Grave Peril (36 page)

I saw a spirit leap for Bianca with blazing hands reached out, and she smote it from the air with a blast of frozen black air. She seized Susan by the wrist and started dragging her toward the front door.

More spirits hurtled toward her, the eldest of the murderers of this house, fire and smoke and splinter—even one that had forged a body for itself out of the spent bullets lying upon the floor.

She fought them off. Talon and magic, she thrust her way through them, and toward the front door. Susan began to wake up, to look around her, her expression terrified.

“Susan!” I shouted. “Susan!”

She began to struggle against Bianca, who hissed, turning toward Susan. She fought to drag my girlfriend closer to the front door, but one of the ghosts clawed at the vampire’s leg, setting it aflame.

Bianca screamed, berserk, out of control. She lifted one hand high, her claws glittering, dark, and swept it down at Susan’s throat.

I sent my spell hurtling out along with Susan’s name, the last strength of my body and mind.

I saw her rise. Rachel’s ghost. She appeared, simple and translucent and pretty, and put herself between Bianca’s claws and Susan’s throat. Blood gouted from the ghost, scarlet and horrible. Susan tumbled limply to one side. Bianca started screaming, high enough to shatter glass, as the bloody ghost simply pressed against her, wrapping her arms around the monstrous black form.

My spell followed on the heels of Rachel’s ghost, and took Bianca full in the face, a near-solid column of wind, which seized her, hurtled her up, and then smashed her down into the floor. The overstrained boards gave way beneath her with a creak and a roar, and flame washed up toward me in a wave of reeking black smoke. I felt my balance spin and I struggled to make it to the exit, but fell to the ground.

Spirits flooded after Bianca, fire and smoke, following the vampire sorceress down the hole. The house itself screamed, a sound of tortured wood and twisted beam, and began to fall.

I couldn’t get my balance. I felt small, strong hands under one of my arms. And then I felt Susan beneath the other, powerful and terrified. She lifted me to my feet. Justine stayed by my other side, and together, we stumbled out of the old house.

We had gone no more than a dozen paces when it collapsed with a roar. We turned, and I saw the house drawing
in
upon itself, sucked down into the earth, into an inferno of flame. The fire department, later, called it some kind of inverted backblast, but I know what I saw. I saw the ghosts the dead had left behind settle the score.

“I love you,” I said, or tried to say, to Susan. “I love you.”

She pressed her mouth to mine. I think she was crying. “Hush,” she said. “Harry. Hush. I love you, too.”

It was done.

There was no more reason to hold on.

Chapter
Thirty-nine

I regard it as one last sadistic gibe of whatever power had decided to make my life a living hell that the burn ward was full, and I was given a room to share with Charity Carpenter. She had recovered in spirit, if not in body, and she started in on me the moment I awoke. The woman’s tongue was sharper than any sword. Even
Amoracchius.
I smiled through most of it. Michael would have been proud.

The baby, I learned, had taken an abrupt turn for the better in the hours before dawn the morning Bianca’s house had burned. I thought that maybe Kravos had taken a bite of the little guy, and I had gotten it back for him. Michael thought God had simply decreed the morning to be a day of good things. Whatever. The results were what counted.

“We’ve decided,” Michael said, stretching a strong arm around Charity, “to name him Harry.”

Charity glowered at me, but remained silent.

“Harry?” I asked. “Harry Carpenter? Michael, what did that poor kid ever do to you?”

But it made me feel good. And they kept the name.

Charity got out of the hospital three days before me. Michael or Father Forthill remained with me for the rest of my stay. No one ever said anything, but Michael had the sword with him, and Forthill kept a crucifix handy. Just in case I had some nasty visitors.

One night when I couldn’t sleep, I mentioned to Michael that I was worried about the repercussions of my workings, the harmful magic I had dished out. I worried that it was going to come back to haunt me.

“I’m not a philosopher, Harry,” he said. “But here’s something for you to think about, at least. What goes around comes around. And sometimes you get what’s coming around.” He paused for a moment, frowning faintly, pursing his lips. “And sometimes you
are
what’s coming around. You see what I mean?”

I did. I was able to get back to sleep.

Michael explained that he and Thomas had escaped the fight at the bridge only a few moments after it had begun. But time had stretched oddly, between the Nevernever and Chicago, and they hadn’t emerged until two o’clock the following afternoon.

“Thomas brought us out into this flesh pit,” Michael said.

“I’m not a wizard,” Thomas pointed out. “I can only get in and out of the Nevernever at points close to my heart.”

“A house of sin!” Michael said, his expression stern.

“A
gentlemen’s
club,” Thomas protested. “And one of the nicest ones in town.”

I kept my mouth shut. Who says I never grow any wiser?

Murphy came out of the sleeping spell a couple days later. I had to go in a wheelchair, but I went to Kravos’s funeral with her. She pushed me through a drizzling rain to the grave site. There was a city official there, who signed off on some papers and left. Then it was just us and the grave diggers, shovels whispering on earth.

