Dead Beat

Chapter Thirty-seven

I stared up at the withered old man I'd called Liver Spots, and behind the loose skin, the wrinkles, the white wiry hair, I could see the man who had been one of the Order of the Blackened Denarius.

"How?" I asked him. "How did you find me?"

"I didn't," he said. "The coroner's apartment was easy enough to find. I took hairs from his brush. Since you were so eager to keep him sheltered under your wing, it wasn't too terribly difficult to keep track of him-and you-once we had destroyed your wards."

"Oh," I said. My voice shook a little.

"Are you afraid, boy?" Cassius whispered.

"You're about the fifth-scariest person I've met today," I said.

His eyes became very cold.

"Don't knock it," I said. "That's really better than it sounds."

He rose slowly, looking down at me. The fingers of his right hand tightened and loosened on the handle of the bat. Hatred burned there as well, mindless and irrational and howling to be slaked. Cassius hadn't exactly been stable when I'd faced him two years before. From the look of him now, he was preparing a campaign for the presidency of the World Psychosis Association.

I knew that Cassius was a killer, like few I'd ever seen. He had spent what might have been fifteen or sixteen centuries bound to a different fallen angel within his own silver coin, working hand in hand with the head of the Order. He had, I was sure, personally done away with hundreds of foes who had done far less to him than I had.

He would kill me. If a flash of rage took him, he'd cave my head in with that bat, screaming the whole time.

I shuddered at the image and reached out for my magic, seeing if I could draw in enough to try to sucker punch him. But when I tried, the manacles on my wrists suddenly writhed, moving, and dozens of sharp points suddenly pricked into my wrists, as if I had swept my hand through a rosebush. I winced in pain, my breath frozen in my chest for a second.

Cassius smiled at me. "Don't bother. We've used those manacles on wizards and witches for centuries. Nicodemus himself designed them."

"Yeah. Ouch." I winced, but no amount of writhing would move my arms very much, and I couldn't move to try to make the thorny manacles hurt less.

Cassius stared down at me, his eyes bright. He stood there, watching me try to writhe, enjoying my helplessness and pain.

An image flashed through my mind-an old man of faith and courage who had willingly given himself into the hands of the Order in exchange for my freedom. Shiro had died after sustaining the most hideous torments I had ever seen visited upon a human body-and some of them had come at the hands of Cassius. I closed my eyes. I knew what he wanted. He wanted to hurt me. He wanted to see how much pain he could deliver before I died. And there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

Unless…

I thought of what Shiro had told me about having faith. For him it was a theological and moral truth upon which he had based his life. I didn't have the same kind of belief, but I had seen how forces of light and darkness came into conflict, how imbalances were redressed. Cassius was in the service of some of the darkest forces on the planet. Shiro would have said that nothing he did could have prevented a balancing force of light-such as Shiro and his brother Knights-from being placed in his way. In my own experience, I had noticed that when something truly, deeply evil arose, one of the Knights tended to show up.

Maybe one would show up to face Cassius.

Hell's bells. That was mighty thin.

But it was technically possible. And it was all I had.

I almost laughed. What I needed to survive this lunatic was something I had never had much of: faith, I had to believe that some other factor would intervene. I had no other option.

But that didn't mean I couldn't try to help intervention along. The longer I kept breathing, the more likely it was that someone would happen across the scene-maybe even someone who could help. Maybe even someone like my friend Michael.

I had to keep Cassius talking.

"What happened to you?" I asked him a moment later, opening my eyes. I'd read somewhere that people love to talk about themselves. "The last time I saw you, you could have passed for forty."

Cassius stared at me for a moment more, and then leaned his bat on the floor. "It was the result of losing my coin to you and your friends," he said, voice creaking. "While I held my coin, Saluriel prevented age from ravaging my body. Now nature is collecting her due from me. Plus interest." He waved his stiff-fingered right hand, wrinkled, spotted, swollen with what looked like bad arthritis. "If she has her way, I will be dead within the year."

"Why?" I asked him. "Isn't your new demon stopping the clock for you?"

His eyes narrowed, unsteady and cold. "I have no Denarius now," he said, his voice low and very polite. "When I eventually left the hospital and rejoined Nicodemus, he had no coin being held as a spare." Mad fire flickered through his gaze. "You see, he'd given it to you."

I swallowed. "That's what you were looking for, outside my apartment. You wanted the Denarius."

"Lasciel wouldn't be my first choice, but I must be content with what is available."

"Uh- huh. So where's Nicodemus? He's helping you, I take it."

Cassius's eyes closed almost all the way. "Nicodemus cast me out. He said that if I was too much a fool to keep possession of my coin that I deserved whatever befell me."

"What a guy."

Cassius shrugged. "He is a man of power, with no tolerance for fools. Once you are dead and Lasciel's coin is mine, he will take me back."

"You sound pretty confident there," I said.

