To my immense relief, Discord didn’t send the two of us into the middle of a volcano, a thousand feet up into the air, or anywhere else that would have disrupted my rather intense desire to continue living. I guess even evil trickster chaos gods keep their word every once in a while. After all, constant backstabbing would just be too predictable. Or maybe he just wanted Nicky dead for trying to cut and run more than he wanted me dead on the general principle of him being the bad guy.
It took me a bit to reorient myself—I’m not exactly used to getting teleported all over the place. Not that getting teleported had been part of my plan in the first place, though in hindsight I probably should’ve seen it coming. “And here I was thinking he'd just tell me. Shows me right for trying to predict the actions of a god of chaos.”
Sanya seemed to be taking a bit longer to get over the whole teleport shock thing. Maybe the whole wizard and Winter Knight thing gave me an edge there, or perhaps compared to gallivanting around the multiverse a little cross-town teleportation just wasn’t that big a deal. Heck, maybe some folks just get teleport-sick—if riding in a car or airplane can get some people, teleporting could too. Hadn’t that shown up in Star Trek at some point? Aw who knows, I’m a Star Wars guy, not a Trekkie.
We didn’t seem to be anywhere particularly remarkable. Just a random chunk of what was presumably Canadian suburbia. Actually, from what I vaguely recalled of North American geography, Vancouver was pretty close to the US border, so who knows? Whatever the case, you had the typical nice and semi-identical houses populated by nice, semi-identical husbands, wives, and two point five kids (or whatever the average is now).
Naturally two guys just randomly appearing out of nowhere caused a bit of a stir, especially since one of them was black and carrying an AK-47. The locals wasted no time rushing indoors and presumably calling the cops. Let’s hope response times aren’t too fast in the ‘burbs, because if a couple normal vanilla mortal cops showed up they’d be deader than Ensign Ricky when he got sent down to a planet with Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
I might not be a hard-core Trek fan, but I do know the basics. Though I was wearing a red shirt now thanks to Rarity's makeover, so maybe I wasn't quite as genre savvy as I liked to think.
Sanya gave a quick shake of his head to clear out the final mental cobwebs, and hefted his assault rifle. “So, we are hunting Nicodemus now, da?”
“Hell yeah.” I would’ve felt a lot better if I hadn’t lost my staff and blasting rod before getting here, but I could deal with it. Nicodemus’ little noose necktie meant smacking him with any kind of attack magic wasn’t good for much more than slowing him down a bit anyway. The only real option I had for killing him was to get a good grip on said noosetie, and choke him to death with it. “Smug bastard's had this coming for years.”
“Da.” Sanya finished checking our immediate surroundings, and seemed satisfied enough by the absence of any normal threats to put up his gun and pull out Esperacchius. Guns would do about as much good against Nicky as magic, but a holy sword in the gut would be a bit more effective. He gave the saber a few quick swings, and then shot a glance my way. “I am curious, what is plan for fighting Nicodemus?”
Oh, right. A plan. I use those sometimes. “Uh, actually I don't have one,” I admitted sheepishly “I'm just kinda flying by the seat of my pants here.”
Sanya pondered that answer for a bit, and then offered a fatalistic shrug. “Perhaps today is good day to die.” He sounded entirely too cheerful about the possibility that the two of us were a couple minutes away from a gruesome and painful death. Freakin’ Russians.
Judging from the fact that we’d both survived a minute of post-teleport disorientation and the rest of the time we’d needed to get our bearings, Discord hadn’t dropped the two of us right on top of Nicodemus. I guess he wanted us to actually have a chance in hell of taking the bastard down. I guess the three of us duking it out was kind of a win-win scenario for him. I just hoped I hadn’t made a big mistake trusting the ponies to take him down on their own. Yeah, they’d impressed me more than once with how capable they were, but...
To hell with it. If I’d made the wrong choice it was too late to turn back now in any case. Nicodemus had done far too much for me to let him just ride off into the sunset, and if there was even the slimmest chance in hell that he was a threat to my daughter I had to take him down now. Sure, there was probably only a one-in-a-million chance that he knew and only a one-in-a-million chance that he could actually do anything, but that was too much of a risk. It’s a parental thing. Derpy would understand.
