by Jim Butcher
“Three more steps,” Lara told me in a whisper. “A little more to your left.”
I corrected the direction of my next step, trusting her word. One step more, and I could hear winter wind sighing behind me. Silver moonlight shone on the barrel of the shotgun.
And then I found out whether or not Cowl was actually there.
There was a surge of power, an abrasive scream against my arcane senses, and the offspring of a comet and a pterodactyl came hurtling out of the darkness at the far end of the cavern. My eyes had adjusted enough to see a dim oval of reddish light that outlined a heavily cloaked figure—Cowl, standing in his own gate.
“Master!” Vittorio cried, his voice slurred.
“Look out!” I screamed, and thrashed behind me with my arm as I ducked and lurched to one side, trying to sweep Lara out of the flying thing’s path as I did. It missed us by inches, but we got out of the way.
Cowl’s leathery, rasping voice hissed something in a slithering tongue, and a second surge of power lashed invisibly across the cavern—not at us, but at my gate.
And as quickly as that, my gate began to close, the opening sewing itself shut like a Ziploc bag—starting with the end closest to me.
Tickticktickticktick.
The gate was closing far more quickly than I could have gotten up and moved. I wasn’t getting out. But Lara might.
“Lara!” I shouted. “Go!”
Something with the strength of a freight train and the speed of an Indy car seized my duster and hauled on it so hard that it wrenched my neck and nearly dislocated my arms.
“Dresden!” called Marcone’s voice from the closing gate. “Nineteen!”
I hurtled through the air. Looking wildly around showed me that Lara had seized me and leaped for the far end of the collapsing gate.
“Eighteen!” came Marcone’s shout.
Lara and I flew through empty and unremarkable air.
The gate had closed.
We missed it.
Chapter Forty-Two
The only light was the dim scarlet glow from Cowl’s gate, and everything had become blood and shadows. The eyes of dozens of ghouls burned like nearly dead coals as they turned toward us, reflecting that lurid luminescence.
“Lara,” I hissed. “This cavern goes up in seventeen seconds, and there are ghouls in the tunnel out.”
“Empty night,” Lara swore. Her voice was thready with pain and fear. “What can I do?”
Good question. There had to be…Wait. There might be a way to survive this. I was too tired to work any magic, but…
“You can trust me,” I said. “That’s what you can do.”
She turned her pale, beautiful, gore-smattered face to me. “Done.”
“Get us to the tunnel’s mouth.”
“But if there are ghouls there already—”
“Hey!” I said. “Tick, tick!”
Before I’d gotten to the end of the first tick, Lara had seized me again and hauled us across the floor to the mouth of the tunnel. Behind me, Cowl was shouting something, and so was Vittorio, and the ghouls set up a howl and were running after us. Only one of the ghouls was close enough to get in the way, but Lara’s wicked little wavy-bladed sword ripped straight across its eyes and left the monster momentarily stunned with pain.
Lara dumped me at the mouth of the tunnel, and I took a couple of steps back in, checking the smooth tunnel walls as I shook out my shield bracelet. That demonic flying thing of Cowl’s banked around for another pass.
“What now?” Lara demanded. The ghouls were coming. They were nowhere near as fast as Lara had been, but they weren’t far away.
I took a deep breath. “Now,” I said. “Kiss me. I know it seems weir—”
Lara let out a single, ravenous snarl and was abruptly pressed up against me, arms sliding around my waist with sinuous, serpentine power. Her mouth met mine and…
…ohmygod.
Lara had once boasted that she could do more to me in an hour than a mortal woman could in a week. But it ain’t boasting if it’s true. The first, searing second of that kiss was indescribably intense. It wasn’t simply the texture of her lips. It was how she moved them, and the simple, naked hunger beneath every quiver of her mouth. I knew she was a monster, and I knew she would enslave and kill me if she could, but she wanted me with a passion so pure and focused that it was intoxicating. That succubus kiss was a lie, but it made me feel, within that single moment, strong and masculine and powerful. It made me feel that I was attractive enough, strong enough, worthy enough to deserve that kind of desire.
