by Jim Butcher
“Michael!” I shouted. “Michael, we’ve got a problem!” Michael threw himself behind one of the biers as a stone whistled out of the darkness and shattered to powder against it. “What?”
“Charity!” I shouted. “Her baby’s coming!”
“Harry!” Michael shouted. “Look out!”
I turned and the Nightmare appeared from the darkness behind me, moving almost more swiftly than I could see. It reached down and simply tore a marble headstone from the earth, lifting it high. I threw myself between it and Charity, but even as I did, I knew it would be a futile gesture—it was strong enough to crush her right through me. But I did it anyway.
“Now!” screamed the Nightmare. “Put down your sword, Knight! Put it down, or I crush them both!”
Michael started towards us, his face pale. “Not a step closer,” the Nightmare snarled. “Not an inch.”
Michael stopped. He stared at Charity, who groaned again, panting, eyes forced shut. “H-Harry?” he said.
I could get out of the thing’s way. I could draw its fire, maybe. But if I moved, it could simply crush Charity. She’d have no chance at all.
“The sword,” the Nightmare said, voice cool. “Drop it.”
“Oh Lord,” Michael whispered.
“Don’t do it, Michael,” I said. “It’s only going to kill us anyway.”
“Be thou silent,” the Nightmare said. “My quarrel is with thee, wizard, and with the knight. The woman and her child are nothing to me, so long as I have both of you.”
Rain sleeted down for a long and otherwise silent moment. Then Michael closed his eyes. “Harry,” he said. He lowered the great sword. Then gave it a gentle toss to one side, letting it fall on the ground. “I’m sorry. I can’t do it.”
The Nightmare met my eyes with its own, glowing faint scarlet, and its lips curled up into a gleeful smile. “Wizard,” it said, in a whisper. “Thy friend should have listened to thee.” I saw the grave-stone start to come down toward me.
Charity’s arm abruptly swept up, the crucifix I’d passed her held in it. The symbol flickered, and then kindled with white fire that threw harsh, horror-movie shadows up over the Nightmare’s face. It twisted and recoiled from that light, screaming, and the tombstone crashed down to the earth, rending the damp, vulnerable soil.
Everything slowed down and came into crystalline focus. I could clearly see the grounds, the shadows of the trees. I could hear Charity beside me, uttering something in harsh Latin, and out of the corner of my eye, could see the restless shades moving about the cemetery. I could feel the cold sharpness of the rain, feel it coursing down over me, flowing down the gentle slopes to run in rivulets and streams to the nearby pond.
Running water. The answer was all around me.
I moved forward, toward the Nightmare. It swung at me with one flailing arm, and I felt it clip my shoulder as it swept down. Then I threw myself into the Nightmare’s body, hit it hard. We tumbled together down the slope, toward the newly forming stream.
You ever hear the Legend of Sleepy Hollow? Remember the part with poor old Ichabod riding like blazes for the covered bridge and safety? Running water grounds magical energies. Creatures of the Nevernever, spirit bodies, cannot cross it without losing all the energy required to keep those bodies here. That was the answer.
I rolled down the slope with the Nightmare, and felt its hands tearing at me. We went down into the stream together, as one of its hands clenched my throat and shut off my breath.
And then it began to scream. It jerked and twisted atop me in eight or nine inches of running water, shrieking. The thing’s body just started melting away, like sugar in water, starting at its feet and moving up. I watched it, watched myself dissolve with a morbid kind of fascination. It writhed, it bucked, it thrashed.
“Wizard,” it said, voice bubbling. “This is not over. Not over. When the sun sets again, wizard, I will be back for thee!”
“Melt already,” I mumbled. And, seconds later, the Nightmare vanished, leaving only sticky gook behind, on my coat, my throat.
I stood up out of the water, drenched and shivering, and slogged my way back up the little hill. Michael had gone to his wife and crouched down beside her. He got his arms underneath her and lifted her as though she were a basket of laundry. Like I said before, Michael’s buff.
“Harry,” he said. “The sword.”
