Grave Peril (32 page)

My mind raced, and I struggled to put together a plan. Michael couldn’t keep up. He had managed the sprint before, but his face looked a little greyish, now, and he carried himself stiffly, as though in pain. I trusted Michael. I trusted him at my side, and at my back. I trusted him to be able to take care of himself.

But alone, against a wrathful faerie posse, how would he do? I couldn’t be sure—even with the sword, he was still a man. He could still lose his life. And I didn’t want another life on my conscience.

I glanced over at Thomas. The handsome vampire managed to wear my castoff clothes and make them look like some kind of fashion statement. Slouch nouveau. He returned my glance with a perfect, shining smile, and I thought about what he had said, about what a good liar he was. Thomas had sided with me. Mostly. He’d been friendly enough. He even, apparently, had every reason to want to help me and work with me to get Justine back.

Unless he was lying to me. Unless she hadn’t been taken at all.

I couldn’t trust him.

“The two of you are staying here,” I said. “Hold the bridge. You won’t have to do it for long. Just slow them down. Make them go around.”

“Oooo,” Bob said. “Good plan. That should make it a real pain for them, Harry. I mean, until they kill Michael and Thomas and come after you. But that could take minutes! Hours, even!”

I glanced at the skull, and then at Michael. He shot Thomas a look, and then nodded to me.

“If there’s trouble, you’ll need me to protect you,” Thomas objected.

“I can watch out for myself,” I told him. “Look, this whole plan is based on surprise and speed and quiet. I can be quiet better alone. If it turns out that fighting has to be done, one or two people wouldn’t make a difference. If we have to fight, this whole thing is over.”

Thomas grimaced. “So you want us to stay here and die for you, is that it?”

I glared. “Hold the bridge until I can make it out of the Nevernever. After that, they shouldn’t have any reason to come after you.”

The wind rose to a howl, and shapes began to crest the top of the hill with the dolmens, dark things, moving swift and close to the ground.

“Harry, go,” Michael said. He took
Amoracchius
into his hands. “Don’t worry. We’ll keep them off of your back.”

“Are you sure you wouldn’t rather I come with you?” Thomas asked, and took a step toward me. The shining steel of Michael’s sword abruptly dropped in front of Thomas, the sharp edge of it pressing against his belly.

“I’m sure I’d rather not leave him alone with you, vampire,” Michael said, his tone polite. “Do I make myself clear?”

“As water,” Thomas said, sourly. He glanced at me and said, “You’d better not leave her there, Dresden. Or get killed.”

“I won’t,” I said. “Especially that second part.”

And then the first monstrous thing, like a mountain lion made all of shadows, bounded past Lea, and a set of dark talons flashed toward me. Thomas shoved me out of the way of the strike, crying out as the thing tore into his arm. Michael shouted in Latin, and his sword flared into argent light, cutting the vaguely catlike beast and dropping it into two squirming, struggling halves to the floor of the bridge.

“Go!” Michael roared. “God go with you!”

I ran.

The sounds of fighting died behind me, until I could only hear my own laboring breaths. The Nevernever changed, from sculpted, faerie-tale wilderness to dark, close forest, with cobwebs hanging down across a narrow trail through glowering trees. Eyes flashed in the shadows, things that never quite could be clearly seen, and I stumbled on.

“There!” Bob called. His orange eyelights swung to shine upon the split trunk of a dead, hollow tree. “Open a way there, and it will take us through!”

I grunted, and came to a halt, gasping. “Are you sure?”

“Yes, yes!” Bob said. “Hurry! Some of the Awnsidhe will be here at any moment!”

I cast a fearful glance behind me, and then started gathering in my will. It hurt to do. I felt so weak. The poison in my belly hadn’t started tearing my body apart yet, but I almost thought that I could feel it stirring, moving, licking its chops and eyeing my organs with malevolent glee. I shoved all of that out of my thoughts, and forced myself to breathe steadily, to gather in my strength and reach out to part the curtain between worlds.

“Uh, Harry,” Bob said suddenly. “Wait a minute.”

