by Jim Butcher
“That’s so kind.”
“It gets better. You may take your equipment, your skull, and the White bastard’s whore with you when you leave. Unharmed and free of future malice. All accounts will be called even.”
I let the dry show in my tone. “How could I possibly say no.”
She smiled. “You killed someone very dear to me, Mister Dresden—not directly, true, but your actions mandated her death. For that, too, I will forgive you.”
I narrowed my eyes.
Bianca ran her hands over Susan’s hair. “This one will stay with me. You stole away someone dear to me, Mister Dresden. And I am going to take away someone dear to you. After that, all will be equal.” She gave Ortega a very small smile and then glanced at me and asked, “Well? What say you? If you prefer to remain with her, I’m sure a place could be made for you here. After suitable assurances of your loyalty, of course.”
I remained silent for a moment, stunned.
“Well, wizard?” she snapped, harsher. “How do you answer? Accept my bargain. My compromise. Or it is war. And you will become its first casualty.”
I looked at Susan. She stared blankly, her mouth partially open, caught in a trance of some kind. I could probably snap her out of it, provided a bunch of vampires didn’t tear me limb from limb while I tried. I looked up at Bianca. At Ortega. At the hissing vampire cronies. They were drooling on the polished floor.
I hurt all over, and I felt so very damned tired.
“I love her,” I said. I didn’t say it very loud.
“What?” Bianca stared at me. “What did you say?”
“I said, I love her.”
“She is already half mine.”
“So? I still love her.”
“She isn’t even fully human any longer, Dresden. It won’t be long before she is as a sister to me.”
“Maybe. Maybe not,” I said. “Get your hands off my girlfriend.”
Bianca’s eyes widened. “You are mad,” she said. “You would flirt with chaos, destruction—with war. For the sake of this one wounded soul?”
I smote my staff on the floor, reaching deep for power. Deeper than I’ve ever reached before. Outside, in the gathering morning, the air crackled with thunder.
Bianca, even Ortega, looked abruptly uncertain, looking up and around, before focusing on me again.
“For the sake of one soul. For one loved one. For one life.” I called power into my blasting rod, and its tip glowed incandescent white. “The way I see it, there’s nothing else worth fighting a war for.”
Bianca’s face distorted with fury. She lost it. She split apart her skin like some gruesome caterpillar, the black beast clawing its way out of her flesh mask, jaws gaping, black eyes burning with feral fury. “Kill him!” she shouted. “Kill him, kill him, kill him!”
The vampires came for me, across the floor, along the walls, scuttling like roaches or spiders—too fast for easy belief. Bianca gathered shadow into her hands and hurled it at me.
I fell back a pace, caught Bianca’s strike with my staff, and parried it into one of her flunkies. The darkness enfolded the vampire, and it screamed from within. When the fog around it vanished, nothing remained but dust. I responded with another gout of fire from the rod, sweeping it like a scythe through the oncoming vampires, setting them aflame. They writhed and screamed.
Spittle sliced toward me from above and to one side, and I barely ducked away in time. The vampire clinging to the ceiling followed its venom down, but it met the end of my staff in its belly, the other end solidly planted against the floor. The vampire rebounded with a burping sound and landed hard on the floor. I lifted the staff and smote down on the thing’s head, to the sound of more thunder outside. Power lashed down through the staff, and crushed the vampire’s skull like an egg. Dust rained down from the ceiling, and the vampire’s claws scratched a frantic staccato on the floor as it died.
I had done well for the moment—the vamps nearest me were falling back, teeth bared. But more were coming, from behind them. Bianca hurled another strike at me, and though I interposed both staff and shield, the deathly cold of it numbed my fingers.
I was running out of strength, panting, my weariness and weakness struggling to claim me. I fought off the dizziness, enough to send another flash of fire at an oncoming vampire, but it skittered aside, and all I did was plow a blazing furrow in the floorboards.
They fell back for a moment, separated from me by an expanse of flame, and I struggled to catch my breath.
