by Jim Butcher
There were also plenty of empty spaces, pseudo-alleyways, walkways, and crawl spaces. Here and there, abandoned chambers in the basements and subbasements of the buildings above sat in silent darkness, waiting to be remade into something new. The commuter tunnels could connect down there, and there were several entrances to the insane, deadly labyrinth beneath the city known as Undertown.
Chicago cops patrolled the lower streets on a regular basis. Things came slinking out of Undertown to prowl the darkness. Traffic would blaze through on the actual streets, which were occasionally only separated from the sidewalks by a stripe of faded paint.
All in all, it’s not the sort of place a sane person will casually wander through.
I found Molly standing in one of the narrow alleyways. Snow had fallen through a grate twenty feet overhead and covered the ground. She was dressed in the same rags I’d seen the night before, with her arms clenched around her stomach, shivering in the cold. There was a fresh, purpling bruise on her cheek. She was breathing heavily.
“Again,” said a cool, calm woman’s voice from farther down the alley, out of sight.
“I’m t-t-tired,” Molly said. “I haven’t e-eaten in a day and a half.”
“Poor darling. I’m sure Death will understand and agree to return another time.”
There was a sharp hissing sound, and Molly threw up her left hand, fingers spread. She spat out a word or two, and flickering sparkles of defensive energy spread from her fingertips into a flat plane.
Molly simply didn’t have a talent for defensive magic—but this was the best shield I’d ever seen the grasshopper pull off.
A hurtling white sphere hit the shield. It should have bounced off, but instead it zipped through the shield, its course barely bent. The sphere struck Molly in the left shoulder and exploded into diamond-glitter shards of ice. She let out a short, harsh grunt of pain and staggered.
“Focus,” said the calm woman’s voice. “Use the pain. Make the shield real with your will. Know that it will protect you. Again.”
Molly looked up with her teeth clenched. But instead of talking, she raised her left hand once more, and another ball of ice flew at her. This one hit the shield and went through—but its path was attenuated more significantly than the last. It flew past her, barely clipping one arm.
She gasped and sank to one knee, panting. Magic taxes the endurance of anyone who uses it—and if you use magic you aren’t particularly skilled with, you get worn down even faster.
I shivered to see Molly like that. I knew how she felt. When Justin began teaching me how to create protective shields, he threw baseballs at me at top speed. When I failed, I was hit with a fastball moving at more than eighty miles an hour. Justin said pain was an excellent motivator, and that the activity was good training.
When I had been teaching Molly how to shield, I hadn’t used anything more painful than fluffy snowballs and rotten fruit.
“That will do for now,” said the woman’s voice. “Tomorrow we will move up to knives.”
Molly shuddered and looked down.
The speaker came walking calmly down the alley to stand over Molly.
It was my faerie godmother, the Leanansidhe.
Lea was beautiful beyond the loveliness of mere humanity, but it was a stark, hungry, dangerous beauty that always reminded me of a hunting cat. She was tall and pale, her hair the color of autumn leaves at sunset. Her ears were very slightly pointed, though I wasn’t sure she hadn’t done that to herself in order to conform to mortal expectations. She wore a long gown of green silk, wholly unsuitable to the task of protecting a mortal from the weather, but as she was one of the most powerful Sidhe of the Winter Court, I doubted she even noticed the cold.
She reached out a hand and touched Molly’s hair with her fingertips.
“Why?” Molly asked, her voice barely more than a whisper. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“Obligation, child,” Lea replied. “Favors owed and loyalties given.”
“You owed it to Harry to do this to me?” Molly asked.
“Nay, child, not me. But my queen is committed to him through ancient law and custom. She dispatched me to continue your training in the Art—and pain is an excellent teaching tool.”
“Harry didn’t believe that,” Molly said, her voice brittle. “He never hurt me.”