Behind me, something broke a branch. There was a swift, rushing sound, of something moving toward me. I ignored it and reached out a hand, sinking my fingers into the friable border substance of the Nevernever.

“Harry!” Bob said. “I really think you should hear this!”

“Not now,” I muttered.

The rushing noise grew closer, the rattle of undergrowth shunted aside by something large. Behind me, a warbling bellow shook the ground. Holy brillig and slithy toves, Batman.

“Aparturum!”
I shouted, thrusting out with my will and opening a way. The rent in reality shone with dim light.

I threw myself forward into it, willing the way closed behind me. Something snagged at one corner of my leather duster, but with a jerk I was free of it and through.

I tumbled forward, onto the floor, the smell of autumn air and damp stone all around me. My heart thudded painfully with the effort of both the running and the spell. I lifted my head to look around me and get my bearings.

Bob had been good to his word. He had brought me out of the Nevernever right into Bianca’s mansion. I found myself on the floor at the head of a staircase down, away from the front doors and the main hall.

I also found myself surrounded by a ring of vampires, all of them in their inhuman forms, the flesh masks gone. There had to be a dozen of them there, dark eyes glittering, their noses snuffling, drool spattering out and dripping from their bared fangs to the floor while their talons clawed at the air or ran lightly over their flabby black bodies. Some of them showed burns on their rubbery hide, patches of shrunken, wrinkled, scar-like tissue.

I didn’t move. Anything, I sensed, would have set them off. Any motion, any move to flee or fight or escape would have ignited a frenzy, with myself on the receiving end.

While I watched, frozen, Bianca came up the stairs dressed in a white silk nightgown that whispered around her shapely calves. She carried a single candle that bathed her in soft radiance. She smiled at me, very slowly, very sweetly, and the bottom dropped out of my stomach.

“Well,” she purred. “Harry Dresden. Such a pleasant surprise to have you visit.”

“I tried to tell you,” Bob said, his voice miserable. “The curtain felt weak there. Like someone had just gone through it. Like they had been watching this side.”

“Of course,” Bianca murmured. “A guard for every door. Did you think me a fool, Mister Dresden?”

I glowered at her, despairing. There wasn’t anything I could say. I saved my breath, and began to draw in my will, to throw everything I had left into taking that smug smile off of her pretty, false face.

“Dears,” Bianca purred, watching me. “Bring him down.”

They hit me so fast that I never saw them move. There simply came a hideous, rushing force. I have memories of being passed from claw to claw, thrown, carried into the air, toyed with. Snuffling, squashed snouts, and staring black eyes, and hissing, terrible laughter.

I was driven down, carried, tossed about, everything torn from me, Bob disappearing without a sound. They pressed me down while I struggled and screamed, all useless, my mind too full of terror to focus, to defend myself.

And there, in the dark, they tore my clothes from me. I felt Bianca press her naked flesh to me, a heated, sinuous dream-body that unraveled into a nightmare. I felt the skin split and burst apart around her true form. The sweetness of her perfume gave way to a rotten-fruit reek. Her purring voice became a whining hiss.

And their tongues. Soft, intimate, warm, moist. Pleasure that struck me like hammers while I tried to scream against it. Chemical pleasure, animal sensation, heartless and cold, uncaring of my horror, revulsion, despair.

Darkness. Horrible, thick, sensual darkness.

Then pain.

Then nothing.

Chapter
Thirty-four

I
have very few memories of my father. I was about six years old when he died. What I do remember is a careworn, slightly stoop-shouldered man with kind eyes and strong hands. He was a magician—not a wizard, a stage magician. A good one. He never made it big, though. He spent too much time performing for children’s hospitals and orphanages to pull down much money. He and I and his little show roamed around the country. The memories of the first several years of my life are of my bed in the backseat of the station wagon, going to sleep to the whisper of asphalt beneath the tires, secure in the knowledge that my father was awake, driving the car, and there to take care of me.

