by Jim Butcher
I checked the oncoming rush of Outsiders.
We weren’t going to sink the barge before they got here.
“—to sink it!” Karrin was shouting.
“What?”
“We don’t have to sink the barge!” she shouted. “It can’t move on its own! We just have to kill the boat that’s pulling it!”
“Right!” I said, and leaned the Harley into a turn that would take us arching back toward the barge—this time at its front, or prow, or bow or something, where a rig containing a tugboat a bit bigger than the Water Beetle had been built on.
It also brought us closer to the oncoming Outsiders, and I couldn’t tell which of us would get there first. As I sped up, Karrin dug into the compartments on the Harley, reaching around me, then said, “Hold it steady!”
Then she stood up, and I couldn’t see a damned thing—but I did see the way she pulled the pin out of a freaking hand grenade, and let the spoon spin off into the night. The Harley buzzed past the tugboat’s rig maybe ten feet ahead of the Outsiders, and Karrin gave the grenade a rather feeble little flick as we went by. I heard it smash into glass, like a stone thrown against a window, and then we were past the barge, and a huge sound thudded through the air, like an entire library of books all dropped flat at the same instant, and an incandescent white light flared from the tug.
I looked back over my shoulder and saw that the tugboat was on fire, pouring out thick black smoke and leaning sharply to one side. Murphy saw it, too, and let out an ululating war cry before she sat back down and pushed my hands off the handlebars, reassuming control of the Harley. “Two down!” she said. “One to go!”
I looked back behind me. The Outsiders had begun swarming at the barge, and one of them actually came out of the water at one of the rearmost riders of the Hunt—this horrible thing that was all pustules and multiple limbs with too many joints. As it leapt, the rider raised a shadowy bow and loosed a darkling arrow. It struck the Outsider and burst into red-amber flame the same color as the burning eyes of the Hunt. The Outsider let out an unearthly wail and plunged back beneath the surface.
“Come on,” I said to Karrin. “Head for the other boat.”
“Should we?” she asked. “That Erlking guy seems a little . . . do-it-yourselfy.”
She was right about that. Like any of the other seriously powerful beings of Faerie, the Erlking had a strong sense of pride—and you crossed that pride at your own risk. If I showed up and the Erlking thought I was making the statement that I judged him unfit to finish the task, it could come back to haunt me. On the other hand, I’d already insulted him once and there was a lot on the line. “If he didn’t want me making calls like this, he shouldn’t have let me shoot him and take over his Hunt,” I said. I turned to beckon the riders and hounds behind me and shouted, “Come on!” My voice came out as both my own and in the howling screech of the Hunt, the two interwoven, and the rest of my group joined in the shriek and formed up around the Harley as it raced across the water, toward the third barge.
Where the fight wasn’t going well.
There were several long, straight streaks of molten steel where the Erlking and his riders had struck the barge’s hull, the edges marked with flickering tongues of eerie green fire, but they had not torn a hole in it like we had the first barge, either, and the Outsiders had gotten to this barge faster than they had to mine. Even as we approached, I saw a racing hound of the Hunt vanish in a spray of water as things, plural, too twisted and too confusing to count, surged up from below and began to drag the hound down.
A shriek loud enough to cause spray to rise from the water shook the air, and the Erlking himself plunged down from overhead, leading a trio of hunters behind him. Blades and arrows struck at the Outsiders in plumes of ember fire. The Erlking seized the hound by the scruff of its neck and dragged it up out of the grasp of the creatures beneath the surface.
The Erlking and his riders had fallen into a formation, a great, tilted wheel. At the far end, the riders were maybe fifty feet above the waves, circling in the air to then charge down at the surface of the water where it met the hull of the barge. The Outsiders would throw themselves up out of the waves, meeting each individual rider. Hounds would, in turn, try to throw themselves on the Outsiders, smothering their defense so that the rider could strike the barge.
