by Jim Butcher
Everything slowed down, thoughts burning through my mind at tremendous speed. I saw everything clearly, what was in front of me, what was in my peripheral vision, and everything seemed as bright and organized as a third grader's desk on the first day of school.
The Trailman twins were fraternal, not identical. Terry, the brother, was a couple of inches shorter than his nominally younger sister, but he stuck so far out of his shirt and pants that he had seemed well on the way to reversing that situation. He'd never get to. His body was on the floor of the cave, his face covered in a mask of blood and torn flesh. The ghoul had ripped open his throat. He'd also gotten the femoral artery on Terry's thigh. The kid's mouth was open, and I could see the ghoul's disgusting blood clinging to Terry's teeth. His knuckles were ripped open, too. The kid had died fighting.
Two feet farther on was the source of his motivation. Tina Trailman lay on the stone, staring upward with glazed eyes. She was naked from the waist down. Her throat and trapezius muscles were mostly gone, ripped away, as were her modest breasts. The quadriceps muscle of her right leg was gone, the skin around it showing the roughly torn gouges of ghoul fangs. There was blood everywhere, a sticky pool forming around her.
I saw her shudder a little. A tiny sound escaped her unmoving form. She was dead already—I knew that. I've seen it more than once. Her heart was still laboring, but whatever time she had left was a mere formality.
My vision went red with rage. Or maybe that was the Hellfire. I called upon still more of the dark energy in midleap, staff gripped in both hands, and rammed the tip into the small of the ghoul's back as I snarled, "Fuego!"
The blow, with all my weight and power and speed behind it, probably broke a couple of the ghoul's vertebrae all by itself. The fire spell came rushing out at the same time, filling the tunnel with thunder and light.
Tremendous heat blossomed before me, rushed into the ghoul, and tore him in half at the waist.
The same thermal bloom washed into the stone wall behind the creature and rebounded. I got an arm up to shield my face, and I dropped the staff so that I could draw my hands into my duster's sleeves. I managed to keep much skin from being directly exposed, but it hurt like hell all the same. I remembered that, later. At the time, I didn't give a flying fuck.
I kicked the ghoul's wildly thrashing lower body into the black ness of the mine shaft. Then I turned to the upper half.
The ghoul's blood wasn't red, so he burned black and brown, like a burger that fell into the barbecue just as it was finished cooking. He thrashed and screamed and somehow managed to flip himself onto his back. He held up his arms, fingers spread in desperation, and cried, "Mercy, great one! Mercy!"
Sixteen years old.
Jesus Christ.
I stared down for a second. I didn't want to kill the ghoul. That wasn't nearly enough to cover the debt of its sins. I wanted to rip it to pieces. I wanted to eat its heart. I wanted to pin it to the floor and push my thumbs through its beady eyes and all the way into its brain. I wanted to tear it apart with my fingernails and my teeth, and spit mouthfuls of its own pustuled flesh into its face as it died in slow and terrible agony.
The quality of mercy was not Harry.
I called up the Hellfire again, and with a snarl cast out the simple spell I use to light candles. Backed by Hellfire, directed by my fury, it lashed out at the ghoul, plunged beneath its skin, and there it set fat and nerves and sinews alight. They burned, burned using the ghoul for tallow, and the thing went mad with the pain.
I reached down to the ghoul, caught him by the remains of his robes, and hauled him up to my eye level, ignoring the little runnels of flame that occasionally licked up from the inferno beneath the ghoul's skin. I stared into its face. Then forced it to look at the bodies. Then I turned it back to me, and my voice came out in a snarl so inhuman that I barely understood it myself.
"Never," I told it. "Never again."
Then I threw it down the shaft.
It burst into open flame a second later, the rush of its fall feeding the fires in its flesh. I watched it plummet, heard it wailing in terror and pain. Then, far below, it struck something. The flame flowered and brightened for a second. Then it began to slowly die away. I couldn't make out any details of the ghoul, but nothing moved.
