by Jim Butcher
Keys are a nasty missile weapon, and any street fighter will tell you so. For fun, get yourself a milk carton and throw a ring of keys at it. You don’t even have to throw it very hard. Odds are better than merely good that the milk carton is going to have holes in it and that milk is going to be dribbling out everywhere.
And eyelids are way thinner than milk cartons.
Raith got a bunch of keys in the face and they hit him hard enough to make him scream. I caught them again on the rebound and sent them zipping back at him, as if they’d been fastened to rubber bands tied to his nose. I don’t care how superhumanly sexy you are, if you’re a vertically symmetrical biped, you don’t have much choice but to react when something tries to put out your eyes.
I pummeled Raith with the keys until he ducked out of the light of the black candles, and then I sent them darting over to Thomas. I shouted his name as I did, and he reached up and caught them with his free hand. He shook one out without delay, and started freeing himself of his chains.
It was just then that the swirling clouds over the empty triangle coalesced into the vague outline of an inhuman face—one that I recognized from the darkest hour of my past and the nightmares it had inhabited since. That demonic mouth split into an eerily soundless scream, as if it had created a sudden void of sound rather than the opposite. That hideous face oriented on the very edge of the remaining candlelight—upon Madge. The cloud surged forward and down, sprouting sudden rows of almost toothlike spines as it did. Madge sat up, raising her hands in a useless gesture of defense. The demonic cloud shot itself forward and into her mouth. The spines tore at her, and Madge struggled to keep it out of her, but it was all useless, and not particularly speedy. She had plenty of time to feel it as the demonic killer, the guiding mind who had been behind the entropy curse, flowed in its semigaseous form into her mouth and throat and lungs, then extruded savage spines and tore her apart from within.
Madge didn’t manage to get out a scream as she died.
But it wasn’t for lack of trying.
Thomas got his arms and legs free and got up, staring in horror at Madge—or more accurately, at the spined cloud still mangling Madge’s corpse from within.
Raith hit Thomas from behind, a blur of motion. There was only a second to see what was happening, but I saw it clearly when Raith seized Thomas by the shoulder and chin, and with a single savage twist, broke his neck.
Thomas fell without so much as a twitch.
“No!” I screamed.
Raith turned toward me.
I dropped my sword, slashed at the air with the cane and my will, and the gun Murphy had taken from the bodyguard flew to my hand.
Raith’s face was bruised and torn. Thick globules of pink blood had splattered over his battered features and his dark shirt. He smiled as he started toward me, and the shadows between the candles and my cane covered him.
I aimed more or less at Raith and shot. The flash showed him to me for an instant. I used that single image to redirect my fire and shot again. And again. And again. The last shot showed me Raith, only eight or ten feet away, a look of shock upon his face. The next shot showed him on his knees, clutching at his stomach, where a welter of pink fluid had soaked him.
Then the gun locked open, and empty.
For a minute it was all dark.
Then Raith’s flesh began to glow. His shirt was in shreds, and he tore it from him with a negligent gesture. His skin became suffused with a pale light once more, and I saw his body rippling weirdly around an ungainly hole left of his navel. He was healing.
I stared at him tiredly for a minute, then bent over and picked up my sword.
He laughed at me. “Dresden. Wait there for a moment. I’ll deal with you as I did Thomas.”
“He was my blood,” I said quietly. “He was my only family.”
“Family,” Raith spat. “Nothing but an accident of birth. Random consequence of desire and response. Family is meaningless. It is nothing but the drive of blood to further its own. Random combination of genes. It is utterly insignificant.”
“Your children don’t think that,” I said. “They think family is important.”
He laughed. “Of course they think that. I have trained them to do so. It is a simple and convenient way to control them.”
“And nothing more?”
Raith rose, regarding me with casual confidence. “Nothing more. Put the sword down, Dresden. There’s no reason this has to hurt you.”
“I’ll pass. You can’t have much left in you,” I said. “I’ve given you enough of a beating to kill three or four people. You’ll stay down sooner or later.”
