Heorot

from My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon Anthology

By

Jim Butcher

Jim Butcher's bestselling Dresden Files (now a Sci Fi Channel series) chronicles the life of modern-day Chicago's only professional wizard, Harry Dresden.

I WAS SITTING IN MY OFFICE, SORTING THROUGH my bills, when Mac called and said, "I need your help."

It was the first time I'd heard him use four whole words all together like that.

"Okay," I said. "Where?" I'd out-tersed him. Another first.

"Loon Island pub," Mac said. "Wrigleyville."

"On the way." I hung up, stood up, put on my black leather duster, and said, to my dog, "We're on the job. Let's go."

My dog, Mouse, who outweighs most European cars, bounced up eagerly from where he dozed near my office's single heating vent. He shook out his thick gray fur, especially the shaggy, almost leonine ruff growing heavy on his neck and shoulders, and we set out to help a friend.

October had brought in more rain and more cold than usual, and that day we had both of them, plus wind. I found parking for my battered old Volkswagen Bug, hunched my shoulders under my leather duster, and walked north along Clark, into the wind, Mouse keeping pace at my side.

Loon Island Pub was in sight of Wrigley Field, and a popular hangout before and after games. It was bigger than most such businesses, and could host several hundred people throughout its various rooms and levels. Outside, large posters had been plastered to the brick siding of the building. Though the posters were soaked with rain, you could still read CHICAGO BEER ASSOCIATION and NIGHT OF THE LIVING BREWS, followed by an announcement of a home-brewed beer festival and competition, with today's date on it. There was a lot of foot traffic going in and out.

"Ah-hah," I told Mouse. "Explains why Mac is here, instead of at his own place. He's finally unleashed the new dark on the unsuspecting public."

Mouse glanced up at me rather reproachfully from under his shaggy brows, and then lowered his head, sighed, and continued plodding against the rain until we gained the pub. Mac was waiting for us at the front door, a sinewy, bald man dressed in dark slacks and a white shirt, somewhere between the ages of thirty and fifty. He had a very average, unremarkable face, one that usually wore a steady expression of patience and contemplation.

Today, though, it was what I could only describe as "grim."

I came in out of the rain, and passed off my six-foot oak staff to Mac to hold for me as I shrugged out of my duster. I shook the garment thoroughly, sending raindrops sheeting from it, and promptly put it back on.

Mac runs the pub where the supernatural community of Chicago does most of its hanging out. His place has seen more than its share of paranormal nasties, and if Mac looked that worried, I wanted the spell-reinforced leather of the duster between my tender skin and the source of his concern. I took the staff back from Mac, who nodded to me and then crouched down to Mouse, who had gravely offered a paw to shake. Mac shook, ruffled Mouse's ears, and said, "Missing girl."

I nodded, scarcely noticing the odd looks I was getting from several of the people inside. That was par for the course. "What do we know?"

"Husband," Mac said. He jerked his head at me, and I followed him deeper into the pub. Mouse stayed pressed against my side, his tail wagging in a friendly fashion. I suspected that the gesture was an affectation. Mouse is an awful lot of dog, and people get nervous if he doesn't act overtly friendly.

Mac led me through a couple of rooms where each table and booth had been claimed by a different brewer. Homemade signs bearing a gratuitous number of exclamation points touted the various concoctions, except for the one Mac stopped at. There, a card-stock table tent was neatly lettered, simply reading MCANALLY'S DARK.

At the booth next to Mac's, a young man, good-looking in a reedy, librarian-esque kind of way, was talking to a police officer while wringing his hands.

"But you don't get it," the young man said. "She wouldn't just leave. Not today. We start our honeymoon tonight."

The cop, a stocky, balding fellow whose nose was perhaps more red than warranted by the weather outside, shook his head. "Sir, I'm sorry, but she's been gone for what? An hour or two? We don't even start to look until twenty-four hours have passed."

"She wouldn't just leave," the young man half shouted.

"Look, kid," the cop said. "It wouldn't be the first time some guy's new wife panicked and ran off. You want my advice? Start calling up her old boyfriends."

"But—"

The cop thumped a finger into the young man's chest. "Get over it, buddy. Come back in twenty-four hours." He turned to walk away from the young man and almost bumped into me. He took a step back and scowled up at me. "You want something?"

"Just basking in the glow of your compassion, Officer," I replied.

His face darkened into a scowl, but before he could take a deep breath and start throwing his weight around, Mac pushed a mug of his dark ale into the cop's hand. The cop slugged it back immediately. He swished the last gulp around in his mouth, purely for form, and then tossed the mug back at McAnally, belched, and went on his way.

"Mr. McAnally," the young man said, turning to Mac. "Thank goodness. I still haven't seen her." He looked at me. "Is this him?"

Mac nodded.

I stuck out my hand. "Harry Dresden."

"Roger Braddock," the anxious young man said. "Someone has abducted my wife."

He gripped too hard and his fingers were cold and a little clammy. I wasn't sure what was going on here, but Braddock was genuinely afraid. "Abducted her? Did you see it happen?"

"Well," he said, "no. Not really. No one did. But she wouldn't just walk out. Not today. We got married this morning, and we're leaving on our honeymoon tonight, soon as the festival is over."

I arched an eyebrow. "You put your honeymoon on hold to go to a beer festival."

"I'm opening my own place," Braddock said. "Mr. McAnally has been giving me advice. Sort of mentoring me. This was… I mean, I've been here every year, and it's only once a year, and the prestige from a win is… the networking and…" His voice trailed off as he looked around him.

Yeah. The looming specter of sudden loss has a way of making you reevaluate things. Sometimes it's tough to know what's really important until you realize it might be gone.

"You two were at this booth?" I prompted.

"Yes," he said. He licked his lips. "She went to pick up some napkins from the bar, right over there. She wasn't twenty feet away and somehow she just vanished."

Personally, I was more inclined to go with the cop's line of reasoning than the kid's. People in general tend to be selfish, greedy, and unreliable. There are individual exceptions, of course, but no one ever wants to believe that the petty portions of human nature might have come between themselves and someone they care about.

The kid seemed awfully sincere. While endearing, awfully sincere people whose decisions are driven mostly by their emotions are capable of being mistaken on an epic scale. The worse the situation looks, the harder they'll search for reasons not to believe it. It seemed more likely that his girl left him than that someone took her away.

On the other hand, likely isn't the same as true—and Mac isn't the kind to cry wolf.

"How long you two been together?" I asked Braddock.

"Since we were fifteen," he replied. An anemic smile fluttered around his mouth. "Almost ten years."

"Making it official, eh?"

"We both knew when it was right," he replied. He lost the smile. "Just like I know that she didn't walk away. Not unless someone made her do it."

I stepped around Braddock and studied the high-backed booth for a moment. A keg sat on the table, next to a little card-stock sign that had a cartoon bee decked out with a Viking-style helmet, a baldric, and a greatsword. Words beneath the bee proclaimed BRADDOCK'S MIDNIGHT SUN CINNAMON.

I grunted and reached down and pulled a simple black leather ladies' purse from beneath the bench seating. Not an expensive purse, either. "Not much chance she'd walk without taking her bag," I said. "That's for damned sure."

Braddock bit his lip, closed his eyes, and said, "Elizabeth."

I sighed.

Well, dammit.

Now she had a name.

Elizabeth Braddock, newlywed. Maybe she'd just run off. But maybe she hadn't, and I didn't think I would like myself very much if I walked and it turned out that she really was in danger, and really did get hurt.

What the hell. No harm in looking around.

"I guess the game's afoot," I said. I gestured vaguely with the purse. "May I?"

"Sure," Braddock said. "Sure, sure."

I dumped Elizabeth's purse out on the booth's table, behind the beer keg, and began rummaging through it. The usual. Wallet, some makeup, a cell phone, Kleenex, some feminine sanitary sundries, one of those plastic birth control pill holders with a folded piece of paper taped to it.

And there was a hairbrush, an antique-looking thing with a long, pointy silver handle.

I plucked several strands of dark wavy hair from the brush. "Is this your wife's hair?"

