Jim Butcher - Cold Days

“If the problem was simple and easy, it wouldn’t require wizards to fix it,” I said. “The impossible we do immediately. The unimaginable takes a little while.”

“I’m serious,” she said.

“So am I,” I replied. “Be of good cheer. I think I know the right guy to talk to about this one.”

Half the sun was over the horizon when Chicago’s skyline came into sight. I just basked in that for a minute. Yeah, I know, stupid, but it’s my town and I’d been gone for what felt like a lifetime. It was good to see the autumn sun gleaming off of glass and steel.

Then I felt myself tense, and I pushed myself up from where I’d been leaning on the forward rail. I took a moment to look around me very carefully. I didn’t know what had set off my instincts, but they were doing the same routine they’d learned to do every time Mab had been about to spring her daily assassination attempt, and I couldn’t have ignored them if I’d wanted to.

I didn’t see anything, but then I heard it—the humming roar of small, high-revolution engines.

“Thomas!” I shouted over the snorting of the Water Beetle ’s motor. I gestured toward my ear and then spun my hand in a wide circle.

It wasn’t exactly tactical sign language, but Thomas got the message. From his vantage point in the wheelhouse atop the cabin, he swept his gaze around warily. Then his gaze locked on something northwest of us.

“Uh-oh,” I breathed.

Thomas spun the wheel and rolled the Water Beetle onto a southwesterly course. I hustled over to the ladder up to the wheelhouse and stood on the top rung, which put my head about level with Thomas’s. I shielded my eyes from the glare of the oncoming sun with one hand and peered northwest.

There were five Jet Skis flying toward us over the water. Thomas had altered course enough to buy us a little time, but I could see at a glance that the Jet Skis were moving considerably faster than we were. Thomas opened the throttle all the way and passed me, I kid you not, a shiny brass telescope.

“Seriously?” I asked him.

“Ever since those pirate movies came out, they’re everywhere,” he said. “I’ve got a sextant, too.”

“Any tent you have is a sex tent,” I muttered darkly, extending the telescope.

Thomas smirked.

I peered through the thing, holding myself steady with one hand. Given the speed and bounce of the boat, it wasn’t easy, but I finally managed to get a prolonged glimpse of the Jet Skis. I couldn’t see much in the way of detail yet—but the guy on the lead Jet Ski was wearing a bright red beret.

“We’ve definitely got a problem,” I said.

“Friends of yours?”

“The Redcap and some of his Sidhe buddies, it looks like,” I said, lowering the telescope. “They’re Winter muscle, but I think they’re mostly medieval types. That gives us a couple of minutes to—”

There was a sharp hissing sound and something unseen slapped the telescope out of my hand, sending it spinning through the air in a whirl of torn metal and tiny shards of broken glass.

The report of a gunshot followed a second later.

“Holy crap!” I sputtered, and dropped down to lie flat on the deck. There was another hiss and a loud cracking sound as a round smacked into the wall of the cabin above me.

“Medieval? Are you sure you know what that means?” Thomas demanded. He heeled the boat about a bit and then snaked it back in the original direction, following a serpentine course. That would make us a harder target—but it also meant that we were going slower, cruising in a zigzag while our pursuers were rushing forward in a straight line.

But even with the maneuvers, the rounds kept coming in. At that distance, with the relative movements of the vehicles, a purely human marksman could have hit us only through something that went well past good luck and began approaching divine intervention. But the Redcap and his cronies weren’t human. The grace I’d seen the Sidhe displaying on the dance floor had been all precise, subtle elegance and flawless grace. Both of those things transitioned well into marksmanship.

I still had my shiny, gleaming cowboy rifle, but it was worse than useless in this situation. The .45 Colt round would be killer at conventional gunfight distances, most of which happened at about twenty feet—but it would lose a lot of effectiveness shooting at targets that distant. Coincidentally, the guy holding the gun would also lose effectiveness shooting at targets that distant. So blazing away at them seemed like a stupid plan.

“Hey!” I shouted toward my brother. “If I take the wheel, can you pick them off from here?”

“If we drive straight, maybe!” he called back.

A round tore a chunk of wood off the corner of the boat’s dashboard. Thomas stared hard at it for a second. Six inches to the left and it would have hit him in the lower back.

“Uh,” he said, continuing to veer and swerve the boat. “Plan B?”

“Right,” I muttered. “Right. Plan B.”

I thought furiously while the fusillade continued. Rounds hit the side of the ship in sharp, angry whacks. Surely they didn’t have the ammunition to keep this kind of thing up for very long. Though, thinking about it, I had no idea how rapidly they were going through the ammo. For all I knew, one guy was shooting at us, and getting more and more successful at judging the shot over the surface of the water. And the Sidhe were closing. Their accuracy seemed to be increasing as they did. Once they got into optimal range, where they were close enough to land rounds but we weren’t capable of replying in kind, all they had to do was maintain the distance and kill us to death.

I could start throwing magic at them, but Mab’s training had a gap in it: Everything had been right up in my grille. I’d never engaged her or one of her proxies at more than twenty feet or so, and without a properly prepared staff or blasting rod, I’d never be able to reach out far enough to hit those clowns. Odds were good that they knew it, too. They’d hold the distance.

A weakness. I had to exploit a weakness. The Sidhe hated iron, but even if I found some, how did I get it to them? I mean, a gun shooting jacketed rounds would really screw them up, but for it to work I’d have to hit them. There was a box of nails in the toolbox. I could throw those, maybe, but again there was the issue of actually hitting them. Which wasn’t going to happen as long as they were way out there.

I needed to lure them in closer.

“Grasshopper!” I shouted.

The cabin door swung open and Molly belly-crawled onto the deck until she could see me. “Who started shooting at us?”

“Bad guys!” I cringed as another round hit the side of the boat and peppered me with wooden splinters. “Obviously!”

“Can we outrun them?”

“Not happening,” I said. “Ideas?”

“I could veil us?”

“Going to be hard to hide the boat’s wake, isn’t it?”

“Oh. Right. What do we do?”

“I need mist,” I said. “A bunch of it. Gimme.”

“Oh, ow, I don’t know Harry. I’d have to move an awful lot of fire to give you even a little. You know that’s not my thing.”

“It doesn’t have to be real mist,” I said.

“Oh!” Molly called. “That is exactly my thing!”

“Attagirl!”

“Fuck!” Thomas snarled. I looked up to see him stagger, holding on to the boat’s wheel with his right hand, his face twisted in pain. He’d taken a bullet in his left arm, just above the elbow, and he held it clenched in tight against his body, teeth bared. Slightly too pale blood trickled down his elbow and dribbled to the deck. “Plan B, Harry! Where the hell is plan B?!”