by Jim Butcher
“Two thousand five was a very good year,” I drawled. I reached into my pocket and produced a plastic card from my wallet. “Behold. One code for one blue murloc. The rarest pet in all the game can be thine.” Patterson reached for the card with twitchy fingers, and I snapped it a bit farther away from him. “Do we have a deal?”
“It’s legit?”
I dropped the drama voice. “Yeah, man, I was actually at the con. It’s real—you have my word.”
Patterson crowed and seized the card with absolutely Gollumesque avarice. “Pleasure doing business with you, I Put the Pal In.” He gestured for me to join him behind the desk, and rubbed his hands together in mock-epic greed. “What you need?”
That’s the thing about knowing a lot of gamers. They do not necessarily count their riches with bank accounts. Not when there are virtual status symbols to acquire.
“Guy got admitted a couple of hours ago, ER, first name Stan,” I said. “I sent him in with Reg Lamar, probable overdose. I want to see him.”
Patterson started thumping on computer keys. “You sent him in?”
“Out jogging this morning, found him seizing,” I said.
He stopped typing for a second and looked at me. Then he looked back at the monitor and said, “Someone’s taking his character way too seriously.”
“Nah, I just have too many corpsesicles already,” I said.
“You’re lucky it happened in the morning. We start getting busy come the afternoon.”
I started to tell him that luck hadn’t had anything to do with it, and felt myself shiver.
I mean, that’s kind of a huge thing to think about, you know? That in all probability, luck really hadn’t been involved. That God, or some version of God, who the Knights simply referred to as the Almighty, had knowingly arranged for me to be in the right place at the right time to help Stan—and that He (or She, or It—I mean I didn’t want to get too presumptuous, all things considered, and how should I know?) had done so in such a way as to make it uniquely possible for me, personally, to go help Stan.
Could God, with all the majesty of the universe at his disposal, with the uncounted myriad of life forms to look after throughout practically uncountable galaxies, really be all that interested in one little drug addict? One little medical examiner, playing at being a hero?
Answer that question with a yes or a no, and tell me which is the more terrifying. I’m not sure I can.
I’d asked Michael the same question, more or less. He’d been of the opinion that God couldn’t not be interested on a personal level. That He knew each and every one of us too well to be anything less than passionately involved in caring about our lives and our choices.
And, honestly, that seemed a little stalkery to me. I mean, bad enough when your mom is too interested in what you do. Do you really want God looking over your shoulder at every moment? Me, personally, that was too embarrassing to even consider.
In the end, I’d decided that whatever the Almighty might care about or not care about, He seemed to be interested in helping people who needed help, at least where the Knights of the Cross were concerned. So, okay. Fine. I could work with the Guy. But all these deep questions bothered me.
“Here he is, top of the list,” Patterson said. “Oh, Stanley Bowers. Been in and out a lot lately. I think I know this guy. Addict. One of the worst I’ve seen. Got maybe a year left in him, if the weather isn’t too bad. Got a sedative, saline, observation.”
“How’s he get the drugs?”
“Disability, and some kind of court settlement. Pretty much sticks it up his nose. Won’t do rehab.”
“Family?”
“Nah. We’ve looked.”
“Damn,” I said.
“You want to help guys like this,” Patterson said. “But he doesn’t want to help himself. You know? You can’t save someone who don’t want to be saved.”
“Doesn’t mean we can’t try,” I said. “Where is he?”
Patterson peered at the monitor and rattled the keys a couple more times. Then he said, “Huh. That’s weird.”
AS A MEDICAL examiner, I don’t spend a lot of time in pediatrics. Neither, as a rule, do adult junkies. But for some reason, Stan had been moved up with the kids.
I rode the elevator up, trying to look distracted and disinterested like a proper physician, most of whom were operating on not much sleep at least part of the time, but it was tough, because I was feeling something that I suspected was a deeper-than-usual anger.
Whatever had hurt Stan was bad enough. But now there were kids involved. And some things you just don’t do. You know?
