SMALL FAVOR tdf-10

by Jim Butcher

  I brought up my shield bracelet, slamming my will through it, pushing most of the painful load of power still remaining to me into the barrier that sprang to life. I shouted out in wordless challenge, my voice thin and strained beside the deep-chested bellow that Magog unleashed in answer. Normally my shield manifests as a shimmering dome of mixed blue and silver light.

  This time I left it transparent, on the theory that what Magog didn’t know would hurt him. The shapeshifted Denarian slammed into the invisible barrier in an explosion of silver sparks and found it as immovable as the side of a mountain. The force of the gorilla-thing’s charge was not simply physical, though, and ugly red light clung to the silver power of my defenses. Excess energy bled through my bracelet as heat, scalding my skin-but the barrier held, and Magog staggered back, stunned.

  “Hey,” I said as I let the shield fall. “Where’s an eight-hundred-pound gorilla sit?” I took a step forward and kicked him as hard as I could, right in the coconuts, then followed up with a stomping kick to the neck. Magog shrieked in agony and went tumbling back down the bleachers. “Somewhere with lots of extra cushions, I guess, eh, Monkeyboy?”

  My instincts screamed a warning at me, and I threw myself down behind the last row of bleacher seats just as Mantis Bitch pointed a finger at me and screamed, “Amal-bijal!” There was a crash of thunder, a flash of light, a wash of heat, and a cloud of glowing splinters flew up a few feet away, where a section of seating had been a second before.

  Hell’s bells. A sorceress. A damned dangerous one, too.

  I readied my shield, already acutely aware of how little energy remained to me. I kept it small, maybe three feet across, and had started to rise when I saw a shape flit into my peripheral vision above me: Tessa, in the middle of an airborne leap. She cried out again, and I yelped and pulled into a tight fetal curl behind my shield as another bolt of lightning ripped through the air.

  Pressure slammed my shoulders against concrete floor. Light blinded me, and sound deafened me, leaving my world nothing but one long white tone. My lungs forgot their job for a couple of seconds, but my legs were on the ball, scrambling to get beneath me.

  I had just managed to sort out where I was when another deafening flash and crack hit somewhere close and flung me to the ground again. And then a third. I tried to keep my shield up, but I couldn’t see anything but yellow spots, and there wasn’t anything left to put into it, anyway. It was like walking along and suddenly finding myself without any floor-which happened more literally a second later, when I tripped over a bleacher seat and fell a couple of rows down, banging myself up pretty well in the process.

  Some dazed part of me realized that I’d made a mistake in my assumptions. Tessa wasn’t trying to take me out. She was just trying to keep me dazed and disoriented long enough for her people to arrive. That same part of me realized, even more belatedly, that I’d let myself be goaded into attacking by their words, let my heart rule my decision instead of playing it smart.

  Something slapped my staff out of my hand. I went for my gun, only to be slammed to the ground by another terrific physical force. Then something like an iron bar slammed across my throat.

  The light spots began to clear away in time for me to see a Denarian I’d never seen before atop me, this one like an androgynous, naked, bald statue of obsidian, green eyes glowing above human eyes of bright blue. A second shapeshifted creature, this one covered in a shaggy coat of grey, dusty-looking feathers, its face a grey mass of fleshy, hanging tendrils, had my wrists pinned to the ground.

  Tessa stood over me, watching something on the far side of the room, her eyes narrowed. “Don’t choke him out,” she snapped. “He can’t talk if he’s unconscious.”

  The obsidian statue eased up the pressure on my neck a little.

  “Report,” Tessa said.

  “We think the Hellhound is hiding in the bathrooms,” came a strained-sounding, harsh woman’s voice.

  “You think?”

  “Varthiel and Ordiel are down and McKullen is dead. They were searching there. The exit is watched. There’s no way for him to escape the room.”

  “Their coins?” Tessa asked.

  “Recovered, my lady.”

  “Thank you, Rosanna. Any other word?”

  “We’ve found Thorned Namshiel, unconscious and gravely wounded. There was extensive damage all around the area in which he fell.”

