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“He’s out of control,” Michael said. The injury had aged him, but that was nothing to this.
I knew how he felt. The unbelievability of this past week… If I’d known ten years ago that this would come from being involved with Harry Dresden, I’d have—
“What about the Denarians?” Sanya asked, his hand tightening into a fist around Esperacchius’s hilt.
“The Wardens have most of them staked out,” Molly said. Michael had objected strongly to her being there, but she was needed to relay information between the Wardens and the Knights. Eventually her father had only allowed her to come on the condition that he came, too. “Carlos says they don’t know how long they can hold them.” A pause “And they can’t be sure if Nicodemus is here or not.”
“Bastard,” Sanya spat. Michael shot him a reproving look, but I was with Sanya. Even in this haze of light-headed disbelief that had cushioned all my thoughts for the past days, I knew that this one fact could determine our success or failure.
“It can’t change our plans,” I heard myself say. “We don’t have much time. He draws more power every minute. He might even be able to show Nicodemus a thing or two,” I allowed myself to hope.
“He might,” Michael admitted. “But would he?” His glance flickered to his own daughter, then back to me and Sanya. “He’s no knight.”
“Then it is good that we are,” Sanya said. “We are wasting time strategizing. We must go.” He rose to his feet and pulled Esperacchius from its sheath. The saber’s blade sang in the cold air.
I stood, too, and unsheathed Fidelacchius.
“Dear Lord,” Michael murmured, “give us your guidance.” He crossed himself; Sanya stared bleakly through the tent flap.
Give me strength, I added silently, mimicking Michael’s gesture. The kind of strength I need tonight. I know I’ve done things in the past that I shouldn’t have, but without You, I don’t think I can face him.
I remembered in a flash that moment at his apartment. I came to his door at two in the morning, and he answered. Asked me in. Offered me tea before he asked a single question. He was that sort of person. It was hard for me to speak, hard even to think, but it had been for days now. Ever since the notice, on departmental letterhead. Ever since turning in the badge. “I’ve done some thinking,” I said, taking a sip of my tea. “And I’m wondering if the offer is still open.”
He got up from the kitchen table without saying a word, and a minute later he had returned holding the sword. “Only one way to find out,” he said, setting it gently before me on the table. The lacquered bamboo of the sheath gleamed in the light of the candle that sat on the table between us.
He looked me in the eye for a brief moment. “Are you sure?”
I had nothing else left. I took the sword in my hand and slowly, reverentially, drew it from its sheath. A sudden image fled through my mind—myself as avenging angel, boldly advancing with flaming sword in hand. I shook my head and the image cleared, but the hilt of Fidelacchius felt warm beneath my grip, and when I opened eyes I hadn’t even realized I’d closed, the world was a different color. For the first time since the forced resignation, I had an outlet for my purpose.
The hilt was warm in my hand again now, barely a year later—but all it made me feel was faintly sick.
“Let us go, then,” Sanya said, and he led the way out of the tent and onto the sandy shore of Demonreach.
*
In truth this was all over before it began. It was over before he decided to set up this meeting, or to keep it. I didn’t know it then, but it was over before he even got the call.
I was there. We were in his apartment, just talking—I didn’t even remember now what we were talking about. He laughed at something I said. Then the phone rang, and he got up to get it, still snickering a little. “Dresden.”
In the silence of the room, I could hear Susan’s voice on the end of the line, panicked, breathless, but undeniably hers: “They’ve taken our daughter.”
The line went dead; the phone dropped from his fingers; and he looked at me with a face I will never forget. Gone was any trace of our former laughter. In its place, for that first moment, overpowering even confusion and surprise, was fear, ugly and raw. “Daughter?” he breathed out. That one word held it all: incredulity, disbelief, but mostly the fear. I don’t know what I felt, or if I had the leisure to feel. I was too caught up in his emotions to bother thinking through my own.
*
She died.
He tried everything, and still, she died.
Then they sent him the body.
This was why I could understand how, when everything was gone, he would try this.
*
The Knights had met with the Wardens, once we’d realized that Nicodemus was involved.
“No matter what he tries, he breaks the Laws of Magic,” Luccio said, her youthful face drawn and haggard so that for a moment I could see the woman she had been before Corpsetaker had killed her old body and Dresden had created a life for her in this new one. “He can’t go back in time and change history. He cannot return her to life.”
