by Jim Butcher
I think my jaw might have hung a little loosely for a second. “Uh. Mac?”
“Kill it,” Mac repeated, his voice harder. “It’s only the first.”
“Yes,” Sharkface said, tilting its head almost to the perpendicular. “Kill it. And more will come. Destroy me and they will know. Leave me and they will know. Your breaths are numbered, wizard.”
As it spoke, I could feel a horrible, hopeless weight settling across my heart. Dammit, hadn’t I been through enough? More than enough? Hadn’t my life handed me enough misery and grief and pain and loneliness already? And now I was going to be up against something else, something new and scary, something that came galumphing at me by the legion, no less. What was the point? No matter what I did, no matter how much stronger or smarter or better connected I got, the bad guys just kept getting bigger and stronger and more numerous.
Behind me, I heard Mac let out a low groan. The shotgun must have fallen from his fingers, because it clattered on the floor. On my left, I saw Thomas’s shoulders slump, and he turned his face away, his eyes closed as if in pain.
The people who stayed near me got hurt or killed. As often as not, the bad guys got away to come embadden my life another day. Why deal with a life like that?
Why did I keep on doing this to myself?
“Because,” I growled under my breath. “You’re Charlie Brown, stupid. You’ve got to try for the damned football because that’s who you are.”
And just like that, the psychic assault of despair that Sharkface had sent into my head evaporated, and I could think clearly again. I hadn’t felt the cloying, somehow oily power slithering up to me—but I could sure as hell feel it now as it recoiled and pulled away. I’d felt it before—and I suddenly knew what I was dealing with.
Sharkface jerked its head toward me, and its mouth opened in shock. For a frozen instant, we stared at each other across maybe fifteen feet of cluttered pub. It seemed to last for hours. Thomas and Mac were both motionless, reaching out for physical supports as though drunk or bearing a heavy burden. They wouldn’t be able to get themselves out of the building in their current condition—but I didn’t have any choice.
Sharkface and its sackcloth cloak flung half a ton of furniture at me about a quarter of a second after I raised my right hand and snarled, “Fuego!”
I hadn’t used much fire magic lately, obviously. You don’t go messing around conjuring up flame when you’re at the heart of Winter. There are things there that hate that action. But fire magic has always been my strongest suit. It was the first fully realized spell I ever mastered, and on a good day I could hang around in the same general league as any other wizard in the world when it came to fire magic.
On top of that, I tapped into the latent energy a particularly meddlesome angel had bestowed upon me whether I wanted it or not—an ancient source of the very energy of Creation itself known as soulfire. Soulfire was never meant for battle—but its presence could infuse my battle spells with significant energy and momentum, making them far more difficult to counter. I had to be careful with it—burn too much in too short a time and it would kill me. But if I didn’t live to walk out of the pub, it wouldn’t matter how much soulfire I had stored up for a rainy day.
I expected a roar of flame, a flash of white and gold light, the concussion of superheated air suddenly expanding, right in Sharkface’s ugly mug.
What I got was an arctic-gale howl and a spiraling harpoon of blue-white fire burning hotter than anything this side of a star.
Sharkface hurled furniture at me, trying to shelter behind it, but the fire I’d just called vaporized chairs and tables in the instant it touched them. They shattered with enormous, screaming detonations of thunder, and every impact made sounds that by all rights should have belonged to extremely large and poorly handled construction vehicles.
Sharkface crossed its bony grey forearms before it in a last-ditch effort to deflect the spell. If I’d been focused on it, concentrating on pushing the spell past its defenses, maybe it would have burned right through Sharkface and its stupid cloak. But that wasn’t the plan. Instead, I sprinted across the distance between us, through the hideous heat of my spell’s thermal bloom. It was like running through an oven. I saw my spell splash against Sharkface’s crossed forearms, and the thing managed to deflect almost all of the spell away—but not all of it. Fire scorched across one of its cheeks and splashed over its right shoulder, setting a large mass of sackcloth strips aflame.
It screamed in pain, a sound that raked at my ears, and began to lower its arms to retaliate.
The second it did, I drove my right fist into its stupid, creepy face.
Man, the yahoos I scrap with never seem to anticipate that tactic. They all assume that what with me being a wizard and all, I’m going to stand back and chuck Magic Missiles at them or something, then scream and run away the second they get close enough to let me see the whites of their eyes.
Okay, granted, that is how a lot of wizards operate. But all the same, you’d think they would remember that there’s no particular reason why a wizard can’t be as comfortable with physical mayhem as the next guy.
Two things happened.
First, as my fist sailed forward, there was a sudden thrill that flowed up my arm from my hand, something delicious and startling. I had barely processed that when I heard a crackling noise, and then saw glacial blue and green ice abruptly coating my fist.
Second, I hit Sharkface like a freaking truck, starting right on the tip of its chin and driving straight toward South America. The ice coating my fist shattered into tiny shards that laced and sliced, but I barely felt it. Sharkface flew back as if I’d slugged it with a sledgehammer, and hit the wall with enough violence to crack and splinter the heavy oak paneling. Sharkface’s cloak fluttered hard as it went backward—the freaking thing was cushioning his impact, just as it had managed to stop shotgun pellets at short range.
