by Jim Butcher
The forty-odd kids had their tents pitched within the stone walls of a church someone had built in an effort to bring a little more stability to the general havoc of boomtowns in the Old West. Luccio had pitched her tent with them, but Ramirez, me, and two other young Wardens who were helping her teach had set up our tents on the remains of what had once been a saloon, a brothel, or both. We’d taught kids all day and evening, and once it had gotten cold and the trainees were asleep, we played poker and drank beer, and if I got enough in me, I would even play a little guitar.
Ramirez and his cronies got up every morning just as bright eyed and bushy tailed as if they’d had a full night’s sleep. The cocky little bastards. Breakfast was dished up and served by the trainees every morning, built around several portable grills and several folded tables situated near a well that still held cool water, if you worked the weather-beaten pump long enough. Breakfast was little more than a bowl of cereal, but part of the little more was coffee, so I was surviving without killing anyone—if only because I took breakfast alone, giving the grumpy time to fade before exposing myself to anyone else.
I collected my cereal, an apple, and a big cup of the holy mocha, walked a ways, and settled down on a rock in the blinding light of morning in desert mountains. Captain Luccio sat down beside me.
“Good morning,” she said. Luccio was a wizard of the White Council, a couple of centuries old, and one of its more dangerous members. She didn’t look like that. She looked like a girl not even as old as Ramirez, with long, curling brown locks, a sweetly pretty face, and killer dimples. When I’d met her, she’d been a lean, leathery-skinned matron with iron grey hair, but a black wizard called the Corpsetaker had suckered her in a duel. Corpsetaker, then in Luccio’s current body, had let Luccio run her through—and then Corpsetaker had worked her trademark magic, and switched their minds into the opposite bodies.
I’d figured it out before Corpsetaker had time enough to abuse Luccio’s credibility, but once I’d put a bullet through Corpsetaker’s head, there hadn’t been any way for Luccio to get her original body back. So she’d been stuck in the young, cute one instead, because of me. She had also ceased taking to the field in actual combat, passing that off to her second in command, Morgan, while she ran the boot camp to train new Wardens in how to kill things without getting killed first.
“Good morning,” I replied.
“Mail came for you yesterday,” she said, and produced a letter from a pocket.
I took it, scanned the envelope, and opened it. “Hmmm.”
“Who is it from?” she asked. Her tone was that of one passing the time in polite conversation.
“Warden Yoshimo,” I said. “I had a few questions for her about her family tree. See if she was related to a man I knew.”
“Is she?” Luccio asked.
“Distantly,” I said, reading on. “Interesting.” At Luccio’s polite noise of inquiry, I said, “My friend was a descendent of Sho Tai.”
“I’m afraid I don’t know who that is,” Luccio said.
“He was the last king of Okinawa,” I said, and frowned, thinking it over. “I bet it means something.”
“Means something?”
I glanced at Captain Luccio and shook my head. “Sorry. It’s a side project of mine, something I’m curious about.” I shook my head, folded up the letter from Yoshimo, and tucked it into the pocket of my jeans. “It isn’t relevant to teaching apprentices combat magic, and I should have my head in the game, not on side projects.”
“Ah,” Luccio said, and did not press for further details. “Dresden, there’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about.”
I grunted interrogatively.
She lifted her eyebrows. “Have you never wondered why you did not receive a blade?”
The Wardens toted silver swords with them whenever there was a fight at hand. I had seen them unravel complex, powerful magic at the will of their wielders, which is one hell of an advantage when taking on anything using magic as a weapon. “Oh,” I said, and sipped some coffee. “Actually I hadn’t really wondered. I assumed you didn’t trust me.”
She frowned at me. “I see,” she said. “No. That is not the case. If I did not trust you, I would certainly not allow you to continue wearing the cloak.”
“Is there anything I could do to make you not trust me, then?” I asked. “’Cause I don’t want to wear the cloak. No offense.”
“None taken,” she said. “But we need you, and the cloak stays on.”
“Damn.”
