Jim Butcher: Changes

I let the vampires enter the building.

And then I gathered up my fury and pain, honing them like immaterial blades, and went in after them.

My blasting rod was hanging from its tie on the inside of my coat, a stick of oak about eighteen inches long and a bit thicker than my thumb. The ridges of the runes and sigils carved into it felt comfortably familiar under the fingers of my right hand as I drew it out.

I went up to the building as silently as I could, let myself in with my key, and dropped the veil only after I was inside. It wasn’t going to do anything to hide me from a vampire that got close—they’d be able to smell me and hear my heartbeat anyway. The veil would only hamper my own vision, which was going to be taxed enough.

I didn’t take the elevator. It wheezed and rattled and would alert everyone in the building to where I was. I checked the index board in the lobby. Datasafe, Inc., resided on the ninth floor, five stories above my office. That was probably where Martin and Susan were. It would be where the vampires were heading.

I hit the stairs and took a risk. Spells to dull sound and keep conversations private were basic fare for wizards of my abilities, and it wasn’t much harder to make sure that sound didn’t leave the immediate area around me. Of course, that meant that I was effectively putting myself in a sonic bubble—I wouldn’t hear anything coming toward me, either. But for the moment, at least, I knew the vampires were here while they presumably were unaware of me. I wanted to keep it that way.

Besides, in quarters this close, by the time I reacted to a noise from a vampire I hadn’t seen, I was as good as dead anyway.

So I murmured the words to a reliable bit of phonoturgy and went up the stairs clad in perfect silence. Which was a good thing. I run on a regular basis, but running down a sidewalk or a sandy beach isn’t the same thing as running up stairs. By the time I got to the ninth floor, my legs were burning, I was breathing hard, and my left knee was killing me. What the hell? When had my knees become something I had to worry about?

Cheered by that thought, I paused at the door to the ninth-floor hallway, opened it beneath the protection of my cloak of silence, and then dropped the spell so that I could listen.

Hissing, gurgling speech in a language I couldn’t understand came from the hallway before me, maybe right around the corner I could see ahead. I literally held my breath. Vampires have superhuman senses, but they are as vulnerable to distraction as anyone. If they were talking, they might not hear me, and regular human traffic in this building would probably hide my scent from them.

And why, exactly , a voice somewhere within the storm in my chest whispered, should I be hiding from these murdering scum in the first place? Red Court vampires were killers, one and all. A half-turned vampire didn’t go all the way over until they’d killed another human being and fed upon their life’s blood. Granted, an unwilling soul taken into the Red Court found themselves at the mercy of new and nearly irresistible hungers—but that didn’t change the fact that if they were a card-carrying member of the Red Court, they had killed someone to be there.

Monsters. Monsters who dragged people into the darkness and inflicted unspeakable torments upon them for pleasure—and I should know. They’d done it to me once. Monsters whose existence was a plague upon millions.

Monsters who had taken my child.

The man once wrote: Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger. Tolkien had that one mostly right.

I stepped forward, let the door bang closed, and snarled, “Fuck subtle.”

The gurgle-hissing from around the corner ahead stopped at a confused intersection of speech that needed no translation: Huh?

I lifted the blasting rod, aimed it at the corner ahead of me, and poured my rage, my will, and my power into it as I snarled, “ Fuego! ”

Silver-white fire howled down the hallway and bit into the corner ahead, blowing through it as easily as a bullet through a paper target. I drew the line of fire to my left, and as quickly as that, the fire gouged an opening as big as my fist through several sections of studs and drywall, blasting through to the perpendicular hallway where I’d heard the vampires talking. The din was incredible. Wood tore and exploded. Drywall flew into clouds of dust. Pipes screamed as they were severed as neatly as if I’d used a cutter. Wires erupted into clouds of popping sparks.

And something entirely inhuman let out a piercing shriek of pain, pain driven by unnaturally powerful lungs into a scream that was louder than gunshots.

I screamed in answer, in challenge, in defiance, and pelted forward. The runes on my blasting rod shone with white-hot fire, throwing brilliant silver-white light out ahead of me into the darkened building as I ran.

As I rounded the corner a shape was already in motion, coming toward me. My shield bracelet was ready. I lifted my left hand, fingers contorted into a gesture that had nothing to do with magic but that was generally considered insulting. My will poured into the charm bracelet hung with multiple tiny shields, and in an instant my power spread from there into a quarter-dome shape of pure, invisible force in front of me. The black shape of the vampire hit the shield, sending up concentric circles of blue light and white sparks, and then rebounded from it.

I dropped the shield almost before he was done rebounding, leveled the blasting rod with a flick of my wrist, and ripped the vampire in half with a word and a beam of silver fire. The pieces flew off in different directions, still kicking and thrashing hideously.

In the middle of the hallway was a second bisected vampire, which I’d apparently hit when firing blindly through the wall. It was also dying messily. Because I’ve seen too many bad horror movies and know the rules for surviving them, the instant I’d made sure the hallway was empty of more threats, I swung the rod up to point above me.

A vampire clung to the ceiling not twenty feet away. People have this image of vampires as flawless, beautiful gods of dark sex and temptation. And, while the Red Court can create a kind of outer human shell called a flesh mask, and while that mask was generally lovely, there was something very different underneath—a true, hideous, unrepentant monster, like the one looking down at me.

It was maybe six feet tall when standing, though its arms were scrawny and long enough to drag the backs of its claw-tipped hands along the ground. Its skin was rubbery and black, spotted here and there with unhealthy-looking bits of pink, and its belly hung down in flabby grotesquerie. It was bandy-legged and hunchbacked, and its face was somewhere between that of a vampire bat and something from H. R. Giger’s hallucinations.

It saw me round the corner, and its goggling black eyes seemed to get even larger. It let out a scream of . . .

Terror.

It screamed in fear.

The vampire flung itself away from me even as I unleashed a third blast, bounding away down the hall, flinging itself from the ceiling to the wall to the floor to the wall and back again, wildly dodging the stream of ruinous energy I sent after it.

“That’s right!” I heard myself scream. “You’d better run, pretty boy!” It vanished around the next corner and I shouted in incoherent rage, kicked the still-twitching head of one of the downed vampires with the tip of my steel-toed work boots, and rushed after it in pursuit, cursing up a storm.

The entire business had taken, at most, six or seven seconds.

After that, things got a little complicated.

I’d started half a dozen small fires with the blasts, and before I’d gone another half a dozen steps the fire alarms twittered shrilly. Sprinkler systems went off all around me. And at the same moment, gunfire erupted from somewhere ahead of me. None of that was good.