by Jim Butcher
I started to think that we were going to make it back safely, when I heard running footsteps and a woman rounded the corner ahead of us, her pale skin glowing in the dimness.
I cursed, pushing more will into the shield, and crouched down, letting Thomas collapse ungraciously onto the gravel parking lot. I fumbled for his gun, found it, and whipped the weapon up. I flicked off the safety with my thumb, took a half second to aim, and pulled the trigger.
"No," Thomas gasped at the last possible instant. He leaned hard against me just as the gun went off, the barrel wavered, and the shot kicked up sparks on a concrete retaining wall fifty feet away. Panicked, I lined up the weapon again, though I knew it would be a useless gesture. I might have taken her out with a surprise shot, but there was no chance at all that I could outshoot Lara Raith in a direct confrontation.
But it wasn't Lara. I couldn't see very far in the dimness, but Inari stumbled to a halt only a few feet shy of me, her eyes wide and her mouth open. "Oh, my God," she cried. "Thomas! What happened? What have you done to him?"
"Nothing!" I said. "He's been hurt. For the love of Pete, help me."
She hesitated for a second, her eyes wide, and then rushed forward to Thomas. "Oh, my God. There's blood! He's b-bleeding!"
I shoved my blasting rod at her. "Hold this," I snapped.
"What did you do to him?" she demanded. She had begun weeping. "Oh, Thomas."
I felt like screaming in frustration, and I tried to look at every possible place Lara might be, all at the same time. My instincts screamed that she was getting closer, and I wanted nothing more than to run away. "I told you, nothing! Just get moving and open the doors for me. We have to get back inside and call nine-one-one."
I bent down to pick up Thomas again.
Inari Raith screamed in grief and rage. Then she used my blasting rod with both hands to clout me on the back of the neck with so much force that it snapped in half. Stars exploded over my vision and I didn't even feel it when my face hit the gravel.
Everything got real confused for a minute or two, and when I finally started stirring I heard Inari crying. "Lara, I don't know what happened. He tried to shoot me, and Thomas isn't awake. He might be dead."
I heard footsteps on the gravel, and Lara said, "Give me the gun."
"What do we do?" Inari said. She was still crying.
Lara worked the slide on the gun with a couple of quiet clicks, checking the chamber. "Get inside," she said, her tone firm and confident. "Call emergency services and the police. Now."
Inari got up and started to run off, leaving Thomas and me alone with the woman who had already half killed him. I tried to get up, but it was difficult. Everything kept spinning around.
I managed to get to one knee just as a cold, slithery feeling washed down my spine.
The three vampires of the Black Court did not announce their presence. They simply appeared as though formed from the shadows.
One of them was the one-eared vamp I had smacked with the holy-water balloon. On either side of him stood two more Black Court vamps, both male, both dressed in funeral finery, and both of teenage proportions. They hadn't been living corpses for very long-there were lividity marks on the arms and fingers of the first, and their faces hardly looked skeletal at all. Like the maimed vampire, they had long, dirty fingernails. Dried blood stained their faces and throats. And their eyes were filmy, stagnant pools.
Inari screamed a horror-movie scream and stumbled back to Lara. Lara sucked in a sharp breath, bringing the gun into point-down firing stance, spinning in a slow circle to watch each of the Black Court vamps in turn.
"Well, well," rasped the maimed vampire. "What luck. The wizard and three Whites to boot. This will be entertaining."
At which point I felt another, stronger slither of vile and deadly magical energy.
The malocchio. It was forming again, more powerfully than before-and I sensed that the deadly spell was already near and gathering more vicious power as it headed my way. Still dazed, I couldn't do a damned thing about it.
"Kill them," the Black Court vampire whispered. "Kill them all."
See what I mean? It's just like I said.
Things can always get worse.
Chapter Seventeen
I'm not hopeless at hand-to-hand, but I'm not particularly talented, either. I've been beaten senseless once or twice. Well. A lot. It isn't as unlikely as it sounds-a lot of the things that started pummelling me could bench-press a professional basketball team, whereas I was only human. In my neck of the woods, that meant that I was slightly tougher than a ceramic teacup.
