Jim Butcher - Dresden Files Omnibus

by Jim Butcher

  “ You … you …” She shook her head and slammed her shoulder gently against me, still laughing.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Welcome to the club,” she said. “Tiny.”

  “I mean it,” I said. “This is bad stuff.”

  “Right now,” she said, “every precinct in Chicago is scrambling to round up every officer it can get. They’ll be doing everything they can to get ahead of the chaos that’s going to come from the blackout. Firefighters, too, for all the good it will do them.” She shook her head. “They don’t feel too big, either. And they don’t even have a magic island.”

  I thought about footprints on a beach.

  “Maybe they’re about to feel a whole lot smaller,” I said. “Maybe we all are.”

  Karrin frowned at that. She folded her coat closed around her a little more tightly and leaned against me. I put my arm around her.

  “Just how bad are we talking, here?” she asked me.

  “The Fomor think they can wipe out the city, whether we know they’re coming or not,” I said. “They seem sincere.”

  “Wipe out,” Murphy said.

  “Old-school. Think Attila. Genghis Khan.”

  “Jesus Christ,” she breathed, and leaned against me. “The radio’s out. So is the Internet, in town. How do we warn them?”

  “If only we’d put out the word to be on guard already,” I said wryly. “The Paranetters are used to surviving the big kids slugging it out. They’ll get together at their safe houses, Mac’s, places like that.”

  “And everyone else?” Murphy asked.

  “Hey, everybody,” I said, “mythological monsters are coming to kill you. Please evacuate.”

  She pressed her lips together in frustration but acknowledged the point. “So what do we do?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t know.”

  “What’s going to happen?

  I stared out at the darkness ahead of us, tracking the location of the island as surely as I would the progress of an ant across my arm, and pushed emotion away from things, thought through the matter as I would any mathematical problem.

  “What makes this different,” I said, “is Ethniu. And this weapon she has. The Eye of Balor.”

  “Yeah,” Murphy said. “What’s up with that thing?”

  I blew out a breath. “Hell of a lot of variants in Celtic traditional folklore. It’s hard to say. Balor was kind of an equivalent to a Greek Titan, up in Celt territory. He had this eye that could be used to wither the world, to destroy everything it saw, to set it on fire. He kept it covered behind a bunch of eye patches and veils, and he could remove a few of them at a time to get different kinds of destructive effects, from making things rot to setting them on fire to blasting them to dust.”

  “Kind of like gradually reducing the shielding around a radioactive core,” Murphy noted.

  “I …” I blinked. “Ugh. That’s unpleasant to consider. But yes. I don’t know how accurate the folklore is, and I haven’t talked to anyone with direct knowledge yet. But it’s safe to assume that the Eye is a weapon of mass destruction,” I said. “There’s a city-killer coming to our town.”

  “How will they do it?” she asked.

  “Come in from the lake,” I said. “After that, it’s old-school.”

  “Kill everyone they see,” she said.

  “And use the Eye to blow away any points of hard resistance,” I said, nodding. “They’ll kill or take anyone they can, while the mortal authorities flounder in the blackout. Do their worst with the Eye, and I have no idea how bad that could be. Then they’ll be gone before the National Guard can get there.”

  “The people,” Murphy said quietly. “Tonight. There’s no one to protect them.”

  “The hell there isn’t,” I said, and coaxed a little more speed out of the old engine. “I’ll be back before they get here.”

  “You, huh,” Murphy said, and I could hear the smile in her voice. “Against a protogod with a pocket nuke and an army of monsters.”

  “Not just me,” I said. “But if it had to be just me, yeah. I’d be good with that. It’s home. You gotta die somehow. Standing up to a monster at the door isn’t a bad way to do it.”

  She was quiet for a moment before she said, “I feel you.”

  I squeezed her against me a little harder. “Here I am, getting all dramatic. How are you holding up?”

  She shrugged one shoulder. Her voice was heavy and tired. “Everything hurts. But I can move some.”