“I have enough left in me to deal with you,” he said, smiling. “And after that, things will change.”
“Must have been hard,” I said. “All those years. Playing it careful. Never pushing yourself or using your reserves. Not able to risk getting your hands dirty, for fear everyone would see that you couldn’t do what your kind do. Couldn’t feed.”
“It was an annoyance,” Raith said after a wary pause. He took a step toward me, testing my response. “And perhaps taught me a measure of humility, and of patience. But I never told anyone what Margaret’s curse did to me, Dresden. How did you know?”
I kept the point of the sword pointed at his chest and said, “My mother told me about it.”
“Your mother is dead, boy.”
“You’re immune to magic, too. Guess she just doesn’t have a lot of respect for the rules.”
His face darkened into an ugly, murderous mask. “She’s dead.”
I smirked at him, waving the tip of my sword in little circles.
The glow on his skin began to fade, and the darkness closed in with deadly deliberation. “It has been a pleasure speaking with you, but I am healed, wizard,” Raith snarled. “I’m going to make you beg me for death. And my first meal in decades is going to be the little police girl.”
At which point all the lights in the cavern came up at the same time, restoring the place to its slightly melodramatic but perfectly adequate lighting.
Lara stepped from behind the screen, her scarlet skirt swaying, sword on her hip, and murmured, “I think I’d like to see that, Father.”
He stopped, staring at her, his face hardening. “Lara. What do you think you’re doing?”
“Writhing in disillusionment,” she said. “You don’t love me, dearest Papa. Me, your little Lara, most dutiful daughter.”
He let out a harsh laugh. “You know better. And have for a century.”
Her beautiful face became remote. Then she said, “My head knew, Father. But my heart had hoped otherwise.”
“Your heart,” he said, scorn in his voice. “What is that? Take the wizard at once. Kill him.”
“Yes, Papa,” she said. “In a moment. What happened to Thomas?”
“The spell,” he said. “Madge lost control of it when she unleashed it at Dresden. Your brother died trying to protect him. Subdue him, dearest. And kill him.”
Lara smiled, and it was the coldest, most wintry expression I had ever seen. And I had seen some of the champs. She let out a mocking, scornful little laugh. “Did you stage that for my benefit, wizard?”
“It was a little rough,” I said. “But I think I got my point across.”
“How did you know I was watching?” she asked.
I shrugged. “Someone had to have told Raith that bullshit about the accident with the gun,” I said. “You were the only one who could have done that. And since this confrontation was going to be pivotal to your future, regardless of how it turned out, you’d be an idiot not to watch.”
“Clever,” she said again. “Not only is my father drained of his reserves, he is unable to recover more.” She lowered her eyelids, her eyes glittering like silver ice as she did. “Quite helpless, really.”
“And now you know it,” I said.
I gave Raith a very small smile.
Raith’s expression twisted into something somewhere
between rage and horror. He took a step back from Lara, looking from her to me and back.
Lara traced her fingers in light caresses over the sword at her hip. “You’ve made me the cat’s-paw for you, Dresden. While making me think I had the advantage of you. You’ve played me at my own game, and ably. I thought you capable of nothing but overt action. Clearly I underestimated you.”
“Don’t feel bad,” I said. “I mean, I look so stupid.”
Lara smiled. “I have one question more,” she said. “How did you know the curse left him unable to feed?”
“I didn’t,” I said. “Not for certain. I just thought of the worst thing I could possibly do to him. And it wasn’t killing. It was stealing. It was taking all of his power away. Leaving him to face all the enemies he’d made—with nothing. And I figured my mother might have had similar thoughts.”
Raith sneered at Lara. “You can’t kill me,” he said. “You know that the other Lords would never permit you to lead the Court. They follow me, little Lara. Not the office of the Lord of House Raith.”
“That’s true, Father,” Lara said. “But they don’t know that you have been weakened, do they? That you have been made impotent. Nor will they know, when you continue to lead them as if nothing had changed.”
