"I could get someone to carry you," Marcone said, his tone solicitous and sincere.
"Bite me," I growled, and called, "Murphy?"
"Here!" Murphy called. She was among the last of those retreating from the ghoul onslaught. Her boxy little Volvo of a gun was hanging by its strap on one shoulder, and she held my .44 in both hands, though it looked almost comically overlarge for her.
"Ramirez has got a knife in the stomach," I said. "I need you to look after him."
"He's the other Warden, right?"
"Yeah," I said. "He's already through the gate."
"What about you?"
I shook my head and made sure my duster was still covering most of me. "Malvora is still out there. He might try to kill our gate, or try some other spell. I've got to be one of the last ones through."
Murphy gave me a skeptical look. "You look like you're about to fall over. You in any shape to do more magic?"
"True," I said, and offered her my staff. "Hey, maybe you should do it."
She gave me a hard look. "No one likes a wiseass, Harry."
"Are you kidding? As long as the wiseass is talking to someone else, else, people love 'em." I gave her half a smile and said, "Get out of here." people love 'em." I gave her half a smile and said, "Get out of here."
"How are we getting back out again?" she asked. "Thomas led us there, but..."
"He'll lead you back," I said. "Or one of the others will. Or Ramirez, if some idiot doesn't kill him trying to help him."
"If it's all the same to you, I'd rather you did it, Harry." She touched my hand, and departed through the broad oval of the gate. I saw her hurry through ankle-deep snow beneath what looked like sheltering pine trees to Ramirez's side, where he lay limply on his cloak. The thralls looked confused, which of course they would be, and cold, which, given their wardrobe, of course they would be.
"That's all of ours!" shouted the soldier to Marcone. "Two minutes, fifteen seconds!"
He had to shout. The nearest of the ghouls were about ten feet away, doing battle against, for lack of a more cliched term, a thin white line of Raith, including my brother with his two blades spinning.
"Go!" Marcone said, and the soldier went through. Marcone, a fresh shotgun in hand, stepped up next to me. "Dresden?"
"What are you hanging around for?"
"If you recall," he said, "I agreed to extract you alive. I'm not leaving until I have done so." He paused and added, "Provided, of course, that it happens in the next two minutes."
From where I was standing, I could see three two-brick bundles of C4, detonators thrust into their soft surfaces, each fitted with old-fashioned precision timepieces. They were simple charges on the floor. The other three must have been shaped charges affixed to the cavern walls. I had no idea how much destruction was going to be wrought by them, but I didn't suppose it would be much fun to be there when they went boom. Alas, that the poor ghouls would most likely be staying for the fireworks.
"Thomas!" I called. "Time to go!"
"Go!" Thomas shouted, and the other vampires with him broke from their line and fled for the gate, except for one, a tall female Raith who...
I blinked. Holy crap. It was Lara.
The other vampires fled past me, through the gate, and Thomas and his sister stood alone against the horde of eight-foot ghouls. Stood against it, and stopped it cold.
Their skin gleamed colder and whiter than glacial ice, their eyes blazed silvery bright, and they moved with blinding speed and utterly inhuman grace. His saber fluttered and slashed, drawing a constant stream of blood, punctuated by devastating blows of his kukri.
(Ah, right, that was the name of that inward-bent knife. I knew I'd remember it eventually.) Lara moved with him, trailing her damp, midnight hair and shredded silk kimono. She covered Thomas's back like a cloak hung from his shoulders. She was no weaker than her younger brother, and perhaps even faster, and the wavy-bladed short sword in her hand had a penchant for leaving spills of ghoulish entrails in its wake. Together, the pair of them slipped aside from repeated rushes and dealt out deadly violence to one foe after another.
