Jim Butcher - Cold Days

The cats were gone, vanished as if they’d never been there.

I heard someone walk out of the alley behind me, and my body went tense and tight, despite my weariness. Then a young woman’s voice said, in a passable British accent, “The Little Folk are easily startled, but they’ll soon be back. And in greater numbers.”

I sagged in sudden, exhausted relief. The bad guys hardly ever quote Star Wars .

“Molly,” I breathed.

A tall young woman dressed in rather shabby secondhand clothing crouched down next to me and smiled. “Hey, boss. Welcome home.”

“Grasshopper,” I said, feeling myself smile. “Illusion. Very nice.”

Molly gave me a little bow of her head. “It’s what I do.”

“Also good timing,” I said. “Also, what the hell? How did you know I was . . . ?”

“Alive?”

“Here, but sure. How did you know?”

“Priorities, boss. Can you walk?”

“I’m good,” I said, and pushed myself to my feet. It wasn’t as hard as it really should have been, and I could feel my endurance rebuilding itself already, the energy coming back into me. I was still tired—don’t get me wrong—but I should have been falling-down dizzy and I wasn’t.

“You don’t look so good,” Molly said. “Was that a tux?”

“Briefly,” I said. I eyed the car. “Feel like driving?”

“Sure,” she said. “But . . . that’s pretty stuck, Harry, unless you brought a crane.”

I grunted, faintly irritated by her tone. “Just get in, start it, and give it gas gently.”

Molly looked like she wanted to argue, but then she looked down abruptly. A second later, I heard sirens. She frowned, shook her head, and got into the car. The motor rumbled to life a second later.

I went down the stairwell where the car’s tires were stuck, set down Bob’s skull, and found a good spot beneath the rear frame. Then I set my feet, put the heels of my hands against the underside of the Caddy, and pushed.

It was hard. I mean, it was really, really gut-bustingly hard—but the Caddy groaned and then shifted and then slowly rose. I was lifting with my legs as much as my arms, putting my whole body into it, and everything in me gave off a dull burn of effort. My breath escaped my lungs in a slow groan, but then the tires were up out of the stairwell, and turning, and they caught on the sidewalk and the Caddy pulled itself the rest of the way.

I grabbed the skull, still with the mostly limp Toot-toot inside it, staggered back up out of the stairwell and into the passenger side of the car. I lifted my hand and sent a surge of will down through it, muttering, “Forzare,” and the overstrained windshield groaned and gave way, tearing itself free of the frame and clearing Molly’s vision.

“Go,” I grated.

Molly went, driving carefully. The emergency vehicles were rolling in past us, and she pulled over and drove slowly to let them by. I sat there breathing hard, and realized that the real effort of moving that much weight didn’t hit you while you were actually moving it—it came in the moments after, when your muscles recovered enough to demand oxygen, right the hell now. I leaned my head against the window, panting.

“How’s it going, buddy?” I asked a moment later.

“It hurts.” Toot sighed. “But I’ll be okay, my lord. The armor held off some of the blow.”

I checked the skull. The eyelights were gone. Bob had dummied up the moment Molly was around, as per my standing orders, which had been in place since she had first become my apprentice. Bob had almost unlimited knowledge of magic. Molly had a calculated disregard for self-limitation when she thought it justified. They would have made a really scary pair, and I’d kept them carefully separate during her training.

“We need to get off the street,” I said. “Someplace quiet and secure.”

“I know a place just like that,” Molly said. “What happened?”

“Someone tossed a gym bag full of explosives at my car,” I growled. “And followed it up with the freaking pixie death squadron from hell.”

“You mean they picked this car out of all the other traffic?” she asked, her tone dry. “What are the odds?”

I grunted. “One more reason to get off the street, pronto.”

“Relax,” she said. “I started veiling the car as soon as we passed the police. If someone was following you before, they aren’t now. Catch your breath, Harry. We’ll be there soon.”

I blinked, impressed. Veils were not simple spells. Granted, they were sort of a specialty of Molly’s, but this was taking it up a notch. I didn’t know whether I could have covered the entire Caddy with a veil while driving alertly and carrying on a conversation. In fact, I was pretty sure I couldn’t.

Grasshopper was growing up on me.

I studied Molly’s profile while she drove. Stared, really. I’d first met her years ago, when she was a gawky little kid in a training bra. She’d grown up tall, five-ten or a little more. She had dark blond hair, although she had changed its color about fifty times since I’d met her. At the moment, it was in its natural shade and cut short, hanging in an even sheet to her chin. She was wearing minimal makeup. The girl was built like a particularly well-proportioned statue, but she wasn’t flaunting it in this outfit—khaki pants, a cream-colored shirt, and a chocolate brown jacket.

The last time I’d seen Molly, she’d been a starved-looking thing, dressed in rags and twitching at every sound and motion, like a feral cat—which was hardly surprising, given that she’d been fighting a covert war against a group called the Fomor while dodging the cops and the Wardens of the White Council. She was still lean and a little hyperalert, her eyes trying to watch the whole world at once, but that sense of overly coiled spring tension was much reduced.

She looked good. Noticing that made things stir under the surface, things that shouldn’t have been, and I abruptly looked away.

“Uh,” she said. “Harry?”

“You look better than the last time I saw you, kiddo,” I said.

She grinned, briefly. “Right back atcha.”

I snorted. “It’d be hard to look worse. For either of us, I guess.”

She glanced at me. “Yeah. I’m a lot better. I’m still not . . .” She shrugged. “I’m not exactly Little Miss Stability. At least, not yet. But I’m working on it.”

“Sometimes I think that’s where most of us are,” I said. “Fighting off the crazy as best we can. Trying to become something better than we were. It’s that second bit that’s important.”

She smiled, and didn’t say anything else. Within a few moments, she had turned the Caddy into a private parking lot.

“I don’t have any money for parking,” I said.

“Don’t need it.” She paused and rolled down the cracked window to wave at an attendant operating the gate. He glanced up from his book, smiled at her, and pushed a button. The gate opened, and Molly pulled the Caddy into the lot. She drove down the length of it, and pulled the car carefully into a covered parking spot. “Okay. Come on.”

We got out of the car, and Molly led me to a doorway leading into an adjacent apartment building. She opened the door with a key, but instead of moving to the elevators, she guided me to another doorway to one side of the entrance. She unlocked that one too, and went down two flights of stairs to a final door. I could sense magical defenses on the doors and the stairs without even making an effort to open myself up to it. That was a serious bunch of security spells. Molly opened the second door and said, “Please come in.” She smiled at Toot. “And your crew with you, of course.”