My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon (10 page)

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.

In
My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding,
Cecilia Lockhart met her perfect match in an undead pirate captain. But even in calm seas, the course of true love never does run smooth
…

Boston, September

HONESTLY IF SHE'D KNOWN THAT HER WEDDING WAS going to become the media event of the entire eastern seaboard, Cecilia would have gotten a better haircut. And a faster getaway limo, preferably one driven by a NASCAR star.

"Almost there," the limo driver said reassuringly as Cecilia clung to the arm of her groom and looked anxiously out the smoked windows at the flanking phalanx of news vans, reporters hanging out of car windows screaming questions, and bright popping strobes. "I can see the barricades."

The barriers were pulled aside, and the limo sailed sleekly through, coming to a flawless stop in a parking lot surrounded by marked police cars, all flashing their lights. No sirens, thankfully. Cecilia breathed a sigh of relief. She was pretty sure that the last black SUV to peel off pursuit had held Larry King
and
Oprah.

Cecilia looked at her groom, and hoped she didn't look as terrified as she felt. "That was—extreme," she said. Liam Lockhart—Captain Liam Lockhart—smiled.

"Lass, you've sailed with dead men, broken curses, and married a pirate," he said. "You might want to redefine how you measure an extreme."

He had a point. She studied him in the relative quiet of the limousine, and he looked back, perfectly calm. In the six months or so since they'd sailed the eighteenth-century pirate ship
Sweet Mourning
—Liam's ship—back into Boston Harbor and created a media firestorm, Liam had adapted to the modern world well in some ways, and not at all in others. He'd cut his hair, for example; it was a neat salt-and-pepper style, not exactly modern and not exactly antique, either. His wedding suit, however, was definitely a throwback—a fantastic black brocade coat and trousers made along the lines of what he'd been wearing when they met, only much cleaner and without the slashes, bullet holes, and various stains.

He was not conventionally handsome, maybe, but sharply intelligent, with black eyes deep and secret as the sea and a lovely kissable mouth. All in all, Liam looked utterly fantastic, and it gave Cecilia a goosebump-raising shiver of delight to see the sparkle of the gold ring on his left hand.

We're married
. Not exactly a match made in heaven, a formerly cursed pirate and a slightly plain, too-round corporate wage slave who'd spent most of her not-quite-thirty years cultivating a fluorescent light tan in an office cubicle.

But when he looked at her, she felt like a goddess.

Liam lifted her hand to his lips and kissed it, mouth warm and gentle on her fingers. "In your own time, my love," he said. "No hurry."

"I'm ready," she lied with a smile, and he opened the door. He emerged first, then handed her out with the kind of flourish and elegance that she'd seen before only at Renaissance faires. On the other side of the press barricades, the cameras were eating it up. She was too terrified even to glance at the roaring crowd, but the pulse of strobes was so constant, it was like an extra sun.

Liam squeezed her hand, held her gaze, and winked. He bent close, put his lips to her ear, and said, "It'll be over soon. And then we'll have our leisure."

Cecilia fussed a little with her full silk skirts—a copy of a period wedding pattern from the eighteenth century, including a fiercely tied corset that had somehow managed to give her a dainty figure—and took his proffered arm to sweep past the rows of police officers standing at the barricades, heading for the wedding reception.

The
Sweet Mourning
loomed at the end of the dock, a massive ship with her sails currently lashed down, though Cecilia could see men swarming up into the rigging like spiders.

"That's odd," Liam said. "Should be an honor guard ready on the docks for our arrival." He pulled an elegant gold pocketwatch—his own—from his coat and checked it, frowning. "We're in good time, but not early."

With every step closer to the ship, Cecilia felt a tingle of foreboding building to an outright shiver. The crew was moving at a frantic pace on deck. Liam speeded up the pace, taking long strides in his polished black boots, and Cecilia had to hustle faster, with one hand holding her veil on her head. The guests wouldn't be far behind, although getting through security would delay them considerably, not to mention all the traffic.

The passenger ramp didn't lower for her, even when Liam shouted out a command. He cursed under his breath and gestured at the rope ladder hanging from the side of the massive ship.

"Climb?" she asked. "In this dress? Are you
kidding
?"

He wasn't. Her ascent wasn't nearly so graceful as his, and she was very relieved when he reached down to lift her the rest of the way and set her gently on the deck. The lift was performed one-handed. Liam was lean, but fearfully strong—cabled steel in those muscles.

Liam hadn't said anything about missing his ship, but she could see the change in him now, the brightness in eyes she hadn't even noticed had dulled, the subtle energy that ran through him. This was his home, not the apartment they'd gotten for him near the harbor. Liam Lockhart belonged here, on this deck—not on land, with her. Just for a second, she felt as though she was about to cry.
This is where he's happy
. It made her feel small, and second place.

Liam didn't notice. He'd been frowning and sweeping the decks with a captain's critical eye, and now he sent her a quick look of apology, and moved away from her to bellow, "Mr. Argyle, what the devil is going on here?
Argyle
!"

Cecilia realized belatedly that the supplies for the reception were piled in an untidy mess toward the bow—catering tables, tablecloths, punch bowls, silver cups, streamers, battery-powered party lights, speakers for the music. There were also people cowering there as well. Catering staff. The DJ. The wedding photographer.

As she stared in horror, a huge banner that read CONGRATULATIONS CAPTAIN AND MRS. LOCKHART fluttered from its place between the masts to the decks, was grabbed by two sailors, and flung onto the pile of reception debris.

Cecilia gasped as a pair of strange hands closed around her from behind. "Beg pardon, ma'am," said a rough voice. She struggled, but that was about as much good as fighting the tide; he simply put his arms around her, lifted her off the ground, and carried her off.

"Let go!" she screamed, and tried to twist to see Liam. She heard a clash of steel, and shouting. "Liam!"

"Quiet," her captor growled, and clapped a hand over her mouth as he hurried her down the darkened hallway, kicked open the door to the captain's cabin, and dumped her inside. "You've caused enough trouble already."

She fell to her hands and knees, twisted around, and glared back at him. He was a smallish man, compact and muscular, with wild dark hair and slightly mad eyes, arcane-looking tattoos crawling in a blue ring around his throat and down his chest.

In other words, scary.

"Stay here, witch," he ordered, and slammed the door on her. She tried the handle as soon as she heard his footsteps thump away, but of course, it was locked.

Perfect. Just
perfect
.

In the corner of the room, Cecilia spotted her blue suitcases—delivered ahead of time, thankfully—and charged for them. She skipped past the lovely going-away outfit and went for the blue jeans and comfortable white shirt at the bottom of the stack of clothing. She'd brought her own boots this time, and found a thick pirate-style belt in one of Liam's chests to finish out the ensemble.