  “Maybe you should take shelter,” I said. “The Paranetters are going to head for Mac’s place. They’ll need someone to keep a cool head and a sharp watch.”

  She snorted. “You think I can’t handle myself?”

  “Don’t,” I said quietly. “I was ready to take you with me into literal Hell and you know it. Every warrior gets hurt. Has limits. There’s no shame in acknowledging that.”

  She was quiet for a moment. Then she asked, “If you were hurt, would you sit this one out?”

  I said nothing.

  “It’s my home, too, Harry.”

  I clenched my teeth.

  “And,” she said, leaning her cheek against my biceps, “if you try to strand me on that damned island to keep me safe, I swear to God I will shoot you in the leg.”

  I stiffened and gave her a quick guilty glance.

  She smiled wanly in the green chemical light, widened her eyes, and said in a dramatic impersonation of my voice, “I’ll be back in time.” She snorted. “Get over yourself. You are who you are. And mostly I like it. But let’s treat each other like grown-ups. Promise me.”

  I felt sick.

  Karrin was smart, tough, and capable. She was also hurt. She was also right. And what was coming would give her no special consideration whatsoever.

  But she was who she was. Karrin Murphy could no more have sat quietly by while Chicago burned than she could grow wings and fly. She would fight for her home. She would die for it.

  Some part of me made whimpering animal sounds, way down deep inside.

  At the end of the day, people have to be who they are. If you try to take that from them, you diminish them. You reduce them to children, unable to make decisions for themselves. There’s no way to poison your relationship with someone else faster.

  I didn’t want to lose her.

  If she fought, she might well be taken from me.

  If I tried to keep her from fighting, I would lose her for sure.

  So while my heart and some enormous portion of my soul quailed in terror, my mouth said, “I promise.”

  I felt her arm go around my lower back and she squeezed gently for a moment. “Thank you.”

  “Promise me you’ll fight smart,” I said.

  She bumped her head against my arm and said, “How would you know if I did?”

  I huffed out part of a laugh. And we stood together.

  Chapter

  Thirty-four

  The little cheap plastic compass swung and bobbed as the boat did, but I didn’t need it. Now that I had acquainted myself with the island’s arcane functions, I had my own personal compass, a subtle, tiny sensation in my head that always told me where I could find the place.

  That was part and parcel of being the Warden of Demonreach.

  I felt it when the Water Beetle hit the outer ring of defenses, about a mile out from the island. With a few words and an effort of will, I could have had the island causing treacherous currents, frigid vortexes that would pull intruders down to sharp rocks below. The lake would have boiled like a sea under a storm.

  I could tell that Karrin felt the island’s influence as well, a subtle presence that caused unease in all who entered. It prevented casual visitors: No one who came into these waters would feel at ease until they’d changed course to go around the island. Hell, planes didn’t fly directly overhead; that’s how powerful the island’s influence was.

  That wasn’t a planned defense, exactly. It was simply the natural presence of th
e things held prisoner there—a menagerie of supernatural terrors that started with some of the foulest beings I’d ever faced and progressed down into the depths of nightmare from there. Demonreach was the Alcatraz of the supernatural world—and I was the guy holding all the keys.

  I could have found that place blindfolded and in the dark. Hell, I was finding it in the dark, piloting the ship without much need to turn the wheel until the looming mass of the island rose above us.

  We’d prepared for arriving at night—the floating dock my brother and I had built, the Whatsup Dock, had been lined with luminescent marine tape. I cut the throttle and came in slow and careful. Even without the possibility of aquatic bad guys, operating a boat was a damned dangerous occupation for fools, so I had to be extra cautious.

  I saw Freydis move up to the prow of the ship as we approached the dock, skin glowing in the green chemical light. She rubbed her arms a few times as the shadow of the island fell over her, as if the place chilled her. Beside me, Karrin shifted restlessly.

  “It’s that bad?” I asked her.

  “You don’t feel it at all, do you?” she asked. “Ugh. It’s … You know that feeling, when you’re dreaming, and you realize that you’re in a nightmare?” She nodded toward the island. “It’s that. In IMAX.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Well, it’s not supposed to be a place where visitors are welcome.”