I let Sanya take the lead from here. I didn’t really have any way of tracking Nicodemus right now, but the Knights of the Cross have always had this knack for knowing where to go when evil needs to get punched in the snoz. There’s been more than one time when they saved my bacon by showing up a couple seconds before I would’ve ended up dead. Sadly, I don’t get many opportunities to return the favor. On the bright side, maybe I would get one in a couple minutes.
See? That’s the power of positive thinking.
With Sanya using his divine compass to lead the way it only took us a couple minutes to find Nicodemus. The denarian was standing in front of a nice black luxury car with the hood up, staring down at it in vague bemusement. One his little cultist buddies, presumably his driver or something, stood off to the side. Unfortunately, there was a complication.
This being the nice happy suburbs, some of the local cops had helpfully stopped to help out a motorist in distress. For some reason, the cops took one look at the tall, scruffy and disreputable looking guy in a duster that was just made for concealing weapons and the big black Russian toting a freaking assault rifle across his back, and decided we must be a couple of suspicious characters. No clue what could’ve given them that idea.
I guess the Big Guy's random luckorizor that usually helps out Knights of the Cross didn't pan out so well here. Well, it did help the two of us find Nicky in the first place, so I guess the scales had to get balanced out somehow. Heaven and hell are big on the whole balance thing.
Both the cops jumped in surprise when they saw us, and then pulled their guns. I suppose I should’ve been vaguely relieved that both of them were pointing at Sanya, since he was the only one openly carrying a sword and packing a decent collection of other weapons. One of them, who I promptly labelled Officer Pornstache, shouted. “Put the sword down and get your hands in the air! Now!”
My first instinct might have been to try to explain the situation, except I think that would go very well for us. Most cops would have a hard time swallowing that the sword was actually a legendary holy weapon, which we were planning to use on the ancient demon lord standing behind them. A demon lord who just happened to look like an ordinary, respectable member of society. A lot more ordinary and respectable than the two of us, now that I think about it.
I really have the worst luck sometimes.
Our options were more limited than I would’ve liked. Sanya and I might be all-around badasses, but I’d just recently gotten over spending six months in a near-death semi-coma from getting shot. Sure, that had been from getting sniped by a merc who I’m pretty sure was way more than human, but he was still hitting me with a relatively normal bullet fired out of a relatively normal gun. I might be able to shoot fire, freeze things solid and put up bullet-deflecting shields, but even after the Winter Knight goodies Mab gave me, my body was still about as squishy as that of any ordinary human being.
The problem was, these guys were still ordinary beat cops who were just doing their jobs. It’s not their fault they landed right in the middle of this whole mess. There are plenty of ways I can handle an ordinary mortal pointing a gun at me ... but most of those involve causing an unpleasant amount of bodily harm.
Lucky for them, I’ve diversified my toolkit a lot over the years, including a couple ways of dealing with guns that don’t cause too much damage to the owners. “Arctis!” Guns don’t tend to work so well when pretty much everything other than the grip is covered in an inch of ice. I had to leave the grips out—freezing off the fingers of a couple cops falls under my general category of doing more harm to innocents than I’d prefer.
The cops reacted the way most completely uninitiated mortals will when magic suddenly starts flying all over the place. Disbelieving stares and a string of expletives were the order of the day. Then the two them shared a look, and their survival instincts kicked in. Officer Pornstache starting running first, but his partner wasted no time joining him in getting the hell out of Dodge. Probably a smart thing to do when dealing with magic for the first time in your life.
Nicodemus let them run. Probably just because he didn’t want to waste any time on going after a couple vanilla mortals who weren’t important, especially if it meant taking his eyes off us for even a fraction of a second. He still looked completely calm, with a tiny, confident little smirk on his face. Like he knew something we didn’t. That was probably a bad sign. “I should’ve known you wouldn’t let me get away quite so cleanly, Dresden.” He waved a hand towards his stalled-out vehicle. “Judging by the fact you found me despite all my precautions, and the fact that my engine block seems to have been replaced with a hamster in a large plastic ball, it would seem you’ve made another deal with the devil. You do seem to make a habit of doing that.”
Oh goody, we were doing pre-battle banter again. A lot of people think it’s silly to waste time talking when you could just come out blasting. There are plenty of times when I’m partial to that school of thought myself.
However, the thing about pre-battle banter is that the term is technically inaccurate, because it’s not really pre-battle. It’s more like an opening phase of the fight, which people don’t always bother with. The psychological side of things can be a really big deal in some fights. Take my fight against Victor Sells, the Shadowman. Part of what made the difference in that fight was knowing exactly what taunt to throw at him to get him to stop thinking rationally.
