Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  The only thing that mattered was Lara Raith.

  She stood maybe three feet from the Einherjar, balanced on her toes as one lovely leg slowly, slowly shifted, sliding forward. The motion made muscles stretch and bunch, and shadows rippled over her body in ways that should not have been possible, much less maddeningly arousing.

  I forgot what I was doing on the floor of the castle.

  That didn’t matter.

  Lara mattered.

  I found myself just staring at her, at the most vibrant, dangerous, glorious woman I’d ever seen, only a few feet away, naked and pulsing with erotic energy. I didn’t care about the smudges of dirt on that pale, perfect skin. I didn’t care that my own body was smudged with filth. I didn’t care about the mission, or the nightmare spider shaft I’d just slithered down, or the now-unfamiliar aches and pains, just so long as I didn’t have to stop looking at the most incredible sight any man could ever s—

  I sneezed, out of nowhere, hard, five or six times.

  Magic surged out of me, energy pouring out with each involuntary contraction.

  Lara’s head whipped around toward me, her silver-blue eyes wide like a cat’s.

  Black widow spiders with bodies the size of basketballs came boiling out of the shaft behind me—five or six of them.

  The Einherjar’s glazed stare abruptly snapped into focus, and his cold grey eyes snapped from Lara to me to the spiders. His finger moved from ready position along the receiver to the trigger of the rifle.

  Lara blurred.

  She was inside the Einherjar’s guard before I had fully realized she had begun to move, dipping down and coming up inside the circle of his arms, between the man and the rifle, her back to his chest. Before he’d begun to do much more than twitch in reaction, she had ahold of the weapon and had knocked his hand away from the trigger. The two struggled over the rifle. The Einherjar gave up trying to recover the rifle and clamped his huge right hand down on Lara’s throat. Muscle and tendon in his forearms stood out like cord as he began to crush her neck.

  Meanwhile, the spiders chittered and hissed and leapt toward the nearest target, which happened to be me.

  “Glah!” I shouted. In a very manly fashion.

  Look, big bugs are like a thing. I mean, imagine you looked down the length of your underwear-only-clad body and saw giant Alaskan crabs charging up it, pincers waving. You’d have shouted in a manly fashion as well, to prepare yourself for battle.

  There wasn’t much light, and even less time. I kicked frantically at one enormous spider and knocked it aside like a flabby kickball full of peanut butter. I shoved a second creature out of the air as it came at my face and then felt horrible puncture wounds happening as the other four bit into me. When teeth pierce your flesh, you don’t feel much for a second or two—until whatever bit you starts worrying you, thrashing back and forth while tearing. Then it’s like electricity flowing into you, lightning bolts of sharp silver sensation that surge up and down whatever limb is being bitten. Fangs pierced. Venom seared. My heart rate skyrocketed.

  The other two widows rebounded from where I’d knocked them away and joined in.

  And then, frantic breaths later, the forms of the spiders just wobbled and suddenly collapsed into translucent goo. One second, dozens of hard, tiny spider feet were poking into me everywhere while spider fangs sent pain scorching through me. The next, I was covered in ectoplasm and small wounds, having thoroughly slimed myself.

  Goddamned conjuritis.

  I would just have to hope that there weren’t any negative interactions with ectoplasm being injected into my bloodstream—because whatever the venom had been, it was definitely reduced to ectoplasm now.

  I flopped like a landed fish, ectogoo making the floor more slippery than your average waterslide, eventually thrashing until I could see Lara again.

  She still stood with her back to the Einherjar. They’d dropped the gun in the struggle, and the man had both hands on her throat now. Her face was bright pink, her lips an ugly greyish color. I couldn’t understand why she wasn’t fighting back until I saw her hands, behind her, at the small of her back.

  She wasn’t trying to fight off his hold on her. She was going for the kill.

  Lara arched, twisting and struggling, and the poor bastard hung on to her neck. He thought he was winning the fight.

  Then his fatigue pants came loose. Lara’s lips twisted into a triumphant snarl. There was a surge of bodies, and then the Einherjar let out a startled huffing sound. His eyes went wide and unfocused.