They were coming. The vampires would be coming for me. My brain kept chattering at me, frantic, panicked. They’re coming. Justine, Susan, and I might as well be dead. Dead like all the others. Dead like all their victims.
I leaned against the wall by the stairs, panting, fighting to hold on to some sense of clarity. Dead. Victims. The victims below. The dead.
I dropped the blasting rod. I fell to my knees.
With my staff, I scratched a circle around me, in the dust. It was enough. The circle closed with a thrum of power. Magic ran rampant in that house, the sea of supernatural energy stirred to froth.
I had no guide for this kind of spell. I had no focus, nothing to target, but that wasn’t the kind of magic I was working with. I shoved my senses down, into the earth, like reaching fingers. I blanked out the burning hall, my enemies, Bianca’s howling. I shut away the fire, the smoke, the pain, the nausea. I focused, and reached beneath me.
And I found them. I found the dead, the victims, the ones who had been taken. Not just the few piled below, like so much trash to be discarded. I found others. Dozens of others. Scores. Hundreds. Bones hidden away, never marked, never remembered. Restless shades, trapped in the earth, too weak to act, to take vengeance, to seek peace. Maybe on another night, or in another place, I couldn’t have done it. But the way had been prepared for me, by Bianca and her people. They’d thought to weaken the border between life and death, to use the dead as a weapon against me.
But that blade can cut both ways.
I found those spirits, reached out and touched them, one by one.
“Memorium,” I whispered. “Memoratum. Memortius.”
Energy rushed out of me. I shoved it out as fast as it would go, and I gave it to them. To the lost ones. The seduced, the betrayed, the homeless, the helpless. All the people the vampires had preyed on, through the years, all the dead I could reach. I reached out into the turmoil Bianca and her allies had created, and I gave those wandering shades power.
The house began to shake.
From below, in the basement, there came a rumbling sound. It began as a moan. It rose to a wail. And then it became a screaming mob, a roar of sound that shattered the senses, that made my heart and my belly shiver with the sheer force of it.
The dead came. They erupted through the floor, and took forms of smoke and flame and cinder. I saw them as I swayed, weakened, finished by the effort of the spell. I saw their faces. I saw newsboys from the roaring twenties, and greaser street punks from the fifties. I saw delivery people and homeless transients and lost children rise up, deadly in their fury. The ghosts reached out with flaming hands to burn and sear; they shoved their smoky bodies into noses and throats. They howled their names and the names of their murderers, the names of their loved ones, and their vengeance shook that grand old house like a thunderstorm, like an earthquake.
The ceiling began to fall in. I saw vampires being dragged into the flames, down into the basement as burning sections of floor gave way. Some tried to flee, but the spirits of the dead knew no more pity than they had rest. They hammered at the vampires, raked at them, ghostly hands and bodies made nearly tangible by the power I’d channeled into them.
Vampires died. Ghosts swarmed and screamed everywhere, terrible and beautiful, heartbreaking and ridiculous as humanity itself. The sound banished any thought of speech, hammered upon my skin like physical blows.
I was more terrified than I had ever been in my life. I struggled to my feet and be
ckoned down the stairs. Justine stumbled up them, Bob’s eyelights blazing bright orange, a beacon in the smoke. I grabbed her wrist and tried to make my way around the trembling house, the gaping hole in the floor that led down to an inferno.
I saw a spirit leap for Bianca with blazing hands reached out, and she smote it from the air with a blast of frozen black air. She seized Susan by the wrist and started dragging her toward the front door.
More spirits hurtled toward her, the eldest of the murderers of this house, fire and smoke and splinter—even one that had forged a body for itself out of the spent bullets lying upon the floor.
She fought them off. Talon and magic, she thrust her way through them, and toward the front door. Susan began to wake up, to look around her, her expression terrified.
“Susan!” I shouted. “Susan!”
She began to struggle against Bianca, who hissed, turning toward Susan. She fought to drag my girlfriend closer to the front door, but one of the ghosts clawed at the vampire’s leg, setting it aflame.
Bianca screamed, berserk, out of control. She lifted one hand high, her claws glittering, dark, and swept it down at Susan’s throat.
