by Jim Butcher
It screamed again, the sound deeper-chested than before, more resonant. The creature whirled on Andi, too swiftly to be believed, and a limb slammed into her, sending her flying into a brick wall. She hit with a yipping cry of pain and a hideous snapping sound.
I raised my staff, anger and terror and determination surging down into the wooden tool, and shouted, “Forzare!”
My will unspooled into a lance of invisible energy and slammed into the creature. I’ve flipped over cars with blasts of force like that, but the thing barely rocked back, slapping at the air with its forelimbs. The blast shattered against it in a shower of reddish sparks.
The conflicting energies disrupted its veil, just for a second. I saw something somewhere between a cougar and a bear, with sparse, dirty golden fur. It must have weighed several hundred pounds. It had oversized fangs, bloodied claws, and its eyes were a bright and sickly yellow that looked reptilian, somehow.
Its snarling mouth twisted in a way that no animal’s could, forming words, albeit words that I did not understand. Its form twisted, changing with liquid speed, and in maybe half a second, a cougar bigger than any mountain lion I’d ever even heard about was hurtling toward me, vanishing into the rippling colors of a veil as it came.
I brought up my left hand, slamming my will into the bracelet hung upon it. The bracelet, a braid of metals hung with charms in the shape of medieval shields, was another tool like the staff, a device that let me focus the energies I wielded more quickly and efficiently.
A quarter dome of blue-white light sprang into existence before me, and the creature slammed into it like a brick wall. Well. More like a rickety wooden wall. I felt the shield begin to give as the creature struck it—but at least initially, it stopped it in its tracks.
Billy hit it low and hard.
The great dark wolf sailed in, teeth ripping, and got hold of something. The creature howled, this time more in pain than fury, and whirled on Billy—but the leader of Chicago’s resident werewolves was already on the way back out, and he bounded aside from the creature’s counterattack.
It was faster than Billy was. It caught him, and I saw Billy hunch his shoulders against its attack, his fur being bloodied as he crouched low, standing his ground.
So that Georgia could hit it low and hard.
Georgia’s wolf form was dusty brown, taller and lither than Billy’s, and moved with deadly precision. She raked at the creature, forcing it to turn to her—only to be forced to keep whirling as Billy went after its flank.
I brandished my staff, timing my shot with my teeth gritted, and then screamed again as I sent another lance of force at the creature, aiming for its legs. The blast tore gashes in the asphalt and brought the nearly invisible thing to the ground, once more disrupting its veil. Billy and Georgia rushed toward it to keep it pinned down, and I raised my staff, calling up more energy. My next shot was going to pile-driver the thing straight down into the water table, by God.
But once more, its shape turned liquid—and suddenly a hawk with a wingspan longer than my car tore into the air, reptilian yellow eyes glaring. It soared aloft, its wings beating twice, and vanished into the night sky.
I stared after that for a second. Then I said, “Oh, crap.”
I looked around in the wildly dancing light of my amulet, and rushed toward Andi. She was unconscious, her body reverted to its human form—that of a redhead with a killer figure. One entire side of her body was a swelling purple bruise. She had a broken arm, shoulder, ribs, and her face was so horribly damaged that I had to worry about her skull as well. She was breathing, barely.
The shapeshifter had been strong.
Georgia arrived at my side in wolf form, her eyes, ears, and nose all alert, scanning around us, above us.
I turned my head to see Billy, nude and in human form, crouched over Kirby. I lifted my light and moved a couple of steps over toward him so I could see.
Kirby’s throat was gone. Just gone. There was a scoop of flesh as wide as my palm missing, and bare vertebrae showed at the back of it. The edges of the gaping wound were black and crumbling, as if charred to black dust. Kirby’s eyes were glassy and staring. His blood was everywhere.
“Hell’s bells,” I breathed. I stared at the dead young man, a friend, and shook my head hard once. “Billy, come on. Andi’s still alive. We can’t leave her out here. We’ve got to get her behind your threshold and get her an ambulance, now.”
