Jim Butcher - Changes

I turned to her and shouted, “Ladder! Where’s the ladder? I need to use the ladder!”

“No!” she shouted back. “You need to use the ladder!”

Good grief.

“Okay!” I shouted back, and gave her a thumbs-up.

She hustled back to the little storage shed in the backyard. She picked a key and unlocked it. I swung the door open and seized the metal extending ladder I used to put up and take down Christmas lights every year. I ditched my crutch and used the ladder itself to take some of the weight. I went as fast as I could, but it seemed to take forever to position the ladder under the Willoughbys’ bedroom windows.

Mrs. Spunkelcrief handed me a loose brick from a little flower planter’s wall and said, “Here. I can’t climb this thing. My hip.”

I took the brick and dropped it in my duster pocket. Then I started humping myself up the ladder, taking a grip with both hands, then hopping up with a painful little jump. Repeat, each time growing more painful, more difficult. I clenched my teeth over the screams.

And then there was a window in front of me.

I got the brick out of my pocket, hauled off, and shattered the window.

Black smoke bellowed out, catching me on the inhale. I started coughing viciously, my voice strangled as I tried to shout, “Mr. and Mrs. Willoughby! Fire! You’ve got to get out! Fire! Come to the window and down the ladder!”

I heard two people coughing and choking. They were trying to say, “Help!”

Something, maybe the little propane tank on Mrs. Spunkelcrief’s grill, exploded with a noise like a dinosaur-sized watermelon hitting the ground. The concussion knocked Mrs. S down—and kicked the bottom of the ladder out from under me.

I fell. It was a horrible, helpless feeling, my body twisting uselessly as I tried to land well—but I’d had no warning at all, and it was a futile attempt. The small of my back hit the brick planter, and I achieved a new personal best for pain.

“Oh, God in Heaven,” Mrs. Spunkelcrief said. She knelt beside me. “Harry?”

Somewhere, sirens had begun to wail. They wouldn’t get there in time for the Willoughbys.

“Trapped,” I choked out, as soon as I was able to breathe again. “They’re up there, calling for help.”

The fire roared louder and grew brighter.

Mrs. S stared up at the window. She grabbed the ladder and wrestled it all the way back up into position, though the effort left her panting. Then she tried to put a foot up on the first step. She grasped the ladder, began to shift her weight—and groaned as her leg buckled and she fell to the ground.

She screamed, agony in her quavering voice. “Oh, God in Heaven, help us!”

A young black man in a dark, knee-length coat hurdled the hedges at the back of the yard and bounded onto the ladder. He was built like a professional lineman, moved more quickly than a linebacker, and started up the ladder like it was a broad staircase. The planet’s only Knight of the Cross flashed me a quick grin on the way up. “Dresden!”

“Sanya!” I howled. “Two! There’re two of them in the bedroom!”

“ Da , two!” he replied, his deep voice booming. The curving saber blade of Esperacchius rode at his hip and he managed it with thoughtless, instinctive skill as he went through the window. He was back a moment later, with Mrs. Willoughby draped over one shoulder, while he supported most of Mr. Willoughby’s staggering body with the other.

Sanya went first, the old woman hanging limply over his shoulder, so that he could help Mr. Willoughby creep out the window and onto the ladder. They came down slowly and carefully, and as Sanya carefully laid the old woman out onto the grass, the first of the emergency response crews arrived.

“God in Heaven,” Mr. S said, weeping openly as she put her hand on Sanya’s arm. “He must have sent you to us, son.”

Sanya smiled at her as he helped Mr. Willoughby lower himself to the ground. Then he turned to my landlady and said, his Russian accent less heavy than the last time I had seen him, “It was probably just a coincidence, ma’am.”

“I don’t believe in those,” said Mrs. Spunkelcrief. “Bless you, son,” she said, and hugged him hard. Her arms couldn’t have gotten around half of him, but Sanya returned the hug gently for a moment.

“Ma’am,” he said, “you should direct the medical technicians to come back here.”

“Thank you, thank you,” she said, releasing him. “But now I have to go get those ambulance boys over here.” She paused and gave me a smile. “And thank you, Harry. Such a good boy.” Then she hurried away.

Mouse came racing around the side of the house where Mrs. S had just gone, and rushed to stand over me, lapping at my face. Molly wasn’t far behind. She let out a little cry and threw her arms around my shoulders. “Oh, God, Harry!” She shouldered Mouse aside and squeezed tight for several seconds. She looked up and said, “Sanya? What are you doing here?”

“Hey, hey,” I said. “Take it easy.”

Molly eased up on her hug. “Sorry.”

“Sanya,” I said, nodding to him. “Thanks for your help.”

“Part of the job, da ?” he replied, grinning. “Glad to help.”

“All the same,” I said, my voice rough, “thank you. If anything had happened to them . . .”

“Oh, Harry,” Molly said. She hugged me again.

“Easy, padawan, easy,” I said quietly. “Think you should be careful.”

She drew back with a frown. “Why?”

I took a slow breath and said, very quietly, “I can’t feel my legs.”

It didn’t take me long to talk Sanya and Molly out of taking me to the hospital. The Eebs, as it turned out, had shown up, pitched their fire-bomb from a moving car, and kept going, a modus operandi that was consistent with the earlier attempt on my life, except this time they’d been identified. Molly’s description of the thrower was a dead ringer for Esteban.

I had to admit, the vampire couple had a very practical long-term approach to violence—striking at weakness and harassing the victim while exposing themselves to minimal risk. If I’d been a couple of steps higher up when that Molotov hit, I’d be dead, or covered in third-degree burns. Individually, their attempts might not enjoy a high success rate—but they needed to get it right only once.

It would be consistent with that practical, cold-blooded style to keep an eye on the hospitals in order to come finish me off—during surgery, for example, or while I was still in recovery afterward. Sanya, though, had EMT training of some kind. He calmly stole a backboard out of an open ambulance while its techs were seeing to the Willoughbys, and they loaded me onto it in a procedure that Sanya said would protect my spine. It seemed kind of “too little, too late” to me, but I was too tired to rib him over it.

I couldn’t feel anything below the waist, but that apparently didn’t mean that the rest of me got to stop hurting. I felt them carrying the board out, and when I opened my eyes it was only to see nearly a third of the building give way and crash down into the basement—into my apartment. The building was obviously a lost cause. The firemen were focusing on containing the blaze and preventing it from spreading to the nearby homes.

They loaded the backboard into the rental minivan Sanya had, by happy coincidence, been given at the airport when he arrived, at no additional fee, in order to substitute for the subcompact he’d reserved but couldn’t have. As it drove away during the confusion and before the cops could lock everything down, I got to watch my home burn down through the back window of the van.

Even after we were several blocks away, I could see the smoke rising up in a black column. I wondered how much of that smoke was made of my books. My secondhand guitar. My clothes. My comfy old furniture. My bed. My blankets. My Mickey Mouse alarm clock. The equipment in my lab that I’d worked so hard to attain or create—the efforts of years of patient effort, endless hours of concentration and spellcraft.