Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  I stood there for a moment, thinking. Thomas had gone gunning for Etri. Had it been personal? Unlikely. Thomas had been, ahem, in the good graces of the svartalves. Especially their females. I don’t think he’d even spoken to Etri.

  Had it had something to do with jealousy, then? Had Thomas been defending himself against, or maybe trying to make a point to, a jealous boyfriend? Or brother?

  Again, unlikely. Svartalves didn’t understand the concept of sexual monogamy. Their pairings were based upon shared assets, biological or otherwise, and beyond an ironclad code of honor when it came to taking care of one’s progeny, they found the usual human approach to sexuality baffling. If I’d sat down to dinner with Etri and announced that I’d boinked his sister, Etri would have found the remark of casual interest and inquired as to whether or not I had enjoyed myself.

  Okay, I’m going to say something a little mean, here: My brother is not exactly a complicated guy. He likes, in order, Justine, sex, exercise, food and drink, and occasionally fighting someone who needs fighting. That last would not seem to include Etri and his people, who as a group were about as threatening as the Amish on your average day. So there just weren’t many reasons Thomas would have wanted to kill Etri.

  So maybe he didn’t want to. Assume I was your average world-conquering, troublemaking megalomaniac, and I wanted Thomas to whack someone for me. How would I get him to do it?

  Obvious answer. She’d still been dabbing at the occasional tear when I left.

  If someone had threatened Justine, then at the very least they’d have her under surveillance. But who would do that?

  To answer that question, I supposed I had to find out who was watching her and ask them.

  I cracked my knuckles and got to work.

  I did a quick sweep of the hallway outside their apartment and found nothing, which I expected. Lara and her security teams already had the place covered, and my brother had inherited vestiges of Mom’s power. He wasn’t anything close to a wizard, but he had enough juice to be aware of magical patterns, and it would be a hell of a job to slip around this hallway laying down surveillance spells for an hour or two without being noticed.

  I did a second, more careful sweep to be sure, and then went outside, slowly, senses open to perceive any magical forces that might be present. I even took a quick peek at the doorman with my Sight—the dangerous practice of opening one’s mind to the raw input of the energy of the universe. Under the Sight, you see things for what they are, and you remember everything you see, and no enchantment can hide from it.

  I got nothing. The doorman was clean, magically speaking, or at least unwounded by the kind of psychic attack it would take to coerce him. Someone could have bribed him just as easily, I supposed, though I felt confident that Lara’s security people would have had that one covered fairly well. Hell, for that matter, I assumed that the doorman was one of Lara’s people. It would be exactly her kind of move to do that.

  So I took my search outside, as alert to any kind of magical mischief as I was to any purely vanilla suspicious activity. I circled the building carefully, all my senses open, and found … absolutely nothing.

  Which made no damned sense, so I did it again, only slower and more thoroughly, not finishing until after midnight. Apparently, there was a whole lot of nothing going around. But at least it had taken me an hour and a half to determine as much.

  I growled to myself, turned to go again, and readied my Sight to make absolutely sure I hadn’t missed anything.

  “When a hound goes too hard after a scent,” said a man’s voice behind me, “he ain’t watching his own back trail. A wizard ought to do better.”

  I absolutely did not jump in surprise. Not even a little. I turned calmly and with immense dignity and regarded the speaker with stoic calm, and not one of you can prove otherwise.

  I turned to find Ebenezar stepping forward out of a veil, stumpy staff in hand. He stared at me for a good long moment, his craggy face devoid of emotion.

  “Little late to be your apprentice now, sir,” I said.

  “You’d be surprised,” the old man replied. “Hoss—”

  “Busy,” I said brusquely. “I’m working. How’d you find me?”

  The old man clenched his jaw and looked out at nothing for a minute. “Harry, word is out, about Thomas Raith. Once I knew who the svartalves were holding, I figured you’d be in one of a couple places. This was the first one.”

