Turn Coat

by Butcher, Jim

  Lara smiled very slightly.

  “The tale Dresden tells us lacks the credibility of simplicity,” Mai continued. “Despite how carefully you have danced around saying the actual words, it seems that you wish us to believe that the White Court was not involved in the matter of LaFortier’s death. Thus, your story, too, lacks the credibility of simplicity.”

  “In my experience, matters of state are rarely simple ones,” Lara responded.

  Mai moved a hand, a tiny gesture that somehow conveyed acknowledgment. “Yet given recent history, the actions of a known enemy seem a far more likely source for LaFortier’s murder than those of some nameless, faceless third party.”

  “Of course. You are, after all, wizards,” Lara said without a detectable trace of irony. “You are the holders of great secrets. If such a group existed, you would surely know of it.”

  “It is possible that I am unfairly judging your people in accusing them of plotting LaFortier’s death,” Mai replied, her voice utterly tranquil. “You are, after all, vampires, and well-known for your forthright and gentle natures.”

  Lara inclined her head, smiling faintly. “Regardless, we find ourselves here.”

  “That seems incontrovertible.”

  “I seek the safe return of my brother.”

  Mai shook her head firmly, once. “The White Council will not exchange one of our own.”

  “It seems to me,” Lara said, “that Warden Morgan is not in your company.”

  “A transitory situation,” Mai said. She didn’t look at me, but I felt sure that the steel in her voice was aimed in my direction.

  “Then perhaps a cooperative effort,” Lara said. “We need not allow the skinwalker to take the Warden.”

  “Those who ally themselves with the White Court come to regret it,” Mai replied. “The Council has no obligation to assist you or your brother.”

  “Despite the recent efforts made on your behalf by my King and his Court?” Lara asked.

  Mai faced her without blinking and said nothing more.

  “He is my blood,” Lara said quietly. “I will have him returned.”

  “I appreciate your loyalty,” Mai said, in a tone that suggested she didn’t. “However, this matter of the skinwalker wishing an exchange is hardly germane to where we stand at the moment.”

  “Actually,” I said. “It kind of is, Ancient Mai. I had someone tell Shagnasty where to meet me tonight. Depending on how he crosses the water, he could be here any moment.”

  Ebenezar blinked. Then he turned his face to me, his expression clearly asking whether or not I was out of my damned mind.

  “Wile E. Coyote,” I said to him soberly. “Suuuuuuper Genius.”

  I saw him thinking and I recognized it when my old mentor got it, when he understood my plan. I could tell because he got that look on his face I’ve only seen when he knows things are about to go spectacularly wrong and he wants to be ready for it. He let his staff fall to rest against his chest and idly dug in a pocket, his eyes flicking across the woods around us.

  I don’t know where Mai’s head was, or if she worked out anything at all. I had a feeling that she wouldn’t. Since her thought processes would all have to start from given assumptions that were incorrect, she didn’t have much of a chance of coming to a correct conclusion.

  “All that means,” she said to me, “is that it would be wise to finish our business here and retreat from this place.”

  “Sadly, I am reaching a similar conclusion,” Lara said deliberately. “Perhaps it is time for this meeting to adjourn.”

  Behind her, one of her sisters shifted one hand very slightly.

  Lightning flashed overhead, and thunder forced a pause into the conversation. The wind picked up again, and Listens-to-Wind suddenly lifted his head. His gaze snapped around to the north, and his eyes narrowed.

  An instant later, I sensed a new presence on the island. More people had just touched down onto the far side of the bald hill where Demonreach Tower stood. There were twelve of them, and they began moving toward the hilltop at inhuman speed. White Court vampires, they had to be.

  Seconds later, another pair of humanlike presences simply appeared in the woods four hundred yards away. And if that wasn’t enough, two more people arrived on the northwest shore of the island.

  Mai took immediate note of Injun Joe’s expression and tilted her head, staring hard at Lara. “What have you done?” she demanded.