Sharkface bounced off the wall, staggering, and I gave it a left and another right, and then kicked its legs out from underneath it as brutally as I knew how. It went to the floor hard.
Once Sharkface was down I stomped for its head with my hiking boots, going for a quick kill, which was exactly what this asshole had coming to it for messing with my favorite joint—but that stupid cloak got in the way. Strips flew out to gain purchase and hauled him out from beneath my boot. Even as I reacted, moving to follow him up, more of the sackcloth tendrils seized a dozen bottles of liquor from behind the bar—and flung them harshly onto the puddles of vicious blue-white fire still burning upon the floor where Sharkface had deflected them.
I slashed at the tumbling bottles with an effort of will, but I hadn’t had a soft-touch spell in mind during the previous seconds. My clumsy grab accomplished nothing but to shatter one of the bottles early, and flames roared up from where the spilled liquor fell.
Alcohol fires are a nasty business. Booze burns a good deal hotter and faster than, for example, gasoline. In seconds it can take the temperature from below freezing to seven hundred degrees, hot enough to turn flesh into briquettes. Mac and Thomas were both down. There was no way I could get them both out of the fire in time—which meant my only option was to stop it from happening.
Sharkface let out an eerie, defiant shriek and suddenly vanished into the writhing mass of his coat again, becoming nothing but flailing cloth and dust and stench. The creature bounded into the air and streaked like a sackcloth comet out the front door—and there was diddly I could do to stop it.
Instead, I turned to the fires just as bottles began to shatter on the floor, just as white-hot flames began to leap. I hurled my will through my body, drawing forth the frigid purity of Winter, calling, “Infriga!”
Howling wind and cold engulfed the nascent fires. And the floor around where the fires had been. And the walls. And, um, the ceiling.
I mean, pretty much every nonliving surface in the place was completely covered in a layer of frost half an inch thick.
; Mac and Thomas started groaning. I gave them a minute to pull themselves together and watched the door. Sharkface didn’t show up for a rematch. Maybe he was busy changing into fresh undies because I’d scared him so bad. Right. More likely he was off doing a Right Stuff walk and gathering his gang.
The fog lightened and burned off within five minutes or so, and the sounds of the city returned.
The attack was over. Mac stared woozily around the pub, shaking his head. Covered in glittering frost and ice, it looked like the place Santa’s elves must go when they finish their shift at the toy shop.
Mac gave me a look and then gestured at the pub, clearly wanting an explanation.
“Hey,” I said crossly. “At least it didn’t get burned to the ground. Count your blessings, man. That’s better than most buildings get around me.”
Thomas sat up a moment later, and I helped him to his feet.
“What happened?” he asked blearily.
“Psychic assault,” I told him. “A bad one. How you feeling?”
“Confused,” Thomas said. He looked around the place, shaking his head. The pub looked like it had just been raided by Super Bowl–berserk Bears fans. “What was that thing?”
I rubbed at my forehead with the heel of my hand. “An Outsider.”
Thomas’s eyes went wide and round. “What?”
“An Outsider,” I repeated quietly. “We’re fighting Outsiders.”
Chapter
Twenty-three
“Outsiders,” Thomas said. “Are you sure?”
“You felt it,” I said. “That mental whammy. It was exactly like that night in the Raith Deeps.”
Thomas frowned but nodded. “Yeah, it was, wasn’t it?”
Mac walked silently past us to the ruined door. He bent down and picked something up out of the general wreckage there. It was the Accorded Neutral Territory sign. It was scorched on one corner, but he hung it back up on the wall. Then he leaned his hands against it and bowed his head.
I knew how he felt. Violent encounters tend to be scary and exhausting, even if they last for only seconds. My nerves were still jangling, my legs were trembling a little, and I wanted very badly to just plop down onto the floor and breathe for a while. I didn’t. Wizards are stoic about this kind of thing. And my brother would make fun of me.
Thomas exhaled slowly through his nose, his eyes narrowed. “I don’t know much about them,” he said.
“That’s not surprising,” I said. “There’s not a lot of information on Outsiders. We think that’s because most people who run into them don’t get a chance to tell anyone about it.”
“Lot of things like that in the world,” Thomas said. “Sounds like these things are just a little creepier than your average demonic nasty.”
“It’s more than that,” I said. “Creatures out of the Nevernever are a part of our reality, our universe. They can get pretty bizarre, but they have a membership card. Outsiders come from someplace else.”
Thomas shrugged. “What’s the difference?”
“They’re smarter. Tougher. Harder to kill.”
“You handled that one pretty well. Didn’t look so tough.”
I snorted. “You missed out on the end. I hit that thing with my best shot, and I barely made it uncomfortable. It didn’t leave because I hurt it. It left because it didn’t expect me to fight clear of its whammy, and it didn’t want to take any chances that I might get lucky and prevent it from reporting to its superiors.”
“Still ran,” Thomas said. “Yeah, that mind-meld thing was awful, but the bastard wasn’t all that bad.”
