by Butcher, Jim
And then a burned corpse came out of the woods.
That was all I could think of to describe it. Half the body was blacker than a hamburger that had fallen through the bars of a charcoal grill. The rest was red and purple and swollen with bruises and bloody blisters, with very, very occasional strips of pale white skin. A few wisps of dark hair were attached to her skull. I say her because technically the corpse was female, though that hardly mattered amongst all the burned and pulverized meat that smelled slightly of tequila.
The only things I really recognized were the cold silver eyes.
Lara Raith’s eyes were bright with an insane rage and a terrible hunger as she snaked her bruised, swollen left arm around Madeline’s wind-pipe, and tightened it with a horrible strength.
Madeline cried out as her head was jerked back sharply—and then she made no sound at all as the wind was trapped inside her lungs. The burned, blackened corpse that was Lara Raith dug one fire-ruined hip into Madeline’s upper back, using Madeline’s own spine as a fulcrum against her.
Lara spoke, and her voice was something straight from Hell. It was lower, smokier, but every bit as lovely as it ever was. “Madeline,” she purred, “I’ve wanted to do this with you since we were little girls.”
Lara’s burned black right hand, withered, it seemed, down to bones and sinew, reached slowly, sensually around Madeline’s straining abdomen. Slowly, very slowly, Lara sunk her fingertips into flesh, just beneath the floating rib on Madeline’s left flank. Madeline’s face contorted and she tried to scream.
Lara shuddered. Her shoulders twisted. And she ripped an open furrow as wide as her four fingers across Madeline’s stomach, pale flesh parting, as wet red and grey things slithered out.
Lara’s tongue emerged from her mouth, bright pink, and touched Madeline’s earlobe. “Listen to me,” she hissed. Her burned hand continued pulling things out of Madeline’s body, a hideous intimacy. “Listen to me.”
Power shuddered in those words. I felt an insane desire to rush toward Lara’s ruined flesh and give her my ears, ripped off with my own fingers, if necessary.
Madeline shuddered, the strength gone out of her body. Her mouth continued trying to move, but her eyes went unfocused at the power in Lara’s voice. “For once in your life,” Lara continued, kissing Madeline’s throat with her burned, broken lips, “you are going to be useful.”
Madeline’s eyes rolled back in her head, and her body sagged helplessly back against Lara.
My brain got back onto the clock. I pushed myself away from Lara and Madeline’s nauseating, horribly compelling embrace. Binder was sitting with his hands over his ears, his eyes squeezed tightly shut. I grabbed him under the arms and hauled him away from the entwined Raiths, maybe fifty yards downhill, through some thick brush and around the bole of a large old hickory tree. Binder was obviously in pain as I pulled him—and he was pushing with his unwounded leg, doing his best to assist me.
“Bloody hell,” he panted, as I set him down. “Bloody hell and brimstone.”
I staggered and sat down across from him, panting to get my breath back and to push the sight of Lara devouring Madeline out of my head. “No kidding.”
“Some of the bloody fools I’ve known,” Binder said. “Can’t stop talking about how tragic they are. The poor lonely vampires. How they’re just like us. Bloody idiots.”
“Yeah,” I said, my voice raw.
We sat there for a few seconds. From up the slope, there was a low, soft, and eager cry.
We shuddered and tried to look as if we hadn’t heard anything.
Binder stared at me for a moment, and then said, “Why?”
“Once Lara got going, she might not be able to stop. She’d have eaten you, too.”
“Too right,” Binder agreed fervently. “But that ain’t the question. Why?”
“Somebody has to be human.”
Binder looked at me as if I was speaking in a language he’d never been very good at, and hadn’t heard in years. Then he looked sharply down and away. He nodded, without looking up, and said, “Cheers, mate.”
“Fuck you,” I told him tiredly. “How bad are you hit?”
“Broke the bone, I think,” he said. “Didn’t come out. Didn’t hit anything too bad or I’d be gone by now.”