That’s part of why I’d let Discord try to pull his little re-write stunt. Nothing gets to a baddie quite like seeing that you just nullified what they thought was their trump card. Granted, it would’ve been nice if I’d come out of that with my blasting rod and my pride intact, but I considered that a fair trade for showing Discord that for all his power, we’d gotten one up on him. That’s the thing about the pre-battle banter—if you’re smart about it, you can get the advantage once the actual spells start flying.
Or hell, maybe I was just looking for an excuse to swap cheesy one-liners like I was in a bad action movie.
Whatever the case, I wasn’t gonna break from my old habits now. “What can I say, you’ve got a real knack for pissing people off.” I couldn’t resist a quick look under the hood of Nicodemus’ car, just to see if he’d been telling the truth about what happened. Sure enough, he wasn’t lying for once. Huh. If not for the whole evil-god-of-chaos-who-takes-malicious-glee-in-the-suffering-of-others thing he had going for him, I could get to like Discord. “Y'know, I know a guy who can fix just about anything that goes wrong in a car. Dunno if he can cover this, but he'd probably give it a shot.”
Sanya shot the leader of the Nickleheads an amused little smile. “Not so fun when it is you who is getting betrayed instead of doing betraying, is it?”
That got a tiny little annoyed twitch from Nicodemus. With an opening like that, I just couldn’t resist getting a dig of my own in. “Still saying you shoulda seen this coming. I mean seriously, someone with as much experience as you’ve got with backstabbing oughta have some sort of sixth sense for predicting impending betrayal. Besides, did you really think you could pull out an evil god of chaos, and he’d just let you hold onto his leash?”
“I never had any illusions about how long my arrangement with Discord was likely to last,” Nicodemus answered us with an unconcerned shrug. “I mitigated the betrayal as best I could, and made sure to gain everything I needed from the alliance in its early days. I am many things, Harry Dresden, but I have never been a fool.” He gave an almost resigned sigh as he pulled his own sword, the same katana he’d used in the triantop fight years ago. “You, however, have always been a fool at heart, Dresden. I suppose I overestimated you when I thought that you would put the safety of the world over petty revenge.”
I held my hands up next to each other, as if I were balancing a scale. “Hmm, revenge...” I lifted up my right hand. “Or saving the world...” I lifted up my other hand. After a little back and forth wobbling of the imaginary scales, I let the two balanced. “There’s a problem with your logic there, Nicky. You’re assuming I can’t have both.”
Sanya gave a sharp nod. “Bright colorful ponies seem to know how to take care of themselves. We will trust them to stop evil chaos god, while we stop you.” He grinned at Nicky and rolled his shoulders. “But really, you spend so much time monologuing at Harry and do not save any for me? This is very disappointing. We have such colorful history together.”
Nicodemus shot an annoyed look Sanya’s way. “You were Tessa's dog, not mine.” A smirk very slowly worked its way onto his face, and he turned back to me. “Speaking of my dearly departed wife, I really should thank you for ridding me of her. Much less troublesome and far more gratifyingly permanent than going through a divorce.” Not to mention that he could collect on the death insurance without having to resort to fraud.
“You couldn't have just gone to Larry Fowler?” Now there would be episode of his show that beat the usual trailer trash freak shows. ‘Two thousand year old mass murdering demon lords, and the women who love them.’ Probably be a huge ratings booster.”
From the look on his face, Nicodemus didn’t get the reference. Most immortals don’t really keep up with the times all that well. Then again, I’m starting to get to be an old enough fart that some of the references that get tossed wind up flying over my head too. The demon lord gave a dismissive wave of his hand. “If Dierdre wasn’t dead as well I might have been expected to pay child support.”
“Yikes, good point.” I suppose I’d finally found a tiny bit of silver lining to the fact that Susan hid my daughter’s existence from me for so many years. Freelance wizards aren’t exactly drowning in money, and adding child support on top of that would mean I probably would’ve been slinging spells out of a cardboard box on the street. “Still, two thousand years and marriage counseling never came up?”
Nicodemus gave an uncaring shrug. “We actually did try that a few times. Tessa always lost interest halfway through the session and killed the counselor.”
“Tessa always had terrible attention span,” Sanya agreed with a sagely nod. “Became very testy if had to go day without killing something.”
