by Jim Butcher
There were still bloodstains on the front of her long coat, where she’d taken a bullet through the muscle of her thigh. It was based on the design of a fireman’s coat and, like Daniel’s vest, Molly’s coat contained an armored lining of titanium rings sandwiched between layers of ballistic fabric. She still wore her ragged clothing beneath the coat, but she’d added a nylon-web tactical belt to her ensemble. It bore several potions, which she’d always been good at making, and a pair of wands covered in rows of runes and sigils like those on my own staff. One was tipped in a crystal of white quartz, the other with an amethyst.
Once the twins had led her to me, they vanished, reappearing in their previous spaces in the ranks. Molly blinked and looked around for a moment. She took her cane from under one arm and leaned on it, taking some of the weight off her wounded leg. Then she took out the little tuning fork, rapped it once against the cane, and held it up in front of one of her eyes, so that she was looking through the tines.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God,” she breathed, her eyes widening as she took in the spook squad. “Harry, is that you in there?”
“Two ghosts enter; one ghost leaves,” I replied. Then I vanished from the Spookydome and reappeared in front of her. “Hi.”
Molly shook her head a little. She looked tired still, but some of the strain I’d seen in her the night before seemed to have drained out of her. “Who are they?”
“Morty’s friends,” I said. I gestured at her. “You wore your party dress, I see.”
She smiled for a second, enough to show her dimples. Then it was gone. “Butters got in touch with me. He told me what was going on.”
I nodded. “Murphy?”
Molly looked away. “She’s on the way with whoever she can get.”
“Marcone’s guys?”
She shook her head. “Marcone is in Italy or something. Childs is in charge.”
“Let me guess. He’s just supposed to mind the store until the boss gets back, and he didn’t get chosen for his daring and ambition.”
Molly nodded. “Pretty much.”
I grimaced. “How’s your brother?”
“More stitches. More scars,” Molly said, looking away—but not in time to hide the flash of pure, murderous rage I saw in her eyes. “He’ll live.”
“The padre?”
“Stable. Unconscious. He was beaten badly.”
“What about Fitz and his gang?” I asked.
“With my father for now,” she said. “Mom makes battalion-sized meals already. Eight or ten more mouths isn’t bad. Just until there’s enough time to figure out what to do with them.”
I snorted quietly. “And Murph would just call in the kids’ location and tell the cops to round them up for that hit if they’d gone anywhere else. She wouldn’t do that to Michael.”
“I thought the same thing.”
“Your idea?”
Molly shrugged.
“Very good, grasshopper,” I said, smiling.
She smiled, but only with the corners of her eyes. “Thanks.”
I shook my head. Crap. It was easy to get distracted when talking about memories. The ghost thing must have been slowly congealing my brain. “Okay, chitchat’s over. Here’s the short version.”
I told her about the Big Hood hideout, the wards, and what the Corpsetaker was up to. As I spoke, Molly took a moment to open her Sight and take a quick glance at the wards. She shuddered and closed it again. “Are you sure we can’t just hammer through them?”
“If we studied the layout for a day or two, maybe,” I said. “We don’t have that kind of time.”
“What’s the plan, then?”
“Me and my army go in through the back door in the Nevernever,” I said. “Once I’m in, I’ll wreck those formulae and take down the wards. Team Murphy comes storming in like they do on TV. I need you to open the Way.”
Molly bit her lip and then nodded. “I can do that. Are you sure that when I do, the other side will be close enough?”
The Nevernever isn’t subject to normal geography. It attaches to the physical world by means of symbols and ideas. Open a Way in a happy place, and odds are you’ll get a happy place in the Nevernever. Open a Way in a bad place, and the spirit world near it will be the same flavor of bad. Sometimes Ways that opened only ten or twenty feet apart from each other go to radically different portions of the Nevernever. Molly was concerned that if a Way was opened anywhere but in the basement of the stronghold, it might lead to the spiritual version of Timbuktu, rather than where I wanted to go.