“I got it,” I replied. I trudged up to where he’d let Amoracchius fall and picked it up. The great blade weighed less than I would have thought, and it fairly hummed with power, vibrating in my fingers. I didn’t have a sheath for it, so I just slung it up on one shoulder and hoped I wouldn’t fall and cut my head off or something. I recovered my other stuff, too, and turned to walk out with Michael.
That was when Lea arrived, appearing before me with a trio of her hellhounds around her. “My sweet,” she said. “It is time to fulfill your bargain.”
I yelped and jumped back from her. “No,” I said. “No, wait. I beat this thing, but it’s still loose. It will be able to come back from the Nevernever tomorrow night.”
“That is of no concern to me,” Lea said, and shrugged. “Our bargain was for you to save the woman with what I gave you.”
“You didn’t give me anything,” I said. “You just blanked out some of the pain. It isn’t as though you made the water, Godmother.”
She shrugged, smiling. “Semantics. I pointed it out to you, did I not?”
“I would have realized it on my own,” I said.
“Perhaps. But we have a bargain.” She lowered her face, eyes gleaming gold and dangerous. “Are you going to attempt to escape it once more?”
I’d given my word. And broken promises add up to trouble. But the Nightmare hadn’t been defeated. Driven back, sure, but it would only be back the next night.
“I’ll go with you,” I said. “When I’ve beaten the Nightmare.”
“You’ll go now.” Lea smiled. “This instant. Or pay the price.” The three hellhounds took a pace toward me, baring their teeth in a silent snarl.
I fumbled everything out of my grasp but the sword, and gripped it tightly. I don’t know a thing about broadswords, but it was heavy and sharp, and even without its vast power, I was pretty sure I could stick the pointy part into one of those hounds. “I can’t do that,” I said. “Not yet.”
“Harry!” Michael shouted. “Wait! It can’t be used like that!”
One of the hounds leapt toward me, and I lifted the blade. Then there was a flash of light and a jolt of pain that lanced up through my hands and arms. The blade twisted in my grasp, fell out of it and spun to the ground. The hellhound snapped at me, and I stumbled back, my hands gone numb and useless.
Lea’s laughter rang out through the graves like silver bells. “Yes!” she caroled, stepping forward. She bent and with a casual motion picked up the great sword. “I knew you would try to cheat me again, sweet boy.” She smiled at me, a flash of dainty canines. “I must thank you, Harry. I would never have been able to touch this had not the one who held it betrayed its purpose.”
I felt a flash of anger at my own stupidity. “No,” I stammered. “Wait. Can’t we talk about this, Godmother?”
“We’ll talk again, sweet boy. I’ll see you both very soon.” Lea laughed again, eyes gleaming. And then she turned, her hellhounds gathering at her feet, and took a step forward, vanishing into the night. The sword went with her.
I stood there in the rain, feeling tired and cold and stupid. Michael stared at me for a second, his expression shocked, eyes wide. Charity curled against him, shuddering and moaning quietly.
“Harry,” Michael whispered. I think he was crying, but I couldn’t see the tears in the rain. “Oh my God. What have you done?”
Chapter Twenty-two
All hospital emergency rooms have the same feel to them. They’re all decorated in the same dull, muted tones and softened edges, which are meant to be comforting and aren’t. They all have the same smell too: one part tangy antiseptics
, one part cool dispassion, one part anxiety, and one part naked fear.
They wheeled Charity away first, Michael at her side. Triage being what it is, I got bumped to the front of the line. I felt like apologizing to the five-year-old girl holding a broken arm. Sorry, honey. Head trauma before fractured limbs.
The doctor who examined me wore a nameplate that read SIMMONS. She was broadly built and tough-looking, hair going grey in sharp contrast to her rich, dark skin. She sat down on a stool in front of me and leaned over, putting her hands on either side of my head. They were large, warm, strong. I closed my eyes.
“How are you feeling?” she asked, releasing me after a moment, and reaching for some supplies on a table next to her.
“Like a supervillain just threw me into a wall.”
