Jim Butcher - Dresden files:Side jobs

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.

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.