Turn Coat

Chapter Forty-two

Adrenaline does weird things to your head. You hear people talk about how everything slows down. That isn’t the case. Nothing is happening slowly. It’s just that you somehow seem to be able to fit a whole lot more thinking into the time and space that’s there. It might feel like things have slowed down, but it’s a transitory illusion.

For example, I had time to reflect upon the nature of adrenaline and time while sprinting through the woods at night. It didn’t make me run any faster, though. Although if I wasn’t actually moving my arms and legs faster than normal, then why was I twenty feet ahead of everyone else, the vampires included?

I heard someone curse in the dark behind me as they tripped over an exposed root. I didn’t trip. It wasn’t that I had become more graceful—I just knew where to put my feet. It was as if every step I took was over a path that I had walked so many times that it had become ingrained in my muscle memory. I knew when to duck out of the way of a low-hanging branch, when to bound forward at an angle to my last step in order to clear an old stump, exactly how much I needed to shorten a quick pair of steps so that I could leap a sinkhole by pushing off my stronger leg. Lara Raith herself was hard-pressed to keep pace with me, though she managed to close to within three or four yards, her pale skin all but glowing in the dark.

The whole time, I tried to keep track of the position of the enemy. It wasn’t a simple matter. I didn’t have a big map of the island in my head, with glowing dots marking their positions. I just knewwhere they were, as long as I concentrated on keeping track of them, but as the number of enemies continued to increase, it got harder to keep track.

The nearest of the hostile presences was about forty yards away when I lifted my fingers to my lips and let out a sharp whistle. “Out there, in front of me!” I shouted. “Now, Toot!”

It had been an enormous pain in the ass to wrap fireworks in plastic to waterproof them against the rain, and even more of a pain to make sure that a waterproof match was attached to each of the rockets, Roman candles, and miniature mortars. When I had Molly and Will scatter them around the woods in twenty separate positions, I’d gotten those “Is he crazy?” looks from both of them.

After all, it isn’t as if fireworks are heavy-duty weaponry, capable of inflicting grievous bodily harm and wholesale destruction. They’re just loud and bright and distracting.

Which, under the circumstances, was more or less all I needed.

Toot-toot and half a dozen members of the Guard came streaking out of nowhere, miniature comets flashing through the vertical shadows of the trees. They went zipping ahead, alighting on low branches, and then tiny lights flickered as waterproof matches were set to fuses. A second later, a tiny shrill trumpet shrieked from somewhere ahead of us, and a dozen Roman candles began shooting balls of burning chemicals out into the darkness, illuminating the crouched running forms of at least ten of Binder’s grey men in their cheap suits, not fifty feet away. They froze at the sudden appearance of the flashing pyrotechnics, attempting to assess them as threats and determine where they were coming from.

Perfect.

I dropped to one knee, lifting my blasting rod, as the human-seeming demons shrieked at the sudden appearance of the bright lights. I trained it on the nearest hesitating grey man, slammed my will down through the wooden haft, and snarled, “Fuego!”

It was more difficult to do than it would have been if it hadn’t been raining, but it was more than up to the task. A javelin of red-gold flame hissed through the rain, leaving a trail of white steam behind it. It touched the nearest of the grey men on one flank, and his cheap suit went up as readily as if it was lined with tar instead of rayon.

The grey man yawled and began thrashing furiously. The fire engulfed him, throwing out light for a good thirty yards in every direction, and illuminating his companions.

I dropped flat, and an instant later the forest behind me belched forth power and death.

Guns roared on full automatic fire. That would be the Raiths. Lara and her sisters’ sidearms had been modified submachine guns, with an enlarged ammunition clip. Given the superhuman strength, perception, and coordination the vampires had at their disposal, they didn’t suffer the same difficulties a human shooter would have faced, running at full speed in the dark, firing a weapon meant to be braced by a shooter’s entire upper body in one hand—and their left hands at that. Bullets chewed into three different grey men, ten or eleven rounds each, all of them hitting between the neck and temple, blasting the demons back to ectoplasm.

Then it was the Wardens’ turn.

Fire was the weapon of choice when it came to combat magic. Though it was taxing upon the will and physical stamina of the wizard, it got a lot of energy concentrated into a relatively small space. It illuminated darkness, something that was nearly always to a wizard’s advantage—and it hurt. Every living thing had at least a healthy respect, if not an outright fear of fire. Even more to the point, fire was a purifying force in its non-physical aspect. Dark magic could be consumed and destroyed by fire when used with that intent.

The Wardens used the zipping little fireballs from the Roman candles and my own improvised funeral pyre to target their own spells, and then the realfireworks started.

Each individual wizard has his own particular quirks when it comes to how he uses his power. There is no industrial standard for how fire is evoked into use in battle. One of the Wardens coming up behind me sent forth a stream of tiny stars that slewed through the night like machine-gun fire, effortlessly burning holes through trees, rocks, and grey men with equal disdain. Another sent a stream of fire up in a high arc, and it crashed down among several grey men, splashing and clinging to any moving thing it struck like napalm. Lances of scarlet and blue and green fire burned through the air, reminding me for a mad moment of a scene from a Star Wars movie. Steam hissed and snarled everywhere, as a swath of woodland forty yards across and half as deep vanished into light and fury.