  “You want to be a detective, you could apprentice with me for a year,” I said. “If my license is still current. Gotta be honest, I’ve been too busy to give the city of Chicago as much attention as it thinks it needs.”

  “Hoss, Thomas Raith is not your responsibility,” Ebenezar said.

  The hell he wasn’t.

  “The hell he isn’t, sir,” I said. “I owe him my life, several times.”

  “It ain’t about that, boy,” Ebenezar said, keeping his voice calm with an effort. “This one ain’t about right and wrong. It’s about authority and territory.”

  My feet hurt. And I wasn’t a child to be lectured about the way of the goddamned world. “You know, it’s funny how many times I hear something isn’t about right and wrong from people who are about to do something awful,” I said. “It’s almost as if they know they’re about to do something awful, and they just don’t want to face any of the negative consequences associated with their choice.”

  The muscles at the base of the old man’s jaws clenched until it looked like he was smuggling walnuts in his jowls. “Excuse me?”

  “He’s my ally,” I said. “My friend. I recall you telling me about how one should respond to loyalty, once upon a time. That when you get it, you gotta give it back, or else a man starts looking at those people like they’re things to be used.”

  “I said like coins to be spent,” the old man snapped, heat everywhere in his tone. Which was an admission that I was right, as much as anything.

  We traded a look, and his expression told me that he knew what I was thinking, and it made him angrier.

  “You think you know the world,” the old man said. “You’re barely in it yet. You ain’t seen what it gets like. How bad it can get. How cruel.”

  I thought of Susan’s face. At the last. And the rage that went through me was incandescent, yet weirdly remote, like seeing fireworks from a passing jet. The scent of woodsmoke came to me, and the alley was suddenly filling with green-gold light from the runes of my staff.

  “Maybe I’ve seen a thing or two,” I said back, and my voice sounded perfectly calm.

  The wrinkles on the old man’s face were heavier and thicker in the harsh lighting as his expression darkened, even as his voice became gentler, pleading. “You’ve put your feet in the water and you think you know the ocean. My God, boy, I hope you never see the things I’ve seen. But if you keep going the way you’re going, you’ll get that and worse. I’m trying to protect you from the mistakes that damn near killed me. That did kill so many of the people I cared about.”

  I thought of Karrin. Of Nicodemus deliberately, efficiently breaking her body. For good. It had been one of those quiet, close winter nights. I had been near enough to hear the cartilage tearing.

  The edges of the carved runes on my staff began to blacken, and my vision began to narrow.

  In my head, Karrin’s voice warned me quietly about how fights with family hurt so much more. But the voice of my anger was so much louder. By now, the Winter mantle was alert and interested in what was going on, sending jolts of adrenaline into my system, preparing me for a fight.

  I poured as much of my anger into my voice as I could, my only outlet. “Susan tried your way. And if they’d been smart instead of obsessed with revenge, the Red Court could have killed Maggie that same day, along with her mother and you and me. So tell me again what a great plan it is to send her away.”

  “You never should have gotten mixed up in vampire business in the first place,” Ebenezar snarled. “My God, boy. Don’t you
see what you’ve done?”

  “I’ve done what is right,” I spat.

  “How righteous of you,” the old man shot back. “I’m sure that is a great comfort to the families of those who have been killed so you could be right.” He slammed the end of his staff on the ground in frustration, and cracks sprang out through the concrete around it. “Dammit, boy. The extended consequences of your actions have cost lives. They keep costing lives. And if you do this, if you defend that vampire, there’s no chance at all you’ll keep the protection of the White Council.”

  “If I do what is right, they’ll throw me to the wolves, huh?”

  “Look in the mirror,” Ebenezar said harshly. “You are a wolf. That’s the point.”

  That one hit me like a punch in the gut.

  And everything went quiet.

  There was just the sound of me breathing, harshly.

  “When the Red Court took Susan,” I said finally, “the White Council thought I should have done nothing.”