Braddock blinked at me for a second, then nodded. "Yes. Of course."

"Mind if I borrow this?"

He didn't. I pocketed the brush for the moment, and glanced at the birth control pill case. I opened it. Only the first several slots were empty. I untaped the folded paper and opened it, finding instructions for the medicine's use.

Who keeps the instructions sheet, for crying out loud?

While I pondered it, a shadow fell across Braddock and a beefy, heavily tattooed arm shoved him back against the spine of the partition between booths.

I looked up the arm to the beefy, heavily tattooed bruiser attached to it. He was only a couple of inches shorter than me, and layered with muscle gone to seed. He was bald and sported a bristling beard. Scar tissue around his eyes told me he'd been a fighter, and a lumpy, often-broken nose suggested that he might not have been much good at it. He wore black leather and rings heavy enough to serve as passable brass knuckles on every finger of his right hand. His voice was like the rest of him—thick and dull. He flung a little triangle of folded cardstock at Braddock. "Where's my keg, Braddock?"

"Caine," Braddock stammered. "What are you talking about?"

"My keg, bitch," the big man snarled. A couple of guys who wished they were more like Caine lurked behind him, propping up his ego. "It's gone. You figure you couldn't take the competition this year?"

I glanced at the fallen table tent. It also had a little Wagnerian cartoon bee on it, and the lettering read CAINE'S KICKASS.

"I don't have time for this," Braddock said.

Caine shoved him back against the booth again, harder. "We ain't done. Stay put, bitch, unless you want me to feed you your ass."

I glanced at Mac, who stared at Caine, frowning, but not doing anything. Mac doesn't like to get involved.

He's smarter than I am.

I stepped forward, seized Caine's hand in mine, and pumped it enthusiastically. "Hi, there. Harry Dresden, PI. How you doing?" I nodded at him, smiling, and smiled at his friends too. "Hey, are you allergic to dogs?"

Caine was so startled that he almost forgot to try crushing my hand in his. When he got around to it, it hurt enough that I had to work not to wince. I'm not heavily built, but I'm more than six and a half feet tall, and it takes more strength than most have got to make me feel it.

"What?" he said wittily. "Dog, what?"

"Allergic to dogs," I clarified, and nodded down at Mouse. "Occasionally someone has a bad reaction to my dog, and I'd hate that to happen here."

The biker scowled at me and then looked down.

Two hundred pounds of Mouse, not acting at all friendly now, stared steadily at Caine. Mouse didn't show any teeth or growl. He didn't need to. He just stared.

Caine lifted his lips up from his teeth in an ugly little smile. But he released my hand with a jerk, and then sneered at Braddock. "Say, where's that pretty little piece of yours? She run off to find a real man?"

Braddock might have been a sliver over half of Caine's size, but he went after the biker with complete sincerity and without a second thought.

This time Mac moved, interposing himself between Braddock and Caine, getting his shoulder against Braddock's chest. The older man braced himself and shoved Braddock back from the brink of a beating, though the younger man cursed and struggled against him.

Caine let out an ugly laugh and stepped forward, his big hands closing into fists. I leaned my staff so that he stepped into it, the blunt tip of the wood thrusting solidly against the hollow of his throat. He made a noise that sounded like, "glurk," and stepped back, scowling ferociously at me.

I tugged my staff back against my chest so that I could hold up both hands, palms out, just as the dumpy cop, attracted by Braddock's thumping and cursing, came into the room with one hand-on his nightstick. "Easy there, big guy," I said, loud enough to make sure the cop heard. "The kid's just upset on account of his wife. He doesn't mean anything by it."

The bruiser lifted one closed fist as if he meant to drive it at my noggin, but one of his two buddies said urgently, "Cop."

Caine froze and glanced back over his shoulder. The officer might have been overweight, but he looked like he knew how to throw it around, and he had a club and a gun besides. Never mind all the other uniforms theoretically behind him.

Caine opened his fist, showing an empty hand, and lowered it again. "Sure," he said. "Sure. Misunderstanding. Happen to anybody."

"You want to walk away," the cop told Caine, "do it now. Otherwise you get a ride."

Caine and company departed in sullen silence, glaring daggers at me. Well. Glaring letter openers, anyway. Caine didn't seem real sharp.

The cop stalked over to me more lightly than he should have been able to—no question about it, the man knew how to play rough. He looked at me, then at my staff, and kept his nightstick in his hand. "You Dresden?"

"Uh-huh," I said.

"Heard of you. Work for Special Investigations sometimes. Call yourself a wizard."

"That's right."

"You know Rawlins?"

"Good man," I said.

The cop grunted. He jerked his head toward the departing Caine as he put the stick away. "Guy's a con. A hard case too. Likes hurting people. You keep your eyes open, Mr. Wizard, or he'll make some of your teeth disappear."

"Yeah," I said. "Golly, he's scary."

The cop eyed me, then snorted and said, "Your dentures." He nodded, and walked out again, probably tailing Caine to make sure he left.

The cop and Caine weren't all that different, in some ways. The cop would have loved to take his stick to Caine's head as much as Caine had wanted to swat mine. They were both damned near equally sensitive about Braddock's missing wife too. But at least the cop had channeled his inner thug into something that helped out the people around him—as long as he didn't have to run up too many stairs, I guess.

I turned back to Mac and found him still standing between the kid and the door. Mac nodded his thanks to me. Braddock looked like he might be about to start crying, or maybe screaming.

"No love lost there, eh?" I said to Braddock.

The kid snarled at the empty space where Caine had been. "Elizabeth embarrassed him once. He doesn't take rejection well and he never forgets. Do you think he did it?"

"Not really. Mac," I asked. "Something tipped you off that this was from the spooky side. Lights flicker?"

Mac grunted. "Twice."

Braddock stared at Mac and then at me. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Active magic tends to interfere with electrical systems," I said. "It'll disrupt cell phones, screw up computers. Simpler things, like the lights, usually just flicker a bit."

Braddock had a look somewhere between uncertainty and nausea on his face. "Magic? You're kidding, right?"

"I'm tired of having this conversation," I said. I reached into my pocket for Elizabeth Braddock's fallen hairs. "This joint got a back door?"

Mac pointed silently.

"Thanks," I said. "Come on, Mouse."

THE BACK DOOR OPENED INTO A LONG, NARROW, dirty alley running parallel to Clark. The wind had picked up, which meant that the cold rain was mostly striking the upper portion of one wall of the alley. Good for me. It's tough to get a solid spell put together under even a moderate rain. When it's really coming down, it's all but impossible, even for a relatively simple working—such as a tracking spell.

I'd done this hundreds of times, and by now it was pretty routine. I found a clear spot of concrete in the lee of the sheltering wall and sketched a quick circle around me with a piece of chalk, investing the motion with a deliberate effort of will.

As I completed the circle, I felt the immediate result—a screen of energy that rose up from the circle, enfolding me and warding out any random energy that might skew the spell. I took off my necklace, a silver chain with a battered old silver pentacle hanging from it, murmuring quietly, and tied several of Elizabeth's hairs through the center of the pentacle. After that, I gathered up my will, feeling the energy focused by the circle into something almost tangible, whispered in faux-Latin, and released the gathered magic into the pentacle.

The silver five-pointed star flickered once, a dozen tiny sparks of static electricity fluttering over the metal surface and the hairs bound inside it. I grimaced. I'd been sloppy, to let some of the energy convert itself into static. And I'd been harping on my apprentice about the need for precision for a week.

I broke the circle by smudging the chalk with one foot, and glanced at Mouse, who sat patiently, mouth open in a doggy grin. Mouse had been there for some of those lessons, and he was smarter than the average dog. How much smarter remained to be seen, but I got the distinct impression that he was laughing at me.

"It was the rain," I told him.

Mouse sneezed, tail wagging.

I glowered at him. I'm not sure I could take if it my dog was smarter than me.

The falling rain would wash away the spell on the amulet if I left it out in the open, so I shielded it as carefully as I could with the building and my hand. A hat would have come in handy for that purpose, actually. Maybe I should get one.