The Leanansidhe stooped and seized Molly’s chin, jerking my apprentice’s face up to meet her inhuman gaze. “Then he wronged you badly, child,” Lea replied, enunciating each word sharply. “He cheated you of the legacy he lived—and suffered to acquire. I am not teaching you how to tie knots in rope or to bake pastries. I am making you ready to face battle and emerge alive.”
“I have faced battle,” Molly said.
“In which you were shot, of all things, by a mere mortal foot soldier,” Lea said, contempt flavoring her words. “You nearly died, which would have been greatly humiliating to your mentor and by extension to my queen.”
“What does it matter to Mab?” Molly said, her voice bitter. “He’s dead.”
Lea sighed. “Mortals can be so obsessed with useless detail. It grows tiresome.”
“I don’t understand,” Molly said.
“Your mentor took an oath of fealty to my queen. Such oaths are not to be made lightly—and they place mutual obligations on both parties. Minor details do not excuse either party from its responsibilities.”
“His death is a minor detail?”
“As these things go,” Lea said, “of course it is. You’re all mortals. Even the life length of a wizard is something brief and transitory to an immortal. Similarly, extending her hand to the assistance of those her vassal knew in life is a minor detail. If you live another three centuries, it is little more than a long season to the Queen of Air and Darkness.”
Molly closed her eyes. “He made her promise to take care of me?”
Lea blinked at her, politely baffled. “No, of course not, child. He took an oath of fealty. She is one of the Sidhe. The oath binds her as tightly as it does him. Just as when I was”—Lea shivered—“unable to perform my duties to young Dresden, Mab assumed those responsibilities until I could be restored to them. Thus does she now do for you, through me.”
Molly wiped a hand over her eyes. She shook her head and rose to her feet, moving slowly. “Did he know? I mean . . . did he know Mab would do this?”
“I should have,” I said quietly. “If I’d stopped to think about it for two minutes. I should have known.” But neither of them heard me.
“I knew the boy well,” Lea said. “Better than ever he realized. Many a night did I watch over him, protecting him, and he none the wiser. But I was not privy to his mind or his heart.”
Molly nodded slowly. She looked at Lea for a long moment. My godmother simply watched her, waiting until Molly nodded to herself and said, “His shade is in town, looking for the person who killed him.”
The Leanansidhe’s pale red-gold eyebrows flew up. It was one of the most drastic reactions I’d ever seen from her. “That . . . seems unlikely.”
Molly shrugged. “I used my Sight. It’s his ghost, all right. A construct couldn’t have hidden from me.”
“Six months after his death?” the Leanansidhe murmured. “It is rare for a shade to arise after the season in which it was made—and he was slain last autumn. . . .” Her eyes narrowed. “Interesting.” She tilted her head, studying Molly. “What is your condition?”
Molly blinked dully once before she said, “I need to curl into a ball and sleep for a week. I’m starving. I’m cold. I think I’m getting a cold. I hurt everywhere. I would—” Molly paused and eyed Lea. “Why do you ask?”
The Sidhe only smiled in answer.
Bootsteps sounded, heavy and quick, and a small crowd appeared at the far end of the alley. They were all rough-looking men, carrying an assortment of guns, blades, clubs, and axes. They dressed exclusively in black, to the extent that it looked like they all shopped in the same store
. They were also wearing turtlenecks—every single one of them. Talk about weird.
Molly let out a hiss. “Servitors. How did they find me here?”
“I told them where to look,” Lea said calmly.
Molly whirled to her. “You what?”
“I didn’t share your location with the Fomor themselves, child. Just with some of their guard dogs. They think that if they catch you and return you to the Fomor, they will gain great honor—and I did not give them enough time to contact their masters for instructions.” She smiled, showing daintily pointed canines. “Initiative in an underling can be such a troubling thing.”
Molly made a disgusted sound. “I don’t believe this.”
Twenty armed thugs kept striding forward, exuding the calm that comes only from professionals who are not hurrying, keeping their spacing smooth. They were all glaring at Molly.