I sent my spell hurtling out along with Susan’s name, the last strength of my body and mind.
I saw her rise. Rachel’s ghost. She appeared, simple and translucent and pretty, and put herself between Bianca’s claws and Susan’s throat. Blood gouted from the ghost, scarlet and horrible. Susan tumbled limply to one side. Bianca started screaming, high enough to shatter glass, as the bloody ghost simply pressed against her, wrapping her arms around the monstrous black form.
My spell followed on the heels of Rachel’s ghost, and took Bianca full in the face, a near-solid column of wind, which seized her, hurtled her up, and then smashed her down into the floor. The overstrained boards gave way beneath her with a creak and a roar, and flame washed up toward me in a wave of reeking black smoke. I felt my balance spin and I struggled to make it to the exit, but fell to the ground.
Spirits flooded after Bianca, fire and smoke, following the vampire sorceress down the hole. The house itself screamed, a sound of tortured wood and twisted beam, and began to fall.
I couldn’t get my balance. I felt small, strong hands under one of my arms. And then I felt Susan beneath the other, powerful and terrified. She lifted me to my feet. Justine stayed by my other side, and together, we stumbled out of the old house.
We had gone no more than a dozen paces when it collapsed with a roar. We turned, and I saw the house drawing in upon itself, sucked down into the earth, into an inferno of flame. The fire department, later, called it some kind of inverted backblast, but I know what I saw. I saw the ghosts the dead had left behind settle the score.
“I love you,” I said, or tried to say, to Susan. “I love you.”
She pressed her mouth to mine. I think she was crying. “Hush,” she said. “Harry. Hush. I love you, too.”
It was done.
There was no more reason to hold on.
Chapter Thirty-nine
I regard it as one last sadistic gibe of whatever power had decided to make my life a living hell that the burn ward was full, and I was given a room to share with Charity Carpenter. She had recovered in spirit, if not in body, and she started in on me the moment I awoke. The woman’s tongue was sharper than any sword. Even Amoracchius. I smiled through most of it. Michael would have been proud.
The baby, I learned, had taken an abrupt turn for the better in the hours before dawn the morning Bianca’s house had burned. I thought that maybe Kravos had taken a bite of the little guy, and I had gotten it back for him. Michael thought God had simply decreed the morning to be a day of good things. Whatever. The results were what counted.
“We’ve decided,” Michael said, stretching a strong arm around Charity, “to name him Harry.”
Charity glowered at me, but remained silent.
“Harry?” I asked. “Harry Carpenter? Michael, what did that poor kid ever do to you?”
But it made me feel good. And they kept the name.
Charity got out of the hospital three days before me. Michael or Father Forthill remained with me for the rest of my stay. No one ever said anything, but Michael had the sword with him, and Forthill kept a crucifix handy. Just in case I had some nasty visitors.
One night when I couldn’t sleep, I mentioned to Michael that I was worried about the repercussions of my workings, the harmful magic I had dished out. I worried that it was going to come back to haunt me.
“I’m not a philosopher, Harry,” he said. “But here’s something for you to think about, at least. What goes around comes around. And sometimes you get what’s coming around.” He paused for a moment, frowning faintly, pursing his lips. “And sometimes you are what’s coming around. You see what I mean?”
I did. I was able to get back to sleep.
Michael explained that he and Thomas had escaped the fight at the bridge only a few moments after it had begun. But time had stretched oddly, between the Nevernever and Chicago, and they hadn’t emerged until two o’clock the following afternoon.
“Thomas brought us out into this flesh pit,” Michael said.
“I’m not a wizard,” Thomas pointed out. “I can only get in and out of the Nevernever at points close to my heart.”
“A house of sin!” Michael said, his expression stern.
“A gentlemen’s club,” Thomas protested. “And one of the nicest ones in town.”
I kept my mouth shut. Who says I never grow any wiser?