  “I have signaled my family,” Lara replied calmly. “I did not come here to fight you, Ancient Mai. But I will recover my brother.”

  I focused on the two smaller groups, both of them pairs of new presences, and found that their numbers were growing. On the beach, many, many more pairs of feet had begun beating the ground of Demonreach, thirty of them or more. In the forest nearby, a presence that the island had never before encountered appeared, followed by more and more and more of the same.

  There was only one explanation for that—the new arrivals were calling forth muscle from the Nevernever. I was betting that the pair on the beach was Madeline and Binder, and that he had begun calling out his grey men the moment his feet hit the ground. The two who had simply appeared in the forest had to have taken a Way and emerged from the Nevernever onto the island directly. It was possible a second summoning like Binder’s was under way, but I thought it far more likely that someone had gathered up support and brought it with them, through the Way.

  Meanwhile, Mai and Lara were beginning to bare their claws.

  “Is that a threat, vampire?” Mai said in a flat tone.

  “I would prefer that you regard it as a truth,” Lara replied, her own tone losing the charm and conviviality it had contained in some measure throughout the conversation.

  The Wardens behind me started getting nervous. I could feel it, both for myself and through Demonreach. I heard leather creak as hands were put to the grips of holstered guns and upon hilts of swords.

  Lara, in response, rested her fingertips lightly upon her own weapons. Her two sisters did the same.

  “Wait!” I snapped. “Wait!”

  Everyone turned to look at me. I must have looked like a raving mad-man, standing there with my eyes half focused, looking back and forth out of pure instinct and force of habit as the island’s intellectus informed me of the rapidly transpiring events. The White Court reinforcements had bypassed the tower hill and were headed for the beach to support Lara—which was something, at least. Lara’s helicopter hadn’t dropped them up there specifically to look for Morgan. It must have come up low, from the north, using the terrain of the hilltop to mask the sound of its arrival.

  I forced my attention back to the scene around me. “Holy crap. I knew this would put the pressure on him. But this guy’s gone to war.”

  “What?” Listens-to-Wind asked. “What are you talking about?”

  “Don’t start in on one another!” I snapped. “Lara, we need to work together or we’re all dead.”

  She turned her head a little to one side, staring at me. “Why?”

  “Because better than a hundred—one hundred ten, now—beings have just arrived at different points of the island and they aren’t here to cater the little mixer we’ve got going. There are only nine of us and fifteen of you. We’re outnumbered five to one. Six to one, now.”

  Mai stared at me. “What?”

  Howls slithered into the air, muffled by the falling rain, but were made all the more eerie by the lack of direction to them. I recognized them at once—Binder’s grey men. They were coming, moving with mindless purpose that cared nothing for the danger of a forest at night.

  The second group was nearer. They’d stopped growing at a hundred and twenty-five, and were already on the move toward us. They weren’t as fast as the grey men, but they were moving steadily and spreading out into an enormous curved line meant to sweep the forest and then encircle their quarry when they found it. Red light began to pour through the trees in their direction, casting eerie black sha
dows and turning the rain to blood.

  I forced myself to think, to ask Demonreach the right questions. A second’s consideration revealed that the two forces would converge on us at exactly the same time—they were working together.

  The numbers disadvantage was too great. The Wardens might get some spells off, and the Senior Council members would probably leave mounds of corpses piled around them—but outnumbered six to one, on a dark night, when they would have trouble seeing their targets before they were within a few steps, they wouldn’t prevail. The large group would hit them from one side, and the smaller one would come from the other, boxing us in.

  Unless . . .

  Unless we could get to one of the two groups first and eliminate it before its partner reached us and hit us from behind.

  Outnumbered as hideously as we were, the smartest thing would have been to run like hell—but I knew that no one would. The Council still had to recover Morgan. Lara still had to recover Thomas. Neither of them enjoyed the advantage I did. To them, the danger was only a vague threat, some howls in the dark, and it would remain so until it was too late to run.

  Which left us only one option.