I held up the amulet, focusing on the spell. It quivered on the end of its chain, and then swung toward the far end of the alley, a sharp, sudden motion.

I drew my hand and the amulet back up into the sleeve of my duster, whistling. "She came right down this alley. And judging by the strength of the reaction, she was scared bad. Left a really big trail."

At that, Mouse made a chuffing sound and started down the alley, snuffling. The end of his short lead, mostly there for appearance' sake, dragged the ground. I kept pace, and by the time Mouse was twenty yards down the alley, he had begun growling low in his throat.

That was an occasion worth a raised eyebrow. Mouse didn't make noise unless there was Something Bad around. He increased his pace and I lengthened my stride to keep up.

I found myself growling along with him. I'd gotten sick of Bad Things visiting themselves upon people in my town a long time ago.

When we hit the open street, Mouse slowed. Magic wasn't the only thing that a steady rain could screw up. He growled again and looked over his shoulder at me, tail drooping.

"I got your back," I told him. I lifted a section of my long leather duster with my staff, so that I could hold the amulet in the shelter it offered. I looked only moderately ridiculous while doing so.

I'm going to get a hat one of these days. I swear.

The tracking spell held, and the amulet led me down the street, toward Wrigley. The silent stadium loomed in the cold gray rain. Mouse, still snuffling dutifully, abruptly turned down another alley, his steps hurrying to a lope. I propped up my coat again and consulted the amulet again.

I was so busy feeling damp and cold and self-conscious that I forgot to feel paranoid, and Caine came out of nowhere and swung something hard at my skull.

I turned my head and twitched sideways at the last second, and took the blow just to one side of the center of my forehead. There was a flash of light and my legs went wobbly. I had time to watch Caine wind up again and saw that he was swinging a long, white, dirty athletic sock at me. He'd weighted one end with something, and created an improvised flail.

My hips bounced off a municipal trash can, and I got one arm between the flail and my face. The protective spells on my coat are good, but they're intended to protect me against gunfire and sharp, pointy things. The flail smashed into my right forearm. It went numb.

"So what, you steal my keg for Braddock, so his homo-bee cinnamon crap would win the division? I'm gonna take it out of your ass."

And with that pleasant mental image, Caine wound up again with that flail.

He'd made a mistake, though, pausing to get in a little dialogue like that. If he'd hit me again, immediately, he probably could have beaten me unconscious in short order. He hadn't hesitated long—but it had been long enough for me to pull my thoughts together. As he came in swinging, I snapped the lower end of my heavy staff into a rising quarter-spin, right into his testicles. The thug's eyes snapped wide open and his mouth locked into an open, silent scream.

It's the little things in life you treasure.

Caine staggered and fell to one side, but one of the Cainettes came in hard behind him and pasted me in the mouth. By itself, I might have shrugged it off, but Caine had already rung my bells once. I went down to one knee and tried to figure out what was going on. Someone with big motorcycle boots kicked me in the guts. I fell to my back and drove a heel into his kneecap. There was a crackle and a pop, and he fell, howling.

The third guy had a tire iron. No time for magic—my damned eyes wouldn't focus, much less my thoughts. By some minor miracle, I caught the first two-handed swing on my staff.

And then two hundred pounds of wet dog slammed into Cainette Number Two's chest. Mouse didn't bite, presumably because there are some things even dogs won't put in their mouths. He just overbore the thug and smashed him to the ground, pinning him there. The two of them flailed around.

I got up just as Caine came back in, swinging his flail.

I don't think Caine knew much about quarterstaff fighting. Murphy had been teaching it to me, however, for almost four years. I got the staff up as Caine swung and intercepted the sock. The weighted end wrapped around my staff, and I jerked the weapon out of his hands with a sweeping twist. With the same motion, I brought the other end of the staff around and popped him in the noggin.

Caine flopped to the ground.

I stood there panting and leaning on my staff. Hey, I'd won a brawl. That generally didn't happen when I wasn't using magic. Mouse seemed fine, if occupied holding his thug down.

"Jerk," I muttered to the unconscious Caine, and kicked him lightly in the ribs. "I have no idea what happened to your freaking keg."

"Oh my," said a woman's voice from behind me. She spoke perfectly clear English, marked with an accent that sounded vaguely Germanic or maybe Scandinavian. "I have to admit, I didn't expect you'd do that well against them."

I turned slightly, so that I could keep the thugs in my peripheral vision, and shifted my grip on the staff as I faced the speaker.

She was tall blonde, six feet or so, even in flat, practical shoes. Her tailored gray suit didn't quite hide an athlete's body, nor did it make her look any less feminine. She had ice-blue eyes, a stark, attractive face, and she carried a duffel bag in her right hand. I recognized her. She was the supernatural security consultant to John Marcone, the kingpin of Chicago crime.

"Miss Gard, isn't it?" I asked her, panting.

She nodded. "Mr. Dresden."

My arm throbbed and my ears were still ringing. I'd have a lovely goose egg right in the middle of my forehead in an hour.

"Glad I could entertain you," I said. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm working."

"I need to speak to you," she said.

"Call during office hours." Caine lay senseless, groaning. The guy I'd kicked in the knee whimpered and rocked mindlessly back and forth. I glared at the thug Mouse had pinned down.

He flinched. There wasn't any fight left in him. Thank God. There wasn't much left in me, either.

"Mouse," I said, and started down the alley.

Mouse rose up off the man, who said, "Oof!" as the dog planted both paws in the man's belly as he pushed up. Mouse followed me.

"I'm serious, Mr. Dresden," Gard said to my back, following us.

"Marcone is only a king in his own mind," I said without stopping. "He wants to send me a message, he can wait. I've got important things to do."

"I know," Gard said. "The girl. She's a brunette, maybe five foot five, brown eyes, green golf shirt, blue jeans, and scared half out of her mind."

I stopped and turned to bare my teeth at Gard. "Marcone is behind this? That son of a bitch is going to be sorry he ever looked at that—"

"No," Gard said sharply. "Look, Dresden, forget Marcone. This has nothing to do with Marcone. Today's my day off."

I stared at her for a moment, and only partly because the rain had begun to make the white shirt she wore beneath the suit jacket become transparent. She sounded sincere—which meant nothing. I've learned better than to trust my judgment when there's a blonde involved. Or a brunette. Or a redhead.

"What do you want?" I asked her.

"Almost the same thing you do," she replied. "You want the girl. I want the thing that took her."

"Why?"

"The girl doesn't have enough time for you to play twenty questions, Dresden. We can help each other and save her, or she can die."

I took a deep breath and then nodded once. "I'm listening."

"I lost the trail at the far end of this alley," she said. "Clearly, you haven't."

"Yeah," I said. "Skip to the part where you tell me how you can help me."

Wordlessly, she opened up the duffel bag and drew out—I kid you not—a double-bitted battle-ax that must have weighed fifteen pounds. She rested it on one shoulder. "If you can take me to the grendelkin, I'll deal with it while you get the girl out."

Grendelkin? What the hell was a grendelkin?

Don't get me wrong—I'm a wizard. I know about the supernatural. I could fill up a couple of loose-leaf notebooks with the names of various entities and creatures I recognized. That's the thing about knowledge, though. The more you learn, the more you realize how much there is to learn. The supernatural realms are bigger, far bigger, than the material world, and humanity is grossly outnumbered. I could learn about new beasties until I dropped dead of old age a few centuries from now and still not know a quarter of them.

This one was new on me.

"Dresden, seconds could matter, here," Gard said. Beneath the calm mask of her lovely face, I could sense a shadow of anxiety, of urgency.

As I absorbed that, there was a sharp clicking sound as a piece of broken brick, or a small stone from roofing material fell to the ground farther down the alley.

Gard whirled, dropping instantly into a fighting crouch, both hands on her ax, holding it in a defensive position across the front of her body.

Yikes.

I'd seen Gard square off against a world-class necromancer and her pet ghoul without batting a golden eyelash. What the hell had her so spooked?

She came back out of her stance warily, then shook her head and muttered something under her breath before turning to me again. "What's going to happen to that girl… You have no idea. It shouldn't happen to anyone. So I'm begging you. Please help me."

