Even Hand Read online

  Justine swallowed and stared at me for a moment. Then she glanced down at the child in her arms. The child clung harder to her and seemed to lean somewhat away from me.

  One must admire such acute instincts.

  “You have drawn me into a conflict which has nothing to do with me,” I said quietly. “I suggest candor. Otherwise, I will have Mr. Hendricks and Ms. Gard show you to the door.”

  “You can’t…,” she began, but her voice trailed off.

  “I can,” I said. “I am not a humanitarian. When I offer charity it is for tax purposes.”

  The room became silent. I was content with that. The child began to whimper quietly.

  “I was delivering documents to the court of King Corb on behalf of my lady,” Justine said. She stroked the child’s hair absently. “It’s in the sea. There’s a gate there in Lake Michigan, not far from here.”

  I lifted an eyebrow. “You swam?”

  “I was under the protection of their courier, going there,” Justine said. “It’s like walking in a bubble of air.” She hitched the child up a little higher on her hip. “Mag saw me. He drove the courier away as I was leaving and took me to his home. There were many other prisoners there.”

  “Including the child,” I guessed. Though it probably didn’t sound that way.

  Justine nodded. “I… arranged for several prisoners to flee Mag’s home. I took the child when I left. I swam out.”

  “So you are, in effect, stolen property in possession of stolen property,” I said. “Novel.”

  Gard and Hendricks came back into the office.

  I looked at Hendricks. “My people?”

  “Tulane’s got a broken arm,” he said. “Standing in that asshole’s way. He’s on his way to the doc.”

  “Thank you. Ms. Gard?”

  “Mag is off the property,” she said. “He didn’t go far. He’s summoning support now.”

  “How much of a threat is he?” I asked. The question was legitimate. Gard and Hendricks had blindsided the inhuman while he was focused upon Justine and the child and while he wasted his leading magical strike against my protective circle. A head-on confrontation against a prepared foe could be a totally different proposition.

  Gard tested the edge of her axe with her thumb and drew a smooth stone from her pocket. “Mag is a fomor sorcerer lord of the first rank. He’s deadly – and connected. The fomor could crush you without a serious loss of resources. Confrontation would be unwise.”

  The stone made a steely, slithery sound as it glided over the axe’s blade.

  “There seems little profit to be had, then,” I said. “It’s nothing personal, Justine. Merely business. I am obliged to return stolen property to signatory members of the Accords.”

  Hendricks looked at me sharply. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t have to. I already knew the tone of whatever he would say. Are there no prisons, perhaps. Or, No man is an island, entire of itself. It tolls for thee. On and on.

  Hendricks has no head for business.

  Gard watched me, waiting.

  “Sir,” Justine said, her tone measured and oddly formal. “May I speak?”

  I nodded.

  “She isn’t property,” Justine said, and her voice was low and intense, her eyes direct. “She was trapped in a den of living nightmares, and there was no one to come save her. She would have died there. And I am not letting anyone take her back to that hellhole. I will die first.” The young woman set her jaw. “She is not property, Mr. Marcone. She’s a child.”

  I met Justine’s eyes for a long moment.

  I glanced aside at Hendricks. He waited for my decision.

  Gard watched me. As ever, Gard watched me.

  I looked down at my hands, my fingertips resting together with my elbows propped on the desk.

  Business came first. Always.

  But I have rules.

  I looked up at Justine.

  “She’s a child,” I said quietly.

  The air in the room snapped tight with tension.

  “Ms. Gard,” I said, “please dismiss the contractors for the day, at pay. Then raise the defenses.”

  She pocketed the whetstone and strode quickly out, her teeth showing, a bounce in her step.

  “Mr. Hendricks, please scramble our troubleshooters. They’re to take positions across the street. Suppressed weapons only. I don’t need patrolmen stumbling around in this. Then ready the panic room.”

  Hendricks nodded and got out his cell phone as he left. His huge, stubby fingers flew over its touchscreen as he sent the activation text message. Looking at him, one would not think him capable of such a thing. But that is Hendricks, generally.

