by Jim Butcher
I confess that I took advantage of it. I breezed in without any trouble, swooped up an armful of charts, and kept moving as though I knew exactly where I was going, scanning the charts as I did.
I stepped into the first room where a girl, maybe eight or nine, was curled up into a fetal position on her side. She had a very pale little face, and hollows under her eyes as dark as tire marks on a city road. Her hair was brown and listless. I checked charts and found hers. Her name was Gabrielle. She twitched violently as she slept. Her breathing was unsteady, and she made constant sounds as she exhaled.
I’d never been a father, but I didn’t have to be to know that little girl was in the grips of a nightmare. And given the medicine in her IV, she wasn’t going to be able to get out of it.
I read the charts and they told me the story. Seven kids, plus Stan, were down with a remarkably similar set of symptoms. Paranoia, hysteria, insomnia, and a refusal to go to sleep due to horrible nightmares, especially anytime at night, necessitating chemical intervention.
Eight people.
Holy moly.
If that many people were down, and a Knight of the Cross had been sent to deal with it, even if that Knight was me, it meant that there was a supernatural predator of some kind at work. A genuine Grade A monster. That was all mine to deal with.
Just me.
I guess maybe this wasn’t a beginner’s quest.
I slipped out of the room and into the next one in the hall, and found Stan. He’d been restrained as well as being sedated, which, dammit, should not have been happening in his condition. He should have been on saline and close monitoring until his body had a chance to process whatever combination of street drugs he’d been on that nearly killed him. He was in the same condition as the little girl, or worse—out of it, obviously suffering from some terrible dream and unable to escape it. His pulse was thready, his breath erratic, and his monitoring equipment had been jiggered—it was showing numbers that could not possibly have matched up to his respiration and heartbeat.
Someone had done this to him.
“Jesus, Stan,” I said. “I sent you into this. I’m sorry. I should have listened to you.”
He didn’t respond, though his head kind of twitched in my direction. There was something desperate in the little movement. I bit my lip and put my hand on his head. “Hang in there, buddy,” I told him. “Whatever power is given to me, I’ll use it to help you. I promise.”
If whatever had done that to Stan and the kids found me snooping around, it would be happy to do exactly the same thing to me.
My heart started beating faster. It took me a second to realize that it was pounding in time with rapid footsteps coming down the hall. Women’s heels. Click, clack, click, clack—firm and purposeful.
I had a couple of seconds to realize that my fear and the footsteps were connected, and then, just in case that hadn’t been enough, an open square, maybe four by four feet, made of red light, appeared on the wall, evidently tracking the movement of something hostile coming down the hall toward the door to Stan’s room.
I eyed the ceiling and muttered, “I get the point.” I looked around the room and weighed my options as my terror increased, and then ratcheted up more, and I panicked. I stepped into the bathroom and shut the door until it was almost all the way closed, and held very still.
The monster stepped into sight. She wasn’t much of a monster as they went—maybe five-four in the low heels, a woman of slender build with dark hair. She was of Asian extraction, and her name tag read DR. MIYAMUNE. Behind the thick, dark rims of her glasses, her eyes were absolutely crystalline blue.
As she came into the room, she paused, and her eyes swept back and forth, right past me. She didn’t look old, maybe mid-thirties, like a doctor who had finished her internship and was a few years into a specialist’s residency. Those blue eyes fastened hard on Stan, and suddenly she wasn’t just a woman in a white lab coat anymore. She changed, right in front of me.
It wasn’t a physical transformation. I mean, a camera wouldn’t have shown you bupkes. This was something deeper, something intangible. Her posture changed slightly, from rigidly proper into a more relaxed, looser-limbed tension. Her eyes narrowed. It was her mouth that was worst. Her lips just sort of lifted away from her teeth. The expression was damned creepy, and I felt a little sick to my stomach.
Monster is a subjective word. But the thing that was hiding inside a human shape met the definition. I held absolutely still.
Miyamune stalked from one side of Stan’s bed to the other, focused on him, then turned and paced back, like a restless lion at the zoo. For a moment she did nothing else, but Stan reacted. His soft sounds increased in pitch, and as they did her eyes seemed to brighten. She put one hand on the bed and ran it over his bedclothes, not actually touching him, dragging her fingertips along as she went, and Stan’s breathing became ragged, desperate.
She was feeding on him. Maybe on his fear. Drawing the life out of him.
Stan was getting close.
Well.
Time to saddle up.
I moved one arm toward the bag at my side, cloth making a soft whisper as it slid across cloth.
And she heard it.
I had my fingertips on the smooth wooden hilt of Fidelacchius when her hand and arm smashed through the wooden bathroom door in a shower of splinters, seized me by the lab coat, and flung me out of the bathroom and into the opposite wall.
I couldn’t believe the force of it. Miyamune’s arm tore through the rest of the door as if the wood had been damp cardboard, ripping the sleeves of her coat and shirt to ribbons while leaving the skin beneath untouched. I dimly registered that I was up against a being with supernatural strength as I flew, relaxed, and hit the wall as flat as I could, my arms slapping back as if taking a fall in judo, one of the other things Charity had taught me.