I sighed.

Well, dammit.

She said please.

THE RAIN WAS WEAKENING THE TRACKING SPELL ON my amulet and washing away both the scent of the grendelkin and the psychic trail left by the terrified Elizabeth, but between me and Mouse we managed to find where the bad guy had, literally, gone to earth. The trail ended at an old storm-cellar-style door in back of the buildings on the east side of Wrigley Field, under the tracks of the El, near Addison Station. The doors were ancient and looked like they were rusted shut—though they couldn't have been, if the trail went through them. They were surrounded by a gateless metal fence. A sign on the fence declared the area dangerous and to keep out—you know, the usual sound advice that thrill-seeking blockheads and softhearted wizards with nagging headaches always ignore.

"You sure?" I asked Mouse. "It went in there?"

Mouse circled the fence, snuffling at the dry ground protected from the rain by the El track overhead. Then he focused intently on the doors and growled.

The amulet bobbed weakly, less definitely than it had a few minutes before. I grimaced and said, "It went down here, but it traveled north after that."

Gard grunted. "Crap."

"Crap," I concurred.

The grendelkin had fled into Undertown.

Chicago is an old city—at least by American standards. It's been flooded, burned down several times, been constructed and reconstructed ad nauseum. Large sections of the city have been built up as high as ten and twelve feet off the original ground level, while other buildings have settled into the swampy muck around Lake Michigan. Dozens and dozens of tunnel systems wind beneath its surface. No one knows exactly how many different tunnels and chambers people have created intentionally or by happenstance. And since most people regard the supernatural as one big scam, no one has noticed all the additional work done by not-people in the meantime.

Undertown begins somewhere just out of the usual traffic in the commuter and utility tunnels, where sections of wall and roof regularly collapse, and where people with good sense just aren't willing to go. From there, it gets dark, cold, treacherous, and jealously inhabited, increasingly so the farther you go.

Things live down there. All kinds of things.

A visit to Undertown bears more resemblance to suicide than exploration, and those who do it are begging to be Darwined out of the gene pool. Smart people don't go down there.

Gard slashed a long opening in the fence with her ax, and we descended crumbling old concrete steps into the darkness.

I murmured a word and made a small effort of will, and my amulet began to glow with a gentle blue-white light, illuminating the tunnel only dimly—enough, I hoped, to see by while still not giving away our approach. Gard produced a small red-filtered flashlight from her duffel bag, a backup light source. It made me feel better. When you're underground, making sure you have light is almost as important as making sure you have air. It meant that she knew what she was doing.

The utility tunnel we entered gave way to a ramshackle series of chambers, the spaces between what were now basements and the raised wall of the road that had been built up off the original ground level. Mouse went first, with me and my staff and my amulet right behind him. Gard brought up the rear, walking lightly and warily.

We went on for maybe ten minutes, through difficult-to-spot doorways and at one point through a tunnel flooded with a foot and a half of icy stagnant water. Twice, we descended deeper into the earth, and I began getting antsy about finding my way back. Spelunking is dangerous enough without adding in anything that could be described with the word "ravening."

"This grendelkin," I said. "Tell me about it."

"You don't need to know."

"Like hell I don't," I said. "You want me to help you, you gotta help me. Tell me how we beat this thing."

"We don't," she said. "I do. That's all you need to know."

That sort of offended me, being so casually kept ignorant. Granted, I'd done it to people myself about a million times, mostly to protect them, but that didn't make it any less frustrating. Just ironic.

"And if it offs you instead?" I said. "I'd rather not be totally clueless when he's charging after me and the girl and I have to turn and fight."

"It shouldn't be a problem."

I stopped in my tracks, and turned to regard her.

She stared back at me, eyebrows lifted. Water dripped somewhere nearby. There was a faint rumbling above us, maybe the El going by somewhere overhead.

She pressed her lips together and nodded, a gesture of concession. "It's a scion of Grendel."

I started walking again. "Whoah. Like, the Grendel?"

"Obviously," Gard sighed. "Before Beowulf faced him in Heorot—"

"The Grendel?" I asked. "The Beowulf?"

"Yes."

"And it actually happened like in the story?" I demanded.

"It isn't far wrong," Gard replied, an impatient note in her voice. "Before Beowulf faced him, Grendel had already taken a number of women on his previous visits. He got spawn upon them."

"Ick," I said. "But I think they make a cream for that now."

Gard gave me a flat look. "You have no idea what you're talking about."

"No kidding," I said. "That's the point of asking."

"You know all you need."

I ignored the statement, and the sentiment behind it to boot. A good private investigator is essentially a professional asker of questions. If I kept them coming, eventually I'd get some kind of answer. "Back at the pub, there was an electrical disruption. Does this thing use magic?"

"Not the way you do," Gard said.

See there? An answer. A vague answer, but an answer. I pressed ahead. "Then how?"

"Grendelkin are strong," Gard said. "Fast. And they can bend minds in an area around them."

"Bend how?"

"It can make people not notice it, or to notice only dimly. Disguise itself, sometimes. It's how they get close. Sometimes it can cause malfunctions in technology."

"Veiling magic," I said. "Illusion. Been there, done that." I mused. "Mac said there were two disruptions. Is there any reason it would want to steal a keg from the beer festival?"

Gard shot me a sharp look. "Keg?"

"That's what those yahoos in the alley were upset about," I said. "Someone swiped their keg."

Gard spat out a word that would probably have gotten bleeped out had she said it on some kind of Scandinavian talk show. "What brew?"

"Eh?" I said.

"What kind of liquor was in the keg?" she demanded.

"How the hell should I know?" I asked. "I never even saw it."

"Dammit."

"But…" I scrunched up my nose, thinking. "The sign from his table had a drawing of a little Viking bee on it, and it was called Caine's Kickass."

"A bee," she said, her eyes glittering. "You're sure?"

"Yeah."

She swore again. "Mead."

I blinked at her. "This thing ripped off a keg of mead and a girl? Is she supposed to be its… bowl of bar nuts or something?"

"It isn't going to eat her," Gard said. "It wants the mead for the same reason it wants the girl."

I waited a beat for her to elaborate. She didn't. "I'm rapidly running out of willingness to keep playing along," I told her, "but I'll ask it—why does it want the girl?"

"Procreation," she said.

"Thank you, now I get it," I said. "The thing figures she'll need a good set of beer goggles before the deed."

"No," Gard said.

"Oh, right, because it isn't human. The thing is going to need the beer goggles."

"No," Gard said, harder.

"I understand. Just setting the mood, then," I said. "Maybe it picked up some lounge music CDs too."

"Dresden," Gard growled.

"Everybody needs somebody sometime," I sang. Badly.

Gard stopped in her tracks and faced me, her pale blue eyes frozen with glacial rage. Her voice turned harsh. "But not everybody impregnates women with spawn that will rip its own way out of its mother's womb, killing her in the process."

See, another answer. It was harsher than I would have preferred.

I stopped singing and felt sort of insensitive.

"They're solitary," Gard continued in a voice made more terrible for its uninflected calm. "Most of the time, they abduct a victim, rape her, rip her to shreds and eat her. This one has more in mind. There's something in mead that makes it fertile. It's going to impregnate her. Create another of its kind."

A thought occurred to me. "That's what kind of person still has her instructions taped to her birth control medication. Someone who's never taken it until very recently."

"She's a virgin," Gard confirmed. "Grendelkin need virgins to reproduce."

"Kind of a scarce commodity these days," I said.

Gard snapped out a bitter bark of laughter. "Take it from me, Dresden. Teenagers have always been teenagers. Hormone-ridden, curious, and generally ignorant of the consequences of their actions. There's never been a glut on the virgin market. Not in Victorian times, not in the Renaissance, not at Hastings, and not now. But even if they were ten times as rare in the modern age, there would still be more virgins to choose from than at any other point in history." She shook her head. "There are so many people, now."

We walked along for several paces.

"Interesting inflection, there," I said. "Speaking about those times as if you'd seen them firsthand. You expect me to believe you're better than a thousand years old?"

"Would it be so incredible?" she asked.

