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Small Favor(65)

By:Jim Butcher

"You know. You've got that beautiful sad aura going. You look mournful and tragic and pretty. Radiate that ‘save me, save me' vibe. Probably get all kinds of young men who want to carry you off on a white horse."
"Is that what you think of me?" she asked.
"Lady," I said, "a year or three ago, I'd have been the first in line. Hell, if I thought you were serious about getting out, I'd probably still help you. But I don't think you want out. I think that if you were all that pathetic, you wouldn't be controlling your Fallen-it would be controlling you. I think you're Tessa's trusted lieutenant for a reason. Which means that either this tragic, trapped-lady routine is a bunch of crocodile tears, or else it's hypocrisy on such an epic scale that it probably qualifies as some kind of psychological dysfunction."
She stared out into darkness and said nothing.
"You never did answer my question," I said.
"Why not say it louder?" she asked me in a bitter undertone. "If that is what you think of me, then your friends need to be forewarned of my treachery."
"Right," I said. "I do that, and then your eyes well up with tears, and you turn away from me. You let them see one tear fall down your cheek, then turn your head enough to let the wind carry your hair over the rest. Maybe let your shoulders shake once. Then it's the big bad suspicious wizard, who doesn't forgive and doesn't understand, picking on the poor little girl who is trapped in her bad situation and really just wants to be loved. Give me some credit, Rosanna. I'm not going to help you set them up."
The glowing green eyes turned to examine me, and Rosanna's mouth moved, speaking in an entirely different, feminine voice. "Lasciel taught you something of us."
"You might say that," I replied.
Ahead of us and slightly to the right a light flared up in the darkness-a bonfire, I thought. I couldn't tell how far away it was, given the night and the falling snow.
"There," Rosanna murmured. "That way. If you would excuse me."
As she walked back to the wheel of the boat, a breath of wind sighed over the lake. In itself that wasn't anything new. Wind had been blowing all the way through the snowstorm. Something about this breeze, though, caught my attention. It wasn't right.
It took me another three or four seconds to realize what was wrong.
This was a south wind. And it was warm.
"Uh-oh," I said. I held up the chemical light and started scanning the waters all around us.
"Harry?" Michael said. "What is it?"
"Feel that breeze?" I asked.
"Da," Sanya said, confusion in his voice. "Is warm. So?"
Michael caught on. "Summer is on the way," he said.
Rosanna shot a glance over her shoulder at us. "What?"
"Get us to shore," I told her. "The things coming after me might not give a damn if they take you out along with me."
She turned back to the wheel and turned the ignition. The boat's engine stuttered and wheezed and didn't turn over.
The breeze picked up. Instead of snowflakes, thick, slushy drops of half-frozen sleet began to fall. More ice began forming on the boat, thickening almost visibly in the green glow of my light. The waves began to grow steeper, rocking the boat more and more severely.
"Come on," I heard myself saying. "Come on."
"Look there!" Sanya called, pointing a finger down at the water beside the boat.
Something long, brown, fibrous, and slimy lashed up out of the water and wrapped around the Russian knight's arm from wrist to elbow.
"Bozhe moi!"
Two more strands whipped up from different angles, one seizing Sanya's upper arm, one wrapping around his face and skull, and jerked him halfway from the boat in the time it took me to shift my weight and reach for him. I managed to grab one of his boots before he could be pulled all the way over the side into the water. I planted one foot on the wall of the boat and hauled on Sanya's leg for all I was worth. "Michael!"
The boat's engine coughed, turned over, stuttered, and died.
"In nomine Dei Patri!" Michael roared as Amoracchius cleared its sheath. The broadsword flashed in a single sweeping slash, and severed the strands strangling Sanya. The edges of the slashed material burned away from the touch of Amoracchius's steel like paper from an open flame.
I dragged Sanya back into the boat, and the big Russian whipped his saber from its sheath just in time to neatly sever another lashing brown tendril of animate fiber. "What is it?"
"Kelpies," I growled. If they tangled up the blades of the engine our boat wasn't going anywhere. I howled at Rosanna, "Come on!"
