by Jim Butcher
The strange sound resolved itself into a yowling chorus, like half a hundred band saws on helium, and Mouse burst out of the tunnel with a living thunderstorm of malks in hot pursuit.
My dog flung himself into the empty air, and malks bounded after him, determined not to let him escape. Mouse fell thirty feet, onto the huge pile of nesting material, landing with a yelp. The malks spilled after him, yowling in fury, dozens and dozens of malevolent eyes glittering in the light of the flare. Some jumped, some flowed seamlessly down the rough stairs, and others bounded forward, sank their claws into the stone of the far wall, and slid down it like a fireman down a pole.
I unleashed the spell.
“Useless vermin!” bellowed the grendelkin, his voice still pitched higher than before. He pointed at me, a battered-looking man in a long leather coat, and roared, “Kill the wizard or I’ll eat every last one of you!”
The malks, now driven as much by fear as anger, immediately swarmed all over me. I gave them a pretty good time of it, but there were probably better than three dozen of them, and the leather coat couldn’t cover everything.
Claws and fangs flashed.
Blood spattered.
The malks went insane with bloodlust.
I screamed, swinging wildly with both hands, killing a malk here or there, but unable to protect myself from all those claws and teeth. The grendelkin turned toward the helpless Elizabeth.
It was a real bitch, trying to undo the grendelkin’s knotted ropes while still holding the illusion in place in my mind. Beneath the glamour that made him look like me, he fought furiously, clawing and swinging at the malks attacking him. It didn’t help that Elizabeth was screaming again, thanks to the illusion of the grendelkin I was holding over myself, but hey. No plan is perfect.
“Mouse!” I cried.
A malk flew over my head, screaming, and splattered against a wall.
My dog bounded up just as I got the girl loose. I shoved her at him and said, “Get her out of here! Run! Go, go, go!”
Elizabeth didn’t know what the hell was going on, but she understood that last part well enough. She fled, back toward the crude staircase. Mouse ran beside her, and when a malk flung itself at Elizabeth’s naked back, my dog intercepted the little monster in the air, catching it as neatly as a Frisbee at the park. Mouse snarled and shook his jaws once. The malk’s neck broke with an audible snap. My dog dropped it and fled on.
I grabbed my staff and ran to Gard. The malks hadn’t noticed her yet. They were still busy mobbing the grendelkin—
Crap. My concentration had wavered. It looked like itself again, as did I.
I whirled and focused my will upon the giant pile of clean-picked bones. I extended my staff and snarled, “Counterspell this. Forzare!”
Hundreds of pounds of sharp white bone flung themselves at the grendelkin and the malks alike. I threw the bones hard, harder than the grendelkin had thrown his rock, and the bone shards ripped into them like the blast of an enormous shotgun.
Without waiting to see the results, I snatched up the still-burning flare and flung it into the pile of nesting fabric, bloody clothes, and old newspapers. The whole mound flared instantly into angry light and smothering smoke.
“Get up!” I screamed at Gard. One side of her face was bruised and swollen, and she had a visibly broken arm, one of the bones in her forearm protruding from the skin. With my help, she staggered up, dazed and choking on the smoke, which also blotted out the light. I got her onto the stairs, and even in our battered state, we set some kind of speed record going up them.
The deafening chorus of bellowing grendelkin and howling malks faded a little as the smoke started choking them, too. Air was moving in the tunnel, as the fire drew on it just as it might a chimney. I lit up my amulet again to show us the way out.
“Wait!” Gard gasped, fifty feet up the tunnel. “Wait!”
She fumbled at her jacket pocket, where she kept the little ivory box, but she couldn’t reach it with her sound arm. I dug it out for her.
“Triangle, three lines over it,” she said, leaning against a wall for support. “Get it out.”
I poked through the little ivory Scrabble tiles until I found one that matched her description. “This one?” I demanded.
“Careful,” she growled. “It’s a Sunder rune.” She grabbed it from me, took a couple of steps back toward the grendelkin’s cavern, murmured under her breath, and snapped the little tile. There was a flicker of deep red light, and the tunnel itself quivered and groaned.
