Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  “Could,” he said. “So my advice to you, Dresden. Watch your back.”

  “Gee. Thanks.”

  “No charge.” He paused for a second as someone spoke in the background, then said, “Ivy says to tell your kitty hello for her.” He hung up.

  I put the phone down, thoughtful. When I turned around Thomas was sitting up on the couch. Silently he offered me the business card with Kincaid’s account number and the amount of the bill on it.

  “Found it in the laundry,” he said.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” I said.

  “I know,” he replied.

  “You really have that much money?”

  He shook his head. “Not anymore. That was pretty much everything I’d set aside. I hadn’t made a lot of plans for independence. I figured I’d either be dead or running things. I’ve got about fifty bucks to my name now.”

  I sat down on the couch. The puppy snuffled me with his nose and wagged his tail in greeting.

  “Where are you going to go?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Guess I can do what my cousin Madrigal does: find some rich girl.” He grimaced. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “Look,” I said. “You really saved my ass. Crash here for a while.”

  “I don’t want charity.”

  “It isn’t,” I said. “Think of that money transfer as a rent payment. You can have the couch until you get your feet under you again. It’ll be crowded, maybe, but it isn’t forever.”

  He nodded. “You sure?”

  “Sure.”

  Later Thomas went to the grocery store and I went down to the lab to talk to Bob. I filled him in on events.

  “You’re sure?” Bob asked. “It was He Who Walks Behind?”

  I shivered. “Yeah. Thought I’d killed him.”

  “Walkers aren’t killable, Harry,” Bob said. “When you tore him up before, it banished him from the mortal realm. Might have hurt him, made him take time to heal up. But he’s still out there.”

  “That’s comforting,” I said. I unwrapped my burned hand.

  “Yuck,” said Bob.

  “Can you see anything about the injury?” I asked.

  “Burned meat and nerve damage, looks like,” Bob said. “Hmm, I think it still has reflexes, though. I bet you could use it a little if you did it without thinking about it.”

  I frowned. “You’re right. I think I did during the fight with Raith. But look at this.” I opened my stiff fingers with my right hand.

  There was unburned flesh there, just as the doctor had observed. What he didn’t know was that the unharmed flesh was in the shape of a sigil in angelic script—the name of one of the Fallen angels. Specifically, the same entity imprisoned in an ancient silver coin, at that very moment trapped under two feet of concrete and half a dozen warding spells on the far side of the lab.

  “Lasciel,” Bob said. His voice was worried.

  “I thought she was locked up. I thought she couldn’t touch me from there, Bob.”

  “She can’t,” Bob said, bewildered. “I mean, that’s impossible. There’s no way she should be able to reach out from there.”

  “Sounds kind of familiar,” I muttered. I wrapped up my hand again. “But that’s what I thought too. And my staff is acting weird. When I start to run power through it, I’m getting excess heat. The runes start glowing like embers and there smoke curling up out of them. Seemed like my workings with the staff were coming out a lot bigger than I wanted, too. Did I blow something on the preparation?”

  “Maybe,” Bob said. “But, uh. Well, it sounds a lot like Hellfire. I hear that some of the Fallen really love it.”

  “What?”

  “Hellfire,” Bob said. “Uh, it’s sort of an alternate power source. Not a pleasant one, but man, you could really turbocharge violent spells with it.”

  “I know what Hellfire is, Bob.”

  “Oh. Right. Why are you using it then, Harry?”

  I said through clenched teeth, “I don’t know. I didn’t mean to. I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

  “Hell,” Bob said. “Heh. You made with the funny, boss.”

  I had involuntary access to Hellfire. How had that happened?

  Lasciel’s sigil on my left palm was the only cool spot on my burning hand.

  Hell’s bells. I shook my head and headed for the ladder back up.

  As I left Bob said, “Hey, Harry?”

  “Yeah?”

  The orange lights in the skull glowed eagerly. “Tell me again about Murphy’s ass.”

  Thomas came back from the store later that day. “Got the puppy a bowl and a collar and food and so on. Nice little guy. Real quiet. Don’t think I’ve heard him whine at all.” He tousled the puppy’s ears. “You decide on a name?”

  The puppy cocked his head to one side, ears tilted up with interest, dark little eyes on my face.

  “I never said I was keeping him,” I said.

  Thomas snorted. “Yeah. Right.”

  I frowned down at the puppy. “He’s tiny. He’s grey. He doesn’t make much noise,” I said after a minute. I dropped to a knee and held my hand out to the little dog. “How about Mouse?”

  Mouse bounced straight up in a fit of eager puppy joy and romped over to lick my hand and chew gently on one of my fingers.

  Thomas smiled, though it was a little sad. “I like it,” he said.

  We started putting groceries away, and it was the strangest feeling. I was used to being alone. Now there was someone else in my personal space. Someone I didn’t mind being there. Thomas was all but a stranger, but at the same time he wasn’t. The bond I sensed between us was not made weaker by being inexplicable, no less absolute for being illogical.

