by Jim Butcher
“I’m out!” Murphy screamed.
I whirled back to find LeBlanc pushing herself off the wall, regaining her balance. She gave Murphy a look of flat hatred, and her eyes flushed pure black, iris and sclera alike. She opened her mouth in an inhuman scream, and then the vampire hiding beneath LeBlanc’s seemingly human form exploded outward like a racehorse emerging from its gate, leaving shreds of pale, bloodless skin in its wake.
It was a hideous thing—black and flabby and slimy looking, with a flaccid belly, a batlike face, and long, spindly limbs. LeBlanc’s eyes bulged hideously as she flew toward me.
I brought my shield up in time to intercept her, and she rebounded from it, to fall back to the section of floor already stained with her blood.
“Down!” Murphy shouted.
I dropped down onto my heels and lowered the shield.
LeBlanc rose up again, even as I heard Murphy take a deep breath, exhale halfway, and hold it. Her gun barked once.
The vampire lost about a fifth of her head as the bullet tore into her skull. She staggered back against the wall, limbs thrashing, but she still wasn’t dead. She began to claw her way to her feet again.
Murphy squeezed off six more shots, methodically. None of them missed. LeBlanc fell to the floor. Murphy took a step closer, aimed, and put another ten or twelve rounds into the fallen vampire’s head. By the time she was done, the vampire’s skull looked like a smashed gourd.
A few seconds later, LeBlanc stopped moving.
Murphy reloaded again and kept the gun trained on the corpse.
“Nice shootin’, Tex,” I said. I checked out Maroon. He was still breathing.
“So,” Murphy said, “problem solved?”
“Not really,” I said. “LeBlanc was no practitioner. She can’t be the one who was working the whammy.”
Murphy frowned and eyed Maroon for a second.
I went over to the downed man and touched my fingers lightly to his brow. There was no telltale energy signature of a practitioner. “Nope.”
“Who, then?”
I shook my head. “This is delicate, difficult magic. There might not be three people on the entire White Council who could pull it off. So … it’s most likely a focus artifact of some kind.”
“A what?”
“An item that has a routine built into it,” I said. “You pour energy in one end, and you get results on the other.”
Murphy scrunched up her nose. “Like those wolf belts the FBI had?”
“Yeah, just like that.” I blinked and snapped my fingers. “Just like that!”
I hurried out of the little complex and up the ladder. I went to the tunnel car and took the old leather seat belt out of it. I turned it over and found the back inscribed with nearly invisible sigils and signs. Now that I was looking for it, I could feel the tingle of energy moving within it. “Hah,” I said. “Got it.”
Murphy frowned back at the entry to the Tunnel of Terror. “What do we do about Billy the Kid?”
“Not much we can do,” I said. “You want to try to explain what happened here to the Springfield cops?”
She shook her head.
“Me, either,” I said. “The kid was LeBlanc’s thrall. I doubt he’s a danger to anyone without a vampire to push him into it.” Besides, the Reds would probably kill him on general principles, anyway, once they found out about LeBlanc’s death.
We were silent for a moment, then stepped in close to each other and hugged gently. Murphy shivered.
“You okay?” I asked quietly.
She leaned her head against my chest. “How do we help all the people she screwed with?”
“Burn the belt,” I said, and stroked her hair with one hand. “That should purify everyone it’s linked to.”
“Everyone,” she said slowly.
I blinked twice. “Yeah.”
“So once you do it … we’ll see what a bad idea this is. And remember that we both have very good reasons to not get together.”
“Yeah.”
“And … we won’t be feeling this anymore. This … happy. This complete.”
“No. We won’t.”
Her voice cracked. “Dammit.”
I hugged her tight. “Yeah.”
“I want to tell you to wait awhile,” she said. “I want us to be all noble and virtuous for keeping it intact. I want to tell you that if we destroy the belt, we’ll be destroying the happiness of God knows how many people.”
“Junkies are happy when they’re high,” I said quietly, “but they don’t need to be happy. They need to be free.”
I put the belt back into the car, turned my right hand palm up, and murmured a word. A sphere of white-hot fire gathered over my fingers. I flicked a hand, and the sphere arched gently down into the car and began charring the belt to ashes. I felt sick.
I didn’t watch. I turned to Karrin and kissed her again, hot and urgent, and she returned the kiss frantically. It was as though we thought we might keep something from escaping our mouths if they were sealed together in a kiss.
I felt it when it went away.
We both stiffened slightly. We both remembered that we had decided the two of us couldn’t work out. We both remembered that Murphy was already involved with someone else and that it wasn’t in her nature to stray.
She stepped back from me, her arms folded across her stomach.
“Ready?” I asked her quietly.
She nodded, and we started walking. Neither of us said anything until we reached the Blue Beetle.
