JIM BUTCHER - SMALL FAVOR

The eerie part was that the fiery current of energy was silent. Absolutely silent. There was no crackle of flame, no roar of superheated air, no hiss of steam as snow and ice melted. I heard some rubble falling, stone landing on stone. I heard a broken electrical line somewhere, spitting and snapping for a few seconds before it, too, went silent.

That was when I realized a couple of things.

The silver energy construct that had gripped the Denarian was gone.

And I couldn’t feel my right hand.

I looked down in a panic, but found that it was still there, at least, flopping loosely at the end of my arm. I couldn’t feel anything below my wrist. My fingers were slightly curled and didn’t respond when I told them to move.

“Crap,” I muttered. Then I gathered my wits about me, gripped my staff more firmly in my left hand, and took several rapid steps until I stood over Spinyboy.

Then I bashed him over the head with the solid length of oak until he stopped moving.

Immobilized wasn’t the same as unconscious. He wouldn’t be the only one of his kind in the building, and I didn’t want him shouting my location to anybody the second my back was turned.

One down. Who knew how many to go.

I crouched in the walkway with the wall on my right, the windows facing the outside of the Oceanarium on my left, and the beam of Hellfire at my back. It was the most secure position I was likely to get. There was still no sound, which meant that they hadn’t tried to take the Archive yet. Kincaid would not go down quietly.

But they were in here with me. They had to be.

But they didn’t necessarily know I was in here with them.

That could be an advantage. Maybe even a huge advantage.

Sure, Harry. What cat ever expects the mouse to come after it?

I stuffed my numb right hand in my duster pocket, tried to ignore the bone-deep ache of unspent power racking my body and the limb-weakening tremors of raw terror radiating through my guts, and stalked silently forward to sucker punch some Fallen angels.

I’ ve read that dolphins are as smart as people. I’ve even read one article by a researcher who claimed that her results indicated that the dolphins she’d been working with had been throwing the tests, and it had taken us years to realize it-that in fact, they might be smarter than us. I’d read other positions that said that they were quite a bit dumber than that. Being as how I’d never really sat down for a game of checkers with a dolphin, my own personal meter for such things, I didn’t really have an opinion until that day in the Shedd.

That was when those ugly little dolphins swam by me in perfect silence, except for the swish of their dorsal fins breaking the surface to get my attention-and then raised holy hell seventy feet farther down the path beside the pool, around the curve and out of my sight, splashing and chattering and squeaking for all they were worth.

I stared stupidly for about half a second before the message got through: Bad guys sighted, and close. Evidently the aquatic Americans had decided that I was on the home team. As quickly as the chattering had begun it ended, the dolphins vanishing beneath the surface.

I heard a creaking, skittering sound, and instinct drew my face up. Shadows moved on the snow-covered glass roof of the Oceanarium.

More of Nicodemus’s plan in delaying me became clear. He’d needed time to let his people get into position within and atop the building, once he’d been able to determine generally where the Archive was within the Aquarium.

I threw myself into the heavy ferns planted next to the footpath beside the outer pools, crouching down in the thickest bunch of greenery I could find. I held on hard to the power I’d drawn into me and hoped I could make my sucker punch last for more than a single hit.

A breath later, glass shattered and fell. Dark, inhuman forms dropped silently from overhead.

I picked the outermost of the invading Denarians, the one farthest from the center of action and attention, pointed my staff at him from my hiding spot amidst the green, and snarled, “ Forzare! ” unleashing a moderate effort of will. Invisible force caught the shapeshifted fiend as he was falling. I never got much of a look at him, beyond the fact that he had a lot of muscle and a ridge of leathery plates running down his spine.

Muscle doesn’t do you any good in free fall, no matter how many Fallen angels you’ve got inside you. Unless you’ve got some wings to put it to use, you’re in the hands of Mother Earth and Sir Isaac Newton.

I wasn’t trying to smash him into the middle of the lake. I applied just enough force to alter his trajectory, shoving the falling Denarian thirty feet off course, and he landed in one of those beams of titanic energy.

There was a flash of white light, a brief shadow of a human skeleton burned onto my vision, and then a white-hot something went spinning out from the beam. It landed in one of the pools in an angry gush of steam. The dolphins darted away from it.

Then I froze, not moving.

Denarians fell like rain, more than a dozen of them, landing with heavy-sounding thumps and a couple of splashes…

…and a splat. One of them, a lizard-looking thing, had fallen into the foliage behind me and not five feet from my hiding spot, with about two-thirds of its head simply missing from its shoulders. It twitched wildly for several seconds, pumping very human-looking blood all over the place before it slowly went still and simply started draining.

My eyes tracked up to the roof and found a darkened corner.

Kincaid hung in it like a spider, suspended from some sort of harness and perfectly still, and I realized that he’d had the same idea I had: Remove them before they’d realized that the battle was well and truly begun, while they were still holding back all their power to unleash in concentration. He gave me a grim little smile, moved his head in an “after you” sort of gesture, and raised a rifle sporting a heavy, outsized silencer to his cheek.

Kincaid had once informed me, quite calmly, that if he ever wanted to kill me, it would be with a rifle from more than a mile away. This was more like a hundred feet, maybe less, but Kincaid had dropped the Denarian with a shot to the head, maybe more than one, while it fell to the ground amidst a shower of broken glass. He was deadly as hell, and he could just as easily be coming after me as my enemies, but somehow my terror had dwindled to something familiar-and ferocious.

Sure, I might be outnumbered, but I was no longer at all certain that I was outclassed. When the Fallen were calling the shots they were arrogant to the extreme, and they weren’t at all used to playing it by ear and adjusting to changes in the tempo. When the coin bearers were running things, they could be more dangerous-but no more so than anyone else I had crossed metaphorical swords with.

Nicodemus, then, was dangerous because he was Nicodemus-not because of a Fallen angel or a lack of one. And while I would be a fool to think him anything less than a deadly threat, I had survived him once, and seen the trap coming this time, even if it had been at the last minute.

I spared a glance for the splattered, twitching remains of the decapitated Denarian in the ferns. These creeps might have scary angels looking over their shoulders-but for the next couple of minutes, at least, so did I.

It didn’t make them any less dangerous. It just made me see that I had a chance of standing up to them.

No flash and thunder, then. I had no energy to spare for them. No wasted time, either. I rose and stole through the ferns toward where I thought the next-nearest Denarian had come down, up a steep hillside that was murder to move over silently. The Denarian who had landed hadn’t stayed immobile, though. I found the spread talon prints in the earth where it had touched down, like those of a turkey, but larger.