  I had a family. Hell, I had a dog.

  This was a huge change. I was happy about it, but at the same time I realized that it was going to be a big adjustment. My place was going to be pretty crowded, pretty fast, but once Thomas got into his own apartment, it would be more normal. I don’t think either one of us wanted to be tripping all over each other every time we turned around.

  I felt myself smiling. It looked like life was looking up.

  I had started feeling a little crowded already, sure. But I took a deep breath and brushed it back. Thomas wouldn’t be here too long, and the dog was certainly a lot smaller than Mister. I could handle a little claustrophobia.

  I frowned at a giant green bag and asked Thomas, “Hey. Why did you get large breed Puppy Chow?”

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Chapter Twenty-seven

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-one

  Chapter Thirty-two

  Chapter Thirty-three

  Chapter Thirty-four

  Chapter Thirty-five

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-one

  Chapter Forty-two

  Chapter Forty-three

  Chapter

  One

  On the whole, we�
��re a murderous race.

  According to Genesis, it took as few as four people to make the planet too crowded to stand, and the first murder was a fratricide. Genesis says that in a fit of jealous rage, the very first child born to mortal parents, Cain, snapped and popped the first metaphorical cap in another human being. The attack was a bloody, brutal, violent, reprehensible killing. Cain’s brother Abel probably never saw it coming.

  As I opened the door to my apartment, I was filled with a sense of empathic sympathy and intuitive understanding.

  For freaking Cain.

  My apartment isn’t much more than a big room in the basement of a century-old wooden boardinghouse in Chicago. There’s a kitchen built into an alcove, a big fireplace almost always lit, a bedroom the size of the bed of a pickup truck, and a bathroom that barely fits a sink, toilet, and shower. I can’t afford really good furniture, so it’s all secondhand, but comfortable. I have a lot of books on shelves, a lot of rugs, a lot of candles. It isn’t much, but at least it’s clean.

  Or used to be.

  The rugs were in total disarray, exposing bare patches of stone floor. One of the easy chairs had fallen over onto its back, and no one had picked it up. Cushions were missing from the couch, and the curtains had been torn down from one of the sunken windows, letting in a swath of late-afternoon sunshine, all the better to illuminate the books that had been knocked down from one of my shelves and scattered everywhere, bending paperback covers, leaving hardbacks all the way open, and generally messing up my primary source of idle entertainment.

  The fireplace was more or less the epicenter of the slobquake. There were discarded clothes there, a couple of empty wine bottles, and a plate that looked suspiciously clean—doubtless the cleanup work of the other residents.

  I took a stunned step into my home. As I did my big grey tom, Mister, bounded down from his place on top of one of the bookshelves, but rather than give me his usual shoulder-block of greeting, he flicked his tail disdainfully at me and ghosted out the front door.

  I sighed, walked over to the kitchen alcove, and checked. The cat’s bowls of food and water were both empty. No wonder he was grumpy.

  A shaggy section of the kitchen floor hauled itself to its feet and came to meet me with a sheepish, sleepy shuffle. My dog, Mouse, had started off as a fuzzy little grey puppy that fit into my coat pocket. Now, almost a year later, I sometimes wished I’d sent my coat to the cleaners or something. Mouse had gone from fuzz ball to fuzz barge. You couldn’t guess at a breed to look at him, but at least one of his parents must have been a wooly mammoth. The dog’s shoulders came nearly to my waist, and the vet didn’t think he was finished growing yet. That translated into an awful lot of beast for my tiny apartment.

  Oh, and Mouse’s bowls were empty, too. He nuzzled my hand, his muzzle stained with what looked suspiciously like spaghetti sauce, and then pawed at his bowls, scraping them over the patch of linoleum floor.

  “Dammit, Mouse,” I growled, Cain-like. “It’s still like this? If he’s here, I’m going to kill him.”

  Mouse let out a chuffing breath that was about as much commentary as he ever made, and followed placidly a couple of steps behind me as I walked over to the closed bedroom door.

  Just as I got there, the door opened, and an angel-faced blonde wearing nothing but a cotton T-shirt appeared in it. Not a long shirt, either. It didn’t cover all of her rib cage.

  “Oh,” she drawled, with a slow and sleepy smile. “Excuse me. I didn’t know anyone else was here.” Without a trace of modesty, she slunk into the living room, pawing through the mess near the fireplace, extracting pieces of clothing. From the languid, satisfied way she moved, I figured she expected me to be staring at her, and that she didn’t mind it at all.

  At one time I would have been embarrassed as hell by this kind of thing, and probably sneaking covert glances. But after living with my half brother the incubus for most of a year, I mostly found it annoying. I rolled my eyes and asked, “Thomas?”

  “Tommy? Shower, I think,” the girl said. She slipped into jogging wear—sweatpants, a matching jacket, expensive shoes. “Do me a favor? Tell him that it—”

  I interrupted her in an impatient voice. “That it was a lot of fun, you’ll always treasure it, but that it was a onetime thing and that you hope he grows up to find a nice girl or be president or something.”