“Nothing says Shiny Object Syndrome like watching light reflect off of fresh blood,” I snarked. “And you know what they say: the family that slays together stays together.”
“Her impulsiveness was always a flaw, though one that was somewhat offset by other assets.” I could imagine which of her assets Nicky meant—if you could overlook the fact that she was a complete psycho who would rip your throat out with her teeth and bathe in your blood, as well as the fact that her demon transformation involved puking herself out, then I guess she was pretty good looking. Clearly, those two things weren’t as much a sticking point for Nicodemus. The guy slept with his own daughter, after all. “I suppose torturing and eventually murdering the marriage counselor did always put her in a good mood, so perhaps it worked in a way.”
“Unless you were counselor,” Sanya commented with the sort of dry humor that only a true smartass can manage. “Then it does not work so great.”
“Y’know, the more I learn about her parents, the more I understand why Deidre was such a mess.” I wasn’t too optimistic about my chances of getting under Nicodemus’ skin, but he did seem to be a bit fond of his daughter. Fonder than a father really should be of his little girl, but that’s the Denarians for you. Even their take on parental love has to be twisted and terrifying. Still, he seemed to have some level of attachment to her, which put her above the rest of his utterly expendable minions.
Not much above them though, if Nicodemus’ indifferent shrug was anything to go by. “Well, at least she loved her father.” He brought his free hand up under his chin, and mused, “I suppose I'll have to replace her, too. With her mother dead I suppose that a literal replacement is impossible, but I’m sure I can improvise something.”
Oh, poor little Nicodemus has it so hard. Still, in a strange way I was almost glad to see him just casually brush off the fact that I’d corpsified Daddy’s Little Denarian. If Nicodemus had actually gotten all parental and furious about the fact that his daughter was dead, I might have actually started relating to him a bit. After the Red Court took my little girl I learned a whole lot about righteous parental fury very quickly. Seeing Nicky in the role of the grieving father struggling to avenge the death of his daughter might’ve made it just a bit harder to see him as a complete murdering psycho. I like it a lot better when the bad guys I have to deal with are just pure black hats with no relatable or redeeming features. Makes the whole process of killing them feel clean and heroic—when I have to start dealing with a dozen different shades of grey, it makes me feel less like a hero for killing them and more like a murderer.
I shared a quick nod with Sanya. No more back-and-forth banter—it was time to get down to business. Sanya brought his sword up to a ready position. “So Nicodemus, you know drill. Give up coin or I try and chop your head off.”
Nicodemus scoffed at us. “‘Try’ being the important word there. The two of you could not beat me with aid of Carpenter, the mobster, and several other allies. What makes you think you can win as you are now?”
I was a bit tempted to point out that Nicky had cheated like mad during that fight, but realistically speaking he probably had a lot of dirty tricks planned for us this time around too. Fair and honorable combat isn’t really something the Legions of Hell are known for. I pulled magic in and got ready to throw one hell of a sucker punch Nicodemus’ way. Well, not really a sucker punch since unless he was completely brain-dead he had to know it was coming, but still a magical haymaker that would hopefully ruin his entire day. “I’ve been going through some pretty rigorous new training lately.” I couldn’t resist the chance to throw out one last pun before we got down to business. “I'm a lot cooler than I used to be.”
As always seem to happen when I break out the witty puns, all I got was brief moment of annoyed silence before everyone else just continued talking as if I hadn’t said anything. Pun-meisters get no respect.
Sanya gave a tight grin, and began slowly circling around so that the two of us could catch Nicky in some kind of flanking move where he’d have to split his attention. “Feeling lucky today myself. It good day to take on Denarians.”
Nicky heaved out a melodramatic sigh, and was obviously about to offer his own final little line before we got down to business, but now that I was finally geared up and ready to go I wasn’t in the mood to indulge in any more chit-chat. Trust me, there’s nothing worse than when the bad guy starts monologuing at you about their plans to take over the world, and how if you just stopped fighting them and listened to reason the two of you could rule together. At least I was reasonably safe from any shocking revelations like Nicodemus suddenly revealing that he was my father.
