Jim Butcher - Cold Days

If I lived through the next day or so, I needed to start keeping track of where these jokers liked to get their bloodthirsty freak on. It might give me an edge someday. Or at least a list of places that could use a nice burning down. I hadn’t burned down a building in ages.

Two ninety-nine. Three hundred.

“Ready or not,” I muttered, “here I come.”

I strode out of the alley across from the warehouse, gathering my will into a shield around my left hand, and readied a lance of force in my right. Hell’s bells, I missed my equipment. Mab had forced me to learn how to do without, but that didn’t mean I could do it as well . I missed my shield bracelet. I missed my blasting rod. I missed my spell-armored coat. With that gear, this would be pretty simple. I could protect myself better from every direction and have a lot more range on my spells to make the bad guys keep their heads down. But it would take me weeks to build new ones, and I had to work with what I had—which was pretty much just me.

My shields would be as strong, but I couldn’t sustain them for as much time, or in every direction—so I couldn’t walk in with a nice comfortable bubble of force around me. Without the bracelet or a tool like it, I could protect myself only from the front, and only for a few seconds at a time. My offensive spells would hit just as hard, but they’d have a shorter range, and they would take a few more crucial fractions of a second to enact.

Man, I missed my toys.

The warehouse had a little fence covered in plastic sheeting and topped with barbed wire. There was a gated area in front of the main entryway, though the gate had been blasted off its hinges by some deranged ruffian who did not look like me, no matter what the witnesses said, and apparently no one had replaced it since.

Awful lot of open space out there. I’d be a really juicy target. Which was sort of the point: Make myself so attractively vulnerable that no one was watching the back door. It wasn’t the best idea in the world to walk out into that, but Halloween night was maybe an hour away, and there wasn’t time to be smart.

That said, there’s a difference between being reckless and being insane. I didn’t especially like the idea of stumbling over a trip line tied to, let’s say, an antipersonnel mine, so before I went in, I flung my right arm forward in a large sweeping underhand motion, as if I were trying to throw a bowling ball at the pins two lanes over from where I was standing. I muttered, “Forzare!” as I threw the spell, focusing on shaping the force I’d released into what I needed.

Energy rippled across the ground in a shock wave that threw up dust and bits of gravel and irregular chunks of broken asphalt. It rippled across the ground to the warehouse and landed against its front doorway with a giant, hollow boom.

“Say, ‘Who’s there!’” I shouted at the warehouse, already walking forward rapidly, while the dust still hung in the air—it would make it more possible, if not likely, to spot any of the Redcap’s Sidhe buddies who might be hiding under a veil inside it. “I dare you! I double-dog dare you!”

I hurled another blast of force at the big loading doors in the front of the warehouse, something meant to make a lot of noise, not to tear them down. It succeeded. A second enormous concussion made the building’s steel girders and metal walls ring like some vast, dark bell.

“The furious wizard, that’s who!” I shouted. “You’ve got ten seconds to free my friends, unharmed, or I’m going to fucking smite every last mother’s son of you!”

I had maybe half a second’s warning, and then a streaking black form dived down from above me and raked at my eyes with its talons. I snapped my head back out of the way, only to see a hawk beating back up out of the nadir of its dive. It rolled in the air, and as it did it shimmered, and in an instant the hawk was gone and one of the Sidhe was there in its place, arcing through the air in free fall, holding a bow and an arrow in his hands. He drew and shot in the same instant he shifted, and I barely caught the arrow on my shield. Before he could begin to fall, he completed the roll and shifted again, back into hawk form, then beat his wings and continued rising into the sky.

Hell’s bells. That looked awesome . It took a serious mastery of shape-shifting to bring equipment and clothes and things with you when you changed form, but that guy had made it look as easy as breathing.

I mean, say what you will about the faeries, but they’ve got style. Not so much style that I didn’t hurl another bolt of force after the flying archer, but I missed him and he winged away with a mocking shriek.

Then I felt a small, sharp pain in my left leg.

I looked down to see a little wooden dart sticking out of the back of my calf. It was carved, perfectly smooth and round, and fletched with a few tiny slivers of scarlet feather. I snapped my gaze around behind me, and caught a single glimpse of the Redcap poised in a crouch atop the fence surrounding the warehouse, balancing his weight with apparent effortless ease along a strand of barbed wire that had to have been a sixteenth of an inch wide.

His mouth was spread in a wide, manic grin. He held a short silvery tube in one hand, and as my eyes found his face, he touched two fingertips of his other hand to his lips, blew me a kiss, and plummeted back off of the fence and out of sight.

I whirled toward him and brought up my shield, then spun around and angled it that way, then jittered about, rubbernecking everywhere at once. But that was it. Assuming the Sidhe weren’t simply undetectable to my senses, they were gone.

A slow burning sensation began to spread from the wound in my leg.

A cold shiver oozed down my spine. I tugged the dart out of my calf. It hadn’t done much—the slender spear of wood had penetrated maybe a quarter inch into my skin—but when I rolled up my pant leg to look, I found an inordinately large trickle of blood coming from the tiny wound.

And that burning sensation became an almost infinitesimally greater presence with each heartbeat.

This hadn’t been a hostage crisis at all.

It had been an assassination. Or . . . or something.

“God dammit !” I snarled. “I just got played again ! I am so sick and tired of this backstabby bullshit!”

I more or less stormed into the warehouse, shoving open the office door and stalking out onto the main floor. The place was just as empty as I remembered, give or take the leavings of several apparent transients between the present and the past. Molly was at the very rear of the warehouse, near the door. She was helping Justine to sit up. Mac was there, too, and he and Butters were between them helping a wobbly-looking Andi to remain on her feet. Mouse was standing guard between the group and the front of the warehouse, and he started wagging his tail when he saw me.

“Clear,” I called out to them, hurrying over. “Or at least clearish. What happened?”

“They were under a sleeping enchantment,” Molly reported. “Pretty standard stuff. I woke them up.”

“Everyone okay?”

“Andi got hit on the head when they took her,” she said. “Other than that, I think we’re good.”

When she spoke, Molly’s voice never quavered, but her eyes flickered uncertainly toward Mac. I took a closer look at everyone. Andi, Butters, and Justine had all been bound. Justine was only now getting the ropes cut off of her wrists, and as Molly sawed them away with a pocketknife, I could see the deep red marks they’d left on Justine’s slender wrists. Butters and Andi had them, too, visible even in the dimness of the warehouse.

Mac didn’t.

That was interesting. Why hadn’t Mac been tied up? Or if he had, how come there wasn’t a mark to show for it? Either way, that was odd.