Jim Butcher: Side Jobs

But the one who’d leapt over me dropped back down, adjusting swiftly to the situation, and then whipped the hooked knife across my belly.

Almost anyone else in town would have been killed. The knife struck with enormous power, and its blade was sharp. Standard Kevlar-style body armor wouldn’t have done a damn thing to stop it. I’d stopped wearing the standard stuff, thanks to one too many exciting outings with Dresden. I wore a double-thickness vest now—and sandwiched between the layers of antiballistic fabric was a corselet of tightly linked titanium rings, manufactured for me by one of Dresden’s friends, the wife of a retired Fist of God.

The knife sliced right through the Kevlar. It split a ring or three, but then the tip caught in the titanium. Instead of spilling my intestines upon the ground, the superhumanly powerful blow wound up dragging me along and flung me across the concrete floor. I went down into a roll and spread out the force of the fall, coming back up to my feet, already having released the empty magazine from the P-90. I was reaching for the fresh one when another turtleneck abruptly closed in on me from behind and slipped a slim, iron-hard arm around my neck.

I barely got a hand inside the loop of his arm before he could lock the choke on me, and I twisted like an eel to get out. His strength was far superior to mine, but then, whose wasn’t? Even in grappling, strength isn’t absolutely everything. The turtleneck might have been faster than I, but I had the advantage of experience. My timing was good enough to let me sense the opening, the lack of pressure in the weakest part of his hold, and I managed to writhe out of his grip—only to have a forearm smash down across my shoulders, driving me to the floor.

As I went down, I saw that the turtleneck with the knife was only a few steps away. I’d never escape a pair of them.

I didn’t have time to get another magazine into the P-90, so I rolled with it and smashed the heavy polymer stock of the weapon into the nearest turtleneck’s kneecap.

He screamed and seized me by the neck of the leather jacket, shaking me like a doll.

At which point Will and Marcy gave Nothing’s companions an object lesson as to why werewolves instill terror in mortal hearts and minds.

There was a flash of dark fur, a snarl, a horrible, tearing sound, and the turtleneck screamed. He started listing to one side, and I realized that one of the werewolves had just severed the hamstring of the turtleneck’s unwounded leg. We both went down. I twisted out of the leather jacket, though I had to drop the P-90 and let it hang from my harness to do it, and rolled free of the turtleneck. An instant later, a second, slightly lighter brown form, teeth gleaming, darted past the fallen turtleneck and ripped out what would have been the jugular vein on a human being.

Apparently, it was close enough for government work. The turtleneck thrashed in dying agony as mucuslike red blood bubbled from the gaping wound.

And suddenly there were two beasts from the nightmares of mankind standing on either side of me, facing the enemy. They were wolves, one large and dark, the other slightly smaller and lighter, but both heavily laden with muscle and thick fur, and their golden eyes burned with awareness—and fury.

Faced with a pair of murderous werewolves, the knife-wielding turtleneck slid to a sudden, uncertain halt.

In the sudden silence that followed, the sound of me slapping a fresh magazine into the P-90 and racking the first round into the chamber was a sharp trio of clicks. Pop. Click-clack.

See, Nothing? I thought. I can make ominous noises, too.

I brought the weapon back up and snarled, “Lose the knife.”

The turtleneck hesitated for half a second, eyes darting left and right, then released it. The steel chimed as the knife hit the floor.

I kept the weapon on him, the trigger half pulled. Yeah, it wasn’t the safe, smart way to operate, but frankly I wouldn’t lose any sleep if I accidentally shot this guy. He was just too damn fast to give up any advantage at all.

“There were five of them,” I said to the wolves. “How many did you handle, including the one that was on me?”

The more lightly colored wolf let out two precise, low barks.

“I got two,” I said. “That leaves this one and the big guy.”

A complex sequence of clicks and pops drifted through the air, and the lights went out, plunging the warehouse into perfect darkness.

Instinctively, my finger tightened on the trigger, and I sent a burst of rounds out almost before the lights were gone. But I was literally shooting blind against a foe who had supernatural reflexes and had also known, thanks to those damn clicks, what was about to happen. I heard the rounds hammer through the far wall.

The wolves snarled and started forward—the warehouse wasn’t a light-tight darkroom, and a wolf’s eyes actually see better in near darkness than in full light. The gloom was no obstacle to them. But I seized handfuls of fur and hissed, “Wait.”

Their momentum dragged me several inches forward before they slowed down, but I said, “The growths on the wall spray out acid, at least seven or eight feet. Don’t get suckered in close to one. The big guy has something like a gun. Go.”

The wolves bounded out from beneath my hands, leaving me alone in the darkness.

Clicks and pops continued to bounce around the empty space of the warehouse, impossible for me to localize. They were an ongoing thing, every couple of seconds, and I couldn’t shake the idea that they were coming closer and closer to me.

Even as I crouched there, defenseless and hating it, my hands were scrabbling at the pouch on my tac vest. If there was too much magic running amok, flashlights might not be reliable. Magic screws up technology when there’s too much of both of them around, and you don’t take chances with something as important as being effectively struck blind. I’d prepared the tac vest with this kind of situation in mind.

I opened the pouch and pulled out a flare, popping the pull cord, which struck it to life as I did. Red light glared into the darkness, and I lifted the flare over my head and out of my own vision in my left hand. I held the P-90 in my right. The small weapon could be fired in one hand, no problem, and while it wouldn’t be as accurate, I could still send bursts downrange almost as well as I could two-handed.

The pops and clicks continued, everywhere and nowhere. I had no idea where Will and Marcy were, and Nothing and the other turtleneck had an awful lot of shadow to hide in. I realized I was essentially sitting in the middle of an open floor under a spotlight, a perfect target for Nothing and his weird little urchin-gun, and I retreated toward the caged prisoners.

“Georgia,” I said, crouching down beside her. I studied the door of the cage, and found that the thing wasn’t even locked. It had a ring for a padlock on it, but the door’s mechanism was simply cycled closed. I spun it open and pulled open the cage door. “Georgia. Can you move?”

She lifted her head and stared at me grimly. Then she turned her body and leaned forward, moving as though underwater, and slowly began to crawl out of the cage. I hurried to Andi’s cage and opened that door as well—but the girl did not so much as blink or stir a finger when I urged her to get out. So much for reinforcements. I felt useless. I couldn’t go out there into the dark to join Will and Marcy in the hunt. I’d be worse than useless, stumbling around out there. They’d be forced to take their attention from their attack in order to protect me.

“Murphy,” Georgia said. “M-Murphy.”

I hurried to her side. “I’m here. Are you hurt?”

She shook her head. “N-n-no . . . L-listen.” She lifted her head to meet my eyes, her neck wobbling like a paraplegic’s. “Listen.”