She smiled briefly. The expression had entirely too much weight and subtlety for a face so young. “The fact of the matter is that the swords the Wardens have used in your lifetime must be tailored specifically to each individual Warden. They were also all articles of my creation—and I am no longer capable of creating them.”
I frowned and imbibed more coffee. “Because…” I gestured at her vaguely.
She nodded. “This body did not possess the same potential, the same aptitudes for magic as my own. Returning to my former level of ability will be problematical, and will happen no time soon.” She shrugged, her expression neutral, but I had a feeling she was covering a lot of frustration and bitterness. “Until someone else manages to adapt my design to their own talents, or until I have retrained myself, I’m afraid that no more such blades will be issued.”
I chewed some cereal, sipped some coffee, and said, “It must be hard on you. The new body. A big change, after so long in the first one.”
She blinked at me, eyes briefly wide with surprise. “I…Yes, it has been.”
“Are you doing okay?”
She looked thoughtfully at her cereal for a moment. “Headaches,” she said quietly. “Memories that aren’t mine. I think they belong to the original owner of this body. They come mostly in dreams. It’s hard to sleep.” She sighed. “And, of course, it had been a hundred and forty years since I’d put up with either sexual desire or a monthly cycle.”
I swallowed cereal carefully instead of choking. “It sounds, ah, awkward. And unpleasant.”
“Very,” she said, her voice quiet. Then her cheeks turned faintly pink. “Mostly. Thank you for asking.” Then she took a deep breath, exhaled briskly, and rose, all businesslike again. “In any case, I felt I owed you an explanation.”
“You didn’t,” I said. “But thank y—”
Automatic weapons fire ripped the dew-spangled morning.
Luccio was moving at a full sprint before I’d gotten my ass up off the rock. I wasn’t slow. I’ve been in enough scrapes that I don’t freeze at the unexpected appearance of violence and death. Captain Luccio, however, had been in a lot more scrapes than that and was faster and better than me. As we ran, there was the continued chatter of weapons fire, screams, and then a couple of awfully loud explosions and an inhuman scream. I caught up to the Captain of the Wardens as we came into sight of the breakfast area, and I let her take the lead.
I’m pigheadedly chivalrous. Not stupid.
The breakfast area was in a shambles. Folding tables had been knocked over. Blood and breakfast cereal lay scattered on the rocky ground. I could see two kids on the ground, one screaming, one simply doubled over in a fetal position, shaking. Others were lying flat, faces in the dirt. Maybe thirty yards away, in the ruins of what had been a blacksmith’s shop, the only remaining brick wall was missing an enormous circle of stone—simply gone, probably in one of those weird, silent green blasts Ramirez favored. I could see the barrel of a heavy weapon of some kind lying on the ground, neatly severed about a foot behind its tip. Whoever had been holding it was likely gone with the bricks of the wall.
Ramirez’s head appeared at the hole in the wall. He had dark brown fluid spattering one side of his face. “Captain, get down!”
Bullets hissed down, making whistling, whipping sounds as they kicked up dirt a foot to Luccio’s right, and the report of the shots reached us half a second later.
Luccio didn’t waver or slow. Sh
e threw her right hand out, fingers spread. I couldn’t see what she’d done, but the air between us and the slope of the mountain above suddenly went watery with haze. “Where?” she shouted.
“I’ve got two wounded ghouls here!” Ramirez shouted. “At least two more upslope, maybe a hundred and twenty meters!”
As he spoke, one of the other Wardens rolled around the end of the broken wall, pointed his staff upslope, and spat out a vicious-sounding word. There was a low hum, a sudden flash, and a blue-white bolt of lightning snarled up the side of the mountain in the general direction of the shots. It struck a boulder with a roar and shattered it to gravel, the sight bizarre through the haze Luccio had conjured.
“Watch it!” Ramirez screamed. “They took two of our kids!”
The other Warden shot him a horrified look, and then dove for cover as more gunfire spat down the mountain. He let out a short, clench-toothed scream and grabbed at his leg, and one of the kids not far from him gasped, clutching at her cheek.
