Jim Butcher - Side Jobs

“Other things?” Murphy asked, gun steady on the darkness below. “Like what?”

“Things,” I said, staring down at the patient, lightless murk of Undertown. “Anything that doesn’t like sunlight or company. Vampires, ghouls, some of the nastier faeries, obviously. Once, I fought this wacko who kept summoning up fungus demons.”

“Are you stalling?” Murphy asked.

“Maybe I am.” I sighed. “I’ve been down there a few times. Never been good.”

“How you wanna do this?”

“Like we did the vampire lair. Let me go first with the shield. Something jumps out at us, I’ll drop and hold it off until you kill it.”

Murphy nodded soberly. I swallowed a lump of fear out of my throat. It settled into my stomach like a nugget of ice. I prepared my shield, and the same color light as emanated from my pentacle surrounded it, drizzling heatless blue-white sparks in an irregular stream. I prepared myself to use my blasting rod if I had to, and started down the stairs, following the tracking spell toward Georgia.

The old brick stairs ended at a rough stone slope into the earth. Water ran down the walls and in rivulets down the sides of the tunnel. We went forward, through an old building that might have been a schoolhouse, judging by the rotted piles of wood and a single old slate chalkboard fallen from one wall. The floor was tilted to one side. The next section of tunnel was full of freezing, dirty, knee-deep water until it sloped up out of the water, went round a corner where the walls had been cut by rough tools, and then opened into a wider chamber.

It was a low-ceilinged cave—low for me, any way. Most folks wouldn’t have been troubled. Three feet from the doorway, the floor dropped away into silent, black water that stretched out beyond the reach of my blue wizard light. Murphy stepped up next to me, and the light on her gun sent a silver spear of white light out over the water.

There, on a slab of stone that rose up no more than an inch or two from the water’s surface, lay Georgia.

Murphy’s light played over her. Georgia was a tall woman—in high-enough heels, she could have looked me in the eye. She’d been stork-skinny and frizzy haired when I met her. The years in between had softened her lines and brought out a natural confidence and intelligence that made her an extraordinarily attractive, if not precisely beautiful, woman. She was naked, laid on her back with her arms crossed over her chest in repose, funeral-style. She took slow breaths. Her skin was discolored from the cold, her lips tinged blue.

“Georgia?” I called, feeling like a dummy. But I didn’t know of any other way to see if she was awake. She didn’t stir.

“What now?” Murphy asked. “You go get her while I cover you?”

I shook my head. “Can’t be as easy as it looks.”

“Why not?”

“Because it never is.” I bowed my head for a moment, pressed my fingertips lightly to my forehead, between my eyebrows, and concentrated on bringing up my Sight.

One of the things common to all wizards is the Sight. Call it a sixth sense, a third eye, whatever you please; around the world everyone with enough magic has the Sight. It lets you actually see the forces of energy at work in the world around you—life, death, magic, what have you. It isn’t always easy to understand what I see, and sometimes it isn’t pretty—and anything a wizard views with his Sight is there, in Technicolor, never fading—forever.

That’s why you have to be careful what you choose to Look at. I don’t like doing it, ever. You never know what it is you’ll See.

But when it came to finding out what kinds of magic might be between Georgia and me, I didn’t have many options. I opened my Sight and Looked out over the water to Georgia.

The water was shot through with slithery tendrils of greenish light—a spell of some kind, just under its placid surface. If the water moved, the spell would react. I couldn’t tell how. The stone Georgia lay upon held a dull, pulsing energy, a sullen violet radiance that wound in slow, hypnotic spirals through the rock. A binding was in effect, I was sure, something to keep her from moving. Another spell played over and through Georgia herself—a cloud of deep blue sparkles that lay against her skin, especially around her head. A sleeping spell? I couldn’t make out any details from here.

“Well?” Murphy said.

I closed my eyes and released my Sight, always a mildly disorienting experience. The remnants of my hangover made it worse than usual. I reported my findings to Murphy.

“Well,” she said, “I sure am glad we have a wizard on the case. Otherwise we might be standing here without any idea what to do next.”

I grimaced and stepped to the water’s edge. “This is water magic. It’s tricky stuff. I’ll try to take down the alarm spell on the surface of the pool, then swim out and get Geo—”

Without warning, the water erupted into a boiling froth at my feet, and a claw, a freaking pincer as big as a couple of basketballs, shot out of the water and clamped down on my ankle.

I let out a battle cry. Sure, a lot of people might have mistaken it for a sudden yelp of unmanly fear, but trust me: It was a battle cry.

The thing, whatever it was, pulled my leg out from under me, trying to drag me in. I could see slick, wet black shell. I whipped my blasting rod around to point at the thing and snarled, “ Fuego! ”

A lance of fire as thick as my thumb lashed from the tip of my blasting rod, which was pointed at the thing’s main body. It hit the water and boiled into steam. It smashed into the shell of the creature with such force that it simply ripped the thing’s body from its clawed limb. I brought my shield up, a pale, fragile-looking quarter dome of blue light that coalesced into place before the steam boiled back into my eyes.

I squirmed away from the water on my butt, shaking wildly at the severed limb that still clutched me.

The waters surged again, and another slick-shelled thing grabbed at me. And another. And another. Dozens of the creatures were rushing toward our side of the pool, and the pressure wave rushing before them rose a foot off the pool’s surface.

“Shellycobbs!” I shouted, and flicked another burst of flame at the nearest, driving it back. “They’re shellycobbs!”

“Whatever,” Murphy said, stepped up beside me, and started shooting. The third shellycobb took three hits in the same center area of its shell and cracked like a restaurant lobster.

It bought me a second to act, and I raised the blasting rod and tried something new on the fly, a blending of a blast of fire with my shield magic. I pointed the rod at one side of the shore, gathered my will, and thundered, “ Ignus defendarius! ”

A bar of flame, bright enough to hurt my eyes, shot out to one side of the room. I drew a line across the stone with the tip of the blasting rod, and as the flame touched the stone, it adhered, spooling out from my blasting rod until it had formed a solid line between us and the water, and an opaque curtain of flame three feet high separated us from the shellycobbs. Angry rattles and splashes came from the far side of the curtain.

If the fire dropped, the faerie water monsters would swarm us.

The fire took a lot of energy to keep up, and if I tried to hold it too long, I’d probably black out. Worse, it was still fire—it needed oxygen to keep burning, and in those cramped tunnels there wasn’t going to be much of it around for breathing if the fire stayed lit too long. All of this meant we had only seconds and had to do something—fast.

“Murph!” I snapped. “Could you carry her?”

She turned wide blue eyes to me, her gun still held ready and pointing at the shellycobbs. “What?”