And it made me feel lust, a primal need for sex so raw, so scorching, that I felt sure that if I didn’t find expression for that need—here and now—that I would surely go insane. The fires that surged up in me weren’t limited to my loins. It was simply too hot, too intense for that, and my whole body felt suddenly aflame with need. Every inch of me was suddenly supernaturally aware of Lara, in all her blood-soaked sensuality, in all her wanton desirability, pressed against me, the mostly transparent white silk of her gown doing less to conceal her nudity than the black blood of her foes.
Now, my body screamed at me. Take her. Now. Fuck the stopwatch and the bombs and the monsters. Forget everything and feel her and nothing else.
It was a close thing, but I held back enough to keep from forgetting the danger. The lust nearly killed me—but lust is an emotion, too.
I embraced that lust, allowed it to enfold me, and returned the kiss with nearly total abandon. I slid my right hand around the succubus’s waist, and down, pulling her hips hard against me, feeling the amazing strength and elasticity and rondure of her body on mine.
With my left hand, I extended the shield bracelet toward the cavern, the bombs, the onrushing ghouls—and I fed that tidal force of lust through it, building up the energy I would need, some part of me shaping and directing it even as the rest of me concentrated on the mind-consuming pleasure of that single kiss.
The clocks stopped ticking.
The explosives went off.
Cleverness, determination, treachery, ruthlessness, courage, and skill took a leave of absence, while physics took over the show.
Tremendous heat and force expanded from the explosives. It swept through the cavern in an almighty sword of fire, laying low anything unfortunate enough to have remained within. I saw, for one flash-second, the outline of the ghouls, still charging us, unaware of what was about to happen, against the white-hot fireball that expanded through the chamber.
And then that blast hit my shield.
I didn’t try to withstand that incredible sledgehammer of expanding force and energy. It would have shattered my shield, melted my bracelet to my wrist, and crushed me like an egg. The shield wasn’t meant to do that.
Instead, I filled the space at the mouth of the cave with flexible, resilient energy, and packed layer upon layer of it behind the shield, and more of it all around us. I wasn’t trying to stop the energy of the explosion.
I was trying to catch it.
There was an instant of crushing compression, and I felt the pressure on my shield like a vast and liquid weight. It flung me from my feet, and I held hard to Lara, whose arms gripped me in return. I began to tumble, blinded by the flame, and fought to hold the shield, now hardening it all around us, into a sphere, constricting it around us until we were pressed body-to-body. We hurtled up the tunnel, flung out ahead of the explosion like a ship ahead of a hurricane—or, more accurately, like a ball being fired down the barrel of a long, stony musket. The shield banged against the smooth walls, dragging more effort out of me. A single outcropping might have stopped our progress for a disastrous instant, shattering stone, shield, succubus, and shamus into one big mess. Thank God the vanity of Lara’s family had made sure the walls of the tunnel were polished smooth and gleaming.
I didn’t see the ghouls guarding the upper reaches of the tunnel, so much as I felt them hit the shield and be smashed aside and splattered like bugs, o
nly to be consumed by the flood of fire washing up the tunnel after us. I don’t know how fast we were going, beyond “very.” The explosion flung us up the long tunnel, and out into the night air and up through the branches of a couple of trees—which shattered under the force. Then we were arcing through the night, spinning, with stars above us whipping by and a long tongue of angry flame emerging from the entrance to the Deeps below.
And all the while, I was locked in the heated ecstasy of Lara’s kiss.
I lost track of what was happening somewhere near the top of the arc, right about when Lara’s legs twined with mine and she ripped aside my shirt and hers to press her naked chest against me. I had just begun wondering what it was I’d forgotten about how kissing Lara was not the best idea when there was a horrible crashing sound that went on for several seconds.
We weren’t moving. The shield wasn’t under pressure, and I was so dizzy and tired that I couldn’t string two thoughts together. I lowered the shield with a groan of relief that was lost in an answering moan of need from the succubus in my arms.
“St-stopped,” I said. “Lara…st-stop.”