  I looked at Justine as I rose and walked to my closet. “You will go to the child into the panic room. It is, with the possible exception of Dresden’s home, the most secure location in the city.”

  “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  I took off my coat and hung it up in the closet. I took off my tie and slipped it over the same hanger. I put my cuff links in my coat pocket, rolled up my sleeves, and skinned out of my gun’s holster. Then I slipped on the armored vest made of heavy scales of composite materials joined to sleeves of quite old-fashioned mail. I pulled an old field jacket, olive drab, over the armor, belted it, holstered my sidearm at my side, opposite a combat knife, and took a military-grade assault shotgun – a weapon every bit as illegal as my pistol in the city of Chicago – from its rack.

  “I am not doing it for you, young lady,” I said. “Nor am I doing it for the child.”

  “Then why are you doing it?” she asked.

  “Because I have rules,” I said.

  She shook her head gently. “But you’re a criminal. Criminals don’t have rules. They break them.”

  I stopped and looked at her.

  Justine blanched and slid a step farther away from me, along the wall. The child made a soft, distressed sound. I beckoned curtly for her to follow me as I walked past her. It took her a moment to do so.

  Honestly.

  Someone in the service of a vampire ought to have a bit more fortitude.

  This panic room looked like every other one I’ve had built: fluorescent lights, plain tile floor, plain drywall. Two double bunks occupied one end of the room. A business desk and several chairs took up the rest. A miniature kitchen nestled into one corner, opposite the miniature medical station in another. There was a door to a half-bath and a bank of security monitors on the wall between them. I flicked one switch that activated the entire bank, displaying a dozen views from hidden security cameras.

  I gestured for Justine to enter the room. She came in and immediately took a seat on the lower bunk of the nearest bed, still holding the child.

  “Mag can find her,” Gard told me when we all rendezvoused outside the panic room. “Once he’s inside the building and gets past the forward area, he’ll be able to track her. He’ll head straight for her.”

  “Then we know which way he’ll be moving,” I said. “What did you find out about his support?”

  “They’re creatures,” Gard said, “actual mortal beings, though like none you’ve seen before. The fomor twist flesh to their liking and sell the results for favors and influence. It was probably the fomor who created those cat-things the Knights of the Blackened Denarius used.”

  I twisted my mouth in displeasure at the name. “If they’re mortal, we can kill them.”

  “They’ll die hard,” Gard warned me.

  “What doesn’t?” I looked up and down the hallway outside the panic room. “I think the primary defense plan will do.”

  Gard nodded. She had attired herself in an armored vest not unlike my own over a long mail shirt. Medieval looking, but then modern armorers haven’t aimed their craft at stopping claws of late. Hendricks, standing watch at the end of the hall, had on an armored vest but was otherwise covered in modified motorcyclist’s armor. He carried an assault shotgun like mine, several hand grenades, and that same broadsword.


  “Stay here,” I said to Justine. “Watch the door. If anyone but one of us comes down the stairs, shut it.”

  She nodded.

  I turned and started walking toward the stairway. I glanced at Gard. “What can we expect from Mag?”

  “Pain.”

  Hendricks grunted. Skeptically.

  “He’s ancient, devious, and wicked,” Gard clarified. “There is an effectively unlimited spectrum of ways in which he might do harm.”

  I nodded. “Can you offer any specific knowledge?”

  “He won’t be easy to get to,” she said. “The fomor practice entropy magic. They make the antitechnology effect Dresden puts off look like mild sunspot activity. Modern systems are going to experience problems near him.”

  We started up the stairs. “How long before he arrives?”

  From upstairs, there was the crash of breaking plate glass. No alarm went off, but there was a buzzing, sizzling sound and a scream – Gard’s outer defenses. Hendricks hit a button on his cell phone and then came with me as I rushed up the remaining stairs to the ground floor.