Murphy came out of the sleeping spell a couple days later. I had to go in a wheelchair, but I went to Kravos’s funeral with her. She pushed me through a drizzling rain to the grave site. There was a city official there, who signed off on some papers and left. Then it was just us and the grave diggers, shovels whispering on earth.
Murphy watched the proceedings in complete silence, her eyes sunken, the blue faded out until they seemed almost grey. I didn’t push, and she didn’t talk until the hole was half filled in.
“I couldn’t stop him,” she said, then. “I tried.”
“But we beat him. That’s why we’re here and he’s there.”
“You beat him,” Murphy said. “A lot of good I did you.”
“He sucker punched you. Even if you’d been a wizard, he’d have gotten to you—like he damn near did me.” I shivered, remembered agony making the muscles of my belly tight. “Karrin, you can’t blame yourself for that.”
“I know,” she said, but she didn’t sound like she meant it. She was quiet for a long time, and I finally figured out that she wasn’t talking because I’d hear the tears in her voice, the ones the rain hid from me. She didn’t bow her head though, and she didn’t look away from the grave.
I reached out and found her hand with mine. I squeezed. She squeezed back, silent and tight. We stayed there, in the rain, until the last bit of earth had been thrown over Kravos’s coffin.
On the way out, Murphy stopped my wheelchair, frowning at a white headstone next to a waiting plot. “He died doing the right thing,” she read. She looked down at me.
I shrugged, and felt my mouth curl up on one side. “Not yet. Not today.”
Michael and Forthill took care of Lydia for me. Her real name was Barbara something. They got her packed up and moved out of town. Apparently, the Church has some kind of equivalent of the Witness Protection Program, for getting people out of the reach of supernatural baddies. Forthill told me how the girl had fled the church because she’d been terrified that she would fall asleep, and gone out to find some uppers. The vampires had grabbed her while she was out, which was when I’d found them in that old building. She sent me a note that read, simply, “I’m sorry. Thank you for everything.”
When I got out of the hospital, Thomas sent me a thank-you letter, for saving Justine. He sent it on a little note card attached to a bow, which was all Justine was wearing. I’ll let you guess where the bow was. I took the note, but not the girl.
There was too much of an ick factor in sharing girls with a sex vampire. Justine was pretty enough, and sweet enough, when she wasn’t walking the razor’s edge of an organic emotional instability—but I couldn’t really hold that against her. Plenty of people have to take some kind of medication to keep stable. Lithium, supermodel sex vampires—whatever works, I guess.
I had woman problems of my own.
Susan sent me flowers and called me every day, in the hospital. But she didn’t ever talk to me for long. And she didn’t come to visit. When I got out, I went to her apartment. She didn’t live there anymore. I tried to call her at work, and never managed to catch her. Finally, I had to resort to magic. I used some hair of hers left on a brush at my apartment, and tracked her down on a beach along Lake Michigan, on one of the last warm days of the year.
I found her lying in the sun wearing a white bikini that left maximum surface area bared to it. I sat down next to her, and her manner changed, subtly, a quiet tension that I didn’t miss, though I couldn’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses she wore.
“The sun helps,” she said. “Sometimes it almost goes away for a while.”
“I’ve been trying to find you,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you.”
“I know,” she said. “Harry. Things have changed for me. In the daylight, it’s not too bad. But at night.” She shivered. “I have to lock myself inside. I don’t trust myself around people, Harry.”
“I know,” I said. “You know what’s happening?”
“I talked to Thomas,” she said. “And Justine. They were nice enough, I guess. They explained things to me.”
I grimaced. “Look,” I said. “I’m going to help you. I’ll find some way to get you out of this. We can find a cure.” I reached out and took her hand. “Oh, Hell’s bells, Susan. I’m no good at this.” I just fumbled the ring onto it, clumsy as you please. “I don’t want you far away. Marry me.”
She sat up, and stared at her hand, at the dinky ring I’d been able to afford. Then she leaned close to me and gave me a slow, heated kiss, her mouth melting-warm. Our tongues touched. Mine went numb. I got a little dizzy, as the slow throb of pleasure that I’d felt before coursed through me, a drug I’d craved without realizing it.