Lea smirked, already fading out of sight. “It is good training, child.” She vanished Cheshire Cat style, only she left her voice behind instead of her smile. “Let us see what you have learned.”
Chapter
Twenty-two
“What I’ve learned,” Molly muttered, mostly under her breath. “So help me, one of these days, I’ll show you what I’ve learned, you skinny bitch.”
Then she focused on the enemy, took a breath, just as I’d taught her to do under stress, and calmed herself. She began to withdraw, calmly, slowly, one pace at a time. That was smart. Had she turned and sprinted, it would have provoked immediate pursuit. Instead, the guys in turtlenecks kept their professional cool, moving steadily forward in a solid block of muscles and weapons. All of them ready to kill a lone, exhausted young woman.
Scum. No way in hell that was happening to my apprentice.
I hadn’t yet tried any true evocation magic, the fast-and-dirty side of violent wizardry, but I thought I had the basic concept down. So I tuned in to a memory of a particularly powerful evocation, when I had blown a rampaging loup-garou straight through the brick wall of one building and entirely through the building across the street. I left out all the details except for the energy blast itself, vanished, and reappeared in front of the oncoming servitors, and snarled, “Fuego!”
A blast of flame and raw kinetic force exploded from my outflung right hand. It hit the front of the enemy formation like a blazing locomotive—
—and washed completely through them, having no effect whatsoever. I didn’t even ruffle their clothes.
“Oh, come on!” I shouted. “That is just not fair!”
I still couldn’t act, couldn’t touch, couldn’t help.
Molly faced the men alone.
She kept walking back until she emerged from the alley into a small parking lot contained within concrete walls and open to the sky. There were only a handful of cars in it, along with a motorcycle and a couple of mounds of piled snow. There were doors fitted with those magnetic card-swipe locks on two of the lot’s walls—employee or executive parking, obviously. The fourth opening led out to the lower avenue, where dull yellow lights cast a feeble gleam.
Molly walked to the middle of the little lot, looked around her, and nodded. “Well, boys,” she said aloud. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance we could talk about this over a cup of coffee at Denny’s? I’m starving.”
One of the turtlenecks, presumably their leader, said, “Submit yourself to the will of the masters. Your pain will be much shortened.”
“Right,” Molly said. She rolled her neck as if to loosen it up and nodded at the speaker. “You’re my huckleberry.”
The turtleneck tilted his head to one side, frowning.
Molly blew him a kiss.
A gust of wind, channeled through the lower street, rushed by, tugging at her ragged clothes, pulling her long coattails out like a flag beside her—and then she exploded.
It happened so fast that I could barely understand what was happening, much less anticipate what would come next. Where my apprentice had been standing suddenly became half a dozen identical, leanly ragged figures darting in every direction.
One Molly flew sideways, both arms extended in front of her, firing a pair of 1911 Colts, their hammering wham-wham-wham as recognizable as familiar music. Another flipped into a cartwheel and tumbled out of sight behind a parked car. Two more ran to each door, virtually mirror images of each other, swiping a card key and slamming into the buildings. A fifth Molly ducked behind a mound of snow and emerged with a shotgun, which she began emptying at the turtlenecks. The sixth ran to the motorcycle, picked it up as if it had been a plastic toy, and flung it toward her attackers.
My jaw dropped open. I mean, I had known the kid was good with illusions, but Hell’s bells. I might have been able to do one of the illusions Molly had just wrought. Once, I had managed two, under all kinds of mortal pressure. She had just thrown out six. Simultaneously. And at the drop of a hat, to boot.
My gast was pretty well flabbered.
The turtlenecks clearly didn’t know how to react, either. The ones with guns returned fire, and they all scattered for cover. The motorcycle didn’t hit anyone as it tumbled past the group, though the crashing sound it made when it landed was so convincing that it made me doubt my such-as-they-were senses. The guns barked several times as the illusionary Mollys all sought cover behind the snow mounds and cars.