Billy crouched over Kirby, his face twisted in confusion and rage.
“Will!” I shouted.
He looked up at me.
“Andi,” I said. “Help me get her inside.”
He nodded jerkily. Then the two of us went to her. We laid my duster out on the ground and got her onto it as gently as we could. Then we picked her up and carried her back toward the apartment building. People were calling out in the buildings around us, now. Flashlights and candles and chemical glow lights had begun to appear. I had no doubt that within a few minutes, we’d get sirens, too.
From somewhere above us, there was a contemptuous brassy cry—the same tone I heard before, though modulated differently now, coming from an avian throat.
“What was that?” Billy asked, his tone dull and heavy. “What was that thing?”
“I’m not certain,” I answered, breathing hard. Georgia was coming along behind us, dragging my staff in her jaws. “But if it’s what I think it is, things just got a lot worse.”
Billy looked up at me, Kirby’s blood all over his face and hands. “What is it, Harry?”
“A Native American nightmare,” I said. I looked at him grimly. “A skinwalker.”
Chapter Six
Georgia told the EMTs she was Andi’s sister, which was true in a spiritual sense, I suppose, and rode with her in the ambulance to the hospital. The EMTs looked grim.
The cops had gathered around Kirby’s body, and were busy closing off the scene.
“I have to be here,” Billy said.
“I know,” I said. “I’m on the clock, Billy. I can’t stay. I can’t lose the time.”
He nodded. “What do I need to know about skinwalkers?”
“They’re . . . they’re just evil, man. They like hurting people. Shape-shifters, obviously—and the more afraid of them you are, the more powerful they get. They literally feed on fear.”
Billy eyed me. “Meaning you aren’t going to tell me anything more. Because it won’t help me. You think it will scare me.”
“We knew it was here, we were ready for a fight, and you saw what happened,” I said. “If it had hit us from a real ambush, it would have been worse.”
He bared his teeth in a snarl. “We had it.”
“We had it at a momentary disadvantage—and it saw that, and it was smart enough to leave and come back later. All we did was prove to it that it would have to take us seriously to kill us. We won’t get another opportunity like that one.” I put a hand on his shoulder. “You and Georgia stay close to Andi. This thing likes hurting people. And it gets off on hunting down wounded prey. She’s still in danger.”
“Got it,” he said quietly. “What are you going to do?”
“Find out why it’s here,” I said. “There’s Council business afoot. Christ, I didn’t mean to bring you into this.” I stared toward the knot of officers around Kirby’s corpse. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
“Kirby was an adult, Dresden,” Billy said. “He knew what could happen. He chose to be here.”
Which was the truth. But it didn’t help. Kirby was still dead. I hadn’t known what the skinwalker was before, beyond something awful, but that didn’t change anything.
Kirby was still dead.
And Andi . . . God, I hadn’t even thought about that part. Andi and Kirby had been an intense item. She was going to be heartbroken.
Assuming she didn’t die, too.
Billy—I just couldn’t think of him as Will—blinked tears out of his eyes and said, “You didn’t know it was going to
come down like that, man. We all owe you our lives, Harry. I’m glad we got the chance to be there for you.” He nodded toward the police. “I’ll do the talking, then get to Georgia. You’d better go.”
We traded grips, and his was crushingly tight with tension and grief. I nodded to him, and turned to leave. The city lights were starting to come back on as I went out the back entrance to Will’s building, down a side street, and through an alley that ran behind an old bookstore where I wasn’t welcome anymore. I passed the spot in that alley where I’d nearly died, and shivered as I did. I’d barely dodged the old man’s scythe, that day.
Tonight, Kirby hadn’t.
My head felt dislocated, somehow. I should be feeling more than I was. I should be madder than hell. I should be shaking with fear. Something. But instead, I felt like I was observing events from a remote cold place somewhere up above and behind me. It was, I reasoned, probably a side effect of exposing myself to the skinwalker’s true form. Or rather, a side effect of what I’d had to do to get over it.