He’d already tied a strip of cloth tightly around the wound. His wet suit was probably aiding it in acting as a pressure bandage.
“Who was Madeline working for?” I asked.
He shook his head. “She didn’t tell me.”
“Think,” I said. “Think hard.”
“All I know,” he said, “is that it was some bloke with a lot of money. I never talked to him. When she was on the phone with him, they spoke English. He wasn’t a native speaker. Sounded like he’d learned it from a Continental.”
I frowned. Television has most people confident that they could identify the nationality of anyone speaking English, but in the real world, accents could be muddy as hell, especially when you learned from a non-native speaker. Try to imagine the results, for example, of a Polish man learning English from a German teaching at a Belgian university. The resulting accent would twist a linguist’s brain into knots.
I eyed Binder. “Can you get out of here on your own?”
He shivered. “This place? I bloody well can.”
I nodded. Binder was responsible for the death of a Warden, but it wasn’t as though it had been personal. I could bill that charge to Madeline Raith’s corpse. “Do business in my town or against the Council again and I’ll kill you. Clear?”
“Crystal, mate. Crystal.”
I got up and started to go. I didn’t have my staff, my blasting rod, or my gun. They were back up the hillside.
I’d come back for them later.
“Wait,” Binder said. He grunted and took off his belt, and I nearly kicked him in the head, thinking he was going for a weapon. Instead, he just offered the belt to me. It had a fairly normal-looking black fanny pack on it.
“What’s that?” I asked him.
“Two more concussion grenades,” he said.
I put two and two together. My brain was back on the job. “You’d rather not be holding the matches to the one that got Lara, eh?”
“Too right,” he said. I started to turn away and he touched my leg. He leaned toward me a bit and said, very quietly, “Waterproof pocket inside has a phone in it. Boss lady had me hold it for her. It’s powered off. Maybe the lady cop would find it interesting.”
I stared hard at him for a second, and an understanding passed between us. “If this pans out,” I said, “maybe I’ll forget to mention to the Wardens that you survived.”
He nodded and sank back onto the ground. “Never want to see you again, mate. Too right I don’t.”
I snapped the belt closed and hung it across one shoulder, where I could get to the larger pouch in a hurry if I needed to. Then I got on to the next point of business—finding Will and Georgia.
They were both lying on the ground maybe sixty yards from where I’d last seen them. It looked like they’d been circling around the site of the battle with Madeline, planning on coming back in from the far side. I moved easily and soundlessly through the woods and found them on the ground, back in human form.
“Will,” I hissed quietly.
He lifted his head and looked around vaguely. “Uh. What?”
“It’s Harry,” I said, kneeling down next to him. I took off my pentacle amulet and willed a gentle light from it. “Are you hurt?”
Georgia murmured in discomfort at the light. The two of them were twined together rather intimately, actually, and I suddenly felt extremely, um, inappropriate. I shut off the light.
“Sorry,” he slurred. “We were gonna come back, but it was . . . really nice out here. And confusing.”
“I lost track,” Georgia said. “And fell over.”
Their pupils were dilated to the size of quarters, and I suddenly understood what had happened to them:
Madeline’s blood. They’d been inadvertently drugged while ripping at a succubus with their fangs. I’d heard stories about the blood of the White Court, but I hadn’t been able to find any hard evidence, and it wasn’t the sort of thing Thomas would ever talk about.
“Hell’s bells,” I muttered, frustrated. Madeline seemed to have a habit of inflicting far more damage by coincidence than intention.
I heard a short, desperately pleasurable cry from nearby, in the direction where I knew Madeline and Lara were on the ground—then silence.
And Madeline wasn’t on the island anymore.
I lifted a hand in the air and let out a soft whistle. There was a fluttering sound, and then a small faerie hovered in the air beside me, suppressing the light that usually gathered around them when they flew. I could hear its wings buzzing and sensed its position through the island’s intellectus. It wasn’t Toot-toot, but one of his subordinates. “Put a guard around these two,” I said, indicating Will and Georgia. “Hide them and try to lead off anyone who comes close.”