  “Yes. And yet it was done fairly quietly. It seems our intelligence on our young wizard thug was faulty.”

  Someone, presumably Mantis Bitch, kicked me in the ribs. It hurt. There wasn’t much I could do about it other than try to suck in a breath.

  “Very well,” Tessa said. “Take Magog and Deirdre for the Hellhound. Take him alive. Do it within the next five minutes.”

  “Yes, my lady,” Rosanna rasped. What sounded like hooves clopped away.

  Tessa stepped into view again, sweetly pretty face visible atop the monstrous body. She was smiling. “You’re all kinds of feisty, boy. It’s cute. The sort of thing my husband likes in his recruits.” She kicked me again. “I find it endlessly annoying, personally. But I’m willing to play nice, since we might work together in the future. I’ll give you this chance to cooperate. Tell me where the little girl is.”

  “I wish I knew,” I panted. “That way I could exercise free will while telling you to go fuck yourself.”

  She let out a playful little laugh and reached down to tweak my broken nose.

  Okay.

  Ow.

  “They say to give a man three chances to say no,” she said.

  “Save us both time and breath,” I said. “No, twice. That’s three.”

  “Suit yourself,” Tessa said.

  She reached into the pocket of my duster, withdrew my revolver, pointed it at my head, and pulled the trigger.

  I had just enough time to gawk and think, Wait, wait, this isn’t right.

  The muzzle flashed.

  There was a loud noise.

  I reached for power, tried to shield, but there was simply nothing there, nothing to use. The magic was gone.

  So it had to be someone else’s spell that neatly intersected the bullet’s course and bounced it into the shaggy-feathered thing holding my arms.

  My stomach sank as I realized what was happening.

  Ivy must have been there all along, quietly sitting on the bleachers, hidden by her veil from everything that was going on. Now she stood perhaps ten feet away, just a young girl, her expression solemn-but her eyes and cheeks were bright with tears.

  “Get away from him,” she said quietly. “All of you. I will not permit you to hurt him.”

  I hadn’t really extended my line of thinking beyond Kincaid. But of all the people who had dealt with the Archive, I’d been one of the only ones to take any interest in her as anything but a font of knowledge. I’d been the one to inquire after her personally. I’d been the one to give her a name. Sad but true, I was the closest thing that little girl had to a friend.

  She couldn’t have let anything happen to me, either.

  I’d just handed her to the Denarians.

  Tessa threw back her head and loosed a long, triumphant cry.

  Chapter Thirty-three

  “I vy,” I said in that tone you use with children who are up past their bedtime. I’m better at it than you’d think, after so much time working with an apprentice. “Get that veil back up and get out of here.”

  Tessa kicked me in the ribs again, hard enough to keep me from breathing much or talking at all. “When I want an opinion from you, Dresden,” she said, “I’ll read it in your entrails.”

  Ivy took two steps forward at Tessa’s gesture and narrowed her blue eyes. “For the benefit of the slow, Polonius Lartessa, I will repeat myself. I will not allow you to harm him. Step away.”

  Tessa’s eyes narrowed suddenly. “You know my name.”

  “I know everything about you, Lartessa,” Ivy said, her tone flat, passionless. “It was all
recorded, of course. Everything was, in Thessalonica in those days. Your father’s failing business. Your sale to the temple of Isis. If you like, I could draw you a cost-benefit analysis of your training versus your earnings in your first year at the temple, before Nicodemus came. I could use charts to make it easier for you to understand. And color them in with crayons. I enjoy crayons.”

  I wasn’t certain, but it sounded like the kid was trying to give the bad guys some guff on my behalf. She needed to work on her technique, but it was the thought that counted. If I could breathe, I might have gotten a little choked up.

  “Do you think I’m intimidated that you know where I come from, child?” Tessa snarled.

  “I know more about you than you do,” Ivy replied, her voice steady. “I know far more precisely than you how many you’ve harmed. How many bad situations you’ve made worse. Cambodia, Colombia, and Rwanda most recently, but whether in this century, the Wars of the Roses or the Hundred Years’ War, your story is the same stupid little story, told over and over again. You learned your lessons when you were a child, and you’ve never swerved from them. You’re a vulture, Lartessa. A maggot. You survive on diseased flesh and rotting meat. Anything whole and healthy frightens you.”