“There’s seriously bad juju infesting this whole area,” I said. “We’ll get as close as we can to the entrance. It should get me somewhere in the same neighborhood—and I’mpretty light on my feet these days.”
“Ha-ha,” Molly said, and thumped her cane gently on the ground. “I’m not. What if I can’t keep up?”
I pressed my lips together and tried to keep from wincing.
Her mouth tightened. “You don’t want me to go with you.”
“It isn’t about what I want,” I said. “They’ll need you on this side. If Murphy tries to go in before the wards are down, people are going to die. Horribly. You’re the only one who can tell when the wards fall. So you stay.”
Molly looked away again. She swallowed. Then she nodded. “Okay.”
I looked at her for a moment. She was clearly hurting in all kinds of ways. She was just as clearly in control of herself. She didn’t like the role I’d asked her to play, but she had accepted its necessity.
“You’re one hell of a woman, Molly,” I said. “Thank you.”
She flinched as if she’d just been shot. Her eyes widened as she jerked her head back to me, and her face went entirely bloodless. She stared at me for a moment. Her mouth started working soundlessly. Her eyes overflowed with tears. It took her several seconds to let out a little choking sound.
Then she shuddered and turned away from me. She lifted her arm and wiped her eyes on her coat sleeve. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay,” I said, trying to keep my voice gentle. “I know . . . I know things haven’t been easy for you lately. Bound to bring on the waterworks once in a while.”
“God,” she said, both bitterness and amusement in her voice. “Harry. How can you be so completely clueless and still be you?” She took a deep breath, then straightened her back and squared her shoulders. “Okay. We’re burning time.”
“Yeah,” I said.
She walked toward the door to the Big Hoods’ hideout. She planted her feet firmly, withdrew the amethyst-tipped wand from her belt, and held it firmly in her right hand. I saw her gather her focus and do it rapidly. She was very nearly operating on the level of a full member of the White Council. After less than five seconds, she looked up, lifted the wand, drew it in a long, vertical line through the air and murmured, “Rokotsu.”
For a second, nothing happened. Then the air seemed to split and fall open, as if reality had been nothing more than a curtain suddenly stirred by an outside breeze. The opening widened until it was the size of the front door of a home, and odd, aqua green light poured out from the other side.
Molly rolled her neck a little, as if the effort had pained her. It probably had. Opening a Way takes a serious energy investment, and Molly had never been a high-horsepower practitioner. She stepped back and said, “All yours, boss.”
“Thanks, grasshopper,” I said quietly. Then I turned to the spook squad and said, “All right, everybody. Let’s go knock some heads together.”
I turned and plunged through the Way into the Nevernever, and the deadliest spirit-predators of the concrete jungle came with me.
Chapter
Forty-two
Before I died, I went to a lot of movies.
Movie theaters were totally useless for me, especially as more and more of them went with increasingly advanced technology for their sound and projection systems. The way I tended to foul up technology, especially elec
tronics, just by standing around meant that it was tough to see a movie all the way through without something going horribly wrong with the sound, the picture, or both. Magic draws a lot of its power from emotion, and at the movies that meant that things would tend to go bad at the parts of the movie that were the most gripping and interesting.
So I could see a movie that sucked at a theater. Usually. But if I wanted to see a good movie, there was only one solution: a drive-in.
There are still a few of them up and running. I went down to the one in Aurora. There, I could be far enough from the projector not to interfere with it. The sound system of the movie consisted of hundreds of little car speakers and car radios, mostly turned up loud. Yeah, the place was full of kids who were basically at the drive-in in order to make out, wander around in giggling groups, sneak friends in for free in their trunks, and drink smuggled alcohol. That never bothered me. I could park up front, sit on the hood of my car with my back leaning against the windshield, my hands behind my head, and enjoy the whole movie all the way through.