"Is there some reason I should not be?" He moved stiffly over to his duffel bag. "You should make this simpler for both of us. I'm willing to make you an offer. Give it to me now, and I will make your death quick."

"I don't have it," I told him.

He let out a rough cackle. "There are only so many places one can hide it," he said. "If you are holding it as part of you, enough pain will make you drop it." He drew out a slender little coping saw from the bag and set it on the floor. "I once knew a man who swallowed his Denarius, and would swallow it again when it came through."

"Yuck," I said.

Cassius put a standard-head screwdriver down next to the saw. "And one who cut himself open and placed the coin in his abdominal cavity." He drew a vicious-looking hooked linoleum knife from the bag and held it thoughtfully. "If you tell me, I'll take your throat."

"And if I don't?" I asked.

He pared a yellowed fingernail with the knife. "I go on a treasure hunt."

I studied him for a minute, then said, "I don't have it with me. That's the truth. I bound Lasciel and buried the coin."

He let out a snarl and snatched at my left hand. He tore my glove from it, and then twisted my hand to show me my own horribly scarred palm, and the name-sigil of the demon Lasciel upon it, the only skin that wasn't layered in scar tissue. "You have it," he spat. "And it is mine."

I took a deep breath and tried to embrace an optimistic conviction in the moral rectitude of my cause; to think positive.

Hey, hideous torture would draw things out. It wasn't the way I would have chosen to stall Cassius, but again, I wasn't spoiled for choice.

"I'm telling you the truth," I said. "Besides, you wouldn't have made it quick, even if I did give it to you."

He smiled. It looked grandfatherly. "Probably," he agreed. He reached into the duffel bag again and pulled out a three-foot length of heavy chain, the kind they used to use for bicycle locks. He held it in one hand while he moved my wrists, lifting them so that I lay flat on my back, my arms outstretched over my head. "I'm a winner either way."

I wasn't strong enough to move them. The damned manacles made me weaker than a newborn kitten.

"Surrender your coin," Cassius said pleasantly. Then he gave me a hard kick in the ribs.

It drove the breath from me and hurt like hell. I managed to choke out the words, "Don't have it."

"Surrender your coin," he said again. And this time he swung the chain and lashed it down hard over my stomach. My duster was open and the chain tore through my shirt and ripped at the flesh of my belly. My vision went red with a sudden haze of agony. "I d-d-don't…" I began.

"Surrender your coin," he purred. And he hit me again with the chain.

Rinse and repeat. I don't know how many times.

An eternity later, Cassius touched his tongue to some of the blood on the chain and regarded me thoughtfully. "I hope you aren't too impatient for me to get the bat," he said. "You see, my balance is quite unsteady these days. I'm told it's a result of all the damage to my knees and ankles."

I lay there hurting. My belly and chest were on fire. Blood from one of the snakebites had trickled into my left eye, and had crusted my eyelashes together so that I couldn't open it again.

"You see, I've only got this one good hand to swing the bat with. My other was badly broken by multiple blunt-impact traumas. One-handed, I'm afraid it's difficult to aim properly or judge the power of my swing."

I tried to look around me, but I couldn't get my right eye to move properly.

"As a result," Cassius continued, "once I start paying you back for what you did to me, I'm afraid it's quite likely that I might hit you too hard and too many times. And I want to savor this."

Where was Michael? Where was… anyone?

Cassius leaned down and said, "And when I start, Dresden, I want to be free to indulge myself. To really let go and live the moment. I'm sure you understand."

No one is coming to save you, Harry.

I rasped, "I told you."

He paused, eyebrows lifted, and rolled a hand. "Pray continue."

"Told you," I said, and it was marred with a groan. "Told you if I ever saw you again I would kill you."

He let out a low, amused little chuckle and put the chain down.

He picked up the linoleum knife. Then he knelt stiffly down beside me, and calmly cut my shirt open and spread it and my duster away from my abdomen. "I remember," he said. "One should never make promises one cannot keep."

"I didn't," I told him quietly.

"Best you hurry then," he told me. "I can't imagine you have more than a few moments to make good." He prodded my belly with his finger, drawing a gasp of pain from me. "Mmmm. Nice and tender now. The better to cut through."

I watched the knife move, slow and bright and beautiful. Time seemed to slow down as it did.

Dammit, I was not going to die. I was not going to let this murderous bastard kill me. I was going to survive. I didn't know how I would do it, but my will locked onto the notion and I found myself grinding my teeth. I had shown him mercy before. He'd had his chance to walk away. I was going to live. And I was going to kill him.

The knife bit into the muscle of my stomach. He moved it very slowly, staring at the inner edge of the hooked blade as he drew it toward my groin in a gradually deepening incision. It hurt almost as much as the chain, but it left me with enough breath to scream.

I did. I howled at him at the top of my lungs. I shrieked profanities at him. I even managed to twitch my body a little, and I began calling up my will again, bringing fresh agony from the manacles.