She had me there. Lots of supernatural critters were immortal, or the next best thing to it. Even mortal wizards could hang around for three or four centuries. On the other hand, I'd rarely run into an immortal who felt so human to my wizard's senses.

I stared at her for a second and then said, "You wear it pretty well, if it's true. I would have guessed you were about thirty."

Her teeth flashed in the dim light. "I believe it's currently considered more polite to guess twenty-nine."

"Me and polite have never been on close terms."

Gard nodded. "I like that about you. You say what you think. You act. It's rare in this age."

I kept on the trail, quiet for a time, until Mouse stopped in his tracks and made an almost inaudible sound in his chest. I held up a hand, halting. Gard went silent and still.

I knelt down by the dog and whispered, "What is it, boy?"

Mouse stared intently ahead, his nose quivering. Then he paced forward, uncertainly, and pawed at the floor near the wall.

I followed him, light in hand. On the wet stone floor were a few tufts of grayish hair. I chewed my lip and lifted the light to examine the wall. There were long scratches in the stone—not much wider than a thumbnail, but they were deep. You couldn't easily see the bottom of the scratch marks.

Gard came up and peered over my shoulder. Amidst the scents of lime and mildew, her perfume, something floral I didn't recognize, was a pleasant distraction. "Something sharp made those," she murmured.

"Yeah," I said, collecting the hairs. "Hold up your ax."

She did. I touched the hairs to the edge of the blade. They curled away from it as they touched it, blackening and shriveling, adding the scent of burnt hair to the mix.

"Wonderful," I sighed.

Gard lifted her eyebrows and glanced at me. "Faeries?"

I nodded. "Malks, almost certainly."

"Malks?"

"Winterfae," I said. "Felines. About the size of a bobcat."

"Nothing steel can't handle, then," she said, rising briskly.

"Yeah," I said. "You could probably handle half a dozen."

She nodded once, brandished the ax, and turned to continue down the tunnel.

"Which is why they tend to run in packs of twenty," I added, a couple of steps later.

Gard stopped and gave me a glare.

"That's called sharing information," I said. I gestured at the wall. "These are territorial markings for the local pack. Malks are stronger than natural animals, quick, almost invisible when they want to be, and their claws are sharper and harder than surgical steel. I once saw a malk shred an aluminum baseball bat to slivers. And if that wasn't enough, they're sentient. Smarter than some people I know."

"Od's bodkin," Gard swore quietly. "Can you handle them?"

"They don't like fire," I said. "But in an enclosed space like this, I don't like it much, either."

Gard nodded once. "Can we treat with them?" she asked. "Buy passage?"

"They'll keep their word, like any fae," I said. "If you can get them to give it in the first place. But think of how cats enjoy hunting, even when they aren't hungry. Think about how they toy with their prey sometimes. Then distill that joyful little killer instinct out of every cat in Chicago and pour it all into one malk. They're to cats what Hannibal Lecter is to people."

"Negotiation isn't an option, then."

I shook my head. "I don't think we have anything to offer them that they'll want more than our screams and meat, no."

Gard nodded, frowning. "Best if they never notice us at all, then."

"Nice thought," I said. "But these things have a cat's senses. I could probably hide us from their sight or hearing, but not both. And they could still smell us."

Gard frowned. She reached into her coat pocket and drew out a slim box of aged, pale ivory. She opened it and began gingerly sorting through a number of small ivory squares.

"Scrabble tiles?" I asked. "I don't want to play with malks. They're really bad about using plurals and proper names."

"They're runes," Gard said quietly. She found the one she was after, took a steadying breath, and then removed a single square from the ivory box with the same cautious reverence I'd seen soldiers use with military explosives. She closed the box and put it back in her pocket, holding the single ivory chit carefully in front of her on her palm.

I was familiar with Norse runes. The rune on the ivory square in her hand was totally unknown to me. "Um. What's that?" I asked.

"A rune of Routine," she said quietly. "You said you were skilled with illusion magic. If you can make us look like them, even for a few moments, it should allow us to pass through them unnoticed, as if we were a normal part of their day."

Technically, I had told Gard that I was familiar with illusion magic, not skilled. Truth be told, it was probably my weakest skill set. Nobody's good at everything, right? I'm good with the ka-boom magic. My actual use of illusion hadn't passed much beyond the craft's equivalent of painting a few portraits of fruit bowls.

But I'd just have to hope that what Gard didn't know wouldn't get us both killed. Elizabeth didn't have much time, and I didn't have many options. Besides, what did we have to lose? If the bid to sneak by failed, we could always fall back on negotiating or slugging it out.

Mouse gave me a sober look.

"Groovy," I said. "Let's do it."

A GOOD ILLUSION IS ALL ABOUT IMAGINATION, YOU create a picture in your mind, imagining every detail, imagining so hard that the image in your head becomes nearly tangible, almost real. You have to be able to see it, hear it, touch it, taste it, smell it, to engage all your senses in its (theoretical) reality. If you can do that, if you can really believe in your fake version of reality, then you can pour energy into it and create it in the minds and senses of everyone looking at it.

For the record, it's also how all the best liars do business—by making their imagined version of things so coherent that they almost believe it themselves.

I'm not a terribly good liar, but I knew the basics of how to make an illusion work, and I had two secret weapons. The first was the tuft of hair from an actual malk, which I could use to aid in the accuracy of my illusion. The second was a buddy of mine, a big gray tomcat named Mister who deigned to share his apartment with Mouse and me. Mister didn't come with me on cases, being above such trivial matters, but he found me pleasant company when I was at home and not moving around too much, except when he didn't, in which case he went rambling.

I closed my eyes once I'd drawn my chalk circle, gripped the malk hair in my hand, started my image on a model of Mister. I'd seen malks a couple of times, and most of them bore the same kinds of battle scars Mister proudly wore. They didn't look exactly like cats, though. Their heads were shaped differently, and their fur was rougher, stiffer. The paws had one too many digits on them too, and were wider than a cat's—but the motion as they moved was precisely the same.

"Noctus ex illuminus," I murmured, once the image was firmly fixed in my thoughts, that of three ugly, lean, battle-marked malks walking through on their own calm business. I sent out the energy that would power the glamour and broke the circle with a slow, careful motion.

"Is it working?" Gard asked quietly.

"Yeah," I said, my eyes still closed, focused on the illusion. I fumbled about until I found Mouse's broad back, and rested one hand on his fur. "Stop distracting me. Walk."

"Very well." She drew in a short breath, said something, and then there was a snapping sound and a flash of light. "The rune is active," she said. She put her hand on my shoulder. The malks weren't using any light sources, and if a group of apparent-malks tried to walk through with one, it would kind of spoil the effect we were trying to achieve. So we'd have to make the walk in the dark. "We have perhaps five minutes."

I grunted, touched my dog, and we all started walking, trusting Mouse to guide our steps. Even though it was dark, I didn't dare open my eyes. Any distraction from the image in my head would cause it to disintegrate like toilet paper in a hurricane. So I walked, concentrating, and hoped like hell it worked.

I couldn't spare any brain-time for counting, but we walked for what felt like half an hour, and I was getting set to ask Gard if we were through yet when an inhuman voice not a foot from my left ear said, in plain English, "More of these new claws arrive every day. We are hungry. We should shred the ape and have done."

I nearly fell on my ass, it startled me so much, but I held on to the image in my head. I'd heard malks speak before, with their odd inflections and unsettling intonations, and the sound only reinforced the image in my head.

A round of both supporting and disparaging comments rose from all around me, all in lazy, malk-inflected English. There were more than twenty of them. There was a small horde.

"Patience," said another malk. The tone of its voice somehow suggested that this was a conversation that had repeated itself a million times. "Let the ape think it has cowed us into acting as its door wardens. It hunts in the wizard's territory. The wizard will come to face it. The Erlking will give us great favor when we bring the wizard's head."

Gosh. I felt famous.

"I'm weary of waiting," said another malk. "Let us kill the ape and its prey and then hunt the wizard down."