The nightmares hadn’t started until just before his death. I don’t remember them, specifically—but I remember waking up, screaming in a child’s high-pitched shriek of terror. I’d scream in the darkness, scrambling to squeeze into the smallest space I could find. My father would come looking for me, and find me, and pull me into his lap. He would hold me, and make me warm, and soon I would fall asleep again, safe, secure.

“The monsters can’t get you here, Harry,” he used to say. “They can’t get you.”

He’d been right.

Until now. Until tonight.

The monsters got me.

I don’t know where real life left off and the nightmares began, but I thrashed myself awake, screaming a scratchy, hollow scream that made little more noise than a whimper. I screamed until I ran out of breath, and then all I could do was sob.

I lay there, naked, undone. No one came to hold me. No one came to make it all better. No one had, really, since my dad died.

Breathing first, then. I forced myself to control it, to stop the racking sobs and to draw in slow, steady breaths. Next came the terror. The pain. Humiliation. More than anything, I wanted to crawl into a hole and pull it in after me. I wanted to be not.

But I wasn’t not. I hurt too much. I was very painfully, very acutely, very much alive.

The burn still hurt the most, but the sweeping nausea running through me came in a photo finish second. My hands told me that I was lying upon a floor, but the rest of me thought I had been strapped into a giant gyroscope. I ached. My throat felt tight, and burned, as though seared by some hot liquid or chemical. I didn’t want to dwell too long on that.

I tested my limbs, and found them all present and functional. My belly twisted and roiled, and for a moment locked up tight, jerking me into a tight curl around it.

The sweat on my naked body went cold. The mushroom. The poison. Six to eighteen hours. Maybe a little more.

I felt thick, dry mouthed, fuzzy with the same aftereffects of the vampire venom that I’d felt before.

For a minute, I stopped fighting. I just lay there, weak and thirsty and hurting and sick, curled up into a ball. I would have started crying again if I’d had that much feeling left in me. I would have wept and waited to die.

Instead, some merciless, steady voice in my head drove me to open my eyes. I hesitated, afraid. I didn’t want to open my eyes and see nothing. I didn’t want to find myself in that same darkness. That darkness, with hissing things all around me. Maybe there, still, just waiting for me to awaken so that they—

Panic swept me for a moment, and gave me enough strength to shiver and push myself up into a sitting position. I took a deep breath, and opened my eyes.

I could see. Light seared at my eyes, a thin line of it surrounding a tall rectangle—a doorway. I had to squint for a moment, so used were my eyes to the darkness.

I looked around the room, wary. It wasn’t big. Maybe twelve by twelve, or a little more. I lay in a corner. The smell was violently rotten. My jailors, apparently, had no problems with letting me lie in my own filth. Some of it had crusted onto me, onto my legs and arms. Vomit, I guessed. There was blood in it. An early symptom of the mushroom poisoning.

There were other shapes in the dimness. A lump of cloth in one corner, like a pile of dirty laundry. Several laundry baskets, as well. A washer and dryer, on the far wall from the door.

And Justine, dressed in as little as I, curled up and sitting with her back to the wall, her arms wrapped loosely around her drawn-up knees, watching me with dark, feverish eyes.

“You’re awake,” Justine said. “I didn’t think you’d ever wake up.”

Gone was the glamorous girl I’d seen at the ball. Her hair hung lank and greasy. Her pale body looked lean, almost gaunt, and her limbs, what I could see of them, were stained and dirty, as was her face.

Her eyes disturbed me. There was something feral in them, something unsettling. I didn’t look at her for too long. Even as bad off as I was, I had enough presence of mind to not want to look into her eyes.

“I’m not crazy,” she said, her voice sharp, edged. “I know what you’re thinking.”

I had to cough before I could talk, and it made pains shoot through my belly again. “That wasn’t what I was thinking.”

“Of course it wasn’t,” the girl snarled. She rose, all lean grace and tension, and stalked toward me. “I
know
what you were thinking. That they’d shut you in here with that stupid little
whore
.”