Meanwhile, figures aboard the barge fired rifles wildly into the night, though the deck of the thing was actually bobbing with the thrashing of the Outsiders in the water around it. Whoever they were, they struck me as amateurish—though maybe it was only because I’d been exposed to real soldiers before, who were a deadly threat even on the scale of supernatural conflict. These guys weren’t the Einherjaren—but at the end of the day, they still had deadly weapons, and more than one rider and hound had been struck by rounds and bled molten light from their shadow-masked bodies. The piercing screech of the Hunt met with the howls of Outsiders and the crack of rifle fire, and bit by bit, the barge’s hull bled red-hot steel.
But it wasn’t happening fast enough.
With a groan, the barge’s tugboat, this one mounted behind it, began shoving the thing forward through the water and toward the shore of Demonreach.
“I shouldn’t have split us up,” I said. “We didn’t cover twice as many targets. We just got twice as half-assed.”
Karrin made a sputtering sound, then said, “You and math are not friends. Regret later. Lead now.”
“Right,” I said. The barge wasn’t exactly leaping into motion—but it wouldn’t stop on a dime once it got moving, either. “Do you have any more grenades?” I asked Karrin.
“I used them a couple of weeks ago,” she said.
“With Kincaid?” I asked. There was an edge to it. She and the assassin were kind of an item, the last time I looked.
“Harry,” she said, “focus.”
Hell’s bells, she was right. I didn’t need the Winter mantle turning me into a territorial alpha dick right now. I stared at the barge for a long second, pushing that instinct away, and then said to the Hunt, “Join the Erlking! Attack the barge!”
Hounds and riders streamed past us, joining the madman’s wheel of death in the sky, and I lowered my voice, speaking only to Karrin as I reloaded the Winchester. “Get me to the tugboat.”
She gave me a quick, wide-eyed glance, and then seemed to get it. She gunned the motor, sending the Harley shooting past the Erlking’s very large, very threatening, and very distracting formation, as we raced alone toward the chugging tugboat.
She brought us right alongside it, and once again I leapt from the back of the Harley. I hit the side of the tug pretty hard, but was able to get the fingers of my left hand around the top of the rail, and with a few kicks managed to swing myself up onto the deck. I landed in a crouch, clutching the rifle, got my bearings, and headed toward a stairwell that would lead me to the boat’s bridge.
I went up it as quietly as I could, which is pretty damned quiet for a guy my size, Winchester at the ready. The bridge of the tug was big enough to merit its own enclosed space, and I slipped up to the door, took a breath, then ripped it open, lifting the Winchester as I did.
The bridge was empty, the wheel secured with a pair of large plastic ties. There was a piece of paper taped to the wheel, and on it was written in large black marker, LOOK BEHIND YOU.
I started to turn, but a cannonball hit me between the shoulder blades. I flew forward onto the bridge and slammed my head against the Plexiglas forward windows. I fell back from that, stunned, and a heavy weight hit me from the side, slamming me into a bulkhead, which felt almost exactly like being slammed into a steel wall.
I wound up prone, my face to the deck, and once more the heavy weight slammed into me, landing on my back.
And Cat Sith, who had told me not to turn my back on anyone, purred, “Wizard, Knight, fool. Too ignorant even to know how to die properly.” His skin-crawling voice came out in a throaty buzz next to my ear. “Allow me to educate you.”
Chapter
Forty-four
The reasonable thing to do would have been to whimper or flinch or just freak out and look for the nearest exit. But instead of doing any of those things, I felt a chill settle over my brain, and a very cold, calm part of me studied the situation objectively.
“Join, hide, or die,” I said. I heard the faint echo of the Wild Hunt’s screech in my voice.
“Excuse me?” Cat Sith said.
“You have excellent hearing,” I said. “But I will repeat myself. Join. Hide. Or die. You know the laws of the Hunt.”
“I do know them, wizard. And once I have slain you, the Hunt will be mine to do with as I please.”
“The real Cat Sith wouldn’t be having this conversation with me, you know. He’d have killed me by now.”
A blow struck the back of my head, sharp, painful, but not debilitating. “I am Cat Sith. The one. The only.”
