by Jim Butcher
“Very,” I said. “I know there are fewer than two hundred Venatori in the world. But we’re organized in cells. I only know one other Venator.”
“Venatori?” Bob said. “There’s like five thousand of those dried-up old prunes. They’ve been helping the Council fight the war, remember?”
I waved a hand. “Those are the Venatori Umbrorum.”
“Yeah,” Bob said. “The Hunters of the Shadows.”
“One way to translate their name,” I said, “and it’s the one they believe is correct. But it’s more accurate to call them the Shadows of the Hunters. They don’t know it, but we founded them. Gave them their store of knowledge. Use them to gather information, to help us keep an eye on things. And they’re camouflage, too, to make our enemies have to work a little harder to find us.”
“Enemies, right,” Bob said. “A war has to have two sides.”
I nodded. “Or more. There are a lot of . . . people . . . interested in the old demons. They’re weak compared to what they once were, but they’re still a route to power. Cults, priests, societies, individual lunatics. They’re trying to keep the demons nailed to this world. We’re trying to stop them.” I shook my head. “The Oblivion War has been going on for more than five thousand years. Sometimes decades will pass without a single battle being fought. Sometimes it all goes insane.”
“How many demons have you guys cut off?” Bob asked brightly. Then he chirped, “Oh, heh, I guess you wouldn’t know, would you. If you kacked ’em, you don’t even remember ’em.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Kind of a thankless way to fight a war.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. “This is secret stuff, Bob. Just knowing it creates a kind of resonance in the mind. If someone knows to look for it, they can see it. If Harry finds out about the war, and anyone from either side realizes that he’s aware ...”
“The bad guys will assume he’s a Venator or a rival and kill him,” Bob said, his manner suddenly sober. “And the Venatori will assume he’s a threat like the rest of the nut balls. They’ll either consider him a security risk and kill him or impress him into joining their army. And he’s already fighting one war.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Um,” Bob said. “One wonders why they won’t do the same thing to me.”
“You aren’t mortal,” I said. “Your knowledge won’t bind anything to this world.”
The skull somehow looked reassured. “That’s true. Tell me about this client that’s with my boss.”
“You know about the Prosthanos Society?” I asked.
“Buncha lunatics in the Baltic region,” Bob replied immediately. “They lop off their bits and pieces and replace them with grafts from inhuman sources. Demons and ghouls and such. Patchwork immortality.”
I nodded. “The Stygian Sisterhood does the same thing—only with their psyches instead of with their physical bodies. They slice out the parts of their human personalities they don’t want, and replace them with pieces torn from inhuman minds.”
“Cheery,” Bob leered. “Sorority, huh? They hot?”
“It’s generally advantageous,” I said. “So for the most part, yes. They’re dedicated to the service of a number of old demon-goddesses whom they’re trying to keep in the world through the publication of a book of rituals called the Lexicon Malos.”
“So,” the skull said, “hot girl comes into Harry’s office. He drools on her shoes, acts like an idiot, and doesn’t take her up on her offer to do morally questionable things to him right then and there.”
“Uh,” I said. “I’m not sure if—”
“Being a stupid hero, he tells her not to worry, that he’ll find her obvious sob-story decoy—I mean, lost child. Only when he does find the kid, he finds this book of rituals, too.”
“And being a stalwart Warden of the White Council now . . .” I said.
Bob snorted. “He’ll take them this book of dangerous rituals anyone could use. And the Council will do with it what they did with the Necronomicon in order to defuse it.”
I nodded. “They publish it, because they think that by making the rituals available to every nut who wants to try them, the power that comes out of them will be so diffused that it will never amount to any harm.”
“Only the real danger isn’t the rituals,” Bob said. “But the knowledge of the beings behind them.”
“And we might never be rid of them—just as we’ll never be rid of the faeries.”
Bob looked suddenly wistful. “You were trying to ditch the faeries?”
“The Venatori tried, yes,” I said. “But the G-men stopped us cold.”
“G-men? What, like the government?” Bob asked. “Like the Men in Black?”
“Like Gutenberg and the Grimms,” I replied.
Bob narrowed his eyelights for a moment, apparently in thought. “This Stygian hottie. She laid a trap for you. She knew who you were, and what you’d do.”
“I’ve crossed swords with the Sisterhood before. They know me.” I shook my head. “I’ve got no idea why she messed up my face instead of killing me, though.”
“Because Dresden would have sensed it,” Bob said promptly.
“Eh?”
“Murdering someone with magic? It leaves an odor, and there isn’t a body spray on earth that can hide it completely so soon after a kill. If Harry got close enough to sense a whiff of black magic on her, there wouldn’t be any way she could pretend to be a damsel in distress.”
“He’d still be able to tell she was a practitioner.”
“Only if he actually touched her,” Bob said. “And even then, if she’s significantly different from a normal human, mentally, it’ll alter the sense of her aura. Besides, sensing a little tingle of magical potential in a client is a whole lot different from realizing that she’s spattered in supernatural gore.”
“I get it. So instead she changed my face.”
