Dead Beat(71)

I blinked slowly, waiting for my eyes to focus.
Liver Spots appeared in my vision, weathered and strange, white hair wiry and stiff beneath his hat, his loose skin somehow reptilian in the dim light.
"I know you," I slurred, the words tumbling out without checking in with my brain. "I know who you are now."
Liver Spots knelt down over me. He took my wrists and clamped something around them.
While he did, Grevane came up and took The Word of Kemmlar from my limp fingers. He opened it and began scanning through pages until he found the passage he'd been looking for. He read it, stared at it for a long moment, and then opened his mouth in a slow, wheezing cackle.
"By the night," he said, his voice dusty and amused. "It's so simple. How could I not have seen it before?"
"You are satisfied?" Liver Spots asked Grevane.
"Entirely," Grevane said.
"And you will stand by our bargain."
"Of course," Grevane answered. He read another page of the book. "A pleasure working with you. He's all yours." Grevane turned, still beating a slow rhythm on his leg, and the shambling zombies followed him.
"Well, Dresden," Liver Spots said once they were gone. His voice was a rich, rough purr. "I believe you were saying you recognized me?"
I stared up at him blankly.
"Let me help your memory," he said. He took an olive-drab duffel bag from his shoulder and set it on the ground. Then, mostly with one hand, he opened it.
And he drew out a Louisville Slugger.
Oh, my God. I tried to move, but I couldn't. The metal bindings burned cold on my wrists.
"You," I said. "You busted up my car."
"Mmmm. Much as you broke my ankles. My knees. My wrists and my hands. With a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. While I lay helpless on the floor."
Quintus Cassius, the Snakeboy, the serpent-summoning sorcerer and former Knight of the Order of the Blackened Denarius, smiled down at me. He leaned over, kneeling and far too close to me for comfort, and whispered to me as if to a lover.
"I have dreamed of this night, boy," he purred, and gently stroked the side of my face with the baseball bat. "In my day, we would say that revenge is sweet. But times have changed. How do you say? Payback is a bitch."

     
 