“Dammit,” snarled Luccio. She slid to a stop and raised her other hand, and the haze in the air became a rippling blur of moving color that made the entire mountainside look like some enormous, desert-themed Lava lamp.
Shots began to ring out, singly, as the attacker fired randomly into the haze. Each one made trainees cringe and gasp. “Trainees stay down!” Luccio trumpeted. “Stay still. Be quiet. Do not give your position away by sound or movement.”
Bullets struck the ground near her feet again as she spoke, drawing the fire to herself, but she didn’t flinch, though her face had already broken out in a sweat with the strain of holding up the broad obscurement spell.
“Dresden,” she said between gritted teeth. “Only one of those things is keeping fire on us. He’s pinning us down while the other escapes with hostages. We must protect the trainees foremost, and we can’t help the wounded while we’re still taking fire.”
“You hold the haze and keep them hidden,” I said, drawing a shot and a puff of dirt of my own. I sidestepped judiciously. “Shooter’s mine.”
She nodded, but her eyes showed something of wounded pride as she said, “Hurry. I can’t hold it for long.”
I nodded to her and looked up the mountainside—and then I shook my head and drew up my Sight.
At once, my vision cut through Luccio’s bewildering haze as though it had never existed. I could see the mountainside in perfect detail—even as it was in turn partially veiled by the vision my Sight granted me, which showed me all the living magic in the world around us, all the traces of magic that had lingered before, including dozens of imprints made in the past few days, and hundreds of ghostly glimpses of particularly strong emotional images that had sunk into the area during its heyday. I could see where the girl who now lay shuddering with a bullet in her had tried to call up raw fire for the first time, near a scorch mark upslope. I could see where a grizzled man, desperately addicted to opium and desperately broke, had shot himself more than a century ago, and where by night his shade still lingered, leaving fresh imprints behind.
And I could see the little coiling cloud of darkness that formed the inhuman energy of the attacking ghoul, running hot on the emotions of battle.
I marked the ghoul’s location, lowered my Sight, and took off at a dead sprint, bounding up the slope and bouncing back and forth in a wavering line. It’s damned hard to hit a target like that, even one growing steadily closer, and even with Luccio’s haze to cover me, I didn’t want to get shot if I could possibly avoid it. It was hard going, uphill, rough terrain, but it hadn’t had time to get hot yet, and I practiced running regularly—though admittedly, I did it to give me the option of running away from bad guys more ably, not toward them.
More shots rang out, but none of them seemed to come near. I kept my eyes locked on the spot on the slope where the ghoul lay shooting, probably behind cover. I couldn’t see a thing through the haze, but as soon as it began to clear I would present the ghoul with a clear target, either as I came through or when Luccio’s power faltered and the spell fell. I had to get closer. I didn’t have my blasting rod or staff with me, and without them to help me focus my magic, the range and accuracy of any spell I could throw at the ghoul would be drastically reduced. That’s why I had to get closer before I took my shot. I couldn’t hold a shield against bullets and attack at the same time—and the ghoul had to be taken out. I’d get only one shot, and if I missed I’d be an easy target.
I ran, and watched, and began to gather the power to throw at the ghoul.
The haze abruptly cleared as I bounded over a patch of scrub growth.
The ghoul crouched behind a rock maybe twenty yards upslope, his face only barely distended as he held mostly to his human shape while employing the human weapon—a freaking Kalashnikov. Thank God. The weapon was tough and serviceable, but it wasn’t exactly a sharpshooter’s tool. If he’d been toting something more precise, he probably could have inflicted a lot more damage than he had.
I was over to one side, and the ghoul was squinting hard down the rifle’s sights, so that I was only a flicker of motion in the periphery of his focus. It took him a second to recognize the threat and whip the weapon toward me.
I had time, and I threw out my hand and my will, and snarled, “Fuego!”