She let out a soft chuckle. “More specifically. Are you in pain? Dizzy? Nauseous?”
“Yes, no, and a little.”
“You hit your head?”
“Yeah.” I felt her start to daub at my forehead with a cold cloth, cleaning off grime and dried blood, though there wasn’t much left, thanks to the rain.
“Mmmm. Well. There’s some blood here. Are you sure it’s yours?”
I opened my eyes and blinked at her. “Mine? Whose else would it be?”
The doctor lifted an eyebrow at me, dark eyes glittering from behind her glasses. “You tell me, Mister . . .” she checked her charts. “Dresden.” She frowned and then peered up at me. “Harry Dresden? The wizard?”
I blinked. I’m not really famous, despite being the only wizard in the phone book. I’m more infamous. People don’t tend to spontaneously recognize my name. “Yeah. That’s me.”
She frowned. “I see. I’ve heard of you.”
“Anything good?”
“Not really.” She let out a cross sigh. “There’s no cut here. I don’t appreciate jokes, Mister Dresden. There are people in need to attend to.”
I felt my mouth drop open. “No cut?” But there had been a nice, flowing gash in my head at some point, pouring blood into my eyes and mouth. I could still taste some of it, almost. How could it have vanished?”
I thought of the answer and shivered. Godmother.
“No cut,” she said. “Something that might have been cut a few months ago.”
“That’s impossible,” I said, more to myself than to her. “That just can’t be.”
She shone a light at my eyes. I winced. She peered at each eye (mechanically, professionally—without the intimacy that triggers a soulgaze) and shook her head. “If you’ve got a concussion, I’m Winona Ryder. Get off that bed and get out of here. Make sure to talk to the cashier on the way out.” She pressed a moist towelette into my hand. “I’ll let you clean up this mess, Mister Dresden. I have enough work to do.”
“But—”
“You shouldn’t come into the emergency room unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
“But I didn’t—”
Dr. Simmons didn’t stop to listen to me. She turned around and strode off, over to the next patient—the little girl with the broken arm.
I got up and made my bruised way into the bathroom. My face was a mess of faint, dried blood. It had settled mostly into the lines and creases, making me look older, a mask of blood and age. I shivered and started cleaning myself off, trying to keep my hands from shaking.
I felt scared. Really, honestly scared. I would have been much happier to have needed stitches and painkillers. I wiped away blood and peered at my forehead. There was a faint, pink line beginning about an inch below my hair and slashing up into it at an angle. It felt very tender, and when I accidentally touched it with the rag, it hurt so much that I almost shouted. But the wound was closed, healed.
Magic. My godmother’s magic. That kiss on the forehead had closed the wound.
If you think I should have been happy about getting a nasty cut closed up, then you probably don’t realize the implications. Working magic directly on a human body is difficult. It’s very difficult. Conjuring up forces, like my shield, or elemental manifestations like the fire or wind is a snap compared to the complexity and power required to change someone’s hair a different color—or to cause the cells on either side of an injury to fuse back together, closing it.
The healing cut was a message for me. My godmother had power over me on earth now, too, as well as in the Nevernever. I’d made a bargain with one of the Fae and broken it. That gave her power over me, which she demonstrated aptly by the way she’d wrought such a powerful and complex working on me—and I’d never even felt it happening.
That was the part that scared me. I’d always known that Lea had outclassed me—she was a creature with a thousand years or more of experience, knowledge, and she had been born to magic like I had been born to breathing. So long as I remained in the real world, though, she’d had no advantage over me. Our world was a foreign place to her, just as hers was to me. I’d had the home field advantage.
Had being the operative word. Had.
Hell’s bells.
I gave up and let my hands shake while I wiped off my face. I had a good reason to be afraid. Besides, my clothes were soaked from the rain and I felt desperately cold. I finished washing the blood away, and went to stand in front of the electric hand dryer. I had to slam the button a dozen times before it started.
