by Jim Butcher
Murphy nodded. "So what's the plan?"
"Get us to the motel," I said. We were getting close enough that I could start trying the spell. "I'm going to try to reach Elaine."
"Then what?"
"I've got no use for anything that does what this thing does," I said. "Do you?"
Her blue eyes glittered as the car zipped through the illumination of a lonely streetlamp. "No."
"And as I recall, you are on vacation right now."
"And having fun, fun, fun," she snarled.
"Then we won't worry too much about saving anything for later," I said. I turned my head and said, "Molly."
The girl's head whipped up almost audibly. "Um. What?"
"Can you drive a stick?"
She was silent for a second, then jerked her head in a nod.
"Then when we get out, I want you to get behind the wheel and keep the engine running," I said. "If you see anyone else coming, honk the horn. If you see a tall woman in a turtleneck sprinting away, I want you to drive the car over her."
"I… but… but…"
"You wanted to help. You're helping." I turned back around. "Do it."
Her answer came back with the automatic speed of reflex. "Yes, sir."
"What about Grey Cloak and Madrigal?" Murphy asked me. "Even if we take out the Skavis, they're waiting to jump in."
"One thing at a time," I said. "Drive."
Then I closed my eyes, drew in my will, and hoped that I could call out to Elaine—and that she would be alive to hear me.
Chapter Thirty-One
I closed my eyes and blocked out my senses, one by one. The smell of the car and Murphy's deodorant went first. At least Molly had learned from experience and left off any overt fragrances when she tried to use the veil trick a second time. Sound went next. The Beetle's old, laboring engine, the rattle of tires on bad spots of road, and the rush of wind all faded away. Chicago's evening lights vanished from their irregular pressure on my closed eyelids. The sour taste of fear in my mouth simply became not, as I focused on the impromptu variation of the old, familiar spell.
Elaine.
I referred to the same base image I always had. Elaine in our first soulgaze, an image of a woman of power, grace, and oceans of cool nerve superimposed over the blushing image of a schoolgirl, naked for the first time with her first lover. I had known what she would grow into, even then, that she would transform the gawky limbs and awkward carriage and blushing cheeks into confidence and poise and beauty and wisdom. The wisdom, maybe, was still in process, as evidenced by her choice of first lovers, but even as an adult, I was hardly in a position to cast stones, as evidenced by my choice of pretty much everything.
What we hadn't known about, back then, was pain.
Sure, we'd faced some things as children that a lot of kids don't. Sure, Justin had qualified for his Junior de Sade Badge in his teaching methods for dealing with pain. We still hadn't learned, though, that growing up is all about getting hurt. And then getting over it. You hurt. You recover. You move on. Odds are pretty good you're just going to get hurt again. But each time, you learn something.
Each time, you come out of it a little stronger, and at some point you realize that there are more flavors of pain than coffee. There's the little empty pain of leaving something behind—graduating, taking the next step forward, walking out of something familiar and safe into the unknown. There's the big, whirling pain of life upending all of your plans and expectations. There's the sharp little pains of failure, and the more obscure aches of successes that didn't give you what you thought they would. There are the vicious, stabbing pains of hopes being torn up. The sweet little pains of finding others, giving them your love, and taking joy in their life as they grow and learn. There's the steady pain of empathy that you shrug off so you can stand beside a wounded friend and help them bear their burdens.
And if you're very, very lucky, there are a very few blazing hot little pains you feel when you realize that you are standing in a moment of utter perfection, an instant of triumph, or happiness, or mirth which at the same time cannot possibly last—and yet will remain with you for life.
Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.
Pain is a part of life. Sometimes it's a big part, and sometimes it isn't, but either way, it's part of the big puzzle, the deep music, the great game. Pain does two things: It teaches you, tells you that you're alive. Then it passes away and leaves you changed. It leaves you wiser, sometimes. Sometimes it leaves you stronger. Either way, pain leaves its mark, and everything important that will ever happen to you in life is going to involve it in one degree or another.
