Chapter Fourteen
Chapter
Fourteen
I spent the day hungover, and we went out to hunt ghouls at sundown.
“For the record,” Bear said, as we settled down in the shadows of the alley, “you shouldn’t be out tonight.”
“Your Valkyrie sense is tingling?” I asked grumpily.
Bear squinted at me. I could barely see her face in the darkness of the trash can fires in the encampment across the street. “Dresden,” she asked, “have you ever fought an angel of death?”
“No,” I said carefully.
“I have,” she said. “And here I am. Could be I know a couple things you don’t.”
I snorted quietly through my nose. “Could be you know everything I don’t. Doesn’t change that we need to make some ghouls go away.”
Bear grunted a reluctant affirmative. “You’re hungover. Your head is a mess. Don’t try to pretend you’re in shape for a fight. You need more time.”
“What I need is a good costume for Halloween.”
“Dammit, Dresden,” she said, poking me in the forehead with one thick finger. “Focus.”
“It’s just possible I’ve taken on ghouls once or twice,” I said. I rubbed my head. It hurt less than it had the night before. “I’ll be fine.”
Bear gave me a skeptical look, her whole weight balanced easily as she crouched on her heels and looked back out at the night.
Footsteps sounded on the street outside the alley, and Fitz appeared.
He slipped quietly into place beside us and crouched down.
The kid looked short and slight, given his company.
“I think something’s out there,” he said quietly.
“Hairs on my neck are standing up. The people in the camp are nervous. They told me to move along.”
I grunted. We were waiting in an alley near Michigan Avenue, where a lot of the destruction had happened during the battle.
The corpses of a number of skyscrapers covered pretty much everything.
An encampment of tents, barrels, and various storage boxes of all kinds stood across the street in the shadow of the ruins.
Scavengers had descended upon the ruined buildings in the weeks after the battle.
They’d begun as volunteers looking for the remains of the dead, but now they mostly seemed to be taking whatever had survived the destruction.
The police had a lot to do. They hadn’t gotten around to breaking up the scavenging camps yet.
A number of spots like this one had sprung up, and the ghouls had been vanishing people from them for weeks.
The news was calling the scavengers “ghouls” for taking the possessions of the dead.
I didn’t have strong feelings either way, given what I knew about actual ghouls.
People were just people. When things got bad, they did what they needed to do to survive and protect their families.
Some of them were in it to make easy money, I supposed.
I just didn’t feel like I was in a position to pass much in the way of judgment when it came to random people scooping up whatever they could from the ruins of their world.
Monsters eating people was a lot less murky. About the time something was making men, women, and children disappear, it was time for some avenging.
“All right, kid,” I said. “The campers have any arms?”
“Handguns, most of them,” he said. “Nobody wants to carry a rifle climbing around the ruins. Saw a shotgun in someone’s tent, but that was it.”
Sidearms weren’t too much use against ghouls. About as effective as bear spray was for grizzlies. A pistol would discourage them. Mostly.
“Good work, Fitz. You remember the plan?”
“Stay within arm’s reach of you,” he said dutifully. “Stay under my veil. Warn you if you’re about to get flanked. Don’t try anything unless there’s no other choice.”
“There you go,” I said. “Got your knife?”
He opened his coat and showed me the heavy blade at his belt. Fitz had lived a tough life. He knew how to use a knife. He stared across the street at the encampment. The kid had lived like those people for years. His expression looked…complicated. “What do we do now?”
“We wait,” Bear said patiently. “Ghouls will want people to get drunk and sleepy before they come in. Easier targets.”
“Settle in, kid,” I said. “A lot of the game is like this.”
And we waited.
Waiting in the dark and the cold isn’t easy.
There’s a need to get up, to move. Tired muscles want to stretch.
Chilled flesh wants to shift and ease. But when you’re hunting, stillness is imperative.
Movement is the first thing the eye tends to notice, and we didn’t want to reveal ourselves to our would-be prey.
The problem, for me, was that sitting and doing nothing left too many thoughts running around my head.
That could have gotten me to bad places, so I let my eyes mostly close, slowed my breathing, and focused exclusively on what I could hear, paying more and more and more attention to the sounds around me, Listening.
I overheard conversations in the camp across the street.
Most of them happened around the barrel fires, where a dozen men and four women were cooking some pretty basic food, mostly soup.
A couple were being carnal in one of the tents, though not loudly enough for the other people in the camp to notice.
There was a pub a couple of blocks away that apparently had its doors open, and the distant sound of singing drifted through the air.
We might have had a local end of the world, but the Irish just poured another round and made more songs.
On the far side of the nearest ruined skyscraper, someone was working with tools, maybe banging something back into shape.
In the very far distance, the clang and clatter of a passing freight train echoed through the air.
For a Chicago night, it was really quiet. It was the lack of auto traffic, I think. The Guard was still limiting who could take the interstates through the city.
I breathed slowly and Listened and waited, until almost an hour after the scavengers had turned in, and when the ghouls came out of their tunnel somewhere in the ruins, I heard the scrape and scuffle of gravel sliding over gravel.