Hell’s bells. I mean, I’d seen Wardens at work before, but it had all been fairly precise, controlled work. This was pure destruction, wholesale, industrial-strength, and the heat of it was so intense that it sucked the air out of my lungs.

The grey men, though, weren’t impressed. Either they weren’t bright enough to attempt to preserve their own existence or they just didn’t care. They scattered as they advanced, spreading out. Some of them rushed forward, low to the ground and half hidden by the brush. Others bounded into the trees and came leaping and swinging forward, branch by branch. Still more of them darted to the sides, out of the harsh glare of the fires, spreading out around us.

“Toot!” I screamed over the roaring chaos. “Go after the flankers!”

A tiny trumpet added its own notes to the din, and the Pizza Patrol zipped out into the woods, two or three of the little faeries working together to carry fresh Roman candles. They gleefully kept on with the fireworks, sending the little sulfurous balls of flame chasing the grey men trying to slip around us through the shadows, marking their positions.

Lara let out a piercing call and came up to my side, gun in hand, snapping off snarling bursts every time a target presented itself. I pointed to either side and said, “They’re getting around us! We’ve got to stop them from taking Mai and Injun Joe from behind!”

Lara’s eyes snapped left and right, and she said something to her sisters in ancient Etruscan, the tongue of the White Court. One of them went in either direction, vanishing into the dark.

A grey man came crashing out of the flame twenty feet away from me, blazing like a grease fire. He showed absolutely no concern for the flame. He just sprinted forward and leapt at me, hands spread wide. I made it up to my knees and braced one end of my quarterstaff against the ground, aiming the other at the grey man’s center of mass. The staff struck it, but not squarely. It twisted to one side at the impact, bounced off the ground, took a fraction of a second to reorient itself on me—

And erupted into a cloud of ectoplasm as rounds from Lara’s gun took its head apart.

The next attacker was already on the way, out in the darkness beyond the firelight. I came to my feet and on pure instinct snapped off another blast of fire at the empty air twenty feet beyond Lara and about ten feet up. There was nothing there as I released the blast, and I knew it, but as the fire hissed through the falling rain, it illuminated the form of a grey man in the midst of a spectacular leap that would have ended at the small of Lara’s back. The blast struck him and hammered him to one side so that he came down like a burning jet, crashing across a dozen yards of ground before dissolving into flame-licked mounds of swiftly vanishing transparent jelly.

Lara didn’t see the attacker until he’d tumbled past. “Oh,” she said, her voice conversational. “That was gentlemanly of you, Dresden.”

“I’ve been known to pull out chairs and open doors, too,” I said.

“How very unfashionable,” Lara said, her pale eyes gleaming. “And endearing.”

Ebenezar stumped up to us, staff in hand, his eyes narrow and flickering all around us while Wardens continued to send blasts of power hammering into targets. Off in the woods behind us, submachine guns chattered. Apparently Lara’s sisters were still hunting the grey men who had gotten around us.

“We’ve got one Warden down,” Ebenezar said.

“How bad?”

“One of those things came out of a tree above her and tore her head off,” he said.

I tracked a slight motion in a nearby treetop and swiveled to point a finger. “Sir, up there!”

Ebenezar grunted a word, reached out a hand, and made a sharp, pulling motion. The grey man who had been clambering toward us was seized by an unseen force, ripped out of the tree, and sent sailing on an arc that would land it in Lake Michigan a quarter of a mile from the nearest shore.

“Where is the second group?” Ebenezar asked.

I thought about it. “They’re at the dock, at the edge of the trees. They’re closing on Mai and Injun Joe.” I glanced at Lara. “I think the vampires have been holding them off.”

Ebenezar spat a curse. “That summoner is still out there somewhere. His pets won’t last long in this rain, but we can’t afford to give him time to call up more. Can you find him?”

I checked. There was so much confusion and motion on the island that Demonreach had trouble distinguishing one being from another, but I had a solid if nonspecific idea of where Binder was. “Yeah.” I sensed more movement and pointed behind us, to where a trio of grey men had managed to close on a pair of Wardens who were standing on either side of a still, red-spattered form on the ground. “There!”

Ebenezar stopped talking to make another swift gesture, spoke a word, and one of the approaching grey men was suddenly and literally pounded flat by an invisible anvil. Ectoplasmic ichor flew everywhere. The two Wardens, warned by the magical strike and now facing even odds, made short work of the remaining two.

Ebenezar turned back to me and said, “Shut down that summoner, Hoss. I’m taking the Wardens back to support Injun Joe and Mai. Let’s go, vampire.”

“No,” Lara said. “If Binder is nearby, then so is my sweet cousin Madeline. I’ll stay with Dresden.”

