She moved fast, but I’d been paranoid enough to sense the movement and dodge in the only direction that wouldn’t have hemmed my movement in more, and it was the right way to move. I avoided the bed, shuffle-stepped forward with my feet dragging the floor just slightly, to make sure I wouldn’t lift them and put them down on anything that would trip me, and swept the blade in a clean cut at her midsection.
Miyamune avoided the blow by an inch with a gracefully timed step back, and flung her clipboard at me with supernatural strength. It made an ugly hissing sound as it came, tearing bits off the papers that were on it. I barely got the Sword in the way, splitting the plastic clipboard as if it had been sliced with a laser cutter, sending a small cloud of chopped printer paper into the air. The pieces of clipboard flew past me and, from the sound of it, buried themselves, quivering, in the drywall.
One of her heels was coming along the floor in a leg sweep even before I had finished the defensive cut. I shifted my weight back, barely in time, and she kicked my forward leg hard enough to make it go numb—but didn’t send me to the ground with the kick. I swept the Sword into a clumsy arc as I fought for my balance. It forced her to duck to one side instead of following up in my moment of vulnerability—directly toward Stan.
“No!” I said.
She seized his throat and her hand flexed. As quickly as that, Stan’s labored breaths stopped completely as she closed off his windpipe.
That predator looked out of the doctor’s face, and its blue eyes danced with amusement. “I’ll kill him,” she said. “One move, little man, and I will end his life.”
“Don’t,” I breathed.
Her smile widened a little as she regarded the Sword, still humming with the power of an angry chorus. Silence stretched.
“I was like you once,” she said finally. Something ugly went through those blue eyes. “Struggling to protect them. What a fool I was.”
“Yeah?” I asked. “Look, we don’t have to be doing the combat thing. Be glad to talk with you about it. Coffee, maybe some nosh? What do you say?”
She sneered. “Do you think I care about your thoughts, little mortal?”
“How will you know if you never hear them?” I asked mildly.
Whatever I’d said, it was the wrong thing. Pure rage flared through her features. “So righteous,” she spat. Then she looked me up and down and said, “I offer you a trade for his life.”
“Um,” I said. “I’m listening.”
“Give me your glasses.”
That made my heart all but stop.
Suddenly that scared ten-year-old kid inside me was screaming again.
“Give me,” Miyamune purred, “your glasses. Or I kill him. Right now.”
“If I do,” I said quietly, “you walk away. You leave him alone.”
“For as long as you live and breathe,” Miyamune said.
I swallowed.
Stan was here because of me.
I took one hand off the Sword and reached up.
The world dissolved into a blur of vague color as I took off my glasses, and my stomach jumped and twitched in random spasms of pure, unfiltered, childhood fear.
I felt the glasses in my fingers, heavy and cool. Then I tossed them toward the last place it seemed like Miyamune had been standing. There was no sound of the glasses falling. She must have caught them silently.
A second later, there were crackling, popping sounds—and the sound of safety glass pattering to the floor in little squares like so many oversized grains of sugar.
“Little protector,” Miyamune said a moment later. “I will make you suffer. I give you as long as it will take me to shoo the mortals from this floor. Then I will hunt you. I will feed on you. And in the end, I will take your life.”
There was a clack as the door unlocked. Then it opened.
“Run,” Miyamune said softly, “and others will die in your place.”
Then the door closed again.
The whole time, her feet never made a sound on the floor. But I had that feeling, that certainty you have when you’re standing in a room that isn’t otherwise occupied.
My legs gave out and I found myself sitting helplessly on the floor next to Stan’s bed as he whimpered in his nightmares. The light of the Sword went out when I hit the floor.
I sat with him in the blind gloom. I was breathing too fast and making sounds just like him.
“YELLOW,” ANSWERED A voice when I speed-dialed 1 on my cell phone, by touch. “Harry’s Taxidermy. You snuff ’em, we’ll stuff ’em.”
“It’s me,” I said.
The levity vanished from his voice. “Butters? What’s wrong?”
“I, uh,” I said. “I …”
I am the wrong person to be a Knight of the Cross, is what I wanted to say. But instead I said, “What are you doing?”
“You just caught us. Getting set to take Maggie and Mouse to the zoo to meet mighty Moe,” he replied, his voice holding gentle cheer. “Going to be a good time. You ever been to the zoo?”
“Not really an animal guy,” I said.
“You should come along, maybe,” he said.
I felt myself laugh weakly. “I can’t. Working.”
“Which hat you wearing?”
“The Jedi hat,” I said.
“Oh,” he said. He was quiet for a second, then exhaled slowly. “Guess they’re starting you early. How bad?”
“It’s bad,” I said. “I … I might need help.”
There was a long silence from the other end of the phone. It hissed and crackled with static. He was upset. Wizards play merry hell with electronics around them when they get emotional. Even on an old landline, nothing was a sure bet. Especially not around Harry Dresden.
“I won’t come,” he said quietly.
“What?” I asked. “Harry …”
“Michael told me something once that I thought was utter crap,” he said. “But I’m going to tell it to you now.”
“What?” I demanded.
“You’re a Knight now, Butters. You’re working for the freaking Almighty. And He won’t give you a burden bigger than your shoulders can bear.”
“Harry, He already has,” I said. I didn’t say it, honestly; I sort of gibbered it.
“Butters,” he snapped.
I’d heard him use that tone of voice one other time. Exactly once. It had been in a basement, and zombies had been coming to kill us.
“Polka will never die,” I breathed. It came out, smooth and automatic. It was kind of a mantra of mine.
“Good man,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”
I did. I stuttered a lot. I stammered a lot.
“Wait,” he said. “The thing’s shadow. A lion’s mane and a damned elephant’s trunk?”
I thought of the thrashing tendril in the thing’s shadow. “Yeah, uh, I guess it could have been.”
“And it had blue eyes, didn’t it?”
I hadn’t gotten to that part yet. “Yeah,” I said. “It did. They were crazy.”
“Hell,” he said. “It’s a baka baku.”
“What is that?” I asked. “I’ve never heard of that creature.”
“Because it isn’t real,” he said. “Or it wasn’t, until the nineties. I mean, there was a thing called a baku in Japanese lore, but it wasn’t the same thing at all. Look, some company made a kid’s stuffed toy, called it a dream-eater, said that it was a magical protector that ate bad dreams before children could have them. Came with a little book that explained the whole thing.”
“I’m fighting a stuffed animal?” I asked. My leg pounded. There would be a huge bruise there for weeks where the thing had kicked me.
“Nah,” he said. “Look, they were just making a toy, but they gave it to kids. Kids believing in things has freaking power. It either created the real ones or it gave access to something similar from the Never-never that used that belief to create a place for itself in reality.”
“Then why has it gone all Manson on these people?” I asked.
“Some laws are kind of universal. Like ‘You are what you eat,’ ” the wizard told me. “You eat enough nightmares, sooner or later you turn into one. Now, instead of protecting people from nightmares, it uses them to inflict torment. Probably gets energy from it.”
“Oh, fantastic,” I said. “What can they do?”
“Listen carefully. This thing has laid a fear whammy on you, man.”
“That stuff doesn’t work on Knights,” I said.
“Horse crap,” Harry said. “Look, the Knights have power, but you have to choose to use it, man. You don’t get any get-out-of-jail-free cards. What you get is the chance to fight when other people would get eaten. That thing has gotten into your head. It’s scaring you to death. Just like those people around you. It’s eating you.”