I'd managed to survive the beatings thanks to good luck, determined friends, and an evil faerie godmother, but I figured that sooner or later my luck would run out, and I'd find myself alone, in danger, and at the limits of my endurance. Tonight had proved me right.
So it was a good thing I'd planned ahead.
I reached for my new belt buckle, with its carved design of a bear. The buckle was cast from silver, and the bear design was my own hand-carved work. It took me months to make it, though it wasn't particularly beautiful or inspirational, but I hadn't been trying for artistic accomplishment when I'd been creating it.
I'd been trying to prepare myself for, in the words of Foghorn Leghorn, just such an emergency.
I touched my left hand to my belt buckle and whispered, "Fortius."
Power rushed into the pit of my stomach, a sudden tide of hot, living energy, nitrous for the body, mind, and soul. Raw life radiated out into my bones, running riot through my limbs. My confusion and weariness and pain vanished as swiftly as darkness before the sunrise.
This was no simple adrenaline boost, either, though that was a part of it. Call it chi or mana or one of thousand other names for it-it was pure magic, the very essence of life energy itself. It poured into me from the reservoir I'd created in the silver of the buckle. My heart suddenly overflowed with excitement, my thoughts with hope, confidence, and eager anticipation, and if I had a personal soundtrack to my life it would have been playing Ode to Joy while a stadium of Harry fans did the wave. It was all I could do to stop myself from bursting into laughter or song. The pain was still there, but I shrugged off the recent blows and exertions and suddenly felt ready to fight.
Even when magic is involved, there ain't no free lunch. I knew that the pain would catch up to me. But I had to focus. Survive now; worry about the backlash later.
"Lara," I said. "I realize that you're kind of invested in killing me, but from where I'm standing the situation has changed."
The succubus shot a glance at the vampires and then at Inari. "I concur, Dresden."
"Rearrange teams and get the girl out?"
"Can you move?"
I pushed myself up, feeling pretty peppy, all things considered. Lara had her back more or less to me, and was trying to keep her eyes on all three Black Courters. The vampires, in turn, simply stood there with only the flicker of something hungry stirring in their dead, eyes to proclaim them something other than lifeless corpses. "Yeah, I'm good to go."
Lara shot a glance over her shoulder, her expression flickering with disbelief. "Impressive. Pax, then?"
I jerked my chin in a nod. "Twenty-four hours?"
"Done."
"Groovy."
"Their faces," Inari wailed. "Their faces! My God, what are they?"
I blinked at the terrified girl and shot a glance at Lara. "She doesn't know? You don't tell her these things?"
The succubus shrugged a shoulder, keeping most of her attention on the nearest vampire and said, "It's my father's policy."
"Your family is twisted, Lara. It really is." I picked up the shattered halves of my blasting rod. The carvings and spells laid on the wood were difficult, time-consuming, and expensive to make. I'd had to replace maybe half a dozen rods over the years, and it was the labor of better than a fortnight to create a new one. The girl had broken mine, which annoyed the hell out of me, but the drought of positive energ
y still zinging through me pointed out the upside: I now had two handy shafts of wood with jagged, pointy ends. I stepped between Inari and the nearest vampire and passed her one broken half of the rod. "Here," I said. "If you get the chance, make like Buffy."
Inari blinked at me. "What? Is this a joke?"
"Do it," said Lara. Her voice was laced with iron. "No questions, Inari."
The steel in the succubus's voice galvanized the young woman. She took the shard of wood without further hesitation, though her expression grew no less terrified.
Overhead, the dark energy of the curse swirled around and around, a constant, intimidating pressure on my scalp. I tried to block out all the distractions, focusing on the curse and on where it was going. I needed to know who its target was-not only for the sake of my investigation, but for my immediate survival.
That curse was several kinds of nasty. And as it happened, I had a constructive, life-affirming purpose for a boatload of nasty juju. I drew my silver pentacle from my neck and spoke a troubling thought aloud. "Why are they just standing there?"
"They're communing with their master," Lara stated.
"I hate getting put on call waiting," I said, wrapping the chain of my pentacle around my fist. "Shouldn't we hit them now?"