(I usually took Bob along. He sat on the dashboard. I always thought I’d been doing him a favor, although when I thought back, it made me think he’d been doing it for the sake of shared experience. For company.)
Anyway, the point is, I’ve seen a lot of movies. So I know whereof I speak when I say that I went through the Way my apprentice opened and landed in the first act of a movie.
Cold water engulfed the lower half of my body, and a second later a wave slapped me in the middle of the back, nearly throwing me off my feet. After the past days of muted physical stimuli, I staggered and gasped against the sudden shock of pure sensation. Salt spray filled my mouth.
I should have expected that. This was the spirit world, where the immaterial wasn’t. Gravity, heat, cold, light—they were all just as real as I was now. I was a civilian again. There wouldn’t be any fun ghost tricks like vanishing out of the cold water.
I spat, regained my balance, and got my bearings. I was maybe ten yards away from a pebble beach. The light was grey and somehow oppressive. The beach rose a couple of feet from the water across maybe two or three hundred yards, then ran right up onto the feet of a granite cliff.
There were . . . things, littering the beach. Imagine a jack from the children’s game. Now imagine it had babies with a porcupine the size of a dump truck. That was what lurked there: some kind of massive, lethargic-looking beasts, their bodies mostly dug into the ground. Each projected several enormous, bladelike spines seven or eight feet long in several directions from its hump of a body—along with hundreds of other spines about a quarter that size. They were scattered in a vaguely ordered pattern all across the beach between us and the cliffs, their sides heaving gently as they breathed.
My eyes tracked on the cliffs, to squat, ugly, blocky-looking structures at their summit. There were narrow slits carved in their fronts. In a couple of spots along the cliff face, the stone had collapsed into a very steep gradient. A particularly agile monkey might be able to make his way up to the top. All of those spots were covered in razor wire and surrounded by fortified positions that would make an ascension a particularly nerve-racking form of suicide.
A cool wind that smelled of rotten meat fluttered across the pebbles and sand, and it carried a bloodred banner mounted above the structures out to the side, displaying a black swastika within a white circle. I stared at it blankly for half a second while another wave hit me in the back and threatened my balance. Then it struck me where I’d seen this before: the first act of Saving Private Ryan.
“Oh, crap,” I breathed.
This was the Nevernever, the spirit world, and beings of powerful mind and will could reshape the world to their liking. Evil Bob had been the part of Bob the Skull, which had been in the service of this jerk named Kemmler, who had apparently been killed for good sometime during World War II. Evil Bob had been working with a theme when he designed defenses to his patron’s base of operations.
There were flashes of light from the firing slits in the bunkers at the top of the cliffs. Bullets that shone faintly scarlet hammered into the beach at the water’s edge and then tracked toward us. The hiss-splat of impact got to us a second before the chattering thump of the guns.
“Get behind me!” I shouted to the spook squad. I heard them splashing through the water in immediate obedience.
Right. As long as I was a spirit in the spirit world, I might as well take advantage of it. Since I didn’t really have my old duster, even though I’d been wearing it ever since Carmichael pulled me up off the tracks, I didn’t see any reason why I shouldn’t have my shield bracelet, either. I focused on my left wrist without actually looking at it, exerted my will, and then shook my arm in the old, familiar gesture that would make sure the bracelet was clear of the sleeve of my duster. When I did, I felt its slight, familiar weight as it dropped down—a chain, its links made of several braided metals and festooned with dangling charms in the shape of medieval shields.
“Hah!” I muttered, and began to run my will into it to bring up a shield.
A heavy weight hit me and sent me to one side. I hit the cold water and went under.
Glowing red energy masquerading as bullets smashed through the water where I’d just been standing. I came up out of the water, sputtering, and saw one of the projectiles slam into a protector ghost who had been behind me. The round impacted as if upon a living body, apart from one detail: There was no blood. Instead, it tore away a section of the spirit’s arm and sent a spray of clear ectoplasm splattering out of him. He barely reacted, pausing to glance at his arm as if puzzled.