  “I worry about you, when you’re out here,” she said. “What it’s doing to you.”

  “It’s not doing anything to me,” I said. “I’m the Warden.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Or maybe it’s something you can’t feel happening to you. Something else.”

  A disturbing thought.

  But not one I hadn’t had before.

  “You’re just going to have to trust me.”

  “Yeah. That’s why I’m standing here.”

  I brought the ship in carefully to the dock and Freydis leapt like a doe down from the ship and started making her fast.

  “Is the cabin still livable?” Karrin asked. “It has supplies?”

  “Everything we need,” I said. I cut the motor and headed out of the wheelhouse. “I’ll check on Thomas.”

  I cracked a fresh light and took it down belowdecks with me, to the boat’s little living compartment, and into a tableau from some kind of Renaissance painting.

  The boat had a couple of bunks, nothing fancy, generally covered in white sheets and heavy red plaid blankets. Thomas and Lara were reclining on one of them. She sat up at the head of the bunk, and he was sprawled back, his shoulders across her upper body. Both were naked, and there was nothing sexual in the moment at all. One of her hands held his broken ones upon his chest. The other simply cupped his cheek. Her head was bowed, as if in exhaustion, and her shoulders sagged. Her hair spilled across her face, hiding all but a bit of her profile, and brushed across his forehead.

  My brother’s eyes were open, unfocused. They had acquired faint hints of grey among the silver in his gaze.

  He looked like some poor broken knight, being gathered into the gentle arms of an angel of death.

  “What the hell?” I asked.

  Lara lifted her gaze to me, her eyes flickering with bits of mirror-bright silver that shifted even as I took note of them, sending the eerie light of the chemical stick dancing about them in fluttering, kaleidoscope changes of all shades of otherworldly green… .

  I tore my eyes away before something bad happened.

  “Lara. What are you doing?”

  It took her a moment to speak. Her voice came out furry and delicious. “I’m giving him the energy I took earlier. It’s … slowing down the damage his Hunger is inflicting. But it’s very bad. And I’m almost …”

  She licked her lips. The sight of it made me want to rip off my shirt and start boasting of my many manly deeds.

  “… empty.” She made the word sound like a sin. “I’ll need to feed if I’m to give him more.”

  “Not really an option,” I said. I had to clear my throat in the middle. “We’re here.”

  She looked up at me, her silver eyes sharp and clear. “And you’re sure you can protect him here? Even from his own Hunger?”

  “Everything we need,” I said. “Give him to me.”

  She nodded and said, “Take him.”

  She transferred Thomas to me, wrapped in a blanket. The air around her was cold. Like, gorgeously cold. Like, I wanted to take my shirt off and stretch out in it and cool off. And the Winter mantle let out a low growl in my mind that suggested that a number of terrible ideas were in fact the most interesting concepts I had ever considered.

  “Dammit, Lara,” I snapped in irritation. “We’re working.”

  She blinked at me for a moment at that, as I wrapped a blanket around him and gathered Thomas up like a child. Then she said, “Involuntary. Honestly. We can always choose to use the Hunger. We can’t always choose not to.”

  “Well, it’s annoying,” I said grumpily.

  She lifted her hand and quickly covered a smile. “Oh. You know, I’ve … never been told that before. Not once.”

  I rolled my eyes and said, “I believe you.” It would be a trick to carry my brother up the narrow stairwell to the deck, but whatever. I growled in irritation and toted him out. He was still barely conscious, and he felt entirely too light.

  Stupid svartalves.

  Stupid vampires.

  Stupid Titans.

  Stupid Thomas. Why in the hell had my brother gotten himself into this mess?

  I got him up on the deck and Freydis was there to steady me. The redheaded Valkyrie eyed me in the light and nodded toward the island. “Not much here.”

  “Everything we need,” I said. “Don’t step off the dock. I’m not sure what would happen to you.”