"No," Lara said sharply. "They're aware of us. Don't move. It will only set them off, and time is our ally."
A sudden wash of almost physical cold set the hairs on the back of my neck on end. The curse was about to land, and I still wasn't sure who it was coming for. I glanced upward, hoping for a physical cue. "I wouldn't be so sure about that, Miss Raith."
One of the vampires, the smallest of the pair who had showed up with One-ear, suddenly shuddered. Its dead eyes flickered around until they landed on me, and then it spoke. You wouldn't think there would be a whole lot of difference between the rasp of one dry, leathery dead larynx and another, but there was. This voice flowed out and it wasn't the voice of the vampire whose lips were moving. It was an older voice. Older and colder and vicious, but somehow tinged with something feminine. "Dresden," that voice said. "And Raith's right hand. Raith's bastard son. And the darling of his eye. This is a fortunate night."
"Evening, Mavra," I said. "If it's all the same to you, can you stop playing sock puppet with the omega Nosferatu and move this along? I've got a big day tomorrow and I want to get to bed for it."
"Christ, Harry," came a choking voice. I looked back and saw Thomas on the ground, his eyes open. He looked like death, and he had trouble focusing on me, but at least he was lucid. "Are you drunk all of a sudden?"
I winked at him. "It's the power of positive thinking."
The puppet vampire hissed with Mavra's anger, and its voice took on a quavering, modulated, half-echoing quality. "Tonight will balance many scales. Take them, my children. Kill them all."
And a lot of things went down.
The vampires came for us. One-ear rushed at Lara. The sock puppet went for me, and the third one headed for Inari. It happened fast. My attacker may have been new to the game and clumsy, yet it moved at such a speed that it barely registered on my thoughts-but my body was still singing with the infusion of positive energy, and I reacted to the attack as if it had been the opening steps of a dance I already knew. I sidestepped the vampire's rush and drove my half of the former blasting rod down at its back, Buffy-like.
Maybe it works better on television. The wood gouged the vampire, but I don't think much of it got past its suit coat, much less pierced its heart. But the blow did manage to throw the thing off balance and send it stumbling past me. Maybe it actually hurt the vampire-the creature let out an earsplitting, creaking shriek of rage and surprise.
Inari screamed and swung her stake, but her Buffy impersonation wasn't any better than mine. The vampire caught her arm, twisted its wrist, and broke bones with a snap, crackle, pop. She gasped and fell to her knees. The vampire shoved her over and leaned down, baring its teeth (not fangs, I noticed, just yellow corpse-teeth) and spreading its jaws to tear out her throat and bathe in the flood of blood.
And as if that weren't enough, the curse suddenly coalesced and came shrieking out of the night to end Inari's life.
I had scant seconds to act. I charged the vampire, leaned back, pictured an invisible beer can beginning an inch above the vampire's teeth, and stomp-kicked the creature in the chin with my heel. It wasn't a question of Harry-strength versus undead superstrength. I'd gotten the chump shot in, and while the vampire might have been able to rip through a brick wall, it only weighed as much as a dried corpse and it didn't have enough experience to have anticipated the attack. I drove the kick home, hard. Physics took over from there, and the vampire fell back with a surprised hiss.
I seized Inari's right arm with my left. Energy flows out of the body from the right side. The left side absorbs energy. I stretched out my senses and felt the dark energy of the curse rushing down at Inari. It hit her a second later, but I was ready for it, and with an effort of will I caught the dark power coursing down into the girl before it could do her harm.
Pain erupted in my left palm. The power was cold-and not mountain-breeze cold, either. It was slimy and nauseating, like something that had come slinking out from the depths of some enormous subterranean sea. In that instant of contact, my head exploded with terror. This power, this black magic, was wrong. Fundamentally, nightmarishly, intensely wrong.
Since I'd begun my career as a wizard, I'd always believed that magic came from life, but that it was only potential energy, like electricity or natural gas or uranium. And while it may have come from positive origins, only its application would prove it good or evil. That there was no such thing as truly evil, malevolent, black magic.
I'd been wrong.