Adding pain to that image of Elaine wasn't a process of imagining horrors, fantasizing violence, speculating upon suffering. It was no different from an artist mixing in new color, adding emphasis and depth to the image that, while bright, was not true to itself or to life. So I took the girl I knew and added in the pains the woman I was reaching for had been forced to face. She'd stepped into a world she'd left behind for more than a decade, and found herself struggling to face life without relying upon anyone else. She'd always had me, and Justin—and when we'd gone away, she'd leaned upon a Sidhe woman named Aurora for help and support. When that had vanished, she had no one—I had given my love to someone else. Justin had been dead for years.
She'd been alone in a city, different from everyone around, struggling to survive and to build a life and a home.
So I added in all the pains I'd learned. Cooking blunders I'd had to eat anyway. Equipment and property constantly breaking down, needing repairs and attention. Tax insanity, and rushing around trying to hack a path through a jungle of numbers. Late bills. Unpleasant jobs that gave you horribly aching feet. Odd looks from people who didn't know you, when something less than utterly normal happened. The occasional night when the loneliness ached so badly that it made you weep. The occasional gathering during which you wanted to escape to your empty apartment so badly you were willing to go out the bathroom window. Muscle pulls and aches you never had when you were younger, the annoyance as the price of gas kept going up to some ridiculous degree, the irritation with unruly neighbors, brainless media personalities, and various politicians who all seemed to fall on a spectrum somewhere between the extremes of "crook" and "moron."
You know.
Life.
And the image of her in my mind deepened, sharpened, took on personality. There's no simple way to describe it, but you know it when you see it, and the great artists can do it, can slip in the shades of meaning and thought and truth into something as simple as a girl named Mona's smile, even if they can't tell you precisely how they managed it.
The image of Elaine gained shadows, flaws, character, and strength. I didn't know the specifics of what she'd been through—not all of them, anyway—but I knew enough, and could make good guesses about plenty more. That image in my mind drew me in as I focused on it, just as I once had focused on that younger image of Elaine unrealized. I reached out with my thoughts and touched that image, breathing gentle life into it as I whispered her True Name, freely given to me when we were young, within the vaults of my mind.
Elaine Lilian Mallory.
And the image came to life.
Elaine's face bowed forward, her hair falling around it, not quite hiding the expression of bone-deep weariness and despair.
Elaine, I whispered to her. Can you hear me?
Her thoughts came to me in an echoing blur, like when they want to confuse you at the movies and they muck around with a voice-over… believe I could make a difference. One person doesn't. One person can't ever make a difference. Not in the real world. God, what arrogance. And they paid for it.
I put more will into my thoughts. Elaine !
She glanced up for a moment, looking dully around the room. The image of her was filling in, slowly. She was in well-lit room without many features. Most of it seemed
to be white. Then her head bowed again.
Trusting me to keep them safe. I might as well pull the trigger myself. Too cowardly for that, though. I just sit here. Set things up so that I don't have to fail. I don't have to try. I don't have to worry about being nothing. All I have to do is sit.
I didn't like the sound of that at all. Within the senseless vaults of my mind, I screamed, Elaine!
She looked up again, blinking her eyes slowly. Her mouth began moving in time with her audible thoughts. "Don't know what I thought I could do. One woman. One woman who spent her whole life running away. Being broken. I would have served them better to end it before I ever left, rather than dragging them down with me."
Her lips stopped moving, but, very faintly, I heard her thoughts call, Harry?
And suddenly I could hear a difference in the other thoughts.
"Just sit," she mumbled. "Almost over now. I won't be useless anymore. Just sit and wait and I won't have to hurt anymore. Won't fail anyone else. It will all be over and I can rest."
It didn't sound like Elaine's voice. There were subtle differences. It sounded… like someone doing an impersonation. It was close, but it wasn't her. There were too many small inconsistencies.
