by Butcher, Jim
Lara’s eyes snapped left and right, and she said something to her sisters in ancient Etruscan, the tongue of the White Court. One of them went in either direction, vanishing into the dark.
A grey man came crashing out of the flame twenty feet away from me, blazing like a grease fire. He showed absolutely no concern for the flame. He just sprinted forward and leapt at me, hands spread wide. I made it up to my knees and braced one end of my quarterstaff against the ground, aiming the other at the grey man’s center of mass. The staff struck it, but not squarely. It twisted to one side at the impact, bounced off the ground, took a fraction of a second to reorient itself on me—
And erupted into a cloud of ectoplasm as rounds from Lara’s gun took its head apart.
The next attacker was already on the way, out in the darkness beyond the firelight. I came to my feet and on pure instinct snapped off another blast of fire at the empty air twenty feet beyond Lara and about ten feet up. There was nothing there as I released the blast, and I knew it, but as the fire hissed through the falling rain, it illuminated the form of a grey man in the midst of a spectacular leap that would have ended at the small of Lara’s back. The blast struck him and hammered him to one side so that he came down like a burning jet, crashing across a dozen yards of ground before dissolving into flame-licked mounds of swiftly vanishing transparent jelly.
Lara didn’t see the attacker until he’d tumbled past. “Oh,” she said, her voice conversational. “That was gentlemanly of you, Dresden.”
“I’ve been known to pull out chairs and open doors, too,” I said.
“How very unfashionable,” Lara said, her pale eyes gleaming. “And endearing.”
Ebenezar stumped up to us, staff in hand, his eyes narrow and flickering all around us while Wardens continued to send blasts of power hammering into targets. Off in the woods behind us, submachine guns chattered. Apparently Lara’s sisters were still hunting the grey men who had gotten around us.
“We’ve got one Warden down,” Ebenezar said.
“How bad?”
“One of those things came out of a tree above her and tore her head off,” he said.
I tracked a slight motion in a nearby treetop and swiveled to point a finger. “Sir, up there!”
Ebenezar grunted a word, reached out a hand, and made a sharp, pulling motion. The grey man who had been clambering toward us was seized by an unseen force, ripped out of the tree, and sent sailing on an arc that would land it in Lake Michigan a quarter of a mile from the nearest shore.
“Where is the second group?” Ebenezar asked.
I thought about it. “They’re at the dock, at the edge of the trees. They’re closing on Mai and Injun Joe.” I glanced at Lara. “I think the vampires have been holding them off.”
Ebenezar spat a curse. “That summoner is still out there somewhere. His pets won’t last long in this rain, but we can’t afford to give him time to call up more. Can you find him?”
I checked. There was so much confusion and motion on the island that Demonreach had trouble distinguishing one being from another, but I had a solid if nonspecific idea of where Binder was. “Yeah.” I sensed more movement and pointed behind us, to where a trio of grey men had managed to close on a pair of Wardens who were standing on either side of a still, red-spattered form on the ground. “There!”
Ebenezar stopped talking to make another swift gesture, spoke a word, and one of the approaching grey men was suddenly and literally pounded flat by an invisible anvil. Ectoplasmic ichor flew everywhere. The two Wardens, warned by the magical strike and now facing even odds, made short work of the remaining two.
Ebenezar turned back to me and said, “Shut down that summoner, Hoss. I’m taking the Wardens back to support Injun Joe and Mai. Let’s go, vampire.”
“No,” Lara said. “If Binder is nearby, then so is my sweet cousin Madeline. I’ll stay with Dresden.”
Ebenezar didn’t argue with her. He just snarled, made a fist, and lifted it up, and Lara let out a short, choking cry and rose up ten feet into the air, her arms and legs snapping down straight, locking her body into a rigid board.
I put a hand against his chest. “Wait!”
He glanced at me from beneath shaggy grey brows.
“Let her down. She can come along.” Ebenezar had no way of knowing that I wasn’t out there alone. Georgia and Will were lurking nearby, and could be at my side in a couple of seconds if necessary. Between the two of them, they had accounted for three grey men, too. I tried to put that knowledge behind a very slight emphasis in my tone and told him, “I’ll be fine.”