  The struggle stopped. A slow smile spread over Lara’s half-strangled face. She slid her hands up the Einherjar’s arms and tugged gently at his fingers. His hands came away at once, sliding down her shoulders to her breasts. She coughed once, then let out a low purring sound, and her hips began to move in slow rhythm.

  The Einherjar staggered. He sank back against his desk, balance wavering. Lara stayed with him, and though the motion should have been awkward, Lara moved smoothly and nimbly to match him, somewhere between a dance partner, a lover, and a hungry spider wrapping up its prey for the feast.

  She looked back at her victim, teeth showing, and then looked at me. Her eyes were liquid silver, like mirrors. Deep pink finger marks on her neck promised bruises to come, but even as I stared at her, they were fading—as the Einherjar’s breathing became heavier and more desperate.

  “What the hell was that?” she demanded. Her voice was quiet and rough, as if she’d somehow spent ten years drinking whiskey. “Giant spiders? Dammit, Dresden.”

  I found myself just staring for a second. She wasn’t putting out the same kind of aura she had before, but she was still one of the most erotic, terrifying sights I had looked upon. Her allure drew me, calling to my purely human hormones—and, needless to say, the Winter mantle was going absolutely insane with lust for her. It wanted nothing so much as to challenge the Einherjar, beat him to death, and then claim Lara as a prize of conquest.

  But that wasn’t me. Not the real me. That was just the mantle and the meat, wanting what they wanted. I pushed back against them both with my mind, with my will, until I remembered my purpose.

  Thomas.

  Save my brother.

  I came to my sock feet, soaked with ectoplasm though they might be, and padded forward squishily.

  “Don’t kill him,” I hissed intently, trying not to look at her. “All of this trouble is for nothing if you kill him.”

  “Don’t be long,” she countered, her voice throaty, sensual, a hint of a moan in every word. Her eyes had become almost completely white at this point, pupils like beads of black in their centers. Her eyes looked utterly inhuman—and exactly like those of the demon Hunger I’d observed with my wizard senses in my brother, years ago. “He’s stronger than he looks. Hurt me badly. I’m still healing.”

  The Einherjar just remained locked where he was, his eyes blank, his expression one of a man in torment, moving only as needed to match Lara’s motion. She was a tiny thing compared to his sheer muscular mass—and he clearly didn’t have a chance in the world against her at this point. A man dedicated for centuries to his profession, and it meant nothing in the face of her power. There was no dignity to it.

  Do we all look that goofy and clumsy during the act?

  Yeah. Probably. Even when there wasn’t a succubus involved.

  I pushed past the vampire and her victim and tried to figure out exactly when I’d started taking the field beside the things that go bump in the night instead of against them.

  And then I pushed those thoughts away, grabbed an armload of towels, and went looking for my brother.

  Chapter

  Twenty-seven

  At the end of the hallway, I found a heavy trapdoor set in the floor.

  I froze.

  My heart started beating faster.

  The door didn’t match the castle’s décor. It wasn’t lined up exactly right with the stones. It was old and made of heavy wood.

  A
nd there were scorch marks on it.

  Because it was my door.

  My door, mine, from my old apartment; the door to my subbasement lab. It still had the ring in it that I used to pull it up. And it had an additional bar on it that hadn’t been there before.

  I shook myself out of the freeze and stretched out a shaking hand to slide back the bar and open the door. It came up easily; it even squeaked at the right spot and felt, dammit, exactly like it always had. My chest suddenly hurt and my eyes burned.

  Hell’s bells, I wanted to feel like I was home again.

  And instead, I was standing in Marcone’s house.

  Something stirred in me, down deep. It wasn’t rage. It wasn’t anything as ephemeral and temporary as rage. It wasn’t predicated on my emotional pain. It felt older than that. Primordial. What was mine had been taken away.

  It wasn’t right. And no one was going to do anything about it.

  Unless it was me.

  Something went click somewhere inside.