  We had to attack.

  The grey men howled again, from much closer.

  I gave Ebenezar a desperate glance and then stepped forward, lifting my staff. “They’ve got us boxed in! Our only chance is to fight our way clear! Everyone, with me!”

  Lara and her sisters stared at me in confusion. The Wardens did the same—but the fear in my voice and on my face was very real, and when one human being displays a fear response, those nearby it tend to find it psychologically contagious. The Wardens’ eyes immediately went to Ancient Mai.

  I started jogging, beckoning as I went, and Ebenezar immediately fell in with me. “You heard the man!” Ebenezar roared. “Wardens, let’s move!”

  At his bellow, the dam broke, and the Wardens surged forward to join us.

  Lara stared at me for another half a second, and then cried, “Go, go!” to her sisters. They began running with us, effortlessly keeping pace, their motion so graceful and light that it hardly seemed possible that they would leave footprints.

  I looked over my shoulder as I slowly increased the pace. Ancient Mai had turned toward the hateful red glare coming from the forest to the south, facing it calmly. “Wizard Listens-to-Wind, with me. Let us see if we can slow the progress of whatever is coming this way.”

  Injun Joe went to her side, and the two of them stood there, gathering their will and muttering to each other.

  I consulted Demonreach for the best route to follow toward the enemy, put my head down, and charged the demons that were coming to kill us, Wardens and vampires alike at my side.

  Chapter Forty-two

  Adrenaline does weird things to your head. You hear people talk about how everything slows down. That isn’t the case. Nothing is happening slowly. It’s just that you somehow seem to be able to fit a whole lot more thinking into the time and space that’s there. It might feel like things have slowed down, but it’s a transitory illusion.

  For example, I had time to reflect upon the nature of adrenaline and time while sprinting through the woods at night. It didn’t make me run any faster, though. Although if I wasn’t actually moving my arms and legs faster than normal, then why was I twenty feet ahead of everyone else, the vampires included?

  I heard someone curse in the dark behind me as they tripped over an exposed root. I didn’t trip. It wasn’t that I had become more graceful—I just knew where to put my feet. It was as if every step I took was over a path that I had walked so many times that it had become ingrained in my muscle memory. I knew when to duck out of the way of a low-hanging branch, when to bound forward at an angle to my last step in order to clear an old stump, exactly how much I needed to shorten a quick pair of steps so that I could leap a sinkhole by pushing off my stronger leg. Lara Raith herself was hard-pressed to keep pace with me, though she managed to close to within three or four yards, her pale skin all but glowing in the dark.

  The whole time, I tried to keep track of the position of the enemy. It wasn’t a simple matter. I didn’t have a big map of the island in my head, with glowing dots marking their positions. I just knew where they were, as long as I concentrated on keeping track of them, but as the number of enemies continued to increase, it got harder to keep track.

  The nearest of the hostile presences was about forty yards away when I lifted my fingers to my lips and let out a sharp whistle. “Out there, in front of me!” I shouted. “Now, Toot!”

  It had been an enormous pain in the ass to wrap fireworks in plastic to waterproof them against the rain, and even more of a pain to make sure that a waterproof match was attached to each of the rockets, Roman candles, and miniature mortars. When I had Molly and Will scatter them around the woods in twenty separate positions, I’d gotten those “Is he crazy?” looks from both of them.

  After all, it isn’t as if fireworks are heavy-duty weaponry, capable of inflicting grievous bodily harm and wholesale destruction. They’re just loud and bright and distracting.

  Which, under the circumstances, was more or less all I needed.

  Toot-toot and half a dozen members of the Guard came streaking out of nowhere, miniature comets flashing through the vertical shadows of the trees. They went zipping ahead, alighting on low branches, and then tiny lights flickered as waterproof matches were set to fuses. A second later, a tiny shrill trumpet shrieked from somewhere ahead of us, and a dozen Roman candles began shooting balls of burning chemicals out into the darkness, illuminating the crouched running forms of at least ten of Binder’s grey men in their cheap suits, not fifty feet away. They froze at the sudden appearance of the flashing pyrotechnics, attempting to assess them as threats and determine where they were coming from.