I walked briskly into pediatrics. There are a ton of pediatric physicians at St. Tony’s, plus various pediatric specialists, consulting physicians, et cetera, et cetera. The floor was busy, its beds full, and the nurses had their plates full—and to make things worse, there were renovators at work on the floor. Plastic sheets hung from some of the walls, shutting parts of the floor off from the rest, and buckets and tools and sawhorses and materials were stacked up, blurry shapes just out of sight on the other side of the first layer of curtains.
Workmen, tagged with hospital tags and clearly utterly ignorant of the place’s rhythms, were walking out, evidently headed to an early lunch break. One of them was flirting with a young nurse who obviously had a mile of work to do. It was kind of pandemonium, or what passes for it in an orderly hospital.
I confess that I took advantage of it. I breezed in without any trouble, swooped up an armful of charts, and kept moving as though I knew exactly where I was going, scanning the charts as I did.
I stepped into the first room where a girl, maybe eight or nine, was curled up into a fetal position on her side. She had a very pale little face, and hollows under her eyes as dark as tire marks on a city road. Her hair was brown and listless. I checked charts and found hers. Her name was Gabrielle. She twitched violently as she slept. Her breathing was unsteady, and she made constant sounds as she exhaled.
I’d never been a father, but I didn’t have to be to know that little girl was in the grips of a nightmare. And given the medicine in her IV, she wasn’t going to be able to get out of it.
I read the charts and they told me the story. Seven kids, plus Stan, were down with a remarkably similar set of symptoms. Paranoia, hysteria, insomnia, and a refusal to go to sleep due to horrible nightmares, especially anytime at night, necessitating chemical intervention.
Eight people.
Holy moly.
If that many people were down, and a Knight of the Cross had been sent to deal with it, even if that Knight was me, it meant that there was a supernatural predator of some kind at work. A genuine Grade A monster. That was all mine to deal with.
Just me.
I guess maybe this wasn’t a beginner’s quest.
I slipped out of the room and into the next one in the hall, and found Stan. He’d been restrained as well as being sedated, which, dammit, should not have been happening in his condition. He should have been on saline and close monitoring until his body had a chance to process whatever combination of street drugs he’d been on that nearly killed him. He was in the same condition as the little girl, or worse—out of it, obviously suffering from some terrible dream and unable to escape it. His pulse was thready, his breath erratic, and his monitoring equipment had been jiggered—it was showing numbers that could not possibly have matched up to his respiration and heartbeat.
Someone had done this to him.
“Jesus, Stan,” I said. “I sent you into this. I’m sorry. I should have listened to you.”
He didn’t respond, though his head kind of twitched in my direction. There was something desperate in the little movement. I bit my lip and put my hand on his head. “Hang in there, buddy,” I told him. “Whatever power is given to me, I’ll use it to help you. I promise.”
If whatever had done that to Stan and the kids found me snooping around, it would be happy to do exactly the same thing to me.
<
br /> My heart started beating faster. It took me a second to realize that it was pounding in time with rapid footsteps coming down the hall. Women’s heels. Click, clack, click, clack—firm and purposeful.
I had a couple of seconds to realize that my fear and the footsteps were connected, and then, just in case that hadn’t been enough, an open square, maybe four by four feet, made of red light, appeared on the wall, evidently tracking the movement of something hostile coming down the hall toward the door to Stan’s room.
I eyed the ceiling and muttered, “I get the point.” I looked around the room and weighed my options as my terror increased, and then ratcheted up more, and I panicked. I stepped into the bathroom and shut the door until it was almost all the way closed, and held very still.
The monster stepped into sight. She wasn’t much of a monster as they went—maybe five-four in the low heels, a woman of slender build with dark hair. She was of Asian extraction, and her name tag read DR. MIYAMUNE. Behind the thick, dark rims of her glasses, her eyes were absolutely crystalline blue.
