JIM BUTCHER - SMALL FAVOR

“You’ve met them once already,” Gard said.

From downstairs Thomas suddenly shouted, “Harry!”

I whirled toward the door in time for the window, behind me, to explode in a shower of glass. It jounced off my spell-layered leather duster, but I felt a pair of hot stings as bits of glass cut my neck and my ear. I tried to turn and had the impression of something coming at my face. I slapped it aside with my left hand even as I ducked, then hopped awkwardly back from the intruder.

It landed in a crouch upon the bed, digging one foot into the helpless Gard’s wounded belly, a creature barely more than the size of a child. It was red and black, vaguely humanoid in shape, but covered in an insect’s chitin. Its eyes were too large for its head, multifaceted, and its arms ended in the serrated clamps of a preying mantis. Membranous wings fluttered at its back, a low and maddening buzzing.

And that wasn’t the scary part.

Its eyes gleamed with an inner fire, an orange-red glow-and immediately above the first set of eyes another set, this one blazing with sickly green luminescence, blinked and focused independently of the first pair. A sigil of angelic script burned against the chitin of the insect-thing’s forehead.

I suddenly wished, very much, that my staff weren’t twenty feet away and down a flight of stairs. It might as well have been on the moon, for all the good it was going to do me.

No sooner had that thought come out than the Knight of the Blackened Denarius opened its insectoid maw, let out a brassy wail of rage, and bounded at my face.

A t one time in my life, a shapeshifted, demonically possessed maniac crashing through a window and trying to rip my face off would have come as an enormous and nasty surprise.

But that time was pretty much in the past.

I’d spent the last several years on the fringes of a supernatural war between the White Council of the wizards and the Vampire Courts. In the most recent years, I’d gotten more directly involved. Wizards who go to a fight without getting their act together tend not to come home. Worse, the people depending on them for protection wind up getting hurt.

The second most important rule of combat wizardry is a simple one: Don’t let them touch you.

Whether you’re talking about vampires or ogres or some other kind of monstrous nasty, most of them can do hideous things to you if they get close enough to touch-as even a lesser member of the gruff clan had demonstrated on my nose the night before.

The prime rule of combat wizardry is simple too: Be prepared.

Wizards can potentially wield tremendous power against just about anything that might come along-if we’re ready to handle it. The problem is that the things that come after us know that too, so the favored tactic is the sudden ambush. Wizards might live a long time, but we aren’t rend-proof. You’ve got to think ahead in order to have enough time to act when the heat is on.

I’d made myself ready and taught young wizards with even less experience than me how to be ready too-for an occasion just such as this.

The coil of steel chain in my coat pocket came out smoothly as I drew it, because I’d practiced the draw thousands of times, and I whipped one end at the mantis-thing’s face.

It was faster than me, of course. They usually are. Those two clamps seized the end of the chain. The mantis’s jaws clamped down on it, and the creature ripped the chain from my hands with a wrench of its head and upper body, quicker than thought.

That was a positive thing, really. The mantis hadn’t had time to notice two important details about the chain: first, that the whole thing was coated in copper.

Second, that a standard electrical plug was attached to the other end.

I flipped my fingers at the nearest wall outlet and barked, “ Galvineus! ”

The plug shot toward the outlet like a striking snake and slammed home.

The lights flickered and went dim. The Denarian hopped abruptly into the air and then came down, thrashing and twitching madly. The electricity had forced the muscles in its jaws and clamps to contract, and it couldn’t release the chain. Acrid smoke began to drift up from various points on its carapace.

“Wizard!” Gard gasped. She gripped the wooden handle of her ax and tossed it weakly toward me. I heard shouting and the bellow of a shotgun coming from downstairs. It stayed in the background, unimportant information. Everything that mattered to me was nearly within an arm’s length.

The ax bounced and struck against my leg, but my duster prevented it from cutting into me. I picked up the ax-Christ, was it heavy-hauled off, and brought it straight down on the Denarian, as if I’d been splitting cordwood.

The ax crunched home, sinking to the eye somewhere in the Denarian’s thorax. The thing’s convulsions ripped the weapon out of my hands-and the plug from the wall outlet.

The mantis’s head whipped toward me, and it screamed again. It ripped out the ax and came to its feet in the same instant.

“Get clear!” Gard rasped.

I did, diving to the side and going prone.

The wounded woman emptied her assault rifle into the mantis in two or three seconds of howling thunder, shooting from the hip from about three feet away.

Words cannot convey how messy that was. Suffice to say that it would probably cost more to remove the ichor stains than it would to strip and refinish the walls, the floor, and the ceiling.

Gard gasped, and the empty rifle slid from her fingers. She shuddered and pressed her hands to her belly.

I moved to her side and picked her up, trying not to strain her stomach. She was heavy. Not like a sumo wrestler or anything, but she was six feet tall in her bare feet and had more than the usual amount of muscle. She felt at least as heavy as Thomas. I grunted with effort, got her settled, and started for the door.

Gard let out a croaking little whimper, and more blood welled from her injury. Faint pangs of sympathetic pain flickered through my own belly. Her eyes had rolled back in her head. It had taken a lot to beat Gard’s apparent pain threshold, but it looked like the visit from the Denarian-and the activity it had forced on her-had done it.

The day just couldn’t have gotten any more disturbing.

Until the splattered mass that had been the Denarian started quivering and moving.

“Oh, you have got to be kidding me!” I shouted.

Where there had been one big bug thing, now there were thousands of little mantislike creatures. They all began bounding toward the center of the room, piling up into two mounds that gradually began to take on the shape of insectoid legs.

The shotgun downstairs roared again, and running footsteps approached.

“Harry!” Thomas shouted. He appeared at the bottom of the stairs, sword in hand, just as I hurried out the door, still toting Gard.

“We had company up here!” I called. I started down the stairs as quickly and carefully as I could.

“I think there are three more of them down here,” Thomas said, making way for me. He took note of Gard. “Holy crap.”

A corpse lay on the floor of the entry hall. It was black and furry and big, and I couldn’t tell much more about it than that. The top four-fifths of its head were gone and presumably accounted for the mess all over the opposite wall. Its guts were spilled out on either side of its body, steaming in the cold air drifting through the shattered front door. Hendricks crouched in the shadowed living room, covering the entryway with his shotgun.

Something scraped over the floorboards of the ceiling above us.

“What’s that?” Thomas asked.

“A giant preying mantis demon, dragging itself over the floor.”