogface was nothing less than murderous.
Frogface chuckled at the expression and turned to face Will and Marcy. He dipped his fingers into a pouch that hung around his neck, almost invisible against his leathery skin, and withdrew what looked like a small seashell from it. He leered at the motionless Marcy and said, “Firssst, the female.”
He closed his eyes and made a low sound in his throat, then began chanting words that bubbled and gobbled out from between his rubbery lips.
Now I’ve got you, I thought to myself, and sighted the gun on Frogface’s rubbery lips. I didn’t have Dresden’s knowledge of magic, but I knew any wizard was vulnerable when they began working forces, the way Frogface was doing. The concentration needed was intense. If I’d understood Dresden correctly, it would mean that Frogface would have to be focusing his entire attention on his spell—leaving nothing remaining for defending his sallow hide.
The air began to shimmer around Frogface’s hands, and fine, slithering tendrils emerged from the brightly colored shell and began to drift down toward Marcy, a cloud of tendrils as fine as a cobweb.
Certain now of my target, I breathed, held it, and squeezed the trigger.
Say what you like about the Belgians. They can make some fine weaponry.
The silenced P-90 barely whispered when the burst of automatic fire erupted from the end of the suppressor. There was no flash, no thunder—just a soft, wheezing sound and the click of the gun’s action cycling. Thanks to the subsonic ammunition, the discharge itself actually made less noise than the rounds striking Frogface’s skull.
There were several wet, loud cracking sounds, and every one of the rounds I’d fired struck home. One round would have been messy enough. When half a dozen of them hit, Frogface’s head quite literally exploded, shattered to pulp and shards of bone by the bullets’ impact, and two-thirds of his skull, from the upper lip on up, simply vanished into green-blooded spray.
There was a flash of angry red light from the seashell. Frogface let out a high-pitched, tinny scream, and the near-headless body began to topple, thrashing wildly.
The turtlenecks all came to their feet, looking around in wide-eyed confusion. My weapon had given them absolutely no clue as to where the attack had come from. I sighted in on Nothing, but from my angle, any rounds that went through him would threaten Will and a caged prisoner, beyond him.
I shifted targets, settling the red crosshairs on another turtleneck standing just past Will. I squeezed off another whispering burst of a half-dozen or so rounds, and the creature’s neck exploded into a cloud of scarlet gore the consistency of mucus. It went limp, settling to the floor like a deflating balloon.
Nothing’s pale-eyed gaze snapped over toward me, and I saw his gaze track the fall of brass bullet casings from where they bounced off the floor back up to my position on the shelves.
He let out an enraged sound, pulled a short tube from his pocket, and pointed it at me. I moved, sliding back down the ladder to the floor, hardly moving more slowly than if I’d fallen. There was a high-pitched whistle, and something that looked like a small, spiny sea urchin flew past me, just over my head, close enough for the wind of its passage to stir dark-dyed hairs. It slammed into the wall behind me and remained there, quivering, as its spines punched through the metal siding and stuck. Drops of yellow-green liquid fell from the tips of some of the spines, and began smoking and eating small holes in the concrete floor.
Yikes.
Throaty popping, clicking sounds from several sources filled the air, an exchange of what could only be language. I ran for the far end of the shelving unit as the dark forms of the turtlenecks started moving toward me. I caught glimpses of them between the boxes and containers stacked on the lowest shelf, running with the lithe, floating agility of professional athletes.
I ran past a clump of the growth on the wall, a little lower than most, and as I approached, it suddenly fluoresced with bioluminescent color. On sheer instinct, I threw myself flat to the concrete floor and slid past on my belly as the lumpy growths began hissing, and jets of mist, the same color as the fluid covering the urchin spines, began to spray forth at random. The smell was hideous, and I scrambled back to my feet and kept running down the aisle, staying as far from the wall as I could.
If I’d been half a step slower, I would have died. There was a great crash, and Nothing smashed through the lowest level of the shelving unit, thrusting aside a steel drum and a wooden crate the size of a coffin as if they’d been made of Styrofoam. His fingers missed grabbing onto me by inches.
A second turtleneck beat me to the end of the shelf. I opened up with the P-90, praying that a ricochet wouldn’t kill one of the prisoners, but my target moved with the speed of a striking serpent, bounding forward to plant a foot against the steel wall of the warehouse, six feet off the ground. Using only a single leg, he kicked off into a back-flip that carried him back past the end of the shelf and out of my line of fire.