I looked up in time to see Ramirez come through the ruins of the wooden partition. He stared at me for a second, where I stood over the mine shaft, dark smoke rising from the surface of my duster, red light shining up from far below, the stench of brimstone heavy in the air.
Ramirez is rarely at a loss for words.
He stared for a moment. Then his eyes tracked over to the dead kids. His breath escaped him in a short, hard jerk. His shoulders sagged. He dropped to one knee, turning his head away from the sight. "Di or."
I picked up my staff and started walking back to the camp.
Ramirez caught up with me a few paces later. "Dresden," he said.
I ignored him.
"Harry!"
"Sixteen, Carlos," I said. "Sixteen. It had them for less than eight minutes."
"Harry, wait."
"What the hell was I thinking?" I snarled, stepping out into the sunlight. "Staff and blasting rod and most of my gear in the damned tent. We're at war."
"There was security in place," Ramirez said. "We've been here for two days. There was no way you could know this was coming."
"We're Wardens, Carlos. We're supposed to protect people. I could have done more to be ready."
He got in front of me and planted his feet. I stopped and narrowed my eyes at him.
"You're right," he said. "This is a war. Bad things happen to people, even if no one makes any mistakes."
I don't remember consciously doing it, but the runes of my staff began to burn with Hellfire again.
"Carlos," I said quietly. "Get out of my way."
He ground his teeth, but his eyes flickered away from me. He didn't actually turn, but when I brushed past him, he didn't try to stop me.
At the camp, I caught one brief glimpse of Luccio as she helped carry a wounded trainee on a stretcher. She stepped into a glowing line of light in the air, an opened way to the Nevernever, and vanished. Reinforcements had arrived. There were Wardens with medical kits, stretchers, the works, trying to stabilize the wounded and get them to better help. The trainees looked shocked, numb, staring around them—and at two silent shapes lying close together over to one side, covered from their heads to their knees by an unzipped sleeping bag.
I stormed into the smithy and snarled, "Forzare!" putting all my rage and will into a lashing column of force directed at the captured ghouls.
The spell blew the remaining wall of the smithy and the two ghouls fifty feet through the air and onto a relatively flat area of the street. I walked after them. I didn't hurry. In fact, I picked up a jug of orange juice off one of the breakfast tables, and drank some of it as I went.
The mountainside was completely silent.
Once I reached them, another blast opened up a six-foot crater in the sandy earth. I kicked the mostly human ghoul into it, and with several more such blasts collapsed the crater in on him, burying him to the neck.
Then I called fire and melted the sand around the ghoul's exposed head into a sheet of glass.
It screamed and screamed, which did not matter to me in the least. The sheer heat of the molten sand burned away its features, its eyes, its lips and tongue, even as the trauma forced the ghoul into its true form. I upended the jug of juice. Some of it splashed on the ghoul's head. Some of it sizzled on the narrow band of glass around it. I walked calmly, pouring orange juice on the ground in a steady line until, ten feet later, I reached the enormous nest of fire ants one of the trainees had stumbled into on our first day at Camp Kaboom.
Presently, the first scouts started following the trail back to the ghoul.
I turned on the second ghoul.
It cringed away from me, holding completely still. The only sound was the raw whi
sper-screams of the other ghoul.
"I'm not going to kill you," I told the ghoul in a very quiet voice. "You get to carry word to your kind." I thrust the end of my staff against its chest and stared down. Wisps of sulfurous smoke trickled down the length of the wooden shaft and over the maimed ghoul. "Tell them this." I leaned closer. "Never again. Tell them that. Never again. Or Hell itself will not hide you from me."
The ghoul groveled. "Great one. Great one."
I roared again and started kicking the ghoul as hard as I could. I kept it up until it floundered away from me, heading for the open desert with only one leg and one arm, the movements freakish and terrified.
I watched until the maimed ghoul was gone.
By then, the ants had found his buddy. I stood over it for a time and beheld what I had wrought without looking away.
I felt Ramirez's presence behind me. "Dios, " he whispered.
I said nothing.
Moments later, Ramirez said, "What happened to not hating them?"