Ebenezar frowned at me, then shot a glance out at the woods and gave me a reluctant nod. He turned back to Lara and released her from the grip of his will. She didn’t quite manage to fall gracefully, and landed in a sprawl that gave me a great look at her long, intriguingly lovely legs. The old man eyed her and said, “You just remember what I told you, missy.”
She rose to her feet, her expression unreadable—but I knew her well enough to know that she was furious. My old mentor had just insulted her on multiple levels, not the least of which was pointing out to her exactly how easy it would be for him to make good on his previous threat. “I’ll remember,” she said, her tone frosty.
“Wardens!” Ebenezar said. “On me!” The old man broke into a woodsman’s lope, a shuffle-footed, loose-kneed gait that managed unpredictable terrain well and covered ground with deceptive speed. The four remaining Wardens fell into a wedge shape behind him and they moved out heading south, back toward the docks and the confrontation with whoever had come forth from the Nevernever with his own army.
Lara turned to me and nodded her head once, gesturing me to lead. I tried to fix Binder’s presence firmly in mind, and was certain he was ahead of us and to the north, probably trying to circle widely around the scene of the battle with his minions. I started out through the woods again, pushing myself to move faster.
This time, Lara stayed close behind me. She mimicked my movements, down to the length of my stride, taking advantage of my instinctive knowledge of Demonreach.
“I have little interest in this mercenary,” she said to me as we ran. She wasn’t even breathing hard. “Do with him as you would. But Madeline is mine.”
“She might know something,” I said.
“I can’t believe anyone with half a mind would entrust her with knowledge of any importance.”
“And I can’t believe the treacherous bitch wouldn’t steal every bit of information she could find to use against whoever she’s working with,” I replied, glancing back.
Lara didn’t dispute the statement, but her eyes hardened like silver mirrors, reflecting the dancing flames that were still burning here and there as we moved through the site of the battle and out the other side. “Madeline has betrayed me, my House, and my Court. She is mine. I prefer you remained a living, breathing ally. You will not interfere.”
What do you say to something like that? I shut my mouth and concentrated on finding Binder.
It took us about five minutes to reach the piece of shoreline where Binder and his companion had come ashore. A pair of Jet Skis lay discarded on the beach. So that’s how they’d done it. The tiny craft would have no problems at all skimming over the stone reefs surrounding the island, though they would have been hellish to ride in the rough water.
We swung past the discarded equipment and up a little ridgeline, running along a deer trail. I knew we were getting close, and suddenly Lara accelerated past me, supernaturally fleet of foot on the even ground.
I don’t know what triggered the explosion. It might have been a tripwire stretched across the trail. It’s possible that it was detonated manually, too. There was a flash of light, and something hit me in the chest hard enough to knock me down. An ugly asymmetrical shape was burned into my vision as I lay on my back, trying to sort out what had just happened.
Then my body tingled, and Madeline Raith appeared over me. I realized that she was strad
dling me. There was a fire burning somewhere close by, illuminating her. She was wearing a black surfer’s wet suit with short arms and legs, unzipped past her navel. She held a mostly empty bottle of tequila in one hand. Her eyes were wide and shining with a disorienting riot of colors as she leaned down and kissed me on the forehead and . . .
And Hell’s freaking bells.
The pleasure that surged through me from that simple touch was delicious to the point of pain. Every nerve ending in my entire body lit up, as though someone had run up the wattage on my pleasure centers, or injected their engines with nitrous. I felt my body arch up and shudder, a purely sexual reaction to a physical bliss that went far beyond sexuality. I stayed that way, locked into a quivering arch of ecstasy. It took maybe ten or fifteen seconds to subside.
From a kiss on the forehead.
God. No wonder people came back to the vampires for more.
I could barely register what was happening around me. So I only dimly noticed when Madeline produced a gun of her own, the other favorite model of those with more than human strength—a Desert Eagle.