  The lights went out as we went, and Hendricks’s phone sputtered out a few sparks. Battery-powered emergency lights flicked on an instant later. Only about half of them functioned, and most of those were behind us.

  Mag had waited for nightfall to begin his attack and then crippled our lights. Quite possibly he assumed that the darkness would give him an overwhelming advantage.

  The hubris of some members of the supernatural community is astonishing.

  The nightvision scopes mounted on my weapon and Hendricks’s had been custom-made, based off of designs dating back to World War II, before nightvision devices had married themselves to the electronics revolution. They were heavy and far inferior to modern systems – but they would function in situations where electronic goggles would be rendered into useless junk.

  We raised the weapons to our shoulders, lined an eye up with the scopes, and kept moving. We reached the first defensive position, folded out the reinforced composite barriers mounted there, and knelt behind them. The ambient light from the city outside and the emergency lights below us was enough for the scopes to do their jobs. I could make out the outline of the hallway and the room beyond. Sounds of quiet movement came closer.

  My heart rate had gone up, but not alarmingly so. My hands were steady. My mouth felt dry, and my body’s reaction to the prospect of mortal danger sent ripples of sensation up and down my spine. I embraced the fear and waited.

  The fomor’s creatures exploded into the hallway on a storm of frenzied roars. I couldn’t make out many details. They seemed to have been put together on the chassis of a gorilla. Their heads were squashed, ugly-looking things, with wide-gaping mouths full of sharklike teeth. The sounds they made were deep, with a frenzied edge of madness, and they piled into the corridor in a wave of massive muscle.

  “Steady,” I murmured.

  The creatures lurched as they moved, like cheap toys that had not been assembled properly, but they were fast for all of that. More and more of them flooded into the hallway, and their charge was gaining momentum.

  “Steady,” I murmured.

  Hendricks grunted. There were no words in it, but he meant, I know.

  The wave of fomorian beings got close enough that I could see the patches of mold clumping their fur and tendrils of mildew growing upon their exposed skin.

  “Fire,” I said.

  Hendricks and I opened up.

  The new military AA-12 automatic shotguns are not the hunting weapons I first handled in my patriotically delusional youth. They are fully automatic weapons with large circular drums that rather resembled the old tommy guns made iconic by my business predecessors in Chicago. One pulls the trigger and shell after shell slams through the weapon. A steel target hit by bursts from an AA-12 rapidly comes to resemble a screen door.

  And we had two of them.

  The slaughter was indescribable. It swept like a great broom down that hallway, tearing and shredding flesh, splattering blood on the walls and painting them most of the way to the ceiling. Behind me, Gard stood ready with a heavy-caliber big-game rifle, calmly gunning down any creature that seemed to be reluctant to die before it could reach our defensive point. We piled the bodies so deep that the corpses formed a barrier to our weapons.

  “Hendricks,” I said.

  The big man was already reaching for the grenades on his belt. He took one, pulled the pin, cooked it for a slow two count, and then flung it down the hall. We all crouched behind the barriers as the grenade went off with a deafening crunch of shock-wave-driven air.

  Hendricks threw another one. He might disapprove of killing, but he did it thoroughly.

  When the ringing began to fade from my ears, I heard a sound like raindrops. It wasn’t raining, of course – the gunmen in the building across the street had opened fire with silenced weaponry. Bullets whispered in through the windows and hit the floor and walls of the headquarters will innocuous-sounding thumps. Evidently Mag’s servitors had been routed and were trying to flee.

  An object the size of Hendricks’ fist appeared from nowhere and arced cleanly through the air. It landed on the floor precisely between the two sheltering panels, a lump of pink-and-gray coral.

  Gard hit me with a shoulder and drove me to the ground even as she shouted, “Down!”

  The piece of coral didn’t explode. There was a whispering sound, and hundreds of tiny holes appeared in the bloodstained walls and ceiling. Gard let out a pained grunt. My left calf jerked as something pierced it and burned as though the wound had been filled with salt.