Then I got it.
That was the Skavis, whispering thoughts of despair and grief into her mind, just as the Raiths would whisper of lust and need.
She was under attack.
Elaine Lilian Mallory! I called, and in my head, my voice rumbled like thunder. I am Harry Blackstone Copperfield Dresden, and I bid thee hear me! Hear my voice, Elaine!
There was a shocked silence, and then Elaine's thought-voice said, more clearly, Harry?
And her lips moved, and the not-Elaine voice said, "What the hell?"
Elaine's eyes snapped to mine, suddenly meeting them, and the room around her clarified into crystalline relief.
She was in the bathroom of the hotel, in the tub, naked in the bath.
The air was thick with steam. She was bleeding from a broad cut across one wrist. The water was red. Her face was god-awful pale, but her eyes weren't fogged over and hazed out. Not yet.
Elaine! I thundered. You are under a psychic attack! Priscilla is the Skavis!
Elaine's eyes widened.
Someone slapped me hard on the face and screamed, "Harry!"
The world flew sideways and expanded in a rush of motion and sound as my denied senses came crashing back in upon me. The Beetle was sitting sideways across several parking spaces in the motel's little lot, both doors open, and Murphy, gun in one hand, had a hold of my duster with the other and was shaking me hard. "Harry! Get up!"
"Oh," I said. "We're here."
I stumbled out of the car, getting my bearings. Behind me, Molly scrambled behind the wheel.
"Well?" Murphy demanded. "Did you get through?"
I opened my mouth to answer, but before I could, every light in sight suddenly went dim. I don't mean they went out. They didn't They just… dwindled, the way a lantern's flame does if you close off the glass. Or, I thought, struck with a sudden impression, the way a fire might dim if something nearby had just drawn the air away. Something big enough to dim nearby flame as it inhaled.
Something big taking a deep breath.
And then a voice that rang with silvery rage rolled through the air, kicking up a layer of dust from the ground in a broad wave in the wake of its passing as it rang out in an echoing clarion call, "FUL-MINARIS!"
There was a flash of green-white light so bright that it came to my reawakened senses as a physical pain, a roar of sound loud enough to drown out a spring break band, and the entire front wall of the first-floor hotel room we'd rented earlier that day was blown off the freaking building and into the street.
I had my shield up overhead before the debris started raining down, protecting Murphy, me, the windshield of the Beetle, and the girl staring wide-eyed through it. I squinted through the flying bits of building and furniture and rock, and a second later managed to spot a broken human form lying with its head in the street, its feet still up on the curb. Priscilla's turtleneck was on fire, and her hair stood straight out and was blackened and burned off within three or four inches of her skull. She ripped the turtleneck away in a kind of wobbly, disoriented panic—and revealed a bra and falsies. Those got ripped off too, and what was left, while slender and hairless, was also obviously the upper torso of a very pale, rather effeminate-looking man.
There was motion in the gaping maw of ruin that had been Elaine's hotel room, and a woman appeared in it. She was dressed in the cheap plastic curtain that had been hanging over the tub. She had a thick-linked chain wrapped tightly around her left arm a couple of inches above her bloodied, slashed wrist, tied in an improvised tourniquet. She was quite dry, and her hair floated out and around her head, crackling with little flashes of static electricity as she moved. She slid herself slowly, carefully across the debris-strewn floor, and she held a short length of carved wood that looked like nothing so much as an enormous thorn of some kind in her right hand, its sharp tip pointing at the man in the parking lot. Tiny slivers of green lightning danced around its tip, occasionally flickering out to touch upon nearby objects with snapping, popping sounds as she passed.
Elaine kept that deadly little wand pointed at the Skavis, eyes narrowed, and said, her voice rough and raw, "Who's useless now, bitch?"
I just stared at Elaine for a long minute. Then I traded a glance with Murphy, who looked just as startled and impressed as I felt. "Murph," I said, "I think I got through."