“Run!”
We did.
Behind us, the tunnel collapsed in on itself with a roar, sealing the malks and the grendelkin away beneath us, trapping them in the smothering smoke.
We both stopped for a moment after that, as dust billowed up the tunnel and the sound of furious supernatural beings cut off as if someone had flipped a switch. The silence was deafening.
We both stood there, panting and wounded. Gard sank to the floor to rest.
“You were right,” I said. “I guess we didn’t need to worry about the malks on the way out.”
Gard gave me a weary smile. “That was my favorite ax.”
“Go back for it,” I suggested. “I’ll wait for you here.”
She snorted.
Mouse came shambling up out of the tunnel above us. Elizabeth Braddock clung to his collar, and looked acutely embarrassed about her lack of clothing. “Wh-what?” she whispered. “What happened here? I d-don’t understand.”
“It’s all right, Mrs. Braddock,” I said. “You’re safe. We’re going to take you back to your husband.”
She closed her eyes, shuddered, and started to cry. She sank down to put her arms around Mouse’s furry ruff, and buried her face in his fur. She was shivering with the cold. I shucked out of my coat and draped it around her.
Gard eyed her, then her own broken arm, and let out a sigh. “I need a drink.”
I spat some grit out of my mouth. “Ditto. Come on.”
I offered her a hand up. She took it.
SEVERAL HOURS AND doctors later, Gard and I wound up back at the pub, where the beer festival was winding to a conclusion. We sat at a table with Mac. The Braddocks had stammered a gratuitous number of thanks and rushed off together. Mac’s keg had a blue ribbon taped to it. He’d drawn all of us a mug.
“Night of the Living Brews,” I said. I had painkillers for my shoulder, but I was waiting until I was home and in bed to take one. As a result, I ached pretty much everywhere. “More like night of the living bruise.”
Mac rose, drained his mug, and held it up in a salute to Gard and me. “Thanks.”
“No problem,” I said.
Gard smiled slightly and bowed her head to him. Mac departed.
Gard finished her own mug and examined the cast on her arm. “Close one.”
“Little bit,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”
She nodded.
“The grendelkin called you a Geat,” I said.
“Yes, he did.”
“I’m familiar with only one person referred to in that way,” I said.
“There are a few more around,” Gard said. “But everyone’s heard of that one.”
“You called the grendelkin a scion of Grendel,” I said. “Am I to take it that you’re a scion of the Geat?”
Gard smiled slightly. “My family and the grendelkin’s have a long history.”
“He called you a Chooser,” I said.
She shrugged again, and kept her enigmatic smile.
“Gard isn’t your real name,” I said. “Is it?”
“Of course not,” she replied.
I sipped some more of Mac’s award-winning dark. “You’re a Valkyrie. A real one.”
Her expression was unreadable.
“I thought Valkyries mostly did pickups and deliveries,” I said. “Choosing the best warriors from among the slain. Taking them off to Valhalla. Oh, and serving drinks there. Odin’s virgin daughters, pouring mead fo
r the warriors, partying until Ragnarok.”
Gard threw back her head and laughed. “Virgin daughters.” She rose, shaking her head, and glanced at her broken arm again. Then she leaned down and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were a sweet, hungry little fire of sensation, and I felt the kiss all the way to my toes—some places more than others, ahem.
She drew away slowly, her pale blue eyes shining. Then she winked at me and said, “Don’t believe everything you read, Dresden.” She turned to go, then paused to glance over her shoulder. “Though, to be honest, sometimes he does like us to call him Daddy. I’m Sigrun.”
I watched Sigrun go. Then I finished the last of the beer. Mouse rose expectantly, his tail wagging, and we set off for home.
DAY OFF
—from Blood Lite, edited by Kevin J. Anderson
Takes place between Small Favor and Turn Coat
Kevin Anderson talked to me at NYCC and asked me if I’d be interested in participating in a new kind of anthology (for me, anyway) in which authors known for their work in supernatural and horror fiction tried their hands at comedy. I loved the idea.