  Freydis looked at me and shuddered. “I won’t.”

  I brushed past her and carried my brother down the dock toward the island itself. No one stopped me. Everyone was too worried about what was happening back in Chicago. Which was just as well.

  I had told everyone Thomas would be safe on the island. I hadn’t yet told them where he’d be staying.

  See, the thing about keeping people safe is that, in the end, if you really want to keep someone truly protected, your only option is to lock them up. Fortresses are prisons.

  And vice versa.

  I started up the dock and stepped onto the rough ground of the island, walking with perfectly sure footing, my intellectus of the place making it impossible to slip or fall. I knew Demonreach, every tree and stone, as thoroughly as I knew my own body.

  I had taken fewer than a dozen steps onto the stones of the island before there was a massive movement in the trees. I came to a halt, waiting, as the figure came gliding out of the darkness. It was enormous, as tall as the Titan, and far broader, a menacing shape in a billowing, shadowy cloak and hood that hid its form from the human eye. A pair of green flames burned somewhere back in the hood, supernaturally bright eyes that were currently narrowed in something like concern.

  The vast figure drifted out to a halt in front of me and bowed slowly, formally, from the waist.

  “WARDEN,” it said. Its voice was a grating rumble of stone and tearing earth, heard as much inside my head and chest as with my ears. “YOU HAVE RETURNED.”

  “Alfred,” I said. “We’ve got trouble right here in River City.”

  The genius loci of the island regarded me in stillness for a moment before it said, “THE ISLAND IS IN A LAKE.”

  The supernatural crowd is not generally up on any cultural reference that has occurred since the Renaissance. “Human reference, Alfred. Pay it no mind.”

  “AS YOU COMMAND, WARDEN.” The enormous hood tilted to one side, verdant gaze fixing on my brother’s unmoving form. “YOUR BLOOD KIN IS DYING.”

  “I know,” I said. “We’re going to help him.”

  “I AM NOT MADE TO HELP,” Alfred said. There wasn’t any passion to the statement. There was no mercy,
either. Alfred was … the spirit of the prison itself, a place constructed to contain magical threats too dangerous to be permitted to roam the world. Over the millennia, more than six thousand beings of terrible power had been consigned to the oubliette tunnels beneath the island: They were a legion of nightmares, the least of which made me shudder in a very real fear I could never quite shake.

  Alfred was the being created to maintain their isolation. He wasn’t what you call easygoing.

  “Right,” I said. “We’re going to place him in stasis.”

  Alfred’s eyes blazed several shades brighter with eagerness. “IT HAS BEEN OVERLONG SINCE THE LAST FOULNESS WAS CONSIGNED TO MY EVERLASTING CARE,” it said. “THIS PARASITE-RIDDLED VERMIN SCARCELY QUALIFIES FOR MINIMUM SECURITY.”

  “I want him held,” I said. “I want his Hunger held helpless as well, until such time as I return to release him.”

  “WHICH PENITENCE PROTOCOL SHALL HE SUFFER, WARDEN?”

  There were several that could be inflicted on the inmates of the prison. Some were bound in darkness. Some in torment. Some in simple confinement. The various Wardens of Demonreach had tinkered with the cells for a very, very long time. Some of the protocols had been developed before civilization had been more than a few collections of huts and fires in the darkness, and they were not kind.

  There was one prisoner held below in a kind of unique stasis, something that could most closely be considered sleep, though he could also awaken and perform limited communications for short periods of time. It was, as best as I could understand, the only protocol with sanitysaving sleep built into it.

  The prison had never been meant for something as frail and nearly mortal as my brother.

  Thomas made a soft, ugly little sound, as if only his utter exhaustion was holding him back from screaming in pain.

  “Contemplation,” I responded quietly. “He is to be shielded from any communication with other prisoners not enduring the same protocol. Give me the crystal.”

  The great spirit bowed again. When it straightened, a shard of crystal about the length of a socket wrench, like quartz but pulsing with a quiet green light, lay shimmering upon the earth.