  Ever since the Red Court had taken my daughter, I’d been reeling from one disaster to the next, surviving. This entire situation was just one more entropy barrage hitting my life, forcing me to scramble once again, maybe getting me killed. (Again. Technically.)

  Things were different now. I was a part of Maggie’s life. And she might need me to walk her down an aisle one day.

  Maybe it was time I started getting ahead of this stuff.

  Maybe it was time to get serious.

  My brother was lying curled up in a fetal position, naked and shockingly thin, as if he’d lost forty pounds of muscle in the past day. He looked better and worse—the bruises were gone, as was the blood. His hands still looked knotted and horrible, but his face was recognizable again. Being a vampire has its privileges, even if his skin looked like it needed to be a couple of sizes larger, drawn tight against what remained of his formerly muscular frame.

  It was his expression that sickened me. He looked up with mercury-colored eyes, dull and glazed with simple animal pain.

  “Thomas,” I hissed. “It’s Harry.”

  He blinked up at the light without speaking.

  “Can you hear me, man?”

  He stared and made a small choking sound.

  “Hell’s bells,” I said. There was no ladder waiting for me below. So I grimaced, swung my legs over the opening, and then dropped down into it as quietly as I could.

  It was a bit of a drop, but I managed not to land on Thomas or fall on my ass.

  “Come on,” I said. “We have to go.”

  For a long beat, nothing happened. Then he moved, and I felt myself let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. My brother was alive.

  But there wasn’t much left of him.

  Stars and stones, the svartalves had worked him over badly. They hadn’t put him in irons. They’d just beaten him until there was no possibility of him effecting his own escape. I wanted to be enraged about it, but among the supernatural nations, their actions would be considered effective, not sadistic. Hell, it would have been a simple matter for them to simply kill him out of hand and then announce that an assassin had made an attempt on Etri and been killed before he could do the job. But instead they were holding to the Accords.

  He was alive. But his Hunger had evidently cannibalized his own body to keep him that way.

  “Thomas, we haven’t got much time,” I said. “Get your lazy ass up. We have to go.”

  He looked at me, and his brow furrowed. I wasn’t at all confident that he understood me.

  “Of course,” I said. “I have to do all the work myself.”

  I lifted my amulet and looked around the room, and my heart hurt. It was my old lab. I’d spent countless hours there, working, studying, brewing, casting, summoning, setting my hair on fire—you know, wizard stuff. So had Molly. There were smoke stains on the floor, and I could see the squares and rectangles where my old furniture had been, the feet of tables, the bases of bookshelves, the holes in the wall where I had screwed in the wire-frame storage shelving. My old copper summoning circle had survived, somehow, at the far end of the room. Maybe the floor of my old living room had collapsed over it, shielding it from the worst of the flames.

  But it offered me no help.

  I wouldn’t have any trouble reaching up and grabbing the lip of the opening, then hauling myself out. But climbing out while carrying my brother would be a hell of a trick. Damn, I wished I had spent more of my time on earth magic. Altering gravity for a few seconds would make this really simple—but doing it at my current level of skill would take time that we did not have.

  I’d have to go with the alternative and hope I didn’t kill us both. Go, me.

  I stooped down, wrapped exposed skin in towels as best as I could, and got hold of Thomas’s arms. He hissed out a breath, but he didn’t move, his body putting up all the resistance of boiled pasta. He was shockingly light, but even light, limp people are a pain and a half to move around. It took me a minute to get him up and over one shoulder in a fireman’s carry. After that, I positioned myself under the exit, turning my body to, hopefully, make sure I didn’t take any of Thomas’s skin off on the way out.

  “I should make a cloak of levitation,” I muttered. “Doctor Strange would never have this problem.”

  I felt a flash of guilt at wasting time with smartassery and shoved it down. Time for that when my brother was safe.

  And then I crouched, made the best guess I could, gathered my will, and thrust my right hand down at the floor while snarling, “Forzare!”