"Patience, hunters. He will come to us," the first one said. "The ape's turn will come, after we have brought down the wizard." There was an unmistakable note of pleasure in its voice. "And his little dog too."

Mouse made another subvocal rumble in his chest. I could, just barely, feel it in his back. He kept walking, though, and we passed through the stretch of tunnel occupied by the malks. It was another endless stretch of minutes and several turns before Gard let out her breath between her teeth and said, "There were more than twenty."

"Yeah, I kind of noticed that."

"I think we are past them."

I sighed and released the image I'd been holding in my head, calling forth dim light from my amulet. Or tried to release the image, at any rate. I opened my eyes and blinked several times, but my head was like one of those TVs at the department store, when one image has been burned into it for too long. I looked at Mouse and Gard, and had trouble shaking the picture of the savage, squash-headed malks I'd been imagining around them with such intensity.

"Do you have another of those rune things?" I asked her.

"No," Gard said.

"We'll have to get creative on the way out," I said.

"There's no need to worry about that yet," she said, and started walking forward again.

"Sure there is. Once we get the girl, we have to get back with her. Christ, haven't you read any Joseph Campbell at all?"

She shrugged one shoulder. "Grendelkin are difficult opponents. Either we'll die, or it will. So there's only a fifty-fifty chance that we'll need to worry about the malks on the way out. Why waste the effort until we know if it will be necessary?"

"Call me crazy, but I find that if I plan for the big things, like how to get back to the surface, it makes it a little simpler to manage the little things. Like how to keep on breathing."

She held up a hand and said, "Wait."

I stopped in my tracks, listening. Mouse came to a halt, snuffling at the air, his ears twitching around like little radar dishes, but he gave no sign that he'd detected lurking danger.

"We're close to its lair," she murmured.

I arched an eyebrow. The tunnel looked exactly the same as it had for several moments now. "How do you know?"

"I can feel it," she said.

"You can do that?"

She started forward. "Yes. It's how I knew it was moving in the city to begin with."

I ground my teeth. "It might be nice if you considered sharing that kind of information."

"It isn't far," she said. "We might be in time. Come on."

I felt my eyebrows go up. Mouse had us both beat when it came to purely physical sensory input, and he'd given no indication of a hostile presence ahead. My own senses were attuned to all kinds of supernatural energies, and I'd kept them focused ever since we'd entered Undertown. I hadn't sensed any stirring of any kind that would indicate some kind of malevolent presence.

If knowledge is power, then it follows that ignorance is weakness. In my line of work, ignorance can get you killed. Gard hadn't said anything about any kind of mystic connection between herself and this beastie, but it was the most likely explanation for how she could sense its presence when I couldn't.

The problem with that was that those kinds of connections generally didn't flow one-way. If she could sense the grendelkin, odds were that it could sense her right back.

"Whoah, wait," I said. "If this thing might know we're coming, we don't want to go rushing in blind."

"There's no time. It's almost ready to breed." There was hint of a snarl in her words as the ax came down off her shoulder. Gard pulled what looked like a road flare out of her duffel bag and tossed the bag aside.

Then she threw back her head and let out a scream of pure, unholy defiance. The sound was so loud, so raw, so primal that it hardly seemed human. It wasn't a word, but that didn't stop her howl from eloquently declaring Gard's rage, her utter contempt for danger, for life—and for death. That battle cry scared the living snot out of me, and it wasn't even aimed in my direction.

Gard struck the flare to life with a flick of a wrist and shot me a glance over her shoulder. Eerie green light played up over her face, casting bizarre shadows, and her icy eyes were very wide and white-rimmed above a smile stretched so tightly that the blood had drained from her lips. Her voice quavered disconcertingly. "Enough talk."

Holy Schwarzenegger.

Gard had lost it.

This wasn't the reaction of the cool, reasoning professional I'd seen working for Marcone. I'd never actually seen anyone go truly, old-school berserkergang, but that scream… It was like hearing an echo rolling down through the centuries from an ancient world, a more savage world, now lost to the mists of time.

And suddenly I had no trouble at all believing her age.

She charged forward, whipping her ax lightly around with her right hand, holding the blazing star of the flare in her left. Gard let out another banshee shriek as she went, a wordless cry of challenge to the grendelkin that declared her intent as clearly as any horde of phonemes: I am coming to kill you.

And ahead of us in the tunnels, something much, much bigger than Gard answered her, a deep-chested, basso bellow that shook the walls of the tunnel in answer: Bring it on.

My knees turned shaky. Hell, even Mouse stood with his ears pressed against his skull, tail held low, body set in a slight crouch. I doubt I looked any more courageous than he did, but I kicked my brain into gear, spat out a nervous curse, and hurried after her.

Charging in headlong might be a really stupid idea, but it would be an even worse idea to stand around doing nothing, throwing away the only help I was likely to get. Besides. For better or worse, I'd agreed to work with Gard, and I wasn't going to let her go in without covering her back.

So I charged headlong down the tunnel toward the source of the terrifying bellow. Mouse, perhaps wiser than I, hesitated a few seconds longer, then made up for it on the way down the tunnel, until he was running a pace in front of me, matching my stride. We'd gone maybe twenty yards before his breath began to rumble out in a growl of pure hostility, and he let out his own roar of challenge.

Hey, when in Cimmeria, do as the Cimmerians do. I screamed too. It got lost in all the echoes bouncing around the tunnels.

Gard, running hard ten paces ahead of me, burst into a chamber. She gathered herself in a sudden leap, flipping neatly in the air, and plummeted from sight. The falling green light of the flare showed me that the tunnel opened into the top of a chamber the size of a small hotel atrium, and if Mouse hadn't stopped first and leaned back against me, I might have slid over the edge before I could stop. As it was, I got a really good look at a drop of at least thirty feet to a wet stone floor.

Gard landed on her feet, turned the momentum into a forward roll, and a shaggy blur the size of an industrial freezer whipped past her, slamming into the wall with a coughing roar and a shudder of impact.

The blonde woman bounced up, kicked off a stone wall, flipped over again, and came down on her feet, ax held high. She'd discarded the flare, leaving it in the center of the floor, and I got my first good look at the place, and at the things in it.

First of all, the chamber, cavern, whatever it was—it was huge. Thirty feet from ceiling to floor, at least thirty feet wide, and it stretched out into the darkness beyond the sharp light cast by the flare. Most of it was natural stone. Some of the surfaces showed signs of being crudely cut with hand-wielded tools. A ledge about two feet wide ran along the edge of the chamber in a C-shape, up near the top. I'd nearly tumbled off the ledge into the cavern. There were stairs cut into the wall below me—if you could call the twelve-inch projections crudely hacked out of the stone every couple of feet a stairway.

My glance swept over the cavern below. A huge pile of newspapers, old blankets, bloodstained clothes, and unidentifiable bits of fabric must have served as a nest or bed for the creature. It was three feet high in the middle, and a good ten or twelve feet across. A mound of bones, nearby, was very nearly as large. The old ivory gleamed in the eerie light of the flare, cleared entirely of meat, though the mound was infested with rats and vermin, all tiny moving forms and glittering red eyes.

A huge stone had been placed in the center of the floor. A metal beer keg sat on top of it, between the tied-down, spread-eagled legs of a rather attractive and very naked young woman. She'd been tied down with rough ropes, directly over a thick layer of old bloodstains congealed into an almost rubbery coating on the rock. Her eyes were wide, her face flushed with tears, and she was screaming.

Gard whipped her ax through a series of scything arcs in front of her, driving them at the big furry blur. I had no idea how she was covering the ground fast enough to keep up with the thing. They were both moving at Kung Fu Theater speed. One of Gard's swipes must have tagged it, because there was a sudden bellow of rage and it bounded into the shadows outside of the light of the flare.

She let out a howl of frustration. The head of her ax was smeared with black fluid, and as it ran across the steel, flickers of silver fire appeared in the shape of more strange runes. "Wizard!" she bellowed. "Give me light!"

I was already on it, holding my amulet high and behind my head, ramming more will through the device. The dim wizard light flared into incandescence, throwing strong light at least a hundred feet down the long gallery—and drawing a shriek of pain and surprise from the grendelkin.