  The little girl didn’t see the Denarian that came creeping through the ferns behind her and flung itself at her back, several hundred pounds of scales and fangs.

  “Ivy!” I choked out.

  She had it covered. There was a flash of light, an overwhelming scent of ozone and fresh laundry, and a silver denarius rolled away from a mound of ash that fell to the ground without ever getting within three feet of the small form of the Archive. The coin rolled past her, on a straight line toward Tessa-but Ivy stomped on it with one small shoe, flattening it to the floor and preventing it from returning to Tessa’s grasp.

  “Tiny,” I said, in an overblown imitation of Sanya’s Russian accent, unable to keep a crazed giggle out of my voice. “But fierce.”

  Tessa regarded the fallen coin with a faint smile. “Costly. How many such spells do you think you can manage before you are out of energy, little one?”

  Ivy shrugged. “How many minions can you throw away? How many will be willing to die for you?”

  Tessa called out, “Around her, everyone. Make sure she knows where you are.”

  And nightmarish forms rose around the little girl, huge beside her single, slender little form. Deirdre, soaked and smelling of dead fish and seawater, gave me a sullen glare as she mounted the steps beside her mother. The shaggy-feathered thing that still held my hands bled quietly, keening under its breath. It was wounded, but it still kept my arms pinned. Magog came monkeying up over a bit of landscaping, grinning an evil grin, and I wondered where the hell Kincaid had wandered off to. The obsidian statue shifted its weight, keeping one hand resting on my chest-I had the feeling it could have shoved it right through to my spine if it wanted to.

  There were half a dozen others. Rosanna proved to be a rather beautiful-looking woman, the classical demoness with scarlet skin and a goat’s legs, complete with leathery black wings and delicately curling horns-though her deep brown eyes were haunted beneath the demonic green glowing set. She had a bag slung on a strap over her shoulder, just like Spinyboy-Tessa had called him Thorned Namshiel-had carried with him. Most of the others just looked big and mean, in various unsettling flavors.

  I guess even in Hell, it’s easier to find strong backs than strong brains.

  Ivy faced them and lifted her arms into a pose that vaguely resembled a defensive martial arts stance. It wasn’t. She was preparing to manipulate defensive energies. I just hadn’t ever seen anyone getting ready to do two entirely separate spells in either hand at the same freaking time before.

  Two questions occurred to me at that point. First, if the plan was for the Denarians to wear Ivy’s magic down and then take her by main force before their trap ran out of power, why weren’t they doing it already? And second…

  What was that hissing sound?

  It rose up around us, something I could just barely hear until I focused my senses on it, tuning out the musty reek and iron blood-scent of Shaggy Feathers and the cold solidity of Obsidian Statue’s hand.

  A definite, steady hissing sound, like air escaping from a tire or…

  Or hair spray issuing forth from a can.

  I lifted my head, twisting around enough to see through the crouched limbs of Shaggy Feathers, which seemed to be neither arms or legs, but something that served it as both, like the extremities of a spider. I couldn’t see what it had my wrists pinned with, and I didn’t want to. What I could see was a couple of leaves trembling on a nearby fern, and a gleam of metal from somewhere near the source of the mysterious hiss.

  Gas.

  The entire strength of this plan is predicated upon attacking the child, not the Archive.

  Children have very low body mass, compared to adults.

  A toxin dispersed in the air would be far more effective against Ivy than one of the Denarians-or even a grown person. All the bad guys had to do was pick something that caused unconsciousness and skewed heavily toward body mass, and they’d have an ideal weapon to use against her. Tessa and Nicodemus must have had several of their more capable lackeys carry in canisters of the stuff, whatever it was. Then all they had to do was open the cans and wait for her to fall.

  My thoughts flashed back to Thorned Namshiel’s spell, the one he’d been carrying out behind his concealing veil. A detail I’d barely noticed at the time suddenly leapt out at me. I’d been worried about what spell he was getting ready. I should have been paying attention to where he was getting ready to cast it-directly underneath a set of large vents. He’d probably been getting ready to set a wind spell in motion, to keep air pumping through the vents and spreading the gas through the Oceanarium.