Ebenezar didn’t argue with her. He just snarled, made a fist, and lifted it up, and Lara let out a short, choking cry and rose up ten feet into the air, her arms and legs snapping down straight, locking her body into a rigid board.

I put a hand against his chest. “Wait!”

He glanced at me from beneath shaggy grey brows.

“Let her down. She can come along.” Ebenezar had no way of knowing that I wasn’t out there alone. Georgia and Will were lurking nearby, and could be at my side in a couple of seconds if necessary. Between the two of them, they had accounted for three grey men, too. I tried to put that knowledge behind a very slight emphasis in my tone and told him, “I’ll be fine.”

Ebenezar frowned at me, then shot a glance out at the woods and gave me a reluctant nod. He turned back to Lara and released her from the grip of his will. She didn’t quite manage to fall gracefully, and landed in a sprawl that gave me a great look at her long, intriguingly lovely legs. The old man eyed her and said, “You just remember what I told you, missy.”

She rose to her feet, her expression unreadable—but I knew her well enough to know that she was furious. My old mentor had just insulted her on multiple levels, not the least of which was pointing out to her exactly how easy it would be for him to make good on his previous threat. “I’ll remember,” she said, her tone frosty.

“Wardens!” Ebenezar said. “On me!” The old man broke into a woodsman’s lope, a shuffle-footed, loose-kneed gait that managed unpredictable terrain well and covered ground with deceptive speed. The four remaining Wardens fell into a wedge shape behind him and they moved out heading south, back toward the docks and the confrontation with whoever had come forth from the Nevernever with his own army.

Lara turned to me and nodded her head once, gesturing me to lead. I tried to fix Binder’s presence firmly in mind, and was certain he was ahead of us and to the north, probably trying to circle widely around the scene of the battle with his minions. I started out through the woods again, pushing myself to move faster.

This time, Lara stayed close behind me. She mimicked my movements, down to the length of my stride, taking advantage of my instinctive knowledge of Demonreach.

“I have little interest in this mercenary,” she said to me as we ran. She wasn’t even breathing hard. “Do with him as you would. But Madeline is mine.”

“She might know something,” I said.

“I can’t believe anyone with half a mind would entrust her with knowledge of any importance.”

“And I can’t believe the treacherous bitch wouldn’t steal every bit of information she could find to use against whoever she’s working with,” I replied, glancing back.

Lara didn’t dispute the statement, but her eyes hardened like silver mirrors, reflecting the dancing flames that were still burning here and there as we moved through the site of the battle and out the other side. “Madeline has betrayed me, my House, and my Court. She is mine. I prefer you remained a living, breathing ally. You will not interfere.”

What do you say to something like that? I shut my mouth and concentrated on finding Binder.

It took us about five minutes to reach the piece of shoreline where Binder and his companion had come ashore. A pair of Jet Skis lay discarded on the beach. So that’s how they’d done it. The tiny craft would have no problems at all skimming over the stone reefs surrounding the island, though they would have been hellish to ride in the rough water.

We swung past the discarded equipment and up a little ridgeline, running along a deer trail. I knew we were getting close, and suddenly Lara accelerated past me, supernaturally fleet of foot on the even ground.

I don’t know what triggered the explosion. It might have been a tripwire stretched across the trail. It’s possible that it was detonated manually, too. There was a flash of light, and something hit me in the chest hard enough to knock me down. An ugly asymmetrical shape was burned into my vision as I lay on my back, trying to sort out what had just happened.

Then my body tingled, and Madeline Raith appeared over me. I realized that she was straddling me. There was a fire burning somewhere close by, illuminating her. She was wearing a black surfer’s wet suit with short arms and legs, unzipped past her navel. She held a mostly empty bottle of tequila in one hand. Her eyes were wide and shining with a disorienting riot of colors as she leaned down and kissed me on the forehead and . . .

And Hell’s freaking bells.

The pleasure that surged through me from that simple touch was delicious to the point of pain. Every nerve ending in my entire body lit up, as though someone had run up the wattage on my pleasure centers, or injected their engines with nitrous. I felt my body arch up and shudder, a purely sexual reaction to a physical bliss that went far beyond sexuality. I stayed that way, locked into a quivering arch of ecstasy. It took maybe ten or fifteen seconds to subside.

From a kiss on the forehead.

God. No wonder people came back to the vampires for more.

I could barely register what was happening around me. So I only dimly noticed when Madeline produced a gun of her own, the other favorite model of those with more than human strength—a Desert Eagle.

“Good night, sweet wizard,” Madeline purred, her hips grinding a slow rhythm against mine. She drew the half-inch-wide mouth of the gun over my cheek as she took a slug of tequila and then rested the gun’s barrel gently on the spot she’d just kissed. It felt obscenely good, like a caress on skin that has just been shaved smooth but hasn’t yet been touched. I knew that she was about to kill me, but I couldn’t stop thinking how good it felt. “And flights of angels,” she panted, her breath coming faster, her eyes alight with excitement, “sing thee to thy rest.”