It worked. I spread out the impact enough to keep it from shattering any bones, and came down on my feet, more or less, hand fumbling for my bag.
Miyamune stared at me for a second, facing me from the far side of the bed, over Stan’s knees. Then, without taking her eyes from me, she reached behind her, as if she knew exactly where to move her arm, and calmly locked the hospital door.
Which did not, at all, send part of me into a gibbering panic. My hands shook so hard that I could barely feel the hilt of Fidelacchius as my fingers closed around it.
“One chance,” I heard myself say, my voice a pale ghost of itself. “Leave. Leave them. All of them. Do it now. And you have my word that you get to walk away alive.”
Her mouth curled up in pure contempt at one corner. “And who is it you think you are, little man?”
“All you need to know is this,” I said, and drew out the Sword.
There was a sound too musical to be called a shriek, too fierce and furious to be called a chord of music. From the old broken wooden hilt in my hand sprang a blade of light, three feet long and shining white. The sound of the blade’s birth settled into a humming musical chord, something low and ominous.
Miyamune faced me without any reaction at all. The Sword’s light reflected in two bright bars from her crystalline blue eyes—and the shadow that the Sword’s light cast on the wall behind her was not shaped at all like her. It was something hulking, with a leonine mane and a writhing tendril of some kind whipping around its head. Her skin, too, became semitranslucent in the Sword’s light, showing shapes that moved and shifted beneath the surface, some kind of grey-and-gold mush of colors, as if something far too large for it had been forced into Miyamune’s tiny form.
“I make you an offer, little man,” she said in calm reply. “Leave this place. Leave what is mine to me. I will permit you to spend the rest of your days exposed only to the nightmares you have created for yourself.”
“Sorry, lady,” I said. “I can’t do that. Step away from that man.”
I moved the Sword to emphasize my words. The chord bobbed and changed with the Sword’s motion, ri
sing to a higher, tenser pitch as it edged closer, and lowering again as it backed away.
The only other time I’d drawn the Sword in earnest, the guy I’d pulled it on had panicked.
Miyamune kicked Stan’s bed at my legs.
She moved fast, but I’d been paranoid enough to sense the movement and dodge in the only direction that wouldn’t have hemmed my movement in more, and it was the right way to move. I avoided the bed, shuffle-stepped forward with my feet dragging the floor just slightly, to make sure I wouldn’t lift them and put them down on anything that would trip me, and swept the blade in a clean cut at her midsection.
Miyamune avoided the blow by an inch with a gracefully timed step back, and flung her clipboard at me with supernatural strength. It made an ugly hissing sound as it came, tearing bits off the papers that were on it. I barely got the Sword in the way, splitting the plastic clipboard as if it had been sliced with a laser cutter, sending a small cloud of chopped printer paper into the air. The pieces of clipboard flew past me and, from the sound of it, buried themselves, quivering, in the drywall.
One of her heels was coming along the floor in a leg sweep even before I had finished the defensive cut. I shifted my weight back, barely in time, and she kicked my forward leg hard enough to make it go numb—but didn’t send me to the ground with the kick. I swept the Sword into a clumsy arc as I fought for my balance. It forced her to duck to one side instead of following up in my moment of vulnerability—directly toward Stan.
“No!” I said.
She seized his throat and her hand flexed. As quickly as that, Stan’s labored breaths stopped completely as she closed off his windpipe.
That predator looked out of the doctor’s face, and its blue eyes danced with amusement. “I’ll kill him,” she said. “One move, little man, and I will end his life.”
“Don’t,” I breathed.
Her smile widened a little as she regarded the Sword, still humming with the power of an angry chorus. Silence stretched.
“I was like you once,” she said finally. Something ugly went through those blue eyes. “Struggling to protect them. What a fool I was.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “Look, we don’t have to be doing the combat thing. Be glad to talk with you about it. Coffee, maybe some nosh? What do you say?”
She sneered. “Do you think I care about your thoughts, little mortal?”
“How will you know if you never hear them?” I asked mildly.
Whatever I’d said, it was the wrong thing. Pure rage flared through her features. “So righteous,” she spat. Then she looked me up and down and said, “I offer you a trade for his life.”
“Um,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“Give me your glasses.”
That made my heart all but stop.
Suddenly that scared ten-year-old kid inside me was screaming again.
“Give me,” Miyamune purred, “your glasses. Or I kill him. Right now.”
“If I do,” I said quietly, “you walk away. You leave him alone.”
“For as long as you live and breathe,” Miyamune said.
I swallowed.
Stan was here because of me.
I took one hand off the Sword and reached up.
The world dissolved into a blur of vague color as I took off my glasses, and my stomach jumped and twitched in random spasms of pure, unfiltered, childhood fear.
I felt the glasses in my fingers, heavy and cool. Then I tossed them toward the last place it seemed like Miyamune had been standing. There was no sound of the glasses falling. She must have caught them silently.
A second later, there were crackling, popping sounds—and the sound of safety glass pattering to the floor in little squares like so many oversized grains of sugar.
“Little protector,” Miyamune said a moment later. “I will make you suffer. I give you as long as it will take me to shoo the mortals from this floor. Then I will hunt you. I will feed on you. And in the end, I will take your life.”