She pressed closer, parted my lips with her tongue, and I thought that I was going to explode, when she suddenly let out a hiss and recoiled from me, a hand flying to her mouth—but not before I saw the blisters rising from the burned flesh around her lips.
I fell slowly to my back and lay there gasping in the near-dark. There were several small fires nearby. We were in a building of some kind. There were a lot of broken things.
I was sure to get blamed for this one.
Lara turned away from me, huddling in upon herself. “Bloody hell,” she said after a moment. “I can’t believe you’re still protected. But it’s old…. My intelligence said Ms. Rodriguez hadn’t left South America.”
“She hasn’t,” I croaked.
“You mean…” She turned and blinked at me, astonishment on her face. “Dresden…do you mean to say that the last time you had relations with a woman was nearly four years ago?”
“Depressing,” I said. “Isn’t it.”
Lara shook her head slowly. “I had just always assumed that you and Ms. Murphy…”
I grunted. “No. She…she doesn’t want to get serious with me.”
“And you don’t want to be casual with her,” Lara said.
“There’s an outside chance that I have abandonment issues,” I said.
“Still…a man like you and it’s been four years…” She shook her head. “I have enormous personal respect for you, wizard. But that’s just…sad.”
I grunted again, too tired to lip off. “Saved my life just now, I suppose.”
Lara looked back at me for a moment and then she…turned pink. “Yes. It probably did. And I owe you an apology.”
“For trying to eat me?” I said.
She shivered, and the tips of her breasts suddenly stood out against the white silk. She’d rearranged her clothes to cover them. I was too tired to feel more than a little disappointed about it. “Yes,” she said. “For losing control of myself. I confess, I thought that we were facing our last moment. I’m afraid I didn’t restrain myself very well. For that, you have my apologies.”
I looked around and realized, dimly, that we were in some part of the Raith château itself. “Hngh. I’m, uh. Sorry about the damage to your home here.”
“Under the circumstances, I’m inclined to be gracious. You saved my life.”
“You could have saved yourself,” I said quietly. “When the gate was closing. You could have left me to die. You didn’t. Thank you.”
She blinked at me as if I had just started speaking in alien tongues. “Wizard,” she said after a moment. “I gave you my word of safe passage. A member of my Court betrayed you. Betrayed us all. I could not leave you to die without forsaking my word—and I take my promises seriously, Mister Dresden.”
I stared quietly at her for a moment and then nodded. Then I said, “I notice that you didn’t go terribly far out of your way to save Cesarina Malvora.”
Her lips twitched up at the corners. “It was a difficult time. I did all that I could to protect my House and then the other members of Court in attendance. More’s the pity that I could not save that usurping, traitorous bitch.”
“You couldn’t save that usurping, traitorous Lord Skavis, either,” I noted.
“Life is change,” Lara replied quietly.
“You know what I think, Lara?” I asked.
Her eyes narrowed and fastened on me.
“I think someone got together with Skavis to plan his little hunt for the low-powered-magic folks. I think someone encouraged him to do it. I think someone pointed it out as a great plan to usurp mean old Lord Raith’s power base. And then I think that same someone probably nudged Lady Malvora to move, to give her a chance to steal Lord Skavis’s thunder.”
Lara’s eyelids lowered, and her lips spread in a slow smile. “Why would someone do such a thing?”
“Because she knew that Skavis and Malvora were going to make a move soon in any case. I think she did it to divide her enemies and focus their efforts into a plan she could predict, rather than waiting upon their ingenuity. I think someone wanted to turn Skavis and Malvora against one another, keeping them too busy to undermine Raith.” I sat up, faced her, and said, “It was you. Pulling their strings. It was you who came up with the plan to kill those women.”
“Perhaps not,” Lara replied smoothly. “Lord Skavis is—was—a well-known misogynist. And he proposed a plan much like this one only a century ago.” She tapped a finger to her lips thoughtfully and then said, “And you have no way of proving otherwise.”
I stared at her for a long moment. Then I said, “I don’t need proof to act on my own.”
“Is that a threat, dear wizard?”