Maybe my own magic worked like that, but this power was something different. It had only one purpose-to destroy. To inflict horror, pain, and death. I felt that power writhe into me through my contact with the girl, and it hurt me on a level so deep that I could not find a specific word, even a specific thought to describe it. It ripped at me within, as though it had found a weakened place in my defenses, and started gouging out a larger opening, struggling to force itself inside me.
I fought it. The struggle happened all within an instant, and it hurt still more to tear that darkness loose, to force it to flow on through me and out of me again. I won the fight. But I felt a sudden terror that something had been torn away from me; that in simple contact with that dark energy, I had been scarred somehow, marked.
Or changed.
I heard myself scream, not in fear or challenge, but in agony. I extended my right hand and the black magic flowed out of it in an invisible torrent, fastening onto the vampire as it gained its feet again and reached out to grab me. The vampire's expression didn't even flicker, so I was sure it did not feel the curse coming.
Which made it a complete surprise when something slammed into the vampire from directly overhead, too quickly to be seen. There was a sound of impact, a raspy, dry scream, and the vampire went down hard.
It lay on the ground like a butterfly pinned to a card, arms and legs thrashing uselessly. Its chest and collarbone had been crushed.
By an entire frozen turkey. A twenty-pounder.
The plucked bird must have fallen from an airplane overhead, doubtlessly manipulated by the curse. By the time it got to the ground, the turkey had already reached its terminal velocity, and was still hard as a brick. The drumsticks poked up above the vampire's crushed chest, their ends wrapped in red tinfoil.
The vampire gasped and writhed a little more.
The timer popped out of the turkey.
Everyone stopped to blink at that for a second. I mean, come on. Impaled by a guided frozen turkey missile. Even by the standards of the quasi-immortal creatures of the night, that ain't something you see twice.
"For my next trick," I panted into the startled silence, "anvils."
And then the fight was on again.
Inari screamed in p
ain from her knees on the ground. Lara Raith lifted Thomas's little gun, and tongues of flame licked from it as she shot at One-ear. She was aiming for his legs. I started to help her, but I'd been playing long odds, mixing it up in hand-to-hand with the Black Court, and they caught up to me.
The vampire I'd dodged in the opening seconds of the fight slammed its arm into my shoulders. The blow was broad and clumsy but viciously strong. I managed to roll with it a little, but it still sent me straight down onto the gravel and knocked the wind from my chest. I felt the edges of rock cut me in a dozen places at once, but the pain didn't bother me. Yet. Nonetheless, it took me a second to get my body moving again.
The vampire stepped right over me and closed in on the fallen girl. With a simple, brutal motion, it seized her hair and shoved her facedown onto the parking lot, baring the back of her neck. It bent forward.
Thomas snarled, "Get away from her!" He hauled himself forward using his unwounded leg and one arm, and he got the other around the vampire's leg. Thomas heaved, and the creature fell, then twisted like an arthritic serpent to grapple with him.
Thomas went mano a mano, no tricks, no subtlety. The living corpse got a hand on Thomas's throat and tried to tear his head off. Thomas writhed sinuously away from the full power of the creature, and then rolled over a couple of times. Thomas got hold of the thing's wrists and tried to force them away from his neck.
And then Thomas changed.
It wasn't anything so dramatic as the vampires of the Red Court, whose demonic forms lurked beneath a masquerade of seemingly normal human flesh. It was far subtler. A cold wind seemed to gather around him. His features stretched, changing, his cheekbones starker, his eyes more sunken, his face more gaunt. His skin took on a shining, almost luminescent luster, like a fine pearl under moonlight. And his eyes changed as well. His irises flickered to a shade of chrome-colored silver, then bleached out to white altogether.
He snarled a string of curses as he fought, and the sound of his voice changed as well-again, a subtle thing. It was more feral, more vicious, and its tone was not even remotely human. Thomas, despite his deathly injuries, went up against the Black Court killing machine in a contest of main strength and won. He forced the vampire's hands from his throat, rolled so that his good leg came up beneath the vampire, and, with the combined strength of his arms, Thomas threw the vampire into the brick wall of the nearest building.