Murphy watched the proceedings in complete silence, her eyes sunken, the blue faded out until they seemed almost grey. I didn’t push, and she didn’t talk until the hole was half filled in.

“I couldn’t stop him,” she said, then. “I tried.”

“But we beat him. That’s why we’re here and he’s there.”

“
You
beat him,” Murphy said. “A lot of good I did you.”

“He sucker punched you. Even if you’d been a wizard, he’d have gotten to you—like he damn near did me.” I shivered, remembered agony making the muscles of my belly tight. “Karrin, you can’t blame yourself for that.”

“I know,” she said, but she didn’t sound like she meant it. She was quiet for a long time, and I finally figured out that she wasn’t talking because I’d hear the tears in her voice, the ones the rain hid from me. She didn’t bow her head though, and she didn’t look away from the grave.

I reached out and found her hand with mine. I squeezed. She squeezed back, silent and tight. We stayed there, in the rain, until the last bit of earth had been thrown over Kravos’s coffin.

On the way out, Murphy stopped my wheelchair, frowning at a white headstone next to a waiting plot. “He died doing the right thing,” she read. She looked down at me.

I shrugged, and felt my mouth curl up on one side. “Not yet. Not today.”

Michael and Forthill took care of Lydia for me. Her real name was Barbara something. They got her packed up and moved out of town. Apparently, the Church has some kind of equivalent of the Witness Protection Program, for getting people out of the reach of supernatural baddies. Forthill told me how the girl had fled the church because she’d been terrified that she would fall asleep, and gone out to find some uppers. The vampires had grabbed her while she was out, which was when I’d found them in that old building. She sent me a note that read, simply, “I’m sorry. Thank you for everything.”

When I got out of the hospital, Thomas sent me a thank-you letter, for saving Justine. He sent it on a little note card attached to a bow, which was all Justine was wearing. I’ll let you guess where the bow was. I took the note, but not the girl. There was too much of an ick factor in sharing girls with a sex vampire. Justine was pretty enough, and sweet enough, when she wasn’t walking the razor’s edge of an organic emotional instability—but I couldn’t really hold that against her. Plenty of people have to take some kind of medication to keep stable. Lithium, supermodel sex vampires—whatever works, I guess.

I had woman problems of my own.

Susan sent me flowers and called me every day, in the hospital. But she didn’t ever talk to me for long. And she didn’t come to visit. When I got out, I went to her apartment. She didn’t live there anymore. I tried to call her at work, and never managed to catch her. Finally, I had to resort to magic. I used some hair of hers left on a brush at my apartment, and tracked her down on a beach along Lake Michigan, on one of the last warm days of the year.

I found her lying in the sun wearing a white bikini that left maximum surface area bared to it. I sat down next to her, and her manner changed, subtly, a quiet tension that I didn’t miss, though I couldn’t see her eyes behind the sunglasses she wore.

“The sun helps,” she said. “Sometimes it almost goes away for a while.”

“I’ve been trying to find you,” I said. “I wanted to talk to you.”

“I know,” she said. “Harry. Things have changed for me. In the daylight, it’s not too bad. But at night.” She shivered. “I have to lock myself inside. I don’t trust myself around people, Harry.”

“I know,” I said. “You know what’s happening?”

“I talked to Thomas,” she said. “And Justine. They were nice enough, I guess. They explained things to me.”

I grimaced. “Look,” I said. “I’m going to help you. I’ll find some way to get you out of this. We can find a cure.” I reached out and took her hand. “Oh, Hell’s bells, Susan. I’m no good at this.” I just fumbled the ring onto it, clumsy as you please. “I don’t want you far away. Marry me.”

She sat up, and stared at her hand, at the dinky ring I’d been able to afford. Then she leaned close to me and gave me a slow, heated kiss, her mouth melting-warm. Our tongues touched. Mine went numb. I got a little dizzy, as the slow throb of pleasure that I’d felt before coursed through me, a drug I’d craved without realizing it.

She drew away from me slowly, her face expressionless behind the sunglasses. She said, “I can’t. You already made me ache for you, Harry. I couldn’t control myself, with you. I couldn’t sort out the hungers.” She pressed the ring into my hand and stood up, gathering her towel and a purse with her. “Don’t come to me again. I’ll call you.”

And she left.

I’d bragged to Kravos, at the end, that I’d been trained to demolish nightmares when I was younger. And to a certain extent it was true. If something came into my head for a fight, I could put up a good one. But now I had nightmares that were all my own. A part of me. And they were always the same: darkness, trapped, with the vampires all around me, laughing their hissing laughter.

I’d wake up, screaming and crying. Mister, curled against my legs, would raise his head and rumble at me. But he wouldn’t pad away. He’d just settle down again, purring like a snowmobile’s engine. I found it a comfort. And I slept with a light always close.

“Harry,” Bob said one night. “You haven’t been working. You’ve barely left your apartment. The rent was due last week. And this vampire research is going nowhere fast.”