      Chapter Thirty-seven
I stared up at the withered old man I'd called Liver Spots, and behind the loose skin, the wrinkles, the white wiry hair, I could see the man who had been one of the Order of the Blackened Denarius.
"How?" I asked him. "How did you find me?"
"I didn't," he said. "The coroner's apartment was easy enough to find. I took hairs from his brush. Since you were so eager to keep him sheltered under your wing, it wasn't too terribly difficult to keep track of him-and you-once we had destroyed your wards."
"Oh," I said. My voice shook a little.
"Are you afraid, boy?" Cassius whispered.
"You're about the fifth-scariest person I've met today," I said.
His eyes became very cold.
"Don't knock it," I said. "That's really better than it sounds."
He rose slowly, looking down at me. The fingers of his right hand tightened and loosened on the handle of the bat. Hatred burned there as well, mindless and irrational and howling to be slaked. Cassius hadn't exactly been stable when I'd faced him two years before. From the look of him now, he was preparing a campaign for the presidency of the World Psychosis Association.
I knew that Cassius was a killer, like few I'd ever seen. He had spent what might have been fifteen or sixteen centuries bound to a different fallen angel within his own silver coin, working hand in hand with the head of the Order. He had, I was sure, personally done away with hundreds of foes who had done far less to him than I had.
He would kill me. If a flash of rage took him, he'd cave my head in with that bat, screaming the whole time.
I shuddered at the image and reached out for my magic, seeing if I could draw in enough to try to sucker punch him. But when I tried, the manacles on my wrists suddenly writhed, moving, and dozens of sharp points suddenly pricked into my wrists, as if I had swept my hand through a rosebush. I winced in pain, my breath frozen in my chest for a second.
Cassius smiled at me. "Don't bother. We've used those manacles on wizards and witches for centuries. Nicodemus himself designed them."
"Yeah. Ouch." I winced, but no amount of writhing would move my arms very much, and I couldn't move to try to make the thorny manacles hurt less.
Cassius stared down at me, his eyes bright. He stood there, watching me try to writhe, enjoying my helplessness and pain.
An image flashed through my mind-an old man of faith and courage who had willingly given himself into the hands of the Order in exchange for my freedom. Shiro had died after sustaining the most hideous torments I had ever seen visited upon a human body-and some of them had come at the hands of Cassius. I closed my eyes. I knew what he wanted. He wanted to hurt me. He wanted to see how much pain he could deliver before I died. And there was nothing I could do to prevent it.
Unless …
I thought of what Shiro had told me about having faith. For him it was a theological and moral truth upon which he had based his life. I didn't have the same kind of belief, but I had seen how forces of light and darkness came into conflict, how imbalances were redressed. Cassius was in the service of some of the darkest forces on the planet. Shiro would have said that nothing he did could have prevented a balancing force of light-such as Shiro and his brother Knights-from being placed in his way. In my own experience, I had noticed that when something truly, deeply evil arose, one of the Knights tended to show up.
Maybe one would show up to face Cassius.
Hell's bells. That was mighty thin.
But it was technically possible. And it was all I had.
I almost laughed. What I needed to survive this lunatic was something I had never had much of: faith, I had to believe that some other factor would intervene. I had no other option.
But that didn't mean I couldn't try to help intervention along. The longer I kept breathing, the more likely it was that someone would happen across the scene-maybe even someone who could help. Maybe even someone like my friend Michael.
I had to keep Cassius talking.
"What happened to you?" I asked him a moment later, opening my eyes. I'd read somewhere that people love to talk about themselves. "The last time I saw you, you could have passed for forty."
Cassius stared at me for a moment more, and then leaned his bat on the floor. "It was the result of losing my coin to you and your friends," he said, voice creaking. "While I held my coin, Saluriel prevented age from ravaging my body. Now nature is collecting her due from me. Plus interest." He waved his stiff-fingered right hand, wrinkled, spotted, swollen with what looked like bad arthritis. "If she has her way, I will be dead within the year."
"Why?" I asked him. "Isn't your new demon stopping the clock for you?"
His eyes narrowed, unsteady and cold. "I have no Denarius now," he said, his voice low and very polite. "When I eventually left the hospital and rejoined Nicodemus, he had no coin being held as a spare." Mad fire flickered through his gaze. "You see, he'd given it to you."
I swallowed. "That's what you were looking for, outside my apartment. You wanted the Denarius."
"Lasciel wouldn't be my first choice, but I must be content with what is available."
"Uh- huh. So where's Nicodemus? He's helping you, I take it."
Cassius's eyes closed almost all the way. "Nicodemus cast me out. He said that if I was too much a fool to keep possession of my coin that I deserved whatever befell me."
"What a guy."
Cassius shrugged. "He is a man of power, with no tolerance for fools. Once you are dead and Lasciel's coin is mine, he will take me back."
"You sound pretty confident there," I said.
"Is there some reason I should not be?" He moved stiffly over to his duffel bag. "You should make this simpler for both of us. I'm willing to make you an offer. Give it to me now, and I will make your death quick."
"I don't have it," I told him.
He let out a rough cackle. "There are only so many places one can hide it," he said. "If you are holding it as part of you, enough pain will make you drop it." He drew out a slender little coping saw from the bag and set it on the floor. "I once knew a man who swallowed his Denarius, and would swallow it again when it came through."
"Yuck," I said.
Cassius put a standard-head screwdriver down next to the saw. "And one who cut himself open and placed the coin in his abdominal cavity." He drew a vicious-looking hooked linoleum knife from the bag and held it thoughtfully. "If you tell me, I'll take your throat."
"And if I don't?" I asked.
He pared a yellowed fingernail with the knife. "I go on a treasure hunt."
I studied him for a minute, then said, "I don't have it with me. That's the truth. I bound Lasciel and buried the coin."
He let out a snarl and snatched at my left hand. He tore my glove from it, and then twisted my hand to show me my own horribly scarred palm, and the name-sigil of the demon Lasciel upon it, the only skin that wasn't layered in scar tissue. "You have it," he spat. "And it is mine."
I took a deep breath and tried to embrace an optimistic conviction in the moral rectitude of my cause; to think positive.