Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  But I got him in the fire extinguisher.

  The grendelkin let out a howl about two octaves higher than his original bellows had been, and I scooted around him, running for the altar stone where Elizabeth Braddock lay helpless—away from Gard. I wanted the grendelkin to focus all his attention on me.

  He did.

  “Behind you!” Elizabeth screamed, her eyes wide with terror.

  I whirled and a sweep of the grendelkin’s arm ripped the staff out of my hand. Something like a steel vise clamped around my neck, and my feet came up off the ground.

  The grendelkin lifted my face to his level. His breath smelled of blood and rotten meat. His eyes were bright with their fury. I kicked at him, but he held me out of reach of anything vital, and my kicks plunked uselessly into his belly and ribs.

  “I was going to make it quick for you,” he snarled. “For amusing me. But I’m going to start with your arms.”

  If I didn’t have him right where I wanted him, I’d have been less than sanguine about my chances of survival. I’d accomplished that much, at least. He had his back to the tunnel.

  “Rip them off one at a time, little seidrmadr.” He paused. “Which, when viewed from a literary perspective, has a certain amount of irony.” He showed me more teeth. “I’ll let you watch me eat your hands. Let you see what I do to these bitches before I’m done with you.”

  Boy, was he going to get it.

  One of his hands grabbed my left arm, and the pain of my dislocated shoulder made my world go white. I fought through the agony, ripped Elizabeth Braddock’s pointy-handled hairbrush from my duster’s pocket, and drove it like an ice pick into the grendelkin’s forearm.

  He roared and flung me into the nearest wall.

  Which hurt. Lots.

  I fell to the stone floor of the cavern in a heap. After that, my vision shrank to a tunnel and began to darken.

  This was just as well—fewer distractions, that way. Now all I had to do was time it right.

  A sound groaned down from the tunnel entrance above, an odd, ululating murmur, echoed into unintelligibility.

  The furious grendelkin ripped the brush out of his arm and flung it away—but when he heard the sound, he turned his ugly kisser back toward the source.

  I focused harder on the spell I had coming than upon anything I’d ever done. I had no circle to help me, lots of distractions, and absolutely no room to screw it up.

  The strange sound resolved itself into a yowling chorus, like half a hundred band saws on helium, and Mouse burst out of the tunnel with a living thunderstorm of malks in hot pursuit.

  My dog flung himself into the empty air, and malks bounded after him, determined not to let him escape. Mouse fell thirty feet, onto the huge pile of nesting material, landing with a yelp. The malks spilled after him, yowling in fury, dozens and dozens of malevolent eyes glittering in the light of the flare. Some jumped, some flowed seamlessly down the rough stairs, and others bounded forward, sank their claws into the stone of the far wall, and slid down it like a fireman down a pole.

  I unleashed the spell.

  “Useless vermin!” bellowed the grendelkin, his voice still pitched higher than before. He pointed at me, a battered-looking man in a long leather coat, and roared, “Kill the wizard or I’ll eat every last one of you!”

  The malks, now driven as much by fear as anger, immediately swarmed all over me. I gave them a pretty good time of it, but there were probably better than three dozen of them, and the leather coat couldn’t cover everything.

  Claws and fangs flashed.

  Blood spattered.

  The malks went insane with bloodlust.

  I screamed, swinging wildly with both hands, killing a malk here or there, but unable to protect myself from all those claws and teeth. The grendelkin turned toward the helpless Elizabeth.

  It was a real bitch, trying to undo the grendelkin’s knotted ropes while still holding the illusion in place in my mind. Beneath the glamour that made him look like me, he fought furiously, clawing and swinging at the malks attacking him. It didn’t help that Elizabeth was screaming again, thanks to the illusion of the grendelkin I was holding over myself, but hey. No plan is perfect.

  “Mouse!” I cried.

  A malk flew over my head, screaming, and splattered against a wall.

  My dog bounded up just as I got the girl loose. I shoved her at him and said, “Get her out of here! Run! Go, go, go!”