I had the nozzle of the thing turned up, directing the hot air up my shirt, when Stallings came in sans, for once, Rudolph. He looked as though he hadn’t slept since I’d seen him last. His suit was rumpled, his grey hair a little greyer, and his moustache was almost the same color as the bags underneath his eyes. He went to the sink and splashed cold water on his face without looking at me.
“Dresden,” he said. “We got word you were in the hospital.”
“Heya, John. How’s Murphy?”
“She slept. We just brought her in.”
I blinked at him. “Christ. Is it dawn already?”
“About twenty minutes ago.” He moved over to the dryer next to mine. His started on the first slap of the button. “She’s sleeping, still. The docs are arguing about whether she’s in a coma or on some kind of drug.”
“You tell them what happened?” I asked.
He snorted. “Yeah. I’ll just tell them that a wizard put her under a spell, and she’s sleepy.” He glanced over at me. “So when’s she going to wake up?”
I shook my head. “My spell won’t hold her for long. Maybe a couple more days, at the most. Each time the sun comes up, it’s going to degrade it a little more.”
“What happens then?”
“She starts screaming. Unless I find the thing that got her and figure out how to undo what it did.”
“That’s what you want Kravos’s book for,” Stallings said.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
He reached into his pocket and produced the book—a little journal, thick but not broad, bound in dark leather. It was sealed in a plastic evidence bag. I reached for it, but Stallings pulled it away.
“Dresden. If you touch this, if you open it up, you’re going to be leaving your prints on it. Skin cells. All sorts of things. Unless it disappears.”
I frowned at him. “What’s the big deal? Kravos is all but put away, right? Hell, we caught him with the murder weapon, with a body at the scene. There isn’t anything in the journal to beat that, is there?”
He grimaced. “If it was just his trial, it wouldn’t be a problem.” “What do you mean?”
He shook his head. “Inside shit. I can’t talk about it. But if you take this book, Dresden, it’s got to vanish.”
“Fine,” I said, reaching for it. “It’s gone.”
He pulled it away again. “I mean it,” he said. “Promise.”
Something about the quiet intensity of his words touched me. “All right,” I said. “I promise.”
He stared at the book for a second, then slapped it into my palm. “Hell with it,” he said. “If you can help Murph, do it.”
“John,�
�� I said. “Hey, man. If I didn’t think I needed it . . . What’s going on here?”
“Internal Affairs,” Stallings said.
“Looking at S.I.? Again? Don’t they have anything better to do? What set them off this time?”
“Nothing,” Stallings lied. He turned to go.
“John,” I said. “What aren’t you telling me here?”
He paused at the door and grimaced. “They’re interested in the Kravos case. That’s all I can say. You should hear word in the next day or so. You’ll know it when you hear it.”
“Wait,” I said. “Something happened to Kravos?”
“I’ve got to go, Harry. Good luck.”
“Wait, Stallings—”
He headed out the door. I cursed and started after him, but he lost me. I wound up standing in the hallway, shivering like a wet puppy.
Dammit. Cops were tight, a special kind of brotherhood. They’d work with you, but if you weren’t a cop, you were on the outside in a billion subtle ways—one of which was that they didn’t let you in on the department’s secrets. What could have happened to Kravos? Something serious. Hell, maybe the Nightmare had taken out a little vengeance on him, as well, as long as it was out and about. Served him right, though, if it had happened.
I stood there for a minute, trying to work out what to do. I had no money on me, no car, no way to get either.
I needed Michael.
I asked someone for directions and headed for Maternity. I took a long route around, staying away from anything that looked technical or expensive. The last thing I wanted was to blow up Grandpa’s iron lung.
I found Michael standing in a hallway. His hair had dried, all curled and mussed. There seemed to be more grey in it, this way, than usual. His beard had a rough, untrimmed look to it. His eyes were sunken. Mud spattered his boots and his jeans to the knee. Amoracchius’s black scabbard hung over his shoulder, empty.
Michael stood in front of a big picture window. Rows of little people in rolling cradles faced the window, heat lamps making sure that they didn’t get chills. I stood there quietly with him, looking at the babies for a time. A nurse looked up, and then did a double take, staring at us, before hurrying out of the room.