“You know what, Harry?” she said quietly from the other side of the car.
“I know,” I told her. “Like you said, love hurts.”
We got into the Beetle and headed back to Chicago.
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 Forty-four
Chapter Forty-five
Chapter Forty-six
Chapter Forty-seven
Chapter Forty-eight
Chapter Forty-nine
Chapter
One
I answered the phone, and Susan Rodriguez said, “They’ve taken our daughter.”
I sat there for a long five count, swallowed, and said, “Um. What?”
“You heard me, Harry,” Susan said gently.
“Oh,” I said. “Um.”
“The line isn’t secure,” she said. “I’ll be in town tonight. We can talk then.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”
“Harry …” she said. “I’m not … I never wanted to—” She cut the words off with an impatient sigh. I heard a voice over the loudspeaker in the background, saying somethin
g in Spanish. “We’ll have time for that later. The plane is boarding. I’ve got to go. About twelve hours.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll … I’ll be here.”
She hesitated, as if about to say something else, but then she hung up.
I sat there with the phone against my ear. After a while, it started making that double-speed busy-signal noise.
Our daughter.
She said our daughter.
I hung the phone up. Or tried. I missed the base. The receiver clattered to the floor.
Mouse, my big, shaggy grey dog, rose up from his usual napping spot in the tiny kitchenette my basement apartment boasted, and came trotting over to sit down at my feet, staring up at me with dark, worried doggy eyes. After a moment, he made a little huffing sound, then carefully picked the receiver up in his jaws and settled it onto the base. Then he went back to staring worriedly at me.
“I …” I paused, trying to get my head around the concept. “I … I might have a child.”
Mouse made an uncertain, high-pitched noise.
“Yeah. How do you think I feel?” I stared at the far wall. Then I stood up and reached for my coat. “I … think I need a drink,” I said. I nodded, focusing on nothing. “Yeah. Something like this … yeah.”
Mouse made a distressed noise and rose.
“Sure,” I told him. “You can come. Hell, maybe you can drive me home or something.”
I got honked at a lot on the way to McAnally’s. I didn’t care. I made it without crashing into anyone. That’s the important thing, right? I pulled my battered, trusty old Volkswagen Bug over into the little parking lot next to Mac’s place. I started inside.
Mouse made a whuffing sound.
I looked over my shoulder. I’d left the car door open. The big dog nosed it closed.
“Thanks,” I said.
We went into the pub.
Mac’s place looks like Cheers after a mild apocalypse. There are thirteen wooden pillars irregularly spaced around the room, holding up the roof. They’re all carved with scenes of Old World fairy tales, some of them amusing, more of them sinister. There are thirteen ceiling fans spinning lazily throughout the place, and the irregularly shaped, polished wooden bar has thirteen stools. There are thirteen tables in the room, placed in no specific pattern.
“There’re a lot of thirteens in here,” I said to myself.
It was about two thirty in the afternoon. No one was in the pub except for me and the dog—oh, and Mac. Mac is a man of medium height and medium build, with thick, bony wrists and a shining smooth pate that never shows signs of growing in. He could be anywhere between thirty and fifty and, as always, he was wearing a spotless white apron.
Mouse stared intently at Mac for a moment. Then he abruptly sat down in the entryway at the top of the little stairs, turned around once, and settled down by the door, his chin on his paws.
Mac glanced toward us. “Harry.”
I shambled over to the bar.
Mac produced a bottle of one of his microbrews, but I shook my head. “Um. I’d say, ‘Whiskey, Mac,’ but I don’t know if you have any whiskey. I need something strong, I think.”
Mac raised his eyebrows and blinked at me.
You’ve got to know the guy. He was practically screaming.
But he poured me a drink of something light gold in a little glass, and I drank it. It burned. I wheezed a little, and then tapped a finger next to the glass.
Mac refilled it, frowning at me.
I drank the second glass more slowly. It still hurt going down. The pain gave me something to focus on. Thoughts started to coagulate around it, and then to crystallize into definite shape.
Susan had called me. She was on the way.
And we had a child.
And she had never told me.
Susan had been a reporter for a yellow rag that covered supernatural news. Most of the people who worked there thought they were publishing fiction, but Susan had clued in to the supernatural world on her own, and we’d crossed trails and verbal swords several times before we’d gotten together. We hadn’t been together a terribly long time—a little less than two years. We were both young and we made each other happy.
Maybe I should have known better. If you don’t stand on the sidelines and ignore the world around you, sooner or later you make enemies. One of mine, a vampire named Bianca, had abducted Susan and infected her with the blood thirst of the Red Court. Susan hadn’t gone all the way over—but if she ever lost control of herself, ever took another’s lifeblood, she would.
She left me, afraid that if she didn’t, I’d be the kill that turned her into a monster, and set out into the world to find some way to cope.