  Elizabeth didn’t know what the hell was going on, but she understood that last part well enough. She fled, back toward the crude staircase. Mouse ran beside her, and when a malk flung itself at Elizabeth’s naked back, my dog intercepted the little monster in the air, catching it as neatly as a Frisbee at the park. Mouse snarled and shook his jaws once. The malk’s neck broke with an audible snap. My dog dropped it and fled on.

  I grabbed my staff and ran to Gard. The malks hadn’t noticed her yet. They were still busy mobbing the grendelkin—

  Crap. My concentration had wavered. It looked like itself again, as did I.

  I whirled and focused my will upon the giant pile of clean-picked bones. I extended my staff and snarled, “Counterspell this. Forzare!”

  Hundreds of pounds of sharp white bone flung themselves at the grendelkin and the malks alike. I threw the bones hard, harder than the grendelkin had thrown his rock, and the bone shards ripped into them like the blast of an enormous shotgun.

  Without waiting to see the results, I snatched up the still-burning flare and flung it into the pile of nesting fabric, bloody clothes, and old newspapers. The whole mound flared instantly into angry light and smothering smoke.

  “Get up!” I screamed at Gard. One side of her face was bruised and swollen, and she had a visibly broken arm, one of the bones in her forearm protruding from the skin. With my help, she staggered up, dazed and choking on the smoke, which also blotted out the light. I got her onto the stairs, and even in our battered state, we set some kind of speed record going up them.

  The deafening chorus of bellowing grendelkin and howling malks faded a little as the smoke started choking them, too. Air was moving in the tunnel, as the fire drew on it just as it might a chimney. I lit up my amulet again to show us the way out.

  “Wait!” Gard gasped, fifty feet up the tunnel. “Wait!”

  She fumbled at her jacket pocket, where she kept the little ivory box, but she couldn’t reach it with her sound arm. I dug it out for her.

  “Triangle, three lines over it,” she said, leaning against a wall for support. “Get it out.”

  I poked through the little ivory Scrabble tiles until I found one that matched her description. “This one?” I demanded.

  “Careful,” she growled. “It’s a Sunder rune.” She grabbed it from me, took a couple of steps back toward the grendelkin’s cavern, murmured under her breath, and snapped the little tile. There was a flicker of deep red light, and the tunnel itself quivered and groaned.

  “Run!”

  We did.

  Behind us, the tunnel collapsed in on itself with a roar, sealing the malks and the grendelkin away beneath us, trapping them in the smothering smoke.

  We both stopped for a moment after that, as dust billowed up the tunnel and the sound of furious supernatural beings cut off as if someone had flipped a switch. The silence was deafening.

  We both stood there, panting and wounded. Gard sank to the floor to rest.

  “You were right,” I said. “I guess we didn’t need to worry about the malks on the way out.”

  Gard gave me a weary smile. “That was my favorite ax.”

  “Go back for it,” I suggested. “I’ll wait for you here.”

  She snorted.

  Mouse came shambling up out of the tunnel above us. Elizabeth Braddock clung to his collar, and looked acutely embarrassed about her lack of clothing. “Wh-what?” she whispered. “What happened here? I d-don’t understand.”

  “It’s all right, Mrs. Braddock,” I said. “You’re safe. We�
��re going to take you back to your husband.”

  She closed her eyes, shuddered, and started to cry. She sank down to put her arms around Mouse’s furry ruff, and buried her face in his fur. She was shivering with the cold. I shucked out of my coat and draped it around her.

  Gard eyed her, then her own broken arm, and let out a sigh. “I need a drink.”

  I spat some grit out of my mouth. “Ditto. Come on.”

  I offered her a hand up. She took it.

  SEVERAL HOURS AND doctors later, Gard and I wound up back at the pub, where the beer festival was winding to a conclusion. We sat at a table with Mac. The Braddocks had stammered a gratuitous number of thanks and rushed off together. Mac’s keg had a blue ribbon taped to it. He’d drawn all of us a mug.

  “Night of the Living Brews,” I said. I had painkillers for my shoulder, but I was waiting until I was home and in bed to take one. As a result, I ached pretty much everywhere. “More like night of the living bruise.”