The little faerie let its wings blur with blue light twice in acknowledgment of the order and zipped off into the dark. A moment later, a double dozen of the Militia were on the way, led by the member of the Guard.
Toot and company were generally reliable—within their limits. This was going to be pushing them. But I didn’t have any other way of helping Will and Georgia at the moment, and the insanity was still in progress. Putting the Little Folk on guard duty might not be a foolproof protection, but it was the only one I had. I’d just have to hope for the best.
I reached out to Demonreach to find out about Ebenezar and the others, when a sense of fundamental wrongness twitched through my brain and sent runnels of fear and rage that did not belong to me oozing down my spine. I focused on the source of those feelings, and suddenly understood the island’s outrage at the presence of a visitor it actively detested. It had come ashore on the far side of the island from Chicago, and was now moving swiftly through the trees, dragging a half-dead presence behind it.
My brother.
The naagloshii had come to Demonreach.
I stood there without allies, without most of my weapons, and grew sick with horror as the skinwalker bypassed the battle at the docks and moved in a straight line toward Demonreach Tower.
Toward Molly. Toward Donald Morgan. And it was moving fast.
I put my head down, found the fastest route up the hill, and broke out into a flat sprint, praying that I could beat the skinwalker to the tower.
Chapter Forty-four
As I ran, I tried to keep track of the battle between the White Council and the forces of the traitor who had brought them to the island. Whatever the enemy had brought with him, they weren’t anything close to human-shaped, and they were all over the place. The Council’s forces, together with the White Court, were arranged in a half circle at the shoreline, their backs protected by the lake. The attackers were stacked up at the tree line, where they would be able to hide, and they were probably making swift attacks at odd intervals. The two human-shaped presences who had arrived first were standing together in the forest, well back from the fight, and I felt a moment of severe frustration.
If I could only get word to the Wardens, to tell them where the traitor was, they might be able to launch an effective attack—but I was pretty sure it wasn’t possible. If I used more of the Little Folk, I’d have to stop to whistle some of them up and dispatch them to the task, and it was always possible that they wouldn’t find the right target to point out to the Council with their fireworks.
Then, too, a wizard would be a far different sort of threat to the Little Folk than a vampire or the grey men had been. A wizard, particularly one smart enough to remain hidden within the Council for years without betraying his treacherous goals, could swat Little Folk out of the air like insects, killing them by the score. Whether or not they thought they understood the risks, I wasn’t going to send them into that.
But I had to figure out something. The fight wasn’t going well for the home team: there was blood mixed heavily with the rain on the muddy ground in the center of their defensive position.
I gritted my teeth in frustration. I had to focus on my task, for my brother’s sake. If I stopped moving now, if I tried to bail the Council and Lara’s family out of their predicament, it could mean Thomas’s life. Besides, if Ebenezar, Listens-to-Wind, and Ancient Mai couldn’t hold off their attackers, it was pretty much a given that I wouldn’t be able to do any better.
They would have to manage without me.
I didn’t quite get up to the tower before the skinwalker, but it was damn near a tie. I guess being a nine-foot-tall shapeshifter with a nocturnal predator’s senses and superhuman strength was enough to trump even my alliance with the island’s spirit.
Taken as an omen for the rest of the evening, it was hardly encouraging, but if I did the smart thing every time matters got dangerous, the world would probably come to an end.
As it turned out, moving through the forest with perfect surety of where to put your feet is very nearly the same thing as moving in perfect silence. I reached the edge of the trees, and saw the skinwalker coming up the opposite side of the bald knoll. I froze in place, behind a screen of brush and shadows.
The wind had continued to rise and grow cooler, coming in from the northeast—which mean that it was at the skinwalker’s back. It would warn the creature should anything attempt to come slipping up his back trail, but it offered me a small advantage: Shagnasty wouldn’t be able to get my scent.