He lifted his chin in an arrogant sneer. “And why should I do that?”
Silver light from Lara’s eyes spread over her. It flowed down the length of her hair. It poured over her skin, flickered over her clothing, and dazzled the very air around her. She let her sword belt fall to the ground, and silver, hungry eyes fell upon Lord Raith.
What she was doing was directed solely at him, but I was on the fringes of it. And I suddenly had pants five sizes too small. I felt the sudden, simple, delicious urge to go to her. Possibly on my knees. Possibly to stay that way.
I panicked and took a step back, making an effort to shield my thoughts from Lara’s seductive power, and it let me think almost clearly again.
“Wizard,” she said, “I suggest you take your friend from this place. And my brother, if he managed to survive the injury.” Her skirt joined the belt, and I made damned sure I wasn’t looking. “Father and I,” Lara purred, “are going to renegotiate the terms of our relationship. It promises to be interesting. And you might not be able to tear yourselves away, once I begin.”
Raith took a step back from Lara, his eyes racked with fear. And with need. He’d totally forgotten me.
I moved, and quickly. I was going to pick Murphy up, but I managed to get her moving again on her own, though she was still only half-conscious. The right side of her face was already purple with bruising. That gave me the chance to pick Thomas up. He wasn’t as tall as me, but he had more muscle and was no featherweight. I huffed and puffed and got him into a fireman’s carry, and heard him take a grating, rattling breath as I did.
My brother wasn’t dead.
At least, not yet.
I remember three more things from that night in the Deeps.
First was Madge’s body. As I turned to leave, it suddenly sat up. Spines protruded from its skin, along with rivulets of slow, dead blood. Its face was ravaged shapeless, but it formed up into the features of the demon called He Who Walks Behind, and its mouth spoke in a honey-smooth, honey-sweet, inhuman voice. “I am returned, mortal man,” the demon said through Madge’s dead lips. “And I remember thee. Thou and I, we have unfinished business between us.”
Then there was a bubbling hiss, and the corpse deflated like an empty balloon.
The second thing I remember happened as I staggered toward the exit with Thomas and Murphy. Lara slid the white shirt from her shoulders to the floor and faced Raith, lovely as the daughter of Death himself, a literal irresistible force. Timeless. Pale. Implacable. I caught the faintest scent of her hair, the smell of wild jasmine, and nearly fell to my knees on the spot. I had to force myself to keep moving, to get Thomas and Murph out of the cave. I don’t think any of us would have come out of it with our own minds if I hadn’t.
The last thing I remember was dropping to the ground on the grass outside the cave, holding Thomas. I could see his face in the starlight. There were tears in his eyes. He took a breath, but it was a broken one. His head and his neck hung at an impossible angle to his shoulders.
“God,” I whispered. “He should be dead already.”
His mouth moved in a little fluttering quiver. I don’t know how I did it, but I understood that he’d tried to say, “Better this way.”
“Like hell it is,” I said back. I felt incredibly tired.
“Hurt you,” he almost-whispered. “Maybe kill you. Like Justine. Brother. Don’t want that.”
I blinked down at him.
He didn’t know.
“Thomas,” I said. “Justine is alive. She told us where you were tonight. She’s still alive, you suicidal dolt.”
His eyes widened, and the pale radiance flooded through his skin in a startled wave. A moment later he drew in a ragged breath and coughed, thrashing weakly. He looked sunken-eyed and terrible. “Wh-what? She’s what?”
“Easy, easy, you’re going to throw up or something,” I said, holding him steady. “She’s alive. Not… not good, really, but she’s not dead. Not gone. You didn’t kill her.”
Thomas blinked several times, and then seemed to lose consciousness. He lay there, breathing quietly, and his cheeks were tracked with the trails of luminous silver tears.
My brother would be okay.
But then a thought occurred to me, and I said, “Well, crap.”
“What?” asked Murphy, blearily. She blinked her eyes at me.