“Forzare!” Force is a pretty good opener against him, since his evil noose can pretty much nullify all the reliably fatal magical attacks. I had a feeling a full-body ‘Infriga’ wouldn’t do me much good against him either. Force, at least, had reliably knocked him around some in the past. I’m no expert on sword fighting, but I figure slapping Nicodemus around like a rag doll would make it a lot easier for Sanya to make with the whole sword chopping and stabbing thing. Sure, the only way to kill him might be to choke him to death with that noose of his, but I was willing to bet that having a sharp chunk of holy steel sticking through his chest would make it a lot easier for the two of us to make with the choking.
The spell definitely connected, but for some reason my force blast did absolutely nothing to him. It didn’t send him flying across the street like it should’ve, or even stagger him a bit. It didn’t even muss up his hair.
I was suddenly, forcefully reminded of Nicodemus’ statements that he’d gotten what he wanted out of his arrangement with Discord. Hell’s bells, I’d caught four of the ponies under his control running around fictionland and trying to get their hooves on all sorts of nasty toys to bring back to their new master. I guess he must’ve gotten a couple Outsider-goodies before I’d shut his little smuggling ring down. Super. Well at least he hadn’t picked up anything too horrifying—otherwise Sanya and I would already be dead.
I was about to toss another spell Nicodemus’ way when something yanked my feet out from underneath me. A quick look down showed inky little tendrils of shadow wrapped around my ankles. For the record, Nicky’s demon-shadow-thing had cold hands. Not just cold in the normal sense, but the sort of nasty, bone-deep cold that leaches the strength from your body. One minor advantage of spending time in Winter, I had a lot of familiarity with different varieties of cold. Strength-leaching-from-your-bones cold was one of the few types that was still a problem for me, even with the whole Winter Knight thing.
Just to make things worse, while his shadow was busy going after me, Nicodemus himself was facing off against Sanya and more than holding his own. Sadly, real sword-fights aren’t nearly as cool the ones you see in movies, where both sides are constantly whirling and jumping all over the place while constantly slashing and stabbing at each other. Instead it was mostly just careful footwork and an occasional careful little probe, gauging their opponent’s reactions and looking for an opening in their defenses. You’d think all the swordfighting would occupy most of Nicodemus’ attention, but he seemed to be managing just fine.
Dammit, Nicodemus could multi-task.
At first blush you’d think just having a living shadow is a pretty unimpressive power for the head of the Denarians compared to some of the amazingly terrifying demonic transformations you would see from some of this minions. You’d think the head of the Denarians would turn into some kind of demon hellfire bone dragon or something completely awesome, but instead all he has is this little living shadow buddy.
Thing is, that shadow of his is a lot more dangerous than you’d expect. Giant demon hellfire dragon might make for a very cool sounding transformation, but in terms of practicality it was pretty lacking. For starters, while your average mortals are pretty good at finding some way to rationalize any magic they run across, there are limits to what you can get away with, and being too blatant about things would end up dragging the mortal authorities into things. That would get messy fast. Plus most of the world just isn’t scaled for things that are too much bigger than an ordinary human.
But the real advantage of Nicky having a demon shadow buddy instead of shape-changing was that it let him split his attention, exactly like he was doing now. Plus his shadow could pull off some impressively versatile tricks, like turning into a pair of wings strong enough for him to fly away on.
I hate it when the baddies pick boring, practical powers over flashy and elaborate ones that aren’t really all that effective.
First things first, I needed to get his shadow off my legs. I went with my old standby. “Fuego!”
A second later it occurred to me that slinging fire at something that was climbing it’s way up my legs might not have been my brightest move ever. Thankfully I had decent enough aim to not fry myself too badly—since I was in long pants they took the worst of it. Fantastic, Rarity went to all the trouble of making me some nice clothes, and I’d ruined them five minutes later.
At least the fire did it’s job. I’m not sure if it’s a matter of literally being able to burn a shadow, or if it just that fire being a light source messed it up, but either way Nicodemus’ demon shadow let go of my legs and slithered away with an angry fingernails-on-chalkboard shriek.
I had just enough time to breathe a sigh of relief before the shadow came right back at me again, rising up off the ground, forming into a group of inky black spikes, and streaking towards me. My first instinct was to bring up a shield, but I had no idea how my current shield bracelet would stand against demonic shadow spikes. Sure, maybe it would work just fine, but I haven’t stayed alive this long by taking unnecessary risks.
Well, actually I do that a lot. Dumb luck is frequently involved too. But ... well ... you get the idea.
A quick roll to the side kept me from getting impaled. I followed that up by snapping another blast of fire at Nicodemus’ shadow. Once again, it didn’t accomplish much beyond mildly annoying the shadow-creature-thing. I guess that’s better than nothing.