I wasn’t worried about the skinwalker sneaking up on me. Oh, sure, he might do it, but not cold. Supernatural beings like the skinwalker had so much power that reality itself gets a little strained around them wherever they go, and that has a number of side effects. One of them is a sort of psychic stench that goes with them—a presence that my instincts had twigged to long before the skinwalker had been in a position to do me any real harm.
Read a little folklore, the stuff that hasn’t been prettied up by Disney and the like. Start with the Brothers Grimm. It won’t tell you about skinwalkers, but it will give you a good idea of just how dark some of those tales can be.
Skinwalkers are dark compared to that. You’ve got to get the real stories from the peoples of the Navajo, Ute, and other Southwestern tribes to get the really juicy material. They don’t talk about them often, because the genuine and entirely rational fear the stories inspire only makes the creatures stronger. The tribes rarely talk about them with outsiders, because outsiders have no foundation of folklore to draw upon to protect themselves—and because you never know when the outsider to whom you’re telling dark tales might be a skinwalker, looking to indulge a sense of macabre irony. But I’ve been in the business awhile, and I know people who know the stories. They’d confided a handful to me, in broad daylight, looking nervously around them as they spoke, as if afraid that dredging up the dark memories might catch a skinwalker’s attention.
Because sometimes it did.
That’s how bad skinwalkers are. Even amongst the people who know the danger they represent, who know better than anyone else in the world how to defend against them, no one wants to talk about skinwalkers.
But in a way, it worked in my favor. Walking down a dark alley in the middle of a Chicago night, and stepping over the spot on the concrete where I’d almost been ripped to pieces just wasn’t spooky enough to encompass the presence of a skinwalker. If things got majorly Tales from the Darkside creepy and shivery, I’d know I was in real trouble.
As it was, the night was simply—
A small figure in a lightweight Cubs jacket stepped around the corner at the end of the alley. The newly restored streetlight shone on blond hair, and Sergeant Karrin Murphy said, “Evening, Dresden.”
—complicated.
“Murph,” I responded woodenly. Murphy was a sergeant with Chicago PD’s Special Investigations department. When something supernaturally bad happened and the cops got involved, Murphy often contacted me to get my take on things. The city didn’t want to hear about “imaginary” things like skinwalkers or vampires. They just wanted the problem to go away—but Murphy and the rest of SI were the people who had to make it happen.
“I tip a guy down at impound to keep an eye out for certain vehicles,” Murphy said. “Pay him in bottles of McAnally’s ale. He calls me and tells me your car got brought in.”
“Uh-huh,” I said.
Murphy fell into pace beside me as I turned out onto the sidewalk. She was five feet nothing, with blond hair that fell a little past her shoulders and blue eyes. She was more cute than pretty, and looked like someone’s favorite aunt. Which seemed likely. She had a fairly large Irish Catholic family.
“Then I hear about a power outage,” she said, “and a huge disturbance at the same apartments where your werewolf friends live. I hear about a girl who might not make it and a boy who didn’t.”
“Yeah,” I said. It might have come out a little bleak.
“Who was it?” Murphy asked.
“Kirby,” I said.
“Jesus,” Murphy said. “What happened?”
“Something fast and mean was following me. The werewolves jumped it. Things went bad.”
Murphy nodded and stopped, and I dimly realized that we were standing next to her Saturn—an updated version of the one that had been blown up—blithely parked in front of a hydrant. She went around to the trunk and popped it open. “I took a look at that pile of parts you call a car.” She drew out the medical toolbox and cooler from her trunk and held them up. “These were on the passenger seat. I thought they might have been there for a reason.”
Hell’s bells. In the confusion of the attack and its aftermath, I had all but forgotten the whole reason I’d gone out in the first place. I took the medical kit from her as she offered it. “Yeah. Stars and stones, yeah, Murph. Thank you.”