  Raw kinetic force lashed down at the floor below me, and because of Sir Isaac Newton, it also propelled me up. I flew through the air, but I’d misjudged the amount of force needed. Magic is more art than science, and it was considerably harder to work with precision without a few tools to help me. So instead of gracefully sailing up to the level of the hallway’s floor, I sort of lurched up to the level of my belt and then started to fall back down.

  I grabbed at the floor of the hallway and desperately levered a knee up into the opening to give me a couple of points of tension—but it was hardly a solid position. I pushed as hard as I could with my right arm, but it was out straight, and there was only so much power in my shoulder and upper back. I strained to lift my brother onto the floor, but I had no leverage, and my position was too precarious to apply much of my strength. My muscles burned and then began, slowly, to falter. I ground my teeth, reaching deep, and strained to gain a few fractions of an inch that began to fade almost at once.

  I started preparing to drop in a controlled fall that would, hopefully, protect my brother—but then his weight suddenly vanished from my shoulder.

  Lara dragged him to one side with quick efficiency, blue eyes bright, cheeks still flushed, and then seized the guard’s heavy leather jacket and tossed me one sleeve. I took it.

  “You’re taking forever,” she said, and hauled me out of the hole.

  “And yet you’re the one literally fucking around on the job,” I countered.

  “That?” she asked, bobbing her head back toward the guard station and flashing me a wise, wicked smile. “No. That was just feeding. The other thing takes much, much longer. And preferably candles and champagne.”

  I pulled my legs out of the way, barely, before she shut the trapdoor—my trapdoor—and threw the bolt.

  “How is he?” she asked.

  I held up my amulet so that she could see her brother better.

  “Empty night,” she cursed. She crouched over him, peeling back one of his eyelids, and then his lips. His gums were swollen and blotchy with dark stains.

  “What’s happening?” I asked her.

  “He’s sustained too much trauma without feeding,” she said. “His Hunger needs life energy. It’s taking his. It’s turned on him. It’s killing him.”

  White Court vampires led a bizarre symbiotic existence: They were born bound to a demon that existed in immaterial tandem with them, called a Hu
nger. It was the demon who gave them their strength, their speed, their long lives, their capacity to recover from injury. In exchange they had to feed on the life force of others, to sustain the Hunger. My brother was, I knew, a rather potent example of the breed. That meant that his Hunger was strong, too.

  And now he was paying for it.

  “What can we do?”

  She shook her head, her face hard. “This is how White Court vampires die. How my father will die, sooner or later.”

  “Justine,” I said.

  That word got through. Thomas lifted his head, mirrored eyes on me. He reached out a weak hand toward me in a gesture that died of exhaustion halfway.

  “No,” Lara said, her eyes intent on his face. “By the time a Hunger turns on one of us, it’s mad, uncontrollable, insatiable. Even if we could redirect the Hunger, it would kill her and the child, and he’d die anyway.” The muscles in her jaw tensed. “There’s still part of him in there. I might be able to reach him if we get him out of here—if we hurry.”

  “Right,” I said, and slung my brother back up onto my shoulder.

  Lara gave me a nod of approval and rose with me, and we both padded as quietly as we could back toward the dumbwaiter shaft. We passed the enormous guard, who was sprawled on his desk, pants back on but unfastened. He reeked of bourbon. I hesitated beside the guard long enough to be sure I saw his chest rise and fall.

  “He’ll have a hell of a hangover,” Lara noted.

  “You were also drinking?” I asked. “When did you have time? Do you have vampire party superpowers I don’t know about?”

  “I found a bottle in his desk after he was finished and poured it on him,” Lara said primly, as if she’d been wearing a Victorian school-marm’s outfit instead of a whole lot of very well-tailored nothing. She strode to the dumbwaiter door and opened it. “Simple explanation for when he wakes up with a headache and a scrambled memory.” She tilted her head. “What was with those spiders? Why did you conjure them?”

  I made a frustrated sound. “It just … happened.”

  She frowned for a half second and then began fighting a smile from the corners of her mouth. “Oh, Empty Night. You’ve got conjuritis? I’ve heard about how awkward it can be when wizard kids get the disease. Aren’t you a few … decades old for that?”