Jim Butcher - Changes

A surprised scream of inhuman agony greeted my efforts, and I spun in place at once, bringing up the shield again. A second vampire bounded around the intersection ahead, running on all fours along the wall, and threw itself at me. At the same time, another of the rubbery black creatures exploded out of an air vent I would have sworn was too tiny to contain it, coming down from almost straight overhead.

I rebounded the first vamp from my shield, as I had only moments before, and Murphy’s gun began to bark the instant it bounced off the wall and to the floor.

I couldn’t get my shield up in time to stop the one plunging down from overhead.

It landed on me, a horrible, squishy weight, and with the crystalline perceptions of surging adrenaline I saw its jaws dropping open nightmarishly wide, unhinging like a snake’s. Its fangs gleamed. Black claws on all four limbs were poised to rake, and its two-foot-long tongue lashed at me as well, seeking exposed skin in order to deliver its stupefying venom.

I went down to the floor on my face, hurriedly covering my head with my arms. The vampire raked at me furiously, but the defensive spells on my duster held and prevented its claws from scoring. The vampire shifted tactics quickly, tossing me over like a rodeo cowboy taking down a calf. The writhing, slimy tongue lashed at my face, now vulnerable.

Susan’s hand closed on that tongue in midmotion, and with a twist of her wrist and shoulders, she ripped it out of the vampire’s mouth. The vamp threw its head back and shrieked—and my ex-sweetie’s improvised mace smashed its skull down into its torso.

The vampire in the closet, still out of sight, continued to wail its agony as I rose again and checked around me to make sure everyone was there. “Anyone hurt?”

“W-we’re fine,” Tilly said. For a guy who’d just had a couple of close encounters with imaginary creatures, he seemed to be fairly coherent. Rudolph had retreated to his happy place, and just kept on rocking, crying, and whispering. “What about you, Dresden?”

“Peachy.”

Murphy turned toward the closet, her face grim, her gun in her hand. I shook my head at her. “No. Let it scream. It’ll draw the others to us and away from anyone else.”

Murphy looked at me for a moment, frowning gently, but nodded. “God, that’s cold, Harry.”

“I lost my warm fuzzies for the Reds a long time ago,” I said. The wounded vampire just wouldn’t shut up. Fire’s tough on them. Their outer layer of skin is combustible. My attack had probably left it in two pieces, or otherwise pared down its body mass. It would be a smoldering lump of agony writhing on the floor, in so much pain that it could literally do nothing but scream.

And that suited me just fine.

“We aren’t just standing here, are we?” Tilly asked.

A pair of particularly loud, simultaneous shrieks came through the vents and shafts, ululating over and under each other. They were particularly strident and piercing, and went on for longer than the others. A chorus of lesser shrieks wailed briefly in reply.

The Eebs, as generals, sending orders to the troops. It had to be, coordinating the raid and directing it toward the injured member of the team.

“Indeed we are not. All right, folks. Murph, Tilly, Rudolph, get scarce. Follow Murphy and do whatever the hell she tells you to do if you want to get out of this alive.”

Murphy grimaced at that. “Be careful, Dresden.”

“You too,” I said. “See you at the church.”

She gave me a sharp nod, beckoned Tilly, and the two of them started off down another hallway to one of the side stairwells. With any luck, the Eebs had just sent everyone they had running toward me. Even if Murphy and Tilly weren’t lucky, I figured they’d probably have only a single sentry to deal with, at the most. I gave Murphy even odds of handling that. A 50 percent chance of survival wasn’t real encouraging, but it was about 50 percent higher than if they’d stayed.

Susan watched them go and then looked at me. “You and Murphy never hooked up?”

“You’re asking this now?” I demanded.

“Should I fix us both a nice cup of tea, in our copious free time?”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head. “No. We haven’t.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“A lot of reasons. Bad timing. Other relationships. You know.” I took a long, deep breath and said, “Keep an eye out. I’ve got to pull off something hard here.”

“Right,” Susan said. She went back to watching the gloom, her club held ready.

I closed my eyes and summoned up my will. Time for some real razzle-dazzle stuff.

Illusions are a fascinating branch of magic. There are two basic ways to manage them. One, you can create an image and put it in someone else’s head. There’s no actual visible object there, but their brain tells them that it’s there, big as life—a phantasm. It’s walking real close to the borders of the Laws of Magic to go that way, but it could be very effective.

The second method is the creation of an actual visible object or creature—a kind of hologram. Those things are much harder to produce, because you have to pour a lot more energy into them, and while a phantasm uses a foe’s own mind to create consistency within the illusion, you’ve got to do it the hard way with holomancy.

Murph’s image was easy to fix in mind, as was Rudolph’s, though I admit that I might have made him look a bit skinnier and slouchier than he might actually have been. My holomancy, my rules.

The hardest was Tilly. I kept getting the image of the actor from The X Files confabulated with the actual Tilly, and the final result was kinda marginal. But I was in a rush.

I pictured the images with as much clarity as I could and sent my will, including a tiny bit of soulfire, into creating the mirages.

Soulfire isn’t really a destructive force. It’s sort of the opposite, actually. And while I used it in fights to enhance my offensive spells, it really shone when creating things.

I whispered, “ Lumen, camerus, factum! ” and released energy into the mental images. The holograms of Murphy, Tilly, and Rudolph shimmered into existence, so absolutely real-looking that even I thought they might have been solid matter.

“They’re coming!” Susan said abruptly. She turned to me and practically jumped out of her shoes upon seeing the illusions. Then she waved a hand at Tilly’s image, and it flickered straight through. She let out a low whistle and said, “Time to go?”

The thunder of the Ick’s heart grew abruptly louder, a vibration I could feel through the soles of my shoes.

Vampires boiled out of the central stairwell, a sudden tide of flabby, rubbery black bodies and all-black eyes, of spotted pink tongues and gleaming fangs. At their center, in their flesh-masked forms, were Esteban and Esmerelda. And looming behind them was the Ick.

Susan and I turned and sprinted. The three illusions did the same thing, complete with the sounds of running footfalls and heavy breathing. With a group howl the vampires came after us.

I ran as hard as I could, drawing up more of my will. I should have been feeling some of the strain by now, but I wasn’t. Go, go, Gadget Faustian bargain.

I gathered my will, shouted, “ Aparturum! ” and slashed at the air down the hallway with my right hand.

I’d used a lot of energy to open the Way, and it tore wide, a diagonal rip in the fabric of space, crooked and off center to the hallway. It hung there like some kind of oddly geometric cloud of mist, and I pointed at it, shouting wordlessly to Susan. She shouted something back, nodding, while behind us the vampires gained ground with every second.

We both screamed in a frenzy of wild fear and rampant adrenaline, and hit the Way moving at a dead run.