“Good night, sweet wizard,” Madeline purred, her hips grinding a slow rhythm against mine. She drew the half-inch-wide mouth of the gun over my cheek as she took a slug of tequila and then rested the gun’s barrel gently on the spot she’d just kissed. It felt obscenely good, like a caress on skin that has just been shaved smooth but hasn’t yet been touched. I knew that she was about to kill me, but I couldn’t stop thinking how good it felt. “And flights of angels,” she panted, her breath coming faster, her eyes alight with excitement, “sing thee to thy rest.”
Chapter Forty-three
I was still sorting things out after the titanic wallop the explosion had given the inside of my skull, when a dark-furred wolf emerged from the shadows of the night and slammed into Madeline Raith like a loaded armored car. I heard bones breaking under the impact, and she was ripped off me by the force of the dark wolf’s rush.
Will didn’t stop there. He’d already hammered her once, and he knew better than to try his strength infighting with a vampire, even if the members of the White Court were physically the weakest of the breed. He hit the ground and bounded away into the dark.
Madeline screamed in surprised rage, and her gun went off several times, but I’m not sure you could call it shooting. She was on her knees, firing that big old Desert Eagle with one delicate hand and holding the now-broken tequila bottle in the other when a sandy brown wolf swept by on silent paws and ripped at Madeline’s weapon hand with her fangs. The rip went deep into the muscles and tendons of Madeline’s forearm, an almost surgically precise attack. The gun tumbled from her fingers, and she whirled to swing the broken bottle at Georgia, but she was no more eager for a fair fight than Will had been, and by the time Madeline turned, Georgia was already bounding away—and Will, unnoticed, was on his way back in again.
Fangs flashed. Pale Raith blood flowed. The two wolves rushed back and forth in perfect rhythm, never giving the vampire a chance to pin one of them down. When Madeline finally realized how they were working her, she attempted to reverse herself suddenly the same instant Georgia began to retreat, to meet Will’s rush squarely—but Will and Georgia had learned their trade from a real wolf, and they’d had eight years of what amounted to low-intensity but deadly earnest combat duty, defending several square blocks around the University from the depredations of both supernatural and mortal predators. They knew when the reverse was coming, and Georgia simply pirouetted on her paws and blindsided Madeline again.
The vampire screamed in frustrated rage. She was furious—and she was slowing down. The members of the White Court were flesh and blood beings. They bled. Bleed them enough, and they would die.
I forced myself to start using my head again, finally shaking off the effects of both Madeline’s psychotically delicious kiss and the concussion of whatever had exploded. I realized that I was covered with small cuts and scratches, that I was otherwise fine, and that Binder was less than twenty feet away.
“Will, Georgia!” I screamed. “Gun!”
The wolves leapt out of sight and vanished into the forest with barely a leaf disturbed by their movements, half a second before Binder came out of the woods, a semiautomatic assault shotgun pressed against his shoulder. The mercenary was dressed in a wet suit as well, though he’d put on a combat jacket and equipment harness over it, and wore combat boots on his feet.
Binder aimed the weapon after Will and Georgia and started rapidly hammering the woods with shells, more or less at random.
Everyone thinks that shotgun pellets spread out to some ridiculous degree, and that if you aim a shotgun at a garage door and pull the trigger, you’ll be able to drive a car through the resulting hole. That isn’t so, even when a shotgun has a very, very short barrel, which allows the load of pellets to spread out more. A longer-barreled weapon, like Binder’s, will only spread the pellets out to about the size of my spread fingers at a hundred or a hundred and fifty yards. Odds were good that he hadn’t hit a damned thing, and given his experience he probably knew it. He must have kept up the salvo to increase the intimidation factor and force the wolves to stay on the run.
In the heat and adrenaline of a battle, gunshots can be hard to count, but I knew he fired eight times. I knew because through Demonreach, I could feel the eight brass and plastic shell casings lying on the ground around him. He stood protectively over Madeline as he reached into his pockets, presumably to reload the weapon with fresh shells.