But I heard the fear in her voice. She knew him better than the other Wardens, and I could tell from the way she said that last statement that she wasn’t entirely sure it was true. She knew he was obstinate and mad with rage and grief. He couldn’t do a thing without breaking one of the Seven Laws of Magic. But perhaps Luccio was the only Warden who understood that the Laws of Magic probably didn’t seem too important to him now. He could transgress them. He could bring back his daughter. And he was one of the only people she knew who had the power to do that.
*
I could feel him before I saw him, a sensation like sun on a sunburn or sandpaper against bare sin: bristling, uncomfortable. Fidelacchius’s hilt itched in my hand.
I climbed the stairs cut into the side of the hill. I’d never made the climb before but I knew the hollowed-out lighthouse atop it, and I knew it had been the site of earlier battles. I knew this would be where I would find him. I had to find him, before—
A voice atop the hill, urbane, maddeningly calm. “Mister Dresden. I see you have come after all.”
“You.” It was a statement, a single word, but my heart seized up. He didn’t even sound surprised. The note had been anonymous and its writer had let Dresden pick the time and the place. Without being a Knight, without the dubious aid of the Wardens, I never would have expected Nicodemus. And yet somehow he had.
“Me,” the Denarians’ leader said. “I don’t know who else you expected.”
I had gained the top of the hill by now, going cautiously and as quietly as I could, praying not to attract attention. The island’s foliage was sparse in the area surrounding the lighthouse and the little cottage; any movement of mine could be spotted.
I could see them now, standing face to face at the base of the crumbling lighthouse tower. Nicodemus, sallow-skinned but impeccably dressed in a black-on-black priest’s ensemble, with a noose in place of a Roman collar. Dresden facing him, all in black as well, a near-perfect mirror of the Fallen. His duster hung limply at his sides. He was closer to me, but his back was towards me, so that I couldn’t see the bruises and scrapes he’d acquired over the past few days, but I knew they were there; I’d been with him when he’d received most of them.
The distance between them was marked out by a shimmering haze in the air, one which grew stronger even as I watched. It made Dresden look a little fuzzy, out of focus. He was inside a circle. He was still drawing power from the island, even as he spoke to the demon. This close, the pressure of all that power was a physical thing.
“Let’s cut the small talk,” he said, “and get down to business.”
“Business is relatively simple,” Nicodemus said. “Something has been taken from you. You want it back. I’m the only one with the power to get it.” And from a pocket inside his suit he withdrew a small drawstring pouch, and I heard the unmistakable clink of coins. Six at least, if I had to guess.
On a different day, Harry would have been busy working through all the different ways he could get those coins away from the Denarian. I knew I was. But things were far from normal.
“I have power already,” he said, his voice surprisingly steady. “The power of this whole island.”
“Indeed you do,” Nicodemus replied. “But it will not be enough.”
I saw the flicker of apprehension on Harry’s face, knew he had been thinking or fearing the exact same thing, and knew that we were done for.
“I have more experience with these matters than you,” Nicodemus said, advancing a step closer to Harry but still staying well away from the circle’s boundary. He and I both knew that to break that circle from the outside would be to draw all of that uncontained power outwards in an explosion of force the likes of which I at least couldn’t survive. From the skittish way in which the Denarian skirted it, I got the feeling it might have been enough to knock even him down a few pegs. “I know the kind of power it takes to cross the boundaries of this life. You could almost do it, I will give you that. But we both know almost is no good to you. You don’t just need the power to bring her back. You need the power to fight off the Wardens, and the Knights, and that Council of yours. Because as soon as they know what you have done, they will be after you.” Nicodemus began now to circle around the edge of the magical circle. “I can give you the power to bring her back, to keep her, and to revenge yourself upon those who thought that they could take her away.
“Why?” Harry asked, teeth clenched. “Why would you offer me this?”
“I only have your best interests at heart.”
“And if I don’t take the deal?”
“You walk away. This is a voluntary bargain, wizard. Just you and I.” He held out once again the sack of coins. “You know their power.”
Harry shifted slightly, watching Nicodemus as he circled. I could see his eyes, now, and the lust in him, the rage, the desire to hurt others in compensation for his own hurt, so fully out of his control—I thought in that moment, as if the sword thought for me, I should kill him. He cannot be allowed to take up a coin.
I could do it. I could charge the circle and use the sword against him. He would never see it coming. I would probably die from the force of the backlash, but it would also wound Nicodemus, and Harry—he would be safe from the coin’s touch.