“No,” I said. “I . . . that isn’t what—”

She hissed like a cat, and raked her nails across my face, scoring my cheek in three lines of fire. I cried out and fell back, the wall interrupting my retreat.

“I can always tell, when I’m like this,” Justine said. She gave me an abruptly careless look, turned on the balls of her feet and walked several feet away before stretching and dropping to all fours, watching me with an absent, disinterested gaze.

I stared at her for a moment, feeling the heat of the blood welling in the scratches. I touched a finger to them, and it came away sprinkled with scarlet. I lifted my gaze to the girl and shook my head. “I’m sorry,” I said. “God. What did they do to you?”

“This,” she said, carelessly, thrusting out one hand. Round, bruised punctures marked her wrist. “And this.” She held out the other wrist, showing another set of marks. “And this.” She stretched out her thigh to one side of her body, parallel to the floor, to show more marks, along it. “They all wanted a little taste. So they got it.”

“I don’t understand,” I said.

She smiled with too many teeth, and it made me uneasy. “They didn’t do anything. I’m like this. This is the way I always am.”

“Um,” I said. “You weren’t that way last night.”

“Last night,” she snapped. “Two nights ago. At least. That was because
he
was there.”

“Thomas?”

Her lower lip abruptly trembled, and she looked as though she might cry. “Yes. Yes, Thomas. He makes it quieter. Inside me, there’s so much trying to get out, like at the hospital. Control, they said. I don’t have the kind of control other people have. It’s hormones, but the drugs only made me sick. He doesn’t, though. Only a little tired.”

“But—”

Her face darkened again. “Shut
up,
” she snapped. “But, but, but. Idiot, asking idiot questions. Fool who did not want me when I was willing to give. Nothing does that. None of them, because they all want to take, take, take.”

I nodded, and didn’t say anything, as she became more agitated. It might have been politically incorrect of me, but the word LOONY all but appeared in a giant neon sign over Justine’s head. “Okay,” I said. “Just . . . let’s just take it easy, all right?”

She glowered at me, falling silent. Then she slunk back to the space between the wall and the washing machine and sank into it. She started playing with her hair, and took no apparent notice of me.

I got up. It was hard. Everything spun around. On the floor, I found a dusty towel. I used it to sweep some of the grime off of my skin.

I went to the door and tried it. It stood firmly locked. I tested my weight against it, but the effort made a sudden fire of scarlet flash through my belly and I dropped to the floor, convulsing again. I threw up in the middle of it, and tasted blood on my mouth.

I lay exhausted for a while after that, and might have dropped off to sleep again. I looked up to find Justine holding the towel, and pushing it fitfully at my skin, the fresh mess.

“How long,” I managed to ask her. “How long have I been here?”

She shrugged, without looking up. “They had you for a while. Just outside this door. I heard them taking you. Playing with you, for two hours, maybe. And then they put you in here. I slept. I woke. Maybe another ten hours. Or less. Or more. I don’t know.”

I kept an arm wrapped around my belly, grimacing, and nodded. “All right,” I said. “We have to get out of here.”

She brayed out a sharp laugh. “There is no out of here. This is the larder. The Christmas turkey doesn’t get up and walk away.”

I shook my head. “I . . . I was poisoned. If I don’t get to a hospital, I’m going to die.”

She smiled again, and played with her hair, dropping the towel. “Almost everyone dies in a hospital. You’d get to be someplace different. Isn’t that better?”

“It’s one of those things I could live without,” I said.

Justine’s expression went slack, her eyes distant, and she became still.

I stared at her, waved my hand in front of her eyes. Snapped my fingers. She didn’t respond.

I sighed and stood up, then tested the door again. It was firmly bolted shut from the other side. I couldn’t move it.

“Super.” I sighed. “That’s great. I’m never going to get out of here.”

Behind me, something whispered. I spun, putting the door at my back, searching for the source of the sound.

A low mist crept out of the wall, a smoky, slithery mass that whirled itself down onto the floor like ethereal lace. The mist touched lightly at my blood on the floor where I’d thrown up, and then began to swirl and shape itself into something vaguely human.