He finished his first long, shallow, almost delicate cut, lifted the knife from my flesh, and repositioned it beside the first. The whole while I never stopped ranting at the top of my lungs. I doubted it was coherent enough to understand-but it described my feelings perfectly. I screamed and I kept on screaming.

And because I did, Cassius never heard Mouse's claws on the marble floor.

The air suddenly shook with a bellowing, damned near leonine roar. Cassius's head whipped around in time to see my dog leap from twenty feet away and hurtle forward like a grey-furred wrecking ball.

Mouse's front paws hit Cassius squarely on the sternum, and a bloodcurdling snarl exploded from the huge dog's chest as they both went down. Mouse snapped his jaws at Cassius's throat, but he had too much momentum remaining from his charge. His paws slid on the smooth floor, carrying him past Cassius before his teeth could do more than lightly rip at one shoulder.

Cassius screamed in rage, crouching, and flicked his hand at Mouse. There was a surge of dark magic, a shimmering blur, and suddenly a serpent coalesced from the shadows lying upon the gallery. It reared up for a second, and I could see the deadly outline of a cobra's hood rising a good five feet from the floor. Then the serpent launched itself at Mouse.

My dog saw it coming, sprang back from the serpent's first strike, and then leapt forward, jaws trying to latch on behind the shadow serpent's head. Lashing loops of reptilian darkness whipped into coils that tried to trap the big dog, and the pair of them rolled along the floor, each seeking to grasp and kill the other.

Cassius stared at Mouse for a second, eyes wide, and then turned to me. There was actual, literal foam at the corner of his mouth, and his face was stretched into a grotesque grimace of fury. He lurched over to my side, speaking a language I didn't recognize in a half-hysterical shriek. Then he seized my hair, jerked my head back to bare my throat, and swept the knife down toward my jugular.

Before his arm was halfway down, there was a thin, high-pitched, tinny-sounding wail. Butters threw himself onto Cassius's back, carrying them both over me and to the floor. The knife missed me entirely, and went skittering away on impact.

Cassius snarled another oath and tried to crawl for the knife. Butters tried to pull Cassius away, his face deathly pale. The little guy had all the fighting prowess of a leatherback turtle, but he got his arms and legs around Cassius's torso and clung like a wild-haired monkey.

Cassius's body may have been weakened, but he'd had more than a millennium to learn about infighting. He twisted his shoulders and then slammed the side of his head into Butters's nose with a crunching sound of impact. Butters reeled from the blow, and blood spattered his face and upper lip.

Cassius then twisted again and escaped Butters's grip. He heaved himself toward the knife.

"Butters!" I screamed, helpless to move and furious and terrified. "Don't let him get the weapon!"

The little medical examiner shook his head once, then let out that tinny wail of challenge again and threw himself at Cassius. Butters caught him around one leg. Cassius kicked at his face, but Butters ducked his head down and the blows rolled off his shoulders. Cassius pushed himself a little closer to the knife.

Butters lifted his head with a squeak of defiance and sank his teeth into Cassius's leg.

The former Denarian howled in sudden, startled pain.

Another bellowing roar shook the gallery, and I looked up to see Mouse gripping the shadow serpent's neck in his heavy jaws. Mouse shook his head violently. There was a burst of crunching sounds, and suddenly the shadow serpent stiffened and then abruptly dissolved into gallons and gallons of translucent, gelatinous ectoplasm.

Butters yelped and I looked up to see Cassius holding the knife, sweeping it clumsily at his opponent. Butters skittered away from the knife, eyes wide with terror.

But he skittered directly between Cassius and me.

And held his ground.

Mouse didn't skip a beat after killing the serpent. This time he rushed forward low, his snarls in chorus with the growling of thunder outside. He hit Cassius at the knees with the full power of his body, and Cassius went down like a tenpin before a bowling ball.

Butters rushed forward and kicked at Cassius's knife hand. The weapon skittered away again, over the edge of the gallery and into the great hall below. Cassius kicked at Butters and got him in the shins, sending Butters to the floor.

Cassius got out from under Mouse and lurched for me, his eyes mad, his hands outstretched in strangling claws.

Mouse landed on his back, and the huge dog's jaws closed on the man's neck.

Cassius froze in place in sudden terror, his eyes very wide. He stared at me.

For a second there was total silence.

"I gave you a chance," I told him, my voice quiet.

Quintus Cassius's liver-spotted face went pale with horrified comprehension. "Wait."

"Mouse," I said. "Kill him."

I had only one open eye with which to watch Cassius meet his end. But in that final second, rage and terror and horrified realization flashed through his eyes. And just as Mouse's jaws crushed the delicate bones of his neck, there was a flare of ugly energies, a flash of unholy purplish light around him, and he spoke words that rang in echoes totally out of proportion to their volume.

"DIE ALONE," he spat.

A flood of power hit me and my vision went black.

The last thing I heard was the snapping of bone.