  She stared at me and then knitted her blond brows into a frown. “You don’t have to be such a bast—” Then her eyes widened. “Oh. Oh! I’m sorry—oh, my God.” She leaned toward me, blushing, and said in a between-us-girls whisper, “I would never have guessed that he was with a man. How do the two of you manage on that tiny bed?”

  I blinked and said, “Now wait a minute.”

  But she ignored me and walked out, murmuring, “He is such a naughty boy.”

  I glared at her back. Then I glared at Mouse.

  Mouse’s tongue lolled out in a doggy grin, his dark tail waving gently.

  “Oh, shut up,” I told him, and closed the door. I heard the whisper of water running through the pipes in my shower. I put out food for Mister and Mouse, and the dog partook immediately. “He could have fed the damned dog, at least,” I muttered, and opened the fridge.

  I rummaged through it, but couldn’t find what I was after anywhere, and it was the last straw. My frustration grew into a fire somewhere inside my eyeballs, and I straightened from the icebox with mayhem in mind.

  “Hey,” came Thomas’s voice from behind me. “We’re out of beer.”

  I turned around and glared at my half brother.

  Thomas was a shade over six feet tall, and I guess now that I’d had time to get used to the idea, he looked something like me: stark cheekbones, a long face, a strong jaw. But whatever sculptor had done the finishing work on Thomas had foisted my features off on his apprentice or something. I’m not ugly or anything, but Thomas looked like someone’s painting of the forgotten Greek god of body cologne. He had long hair so dark that light itself could not escape it, and even fresh from the shower it was starting to curl. His eyes were the color of thunderclouds, and he never did a single moment of exercise to earn the gratuitous amount of ripple in his musculature. He was wearing jeans and no shirt—his standard household uniform. I once saw him in the same outfit answer the door to speak to a female missionary, and she’d assaulted him in a cloud of forgotten copies of The Watchtower. The tooth marks she left had been interesting.

  It hadn’t been the girl’s fault, entirely. Thomas had inherited his father’s blood as a vampire of the White Court. He was a psychic predator, feeding on the raw life force of human beings—usually easiest to gain through the intimate contact of sex. That part of him surrounded him in the kind of aura that turned heads wherever he went. When Thomas made the effort to turn up the supernatural come-hither, women literally couldn’t tell him no. By the time he started feeding, they couldn’t even want to tell him no. He was killing them, just a little bit, but he had to do it to stay sane, and he never took it any further than a single feeding.

  He could have. Those the White Court chose as their prey became ensnared in the ecstasy of being fed upon, and became increasingly enslaved by their vampire lover. But Thomas never pushed it that far. He’d made that mistake once, and the woman he had loved now drifted through life in a wheelchair, bound in a deathly euphoria because of his touch.

  I clenched my teeth and reminded myself that it wasn’t easy for Thomas. Then I told myself that I was repeating myself way too many times and to shut up. “I know there’s no beer,” I growled. “Or milk. Or Coke.”

  “Um,” he said.

  “And I see that you didn’t have time to feed Mister and Mouse. Did you take Mouse outside, at least?”

  “Well sure,” he said. “I mean, uh…I took him out this morning when you were leaving for work, remember? That’s where I met Angie.”

  “Another jogger,” I said, once more Cain-like. “You told me you weren’t going to keep bringing stran
gers back here, Thomas. And on my freaking bed? Hell’s bells, man, look at this place.”

  He did, and I saw it dawn on him, as if he literally hadn’t seen it before. He let out a groan. “Damn. Harry, I’m sorry. It was…Angie is a really…really intense and, uh, athletic person and I didn’t realize that…” He paused and picked up a copy of Dean Koontz’s Watchers. He tried to fold the crease out of the cover. “Wow,” he added lamely. “The place is sort of trashed.”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “You were here all day. You said you’d take Mouse to the vet. And clean up a little. And get groceries.”

  “Oh, come on,” he said. “What’s the big deal?”

  “I don’t have a beer,” I growled. I looked around at the rubble. “And I got a call from Murphy at work today. She said she’d be dropping by.”

  Thomas lifted his eyebrows. “Oh, yeah? No offense, Harry, but I’m doubting it was a booty call.”

  I glared. “Would you stop it with that already?”

  “I’m telling you, you should just ask her out and get it over with. She’d say yes.”

  I slammed the door to the icebox. “It isn’t like that,” I said.

  “Yeah, okay,” Thomas said mildly.

  “It isn’t. We work together. We’re friends. That’s all.”

  “Right,” he agreed.

  “I am not interested in dating Murphy,” I said. “And she’s not interested in me.”

  “Sure, sure. I hear you.” He rolled his eyes and started picking up fallen books. “Which is why you want the place looking nice. So your business friend won’t mind staying around for a little bit.”