I gritted my teeth. “You aren’t one of the rubes, Dresden. You’ve got a backstage pass.” I bent my head, touched my fingers to my forehead for a moment, and opened up my own Sight.
The scene changed colors wildly, going from a dull winter monochrome to an abstract done in smearing, interweaving watercolor. The blurs of magic in the air were responsible for all the tinting—Molly had unleashed a hell of a lot of energy in very little time, and she’d done so from the point of exhaustion. I’d been there enough times to know the look.
Now I could see the illusions for what they were—which was the single largest reason why the wizards of the White Council didn’t put much stock in illusion magic: It could be easily nullified by anyone with the Sight, which was the same thing as saying “anyone on the Council.”
But against this band of hipster, emo, mooklosers? It worked just fine.
Molly, behind an almost perfect magical veil, was standing precisely where she had been at the beginning of the altercation. She hadn’t moved a muscle. Her hands were extended at her sides, fingers twitching, and her face was still and expressionless, her eyes shifted out of focus. She was running a puppet show, and the illusions were her marionettes, dancing on strings of thought and will.
The illusionary versions of Molly were very slightly transparent and grainy, like I remembered movies being when I was a kid. The motorcycle had never moved from where it was parked—an illusion had flown through the air, and a short-term veil was now hiding the bike.
The turtlenecks, though, weren’t going to be shut down by half a dozen young women, even if they had just appeared out of nowhere and apparently were possessed of weapons and superhuman strength. At barked orders from their leader, they came bounding over parked cars and mounds of snow in teams of five, moving with the light, lithe grace rarely seen outside of the Olympics and martial arts movies. They advanced with the kind of frighteningly focused purpose you see only in veterans. These men knew how to survive a battle: Kill before you are killed.
If even one of them closed in on Molly, it was over.
I thought of what it might be like to watch my apprentice die with my Sight open, and almost started gibbering. If that happened, if I saw that horror with eyes that would make sure I could never, ever forget it or distance myself from it, there wouldn’t be anything left of me. Except guilt. And rage.
I shut away my Sight.
“It must be difficult,” said my godmother, standing suddenly beside me, “to watch something like this without being able to affect the outcome.”
“Glah!” I said, or something close to it, jumping a few inches to one side out of sheer nerves. “Stars
and stones, Lea,” I said between my gritted teeth a moment later. “You can see me?”
“But of course, Sir Knight,” she replied, green eyes sparkling. “My duty to oversee my godson’s spiritual growth and development would be entirely futile could I not perceive and speak to a spirit such as thee.”
“You knew I was there a moment ago. Didn’t you?”
Her laugh was a bright, wicked sound. “Your grasp of the obvious remains substantial—even though you do not.”
A curtain of green-blue fire about seven feet high sprang up and swept rapidly across the width of the parking lot, between the position of the various Mollys and the turtlenecks. The flames emitted eerie shrieking sounds, and the faces of hideous beings danced about inside them.
I just blinked. Holy crap.
I hadn’t taught the kid that.
“Tsk,” Lea said, watching the scene. “She has an able mind, but she is filled with the passions of youth. She rushes to her finale without building anything like the tension required for something so . . . overt . . . to prove effective.”
I wasn’t sure what my godmother was talking about, but I didn’t have time to try to pry an explanation out of her. . . .
Except that I did.
I mean, what else was I going to do, right?
“Whatever do you mean?” I replied in a polite tone. I almost managed not to grit my teeth.
“Such an”—her mouth twisted in distaste—“overt and vulgar display as that wall of fire is worthy only of frightening children or appearing in something produced by Hollywood. It might yield a short-lived panic reaction, if built up and timed properly, but it is otherwise useless. And, of course, in very bad taste.” She shook her head in disapproval. “True terror is much more subtle.”
I gave my godmother a sharp look. “What?”
“Veils are of limited utility with snow upon the ground,” she explained. “The footprints, you see. It’s quite difficult to hide so many individual disruptions of the environment. Thus, she must work in another medium to survive.”