If I gave him Butters, I might live. If I didn’t, both of us were going to die, right here next door to Michael’s house.
I was out of options.
“You take the guy behind us,” I muttered to Butters.
The little guy swallowed, and jerked his head in a tiny nod, gripping his Christmas ornament carefully.
Nicodemus nodded, his dark eyes glittering. The point of the slender sword swept up, lithe as a snake’s flickering tongue, and his shadow began to dance and waver in sudden agitation. The Genoskwa let out another rumbling growl and stepped forward. I gripped my staff, and Butters’s tremors abruptly stilled into an electrified tension.
And then Karrin stepped out of the sleet with her rocket launcher prepped and resting on her shoulder, aimed directly at Nicodemus.
“Hi,” she said. “I really don’t like you very much, Denarian.”
“Hah,” I said to Nicodemus. “Heh, heh.”
His eyes slid from me to Karrin and back. His smile widened. “Ms. Murphy,” he said. “You won’t shoot.”
“Why not?” Karrin asked brightly.
“Because it is obvious to me that you love him,” Nicodemus said. “That weapon will kill the wizard, as well as your friend the doctor, if you fire it. At that range, I’m not at all certain that you would survive the blast, either.”
Karrin seemed to regard that offering thoughtfully. Then she said, “You’re right,” and took several steps closer. “There. That should just about do it, don’t you think?”
Nicodemus narrowed his eyes. “You wouldn’t.”
Karrin spoke in a very low, very calm voice. “People do crazy things for love. I’d rather kill us all and take you with us than let you harm him.” Her voice became a bit sharper, and she took another pair of quick strides nearer Nicodemus. “Take one step closer, Tall, Dark and Furry, and I blow us all to hell right now.”
I checked over my shoulder, to see the Genoskwa pause in the act of slipping a little closer. Its cavern-eyes glittered in silent rage.
Karrin took a couple of slow steps toward Nicodemus, her eyes strangely bright. “Crazy, crazy things. Don’t push me.”
Nicodemus’s smile turned into a smirk. “You proceed from a false assumption,” he said. “You assume that your toy can actually threaten me or my companion.”
Guy had a point, even if I didn’t want to admit it. With that Noose around his neck, I was pretty sure Nicodemus would smirk just as hard at a flamethrower, or a giant meat grinder, for that matter.
“Actually, you’re the one proceeding from a false assumption,” Karrin countered in that same deathly calm voice, a decidedly odd light in her eyes, still approaching. “You think I’m holding a rocket launcher.”
And with that she knocked some kind of concealed cap off the back of the rocket launcher’s tube, and from its length withdrew a sword.
Check that. She withdrew a Sword.
It was a Japanese-style katana blade, set into a wooden cane sheath, in the same style as that of the apocryphal Zatoichi. Even as the false rocket launcher casing fell to the ground, the Sword’s blade sprang free of its sheath, and as it did, Fidelacchius, the Sword of Faith, blazed with furious white light.
But more important, the presence of the Sword suddenly filled the night, a nearly subaudible thrumming like the after-vibration of a bass guitar string. It wasn’t something that could be heard, precisely, or seen, or felt on the skin—but its presence was absolute, unquestionable, filling the sleet-streaked air. It was power, bone-deep, earth solid, and terrible in its resolution.
I think it was that power that wiped the smirk from Nicodemus’s face.
His eyes widened in dismay. Even his shadow abruptly went statue-still.
Karrin’s bid to narrow the distance between them as she had been speaking meant that she was only a few strides away. She closed in, her feet sure, barely seeming to touch the icy ground, and he barely lifted his blade to a defensive counter in time. The swords met in a clash of steel and a blaze of furious light, and she carried her momentum into him with a full-body check against his center of gravity.
“Watch the big guy,” I hissed to Butters, and took a step toward Nicodemus and Karrin—then froze in place.
Nicodemus slipped on the treacherous ground as Karrin slammed into him, but he swept a leg back, dropped one knee to the ground, and prevented himself from falling. She pressed her advantage, their swords locked, each blade exerting lethal pressure against the other.
I didn’t dare intervene. The least slip or mistake in balance from either of them would mean that the two razor-sharp blades would slice like scalpels into unprotected flesh.