I turned my head slightly and said, “So why do I still have a spine?”
And I threw an elbow at the weight on my back. I connected with something, hard, and slammed it off me. It hit the other wall of the bridge, and I flung myself to my feet in time to see the large, lean form of Cat Sith thrash his tail and bound at me.
I ducked him, moving forward under his leap, and spun, and it left the two of us facing each other across the full length of the bridge.
“Slow,” I said. “I’ve seen him move. Cat Sith is faster than that.”
A hideous growling sound came from the form of the malk. “I am he.”
“Get me a Coke,” I snarled.
“What?”
“You heard me, Mittens. Get me a freaking Coke and do it now.”
Sith remained in place, as if locked to the floor, though his whole body was quivering, his claws sheathing and unsheathing in rhythm. But he didn’t fly at me, ripping and tearing, either.
“You see,” I said, “Cat Sith is a creature of Faerie, and he swore an oath to Queen Mab to obey her commands. She commanded him to obey mine. And I just gave you a command, kitty. Did Mab release you from her command? Did she suspend the duties of her vassal?”
Sith snarled again, his eyes getting wider and rounder, his tail thrashing around wildly.
“They got to you, didn’t they?” I said. “They jumped you back at the Botanic Gardens while you were covering my exit. Freaking Sharkface was watching the whole thing and he got you.”
Sith began quivering so hard that he was jitterbugging back and forth in place on the floor, his head twitching, his fur standing on end and then abruptly lying flat again.
“Fight it, Sith,” I urged him quietly. “It doesn’t have to win. Fight it.”
For a second, I thought I saw something of Cat Sith’s smug, contemptuous self-assurance on the malk’s face. And then it was gone. Just gone. Everything went away, and the malk stood for a second with its head down. Then it lifted its head and the motion was subtly wrong, something that simply didn’t have the grace I’d seen in the elder malk before. It faced me for a moment and then it spoke, its voice absent of anything like personality. “A pity. I would have been more useful to them as an active, covert asset.”
I shuddered at the utter absence in that voice. I wasn’t talking to Sith anymore.
I was speaking with the adversary.
“Like Mab wouldn’t have figured it out,” I said. “Like she did when you infected Lea.”
“Further conversation is not useful to our design,” Not-Sith said, and then the malk’s form flew at me in a blur.
It was a testament to the power of the Winter Knight’s mantle and the Wild Hunt’s energy that I survived that first leap at all. Sith struck straight at my throat. I got my arms in the way. The black shadow mask of the Hunt over my arms and chest blew apart into splinters, dispersing some of the impact energy of the malk’s spectacular leap, and instead of pulping me against the wall behind me, he just pounded me into it with tooth-rattling force.
Sith bounced off me, which was what I had hoped would happen. In my line of work, I’ve dealt with more than one critter that is faster than fast. When they’ve got their feet underneath them, it’s the next-best thing to impossible to land anything on them—but when they’re in the air, they’re moving at the speed gravity and air resistance dictate, like everybody else. For that one portion of a second, Sith was an object moving through space, not a blindingly fast killing machine. Someone who didn’t know that wouldn’t have known to be ready for it.
But I did. And I was.
The blast of raw force I summoned wasn’t my very best punch—but it was the best I was going to get out here over the lake. It slammed into the creature that had been Cat Sith and plowed it out through the Plexiglas window. The plastic didn’t break. It came entirely out of its housing, and the malk and a slab of Plexiglas the size of a door went whirling out into the madness of the night. Sith flew out over the bow of the tugboat and plunged down into the water through the open spaces of the pipe-steel rig between it and the barge.
I stared hard after the departed malk for a few seconds, to be sure he wasn’t going to bounce right back into my face somehow. As I did, I watched in the other half of the bridge’s forward window while the shadow mask of the Hunt slithered back up over my arms and face. I gave it to a three count, nodded, and then went to the tug’s wheel. I snapped the plastic ties securing it with a pair of fast jerks, then started rolling the wheel as far as it would go to the right. There was a big lever that looked like a throttle, and when I pushed it forward, the boat’s engines started to roar with effort.
