By the time we hit the next cross street, I saw Butters fling out an arm. There was another glitter of orange sparks, this time in a long line, and I saw some kind of dark fiber whip out from his hand and wrap around a streetlight’s pole. He leaned into it with a high-pitched, half-panicked whoop of excitement, and used the line to carry the racing skateboard through a tight ninety-degree turn without slowing down. There was another sparkle of orange campfire sparks along the length of the line, and the thing evidently let go of the pole, as he kept sailing down the street, heading north.
Suits were letting out hunting cries at regular intervals by now, and running unimpeded on streets that were still warm enough from the day’s light to resist the ice. I knew that Binder could probably have forty or fifty of the damned things on the street by now, and that they were smart enough to communicate and work cooperatively. I had to hope that Butters would have the good sense to continue heading in one direction—every turn in the chase would give his more numerous pursuers a chance to maneuver, closing in around him, like hounds around a panicked rabbit.
He kept fleeing down the street, but the smooth surface that let him use his—and I can’t believe I’m going to use this phrase—enchanted skateboard also gave an advantage to his pursuers. The street was still warm enough from the sunlight of the day, and the passage of early-evening traffic meant that the falling precipitation had been given less time to settle, and consequently ice had not yet begun to clog it. The suits and I began to close the distance, and I couldn’t act to discourage them in the excellent lighting without risking observation.
Then came what I had feared might happen. A pair of suits, maybe a little leaner and faster than their companions, vectored in on the chase from a side street, using the cries of their companions to coordinate their attack. They bounded forward in a rush, and it was only because Butters had his left leg forward, and so was facing them as they came, that he saw them close on him.
I’ll give the little guy credit. He didn’t panic. Instead, he dropped his free hand into his coat, seized something and smashed it to the street in his wake, shouting a word as he did. There was a flash of light on some kind of glass globe, and then it shattered on the concrete, expanding into a cloud of thick grey mist, just in front of his pursuers.
The two suits hit the mist, unable to avoid it in their surge of closing speed and plunged into it and out the other side—where their steps abruptly slowed, and the pair of them stumbled to a halt, looking around them blearily as Butters and his orange-sparking skateboard whooshed on down the street.
As the rest of the pack passed the spot, the suits dodged around the cloud of grey mist, and the two who had stopped gave their packmates a startled, confused look and then took off in belated pursuit again, obviously straining to catch up. That was when I realized what I’d just seen, and I went by the cloud of mist cackling madly.
Mind fog. Better than ten years ago, a foe had used the enchanted mist to blanket an entire Wal-Mart store, rendering the memory of everyone inside it temporarily nonfunctional and effectively blurring the previous hour or so of experience beyond recall. Bob and I had worked out the specifics of how the spell must have operated in the aftermath of the case. Obviously, Butters and Bob had, between them, figured out how to can the stuff.
Butters rocketed on down the street, dodging around a couple of slow-moving cars, used his lightpole-lariat again twice in quick succession, and careened onto Michigan Avenue, heading into the heart of downtown, where the towers and lights of Chicago burned brightest in the freezing haze.
That gave even the demonic suits pause. Cities aren’t just streets and buildings—they are collectives of sheer will, of the determination of every person who helped build them and every soul whose work and life maintains them. To something from the Nevernever, a place like downtown Chicago is an alien citadel, a source of power and terror. Mordor, basically. (One does not simply walk into Mordor—except that was exactly what everyone in the story did anyway.)
Similarly, Binder’s goons were not sufficiently impressed with the Loop to let it stop them from pursuing Butters. They put on a surge of speed and gained on him, and for a moment, it looked like they might nab him again—but he hurled a second glass globe of forget-me mist to the street and disrupted the pursuit at exactly the right moment. Butters let out a shriek of terrified defiance and shook his fist at his pursuers as several staggered in confusion, stumbling into their packmates.
Then the Genoskwa appeared out of nowhere on the sidewalk in front of a café and kicked a stone planter the size of a hot tub directly into Butters’s path.
Butters had maybe a whole second to react and nowhere near enough time to steer around the planter. The Genoskwa had acted with calm, precise timing. Butters did the only thing he could do: He let go of the skateboard strap and leapt into the air.
He wasn’t wearing padding and he didn’t have a helmet. That dopey little skateboard had been moving at thirty miles an hour, and all that waited to receive him was cold asphalt. If he’d been in a car with an airbag, I’m sure he’d have been fine—but he wasn’t.
I ground my teeth and prepared a spherical shield to catch him with—but while that would protect him from the fall, it would also mean that he could be briefly held inside it until his momentum was spent. Without the skateboard, the suits or the Genoskwa would catch him in a few heartbeats, and I would be forced to fight to defend him, bringing my mission to an unfortunate conclusion.
So be it. You don’t leave friends, even friends twisted up with mistrust, to the monsters.
But instead of falling onto the street and splattering, or into my shield and getting us both subsequently killed, Butters’s too-billowy overcoat flared with orange sparks and spread out into a giant, cupped wing shape. He windmilled his arms and legs with a high-pitched, creaking shout, and then tucked himself into a ball while the orange light seemed to gather the coat into a resilient sphere around him—one that bounced once when it hit the street, and then rolled several times, dumping him onto the street more or less on his feet.
The little guy darted straight away from the Genoskwa, for which I did not blame him, up the steps of the nearest building—as it happened, the Art Institute of Chicago. The nearest of the suits leapt at his unprotected back.
I flung my staff forward with a howl of “Forzare!” and smashed the suit with invisible power in midair, flinging him just over Butters’s shoulder as he leapt. “Dammit!” I howled, with as much sincerity as I could muster—which wasn’t much. “Clear my line of fire!”
Butters shot an aghast look over his shoulder at me, and stumbled away, fetching up against the northernmost of the two lion statues outside the Art Institute. He darted a look at the statue, licked his lips, and hissed something beneath his breath.
Orange light flooded out of the inner folds of his coat and promptly seeped into the bronze of the statue, confirming how he was managing all of these tricks.
Bob.
Bob the Skull was running around loose, like some kind of bloody superhero sidekick.
Bob had been the one powering the skateboard. Bob had guided the ropes that had flown from Butters’s wrist. Bob had manipulated Butters’s coat to bring him in to a safe landing.
Damn. Bob was kind of awesome.
It only stood to reason. Though Bob was a spirit, he had always been able to manipulate physical objects—and if he had mostly only done so with fairly small, fairly light things in the past, like romance novels or his own skull, there was no reason that I knew that he might not have tried something larger. I’d always assumed he simply lacked the motivation.
But I’d rarely removed Bob from my lab for a reason. To be exercising that kind of control over the spirit, Butters had to be in possession of Bob’s skull, like, right now. He was actually carrying the skull around, probably in that backpack, and that meant that Bob’s allegiance was as fragile as Butters’s ability to remain in physical possession of the skull itself. If someone like Nicodemus got hold of the skull, with Bob’s centuries of experience and knowledge, I shuddered to think what my old friend might be used to accomplish.
Of course, that concern abruptly dwindled to a secondary issue as I realized what Butters had commanded the spirit to do.
Orange firelight-sparks suddenly erupted from the eyes of the enormous bronze lion. Then, moving exactly as if it had been a living beast, the thing turned its head toward me, crouched, and let out an enormous and authentically leonine roar.
“Oh, crap,” I said.
“Hold them off!” Butters shouted.
The lion roared again.
“Dammit, Butters,” I snarled under my breath, “I’m helping!”
And then several tons of living bronze predator, guided by the intelligence and will of the most powerful spirit of intellect I had ever encountered, flung itself directly at my head.