Fire bellowed forth from my right hand—not in a narrow beam, a jet of tightly focused energy, but in a roaring flood, spilling out from my fingertips like water from a garden sprayer. A lot of it, way more than I had intended. The fire got the ghoul, all right—and the ground for twenty feet around him in every direction—more on the uphill side of him. The roar of flame gave way to a hideous shriek, and then a steady, chewy silence shrouded by black smoke. A low breeze, a herald of the day’s oncoming heat, nudged the smoke away for a moment.
The ghoul, now in its true form, lay outstretched on the scorched earth. It had been burned down to little more than an appallingly blackened skeleton, though one leg retained enough muscle matter to continue twitching and thrashing—even then, the creature was not wholly dead. It didn’t surprise me. In my experience, ghouls hadn’t done much that wasn’t disgusting. There was no reason to expect them to die cleanly, either.
Once I was sure it wasn’t getting back up, I scanned the mountainside, looking for any other sign of movement, but found nothing. Then I turned and hurried back down the slope to the encampment.
Luccio was fully engaged in treating the wounded. Three had been hit by gunfire, and several others, including one of the other adult Wardens, had been wounded by shards of shattered rock or splinters thrown from the folding tables and chairs.
Ramirez came hurrying up to me and said, “You get him?” His eyes trailed past me to the enormous area blackened with smoke and half a dozen patches of brush still on fire, and he said, “Yeah, I guess you kind of did.”
“Kind of,” I agreed. “You said they had two of our kids?”
He nodded once, his face grim. “The Terrible Twosome. They were heading up the slope to find a spot above the camp for the lesson. Wanted to show off, I expect.”
“Sixteen,” I muttered. “Jesus.”
Ramirez grimaced. “I was yelling at them to come back when the ghouls hopped up out of the bush and brought them down, and the three assholes who had sneaked into the old smithy opened up.”
“How are you at following tracks?” I asked him.
“Thought they taught that Boy Scout stuff to all you Anglos. I grew up in L.A.”
I blew out a breath, thinking fast. “Luccio’s busy. She’ll call in help for the wounded. That leaves you and me to go get the twins.”
“Fucking right we will,” Ramirez said. “How?”
“You got prisoners?”
“The two I didn’t blast, yeah.”
“We’ll ask them.”
“Think they’ll rat out their buddy?”
“If they think it’ll save their lives?” I asked. “In a heartbeat. Maybe less.”
“Weasels,” Ramirez
muttered.
“They are what they are, man,” I said. “There’s no use in hating them for it. Just be glad we can use it to advantage. Let’s go.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
The ghouls lay covered in grey-white dust as fine as baby powder—the remains of the wall Ramirez had blasted, their companion, his weapon, and the right arm and leg of one of the captive ghouls. The wounded ghoul, body shifted into its natural form under the stress of injury, lay panting and choking, spitting out dust. The second ghoul still looked mostly human, and was dressed in a ragged old set of sand-colored robes that looked like something out of Lawrence of Arabia. Another Kalashinikov lay several feet away, behind Bill Meyers, the young Warden now standing over them with a double-barreled ten-gauge shotgun pointed at the unwounded one of the pair.
“Careful,” Meyers said. He had the rural drawl that seems largely common to any town west of the Mississippi located more than an hour or so from a major city, though he was himself a Texan. “I ain’t searched them, and they don’t ’pear to understand English.”
“What?” Ramirez said. “That’s stupid. Who bothers to sneak ghouls into the country as covert muscle if they can’t pass as locals?”
“Someone who doesn’t have to worry about customs or border guards or witnesses or cops,” I said quietly. “Someone who takes them through the Nevernever straight here from wherever the hell they came from.” I glanced back at Ramirez. “How else do you think they got past the outer wards and sentries and right up to the camp?”
Ramirez grunted. “I thought we had those approaches warded, too.”
“Nevernever’s a tricksy kind of place,” I said. “Tough to know it all. Somebody was sneakier than us.”
“Vampires?” Ramirez asked.
I very carefully said nothing about a Black Council. “Who else would it be?”
Ramirez said something to them in Spanish.