The barge groaned as the tug changed the direction in which it applied force, and the barge’s back end began slowly slewing out and to the left. That drew shouts of consternation from the deck of the barge. I didn’t feel like getting shot in the face, so I knelt down, out of sight, while I pulled the secondhand belt off of my old jeans and used it to secure the wheel in position. Then I recovered the Winchester and backed out of the bridge, hurrying away from it as quietly as I could.
What I’d done was a delaying tactic at best. It wouldn’t turn the barge around—but it would set it to spinning in place, and maybe cost the enemy time to turn it around if they took control of it again. But that was exactly what the Hunt needed to sink her—time. The longer the barge played sit-and-spin, the better. So I found a nice quiet patch of shadow where I could see the stairs leading up to the tug’s bridge, and where I could stand behind a very large steel pipe. I rested the Winchester on the top bend of the pipe, sighted on the doorway, and waited.
It didn’t take long for the first couple of crewmen to arrive. I wasn’t sure whether they came up from belowdecks or somehow swarmed over from the barge, but two men in dark clothing, carrying pistols at the ready, came hurrying along and started up the stairs.
I’m not a great shot. But when you’re resting a rifle on a solid surface, one that is perfectly still (at least relative to all the solid surfaces around it), and when the range is about forty feet, you don’t have to be an expert. You just have to take a breath, let it out, and squeeze.
The Winchester cracked with thunder, and the first man arched into a bow of agony just as he reached the top of the stairs. That ended up working in my favor. He fell back into the second man, just as the second guy spun and raised his pistol. The first man fell into the second, sending his first shot wild, and knocked him about halfway over. The second man couldn’t hold the gun with both hands, but he kept pulling the trigger as fast as he could.
At forty feet, terrified, in the dark, unsure of his target’s exact location, and sprawled out with the deadweight of another man flopping against him, the poor bastard didn’t have a chance. He got off seven or eight rounds, none of them coming anywhere close. I worked the action on the Winchester, took a breath, let half out, and squeezed the trigger.
It wasn’t until the flash of light from the shot illuminated him that I recognized Ace, his expression panicked, his gun aimed at a point ten fe
et to my left. The light flashed and burned his face into my retina for a moment as the dark returned.
And the tugboat was silent again.
* * *
It didn’t take long for the Erlking to finish his work. Maybe three minutes later, a chorus of hideous screams went up from the lake’s surface, and the Hunt howled its triumph and circled into the sky, horns blaring, hounds baying. I saw green fire burning fiercely from the spot the Hunt had started carving, and then the barge started to list toward that side as the water poured into her. Barges aren’t warships, or even maritime vessels. If they have belowdecks spaces at all, they generally aren’t fitted with flood compartments and sealable doors. They sure as hell don’t have automatic systems. They’re just soup bowls. Poke a hole in the bottom, and a bowl isn’t gonna hold much soup.
I didn’t feel like getting Titanicked, so I hustled over to the spot where I’d boarded the tug. There was a roar from the shadow-tiger mask around the Harley, and Murphy swept up alongside the boat. I leapt down onto the back of the bike in a single smooth motion, which I felt was cool, and landed with way too much of my weight on my genitals, which I felt was not.
“Go, go, go,” I gasped in a pained falsetto, and Murphy peeled away from the doomed ships.
Within moments, the Hunt had fallen into formation around me again, and the Erlking was laughing maniacally, whirling his sword over his head. The shadow mask over one leg and a section of his ribs had been torn away, and I could see wounds beneath—but already the shadows were stretching over them again. “I love nights like this!” he bellowed. “I love Halloween!”
“Yeah, it’s pretty badass,” I said in my wobbling, creaky voice.
“Sir Knight,” he said, “that was passably done, but from here I believe it shall take more experience and expertise than you possess to continue the Hunt. Do I have your leave to resume command and pursue these Outsider vermin in a more appropriate fashion?” he asked me.