The Skavis agent came to his feet and bounded at us, quick as thinking.
I raised my staff and unleashed a burst of raw force. He might be strong as hell, but once off the ground, with nothing to push against, he was just mass times acceleration. The blow from the staff swatted him out of the air to the concrete not far from the Beetle. I immediately used another blow to throw him back across the parking lot, creating clear space around him.
"Thank you, Harry," Elaine said, her rough voice prim. Then she lifted the wand and snapped, "Fulminaris!"
There was another blinding flash of light, another crack of homemade thunder, and a green-white globe of light enclosed the vampire. There was a scream, and then his limp form fell to the concrete, one shoulder and most of his chest blackened. It smelled disturbingly like burned bacon.
Elaine lifted her chin, eyes glittering. She lowered the wand, and as she did, the lights came back up to full strength. She nodded once. Then she slipped and staggered to one side.
"Watch him!" I barked to Molly, pointing at the fallen vampire.
Murphy and I reached Elaine at about the same time, and we tried to catch her before she dropped. We succeeded in easing her down to the debris-littered concrete.
"Jesus," Murphy said. "Harry, she needs a hospital."
"They'll be watching the—"
"Fuck 'em," Murphy said, rising. "They can watch her through a wall of cops." She stalked away, drawing out her phone.
I bit my lip as Elaine looked up at me and smiled faintly. She spoke, her words faintly slurred. "Dammit. Every time I come to Chicago, I've got to get rescued. Embarrassing as hell."
"At least it wasn't me that did the building this time," I said.
She made a sound that might have been a laugh if she'd had more energy behind it. "Bastard had me dead to rights. Snuck it up on me. I didn't realize."
"That's how the old psychic whammy works," I said quietly. "Once you start thinking, 'Gee, maybe that isn't me thinking about suicide,' it kind of falls apart."
"Wouldn't have happened if you hadn't warned me," she said. She met my eyes again. "Thank you, Harry."
I smiled at her, and checked her wrist. "This doesn't look good. We're gonna get you to a doctor. Okay?"
She shook her head. "The upstairs room. Abby, Olivia, the others. Make sure they're all right."
"I doubt they've lost as much blood as you have," I said. Murphy, though, was way ahead of me, and was
already on the stairs on the way up to the second level, then down to check the room.
"Okay. Time to wrap this up." I picked Elaine up. I made sure the shower curtain didn't fall off. "Come on. You can sit in the car until the EMTs get here. Maybe I can find something else to keep your arm tied off, huh?"
"If you can find my purse," she said, her eyes closed now, a little smile on her mouth, "you can use my golden lariat."
I turned to the car just as the horn started frantically beeping.
I whirled.
The Skavis agent was moving again. He got his knees underneath him.
"Dammit," I said, and rushed the car. I got the passenger door open and dumped Elaine inside, even as the Skavis rose to his feet. "Murphy!"
Murphy called something I didn't hear very well. The Skavis turned toward me. His face, all contorted with burns on one side, twisted up into a hideous grimace.
Murphy's gun began barking in a steady, deliberate shooting rhythm. Sparks flew up from the concrete near his feet. At least one shot hit the Skavis, making his upper body jerk.
I rose, blasting rod in hand.
There was a roar more appropriate to a great cat than any dog, and the sound of shattering glass from the second level. Mouse flew over the safety railing, landed heavily on the ground, and lunged at the Skavis.
The dog wasn't six inches behind the Skavis agent as it closed on me, its one remaining arm raised up to… well, hit me. But given how hard the blow was going to be, I upgraded the verb to smite. He was about to smite me.
Thomas came out of nowhere with that cavalry saber of his and took off the Skavis's smiting arm at the shoulder.
He let out a scream that didn't sound anything like human, and tried to bite me. I rolled out of his way, helping him along with a stiff shove to his back.