Ultimately, I think, their fight was futile-and all the more valiant and astonishing for being so doomed. No matter how lethal Thomas and Lara proved to be, or how many ghouls went screaming to the floor, their black blood continued to slither back into their fallen bodies, and the ghouls that had been taken down continued to gather themselves together to rise and fight again. Most of those who reentered the fight with renewed vigor and increased fury remained hideously maimed in some way. Some trailed their entrails like slimy grey ropes. Others were missing sections of their skulls. At least two entered the fray armless, simply biting with their wide jaws of vicious teeth. Beside the beauty of the brother and sister vampires, the ghouls' deformed bodies and hideous injuries were all the more monstrous, all the more vile.
"My God," Marcone said, his voice hushed. "It is the most beautiful nightmare I have ever seen."
He was right. It was hypnotic. "Time?" I asked him, my voice rough.
He consulted his own stopwatch. "One minute, forty-eight seconds."
"Thomas!" I bellowed. "Lara! Now!"
With that, the pair of them bounded apart, apparently the last thing the ghouls had been expecting, and dashed for the gate.
I turned to go-and that was when I felt it.
There was a dull pulse, a throb of some power that seemed at once alien and familiar, a sickening, whirling sensation and then a sudden stab of energy.
It wasn't a magical attack. An attack implies an act of force that might be predicted, countered, or at least mitigated in some way. This was something far more existential. It simply asserted itself, and by its very existence, it dictated a new reality.
A spike of thought slammed into my being like a physical blow-it wasn't any one single thought. It was, instead, a melange of them, a cocktail of emotions so heavy, so dense, that it drove me instantly to my knees. Despair flooded through me. I was so tired. I had struggled and fought to achieve nothing but raw chaos, rendering the whole of my effort useless. My only true friends had been badly injured, or had run, leaving me in this hellish cavern. Those who currently stood beside me were monsters, of one stripe or another-even my brother, who had returned to his monstrous ways in feeding on other human beings.
Terror followed hard on its heels. I had been paralyzed, while surrounded by monsters of resilience beyond description. In mere seconds, they would fall on me. I had fallen with my face toward the gate, and though physical movement was beyond me, I could see that everyone, everyone had also pitched over onto the ground, vulnerable to the attack while the gate remained open. Vampires, thralls, and mortal warriors alike, they had all fallen.
Guilt came next. Murphy. Carlos. I had gotten them both killed.
Useless. It had all been useless.
Marcone's stopwatch lay on the ground near his limply outstretched hand. He'd fallen next to me. The second hand was sweeping rapidly downward, and the watches on the charges of C4, the nearest of them about ten feet away, did the same.
Then I understood it. This was Vittorio Malvora's attack. This hideous, paralyzing brew of everything darkest in the moral soul was what he had poured out, as the Raith administered desire, the Malvorans gave fear, and the Skavis despair. Vitto had gone beyond them all. He had taken all the worst of the human soul and forged it into a poisonous, deadly weapon.
And I hadn't been able to do a damned thing to stop him.
I lay staring at Marcone's stopwatch, and wondered which would kill us all first: the ghouls or the explosion.
Chapter Forty-One
Between 1:34 and 1:33, the backward-running hand of the stopwatch suddenly halted. Or it seemed that way. But several moments later, the hand twitched down to the next second, and the tick sounded more like a hollow thump. I just lay there staring at it, and wondering if this was how my mind was reacting to my own imminent death.
And then I thought that I'd had enough will to wonder about something, rather than just being crushed and suffocated by despair and terror. Maybe that that was how I was reacting to my imminent death: with denial and escapist self-induced hallucinations. was how I was reacting to my imminent death: with denial and escapist self-induced hallucinations.
"Not precisely, my host," came Lasciel's voice.
I blinked, which was a lot more voluntary movement than I'd had a second before. I tried to look around.
"Don't try," Lasciel said, her voice a little alarmed. "You could harm yourself."
What the hell. Had she somehow slowed down time?
"Time does not exist," she said, her tone firm. "Not the way you consider it, at any rate. I have temporarily accelerated the processes of your mind."
