Jim Butcher: Side Jobs

“No, my lord,” Nothing muttered.

“Interesssting,” Frogface said, and a leer spread over his broad mouth. “When we arrive, transport her to my chambers. We will sssee what is left of her ssstrength when the ssspawn is taken from her womb.”

Jesus, men can be assholes. Even when they’re barely human. Frogface was officially elected.

Georgia shuddered. She lifted her head, very slowly, as if it had been held down with vast weights—and the glare she turned on Frogface was nothing less than murderous.

Frogface chuckled at the expression and turned to face Will and Marcy. He dipped his fingers into a pouch that hung around his neck, almost invisible against his leathery skin, and withdrew what looked like a small seashell from it. He leered at the motionless Marcy and said, “Firssst, the female.”

He closed his eyes and made a low sound in his throat, then began chanting words that bubbled and gobbled out from between his rubbery lips.

Now I’ve got you , I thought to myself, and sighted the gun on Frogface’s rubbery lips. I didn’t have Dresden’s knowledge of magic, but I knew any wizard was vulnerable when they began working forces, the way Frogface was doing. The concentration needed was intense. If I’d understood Dresden correctly, it would mean that Frogface would have to be focusing his entire attention on his spell—leaving nothing remaining for defending his sallow hide.

The air began to shimmer around Frogface’s hands, and fine, slithering tendrils emerged from the brightly colored shell and began to drift down toward Marcy, a cloud of tendrils as fine as a cobweb.

Certain now of my target, I breathed, held it, and squeezed the trigger.

Say what you like about the Belgians. They can make some fine weaponry.

The silenced P-90 barely whispered when the burst of automatic fire erupted from the end of the suppressor. There was no flash, no thunder—just a soft, wheezing sound and the click of the gun’s action cycling. Thanks to the subsonic ammunition, the discharge itself actually made less noise than the rounds striking Frogface’s skull.

There were several wet, loud cracking sounds, and every one of the rounds I’d fired struck home. One round would have been messy enough. When half a dozen of them hit, Frogface’s head quite literally exploded, shattered to pulp and shards of bone by the bullets’ impact, and two-thirds of his skull, from the upper lip on up, simply vanished into green-blooded spray.

There was a flash of angry red light from the seashell. Frogface let out a high-pitched, tinny scream, and the near-headless body began to topple, thrashing wildly.

The turtlenecks all came to their feet, looking around in wide-eyed confusion. My weapon had given them absolutely no clue as to where the attack had come from. I sighted in on Nothing, but from my angle, any rounds that went through him would threaten Will and a caged prisoner, beyond him.

I shifted targets, settling the red crosshairs on another turtleneck standing just past Will. I squeezed off another whispering burst of a half-dozen or so rounds, and the creature’s neck exploded into a cloud of scarlet gore the consistency of mucus. It went limp, settling to the floor like a deflating balloon.

Nothing’s pale-eyed gaze snapped over toward me, and I saw his gaze track the fall of brass bullet casings from where they bounced off the floor back up to my position on the shelves.

He let out an enraged sound, pulled a short tube from his pocket, and pointed it at me. I moved, sliding back down the ladder to the floor, hardly moving more slowly than if I’d fallen. There was a high-pitched whistle, and something that looked like a small, spiny sea urchin flew past me, just over my head, close enough for the wind of its passage to stir dark-dyed hairs. It slammed into the wall behind me and remained there, quivering, as its spines punched through the metal siding and stuck. Drops of yellow-green liquid fell from the tips of some of the spines, and began smoking and eating small holes in the concrete floor.

Yikes.

Throaty popping, clicking sounds from several sources filled the air, an exchange of what could only be language. I ran for the far end of the shelving unit as the dark forms of the turtlenecks started moving toward me. I caught glimpses of them between the boxes and containers stacked on the lowest shelf, running with the lithe, floating agility of professional athletes.

I ran past a clump of the growth on the wall, a little lower than most, and as I approached, it suddenly fluoresced with bioluminescent color. On sheer instinct, I threw myself flat to the concrete floor and slid past on my belly as the lumpy growths began hissing, and jets of mist, the same color as the fluid covering the urchin spines, began to spray forth at random. The smell was hideous, and I scrambled back to my feet and kept running down the aisle, staying as far from the wall as I could.

If I’d been half a step slower, I would have died. There was a great crash, and Nothing smashed through the lowest level of the shelving unit, thrusting aside a steel drum and a wooden crate the size of a coffin as if they’d been made of Styrofoam. His fingers missed grabbing onto me by inches.

A second turtleneck beat me to the end of the shelf. I opened up with the P-90, praying that a ricochet wouldn’t kill one of the prisoners, but my target moved with the speed of a striking serpent, bounding forward to plant a foot against the steel wall of the warehouse, six feet off the ground. Using only a single leg, he kicked off into a back-flip that carried him back past the end of the shelf and out of my line of fire.

The damn thing hadn’t been moving fast enough to dodge bullets—but he’d been moving fast enough to dodge me , and I was the one doing the aiming. A round might have clipped one of his legs, but that was all, and Nothing was pounding up behind me, gaining despite his mass. I felt like a squirrel being pursued by a German shepherd; if he caught me, it would end about the same way.

So I played squirrel, and instead of running in the open, I turned ninety degrees to my right and dove between two stacks of pallets on the lowest shelf. I took a little skin off an arm in hurling myself between them and emerged onto the open warehouse floor. I heard Nothing’s shoes squealing on the floor as he applied the brakes behind me.

A turtleneck was coming straight at me, on a direct line from the cages not yet loaded into the railroad car. I brought the P-90 up and dropped to one knee. The turtleneck rushed forward, his pale blue eyes wide and staring. He held an inward-curving knife in one hand and carried it low and close to his leg. He knew how to use it.

I put the scarlet crosshairs on his sternum and squeezed the trigger. The instant before the shots would have sputtered out of the gun, the turtleneck leapt straight up, flipping once in the air as he went over me.

After seeing the incredible quickness of the other not-quite-humans, I’d been waiting for the dodge. As soon as his feet left the floor, I spun to my left, opening fire the instant the end of the barrel was clear of the prisoners. Bullets hissed through the air like a great scythe—and in the edge of my vision, I saw the turtleneck I’d wounded seconds before. He’d come charging toward me while I’d aimed at his buddy, and the sudden turn took him by surprise. There was no aiming involved—it was a brute-force approach. I emptied the rest of the clip at him and prayed I could leave him no safe space in which to dodge.

St. Jude gets a lot of business, but sometimes he comes through. The hissing, puffing little gun spat out a line of deadly projectiles and intersected the turtleneck’s path, tearing a row of five or six holes across his upper body. The turtleneck screamed and went down.