I watched them strain silently against each other, strength against strength. Karrin wasn’t relying on upper-body strength to get it done. Her arms were locked in tight against her body, her weight and her legs pressing forward against Nicodemus, and her two-handed grip on Fidelacchius gave her a significant leverage advantage against his one-handed grip. The edge of her sword pressed closer to his face with each straining heartbeat, until a thin, bright ribbon of scarlet appeared on Nicodemus’s cheek.
He showed her his teeth, and the strain on his arm quivered through his entire body as he pushed the Sword back a precious half inch from his skin. “So,” he hissed, “the burnout thinks she has found her new calling.”
She didn’t say anything back. Karrin’s never been a big one for backtalking the bad guys without a damned good reason. It’s not her fault. She’s a practical soul. She took a slow, contained breath, and kept up the pressure, veering the blades, altering the direction slightly, so that the locked swords began a slow descent toward Nicodemus’s throat.
“And you think you deserve to join the ranks of real Knights of the Sword,” Nicodemus said, his voice smooth and confident. “You battered, scarred, broken thing. In my centuries I’ve learned exactly what is needed in a real Knight. You haven’t got what it takes. And you know that. Or you’d have taken up the Sword before now.”
Her eyes blazed, bright blue in her pale, frightened face, and she leaned forward, pressing the Sword closer to his neck, and the beating artery there. I’d seen how sharp the katana’s blade was. It would take a feather’s pressure and the movement of a blade of grass to open Nicodemus’s neck once that steel reached his skin.
“You’ve never done this before,” he said. “Been this close, this tense, this still—not in earnest. Do you know how many times I’ve talked to novices exactly like you, in situations almost exactly like this? I’ve forgotten more about real sword fighting than this pale modern world knows.”
Karrin ignored him. She shifted her hips the barest fraction, seeking a slightly different angle of pressure. The blazing Sword dipped another fraction of an inch closer.
“Dresden,” Nicodemus said, “I’m giving you ample chance to call off your dog before I put her down.” His eyes flicked to me. “End the little doctor and come back to headquarters. There’s no reason I should have to kill all three of you.”
I ground my teeth. Getting myself killed defending Butters was one thing. Taking Karrin with me was something else. But I knew her. I knew what choice she would make, without needing to talk to her about it.
Karrin didn’t let the monsters take her people, either.
But there just wasn’t a good option open to me. The Genoskwa wasn’t far from us, and the damned thing was fast. Even if Butters ran for the safety of Michael’s place right now, he’d never get there before it caught him—and I couldn’t slow the huge thing down with magic, either.
I only had one choice.
“All right,” I croaked. “Dammit, all right.”
I grabbed Butters and threw him out in front of me, pointing my staff at him and calling forth my will. The runes blazed up with the pale green-white light of the crystals beneath Demonreach, from whence the wood for the staff had come.
“Sorry about this, Butters,” I said. “Nothing personal.”
Nicodemus’s eyes widened. Karrin’s gaze flicked toward me for an instant, disbelieving and then resolute.
“Harry?” Butters asked.
“Forzare!” I thundered, and unleashed a blast of unseen force from the staff.
It took Butters full in the chest, hitting him like a charging bull and hurling him through the sleet—and over the little white picket fence into the nearest corner of the Carpenters’ yard.
Everything happened in the same instant.
Nicodemus’s left arm blurred and produced a short-barreled pistol from somewhere on his body. He jammed it into Karrin’s belly and pulled the trigger half a dozen times.
I let out a scream of defiance and drew that monster revolver from my duster even as the Genoskwa came charging toward me. The Winter mantle made me faster than I could ever have been on my own, but even so there was no time for anything but a hip shot. The Genoskwa was maybe three feet away when the gun went off, thundering like a high-powered rifle. Then the huge creature hit me like a freight train, picking me up in its onslaught like a piece of litter being towed along by the breeze, and carried me across the street and into the side of the neighbor’s minivan.
Metal crashed and crunched. Glass broke. Silver lightning ran through my body without causing me any real pain. The carnivore stench of the Genoskwa filled my nose. My arms slammed against the vehicle, but I hung on to the pistol, shoved it against the creature’s torso, but before I could shoot, it got hold of my wrist, its huge hands wrapping my forearm as if I’d been a toddler, and slammed it against the minivan, pinning the pistol there. Its other hand landed on my head, claws pressing into my skin as the thick fingers tightened on my skull like a nutcracker.
“Hold!” I heard Nicodemus shout, his voice sharp.