I saw it for maybe two seconds, while it crouched with one arm thrown up to shield its eyes. The grendelkin was flabby over a quarter ton of muscle, and the nails on its fingers and toes were black, long, and dangerous-looking. It was big, nine or ten feet, and covered in hair. Not fur, like a bear or a dog, but hair, human hair, with pale skin easily seen beneath, so that the impression it gave was one of an exceptionally hirsute man, rather than that of a beast.

Definitely male. Terrifyingly so—I'd seen smaller fire extinguishers. And from the looks of things, Gard and I must have interrupted him in the middle of foreplay.

No wonder he was pissed.

Gard saw the grendelkin and charged forward. I saw my chance to pitch in. I lifted my staff and pointed it at the creature, gathered another surge of will, and snarled, "Fuego!"

My staff was an important tool, allowing me to focus and direct energy much more precisely and with more concentration than I could manage without it. It didn't work as well as my more specialized blasting rod for directing fire, but for this purpose it would do just fine. A column of golden flame as wide as a whiskey barrel leapt across the cavern to the grendelkin, smashing into its head and upper body. It was too dispersed to kill the grendelkin outright, but hopefully it would blind and distract it enough to let Gard get in the killing blow.

The grendelkin lowered his arm and I saw a quick flash of yellow eyes, a hideous face, and a mouthful of fangs. Those teeth spread into a smile, and I realized that I might as well have hit him with the stream of water from a garden hose, for all the effect the fire had on him. He moved, an abrupt whipping of its massive shoulders, and flung a stone at me.

Take it from me, the grendelkin's talents were wasted on the abduct-rape-devour industry.

He should have been playing professional ball.

By the time I realized the rock was on the way, it had already hit me. There was a popping sound from my left shoulder, and a wave of agony. Something flung me to the ground, driving the breath out of my lungs. My amulet fell from my suddenly unresponsive fingers, and the brilliant light died at once.

Dammit, I had assumed big and hostile meant dumb, and the grendelkin wasn't. It had deliberately waited for Gard to charge forward out of the light of the dropped flare before it threw.

"Wizard!" Gard bellowed.

I couldn't see anything. The brief moment of brilliant illumination had blinded my eyes to the dimmer light of the flare, and Gard couldn't be in much better shape. I got to my feet, trying not to scream at the pain in my shoulder, and staggered back to look down at the room.

The grendelkin bellowed again, and Gard screamed—this time in pain. There was the sound of a heavy blow and Gard, her hands empty, flew across the circle of green flare-light, a dim shadow. She struck the wall beneath me with an ugly, heavy sound.

It was all happening so fast. Hell's bells, but I was playing out of my league, here.

I turned to Mouse and snarled an instruction. My dog stared at me for a second, ears flattened to his skull, and didn't move.

"Go!" I screamed at him. "Go, go, go!"

Mouse spun and shot off back down the way we'd come.

Gard groaned on the floor beneath me, stirring weakly at the edge of the dim circle of light cast by the flare. I couldn't tell how badly she was hurt—but I knew that if I didn't move before the grendelkin finished her, she wasn't going to get any better. I could hear Elizabeth sobbing in despair.

"Get up, Harry," I growled at myself. "Get a move on."

I could barely move my left arm, so I gripped my staff in my right and began negotiating the precarious stone stairway.

A voice laughed, out in the darkness. It was a deep voice, masculine, mellow and smooth. When it spoke, it did so with precise, cultured pronunciation. "Geat bitch," the grendelkin murmured. "That's the most fun I've had in a century. Surt, but I wish there were a few more Choosers running about the world. You're a dying breed."

I could barely see the damned stairs in the flare's light. My foot slipped and I nearly fell.

"Who's the seidrmadr?" the grendelkin asked.

"Gesundheit," I said.

It appeared at the far side of the circle of light, and I stopped in my tracks. The grendelkin's yellow eyes gleamed with malice and hunger. It flexed its claw-tipped hands very slowly, baring its teeth in another smile. My mouth felt utterly dry and my legs were shaking. I'd seen it move. If it rushed me, things could get ugly.

Strike that. When it rushed me, things were going to get ugly.

"Is that a fire extinguisher in your pocket?" I asked, studying it intently. "Or are you just happy to see me?"

The grendelkin's smile spread wider. "Most definitely the latter. I'm going to have two mouths to feed, shortly. What did she promise you to fool you into coming with her?"

"You got it backwards. I permitted her to tag along with me," I said.

The grendelkin let out a low, lazily wicked laugh. It was eerie as hell, hearing such a refined voice come from a package like that. "Do you think you're a threat to me, little man?"

"You think I'm not?"

Idly, the grendelkin dragged the clawed fingers of one hand around on the stone floor beside him. Little sparks jumped up here and there. "I've been countering seid since before I left the Old World. Without that, you're nothing more than a monkey with a stick." He paused and added, "A rather weak and clumsy monkey at that."

"Big guy like you shouldn't have any trouble with little old me, then," I said. His eyes were strange. I'd never seen any quite like that. His face, though pretty ugly, was similar to others I'd seen. "I guess you have some history with Miss Gard, there."

"Family feuds are always the worst," the grendelkin said.

"Have to take your word for it," I said. "Just like I'm going to have to take these women. I'd rather do it peaceably than the hard way. Your call. Walk away, big guy. We'll both be happier."

The grendelkin looked at me, and then threw its head back in a rich, deeply amused laugh. "Not enough that I already have a broodmare and wounded little wildcat to play with, I also have a clown. It's practically a festival."

And with that, the grendelkin rushed me. A crushing fist the size of a volleyball flicked at my face. I was fast enough, barely, to slip the blow. I flung myself to the cavern floor, gasping as the shock of landing reached my shoulder. That sledgehammer of flesh and bone slammed into the wall with a brittle crunching sound. Chips of flying stone stung my cheek.

It scared the crap out of me, which was just as well. Terror makes a great fuel for some kinds of magic, and the get-the-hell-away-from-me blast of raw force I unleashed on the grendelkin would have flung a parked car to the other side of the street and into the building beyond.

The grendelkin hadn't been kidding about knowing counter-magic, though. All that naked force hit him and just sort of slid off of him, like water pouring around a stone. It only drove him back about two steps—which was room enough to let me drop to one knee and swing my staff again. It wasn't a bone-crushing blow, powered as it was by only one hand and from a fairly unbalanced position.

But I got him in the fire extinguisher.

The grendelkin let out a howl about two octaves higher than his original bellows had been, and I scooted around him, running for the altar stone where Elizabeth Braddock lay helpless—away from Gard. I wanted the grendelkin to focus all his attention on me.

He did.

"Behind you!" Elizabeth screamed, her eyes wide with terror.

I whirled and a sweep of the grendelkin's arm ripped the staff out of my hand. Something like a steel vise clamped around my neck, and my feet came up off the ground.

The grendelkin lifted my face to his level. His breath smelled of blood and rotten meat. His eyes were bright with their fury. I kicked at him, but he held me out of reach of anything vital, and my kicks plunked uselessly into his belly and ribs.

"I was going to make it quick for you," he snarled. "For amusing me. But I'm going to start with your arms."

If I didn't have him right where I wanted him, I'd have been less than sanguine about my chances of survival. I'd accomplished that much, at least. He had his back to the tunnel.

"Rip them off one at a time, little seidrmadr." He paused. "Which, when viewed from a literary perspective, has a certain amount of irony." He showed me more teeth. "I'll let you watch me eat your hands. Let you see what I do to these bitches before I'm done with you."

Boy, was he going to get it.

One of his hands grabbed my left arm, and the pain of my dislocated shoulder made my world go white. I fought through the agony, ripped Elizabeth Braddock's pointy-handled hairbrush from my duster's pocket, and drove it like an icepick into the grendelkin's forearm.

He roared and flung me into the nearest wall.

Which hurt. Lots.

I fell to the stone floor of the cavern in a heap. After that, my vision shrank to a tunnel and began to darken.

Which was just as well. Fewer distractions, that way. Now all I had to do was time it right.