There was a clack as the door unlocked. Then it opened.
“Run,” Miyamune said softly, “and others will die in your place.”
Then the door closed again.
The whole time, her feet never made a sound on the floor. But I had that feeling, that certainty you have when you’re standing in a room that isn’t otherwise occupied.
My legs gave out and I found myself sitting helplessly on the floor next to Stan’s bed as he whimpered in his nightmares. The light of the Sword went out when I hit the floor.
I sat with him in the blind gloom. I was breathing too fast and making sounds just like him.
“YELLOW,” ANSWERED A voice when I speed-dialed 1 on my cell phone, by touch. “Harry’s Taxidermy. You snuff ’em, we’ll stuff ’em.”
“It’s me,” I said.
The levity vanished from his voice. “Butters? What’s wrong?”
“I, uh,” I said. “I …”
I am the wrong person to be a Knight of the Cross, is what I wanted to say. But instead I said, “What are you doing?”
“You just caught us. Getting set to take Maggie and Mouse to the zoo to meet mighty Moe,” he replied, his voice holding gentle cheer. “Going to be a good time. You ever been to the zoo?”
“Not really an animal guy,” I said.
“You should come along, maybe,” he said.
I felt myself laugh weakly. “I can’t. Working.”
“Which hat you wearing?”
“The Jedi hat,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. He was quiet for a second, then exhaled slowly. “Guess they’re starting you early. How bad?”
“It’s bad,” I said. “I … I might need help.”
There was a long silence from the other end of the phone. It hissed and crackled with static. He was upset. Wizards play merry hell with electronics around them when they get emotional. Even on an old landline, nothing was a sure bet. Especially not around Harry Dresden.
“I won’t come,” he said quietly.
“What?” I asked. “Harry …”
“Michael told me something once that I thought was utter crap,” he said. “But I’m going to tell it to you now.”
“What?” I demanded.
“You’re a Knight now, Butters. You’re working for the freaking Almighty. And He won’t give you a burden bigger than your shoulders can bear.”
“Harry, He already has,” I said. I didn’t say it, honestly; I sort of gibbered it.
“Butters,” he snapped.
I’d heard him use that tone of voice one other time. Exactly once. It had been in a basement, and zombies had been coming to kill us.
“Polka will never die,” I breathed. It came out, smooth and automatic. It was kind of a mantra of mine.
“Good man,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
I did. I stuttered a lot. I stammered a lot.
“Wait,” he said. “The thing’s shadow. A lion’s mane and a damned elephant’s trunk?”
I thought of the thrashing tendril in the thing’s shadow. “Yeah, uh, I guess it could have been.”
“And it had blue eyes, didn’t it?”
I hadn’t gotten to that part yet. “Yeah,” I said. “It did. They were crazy.”
“Hell,” he said. “It’s a baka baku.”
“What is that?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of that creature.”
“Because it isn’t real,” he said. “Or it wasn’t, until the nineties. I mean, there was a thing called a baku in Japanese lore, but it wasn’t the same thing at all. Look, some company made a kid’s stuffed toy, called it a dream-eater, said that it was a magical protector that ate bad dreams before children could have them. Came with a little book that explained the whole thing.”
“I’m fighting a stuffed animal?” I asked. My leg pounded. There would be a huge bruise there for weeks where the thing had kicked me.
“Nah,” he said. “Look, they were just making a toy, but they gave it to kids. Kids belie
ving in things has freaking power. It either created the real ones or it gave access to something similar from the Never-never that used that belief to create a place for itself in reality.”
“Then why has it gone all Manson on these people?” I asked.
“Some laws are kind of universal. Like ‘You are what you eat,’ ” the wizard told me. “You eat enough nightmares, sooner or later you turn into one. Now, instead of protecting people from nightmares, it uses them to inflict torment. Probably gets energy from it.”
“Oh, fantastic,” I said. “What can they do?”
“Listen carefully. This thing has laid a fear whammy on you, man.”
“That stuff doesn’t work on Knights,” I said.
“Horse crap,” Harry said. “Look, the Knights have power, but you have to choose to use it, man. You don’t get any get-out-of-jail-free cards. What you get is the chance to fight when other people would get eaten. That thing has gotten into your head. It’s scaring you to death. Just like those people around you. It’s eating you.”
“Harry, I can’t see,” I stammered.
And, I swear to God, he shifted to a nearly perfect imitation of Alec Guinness in the original movie. “Your eyes can deceive you,” he said. “Don’t trust them.”
I barked out a laugh that felt like it was going to shatter something in my chest.
Or maybe actually did. Suddenly, I started to get my breath back.
“Butters,” he said. “Look. I know it’s hard. But there’s one way you deal with fear.”
“How?” I asked him.
“You stand up and you kick it in the fucking teeth,” he said, and there was a quiet, certain power in his voice that had nothing to do with magic. “You’ve forgotten the most important thing a Knight needs to remember, Butters.”
“What’s that?” I breathed.
“Knights of the Cross aren’t afraid of monsters,” he said. “Monsters are afraid of you. Act like it. Commit to it, hard. And have faith.”