  Mac rose, drained his mug, and held it up in a salute to Gard and me. “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  Gard smiled slightly and bowed her head to him. Mac departed.

  Gard finished her own mug and examined the cast on her arm. “Close one.”

  “Little bit,” I said. “Can I ask you something?”

  She nodded.

  “The grendelkin called you a Geat,” I said.

  “Yes, he did.”

  “I’m familiar with only one person referred to in that way,” I said.

  “There are a few more around,” Gard said. “But everyone’s heard of that one.”

  “You called the grendelkin a scion of Grendel,” I said. “Am I to take it that you’re a scion of the Geat?”

  Gard smiled slightly. “My family and the grendelkin’s have a long history.”

  “He called you a Chooser,” I said.

  She shrugged again, and kept her enigmatic smile.

  “Gard isn’t your real name,” I said. “Is it?”

  “Of course not,” she replied.

  I sipped some more of Mac’s award-winning dark. “You’re a Valkyrie. A real one.”

  Her expression was unreadable.

  “I thought Valkyries mostly did pickups and deliveries,” I said. “Choosing the best warriors from among the slain. Taking them off to Valhalla. Oh, and serving drinks there. Odin’s virgin daughters, pouring mead for the warriors, partying until Ragnarok.”

  Gard threw back her head and laughed. “Virgin daughters.” She rose, shaking her head, and glanced at her broken arm again. Then she leaned down and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were a sweet, hungry little fire of sensation, and I felt the kiss all the way to my toes—some places more than others, ahem.

  She drew away slowly, her pale blue eyes shining. Then she winked at me and said, “Don’t believe everything you read, Dresden.” She turned to go, then paused to glance over her shoulder. “Though, to be honest, sometimes he does like us to call him Daddy. I’m Sigrun.”

  I watched Sigrun go. Then I finished the last of the beer. Mouse rose expectantly, his tail wagging, and we set off for home.

  Mike

  Harry

  I had to push the Blue Beetle the last thirty feet and into the parking lot of Mad Mike’s Motorcycle and Volkswagen Repair. Then, because it was on a slope, all six-feet and eight or nine inches of me had to jump into the Bug and steer it toward one of the repair bays.

  When I hit the brakes they screamed protest.

  And the driver-side door fell off.

  I staggered out of the car, scowled in drunken exhaustion down at the door and said, “You’re weak. And your line is weak.”

  From an office inside the grimy garage came the sound of a flushing toilet, and Mike Atagi appeared, a man who had looked like he was in his mid-fifties by thirty and just stayed that way. He was a lean guy with shaggy grey hair and still-black beard.

  “My God,” he said, eyeing the Beetle’s corpse. “What happened this time?”

  “Would you believe me if I said I was attacked by a giant owl?” I asked.

  “No, man,” Mike said, half of his mouth curling up lazily. “Cause you’re a lunatic. But your money spends fine, right?”

  “I’ll take it,” I said, grinning, and shook his hand. “Can you help?”

  “Could build a Bug from raw steel if I had to,” Mike said, and started a walkaround of the car.

  He paused at the puncture marks in the car’s roof. I mean, they looked exactly like what they were — the evidence of contact with an enormous creature with talons that could shred through steel.

  “Seriously,” he said. “Level with me. What happened?”

  I’d been being level the whole time. You would not believe how level I’d been.

  But what Mike was asking me for wasn’t the same as what he wanted. He didn’t really want to know what had happened to my car. He wanted to know that the world he knew was still there.

  “I was doing a stakeout on a case,” I said. “Some mob guys came after me with a backhoe, of all the cockamamie things.”

  “Hah,” he said. “Knew it. You’re living an exciting life, kid. Like a bad TV show.” He squinted at the Beetle’s wounds and then at me. “How much do you want to spend?”

  “Ideally, I would bake you a plate of cookies,” I said.

  He snorted. “The usual deal, then. Cheap, fast, or good, pick two.”

  “Cheap and good,” I said.

  “Yeah,” Mike said. “That’s you, all right.”

  It's My Birthday, Too

  Harry

  Hey, Miyagi-san,” my apprentice said. Her jeans still dripped with purple-brown mucus. “You think the dry cleaner can get this out?”

