Jim Butcher - Changes

I felt my chest and found nothing there, or around my neck. My fingers quested out and touched the bed and the backboard beneath me, and found my necklace there, the ruby still fixed in place by an ugly glob of rubber. I gripped the chain and slipped a little of my will into it, and cold blue light filled the room.

“. . . so I did what any good mortician would,” Butters continued. “Hit you with a bolt of lightning and tried to reanimate you.” He held up two shock paddles, whose wires had evidently been melted right off them. They weren’t attached to anything now. He was a wiry little guy in hospital scrubs with a shock of black hair, narrow shoulders, and a thin, restless body. He held up his hands and mimed employing the shock paddles. Then he said, in a goofy voice that was probably meant to sound hollow, “It’s alive. Alliiiiiivve.” After a beat he added, “You’re welcome.”

“Butters.” I sighed. “Who called you into—” I stopped and said, “Molly. Never mind.”

“Harry,” she said. “We couldn’t be sure how badly you were hurt, and if you couldn’t feel, you couldn’t know either, and I thought we needed a real doctor, but the only one I knew you trusted was Butters, so I got him instead—”

“Hey!” Butters said.

I pushed the straps off of my head and kicked irritably at the straps on my legs.

“Whoa, there, tiger!” Butters said. The little medical examiner threw himself across my legs. “Hold your horses, big guy! Easy, easy!”

Forthill and Molly meant well. They joined in and the three of them flattened me to the backboard again.

I snarled out a curse and then went limp. I sat there not resisting for a moment, until I thought they’d be listening. Then I said, “We don’t have time for this. Get these straps off of me.”

“Dresden, you might have a broken back,” Butters said. “A pinched nerve, broken bones, damage to the organs in your lower abdomen—for God’s sake, man, what were you thinking, not going to a hospital?”

“I was thinking that I didn’t want to make an easy target of myself,” I said. “I’m fine. I’m better.”

“Good Lord, man!” sputtered Forthill. “Be reasonable. Your heart wasn’t beating three minutes ago.”

“Molly,” I said, my voice hard. “Unfasten the straps. Do it now.”

I heard her sniffle. But then she sat up and came up to where she could see my eyes. “Um. Harry. Are you still . . . you know. You?”

I blinked at her for a second, impressed. The grasshopper’s insight was evidently serving her well.

“I’m me,” I said, looking back at her eyes. That should be verification enough. If someone else had come back behind the wheel of my car, so much change to my insides and a look like that would certainly trigger a soulgaze and reveal what had happened. “For now, at least.”

Molly bit her lip. Then she said, “Okay. Okay, let him up.”

Butters sat up from my legs and then stood scowling. “Wait a minute. This is just . . . This is all moving a little too fast for me.”

The door behind him opened, and a heavyset man in street clothes lifted a gun and put two rounds into Butters’s back from three feet away. The sheer sound of the shots was incredible, deafening.

Butters dropped like a slaughtered cow.

The gunman’s eyes were tracking toward the rest of us before Butters hit the floor. I knew who he was looking for when his eyes swept over me and locked on.

He didn’t talk, didn’t bluster, didn’t hesitate. A professional. There were plenty of them in Chicago. He raised the gun to aim at my head—while I lay there, strapped to a board from the hips down and unable to move. And, as I lifted my left wrist, I noted that my shield bracelet was gone. Of course. They must have removed it so that the defibrillator’s charge wouldn’t have gotten any ideas, just as they’d taken the metal necklace from around my throat, and the rings from my fingers.

They were being helpful.

Clearly, this was just not my day.

I was tied down, but my hands weren’t. I flexed the fingers of my right hand into the mystic position of attack—holding them like a pretend gun—and snapped, “ Arctis! ”

The spell tore the heat from all around the gun and drew water from the air into an instant, thick coating of ice, heaviest around the weapon’s hammer. The shooter twitched in reaction to the spell and pulled the trigger.

The encrusting ice held the hammer back and prevented it from falling.

The gunman blinked and tried to pull the trigger several more times, to no avail. Forthill hit him around the knees. Both men went down, and the gun came loose from the gunman’s cold-numbed fingers as they hit the floor, and went spinning across the room. It struck a wall, cracked the ice around its hammer, and discharged harmlessly into the wall with another roar.

The gunman kicked Forthill in the face and the old priest fell back with a grunt of pain. Molly threw herself at him in pure rage, knocking him flat again, and began pounding her fists into him with elemental brutality and no technique whatsoever. The gunman threw an elbow that got her in the neck and knocked her back, then rose, his eyes searching the floor, until he spotted his weapon. He started for it.

I killed the light from the amulet. He tripped and fell in the sudden darkness. I heard him scuffling with the dazed Forthill.

Then there was a single bright flash of light that showed me the gunman arching up in pain. Then it was gone and there was the sound of something large falling to the floor. Several people were breathing heavily.

I got my fingers onto my amulet again and brought forth light into the room.

Forthill sat against one wall, holding his jaw, looking pale. Molly was in a crouch, one hand lifted as if she’d been about to do something with her magical talents, the way she should have at the first sound of the shots, if she’d been thinking clearly. The gunman lay on his side, and began to stir again.

Butters wheezed, “Clear,” and touched both ends of the naked wires in his hands to the gunman’s chest.

The wires ran back to the emergency defib unit. When they’d been melted off the paddles, it had left several strands of pure copper naked on the ends of both of them. The current did what current does, and the gunman bucked in agony for a second and sagged into immobility again.

“Jerk,” Butters wheezed. He put a hand on the small of his back and said, “Ow. Ow, ow, ow, OW !”

“Butters!” Molly croaked, and hugged him.

“Urgckh,” Butters said. “Ow.” But he didn’t look displeased at the hug.

“Grasshopper, don’t strain him until we know how bad it is,” I said. “Dammit.” I started fumbling with the straps, getting them clear of my upper body so I could sit up and work on my legs. “Forthill? Are you all right?”

Father Forthill said something unintelligible and let out a groan of pain. Then he heaved himself to his feet and started helping me with the buckles. His jaw was purple and swollen on one side. He’d taken one hell of a hit and stayed conscious. Tough old guy, even though he looked so mild.

I got off the backboard, onto my feet, and picked up the gun.

“I’m all right,” Butters said. “I think.” His eyes went wide and he suddenly seemed to panic. “Oh, God, make sure I’m all right!” He started clawing at his shirt. “That maniac freaking shot me!”

He got the scrubs top off and turned around to show Molly his back. He was wearing an undershirt.

And on top of that, he was wearing a Kevlar vest. It was a light, underclothing garment, suitable only for protection against handguns—but the gunman had walked in with a nine- millimeter. He’d put both shots onto the centerline of Butters’s lower back, and the vest had done its job. The rounds were still there, flattened and stuck in the ballistic weave.