Still, I wasn’t gonna do much more than stay alive for the next thirty seconds if all I had going for me was the ability to annoy my opponent. Sure, there have been times when that was enough to get me an edge, but this probably wouldn’t be one of them. I needed a game-changer here. Lucky for me, I’m pretty good at coming up with semi-decent plans when my back is up against the wall and my ass is on the line.
“Fuego!” I pushed this spell a little harder, giving that extra little bit of soulfire kick. With any luck, that would make it more effective at stopping the demon shadow from coming after me for enough time to try out the next stage of my plan. Throwing magic straight at Nicodemus might be a no-go, but there are plenty of ways for a smart wizard to ruin somebody’s day without directly smacking him with a spell.
I opted for a bit of an old trick, but a good one. Okay, the one time I’d tried it in the past it actually failed spectacularly, but that’s not my fault. The guy was a crazy-powerful necromancer, and ... look, it was the best idea I had right then.
I took aim at Nicodemus’ disabled car. “Forzare!” It wasn’t an easy spell to pull off—last time I tried it, I had access to hellfire to boost it up. Soulfire’s a fine substitute for it, especially since it doesn’t make me start racking up Dark Side points the way using hellfire does, but hellfire beats it for raw, destructive power. When I’m trying to throw a couple thousand pounds of steel around, raw power is nice to have.
Fortunately, it’d been seven years since that throw-down with Cowl—I’ve gotten a lot better at magic since then. The fact that Nicodemus’ car didn’t have an engine block anymore thanks to Discord probably helped too.
I gotta admit, the look on Nicky’s face when I picked his car up and dropped it right on his head was priceless.
Sanya wasted no time stepping up and looking for a chunk of Nicodemus that wasn’t covered by car to stick his sword into. but Nicky beat him to the punch. I admit I felt pretty good about the generally battered and bloodied state a car to the head left him, even though his magic necktie meant that the damage had lasted all of half a second. I’d seen him recover from gunshots faster than someone could put bullets into him before.
Still, at least I had a workable strategy now. Pick up something heavy with my magic, and hit him with it. Not the most subtle way of doing things, but subtle has never really been my strong point anyway. All I needed to do was smack Nicky around enough to give Sanya an opening to make with the holy stabbing, and we’d be good.
Naturally, now that I’d finally come up with a tactic that should give us a win against Nicodemus, it all went horribly wrong. Like most times when the universe really bites me in the ass, it all boiled down to a single, seemingly inconsequential detail that we’d overlooked.
In all the excitement over fighting the big bad demon lord, we’d forgotten about his chauffeur
I got lucky. The bullet caught me in the leg instead of somewhere more immediately fatal. Because the universe hates me, it was the leg that hadn’t been gnawed on by the killer rabbit. Maybe an action hero can shrug off getting shot in the meat of their upper thigh with nothing more than a manly grunt and a slight stumble, but when that happens to a real human being your leg collapses on you, and your face meets the ground. Ow.
A second later my leg started screaming in agony. That always seems to be the way getting shot works—at least when it’s a serious gunshot. When you get winged your body starts singing in pain right away, but with the bad ones it’s like your body needs a couple seconds to process the fact that holy shit, I’ve just been shot!
Dammit, if I had my old enchanted duster a simple little handgun bullet would’ve bounced right off of it. The outfit Rarity had me set up with might be wonderfully stylish, but it was woefully lacking in the keeping-me-alive department.
At least me getting shot gave Sanya a critical half second of warning. He got behind cover before Nicky’s little pet cultist could draw a bead on him, and brought his AK-47 to bear. A moment later the guy who’d ventilated my leg was gone. Too bad we hadn’t noticed him fifteen seconds sooner.
I dropped both hands onto my bullet wound and reached down into that cold reserve of power I’d gotten from Mab. My leg was a huge and bloody mess, but if I could just freeze the wound over and grit my teeth, I might be able to stay a little mobile.
Nicky tried to take advantage of Sanya’s distraction, but the Russian was on top of his game. Right before Nicky could make with the stabbing Sanya whirled on him and emptied the rest of his assault rifle’s clip into the Denarian’s chest. The bullets didn’t do all that much damage in and of themselves thanks to the unholy noosetie of protection, but that much lead flying into his chest still sent Nicodemus staggering backwards.
