Jim Butcher - Cold Days

I’d been in the room for about two seconds when the computer made an awful sound, coughed out a little puff of smoke, and the monitor screen went black. I winced. My fault. Wizards and technology don’t get along so well, and the more advanced the technology is, the sooner something seems to go wrong—especially with electronics. Butters had been cobbling together a theory to explain why the world worked like that, but I’d drawn the line at covering my head in a tinfoil hat in the name of science.

The skull let out a startled, disappointed sound, and after several disoriented flickers, its eyelights panned around the room and landed on me.

“Harry!” said the skull. It didn’t move its jaws to form the words or anything. They just came out. “Hell’s bells, you’re back from the dead?”

“From the mostly dead,” I replied. “You made it out of Omaha Beach, huh?”

“You kidding?” Bob said. “The minute you were clear, I ran like a bunny and hid!”

“You could have taken that jerk,” I said.

“Why would I want to?” Bob asked. “So when do we set up the new lab? And can I have broadband?” His eyes gleamed with avarice or something near it. “I need broadband, Harry.”

“That’s a computer thing, right?”

“Philistine,” Bob the Skull muttered.

Bob wasn’t a skull, per se. He was a spirit of air, or intellect, or one of any of a great many other terms used to describe such beings. The skull was the vessel that he inhabited, kind of like a djinni’s bottle. Bob had been working as an assistant and adviser to wizards since before crossbows had gone out of style, and he’d forgotten more about the ins and outs of magical theory than I knew. He’d been my assistant and friend since I’d first come to Chicago.

I hadn’t realized, until I actually heard his voice, how much I’d missed the demented little perv.

“When do we get to work?” Bob asked brightly.

“I am working,” I said. “I need to talk to you.”

“I’m all ears,” Bob said. “Except for the ears part.” Bob blinked. “Are you wearing a tux?”

“Uh, yeah.”

“Tell me you did not get married.”

“I didn’t get married,” I said. “Except for the whole Mab thing, which is creepy and weird. She spent the last three months trying to kill me once a day.”

“Sounds like her style,” Bob said. “How’d you get out of it?”

“Um,” I said.

“Oh,” Bob said. “Uh . . . oh. Maybe you should go, Harry.”

“Relax,” I said. “I know you’ve had your issues with Mab, but I’m the only one here.”

“Yeah. That’s kinda the part that bothers me.”

I scowled at him. “Oh, come on. How long have you known me?”

“Harry . . . you’re Mab’s hit man .”

“Yeah, but I’m not here to hit you,” I said.

“You could be lying,” Bob said. “Maybe the Sidhe can’t lie, but you can.”

“Hell’s bells, I’m not lying.”

“But how do I know that?”

“Because I haven’t hit you already?” I frowned at him. “Wait a minute. . . . You’re stalling me, aren’t you?”

“Stalling you?” Bob asked brightly. “What do you mean?”

There was no warning. None at all. The door to Butters’s bedroom exploded outward, sending splinters of cheap plywood sailing everywhere. A missile of living muscle hit me in the back at almost the same instant, shoving my chest forward and whiplashing my head back. My spine lit up like a casino, and I felt myself driven hard to the ground.

Something powerful and snarling and terribly strong came down on top of me, and I felt claws and fangs begin to rake at me.

Guess I used up all my evening’s luck on the front door guy.

Claws shredded my tux, raking over my back, my buttocks, and the backs of my legs. Jaws would have bitten into my neck if I hadn’t gotten my hands in the way, clamping them over the back of my neck and squeezing them as tight as I could, hoping that a finger wouldn’t come up and be nipped off. Pain came in, hot and high, but the claws didn’t dig as deep as they would have if this had been a malk or a ghoul, and I had to hope the damage wouldn’t be too serious—unless the fight went on long enough for blood loss to weaken me.

Some analytical part of my head was going over those facts in a detached and rational fashion.

The rest of me went freaking berserk with anger.

I got one arm beneath me to brace myself and threw the other elbow back in a heavy strike that slammed into something soft and drew a startled yelp out of my attacker. The teeth vanished for a second and the claws slowed. I rolled, shoving with a broad motion of that same arm, and threw a wolf the size of a Great Dane off of my back. It hit one of the computer tables with a tremendous racket, sending bits of equipment tumbling.

I got my feet underneath me, seized a computer chair by its back, and lifted it. By the time the wolf with dark red fur was getting back onto its feet, the chair was already halfway through its swing, and I was snarling in incoherent fury.

Only at the last second did I recognize my attacker through my rage and divert the arc of the descending chair. It broke into about fifty pieces when it hit the floor just in front of the wolf, plastic and metal tumbling in every direction.

The wolf flinched back from the flying bits, and lifted its eyes toward mine. It froze in what was an expression of perfect shock, and in a pair of seconds the wolf was gone, its form melting rapidly into the shape of a girl, a redhead with generous curves and not a stitch of clothing. She stared at me, gasping in short breaths, her expression pained, before she whispered, “Harry?”

“Andi,” I said, standing straighter and trying to force my body to relax. The word came out in a snarl. Adrenaline still sang along my arms and legs, and more than anything in the whole world, at that moment I wanted to punch someone in the face. Anyone. It didn’t matter who.

And that was not right.

“Andi,” I said, forcing myself to quiet and gentle my voice. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Me?” she breathed. “I . . . I’m not the one who’s dead .”

The night is young, thought the furious part of me, but I fought it down. “Rumors, death, exaggerated,” I said instead. “And I don’t have time to chat about it.”

I turned toward Bob at his desk, and heard Andi open a drawer behind me. The sound an automatic makes when someone racks the slide and pops a round into the chamber is specific and memorable—and gets your attention as effectively as if it were also really, really loud.

“Get your hands away from the skull,” said Andi’s shortened, pained voice, “or I put a bullet in you.”

I paused. My first impulse was to cover the floor of the computer room with frozen chunks of Andi, and what the hell was I thinking ? It was the anger that kept on rolling through me in cold waves that was pushing for that, for action, for violence. Don’t get me wrong; it’s not like I exactly have an allergy to either of those things—but I’d always done a reasonably good job of keeping my temper under control. I hadn’t felt like this in years, not since the first days I’d nearly been killed by the White Council.

I fell back on what I’d learned then. I closed my eyes and took a few deep breaths, reminding myself that the anger was just anger, that it was a sensation, like feeling hot or cold. It didn’t mean anything by itself. It wasn’t a reason to act. That’s what thinking was for.

The old lessons helped, and I separated myself from the fury. I put my hands slowly out to my sides, making sure they were visible. Then I turned to face Andi. She stood with a pistol in a solid Weaver stance, like she’d learned how from someone who knew.