Jim Butcher: Blood Rites

Brother Wang's English was worse than my Latin, and that's saying something, but his body language was unmistakable. I returned his smile, and offered him the box with a bow of my head. "It was my pleasure."

Wang took the box and set it down carefully, then started gently sorting through its contents. I waited, looking around the little chapel, a plain room built to be a quiet space for meditation, so that those who believed in something would have a place to pay honor to their faith. The airport had redecorated the room with a blue carpet instead of a beige one. They'd repainted the walls. There was a new podium at the front of the room, and half a dozen replacement padded pews.

I guess that much blood leaves a permanent stain, no matter how much cleaner you dump on it.

I put my foot on the spot where a gentle old man had given up his life to save mine. It made me feel sad, but not bitter. If we had it to do again, he and I would make the same choices. I just wished I'd been able to know him longer than I had. It's not everyone who can teach you something about faith without saying a word to do it.

Brother Wang frowned at the white powder all over the puppies, and held up one dust-coated hand with an inquisitive expression.

"Oops," I said.

"Ah," Wang said, nodding. "Oops. Okay, oops." He frowned at the box.

"Something wrong?"

"Is it that all the little one dogs are boxed in?"

I shrugged. "I got all of them that were in the building. I don't know if anyone moved some of them before I did."

"Okay," Brother Wang said. "Less is more better than nothing." He straightened and offered me his hand. "Much thanks from my brothers."

I shook it. "Welcome."

"Plane leaving now for home." Wang reached into his robe and pulled out an envelope. He passed it to me, bowed once more, then took the box of puppies and swept out of the room.

I counted the priest's money, which probably says something about my level of cynicism. I'd racked up a fairly hefty fee on this one, first picking up the trail of the sorcerer who had stolen the pups, then tracking him down and snooping around long enough to know when he went out to get some dinner. It had taken me nearly a week of sixteen-hour days to find the concealed location of the room where the pups were held. They asked me to go get them, too, so I had to identify the demons guarding them, and work out a spell that would neutralize them without, for example, burning down the building. Oops.

All in all, my pay amounted to a couple of nice, solid stacks of Ben Franklins. I'd logged a ton of hours in tracking them down, and then added on a surcharge for playing repo. Of course, if I'd known about the flaming poo, I'd have added more. Some things demand overtime.

I went back to the car. Thomas was sitting on the hood of the Beetle. He hadn't bothered moving it to the actual parking lot, instead taking up a section of curb at the loading zone outside the concourse. A patrol cop had evidently come over to tell him to move it, but she was a fairly attractive woman, and Thomas was Thomas. He had taken off her hat and had it perched on his head at a rakish angle, and the cop looked relaxed and was laughing as I came walking up.

"Hey," I said. "Let's get moving. Things to do."

"Alas," he said, taking off the hat and offering it back to the officer with a little bow. "Unless you're about to arrest me, Elizabeth?"

"Not this time, I suppose," the cop said.

"Damn the luck," Thomas said.

She smiled at him, then frowned at me. "Aren't you Harry Dresden?"

"Yeah."

The cop nodded, putting on her hat. "Thought I recognized you. Lieutenant Murphy says you're good people."

"Thanks."

"It wasn't a compliment. A lot of people don't like Murphy."

"Aw, shucks," I said. "I blush when I feel all flattered like that."

The cop wrinkled her nose. "What's that smell?"

I kept a straight face. "Burned monkey poo."

She eyed me warily for a second to see if I was teasing her, then rolled her eyes. The cop stepped up onto the sidewalk and began moving on down it. Thomas swung his legs off the car and pitched my keys at me. I caught them and got in on the driver's side.

"Okay," I said when Thomas got in. "Where do I meet this guy?"

"He's holding a little soiree for his filming crew tonight in a condo on the Gold Coast. Drinks, deejay, snacks, that kind of thing."

"Snacks," I said. "I'm in."

"Just promise me you won't fill up your pockets with peanuts and cookies." Thomas gave me directions to a posh apartment building a few miles north of the Loop, and I got moving. Thomas was silent during the drive.

"Up here on the right," he said finally, then handed me a white envelope. "Give this to the security guys."

I pulled in where Thomas told me to and leaned out of my car to offer the envelope to the guard in the little kiosk at the entrance of the parking lot.

A squeaky, bubbling growl erupted from directly below my seat. I flinched.

"What the hell is that?" Thomas said.

I pulled up to the guard kiosk and stopped. I reached for my magical senses and extended them toward the source of the continuing growl. "Crap. I think it's one of the-"

A sort of greasy, nauseating cold flooded over my perceptions, stealing my breath. A ghostly charnel-house scent came with it, the smell of old blood and rotting meat. I froze, looking up at the source of the sensation.

The person I'd taken to be a security guard was a vampire of the Black Court.

It had been a young man. Its features looked familiar, but desiccation had left its face too gaunt for me to be sure. The vampire wasn't tall. Death had withered it into an emaciated caricature of a human being. Its eyes were covered with a white, rheumy film, and flakes of dead flesh fell from its decay-drawn lips and clung to its yellowed teeth. Hair like brittle, dead grass stood out from its head, and there was some kind of moss or mold growing in it.

It snatched at me with inhuman speed, but my wizard's senses had given me enough warning to keep its skeletal fingers from closing on my wrist-just barely. The vampire caught a bit of my duster's leather sleeve with the tips of its fingers. I jerked my arm back, but the vampire had as much strength in its fingertips as I did in my whole upper body. I had to pull hard, twisting with my shoulders to break free. I choked out a shout, and the sudden rush of fear made it high and thready.

The vampire rushed me, slithering out through the guardhouse window like a freeze-dried snake. I had a panicked instant to realize that if the vampire closed to wrestling range with me inside the car, they'd be harvesting my organs out of a mound of scrap metal and spare parts.

And I wasn't strong enough to stop it from happening.

Thomas's senses evidently didn't compete with mine, because the Black Court vampire was up to its shoulders in the Beetle before he choked out a startled, "Holy crap!"

I threw my left elbow at the vampire's face. I couldn't hurt the creature, but it might buy me a second to act. I connected, snapping its head to one side, and with my other hand I reached into a box on the floor between the seats, right by the stick, and withdrew the weapon that might keep me from getting torn to shreds. The vampire tore at me with its near-skeletal hands, its nails digging like claws. If I hadn't laid those spells on my duster, it would have shoved its hand into my chest and torn out my heart, but the heavy, spell-reinforced leather held out for a second or two, buying me enough time to counterattack.

The vampires of the Black Court had been around since the dawn of human memory. They had acres of funky vampire powers, right out of Stoker's book. They had the weaknesses too-garlic, tokens of faith, sunlight, running water, fire, decapitation. Bram Stoker's book told everyone how to kill them, and the Blacks had been all but exterminated in the early twentieth century. The vampires who survived were the most intelligent, the swiftest, the most ruthless of their kind, with centuries of experience in matters of life and death. Mostly death.