The damn thing hadn’t been moving fast enough to dodge bullets—but he’d been moving fast enough to dodge me, and I was the one doing the aiming. A round might have clipped one of his legs, but that was all, and Nothing was pounding up behind me, gaining despite his mass. I felt like a squirrel being pursued by a German shepherd; if he caught me, it would end about the same way.
So I played squirrel, and instead of running in the open, I turned ninety degrees to my right and dove between two stacks of pallets on the lowest shelf. I took a little skin off an arm in hurling myself between them and emerged onto the open warehouse floor. I heard Nothing’s shoes squealing on the floor as he applied the brakes behind me.
A turtleneck was coming straight at me, on a direct line from the cages not yet loaded into the railroad car. I brought the P-90 up and dropped to one knee. The turtleneck rushed forward, his pale blue eyes wide and staring. He held an inward-curving knife in one hand and carried it low and close to his leg. He knew how to use it.
I put the scarlet crosshairs on his sternum and squeezed the trigger. The instant before the shots would have sputtered out of the gun, the turtleneck leapt straight up, flipping once in the air as he went over me.
After seeing the incredible quickness of the other not-quite-humans, I’d been waiting for the dodge. As soon as his feet left the floor, I spun to my left, opening fire the instant the end of the barrel was clear of the prisoners. Bullets hissed through the air like a great scythe—and in the edge of my vision, I saw the turtleneck I’d wounded seconds before. He’d come charging toward me while I’d aimed at his buddy, and the sudden turn took him by surprise. There was no aiming involved—it was a brute-force approach. I emptied the rest of the clip at him and prayed I could leave him no safe space in which to dodge.
St. Jude gets a lot of business, but sometimes he comes through. The hissing, puffing little gun spat out a line of deadly projectiles and intersected the turtleneck’s path, tearing a row of five or six holes across his upper body. The turtleneck screamed and went down.
But the one who’d leapt over me dropped back down, adjusting swiftly to the situation, and then whipped the hooked knife across my belly.
Almost anyone else in town would have been killed. The knife struck with enormous power, and its blade was sharp. Standard Kevlar-style body armor wouldn’t have done a damn thing to stop it. I’d stopped wearing the standard stuff, thanks to one too many exciting outings with Dresden. I wore a double-thickness vest now—and sandwiched between the layers of antiballistic fabric was a corselet of tightly linked titanium rings, manufactured for me by one of Dresden’s friends, the wife of a retired Fist of God.
The kn
ife sliced right through the Kevlar. It split a ring or three, but then the tip caught in the titanium. Instead of spilling my intestines upon the ground, the superhumanly powerful blow wound up dragging me along and flung me across the concrete floor. I went down into a roll and spread out the force of the fall, coming back up to my feet, already having released the empty magazine from the P-90. I was reaching for the fresh one when another turtleneck abruptly closed in on me from behind and slipped a slim, iron-hard arm around my neck.
I barely got a hand inside the loop of his arm before he could lock the choke on me, and I twisted like an eel to get out. His strength was far superior to mine, but then, whose wasn’t? Even in grappling, strength isn’t absolutely everything. The turtleneck might have been faster than I, but I had the advantage of experience. My timing was good enough to let me sense the opening, the lack of pressure in the weakest part of his hold, and I managed to writhe out of his grip—only to have a forearm smash down across my shoulders, driving me to the floor.
As I went down, I saw that the turtleneck with the knife was only a few steps away. I’d never escape a pair of them.
I didn’t have time to get another magazine into the P-90, so I rolled with it and smashed the heavy polymer stock of the weapon into the nearest turtleneck’s kneecap.
He screamed and seized me by the neck of the leather jacket, shaking me like a doll.
At which point Will and Marcy gave Nothing’s companions an object lesson as to why werewolves instill terror in mortal hearts and minds.
There was a flash of dark fur, a snarl, a horrible, tearing sound, and the turtleneck screamed. He started listing to one side, and I realized that one of the werewolves had just severed the hamstring of the turtleneck’s unwounded leg. We both went down. I twisted out of the leather jacket, though I had to drop the P-90 and let it hang from my harness to do it, and rolled free of the turtleneck. An instant later, a second, slightly lighter brown form, teeth gleaming, darted past the fallen turtleneck and ripped out what would have been the jugular vein on a human being.