I didn’t give him the chance. I pulled my .44 out of my duster pocket, sat up, and tried to stop wobbling. I sighted on his center mass and pulled the trigger.
The revolver roared, and Binder’s left leg flew out from beneath him as if someone had hit it with a twenty-pound mallet. He let out a yelp of what sounded more like surprise than pain and hit the ground hard. In the odd little beat of heavy silence that came after the shot, I almost felt sorry for the guy. He’d had a tough couple of days. I heard him suck in a quick breath and clench his teeth over a howl of pain.
Madeline whirled toward me, her dark hair gone stringy and flat in the rain. Her eyes burned pure white, as the hunger, the demon inside her, fed her more and more of its power and asserted more and more control. Her wet suit had been torn open in several places, and paler-than-human blood smeared her paler-than-human flesh. She wasn’t moving as well as she should have been, but she stalked toward me in a hunter’s crouch, deliberate and steady.
My bells were still ringing hard, and I didn’t think I had time or focus to pull together a spell. And besides, my gun was already right there. It seemed like it would be a waste not to use it.
I sighted on the spot where Madeline’s heart should have been and shot her in the belly, which wasn’t terrible marksmanship under the circumstances. She cried out and staggered to one knee. Then she looked up, her empty white eyes furious, and stood up, continuing toward me.
I shot again and missed, then repeated myself. I gripped the gun with both hands, clenching my teeth as I did, knowing I only had two more rounds. The next shot ripped a piece of meat the size of a racquetball out of one of her biceps, sending her down to one knee and drawing another scream.
Before she could start moving again, I aimed and fired the last round.
It hit her in the sternum, almost exactly between her wet suit- contoured breasts. She jerked, her breath exploding from her in a little huff of surprise. She swayed, her eyelids fluttering, and I thought she was about to fall.
But she didn’t.
The vampire’s empty white eyes focused on me, and her mouth spread into a maniac’s sneer. She reached down and picked up her own fallen weapon. She had to do it left-handed. The right was covered in a sheet of blood and flopped limply.
Running low on options, I threw my empty gun at her face. She bat-ted my revolver aside with the Desert Eagle.
“You,” Madeline said, her voice hollow and wheezing, “are a bad case of herpes, wi
zard. You’re inconvenient, embarrassing, no real threat, and you simply will not go away.”
“Bitch,” I replied, wittily. I still hadn’t gotten my head back together. Everything’s relative, right?
“Don’t kill him,” Binder rasped.
Madeline shot him a look that could freeze vodka. “What?”
Binder was sitting on the ground. His shotgun was farther away than he could reach. He must have tossed it there, because when he had fallen it was still in his hands. Binder had realized precisely how badly the fight had gone for his side, that he had been lamed and therefore probably could not escape, and he was making damned sure that he didn’t look armed and dangerous. “Death curse,” he said, breathing hard. “He could level the island with it.”
I drew in my breath, lifted my chin, and tried to keep my eyes from slipping out of focus. “Boom,” I said solemnly.
Madeline looked bad. One of the bullets might have opened an artery. It was hard to tell in the near-darkness. “Perhaps you’re right, Binder,” she said. “If he was a better shot, I suppose I might be in trouble. As it is, I’m inconvenienced.” Her eyes widened slightly, and her tongue lashed quickly over her lips. “And I need to feed if I’m to repair it.” She lowered the gun as if it had suddenly become too heavy to keep supporting. “Don’t worry, Binder,” she said. “When he’s screaming my name he won’t be cursing anyone. And even if he tries it . . .” She shivered. “I’ll bet it will taste incredible.”
She came closer, all pale skin and mangled flesh, and my body suddenly went insane with lust. Stupid body. It had a lot more clout at the moment than it usually did, with my mind still reeling from the blast.
I aimed a punch at Madeline’s face. She caught my hand as the weak blow came in, and kissed the inside of my wrist. Sweet silver lightning exploded up my arm and down my spine. Whatever was left of my brain went away, and the next thing I knew she was pressing her chest against mine, her mouth against mine, slowly, sensuously overbearing me.