  I checked Hendricks. One side of his face was covered in a sheet of blood. Small tears were visible in his leathers, and he was beginning to bleed through the holes.

  “Get him,” I said to Gard, rising, as another coral spheroid rose into the air.

  Before it could get close enough to be a threat, I blew it to powder with my shotgun. And the next and the next, while Gard dropped her rifle, got a shoulder under one of Hendricks’s, and helped him to his feet as if he’d been her weight instead of two hundred and seventy pounds of muscle. She started down the stairs.

  A fourth sphere came accompanied by mocking laughter, and when I pulled the trigger again, the weapon didn’t function. Empty. I slapped the coral device out of the air with the shotgun’s barrel and flung myself backward, hoping to clear the level of the floor on the stairwell before the pseudo-grenade detonated. I did not quite make it. Several objects struck my chest and arms, and a hot blade slipped across my unscarred ear, but the armor turned the truly dangerous projectiles.

  I broke my arm tumbling backward down the stairs.

  More laughter followed me down, but at least the fomor wasn’t spouting some kind of ridiculous monologue.

  “I did my best,” came Mag’s voice. “I gave you a chance to return what was mine. But no. You couldn’t keep yourself from interfering in my affairs, from stealing my property. And so now you will reap the consequences of your foolishness, little mortal…”

  There was more, but there is hardly a need to go into details. Given a choice between that egocentric drivel and a broken arm, I prefer the latter. It’s considerably less excruciating.

  Gard hauled me to my feet by my coat with her spare hand. I got under the stunned Hendricks’s other arm and helped them both down the rest of the stairs. Justine stood in the doorway of the safe room, at the end of the hallway of flickering lights, her face white-lipped but calm.

  Gard helped me get Hendricks to the door of the room and turned around. “Close the door. I may be able to discourage him out here.”

  “Your home office would be annoyed with me if I wasted your life on such a low-percentage proposition,” I said. “We stick to the plan.”

  The valkyrie eyed me. “Your arm is broken.”

  “I was aware, thank you,” I said. “Is there any reason the countermeasure shouldn’t work?”

  Mag
was going on about something, coming down the steps one at a time, making a production out of every footfall. I ignored the ass.

  “None that I know of,” Gard admitted. “Which is not the same answer as ‘no.’”

  “Sir,” Justine said.

  “We planned for this – or something very like it. We don’t split up now. End of discussion. Help me with Hendricks.”

  “Sir,” Justine said.

  I looked up to see Mag standing on the landing, cloaked in random shadows, smiling. The emergency lights on the stairwell blew out with a melodramatic shower of dying sparks.

  “Ah,” I said. I reached inside the safe-room door, found the purely mechanical pull-cord wrapped unobtrusively around a nail head on the wall, and gave it a sharp jerk.

  It set off the antipersonnel mines built into the wall of the landing.

  There were four of them, which meant that a wash of fire and just under three-thousand-round shot acquainted themselves with the immediate vicinity of the landing and with Mag. A cloud of flame and flying steel enveloped the fomor, but at the last minute the swirling blackness around him rose up like a living thing, forming a shield between Mag and the oncoming flood of destruction.

  The sound of the explosions was so loud that it demolished my hearing for a moment. It began to return to me as the cloud of smoke and dust on the landing began to clear. I could hear a fire alarm going off.

  Mag, smudged and blackened with residue but otherwise untouched, made an irritated gesture, and the fire alarm sparked and fizzled – but not before setting off the automatic sprinklers. Water began pouring down from spigots in the ceiling.

  Mag looked up at the water and then down at me, and his too-wide smile widened even more. “Really?” he asked. “Water? Did you actually think water would be a barrier to the magic of a fomor lord?”

  Running water was highly detrimental to mortal magic, or so Gard informed me, whether it was naturally occurring or not. The important element was quantity. Enough water would ground magic just as it could conduct electricity and short-circuit electronics. Evidently Mag played by different rules.