"Things change."
Ramirez didn't move, and his voice was so low I could barely hear it. "How many lessons will it take the kids to learn this one, do you think?"
The rage came swarming up again.
"Battle is one thing," Ramirez said. "This is something else. Look at them."
I suddenly felt the weight of dozens and dozens of eyes upon me. I turned to find the trainees, all pale, shocked, and silent, staring at me. They looked terrified.
I fought the frustration and anger back down. Ramirez was right. Of course he was right. Dammit.
I drew my gun and executed the ghoul.
"Dios," Ramirez breathed. He stared at me for a moment. "Never seen you like this."
I started feeling the minor burns. The sun began turning Camp Kaboom into a giant cookie sheet that would sear away anything soft. "Like what?"
"Cold," he said, finally.
"That's the only way to serve it up," I said. "Cold."
Cold.
…
Cold.
I came back to myself. No more New Mexico. Dark. Cold, so cold that it burned. Chest tight.
I was in the water.
My chest hurt. I managed to look up.
Sun shone down on fractured ice about eight inches thick. It came back to me. The battle aboard the Water Beetle. The ghouls. The lake. The ice had broken and I had fallen through.
I couldn't see far, and when the ghoul came through the water, swimming like a crocodile, its arms flat against its sides, it was close enough to touch. It spotted me at the same time, and turned away.
Never again.
I reached out and grabbed on to the back of the jeans the ghoul still wore. It panicked, swimming fast, and dived down into the cold and dark, trying to scare me into letting go.
I was aware that I had to breathe, and that I was already beginning to black out. I dismissed it as unimportant. This ghoul was never going to hurt anyone else, ever again, if I had to die to make sure of it. Everything started going dark.
And then there was another pale shape in the water. Thomas, this time, shirtless, holding that crooked knife in his teeth. He closed on the ghoul, which writhed and twisted with such fear and desperation that it tore my weakening fingers lose from their grip.
I drifted. Felt something cold wrap my right wrist. Felt light coming closer, painfully bright.
And then my face was out of the frozen water, and I sucked in a weak gasp of air. I felt a slender arm slip under my chin, and then I was being pulled through the water. Elaine. I'd recognize the touch of her skin to mine anywhere.
We broke the surface, and she let out a gasp, then started pulling me toward the dock. With the help of Olivia and the other women, Elaine managed to get me up out of the lake. I fell to my side and lay there shivering violently, gasping down all the air I could. The world slowly began to return to its usual shape, but I was too tired to do anything about it.
I don't know how much time went by, but the sirens were close by the time Thomas appeared and hauled himself out of the water.
"Go," Thomas said. "Can he walk? Is he shot?"
"No," Elaine said. "It might be shock; I don't know. I think he hit his head on something."
"We can't stay here," Thomas said. I felt him pick me up and sling me over a shoulder. He did it as gently as such a thing can be done.
"Right," Elaine said. "Come on. Everyone, keep up and don't get separated."
I felt motion. My head hurt. A lot.
"I gotcha," Thomas said to me, as he started walking. "It's cool, Harry," he murmured. "They're safe. We got everyone clear. I gotcha."
My brother's word was good enough for me.
I closed my eyes and stopped trying to keep track of things.
Chapter Twenty-Four
The touch of very warm, very gentle fingers woke me. My head hurt, even more than it had after Cowl had finished ringing my bells the night before, if such a thing was possible. I didn't want to regain consciousness, if it meant rising into that.
But those soft, warm fingers touched me, steady and exquisitely feminine, and the pain began to fade. That had the effect it always did. When the pain was gone, its simple lack was a nearly narcotic pleasure of its own.
It was more than that, too. There is a primal reassurance in being touched, in knowing that someone else, someone close to you, wants to be touching you. There is a bone-deep security that goes with the brush of a human hand, a silent, reflex-level affirmation that someone is near, that someone cares.
It seemed that, lately, I had barely been touched at all.
"Dammit, Lash," I mumbled. "I told you to stop doing that."