Sanya was quick to follow up on the opening. Before Nicodemus could regain his bearings, the Russian dropped his rifle and brought Esperacchius back to bear. With a quiet little growl of triumph, he swung the blade at Nicodemus’ head.
Nicky recovered fast, but not quite fast enough. There was no time to dodge, and a holy sword was one of the few things Nicodemus couldn’t just shrug off a wound from. There was no time to dodge or parry his blade. Sanya had Nicky dead to rights.
Or so I thought.
Nicodemus didn’t have time to parry Sanya’s blade ... but he did have enough time to parry Sanya’s arm.
Nicky’s sword caught him just above the elbow. There wasn’t enough momentum behind the hit to do anything dramatic like cut straight through Sanya’s arm, but it still bit pretty deep. Deep enough to leave Sanya’s sword arm completely useless.
Esperacchius tumbled out of his fingers.
I tried to get back up, but my leg gave out before I put even a fraction of my weight on it. Sanya shot me one last look, and had enough time for one final little twitch before Nicodemus’ follow-up sliced his chest open.
I answered that the only way I could. “Fuego! Pyrofuego! Burn, you son of a bitch!” By the time I was done I’d melted a thick line of asphalt between the two of us, and all I had to show for it was some singing on the lapels of Nicodemus’ suit. “Arctis! Infriga!” Maybe it was futile, but there was no way in hell I wasn’t going down swinging.
Nicodemus just turned his back on me, casually strode over to what was left of his car, and ripped off an inch-long hunk of jagged steel. Then, with almost casual indifference, he threw it into my leg. The one that didn’t have a bullet hole in it. Bastard.
Stab wounds hurt. A LOT. I’ve been through all kinds of painful things, so I can say pretty authoritatively that getting sharp chunks of metal stuck in your flesh is one of the nastiest things out there. Being the Winter Knight puts me as close to superhuman as I can get, but at the end of the day that human moniker was still the albatross around my neck. Humans have reactions we can't completely control—like the instant withdrawl of our hands when we get a papercut, or the unwillingness to so much as think of using that finger for a few hours. Real stab wounds multiply that pain and instinctive shutdown by several orders of magnitude.
Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, a whole new level of pain opened up to me. That cold place within that had been there ever since I’d signed on as the Winter Knight was just gone. Realizing what had happened sent even more burning pain through me, to the point where I even diverted power from the Snark Drives. Sonuvabitch! Getting power from faeries meant cold iron was a problem for me now. Just having it in my body burned!
As Nicky walked up to me with all the concern of a man walking down the street on an ordinary Saturday morning, I fell back to my time-honored practice of using humor to try and ignore pain. “Sh-shove it, Nicky.”
Nicodemus just looked down at me with a very slight, mocking little smile on his face. “As you wish, Dresden.” He put his boot on top of the chunk of metal sticking out of my leg, and very slowly started pushing it further in. Just when I thought it couldn’t possibly get any worse, he gave a twitch of his foot and twisted the knife. Bastard. Hell, he'd probably been the one to turn that particular action into a metaphor.
It hurt. I screamed. I’ll spare you the details.
Once I’d gotten to the point where I could understand human speech again, Nicodemus looked down at me with a cold, predatory little smile. “I did advise you to leave me be and aid the ponies against Discord instead.”
I needed a little bit longer before I could actually form a reasonably coherent answer. Pain really doesn’t do my brainpower any favors. Since I was pretty damn sure I was just a couple moments away from dead, I did the only thing I could do while my brain barely worked. I mocked him. “And here I thought the only thing you were into penetrating was your daughter.”
Like usually happened when I tried to get any decent smartassery off against him, it just bounced right off. “Well, I did spend my childhood in Ancient Greece...”
For some reason, probably the insane endorphin high I was riding on to keep from passing out on the spot, that actually got a very pained laugh out of me. “And here I thought the saying was 'when in Rome.' Or was that you too?”
“Well, Greece was under Roman rule at the time,” Nicodemus temporized. “So I suppose in a way both are applicable.”
“Explains a bit about your concept of personal space.” I tried to take all that pain running through my body and put it to good use. One thing I learned the hard way early on in my wizard training—pain is one hell of a good motivator for pulling off magic. “Forzare!”