The stopwatch thud-thump thud-thumped again: 1:32.
Accelerating my brain. That made more sense. After all, we all use only about ten percent of our brain's capacity, anyway. There was no reason it couldn't handle a lot more activity. Well, except that...
"Yes," she said. "It is dangerous, and I cannot maintain this level of activity for very long before it begins inflicting permanent damage."
I presumed that Lasciel was about to make me an offer I couldn't refuse.
Her voice became sharp, angry. "Don't be a fool, my host. If you perish, I perish. I simply seek to give you an option that might enable us to survive."
Right. And by some odd coincidence, might that option just happen to involve the coin in my basement?
"Why do you continue to be so stubborn stubborn about this, my host?" Lasciel demanded, her voice tight with frustration. "Taking up the coin would not enslave you. It would not impede your ability to choose for yourself." about this, my host?" Lasciel demanded, her voice tight with frustration. "Taking up the coin would not enslave you. It would not impede your ability to choose for yourself."
Not at first, no. But it would finish up with me enslaved to the true Lasciel, and she knew it.
"Not necessarily," she said. There was a tone of pleading to her voice. "Accommodations can be reached. Compromises made."
Sure, if I'm willing to go along with her every plan, I'm sure she'd be quite agreeable.
"But you would be alive, alive," Lasciel cried.
It didn't matter, given that the coin was buried in the stone under my lab anyway.
"Not an obstacle, my host. I can teach you how to call it to you within a few seconds."
Thud-thump: 1:31. 1:31.
A thud from behind me. Footsteps. The ghouls. They were coming. I could see part of Marcone's face, twisted in agony under Vittorio Malvora's psychic assault.
"Please," Lasciel said. "Please, let me help you. I don't want to die."
I didn't want to die, either.
I closed my eyes for another second.
Thud-thump: 1:30. 1:30.
It took an effort of will, and what seemed like several moments of effort, but I managed to whisper aloud, "No."
"But you will die, die," Lasciel said, her voice anguished.
It was going to happen sooner or later. But it didn't have to be tonight.
"Then quickly! First, you must picture the coin in your mind. I can help you-"
Not like that. She could help me.
Silence.
Thud-thump: 1:29. 1:29.
"I can't," she whispered.
I thought she could.
"I can't, can't," she replied, her voice anguished. "She would never forgive that. Never accept me back into her...just take the coin. Harry, just take the coin. P-please."
I gritted my teeth.
Thud-thump: 1:28. 1:28.
Again, I said, "No." "No."
"I can't do this for you!"
Untrue. She'd already partially shielded me from the effects of Malvora's attack. The situation was simple, for her: She could do more of what she'd already done. Or she could stand by and do nothing. It was her choice.
Lasciel appeared in front of me for the first time, on her hands and knees. She looked...odd. Too thin, her eyes too sunken. She had always looked strong, healthy, and confident. Now, her hair was a wreck, her face twisted with pain, and...
...and she was crying. She looked blotchy, and she needed a tissue. Her hands touched either side of my face.
"It could hurt you. It could inflict brain damage. Do you understand understand what that could mean, Harry?" what that could mean, Harry?"
Never can tell. It might be nice to have brain damage. I already liked Jell-O. And maybe they'd have cable TV at whatever home they wound up sticking me in. Either way, it would be better than having my brains scooped out by ghouls.
Lasciel stared at me for a moment and then let out a choking little laugh. "It's your brother. Your friends. That's why."
If frying my brain got Murphy, Ramirez, Thomas, and Justine out of the mess I'd gotten them into, it would be worth it.
She stared at me for another long moment.
Thud-thump: 1:27. 1:27.
Then a look of almost childish resentment came over her face, and she looked over one shoulder before turning back to me. "I..." She shook her head and said, very softly, wonderingly, "She...doesn't deserve you."
Deserved or not, the fallen angel wasn't getting me. Not ever.