“Technically, she didn’t change it,” the skull said. “It’s an illusion. You’re still you under there. The question is why would she do that, particularly.”
I frowned. “To slow me down,” I said, thinking it through. It didn’t take me long to figure out what the Stygian had in mind, and I clenched my teeth in frustration. “Oh, empty night. She’s told Harry that there’s a villain in the piece. She’s shown him the picture of the bad man who took the poor kid.” I gestured at my face. “And she’s made me look like him.”
“Damn,” Bob said, admiration in his tone. “That’s sneaky. Harry’s awfully quick on the draw these days. If you mosey up, he might not give you a chance to explain anything.”
I sighed. “The kind of day I’m having, he probably wouldn’t. Are you going to help me or not?”
“Answer me one more question,” the skull said, quieter now.
“Okay.”
“Why?” he asked. “Why would vampires be a part of this? Why would something that eats people be interested in saving humanity from devouring demon gods?”
I snorted. “You want me to tell you that it’s because in our secret hearts, we long to be heroes? Or that deep down, there’s something in us that cries out for humanity, for redemption?” I shook my head and smiled at him, showing teeth. “At the end of the day? Because we don’t like competition.”
“Finally,” Bob said, with a roll of his eyelights. “A motive I can understand. Okay.”
“Okay?”
The skull turned on its shelf, to face the table. “I can show you how to find Harry. But the first thing we do is fix your face. Come on in, let me get a better look.”
Mnemonic lightning flashed and boomed between my ears, and I felt myself smile. “No,” I said.
The skull tilted slightly to one side, watching me. “No?”
“No. I’ve got a better idea.”
5
The skull tried to explain why the tracking spell he showed me was going to work when my own had failed, but about five seconds into the technical talk I started substi
tuting “blah blah blah” for everything he was saying.
I’m not a wizard, okay? I’m a cheap hack. I don’t care why it works, as long as it works.
The Stygian had staged her little charade in a warehouse down in Hammond. When I caught up to my brother, he and the Stygian were lurking in an alley across the street from the warehouse, watching the place. The Stygian was playing her part, that of the frightened, nervous female, anxious with the need to bring her offspring safely home again. She was a reasonably good actress, too, for someone with so little humanity. She was probably a couple of centuries old. She’d had time to get in some practice.
I went up the side of the building adjacent to the warehouse, so that I could get a look at the place, too. There were a couple more ghouls guarding the building, wearing the brown uniforms of private security personnel. They kept up a regular walking routine around the warehouse’s exterior and interior, and they weren’t bothering to so much as glance up at the rooftop I was on. It was five floors up with no fire escape and nothing but bricks to hold on to. Why should they?
I paced down to the back side of the warehouse, where Harry and the Stygian couldn’t spot me, waited until the pacing ghouls were both out of sight, and then leapt the forty feet or so from my rooftop to the roof of the warehouse. I landed in a roll, in near-complete silence, and froze for a long moment, waiting to see if anyone raised an outcry.
No one did. I hadn’t been spotted.
I settled down to wait.
Harry made his move sometime between three and four in the morning, when the guards were most likely to be bored, tired, and convinced that nothing was going to happen tonight—and when there would be the fewest possible witnesses or innocent bystanders. From the front of the warehouse came his resonant baritone, crying out one of those pretend-Latin spell incantations he uses. There was a flash of light, a boom like thunder, and a crash of something slamming into sheet metal with the force of a cannonball.
Scratch one ghoul. My brother hates the creatures with a passion so pure that it’s almost holy. If his first attack hadn’t killed the thing, he’d finish it off before long. I heard the other ghoul shriek as it began to transform.
Once everyone’s attention was on the attack at the front door, I went in through a skylight.
The warehouse was stacked high with years of accumulated junk, consisting mostly of the remains of shipping crates, stacks of loading pallets, and broken boxes. An area in the center of the floor had been cleared, and the concrete had been heavily marked up with occult symbols painted in blood, around a table that was obviously intended to be an altar. A kid, a little boy maybe nine years old, was bound hand and foot on the table, his face blotchy from crying. He was screaming and struggling against the ropes, but was firmly secured to the table.
Harry cried out again. The glass in both windows at the front side of the warehouse exploded inward in a flash of scarlet light. Something that looked disturbingly like a severed arm went tumbling by the open doorway.
I kept looking until I spotted it—the Lexicon Malos, a leather-bound book, like a big old handwritten journal, just the kind of impressive grimoire occult nut-jobs like the Stygians are so giddy about. It rested on a little pedestal beside the table. It didn’t actually have a flashing neon sign over it reading NOTICE ME, but it was pretty close.
I went hand over hand along the steel-beam rafters until I got to one of the girders that ran down the wall. Then I slid down it to the floor and hurried over to the altar and the pedestal. I opened the nylon backpack in my hands, stuffed the Lexicon Malos into it, zipped it closed, and then slid my arms through the shoulder straps.
I could have bailed then. I suppose it would have been the smartest thing. Once the book was removed from the equation, the Stygian’s entire operation was blown. Granted, she and the other members of the Sisterhood would try it again somewhere else, but they would have been stopped for the time being.