But as quickly as that scenario entered my mind, another more daunting one surfaced: It would unmake the sword, if I used it against him. Fidelacchius, the sword of faith, of fidelity. The sword of loyalty. Dresden had my trust, and I his. Whether this was the way it should be didn’t matter—deep in my bones I felt, I knew, that whatever anyone else might say, for me to kill Harry would be an act of treachery. It would unmake the sword, and Nicodemus would win.
I couldn’t use the sword. But I had to do something.
Adrenaline coursing through me faster than blood, and much faster than common sense, I stood up, revealing myself to the tableau with the words, “Harry, don’t do it!”
They were pretty stupid words, I thought, about a second after I said them. Especially if they were going to be some of my last. But hey, at least I got the point across, and I certainly got their attention.
And then suddenly a dark shape that smelled of musk and decay grabbed me and held me rooted to the spot, one hand covering my mouth so I couldn’t make a sound, the other pinning my sword arm behind me. Too late, I realized I had forgotten to account for Nicodemus’s shadow. I saw sparks, and heard an angry hiss—it must have brushed against the sword. Even in my position, I grinned wryly. It couldn’t touch an object of such faith and such power without my permission, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to give that any time soon.
I heard Nicodemus snicker softly, but my eyes were on Harry, staring straight into his incredulous gaze through the heat-haze shimmer and sparkle of the circle. My hair stood on end, like it does before a really big lightning storm. “Karrin,” he said, his voice so strained with concentration and grief, “please go. You don’t know what you’re dealing with.”
“Dammit, Harry!” I screamed. “We’re all hurting! Does it give you the right to do this?” I stared him straight in the eyes, not looking away, throwing all my grief and anger and fear and love for him into that gaze, and in that instant I realized that I had found the only weapon that I had left.
In that instant, the soulgaze was begun.
It was like taking up the sword, but different. Nothing changed around me but suddenly, from within me, the world looked different, as though a computer graphics whiz had suddenly shifted the image out of its ordinary color scheme, or an x-ray tech on hallucinogenic drugs had leant me his sight.
I saw Harry’s despair. He had had a daughter for a week before he lost her. I felt the way the anger and grief tore him apart like giant claws clutched around his vitals. His anger, his hatred of all that he has had to fight against, was only matched by his fear that he was becoming what he fought against, and his anger at himself.
I could hear his thoughts as if they were my own. What if he took the coin? What would the cost be? He had handled a Denarian before. He knew he could not handle one again. This time it would take him over. He had no power left. But he had made it this far. He would do something. He had no other choice.
The only choice he had left—well, there was still one. He could choose the way in which he went.
Regret, stinging and hot, like tears blinked out of unwilling eyes. He did not want it to end like this. He didn’t want her—and suddenly I was faced with a picture of myself viewed through his eyes, a blinding flicker too fast to analyze, but blinding blue-white, regal even in pain—to see him like this, here at the end of it all. He was not supposed to outlive me. That had always been the rationale, that had always been why it was not going to work out between us. What if I had known then that he would die before the age of forty? He’d always sort of expected it might turn out that way, I learned, always sort of wanted to use that as an argument against me, but never wanted it enough. He loved me though and he didn’t want anyone he loved to suffer on his account.
He did not want to be tied down. He saw no other option than the one Nicodemus gave him, but he was reticent to take up a coin, knowing that even if he could work in partnership with the Fallen within, he would have Nicodemus’s leadership to contend with. He had power but he did not fool himself that he had more power than that.
I was still watching his soul in the instant the answer came to him, so I knew before Nicodemus the way the ball would drop. Released from the soulgaze, I sagged back against the captivity of the Denarian’s shadow, tears streaming down my cheeks, and started paying attention again just in time to hear Harry say, “It’s only a deal if the coin I take up is yours.”
I wondered for a moment if this was what they meant when they said something was the last possible thing you would have expected. Although I knew from the soulgaze that Harry was serious about the idea of taking up a coin, I had never believed until the moment he spoke that he would go so far as to ask for that of the most powerful and most deadly of the Fallen. I had not thought he would dare to anger the most powerful and most deadly of their hosts. I would have been less surprised if he’d broken out into a rock guitar solo right there.
I was held completely immobilized by Nicodemus’s shadow, so I could only look forward past Harry’s form to the Denarian, with his impassive face betraying no form of emotion. “I am afraid that would not be possible,” Nicodemus said. “I would not survive divesting myself of the coin, so I would not be present to ensure that you had taken it up. And as much as I would like to recruit you to our cause, I see little point in it if I am not going to be around to witness it.”