  Could I smell something sort of mediciney? Had the end of my nose gone numb? Hell’s bells, Harry, this is no time either to panic or to suddenly pass out. I had to warn Ivy.

  I turned my head back toward her and caught Tessa’s gaze halfway. “Worked it out, did you?” Mantis Girl murmured. “If he speaks,” she said, presumably to Obsidian Statue, “crush his chest.”

  A weirdly modulated voice issued from the general area of the androgynous statue’s head. “Yes, mis-”

  And then there was a whup and a slap of air pressure against my skin, and Statue’s head-and Shaggy Feathers’s too-exploded in simultaneous eruptions of distinctly different forms of gore. The statue went out like some kind of faulty street-paving machine, splattering black sludge that looked like hot asphalt everywhere in a steadily spurting stream. It flung itself onto its back, then bounded to its hands and knees and started hammering its fists at the concrete. I guess it intended to smash me. I guess without a head, it didn’t know that it was actually six feet away, and digging a hole through the bleachers and into the material beneath.

  Shaggy Feathers just fell in a welter of very human-looking, -smelling, and -tasting blood, and maybe three hundred pounds of limp, rubbery muscle landed on my chest.

  “Ivy!” I screamed. “Gas! Get clear!”

  And then things got noisy.

  A series of cracking thumps came down faster than you could rapidly snap your fingers, and Denarians began to scream in pain and rage. I was vaguely aware of them bounding left and right, and saw a muzzle flash from the far side of the Oceanarium. At least I knew where Kincaid had been-getting into a position to kill both demon-taken madmen holding me down with a single freaking bullet, since anything less would have meant my certain death.

  “He is nothing!” howled Tessa. “Tarsiel, take the Hellhound! Everyone else, the girl!”

  Come on, Harry. Time to pay Kincaid back by getting the kid clear. Somehow. My right hand wasn’t moving much, and my singed left arm didn’t like it, but I heaved and strained and got enough of the dead Denarian off me to let me begin to squirm out from under it. Just as I was about to pull free, a silver coin rolled out fro
m amidst the ruined tentacles that had passed for the thing’s head and dropped toward my face. I jerked my head aside in a panic.

  The falling coin missed touching my bare flesh by a hair and bounced off the concrete floor. My left hand moved, faster and smoother than I would have thought possible, snapping the coin from the air on the bounce as smoothly and nimbly as if it had been whole and healthy and not burned and scarred and covered in a leather glove.

  I looked between it and my numb-tingling right hand for a quarter of a second.

  What. The hell.

  That was not normal.

  Worry about it later, Harry. I mean, sure, obviously Something Has Happened to you, but now is not the time to get distracted. Focus. Save the girl.

  I jammed the cursed relic in my pocket, hoped to God my 501s didn’t have a hole in them, and spun toward Ivy.

  I know I’m a wizard, a card-carrying member of the White Council and all. I know I’m a Warden, a certified combat expert of wizardkind, a cop, a soldier-have staff, will kick ass, if you will. I thought I’d seen some real professionals in action, the top of the wizarding game.

  I was wrong.

  It wasn’t that Ivy was slinging around a ton of power. She wasn’t. But think about this one for a moment: What’s really more impressive? A giant truck rumbling around on a great big old smoking engine? Or a little car just barely big enough to get the job done that’s powered by a couple of AA batteries?

  Seven of them were going after Ivy with magic, and she was countering them. All of them.

  Magog had charged her as he had me, but she hadn’t slammed him to a stop with a brick wall. She’d trapped him inside some kind of frictionless bubble, and he was spinning uselessly in circles half an inch off the floor, every motion making him spin faster. Whatever additional metaphysical mass he’d brought to the fight hadn’t cramped her style much. Her arms, bobbing and weaving continuously between all the workings she had up, flicked by the field containing him every few seconds and, I swear, struck his whirling snare for no reason other than to impart an additional, nausea-inducing vector to his spin.