But the bitch had messed with my brother.
“For the time being” wasn’t good enough.
Harry came through the front door of the warehouse, with the Stygian treading fearfully behind him, pretending to tremble. Tall, skinny, sharp-featured, and somewhat rough-looking, Harry wore his usual wizarding gear—the black leather duster. He carried a carved staff in his left hand, a shorter, more heavily carved rod in his right, and the tip of the rod glowed with a sullen red-orange flame.
I was waiting for them.
I had wrapped the dark red blanket around my shoulders and upper body like some sort of dramatic ceremonial garb. I stood over the child, a wicked-looking knife I’d found lying on the altar in hand, with my head thrown back and a sneer on my illusion-covered face.
“So!” I boomed in my most overblown voice. “You have defeated my minions!”
“You have got to be kidding me,” my brother said, staring at me with an expression somewhere between bemusement and naked contempt. “I mean . . . Jesus, look at this place. I’ve seen high school plays with a higher production value than this.”
“Silence!” I thundered, pointing the knife at him. I had eyes only for the Stygian, in any case. She was staring at me with a look of blank surprise. Heh. Serves you right, sweetheart. You shouldn’t make up stories about imaginary villains until you’re certain they won’t come true. “Who dares interrupt my—”
“Yeah, you know what?” Harry asked. “Forzare!”
His staff snapped forward and an invisible truck hit me at thirty miles an hour.
I flew backward, thirty feet or so, and hit a stack of loading pallets.
I went through them.
That hurt.
I hit the wall behind them.
I did not go through it.
That hurt even more.
I landed, dazed, and wobbled to my feet with the help of my demon. No problem, I told myself. I’d planned to fall back to this position in any case—just not quite that vigorously.
The circuit box for the building was on the wall two feet to my left. I reached out and killed the lights.
“Crouch down!” Harry shouted to the woman he thought he was protecting. “Stay still!”
My demon and I adjusted to the darkness almost instantly. The Stygian had done the same. She had produced a wavy-bladed dagger from nowhere and was running toward me on silent feet, her eyes narrowed and intent.
I threw the prop knife I’d been holding when she was ten feet away. She slipped to one side, and it went spinning through the air, striking sparks off the far wall. Her knife struck at me, but I slammed the edge of one hand against her forearm, knocking it away before it could do more than scratch me. I followed that with a pair of sharp blows to the body, driving her back a step, and then drew my kukri from beneath the red blanket-robes, slashing at her head. I missed her, and the follow-up rake at her eyes that I made with my other hand failed to connect as well.
In the background, Harry had his priorities straight. He’d brought forth a little light from his amulet, and was cutting the child free from the makeshift altar. I felt my mouth stretch into a fierce grin.
“So smug,” hissed the Stygian, her reptile eyes flat. “But not for long.” She raised her voice into a terrified scream. “Let me go! Don’t touch me!”
Harry, holding the child over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry, spun toward the sound, raising his blasting rod, and began hurrying toward me.
“Run, Venator,” hissed the Stygian. “But the Blood of the Ancient Mothers is in your veins now. Enjoy your last hours.”
The nick on my arm, the tiny cut from the dagger, suddenly felt very cold.
The book was out of Harry’s hands. The child was safe.
I fled the building.
6
The wound was poisoned.
Without my demon, I don’t think I would have lasted more than an hour. Even with its support, I was having trouble staying steady. The pain was horrible, and my whole body poured sweat even as I shivered with cold. The Hunger
can usually overcome any kind of foreign substance—but while my demon might have been a powerful one, it was not well fed, and I’d been using it hard all night. It had little strength left with which to fight the poison.
It was difficult, but I persevered for three hours.
That was how long it took for me to track the Stygian and catch her alone.
The sweep of my kukri had missed her head—but not the hairs growing out of it. And while my grasping fingers had not found her eyes an instant later, they had snatched those hairs out of the air before they could fall. The tracking spell the skull had taught me had been good enough to let me find the Stygian, despite any countermeasures she might have taken.
When she entered her hotel room, I was half an inch behind her. She never knew I was there until my lips touched the back of her neck, and I unleashed my demon upon her.
She let out a sudden gasp, as my Hunger, starved for so long, rushed into her flesh. Though she might have had the mind and thoughts of a dozen alien beings, she had a mortal life force and a mortal body—a woman’s body, and, as I had told the skull, a rather lovely one at that.
She tried to struggle for five or six seconds, until her nervous system succumbed to my Hunger, until the first orgasm ripped a moan of equal parts ecstasy, need, and despair from her throat.
“Shhhh,” I told her, my teeth gently finding her earlobe and my hands roaming. “It won’t hurt. I promise.”
She cried out in despair again, as her body began moving in helpless acquiescence to desire, and my own reservations flickered and died before the raw, aching need of my Hunger.
I spend most of my life fighting my darker nature.
Most of it.
Not all of it.
I bore the Stygian to the floor and fed her to my demon.
Lara would help me get rid of the body.
7
A long, long shower and the cleansing force of the rising sun had been enough to wash away the illusion that had obscured my true features.