As she came into the room, she paused, and her eyes swept back and forth, right past me. She didn’t look old, maybe mid-thirties, like a doctor who had finished her internship and was a few years into a specialist’s residency. Those blue eyes fastened hard on Stan, and suddenly she wasn’t just a woman in a white lab coat anymore. She changed, right in front of me.
It wasn’t a physical transformation. I mean, a camera wouldn’t have shown you bupkes. This was something deeper, something intangible. Her posture changed slightly, from rigidly proper into a more relaxed, looser-limbed tension. Her eyes narrowed. It was her mouth that was worst. Her lips just sort of lifted away from her teeth. The expression was damned creepy, and I felt a little sick to my stomach.
Monster is a subjective word. But the thing that was hiding inside a human shape met the definition. I held absolutely still.
Miyamune stalked from one side of Stan’s bed to the other, focused on him, then turned and paced back, like a restless lion at the zoo. For a moment she did nothing else, but Stan reacted. His soft sounds increased in pitch, and as they did her eyes seemed to brighten. She put one hand on the bed and ran it over his bedclothes, not actually touching him, dragging her fingertips along as she went, and Stan’s breathing became ragged, desperate.
She was feeding on him. Maybe on his fear. Drawing the life out of him.
Stan was getting close.
Well.
Time to saddle up.
I moved one arm toward the bag at my side, cloth making a soft whisper as it slid across cloth.
And she heard it.
I had my fingertips on the smooth wooden hilt of Fidelacchius when her hand and arm smashed through the wooden bathroom door in a shower of splinters, seized me by the lab coat, and flung me out of the bathroom and into the opposite wall.
I couldn’t believe the force of it. Miyamune’s arm tore through the rest of the door as if the wood had been damp cardboard, ripping the sleeves of her coat and shirt to ribbons while leaving the skin beneath untouched. I dimly registered that I was up against a being with supernatural strength as I flew, relaxed, and hit the wall as flat as I could, my arms slapping back as if taking a fall in judo, one of the other things Charity had taught me.
It worked. I spread out the impact enough to keep it from shattering any bones, and came down on my feet, more or less, hand fumbling for my bag.
Miyamune stared at me for a second, facing me from the far side of the bed, over Stan’s knees. Then, without taking her eyes from me, she reached behind her, as if she knew exactly where to move her arm, and calmly locked the hospital door.
Which did not, at all, send part of me into a gibbering panic. My hands shook so hard that I could barely feel the hilt of Fidelacchius as my fingers closed around it.
“One chance,” I heard myself say, my voice a pale ghost of itself. “Leave. Leave them. All of them. Do it now. And you have my word that you get to walk away alive.”
Her mouth curled up in pure contempt at one corner. “And who is it you think you are, little man?”
“All you need to know is this,” I said, and drew out the Sword.
There was a sound too musical to be called a shriek, too fierce and furious to be called a chord of music. From the old broken wooden hilt in my hand sprang a blade of light, three feet long and shining white. The sound of the blade’s birth settled into a humming musical chord, something low and ominous.
Miyamune faced me without any reaction at all. The Sword’s light reflected in two bright bars from her crystalline blue eyes—and the shadow that the Sword’s light cast on the wall behind her was not shaped at all like her. It was something hulking, with a leonine mane and a writhing tendril of some kind whipping around its head. Her skin, too, became semitranslucent in the Sword’s light, showing shapes that moved and shifted beneath the surface, some kind of grey-and-gold mush of colors, as if something far too large for it had been forced into Miyamune’s tiny form.
“I make you an offer, little man,” she said in calm reply. “Leave this place. Leave what is mine to me. I will permit you to spend the rest of your days exposed only to the nightmares you have created for yourself.”
“Sorry, lady,” I said. “I can’t do that. Step away from that man.”
I moved the Sword to emphasize my words. The chord bobbed and changed with the Sword’s motion, rising to a higher, tenser pitch as it edged closer, and lowering again as it backed away.
The only other time I’d drawn the Sword in earnest, the guy I’d pulled it on had panicked.