I sighed. “That little creep Peabody dropped one Outsider on a meeting of the Council. The best wizards in the world were all in that one room and took it on together, and the thing still managed to murder a bunch of them. It’s hard to make magic stick to Outsiders. It’s hard to make them leave. It’s hard to hurt them. It’s hard to make them die. They’re insanely violent, insanely powerful, and just plain insane. But that isn’t what makes them dangerous.”
“Uh,” Thomas said. “It isn’t? Then what is?”
“They work together,” I said quietly. “Near as we can tell, they all work together.”
Thomas was silent for a moment as he considered the implications of that. “Work together,” he said. “To do what?”
I shook my head. “Whatever they do. Their actions are not always predicated on rationality—or at least, that’s what the Council thinks.”
“You sound skeptical.”
“The White Council always assumes that it’s at least as smart as everyone else all put together. I know better.”
“Because you’re so much smarter than they are,” Thomas said wryly.
“Because I’m on the street more than they are,” I corrected him. “The Council thinks the Outsiders are just a giant box of crazy that can go rampaging in any random direction.”
“But you don’t think that.”
“The phrase ‘crazy like a fox’ leaps to mind.”
“Okay. So what do you think these Outsiders are doing?”
I shrugged. “I’m almost certain they aren’t selling Girl Scout cookies. But don’t quote me.”
“Don’t worry; I hardly ever want to sound clueless. But the fact that they’re working together implies a purpose. A goal.”
“Yes.”
“So?” my brother asked. “What do they want?”
“Thomas, they’re aliens. I mean, they’re like super-mega-überaliens. They might not even think, at least not in the way we understand it. How the hell are we supposed to make even an informed guess about their motivation—assuming that they have one?”
“Doesn’t matter how weird they are,” Thomas said. “Moving together implies purpose. Purpose implies a goal. Goals are universal.”
“They aren’t from this universe. That’s the point,” I said. “Maybe you’re right; I don’t know. But until I have a better idea, it’s smarter to keep reminding myself that I don’t know, rather than assuming that I do know, and then translating anything I learn to fit my preconceptions.”
“Here’s a fact that is no assumption,” Thomas said. “They wanted you.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Why?” he asked.
“All I can do is guess.”
“So guess.”
I sighed. “My gut says they’re planning a jailbreak.”
Thomas grunted. “Might have been smarter for them to have left you alone. Now you know something.”
I made an exasperated sound. “Yes. Those fools. By trying to kill me, they’ve revealed their very souls. I have them now.”
Thomas gave me a steady look. “Being Mab’s bitch has made you a pessimist.”
“I am not a pessimist,” I said loftily. “Though that can’t last.”
That made Thomas grin. “Nice.”
“Thank you.”
At the door, Mac looked up suddenly and said, “Dresden.”
Thomas tilted his head, listening. Then he said, “Cops.”
I sighed. “Poor guys. Bet last night’s watch hasn’t even been released to go home yet. They’re going to be cranky.”
“The explosion thing?” Thomas asked.
“The explosion thing.”
We didn’t need to be detained and questioned all day, and I didn’t need to get into an altercation with the police, either—they’ve got no sense of humor at all for such things. You always hear about there being no rest for the wicked, but I’m pretty sure cops aren’t racking up much extra hammock time, either. Thomas and I traded a look and headed for the door.
I paused by it, and looked at Mac.
“It knew you.”
Mac stared at nothing and didn’t answer.
“Mac, that thing was dangerous,” I said. “And it might come back.”
Mac grunted.
“Look,” I said. “If my guess is right, that twit and its buddies might wipe out a big chunk of the state. Or possibly states. If you know
something about them, I need it.”
Mac didn’t look up. After several seconds, he said, “Can’t. I’m out.”
“Look at this place,” I said quietly. “You aren’t out. Nobody is out.”
“Drop it,” he said. “Neutral territory.”
“Neutral territory that is going to burn with all the rest of it,” I said. “I don’t care who you are, man. I don’t care what you’ve done. I don’t care whether or not you think you’re retired from the life. If you know something I need it. Now.”
“Harry, we need to move,” Thomas said, urgency tightening his voice.
I could hear the sirens now. They had to be close. Mac turned and walked back toward his bar.
Dammit. I shook my head and turned to leave.
“Dresden,” Mac called.
I turned to look back at him. Mac was standing behind the bar. As I watched, he took three bottles of beer from beneath the counter and placed them down in a straight line, one by one, their sides touching. Then he just looked up at me.
“Three of them,” I said. “Three of these things?” Hell’s bells, one of them had been bad enough.
Mac neither nodded nor shook his head. He just jerked his chin at me and said, “Luck.”
“We’re gonna talk,” I said to Mac.
Mac turned a look on me that was as distant and as inaccessible as Antarctic mountains.
“No,” he said. “We aren’t.”
I was going to say something smart-ass. But that bleak expression made it seem like a bad idea.
So instead, I followed my brother up the debris-strewn stairs and into the rainy morning.
* * *
We passed the first police car to arrive at the scene on our way out, driving at the sedate pace of upright citizens.
“I love evading representatives of the lawful authority,” Thomas said, watching the car go by in his rearview mirror. “It’s one of those little things that make me happy.”