My head snapped up, and Bear glanced at me. Her green eyes gleamed in the shadows, and she nodded slowly.
“What?” Fitz breathed. To my adjusted hearing, his voice was all but a shout.
“They’re here,” I whispered.
“How many?” Bear asked.
“Few. Less than half a dozen, I think.”
Bear nodded slowly.
“Remember,” I whispered. “I’m first. You stay in my shadow, Fitz. Bear, you’re riding drag.”
The Valkyrie reached up and silently withdrew the four-bore from the scabbard on her back. The gun would make as much noise as your average battle tank when she fired it, but on the other hand she could probably club a killer whale unconscious with it without ever pulling the trigger.
I moved out slowly. It was after eleven, and that meant it was very late by the standards of a society that was, at least temporarily, mainly reliant upon daylight to conduct everyday business.
The nearest functioning streetlight was blocks away.
The light mostly came from barrel fires and spotlights reflecting from the distant Sears Tower, now the Willis Tower, which had become a kind of orienting beacon.
Neither did much more than separate the night into dark and very dark, and I slipped across the street with as little noise as I could manage.
Fitz muttered under his breath and I glanced back to see a blurry haze in the air behind me. As far as veils went, the kid wasn’t exactly a natural talent, but he’d be damned hard to focus on in the darkness, and it was as safe as I could make him without leaving him back at the castle.
Bear came along behind us, making me sound clumsy by comparison, never mind our mass difference.
She moved as lightly as a bird despite her bulk, and mostly I knew she was there because I could smell the gun oil on her cannon until she took a spot behind a dead car on the side of the road, crouching down.
A single guard remained awake in the camp as Fitz and I approached, a tired-looking man in his fifties, holding his hands out to the last still-burning barrel fire, his shotgun leaned against a cooler within arm’s reach, and he might as well have left it home.
The first ghoul I saw was nothing more than a glassy gleam of light reflected from large eyes less than a foot from the ground as it spider-crawled forward toward the guard.
I lifted my hand and flashed my palm toward Bear.
She dipped a hand into the pocket of her leather biker jacket, produced a pistol with an abnormally thick barrel, and fired a shot. A canister hissed into the air, and within a couple or three seconds, a red flare glared in the air high above the camp.
The guard flinched and then goggled up at the light for a second, and the ghoul came slithering over the ground toward him, its muzzled jaws opening wide in anticipation.
I lifted my clenched right fist, where every finger was covered in a braided metal ring, and triggered all four of them at once.
Enough stored kinetic energy to flip over a parked tractor trailer lashed out, focused on an area about the size of a coffin.
I had aimed at the ground just in front of the ghoul, and shattered concrete and dirt flew up in a bone-crushing wave, simply burying the supernatural predator in a couple of tons of earth and stone.
“Arm up!” I shouted toward the guard, and sprinted forward, shifting my wizard’s staff from my left hand into my right as three more gleaming sets of eyes appeared in the dimness behind the first and came bounding toward me in rapid quadrupedal motion through the scarlet light of the flare.
I pointed my staff, and more kinetic energy stored in the rune-carved wood lashed out and took the second ghoul in the face with more or less the energy of a medieval battering ram.
There was a crushing, crackling sound and a burst of dark fluid and the ghoul went down, arms and legs alike flailing wildly.
Bear’s four-bore spoke like the god of thunder, and the third ghoul’s torso simply collapsed in on itself in a spray of green-black ichor, followed by that of the fourth ghoul, who had unwittingly stood in a straight line for the Valkyrie’s aim.
The huge round passed through both horrors, came out the other side, and smashed a portion of still-standing concrete wall behind them into a shower of gravel.
The ghouls fell in opposite directions, twitching like crushed bugs.
I straightened from my fighting crouch, eyes raking the shadows created by the overhead flare for more ghostly reflective eyes. I kept tabs on the downed ghouls peripherally. Ghouls were like cockroaches: They didn’t die easily, and even when they did, it was messy.
“Harry!” Fitz shouted, and I felt him give me a hard shove in the lower back.
A shotgun bellowed. Pellets went by in the space I’d just occupied, close enough to hear them burring through the air like angry wasps.
I hit the concrete and heard Fitz grunt as he went down next to me.
I whipped my head up to see the old sentry toss his double-barrel to one side and drop to all fours, his expression twisting, a feral muzzle erupting from his face, his eyes going wide and glassy, forearms lengthening, hands stretching into talons as he bounded forward over the ground.
Ghouls erupted from every tent in the scavenger camp.
More appeared from the direction of the next camp down the block.
Still more came bounding out of the ruins, ten yards at a time, thirty or forty of them altogether, and absolutely all of them were focused intently and exactly upon me.
I swept the end of my staff at the nearest one, the one who’d been posing as a sentry, reaching out for the hatred I had for ghouls and what they did to innocent people and…
…nothing happened.
No rage flooded through me. No power kindled inside me. No magic flowed through me into the staff. And when my lips formed the word, “Fuego,” absolutely nothing happened. No power.
No fire.
Nothing.
I just felt tired.
“Fitz!” I spat. “Run!”
And twoscore ghouls descended upon me.