  I threw my car keys down on my kitchen counter, leaned my slimed, rune-carved wooden staff next to them, and said, “The last time I took something stained by a slime golem to a cleaner, the owner burned his place down the next day and tried to collect on the insurance.”

  Molly, my apprentice, was just barely out of her teens, and it was impossible not to notice what great legs she had when she stripped out of her trendily mangled jeans. She wrinkled her nose as she tossed them into the kitchen trash can. “Have I told you how much I love the wizard business, Harry?”

  “Neither of us is in the hospital, kid. This was a good day at work.” I took my mantled leather duster off. It was generously covered in splatters of the sticky, smelly mucus as well. I toted it over to the fireplace in my basement apartment, which I keep going during the winter. Given that I have to live without the benefits of electricity, it’s necessary. I made sure the fire was burning strongly and tossed the coat in.

  “Hey!” Molly said. “Not the coat!”

  “Relax,” I told her. “The spells on it should protect it. They’ll bake the slime hard and I’ll chisel it off tomorrow.”

  “Oh, good. I like the coat.” The girl subsided as she tossed her secondhand combat boots and socks into my trash after her ruined jeans. She was tall for a woman and built like a schoolboy’s fantasy of the Scandinavian exchange student. Her hair was shoulder length and the color of white gold, except for the tips, which had been dyed in a blend of blue, red, and purple. She’d lost a couple of the piercings she’d previously worn on her face, and was now down to only one eyebrow, one nostril, her tongue, and her lower lip. She went over to the throw rug in the middle of my living room floor, hauled it to one side, and opened the trapdoor leading down to my lab in the subbasement. She lit a candle in the fire, wrinkling her nose at the stink from the greasy smoke coming up from my coat, and padded down the stepladder stairs into the lab.

  Mouse, my pet saber-toothed retriever, trotted out of my bedroom and spread his doggy jaws in a big yawn, wagging his shaggy grey tail. He took one step toward me, then froze as the smell of the mucus hit his nose. The big grey dog turned around at once and padded back into the bedroom.

  “Coward!” I called after him. I glanced up at Miste
r, my tomcat, who drowsed upon the top of my heaviest bookshelf, catching the updraft from the fireplace. “At least you haven’t deserted me.”

  Mister glanced at me, then gave his head a little shake as the pungent smoke from the fireplace rose to him. He flicked his ears at me, obviously annoyed, and descended from the bookshelf with gracefully offended dignity to follow Mouse into the relative aromatic safety of my bedroom.

  “Wimp,” I muttered. I eyed my staff. It was crusty with the ichor. I’d have to take it off with sandpaper and repair the carvings. I’d probably have to do the blasting rod, too. Stupid freaking amateurs, playing with things they didn’t understand. Slime golems are just disgusting.

  Molly thumped back up the stairs, now dressed in her backup clothes. Her experiences in training with me had taught her that lesson in about six months, and she had a second set of clothing stored in a gym bag underneath the little desk I let her keep in the lab. She came up in a black broomstick skirt—those skirts that are supposed to look wrinkled—and Birkenstocks, inappropriate for the winter weather but way less inappropriate than black athletic panties. “Harry, are you going to be able to drive me home?”

  I frowned and checked the clock. It was after nine—too late for a young woman to trust herself to Chicago’s public transportation. Given Molly’s skills, she probably wouldn’t be in any real danger, but it was best not to tempt fate. “Could you call your folks?”

  She shook her head. “On Valentine’s Day? Are you kidding? They’ll have barricaded themselves upstairs and forced the older kids to wear the little ones out so they’ll sleep through the noise.” Molly shuddered. “I’m not interrupting them. Way too disturbing.”

  “Valentine’s Day,” I groaned. “Dammit.”

  “What?”

  “Oh, I forgot, what with the excitement. It’s, uh, someone’s birthday. I got them a present and wanted to get it to them today.”

  “Oh?” Molly chirped. “Who?”

  I hesitated for a minute, but Molly had earned a certain amount of candor—and trust. “Thomas,” I said.