I told myself that she had good reason to do so, but reason and heart-break don’t speak the same language. I’d never really forgiven myself for what had happened to her. I guess reason and guilt don’t speak the same language, either.
It was probably a damned good thing I had gone into shock, because I could feel emotions that were stirring somewhere deep inside me, gathering power like a storm far out to sea. I couldn’t see them. I could only feel their effects, but it was enough to know that whatever was rising inside me was potent. Violent. Dangerous. Mindless rage got people killed every day. But for me, it might be worse.
I’m a professional wizard.
I can make a lot more things happen than most people.
Magic and emotions are tied up inextricably. I’ve been in battle before, and felt the terror and rage of that kind of place, where it’s a fight just to think clearly through the simplest problems. I’d used my magic in those kinds of volatile circumstances—and a few times, I’d seen it run wild as a result. When most people lose control of their anger, someone gets hurt. Maybe someone even gets killed. When it happens to a wizard, insurance companies go broke and there’s reconstruction afterward.
What was stirring in me now made those previous feelings of battle rage seem like anemic kittens.
“I’ve got to talk to someone,” I heard myself say quietly. “Someone with some objectivity, perspective. I’ve got to get my head straight before things go to hell.”
Mac leaned on the bar and looked at me.
I cradled the glass in my hand and said quietly, “You remember Susan Rodriguez?”
He nodded.
“She says that someone took our daughter. She says she’ll be here late tonight.”
Mac inhaled and exhaled slowly. Then he picked up the bottle and poured himself a shot. He sipped at it.
“I loved her,” I said. “Maybe love her still. And she didn’t tell me.”
He nodded.
“She could be lying.”
He grunted.
“I’ve been used before. And I’m a sucker for a girl.”
“Yes,” he said.
I gave him an even look. He smiled slightly.
“She’d be … six? Seven?” I shook my head. “I can’t even do the math right now.”
Mac pursed his lips. “Hard thing.”
I finished the second glass. Some of the sharper edges had gotten softer. Mac touched a finger to the bottle, watching me. I shook my head.
“She could be lying to me,” I said quietly. “If she’s not … then …”
Mac closed his eyes briefly and nodded.
“Then there’s this little girl in trouble,” I said. I felt my jaw clench, and the storm inside me threatened to come boiling up. I pushed it down. “My little girl.”
He nodded again.
“Don’t know if I ever told you,” I said. “I was an orphan.”
Mac watched me silently.
“There were times when … when it was bad. When I wanted someone to come save me. I wished for it so hard. Dreaming of … of not being alone. And when someone finally did come, he turned out to be the biggest monster of all.” I shook my head. “I won’t let that happen to my child.”
Mac folded his arms on the bar and looked at me intently and said, in a reso
nant baritone, “You’ve got to be very careful, Harry.”
I looked at him, shocked. He’d … used grammar.
“Something like this will test you like nothing else,” Mac said. “You’re going to find out who you are, Harry. You’re going to find out which principles you’ll stand by to your death—and which lines you’ll cross.” He took my empty glass away and said, “You’re heading into the badlands. It’ll be easy to get lost.”
I watched him in stunned silence as he finished his drink. He grimaced, as though it hurt his throat on the way down. Maybe he’d strained his voice, using it so much.
I stared down at my hands for a moment. Then I said, “Steak sandwich. And something for the pooch.”
He grunted in the affirmative and started cooking. He took his time about it, divining my intentions with a bartender’s instincts. I didn’t feel like eating, but I had a little time to kill while the buzz faded.
He put my sandwich down in front of me. Then he took a bowl with some bones and some meat out to Mouse, along with a bowl of water. I ate my sandwich and idly noted that Mac never carried food out to anyone. Guess he was a dog person.
I ate my sandwich slowly and paid Mac.
“Thanks,” I said.
He nodded. “Luck.”
I got up and headed back for the car. Mouse followed beside me, his eyes lifted, watching me to see what I would do.
I marshaled my thoughts. I had to be careful. I had to be wary. I had to keep my eyes open. I had to keep the storm inside me from exploding, because the only thing I knew for certain was that someone—maybe Susan, maybe my enemies—was trying to manipulate me.
Either way, Mac was right.
I was heading into the badlands.
Chapter
Two
Susan arrived at around one in the morning.
I had gone back home from the pub and straight to my lab in the subbasement, and made with the wizardry, which demanded an intense focus on my tasks. Over the next several hours, I prepared a couple of things that might come in handy in the immediate future. Then I went back up the stepladder to my apartment and put on my force rings. Each of them is a braid of three individual rings, and I had enchanted them to store up a little kinetic energy every time I moved my arm. They were pretty efficient, but it wouldn’t hurt to top them off, so I spent half an hour beating the tar out of the heavy bag hanging in one corner of my apartment’s living area.