“You need a ride?” she asked me.
I’d been planning on flagging down a cab, eventually, but it would be better not to spend the money if I didn’t need to. Wizarding might be sexy, but it didn’t pay nearly as well as lucrative careers like law enforcement. “Sure,” I said.
“What a coincidence. I need some questions answered.” She unlocked the door with an actual key, not the little what’s-it that does it for you automatically with the press of a button, and held it open for me with a gallant little gesture, like I’d done for her about a million times. She probably thought she was mocking me with that impersonation.
She was probably right.
This mess was getting stickier by the minute, and I didn’t want to drag Murphy into it. I mean, Jesus, the werewolves had been capable defenders of their territory for a long while, and I’d gotten half of them taken out in the first couple hours of the case. Murphy wouldn’t fare any better in the waters through which I was currently swimming.
On the other hand, I trusted Murph. I trusted her judgment, her ability to see where her limits lay. She’d seen cops carved to pieces when they tried to box out of their weight division, and knew better than to attempt it. And if she started throwing obstacles in my way—and she could, a lot of them, that I couldn’t do diddly about—then my life would get a whole lot harder. Even though she wasn’t running CPD’s Special Investigations department anymore, she still had clout there, and a word from her to Lieutenant Stallings could hobble me, maybe lethally.
So I guess you could say that Murphy was threatening to bust me if I didn’t talk to her, and you’d be right. And you could say that Murphy was offering to put her life on the line to help me, and you’d be right. And you could say that Murphy had done me a favor with the medical kit, in order to obligate me to her when she told me that she wanted to be dealt in, and you’d be right.
You could also say that I was standing around dithering when time was critical, and you’d be right about that, too.
At the end of the day, Murphy is good people.
I got in the car.
“So let me get this straight,” Murphy said, as we approached my apartment. “You’re hiding a fugitive from your own people’s cops, and you think the guy’s been set up in order to touch off a civil war within the White Council. And there’s some kind of Navajo boogeyman loose in town, following you around and attempting to kill you. And you aren’t sure they’re related.”
“More like I don’t know how they’re related. Yet.”
Murphy chewed on her lip. “Is there anyone on the Council who is in tight with Native
American boogeymen?”
“Hard to imagine it,” I said quietly. “Injun Joe” Listens-to-Wind was a Senior Council member who was some kind of Native American shaman. He was a doctor, a healer, and a specialist in exorcisms and restorative magic. He was, in fact, a decent guy. He liked animals.
“But someone’s a traitor,” Murphy said quietly. “Right?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Someone.”
Murphy nodded, frowning at the road ahead of her. “The reason treachery is so reviled,” she said in a careful tone of voice, “is because it usually comes from someone you didn’t think could possibly do such a thing.”
I didn’t say anything in reply. In a minute, her car crunched to a stop in the little gravel lot outside my apartment.
I picked up the medical kit, the cooler, and my staff, and got out of the car.
“Call me the minute you know something,” she said.
“Yep,” I told her. “Don’t take any chances if you see something coming.”
She shook her head. “They aren’t your kids, Harry.”
“Doesn’t matter. Anything you can do to protect them in the hospital . . .”
“Relax,” she said. “Your werewolves won’t be alone. I’ll see to it.”
I nodded and closed my eyes for a second.
“Harry?” she asked me.
“Yeah?”
“You . . . don’t look so good.”
“It’s been a long night,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Look. I know something about those.”
Murphy did. She’d had more than her share of psychic trauma. She’d seen friends die, too. My memory turned out an unwelcome flash from years before—her former partner, Carmichael, half eviscerated and bleeding to death on white institutional tile flooring.
“I’ll make it,” I said.
“Of course you will,” she said. “There’s just . . . there’s a lot of ways you could deal, Harry. Some of them are better than others. I care about what happens to you. And I’m here.”