  Perfect.

  I dropped to one knee, lifting my blasting rod, as the human-seeming demons shrieked at the sudden appearance of the bright lights. I trained it on the nearest hesitating grey man, slammed my will down through the wooden haft, and snarled, “Fuego!”

  It was more difficult to do than it would have been if it hadn’t been raining, but it was more than up to the task. A javelin of red-gold flame hissed through the rain, leaving a trail of white steam behind it. It touched the nearest of the grey men on one flank, and his cheap suit went up as readily as if it was lined with tar instead of rayon.

  The grey man yawled and began thrashing furiously. The fire engulfed him, throwing out light for a good thirty yards in every direction, and illuminating his companions.

  I dropped flat, and an instant later the forest behind me belched forth power and death.

  Guns roared on full automatic fire. That would be the Raiths. Lara and her sisters’ sidearms had been modified submachine guns, with an enlarged ammunition clip. Given the superhuman strength, perception, and coordination the vampires had at their disposal, they didn’t suffer the same difficulties a human shooter would have faced, running at full speed in the dark, firing a weapon meant to be braced by a shooter’s entire upper body in one hand—and their left hands at that. Bullets chewed into three different grey men, ten or eleven rounds each, all of them hitting between the neck and temple, blasting the demons back to ectoplasm.

  Then it was the Wardens’ turn.

  Fire was the weapon of choice when it came to combat magic. Though it was taxing upon the will and physical stamina of the wizard, it got a lot of energy concentrated into a relatively small space. It illuminated darkness, something that was nearly always to a wizard’s advantage—and it hurt. Every living thing had at least a healthy respect, if not an outright fear of fire. Even more to the point, fire was a purifying force in its non-physical aspect. Dark magic could be consumed and destroyed by fire when used with that intent.

  The Wardens used the zipping little fireballs from the Roman candles and my own improvised funeral pyre to target their own spells, and then the real fireworks started.

  E
ach individual wizard has his own particular quirks when it comes to how he uses his power. There is no industrial standard for how fire is evoked into use in battle. One of the Wardens coming up behind me sent forth a stream of tiny stars that slewed through the night like machine-gun fire, effortlessly burning holes through trees, rocks, and grey men with equal disdain. Another sent a stream of fire up in a high arc, and it crashed down among several grey men, splashing and clinging to any moving thing it struck like napalm. Lances of scarlet and blue and green fire burned through the air, reminding me for a mad moment of a scene from a Star Wars movie. Steam hissed and snarled everywhere, as a swath of woodland forty yards across and half as deep vanished into light and fury.

  Hell’s bells. I mean, I’d seen Wardens at work before, but it had all been fairly precise, controlled work. This was pure destruction, wholesale, industrial-strength, and the heat of it was so intense that it sucked the air out of my lungs.

  The grey men, though, weren’t impressed. Either they weren’t bright enough to attempt to preserve their own existence or they just didn’t care. They scattered as they advanced, spreading out. Some of them rushed forward, low to the ground and half hidden by the brush. Others bounded into the trees and came leaping and swinging forward, branch by branch. Still more of them darted to the sides, out of the harsh glare of the fires, spreading out around us.

  “Toot!” I screamed over the roaring chaos. “Go after the flankers!”

  A tiny trumpet added its own notes to the din, and the Pizza Patrol zipped out into the woods, two or three of the little faeries working together to carry fresh Roman candles. They gleefully kept on with the fireworks, sending the little sulfurous balls of flame chasing the grey men trying to slip around us through the shadows, marking their positions.

  Lara let out a piercing call and came up to my side, gun in hand, snapping off snarling bursts every time a target presented itself. I pointed to either side and said, “They’re getting around us! We’ve got to stop them from taking Mai and Injun Joe from behind!”