Poor Dresden. I mean, I keep putting the weight of the world on the poor guy’s shoulders—and I feel really bad about it. No, really. I’m serious. I feel awful, honestly.
Okay, well. Less “awful” and more “gleeful,” but you get the point. It’s easy to torture Harry when there are master vampires and superghouls and ghosts and demons and ogres traipsing all over the scenery. But I found myself intrigued with the idea of making him suffer just as much frustration and embarrassment in a situation where his opponents and problems were relatively trivial.
I don’t really know how other people reacted to poor Harry struggling to get to enjoy a day off work—but I thought it was pretty darned funny.
• • •
The thief was examining another trapped doorway when I heard something—the tromp of approaching feet. The holy woman was in the middle of another sermon, about attentiveness or was in the middle of another sermon, about attentiveness or something, but I held up my hand for silence and she obliged. I could hear twenty sets of feet, maybe more.
I let out a low growl and reached for my sword. “Company.”
“Easy, my son,” the holy woman said. “We don’t even know who it is yet.”
The ruined mausoleum was far enough off the beaten path to make it unlikely that anyone had just wandered in on us. The holy woman was dreaming if she thought the company might be friendly. A moment later they appeared—the local magistrate and two dozen of his thugs.
“Always with the corrupt government officials,” muttered the wizard from behind me. I glanced back at him and then looked for the thief. The nimble little minx was nowhere to be seen.
“You are trespassing!” boomed the magistrate. He had a big boomy voice. “Leave this place immediately on pain of punishment by the Crown’s law!”
“Sir!” replied the holy woman. “Our mission here is of paramount importance. The writ we bear from your own liege requires you to render aid and assistance in this matter.”
“But not to violate the graves of my subjects!” he boomed some more. “Begone! Before I unleash the nine fires of Atarak upon—”
“Enough talk!” I growled, and threw my heavy dagger at his chest.
Propelled by my massive thews, the dagger hit him two inches below his left nipple—a perfect heart shot. It struck with enough force to hurl him from his feet. His men howled with surprised fury.
I drew the huge sword from my back, let out a leonine roar, and charged the two dozen thugs.
“Enough talk!” I bellowed, and whipped the twenty-pound greatsword at the nearest target as if it were a wooden yardstick. He went down in a heap.
“Enough talk!” I howled, and kept swinging. I smashed through the next several thugs as if they were made of soft wax. Off to my left, the thief came out of nowhere and neatly sliced the Achilles tendons of another thug. The holy woman took a ready stance with her quarterstaff and chanted out a prayer to her deities at the top of her lungs.
The wizard shrieked, and a fireball whipped over my head, exploding twenty-one feet in front of me, then spread out in a perfect circle, like the shock wave of a nuke, burning and roasting thugs as it went and stopping a bare twelve inches shy of my nose.
“Oh, come on!” I said. “It doesn’t work like that!”
“What?” demanded the wizard.
“It doesn’t work like that!” I insisted. “Even if you call up fire with magic, it’s still fire. It acts like fire. It expands in a sphere. And under a ceiling, that means it goes rushing much farther down hallways and tunnels. It doesn’t just go twenty feet and then stop.”
“Fireballs used to work like that.” The wizard sighed. “But do you know what a chore it is to calculate exactly how far those things will spread? I mean, it slows everything down.”
“It’s simple math,” I said. “And it’s way better than the fire just spreading twenty feet regardless of what’s around it. What, do fireballs carry tape measures or something?”
Billy the Werewolf sighed and put down his character sheet and his dice. “Harry,” he protested gently, “repeat after me: It’s only a game.”
I folded my arms and frowned at him across his dining room table. It was littered with snacks, empty cans of pop, pieces of paper, and tiny model monsters and adventurers (including a massively thewed barbarian model for my character). Georgia, Billy’s willowy brunette wife, sat at the table with us, as did the redheaded bombshell Andi, while lanky Kirby lurked behind several folding screens covered with fantasy art at the head of the table.
“I’m just saying,” I said, “there’s no reason the magic can’t be portrayed at least a little more accurately, is there?”