“That’s not what Anduriel thinks, is it?” Harry countered.
Nicodemus’s face betrayed no emotion, but the shadow quivered as it held me, and I could feel its hunger. “We have worked together from the beginning,” he said. “You have power, but you are inexperienced.”
“From the beginning,” Harry quoted back at Nicodemus. “I don’t know about you, but to me, that sounds like a long time. Long enough, perhaps, for even an immortal demon to become a little bored. To want a little fresh blood.”
I struggled against the shadow that bound me, but at the same time I could hear the persuasive power of Harry’s words. I could sense them working on the darkness that lived within Nicodemus, the darkness that he had struck up a working relationship with, but never quite learned how to control.
“You would not have to die,” Harry added. “You have plenty of other coins there. My knowledge of the Fallen is of course not as advanced as yours, but say you were to hold your old coin in one hand—your new coin in another. Another demon is all you need. When Anduriel is gone, the replacement of your choice would be ready and waiting.”
The argument had its appeal on both the man and the monster. Involuntarily Nicodemus stepped toward him. “What of the Knight?” he said.
“I will restrain her,” I heard Harry’s voice say, with a distant cold that sent a shiver down my spine. “She will not trouble either of us tonight.”
And then a pair of green eyes flickered into life on Nicodemus’s forehead, directly above his own, and a new voice issued from his throat: “Wizard, you have yourself a bargain.”
Nicodemus—or rather, Anduriel, finally asserting control over Nicodemus—held out his right hand. A coin appeared in it; a small, silver thing, seemingly innocuous. I could feel the stench of power and evil around it. It was there, just beyond my grasp, and there was nothing I could do to get it. With his left hand, Nicodemus drew a coin from the pouch of free denarii, then clutched it into a fist.
Harry held out his right hand in return, a grim determination etched in every feature, grief and anger washing off him in billows I did not have to be a wizard to feel. They walked toward each other, slowly, steadily.
In the instant their right hands met, the circle of power that had been building around Harry all this time broke, and the world was washed out in a glaring flash of white light.
*
When I came to, I was lying on the ground, feeling like half a ton of bricks had just landed on me, leaving me to be steamrollered flat and trod upon by elephants. But the shock of that pain was nothing to the one that met me when I opened my eyes.
Harry was there, bent over my body, looking in worse shape than I felt. I let out a shocked gasp of surprise, and Fidelacchius was ready in my right hand before he had even realized I was awake. “Get thee away from me, demon,” I spat, trying to look menacing while blinking back tears. It would not be treachery to kill him now, I thought. This is what the swords were forged for.
I was surprised when, instead of reaching to wrench the sword from my feeble hands, Harry backed up in shock and confusion. “I didn’t take it,” he whispered softly, sitting down a few feet outside of my sword’s reach.
Oh, God, how I wanted to believe him. “How?”
“You,” he said, “the soulgaze—you brought me back. I was so close to the edge, Karrin—” He turned away and began to sob, the way he hadn’t been able to when he’d first got the news.
I knew I ought to be on my guard, but dammit if I didn’t cry along with him. From exhaustion, from pain, from a grief that, even when shared, was so large as to feel undiminished.
“I Saw you, and you were an angel,” he said, choking back the tears. “Like the first time I Saw you. And I couldn’t—I couldn’t let you down.”
“If you didn’t take the coin, where’s Nicodemus?” I asked.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” he replied. “Once the coin was out of his hands, I hit him with the power I’d—I’d been—” He shook his head, looked away from me, as if incapable to even consider what he had almost used that power to do. “It wasn’t enough for a weaker demon to handle.”
I did not believe this. I could not believe this. It would be too easy to believe this. “Anduriel’s coin,” I said. “How—”
Through the tears, something almost like a grin—something that almost looked like my best friend. “Magnetic force field,” he said. “I used a little of the power to shield my hand with a field that would attract the coin without letting it touch my skin. I didn’t know if it was going to work, but,” he shrugged, “I had to try.” He shook his head. “Karrin,” he said, and he looked at me deeply, in a way that he couldn’t have an hour ago, “what am I going to do now? What am I doing to do without her?” His voice broke on the last note. The tears started again, the tears started again, and this time he did not even bother to stop them, just sat there and cried.
I held him. “You’ll do what’s right,” I whispered softly. “And you won’t do it alone.”