  I’m not sure what I sounded like. But the old man looked at me with an expression I had never seen on his face before. And then he slowly, slowly ground in his heels, planting his feet, his eyes focused on the middle of my chest.

  “When they took Maggie,” I said, and my throat felt strange, “the White Council would have had me do the same.”

  “This is different,” Ebenezar said, his voice suddenly hard, a clear warning. “The vampire is no innocent. He has drawn first blood. The scales will be balanced. There is no escaping that.”

  I don’t remember calling up my shield, but my copper-band shield bracelet was suddenly drizzling green-gold sparks and ready to go. “He was used.”

  The old man shifted his shoulders, lifting his left hand, fingers spread. He didn’t bother to use the toys like I did, except for his staff. When the master brawler of the White Council wanted a shield, he willed it to be. No trinkets required. “This isn’t a place we have authority,” he pressed, as if trying to drill the words through my thick skull. “He’s not one of ours.”

  “He’s one of mine!” I shouted, slamming my own staff down, and fire sizzled out where it struck the ground, a flashing circle of flame that left a black ring scorched on the concrete.

  The old man glowered at me and thrust out his jaw. “Boy, tell me you ain’t dumb enough to try this.”

  The Winter mantle immediately bayed for blood, for defiance, for violence.

  I started drawing in power.

  The old man sensed it and did the same.

  The universe yawed slightly in his direction as he did, a subtle bending of light, a minor wobble of gravity, a shudder in the very ground as Ebenezar drank power from the earth itself. That’s how much more juice the old man was taking in than me.

  In my head, all I could hear was Maggie screaming. She had a lot of nightmares, of when the Red Court had come for her foster family. And he wanted to put the interests of the Council ahead of that? Of her?

  “Oh, I’m more than dumb enough,” I said through clenched teeth.

  And that was when every hair on my neck suddenly rose and stood on end, all the way down to my heels. Gooseflesh erupted over my entire body at once, and a primal, primeval wave of utter terror flickered through my lizard brain, utterly dislodging every rational thought in my head.

  For a wizard, that’s … less than ideal. Control of our own thoughts and emotions is vital. Otherwise, all kinds of horrible things can happen. The first lesson every practitioner learns is how to quiet and focus his or her mind. And in the face of that mindless fear, I ran to that first lesson, allowing emotions to slough away, seeking calm, patience, balance.

  I didn’t get any of those. But it was enough to let me shove the terror back and to start processing some degree of rational thought.

  That hadn’t been the result of some random eddy of energy. Terror that focused was nothing less than a psychic disruption, a mental attack, the psychic equivalent of an ear-piercing shriek, loud enough to burst eardrums—and whatever had done it wasn’t even in sight yet.

  In the sleeping city around me, hundreds or thousands of people had just been seized in the talons of nightmares of pursuit and mindless fear. Those who were awake and didn’t know what they were dealing with would interpret it as a brief, frightening hallucination or a migraine or simply a dizzy spell.

  The old man had recovered faster than me, and by the time I’d cleared my head, he was already staring out at the night, his jaw set.

  “Is that what I think it is?” I asked him, my voice shaking.

  “Outsiders,” he confirmed grimly. “Someone just whistled them in.”

  “Super,” I said. “Just once, I’d like to be wrong about these things.”

  The old man snorted. “Now, if you were an Outsider, what would you be doing in Chicago the night before a big peace conference?”

  The question was almost meaningless. Outsiders were creatures from beyond the borders of reality, from outside of our universe. They weren’t human. They weren’t anything close to human. They were hideous, and they were dangerous, and they … were just too alien to be understood. There are Outsiders who want to eat your face off, and then there are the rest of them, who don’t go in for that kind of namby-pamby cuddly stuff.

  Demons they might be. But demons summoned by mortals, the only way for them to get into our reality. They always have a mortal purpose, if not always a rational one.

  “Trying to interfere with it in some way,” I suggested. “If a senior member of the Council was torn apart by monsters, it would tend to tilt blame toward the Fomor.”