The fingers stiffened for a second, and Elaine said, "What was that, Harry?"
I blinked and opened my eyes.
I was lying on a bed in dim hotel room. The ceiling tiles were old and water stained. The furniture was similarly simple, cheap, battered by long and careless use and little maintenance.
Elaine sat at the head of the bed with her legs crossed. My head lay comfortably upon her calves, as it had so many times before. My legs hung off the end of the bed, also as they had often done before, a long time ago, in a house I barely remembered except in dreams.
"Am I hurting you, Harry?" Elaine pressed. I couldn't see her expression without craning my neck, and that seemed a bad idea, but she sounded concerned.
"No," I said. "No, just waking up groggy. Sorry."
"Ah," she said. "Who is Lash?"
"No one I especially want to discuss."
"All right," she said. There was nothing but gentle assent in her tone. "Then just lie back for a few moments more and let me finish. Your friend the vampire said that they'd be watching the hospitals."
"What are you doing?" I asked her.
"Reiki," she replied.
"Laying on of hands?" I said. "That stuff works?"
"The principles are sound," she said, and I felt something silky brush over my forehead. Her hair. I recognized it by touch and smell. She had bowed her head in concentration. Her voice became distracted. "I was able to combine them with some basic principles for moving energy. I haven't found a way to handle critical trauma or to manage infections, but it's surprisingly effective in handling bruises, sprains, and bumps on the head."
No kidding. The headache was already gone completely. The tightness in my head and neck was fading as well, as were the twinges in my upper back and shoulders.
And a beautiful woman was touching me.
Elaine was touching me.
I wouldn't have done anything to stop her if I'd had a thousand paper cuts and she'd soaked her hands in lemon juice.
We simply stayed like that for a time. Once in while, she moved her hands, palms running down lightly over my cheeks, neck, chest. Her hands would move in slow, repetitive stroking motions, barely touching my skin. I'd lost my shirt at some point. All of those aches and pains of exertion and combat faded away, leaving only a happy cloud of endorphins beh
ind. Her hands were warm, slow, infinitely patient and infinitely confident.
It felt amazing.
I drifted on the sensations, utterly content.
"All right," she said quietly, an unknown amount of time later. "How does that feel?"
"Incredible," I said.
I could hear the smile in her voice. "You always say that when I'm done touching you."
"Not my fault if it's always true," I replied.
"Flatterer," she said, and her fingers gently slapped one of my shoulders. "Let me up, ape."
"What if I don't want to?" I drawled.
"Men. I pay you the least bit of attention, and you go completely Paleolithic on me."
"Ugh," I replied, and slowly sat up, expecting a surge of discomfort and nausea as the blood rushed around my head. There wasn't any.
I frowned and ran my fingers lightly over my scalp. There was a lump on the side of my skull that should have felt like hell. Instead, it was only a little tender. I've been thumped on the melon before. I know the residue of a hard blow. This felt like a bad one, only after I'd had about a week to recover. "How long have I been down?"
"Eight hours, maybe?" Elaine asked. She rose from the bed and stretched. It was every bit as intriguing and pleasant to watch as I remembered. "I sort of lose track when I'm focused on something."
"I remember," I murmured.
Elaine froze in place, and her green eyes glittered in the dimness as she met my gaze in a kind of relaxed, insolent silence. Then a little smile touched her lips. "I suppose you would."
My heart lurched and sped up, and I started getting ideas.
None of which could be properly pursued at the moment.
I saw Elaine reach the same conclusion at about the same time I did. She lowered her arms, smiled again and said, "Excuse me. I've been sitting there a while." Then she paced into the bathroom.
I went to the hotel's window and opened the cheap blinds a tiny bit. We were somewhere on the south side. Dusk was on the city, the streetlights already flickering into life one by one, as the shadows crept out from beneath the buildings and oozed slowly up the light poles. I checked around but saw no shark fins circling, no vultures wheeling overhead, and no obvious ghouls or vampires lurking nearby, just waiting to pounce. That didn't mean they weren't there, though.