I looked slowly around the ruined room. There was a hole in the house, almost perfectly round, right through the floors above us and the roof four stories above. Bits and pieces were still falling. “What threat could I possibly be to you, Lara?” I drawled.
She took in a slow breath and said, “What makes you think I won’t kill you right here, right now, while you are weary and weakened? It would likely be intelligent and profitable.” She lifted her sword and ran a fingertip languidly down the flat of the blade. “Why not finish you right here?”
I showed her my teeth. “You gave me your word of safe passage.”
Lara threw back her head in a rich laugh. “So I did.” She faced me more directly, set the sword aside, and rose. “What do you want?”
“I want those people returned to life,” I spat at her. “I want to undo all the pain that’s been inflicted during this mess. I want children to get their mothers back, parents their daughters, husbands their wives. I want you and your kind never to hurt anyone ever again.”
Right in front of my eyes, she turned from a woman into a statue, cold and perfectly still. “What do you want,” she whispered, “that I might give you?”
“First, reparations. A weregild to the victims’ families,” I said. “I’ll provide you with the details for each.”
“Done.”
“Second, this never happens again. One of yours starts up with genocide again, and I’m going to reply in kind. Starting with you. I’ll have your word on it.”
Her eyes narrowed further. “Done,” she murmured.
“The little folk,” I said. “They shouldn’t be in cages. Free them, unharmed, in my name.”
She considered that for a moment, and then nodded. “Anything else?”
“Some Listerine,” I said. “I’ve got a funny taste in my mouth.”
That last remark drew more anger out of her than anything else that had happened the entire night. Her silver eyes blazed with rage, and I could feel the fury roiling around her. “Our business,” she said in a whisper, “is concluded. Get out of my house.”
I forced myself to my feet. One of the walls had fallen down, and I walked creakily over to
it. My neck hurt. I guess being moved around at inhuman speed gives you whiplash.
I stopped at the hole in the wall and said, “I’m glad to preserve the peace effort,” I said, forcing the words out. “I think it’s going to save lives, Lara. Your people’s lives, and mine. I’ve got to have you where you are to get that.” I looked at her. “Otherwise, I’d settle up with you right now. Don’t get to thinking we’re friends.”
She faced me, her face all shadowed, the light of slowly growing fires lighting her from behind. “I am glad to see you survived, wizard. You who destroyed my father and secured my own power. You who have now destroyed my enemies. You are the most marvelous weapon I have ever wielded.” She tilted her head at me. “And I love peace, wizard. I love talking. Laughing. Relaxing.” Her voice dropped to a husky pitch. “I will kill your folk with peace, wizard. I will strangle them with it. And they will thank me while I do.”
A cold little spear slid neatly into my guts, but I didn’t let it show on my face or in my voice. “Not while I’m around,” I said quietly.
Then I turned and walked away from the house. I looked blearily around me, got my directions, and started limping for the front gate. On the way there, I fumbled Mouse’s whistle out of my pocket and started blowing it.
I remember my dog reaching my side, and holding on to his collar the last fifty yards or so down the road out, until Molly came sputtering up in the Blue Beetle and helped me inside.
Then I collapsed into sleep.
I’d earned it.
Chapter Forty-Three
I didn’t wake up until I was back home, and then only long enough to shamble inside and fall down on my bed. I was out for maybe six hours, and then I woke up with my whole back fused into one long, enormous muscle cramp. I made some involuntarily pathetic noises, and Mouse rose up from the floor beside my bed and jogged out of my room.
Molly appeared from the living room a moment later and said, “Harry? What’s wrong?”
“Back,” I said. “My back. Freaking vampire tart. Wrenched my neck.”
Molly nodded once and vanished. When she came back, she had a small black bag. “You were holding yourself sort of strangely last night, so after I dropped you off, I borrowed Mother’s medicine bag.” She held up a bottle. “Muscle relaxants.” A jar. “Tiger Balm.” She held up a plastic container of dust. “Herbal tea mix Shiro found in Tibet. Great for joint pain. My father swears by it.”