The next round tore away the largest part of his head, and the spirit simply dissolved into more transparent ectoplasmic jelly that was swallowed by the sea.
Sir Stuart’s shade helped me get back on my feet as a second stream of projectiles strafed through the spook squad, sending ghosts diving and scrambling for cover that was not there. Several more were hit, gaining savage, bloodless wounds. We lost another spirit, one of the Lecters.
“Behind me!” I shouted again, and channeled my will through the shield bracelet, spreading it out into a quarter dome of faint blue energy that came to life ahead of me. It attracted fire at once—and shed it, sending spalling projectiles hissing through the air as they rebounded.
I started forward, toward the beach, with Sir Stuart’s shade behind me and slightly to one side the whole way, steadying me as the surf kept trying to knock me down. The spook squad began to close in on me, taking shelter behind the shield, and we pressed forward to the beach as fast as I could walk while still holding the shield.
It turned into hard work within a few seconds. Even in magic, there are some laws you don’t get away from—like the conservation of energy. Those pseudobullets were hitting my shield with a certain amount of force. I had to expend a similar amount of energy to stop them. I was cheating by making my shield as rounded as possible, deflecting rather than directly opposing, but even so, it was taking one hell of a lot of my effort and will to keep the fire off us.
My shield wasn’t a solution, really. I was working too hard to manage a simultaneous counterstrike. Sometime soon, within the hour, I wouldn’t be able to keep holding it, and when it went, we were all going to be dead. Deader. I had to figure out a way to silence those guns.
“Sir Stuart!” I shouted. “Do any of the gang carry grenades?”
Sir Stuart’s hand and arm came into view from behind me. He was holding, I kid you not, a little black iron bomb about the size of a baseball. There was a hole in it that had been plugged with a cork, and a fuse stuck out of it. The thing was straight out of a cartoon, except for its size.
I looked back over my shoulder, and saw that several of the doughboys had produced more modern-looking pineapple grenades of their own. A couple of shades dressed in uniforms of the Vietnam era had them, too.
“Neat,” I said. “Okay, here’s the plan. We head for the base of that bunker right there,
and your boys blow it up. Then we get the one next to it. Then we blow the nests on that slope between the two bunkers and get the hell off this beach.”
Sir Stuart eyed the ground ahead of me while fire rattled against my shield. He studied it intently for a moment, then nodded. He looked over his shoulder at the rest of the squad, his face devoid of expression. All of them simultaneously nodded back at him.
“That was not even a little creepy,” I muttered. “Okay, stay behind the shield!” And I started pushing forward again, striding across the pebble beach toward the cliff.
That was when the shells came in.
There was a high-pitched whistle from overhead and then a flash of motion. I had an instant’s impression of a skull plummeting at a steep angle and blazing with the same angry scarlet energy as the incoming rounds. It hammered into the beach about thirty yards ahead of us. It didn’t make any noise when it exploded. Instead, there was a sudden and absolute silence, as if the skull was drawing in absolutely every motion around it, including that of sound moving through the air—and then there was a flash of light, and an instant later, a roar of wind and fire. My ears screamed with the pain of the shift in air pressure. Pebbles slammed into my shield, sending it to blazing blue brightness as the incoming energy began to overload what the shield could handle, the excess energy being shed as light. When the dust cleared, there was a crater in the ground, as deep as my grave and twenty feet across.
More screaming whistles came from overhead, and I felt a surge of raw panic trying to push the thoughts out of my brain. Hell’s bells. If one of those skulls hit closer to us or behind us, where my shield couldn’t cover, we were dead. Another near-miss might blow my shield down entirely, and then the machine guns would have us. There was only one place to go that might be safe from the screaming skulls.
“We’ve got to get closer,” I growled. “Come on!”
And I broke into a flat-out sprint toward the machine guns.
Chapter
Forty-three