The boat suddenly rocked violently to the other side. I twisted my head to look over my shoulder and saw kelpies coming up over the sides. They were slimy, nebulous things, only vaguely humanoid in shape, made up of masses of wet weeds with gaping mouths and pinpoints of glittering silver light for eyes.
I turned and swept my arm in a slewing arc, unleashing my will as I cried out, "Forzare!"
Invisible force ripped the kelpies from the sides of the boat, leaving long strands of wet plant matter clinging limply to the fiberglass hull. They let out gurgling screams as they flew back and splashed into the water.
The boat's engine caught and rose to a roar. The rear end of the boat sank, and its nose rose as it surged forward.
One of my feet flew out from underneath me. I went down, flailing my arms and legs, dimly aware that one of the kelpies had somehow gotten a limb tangled around my ankle. I got dragged to the back of the boat in a quick series of painful jerks and impacts, and had just enough time to realize that the boat was about to surge right out from under me, leaving me in the drink. Then it would just be a question of what killed me first-the icy water or the strangling embrace of the company within it.
Then there was a flash of scarlet and white, a whistle and a hissing sound, and a lance of fire on one of my feet. I went into free fall and bounced into the rear wall of the boat, then to the floor. Icy rain and freezing water splashed up against me, viciously cold. I looked down to find a strand of fibrous weed curling and blackening as it fell from my bleeding ankle. Sanya reached down and plucked the remains clear of my leg before tossing it over the rear of the boat and back into the water. My ankle was bleeding, my blood black in the green chemical light. More black stained the tip of Esperacchius.
I clutched at my ankle, hissing in pain. "Dammit, Sanya!"
Sanya peered out at the darkness behind the boat and then down at my leg. "Ah. Oops."
Michael came back to kneel beside me and hunkered down over my foot. "Harry, hold still." He poked at my ankle, and it hurt enough to make me snarl something about his parentage. "It isn't bad. Long but shallow." He opened a leather case on his sword belt, opposite the sheath of Amoracchius, and withdrew a small medical kit. Sanya's sword had already slashed open my jeans, but Michael tore them a little more to get them out of the way of the cut. Then he cleaned the injury with some kind of disposable wipe, smeared it with something from a plastic tube, covered it with a thick white absorbent bandage, and wrapped it in tape. It took him all of two or three minutes, his hands quick and sure, which was just as well. By the time he was done the shock of the injury had worn off, and the hurt had started up.
"Not much to be done about the pain," he said. "Sorry, Harry."
"Pain I can live with," I said, wincing. "Just give me a minute."
"I am sorry, Dresden," Sanya said.
"Yeah. Don't you dare save my life ever again," I told him. Then I lifted my leg onto one of the benches in the back of the boat to elevate it, and closed my eyes. There were a lot of ways to manage pain besides drugs. Granted, most of them wouldn't help you much, unless you'd had several years of training in focus and concentration, but fortunately I had. Lasciel's shadow had shown me a mental technique for blocking pain so effective that it was a little scary-when I'd used it before, I'd pushed myself until my body had collapsed, because I hadn't been aware of exactly how bad my condition was. I could have died as a result.
Body or mind, heart or soul, we're all human, and we're supposed to feel pain. You cut yourself off from it at your own risk.
That said, given what was ahead of us and coming up behind us, I could hardly put myself in any more danger, relatively speaking, and I couldn't afford any distractions. So I closed my eyes, controlled my breathing, focused my mind, and began to methodically wall away the pain of my new injury, my broken nose, my aching body. It took me a couple of minutes, and by the time I was done the pitch of the boat's engine had changed, dropping from a roar to a lower growl.
I opened my eyes to find Sanya and Michael standing on either side of me, swords in hand, watching over me. Up at the front of the boat Rosanna cut the engine still more and turned her head to stare intently at me for a slow beat. The side of her mouth curved up in a slight, knowing smile. Then she turned to face front again, and I realized that there was light enough to see the outline of her delicately curling demon horns.
I rose and found myself staring at an island that rose from the increasingly turbulent waters of the lake. It was covered in the woods and brush of the midwestern United States-lots of trees less than a foot thick, with the space beneath them filled in with brush, thickets, and thorns to a depth of four or five feet. Snow lay over everything, and the light reflecting from it was what let me see Rosanna's profile.