I peered owlishly up at the night sky and wondered, “When is it going to be Tuesday in Switzerland?”
Chapter
Forty-two
I woke up the next morning. More specifically, I woke up the next morning when the last stone on Ebenezar’s painkilling bracelet crumbled into black dust, and my hand began reporting that it was currently dipped in molten lead.
Which, as days go, was not one of my better starts. Then again, it wasn’t the worst one, either.
Normally I’d give you some story about how manly I was to immediately attain a state of wizardly detachment and ignore the pain. But the truth was that the only reason I didn’t wake up screaming was that I was too out of breath to do it. I clenched my hand, still in dirty wrappings, to my chest and tried to remember how to walk to the freezer. Or to the nearest chopping block, one of the two.
“Whoa, whoa,” said a voice, and Thomas appeared, leaning over me. He looked rumpled and stylish, the bastard. “Sorry, Harry,” he said. “It took me a while to get something for the pain. Thought I’d have gotten back hours ago.” He pressed my shoulders to the bed and said, “Stay there. Think of… uh, pentangles or something, right? I’ll get some water.”
He reappeared a minute later with a glass of water and a couple of blue pills. “Here, take them and give them about ten minutes. You won’t feel a thing.”
He had to help me, but he was right. Ten minutes later I lay on my bed thinking that I should texture my ceiling with something. Something fuzzy and soft.
I got up, dressed in my dark fatigue pants, and shambled out into my living room, slash kitchen, slash study, slash den. Thomas was in the kitchen, humming something to himself. He hummed on-key. I guess we hadn’t gotten the same genes for music.
I sat down on my couch and watched him bustle around—as much as you can bustle when you need to take only two steps to get clear from one side of the kitchen to the other. He was cooking eggs and bacon on my wood-burning stove. He knew jack about cooking over an actual fire, so the bacon was scorched and the eggs were runny, but it looked like he was amusing himself doing it, and he dumped burned bits, underdone bits, or bits he simply elected to discard on the floor at the foot of the stove. The puppy and the cat were both there, with Mister eating anything he chose to and the puppy dutifully cleaning up whatever Mister judged unworthy of his advanced palate.
“Heya, man,” he said. “You aren’t gonna feel hungry, but you should try to eat something, okay? Good for you and all that.”
“Okay,” I said agreeably.
He slapped the eggs and bacon more or less randomly onto a couple of plates, brought me one, and kept one for himself. We ate. It was awful, but my hand didn’t hurt. You take what you can get in this life.
“Harry,” Thomas said after a moment.
I looked up at him.
He said, “You came to get me.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“You saved my life.”
I mused on it. “Yeah,” I agreed a moment later. I kept eating.
“Thank you.”
I shook my head. “Nothing.”
“No, it isn’t,” he said. “You risked yourself. You risked your friend Murphy, too.”
“Yeah,” I said again. “Well. We’re family, right?”
“Too right we are,” he said, a lopsided smile on his mouth. “Which is why I want to ask you a favor.”
“You want me to go back with you,” I said. “Feel things out with Lara. Visit Justine. See which way the future lies.”
He blinked at me. “How did you know?”
“I’d do it too.”
He nodded quietly. Then said, “You’ll go?”
“As long as we do it before Tuesday.”
Murphy came by on Monday, to report that the investigation had determined that Emma’s shooting was a tragic accident. Since no prints had been found, and the eyewitness (and owner of the weapon) had vanished, I wasn’t in any danger of catching a murder rap. It still looked as fishy as a tuna boat, and it wouldn’t win me any new friends among the authorities, but at least I wouldn’t be going to the pokey this time around.
It was hard for me to concentrate on Murphy’s words. Raith had partially dislocated her lower jaw, and the bruises looked like hell. Despite the happy blue pain pills, when I saw Murphy I actually heard myself growling in rage at her injury. Murphy didn’t talk much more than business, but her look dared me to make some kind of chivalrous commentary. I didn’t, and she didn’t break my nose, by way of fair exchange.