“Again with this discussion.” Andi sighed. “I mean, I know he’s the actual wizard and all, but Christ.”
Kirby nodded glumly. “It’s like taking a physicist to a Star Trek movie.”
“Harry,” Georgia said firmly, “you’re doing it again.”
“Oh, no, I’m not!” I protested. “All I’m saying is that—”
Georgia arched an eyebrow and gave me a steady look down her aquiline nose. “You know the law, Dresden.”
“He who kills the cheer springs for beer,” chanted the rest of the table.
“Oh, bite me!” I muttered at them, but a grin was diluting my scowl as I dug out my wallet and tossed a twenty on the table.
“Okay,” Kirby said. “Roll your fireball damage, Will.”
Billy slung out a double handful of square dice and said, “Hah! One-point-two over median. Suck on that, henchmen!”
“They’re all dead,” Kirby confirmed. “We might as well break there until next week.”
“Crap,” I said. “I barely got to hit anybody.”
“I only got to hit one!” Andi said.
Georgia shook her head. “I didn’t even get to finish casting my spell.”
“Oh, yes,” Billy gloated. “Seven modules of identifying magic items and repairing things the stupid barbarian broke, but I’ve finally come into my own. Was it like that for you, Harry?”
“Let you know when I come into my own,” I said, rising. “But my hopes are high. Why, this very morrow, I, Harry Dresden, have a day off.”
“The devil you say!” Billy exclaimed, grinning at me as the group began cleaning up from the evening’s gaming session.
I shrugged into my black leather duster. “No apprentice, no work, no errands for the Council, no Warden stuff, no trips out of town for Paranet business. My very own free time.”
Georgia gave me a wide smile. “Tell me you aren’t going to spend it puttering around that musty hole in the ground you call a lab.”
“Um,” I said.
“Look,” Andi said. “He’s blushing!”
“I am not blushing,” I said. I swept up the empty bottles and pizza boxes, and headed into Billy and Georgia’s little kitchen to dump th
em into the trash.
Georgia followed me in, reaching around me to send several pieces of paper into the trash, too. “Hot date with Stacy?” she asked, her voice pitched to keep the conversation private.
“I think if I ever called her ‘Stacy,’ Anastasia might beat the snot out of me for being too lazy to speak her entire name,” I replied.
“You seem a little tense about it.”
I shrugged a shoulder. “This is going to be the first time we spend a whole day together without something trying to rip us to pieces along the way. I . . . I want it to go right, you know?” I pushed my fingers back through my hair. “I mean, both of us could use a day off.”
“Sure, sure,” Georgia said, watching me with calm, knowing eyes. “Do you think it’s going to go anywhere with her?”
I shrugged. “Don’t know. She and I have very different ideas about . . . well, about basically everything except what to do with things that go around hurting people.”
The tall, willowy Georgia glanced back toward the dining room, where her short, heavily muscled husband was putting away models. “Opposites attract. There’s a song about it and everything.”
“One thing at a time,” I said. “Neither one of us is trying to inspire the poets for the ages. We like each other. We make each other laugh. God, that’s nice, these days. ...” I sighed and glanced up at Georgia, a little sheepishly. “I just want to show her a nice time tomorrow.”
Georgia had a gentle smile on her narrow, intelligent face. “I think that’s a very healthy attitude.”
I WAS JUST getting into my car, a battered old Volkswagen Bug I’ve dubbed the Blue Beetle, when Andi came hurrying over to me.
There’d been a dozen Alphas when I’d first met them, college kids who had banded together and learned just enough magic to turn themselves into wolves. They’d spent their time as werewolves protecting and defending the town, which needed all the help it could get. The conclusion of their college educations had seen most of them move on in life, but Andi was one of the few who had stuck around.
Most of the Alphas adopted clothing that was easily discarded—the better to swiftly change into a large wolf without getting tangled up in jeans and underwear. On this particular summer evening, Andi was wearing a flirty little purple sundress and nothing else. Between her hair, her build, and her long, strong legs, Andi’s picture belonged on the nose of a World War II bomber, and her hurried pace was intriguingly kinetic.