“Great,” I muttered. “More ghosts. If I get out of this alive, I’ve got to get a new job.”

The ghost took shape before me, very slowly, very translucently. It resolved itself into the form of a young woman, attractive, dressed like an efficient secretary. Her hair was pulled up into a bun, but for a few appealing tendrils that fell down to frame her cheeks. Her ghostly wrist was crusted with congealed blood, spread around a pair of fang-punctures. Abruptly, I recognized her, the girl Bianca had fed upon until she died.

“Rachel,” I whispered. “Rachel, is that you?”

As I spoke her name, she turned to me, her eyes slowly focusing on me, as though beholding me through a misty veil. Her expression turned, no pun intended, grave. She nodded to me in recognition.

“Hell’s bells,” I whispered. “No wonder Bianca got stuck on a vengeance kick. She literally was haunted by your death.”

The spirit’s face twisted in distress. She said something, but I could hear it only as a distant, muffled sound accompanying the movement of her lips.

“I can’t understand you,” I said. “Rachel, I can’t hear you.”

She almost wept, it seemed. She pressed her hand to her ghostly breast, and grimaced at me.

“You’re hurt?” I guessed. “You hurt?”

She shook her head. Then touched her temple and drew her fingers slowly down over her eyes, closing them. “Ah,” I said. “You’re tired.”

She nodded. She made a supplicating motion, holding out her hands as though asking for help.

“I don’t know what I can do for you. I don’t know if I can help you rest or not.”

She shook her head again. Then she nodded, toward the door, and made a bottle-shaped curving gesture of her hands.

“Bianca?” I asked. When she nodded, I went on. “You think Bianca can lay you to rest.” She shook her head. “She’s keeping you here?”

Rachel nodded, her ghostly, pretty face agonized.

“Makes sense,” I muttered. “Bianca fixates on you as you die tragically. Binds your ghost here. The ghost appears to her and drives her into a vengeance, and she blames it all on me.”

Rachel’s ghost nodded.

“I didn’t kill you,” I said. “You know that.”

She nodded again.

“But I’m sorry. I’m sorry that me being in the wrong place at the wrong time set you up to die.”

She gave me a gentle smile—which transformed into a sudden expression of horror. She looked past me, at Justine, and then her image began to fade, to withdraw into the wall.

“Hey!” I said. “Hey, wait a minute!”

The mist vanished, and Justine started to move. She rose, casually, and stretched. Then glanced down at herself and ran her hands appreciatively down over her breasts, her stomach. “Very nice,” she said, voice subtly altered, different. “Rather like Lydia, in a lot of ways, isn’t she, Mister Dresden.”

I tensed up. “Kravos,” I whispered.

Justine’s eyes flooded with blood through the whites. “Oh yes,” she said. “Yes indeed.”

“Man, you need to get a life in the worst way. That was you, wasn’t it. The telephone call the night Agatha Hagglethorn went nuts.”

“My last call,” Kravos said through Justine’s lips, nodding. “I wanted to savor what was about to happen. Like now. Bianca has ordered that you should receive no visitors, but I just couldn’t resist the chance to take a look at you.”

“You want to look at me?” I asked. I tapped my head. “Come on in. There’s a few things in here I’d like to show you.”

Justine smiled, and shook her head. “It would be too much effort for too little return. Even without the shelter of a threshold, possessing even a mind so weak as this child’s requires a considerable amount of effort. Effort,” she added, “which was made possible by a grant from the Harry Dresden Soul Foundation.”

I bared my teeth. “Leave the girl alone.”

“Oh, but she’s fine,” Kravos said, through Justine’s lips. “She’s really happier like this. She can’t hurt anyone, you see. Or herself. Her ranting emotions can’t compel her to act. That’s why the Whites love her so much. They feed on emotion, and this little darling is positively mad with it.” Justine’s body shivered, and arched sensuously. “It’s rather exciting, actually. Madness.”

“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “Look, if we’re going to fight, let’s fight. Otherwise, blow. I’ve got things to do.”