“Shut up, Bob,” I told him. “This unguent isn’t right. If we can find a way to convert it to a liquid, maybe we can work it into a supplement of some kind—”

“Harry,”
Bob said.

I looked up at the skull.

“Harry. The Council sent a notice to you today.”

I stood up, slowly.

“The vampires. The Council’s at war. I guess Paris and Berlin went into chaos almost a week ago. The Council is calling a meeting. Here.”

“The White Council is coming to Chicago,” I mused.

“Yeah. They’re going to want to know what the hell happened.”

I shrugged. “I sent them my report. I only did what was right,” I said. “Or as close to it as I could manage. I couldn’t let them have her, Bob. I couldn’t.”

The skull sighed. “I don’t know if that will hold up with them, Harry.”

“It has to,” I said.

There was a knock at my door. I climbed up from the lab. Murphy and Michael had shown up at my door with a care package: soup and charcoal and kerosene for me, as the weather got colder. Groceries. Fruit. Michael had, rather pointedly, included a razor.

“How are you doing, Dresden?” Murphy asked me, her blue eyes serious.

I stared at her for a moment. Then at Michael.

“I could be worse,” I said. “Come in.”

Friends. They make it easier.

So, the vampires are out to get me, and every other wizard on the block. The little wizardlings of the city, the have-nots of magic, are making it a point not to go outside after dark. I don’t order pizza for delivery anymore. Not after the first guy almost got me with a bomb.

The Council is going to be furious at me, but what else is new.

Susan doesn’t call. Doesn’t visit. But I got a card from her, on my birthday, Halloween. She only wrote three words.

I’ll let you guess what three.

Author’s Note

When I was seven years old,
I got a bad case of strep throat and was out of school for a whole week. During that time, my sisters bought me my first fantasy and sci-fi novels: the boxed set of
Lord of the Rings
and the boxed set of the Han Solo adventure novels by Brian Daley. I devoured them all during that week.

From that point on, I was pretty much doomed to join SF&F fandom. From there, it was only one more step to decide I wanted to be a writer of my favorite fiction material, and here we are.

I blame my sisters.

My first love as a fan is swords-and-horses fantasy. After Tolkien I went after C. S. Lewis. After Lewis, it was Lloyd Alexander. After them came Fritz Leiber, Roger Zelazny, Robert Howard, John Norman, Poul Anderson, David Eddings, Weis and Hickman, Terry Brooks, Elizabeth Moon, Glen Cook, and before I knew it I was a dual citizen of the United States and Lankhmar, Narnia, Gor, Cimmeria, Krynn, Amber—you get the picture.

When I set out to become a writer, I spent years writing swords-and-horses fantasy novels—and seemed to have little innate talent for it. But I worked at my writing, branching out into other areas as experiments, including SF, mystery, and contemporary fantasy. That’s how the Dresden Files initially came about—as a happy accident while trying to accomplish something else. Sort of like penicillin.

But I never forgot my first love, and to my immense delight and excitement, one day I got a call from my agent and found out that I was going to get to share my newest swords-and-horses fantasy novel with other fans.

The Codex Alera is a fantasy series set within the savage world of Carna, where spirits of the elements, known as furies, lurk in every facet of life, and where many intelligent races vie for security and survival. The realm of Alera is the monolithic civilization of humanity, and its unique ability to harness and command the furies is all that enables its survival in the face of the enormous, sometimes hostile elemental powers of Carna, and against savage creatures who would lay Alera in waste and ruin.

Yet even a realm as powerful as Alera is not immune to destruction from within, and the death of the heir apparent to the Crown has triggered a frenzy of ambitious political maneuvering and in-fighting amongst the High Lords, those who wield the most powerful furies known to man. Plots are afoot, traitors and spies abound, and a civil war seems inevitable—all while the enemies of the realm watch, ready to strike at the first sign of weakness.

Tavi is a young man living on the frontier of Aleran civilization—because, let’s face it, swords-and-horses fantasies start there. Born a freak, unable to utilize any powers of furycrafting whatsoever, Tavi has grown up relying upon his own wits, speed, and courage to survive. When an ambitious plot to discredit the Crown lays Tavi’s home, the Calderon Valley, naked and defenseless before a horde of the barbarian Marat, the boy and his family find themselves directly in harm’s way.

There are no titanic High Lords to protect them, no Legions, no Knights with their mighty furies to take the field, Tavi and the free frontiersmen of the Calderon Valley must find some way to uncover the plot and to defend their homes against a merciless horde of Marat and their beasts.

It is a desperate hour, when the fate of all Alera hangs in the balance, when a handful of ordinary steadholders must find the courage and strength to defy an overwhelming foe, and when the courage and intelligence of one young man will save the Realm—or destroy it.

Thank you, readers and fellow fans, for all of your support and kindness. I hope that you enjoy reading the books of the Codex Alera as much as I enjoyed creating them for you.

—Jim

Furies of Calderon, Academ’s Fury, Cursor’s Fury,
and
Captain’s Fury
are available from Ace Books.