A sound groaned down from the tunnel entrance above, an odd, ululating murmur, echoed into unintelligibility.

The furious grendelkin ripped the brush out of his arm and flung it away—but when he heard the sound, he turned his ugly kisser back toward the source.

I focused harder on the spell I had coming than upon anything I'd ever done. I had no circle to help me, lots of distractions, and absolutely no room to screw it up.

The strange sound resolved itself into a yowling chorus, like half a hundred band saws on helium, and Mouse burst out of the tunnel with a living thunderstorm of malks in hot pursuit.

My dog flung himself into the empty air, and malks bounded after him, determined not to let him escape. Mouse fell thirty feet, onto the huge pile of nesting material, landing with a yelp. The malks spilled after him, yowling in fury, dozens and dozens of malevolent eyes glittering in the light of the flare. Some jumped, some flowed seamlessly down the rough stairs, and others bounded forward, sank their claws into the stone of the far wall, and slid down it like a fireman down a pole.

I unleashed the spell.

"Useless vermin!" bellowed the grendelkin, its voice still pitched higher than before. He pointed at me, a battered-looking man in a long leather coat, and roared, "Kill the wizard or I'll eat every last one of you!"

The malks, now driven as much by fear as anger, immediately swarmed all over me. I gave them a pretty good time of it, but there were probably better than three dozen of them, and the leather coat couldn't cover everything.

Claws and fangs flashed.

Blood spattered.

The malks went insane with bloodlust.

I screamed, swinging wildly with both hands, killing a malk here or there, but unable to protect myself from all those claws and teeth. The grendelkin turned toward the helpless Elizabeth.

It was a real bitch, trying to undo the grendelkin's knotted ropes while still holding the illusion in place in my mind. Beneath the glamour that made him look like me, he fought furiously, clawing and swinging at the malks attacking him. It didn't help that Elizabeth was screaming again, thanks to the illusion of the grendelkin I was holding over myself, but hey. No plan is perfect.

"Mouse!" I cried.

A malk flew over my head, screaming, and splattered against a wall.

My dog bounded up just as I got the girl loose. I shoved her at him and said, "Get her out of here! Run! Go, go, go!"

Elizabeth didn't know what the hell was going on, but she understood that last part well enough. She fled, back toward the crude staircase. Mouse ran beside her, and when a malk flung itself at Elizabeth's naked back, my dog intercepted the little monster in the air, catching him as neatly as a Frisbee at the park. Mouse snarled and shook his jaws once. The malk's neck broke with an audible snap. My dog dropped it and fled on.

I grabbed my staff and ran to Gard. The malks hadn't noticed her yet. They were still busy mobbing the grendelkin—

Crap. My concentration had wavered. It looked like itself again, as did I.

I whirled and focused my will upon the giant pile of clean-picked bones. I extended my staff and snarled, "Counterspell this. Forzare!"

Hundreds of pounds of sharp white bone flung themselves at the grendelkin and the malks alike. I threw the bones hard, harder than the grendelkin had thrown his rock, and the bone shards ripped into them like the blast of an enormous shotgun.

Without waiting to see the results, I snatched up the still-burning flare and flung it into the pile of nesting fabric, bloody clothes, and old newspapers. The whole mound flared instantly into angry light and smothering smoke.

"Get up!" I screamed at Gard. One side of her face was bruised and swollen, and she had a visibly broken arm, one of the bones in her forearm protruding from the skin. With my help, she staggered up, dazed and choking on the smoke, which also blotted out the light. I got her onto the stairs, and even in our battered state we set some kind of speed record going up them.

The deafening chorus of bellowing grendelkin and howling malks faded a little as the smoke started choking them too. Air was moving in the tunnel, as the fire drew on it just as it might a chimney. I lit up my amulet again to show us the way out.

"Wait!" Gard gasped, fifty feet up the tunnel. "Wait!"

She fumbled at her jacket pocket, where she kept the little ivory box, but she couldn't reach it with her sound arm. I dug it out for her.

"Triangle, three lines over it," she said, leaning against a wall for support. "Get it out."

I poked through the little ivory Scrabble tiles until I found one that matched her description. "This one?" I demanded.

"Careful," she growled. "It's a Sunder rune." She took it from me, took a couple of steps back toward the grendelkin's cavern, murmured under her breath, and snapped the little tile. There was a flicker of deep red light, and the tunnel itself quivered and groaned.

"Run!"

We did.

Behind us, the tunnel collapsed in on itself with a roar, sealing the malks and the grendelkin away beneath us, trapping them in the smothering smoke.

We both stopped for a moment after that, as dust billowed up the tunnel and the sound of furious supernatural beings cut off as if someone had flipped a switch. The silence was deafening.

We both stood there, panting and wounded. Gard sank to the floor to rest.

"You were right," I said. "I guess we didn't need to worry about the malks on the way out."

Gard gave me a weary smile. "That was my favorite ax."

"Go back for it," I suggested. "I'll wait for you here."

She snorted.

Mouse came shambling up out of the tunnel above us. Elizabeth Braddock clung to his collar, and looked acutely embarrassed about her lack of clothing. "Wh-what?" she whispered. "What happened here? I d-don't understand."

"It's all right, Mrs. Braddock," I said. "You're safe. We're going to take you back to your husband."

She closed her eyes, shuddered, and started to cry. She sank down to put her arms around Mouse's furry ruff, and buried her face in his fur. She was shivering with the cold. I shucked out of my coat and draped it around her.

Gard eyed her, then her own broken arm, and let out a sigh. "I need a drink."

I spat some grit out of my mouth. "Ditto. Come on."

I offered her a hand up. She took it.

SEVERAL HOURS AND DOCTORS LATER, GARD AND I wound up back at the pub, where the beer festival was winding to a conclusion. We sat at a table with Mac. The Braddocks had stammered a gratuitous amount of thanks and rushed off together. Mac's keg had a blue ribbon taped to it. He'd drawn all of us a mug.

"Night of the Living Brews," I said. I had painkillers for my shoulder, but I was waiting until I was home and in bed to take one. As a result, I ached pretty much everywhere. "More like night of the living bruise."

Mac rose, drained his mug, and held it up in a salute to Gard and me. "Thanks."

"No problem," I said.

Gard smiled slightly and bowed her head to him. Mac departed.

Gard finished her own mug and examined the cast on her arm. "Close one."

"Little bit," I said. "Can I ask you something?"

She nodded.

"The grendelkin called you a Geat," I said.

"Yes, he did."

"I'm familiar with only one person referred to in that way," I said.

"There are a few more around," Gard said. "But everyone's heard of that one."

"You called the grendelkin a scion of Grendel," I said. "Am I to take it that you're a scion of the Geat?"

Gard smiled slightly. "My family and the grendelkin's have a long history."

"He called you a Chooser," I said.

She shrugged again, and kept her enigmatic smile.

"Gard isn't your real name," I said. "Is it?"

"Of course not," she replied.

I sipped some more of Mac's award-winning dark. "You're a valkyrie. A real one."

Her expression was unreadable.

"I thought valkyries mostly did pickups and deliveries," I said. "Choosing the best warriors from among the slain. Taking them off to Valhalla. Oh, and serving drinks there. Odin's virgin daughters, pouring mead for the warriors, partying until Ragnarok."

Gard threw back her head and laughed. "Virgin daughters." She rose, shaking her head, and glanced at her broken arm again. Then she leaned down and kissed me on the mouth. Her lips were a sweet, hungry little fire of sensation, and I felt the kiss all the way to my toes. Some places more than others, ahem.

She drew away slowly, her pale blue eyes shining. Then she winked at me and said, "Don't believe everything you read, Dresden." She turned to go, and then paused to glance over her shoulder. "Though, to be honest: sometimes he does like us to call him Daddy. I'm Sigrun."

I watched Sigrun go. Then I finished the last of the beer.

Mouse rose expectantly, his tail wagging, and we set off for home.

Jim Butcher enjoys fencing, martial arts, singing, bad science-fiction movies, and live-action gaming. He lives in Missouri with his wife, son, and a vicious guard dog. You may learn more at www.jim-butcher.com.