He came up the hill, all wiry limbs and stiff yellow fur that seemed entirely unaffected by what must have been a long swim or by the rain that was currently falling in intermittent splatters. The racing clouds overhead parted for a few seconds, revealing a moon most of the way toward being full, and a scythe of silver light swept briefly over the hilltop.
It showed me Thomas.
The naagloshii was dragging him by one ankle. His shirt was gone, and his upper body was covered in so many fine cuts and scratches that they looked like marked roads in a particularly detailed atlas. He’d been beaten, too. One eye was swollen up until it looked like someone had stuck half of a peach against the socket. There were dark bruises all over his throat, too—he’d been strangled, maybe repeatedly, maybe for fun.
His head, shoulders, and upper back dragged on the ground, and his arms followed limply along. When the naagloshii stopped walking, I saw his head move a little, maybe trying to spot some way to escape. His hair was still soaking wet and clinging to his head. I heard him let out a weak, wet cough.
He was alive. Beaten, tortured, half drowned in the icy water of Lake Michigan—but he was alive.
I felt my hands clench as a hot and hungry anger suddenly burned through me. I hadn’t planned on trying to take the naagloshii alone. I’d wanted Lara and her people and every member of the Council present to be there, too. That had been part of the plan: establish a common interest by showing them that they had a common enemy. Then take the naagloshii on with overwhelming force and force it to flee, at the very least, so that we could recover Thomas. I just hadn’t counted on the traitor showing up in such numerical strength.
Taking the naagloshii on alone would be a fool’s mistake. Anger might make a man bolder than he would be otherwise. It was possible that I could use it to help fuel my magic, as well—but anger alone wouldn’t give a man skill or strength that he didn’t have already, and it wouldn’t grant a mortal wizard undeniable power.
All it could do was get me killed if I let it control me. I swallowed down my outrage and forced myself to watch the naagloshii with cold, dispassionate eyes. Once I had a better opportunity, once I had spotted something that might give me a real chance at victory, I would strike, I promised my rage. I’d hit it with the best sucker punch of my life, backed by the ambient energy of Demonreach.
I focused my whole concentration on the skinwalker, and waited.
The skinwalker
, I realized a moment later, was enormously powerful. I’d known that already, of course, but I hadn’t been able to appreciate the threat it represented beyond the purely physical, even though I’d viewed it through my Sight.
(That memory welled up again, trying to club me unconscious as it had before. It was difficult, but I shoved it away and ignored it.)
Through Demonreach, I could appreciate its presence in a more tactile sense. The skinwalker was virtually its own ley line, its own well of power. It had so much metaphysical mass that the dark river of energy flowing up from beneath the tower was partially disrupted by its presence, in much the same way as the moon causes tidal shifts. The island reflected that disruption in many subtle ways. Animals fled from the naagloshii as they might from the scent of a forest fire. Insects fell silent. Even the trees themselves seemed to grow hushed and quiet, despite the cold wind that should have been causing their branches to creak, their leaves to whisper.
It paced up to the cottage, where Morgan and my apprentice were hiding, and something odd happened.
The stones of the cottage began to glimmer with streamers of fox fire. It wasn’t a lot of light, only enough to be noticeable in the darkness, but as the naagloshii took another step forward, the fox fire brightened and resolved itself into symbols, written on each stone in gentle fire. I had no idea what script it was written in. I had never seen the symbols before.
The naagloshii stopped in its tracks, and another flicker of moonlight showed me that it had bared its teeth. It took another step forward, and the symbols brightened even more. It let out a low, snarling noise, and tried to take another step.
Suddenly, its wiry fur was plastered tight to the front of its body, and it seemed unable to take another step forward. It stood there with one leg lifted and let out a spitting curse in a language I did not know. Then it retreated several steps, snarling, and turned to the tower. It approached the ruined tower a bit more warily than it had the cottage, and once again those flowing sigils appeared upon the stones, somehow seeming to repulse the naagloshii before it could get closer than eight or ten feet to it.