Miyamune kicked Stan’s bed at my legs.
She moved fast, but I’d been paranoid enough to sense the movement and dodge in the only direction that wouldn’t have hemmed my movement in more, and it was the right way to move. I avoided the bed, shuffle-stepped forward with my feet dragging the floor just slightly, to make sure I wouldn’t lift them and put them down on anything that would trip me, and swept the blade in a clean cut at her midsection.
Miyamune avoided the blow by an inch with a gracefully timed step back, and flung her clipboard at me with supernatural strength. It made an ugly hissing sound as it came, tearing bits off the papers that were on it. I barely got the Sword in the way, splitting the plastic clipboard as if it had been sliced with a laser cutter, sending a small cloud of chopped printer paper into the air. The pieces of clipboard flew past me and, from the sound of it, buried themselves, quivering, in the drywall.
One of her heels was coming along the floor in a leg sweep even before I had finished the defensive cut. I shifted my weight back, barely in time, and she kicked my forward leg hard enough to make it go numb—but didn’t send me to the ground with the kick. I swept the Sword into a clumsy arc as I fought for my balance. It forced her to duck to one side instead of following up in my moment of vulnerability—directly toward Stan.
“No!” I said.
She seized his throat and her hand flexed. As quickly as that, Stan’s labored breaths stopped completely as she closed off his windpipe.
That predator looked out of the doctor’s face, and its blue eyes danced with amusement. “I’ll kill him,” she said. “One move, little man, and I will end his life.”
“Don’t,” I breathed.
Her smile widened a little as she regarded the Sword, still humming with the power of an angry chorus. Silence stretched.
“I was like you once,” she said finally. Something ugly went through those blue eyes. “Struggling to protect them. What a fool I was.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “Look, we don’t have to be doing the combat thing. Be glad to talk with you about it. Coffee, maybe some nosh? What do you say?”
She sneered. “Do you think I care about your thoughts, little mortal?”
“How will you know if you never hear them?” I asked mildly.
Whatever I’d said, it was the wrong thing. Pure rage flared through her features. “So righteous,” she spat. Then s
he looked me up and down and said, “I offer you a trade for his life.”
“Um,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“Give me your glasses.”
That made my heart all but stop.
Suddenly that scared ten-year-old kid inside me was screaming again.
“Give me,” Miyamune purred, “your glasses. Or I kill him. Right now.”
“If I do,” I said quietly, “you walk away. You leave him alone.”
“For as long as you live and breathe,” Miyamune said.
I swallowed.
Stan was here because of me.
I took one hand off the Sword and reached up.
The world dissolved into a blur of vague color as I took off my glasses, and my stomach jumped and twitched in random spasms of pure, unfiltered, childhood fear.
I felt the glasses in my fingers, heavy and cool. Then I tossed them toward the last place it seemed like Miyamune had been standing. There was no sound of the glasses falling. She must have caught them silently.
A second later, there were crackling, popping sounds—and the sound of safety glass pattering to the floor in little squares like so many oversized grains of sugar.
“Little protector,” Miyamune said a moment later. “I will make you suffer. I give you as long as it will take me to shoo the mortals from this floor. Then I will hunt you. I will feed on you. And in the end, I will take your life.”
There was a clack as the door unlocked. Then it opened.
“Run,” Miyamune said softly, “and others will die in your place.”
Then the door closed again.
The whole time, her feet never made a sound on the floor. But I had that feeling, that certainty you have when you’re standing in a room that isn’t otherwise occupied.
My legs gave out and I found myself sitting helplessly on the floor next to Stan’s bed as he whimpered in his nightmares. The light of the Sword went out when I hit the floor.
I sat with him in the blind gloom. I was breathing too fast and making sounds just like him.
“YELLOW,” ANSWERED A voice when I speed-dialed 1 on my cell phone, by touch. “Harry’s Taxidermy. You snuff ’em, we’ll stuff ’em.”