  “Definitely a poor way to begin negotiations,” Ebenezar agreed. “And I don’t think that we—”

  He suddenly froze and stared.

  I followed his gaze.

  In a corner of the alley, where one of the building’s cornices formed a shadowy alcove, blue lines of light had appeared at the intersection of the ground and the two walls.

  “Oh, Hell’s bells,” I breathed. “Is that what I think it is?”

  “Belike,” growled the old man, his eyes shifting around. “How well do you know this block?”

  “It’s Chicago,” I said.

  “Good. We need a place without people or much that can catch fire.”

  I eyed him and said, “It’s Chicago.”

  The light in the corner shifted weirdly, warped, spun into curlicues and spirals that should have existed only in Escher drawings. The stone of the building twisted and stretched, and then rock rippled and bubbled like pancake batter, and something started hauling itself out of the surface of the stone at the intersection of the three lines of light. My chest suddenly vibrated as if I’d been standing in a pool in front of an outflow pipe, and a surge of nausea nearly knocked me down.

  The thing that slithered into our world was the size of a horse, but lower, longer, and leaner. It was canine in shape, generally—a quadruped, the legs more or less right, and everything else subtly wrong. A row of short, powerful-looking tentacles ran along its flanks. A longer, thicker tentacle lashed like a whip where its tail should have been. The feet were spread out, wide, for grasping, kind of like an eagle’s talons, and where its head should have been was nothing but a thick nest of more of the tendrils. It had something like scales made of mucus, rather than fur, and flesh squelched on flesh.

  “Cornerhound,” Ebenezar said, his voice purely disgusted. “Damned things.”

  The old man looked weary and obdurate, like a stone that had been resisting the sea since the last ice age. His expression was annoyed.

  But then I noticed one of the more terrifying sights I’d seen in my life.

  Ebenezar McCoy’s hands were unsteady.

  The end of his staff quivered as they trembled.

  My mentor, my teacher, the most feared wizard on the planet, was frightened.

  He stepped between the hound and me and lifted his left hand as the thing stood there for a second, dripping slime onto the ground beneath it
and seething. Dozens of little mouths lined with serrated teeth opened along its flanks, gasping at the thick summer air as though it was something that the creature found only partially breathable.

  Then the cornerhound crouched, its body turning toward us with serpentine fluidity. The cluster of tentacles around its head began to quiver and undulate in weird unison, the motion becoming more and more energetic, and a weird moaning sound erupted from the creature, descending swiftly down the scale of audible sound until the tentacles all undulated together in a single quivering movement, and suddenly flew forward at the same instant, with a sound so deep I could feel it more than hear it.

  The old man lifted his hand with a single sharp word, and a wall of pure arcane power blazed into light between us, its surface covered in sigils and formulae and runes I had never seen before, a wall of such density and complexity that it made me feel young and clumsy for the first time in years.

  Something hit the wall with a visible impact, sending out ripples of energetic transfer through its surface, making it suddenly opaque with spreading concentric circles of light, and the ground quivered so sharply that it buzzed and tickled at the soles of my feet clear through my shoes.

  Ebenezar shouted, “Concentrated fire works best!”

  And then there was a flash of light and a huge sound and an invisible tsunami grabbed me and threw me off my feet.

  As I went down, I saw the old man’s shield wall shatter, as a thousand pounds of Outsider came crashing through it. Broken shards of light streaked in every direction as the cornerhound’s talons ripped the shield apart. The energies released were tremendous, and in their wake, runeshaped patches of fire burned on the cornerhound’s flesh—but the creature shook itself in a twisting shimmy as it landed, shedding the flame like water, and slashed an impossibly fast claw at the old man.

  I lay there stunned, but Ebenezar had been to this dance a few times before. The old man didn’t even try to pit his speed against the Outsider’s. He was already on the way out of talon range by the time the thing decided to attack, and it missed him by inches. The nest of tentacles sprouting from the thing’s neck snaked toward the old man, and the cornerhound’s body followed.