Even if my pain-addled brain had retained enough sense to use a spell that hadn’t failed the last time I threw it his way, I doubt I would have accomplished much. Nicky wasn’t going to go down to a single spell. If anything, he seemed amused by attempt when my spell fizzled. “Ever the fighter, even at the end. It is a pity you never saw reason.”
Okay, trying to smack him with a spell just made things hurt even worse, and I hadn’t thought that was possible. I swear, I’m starting to get way too familiar with what it feels like to be in a state of utter agony. “Reason?” I might be in pain, but I wasn’t gonna just let him have his triumphant evil monologue in peace. “Whose reason? Yours? Reason at the edge of a knife ended when the Church stopped having standing armies.”
Nicodemus just gave a slightly annoyed little shake of his head, as if I were a particularly stubborn child. “Ah, Dresden. You truly are ignorant. You think me your Nemesis, when in truth I would always have preferred you as an ally.”
To be honest I could barely even process what he was saying right now, but I knew enough to realize that he’d left me an opening. “You missed your window by hours. Sucks for you.”
“Yes, quite a pity.” Nicodemus talked about losing out a chance to turn me to the Dark Side like most people would talk about being a couple minutes late for an appointment. A bit unfortunate, but hardly something worth getting upset over. “I do wonder though, if Mab had rejected you in your hour of need, where would you have turned?”
“You, probably,” I admitted. It was entirely possible I'd spent too much time around Applejack.
“Indeed.” Nicodemus was smiling—that was a bad sign. “I would say that you are in great need, Dresden, and it is clear that Mab’s power has failed you. I offer you one final chance, if only for the sake of symmetry. Much as I know you hate it when I repeat myself, I will offer you two options. Either you will voluntarily and fully take up a coin, or I will slit your throat.”
Man, the legions of hell really were getting stale and uninventive. Naturally, there was only one answer I could give to an offer like that. “Sorry, one of Discord's clouds got some bullshit lodged in my ears. Say it again?”
“I suppose I shouldn't have expected any other answer.” Nicodemus spoke with the simple resignation of a father whose child was prepared to do something stupid, no matter how many times his parents told him he shouldn’t. I could see him casually wiping the blood off of his sword—why bother with that, anyway? he was just going to dirty it up again in a couple seconds.
“I've learned not to disappoint, Mab got bitchy if I went off her exercise regimen.” I tried to think of something, anything that could get me out of this mess. I wasn’t having much luck. So I went to my old standby of trying to keep the bad guy talking until I came up with something.
“Lucky for me I took all my vitamins like a good little Knight.”
Nicodemus wasn’t even responding to me now. He just yanked my head back to expose my throat, and I could see his other arm winding up for the killing strike.
C’mon. Something ... anything to give me a snowball's’ chance in hell of surviving this ... Wait! There it is. Okay, I just needed to stall him for a bit, and I might be able to make it out of this. Or failing that, at least take him with me.
First I had to stall him enough to survive the next few seconds. Fortunately, the prospect of death literally seconds away, I didn’t have to fake any of the frantic desperation in my voice. “Wait wait wait! Can I just ask one last question?”
After a few seconds of hesitation, Nicky let go. I let out a relieved sigh—I really should’ve known better.
His arm blurred, and I felt a line of fire across my stomach. My arms instinctively crossed over the fresh wound. There was blood. A lot of it. Nicodemus looked entirely too happy about that. “Ask your question, Dresden. You had best ask quickly—even if you keep pressure on the wound, you’re still losing a great deal of blood.”
Damn. This complicated things a bit. I guess I should’ve known he wouldn’t let me off too easy. Still, I could get through this. If I could just get that hunk of cold iron out of my leg and get a bit of time to focus, I could freeze the injury over. That would at least keep most of my blood more-or-less inside my body.
But first things first, keep Nicodemus’ attention on me. “Okay, I gotta know this one. With all of fictionland at your disposal, why the hell did you go for My Little Pony? Seriously, even if you win this one, you're never gonna live that down.”
Nicodemus thought that one over for a bit, and then gave a careless shrug. “Well, as final requests go, I suppose that satisfying your curiosity about something so benign is harmless enough. It’s not like you’re asking me to divulge all my secret plans since you’re about to die anyway.”
Nicodemus shot a glance over his shoulder, and I could vaguely make out the Discorded Vancouver skyline in the distance. “As you said, it was not a place most would expect me to go in search of power. More obvious targets are often more carefully guarded by the Arab.” With the beating I’d taken, it took a second for my brain to figure out that he meant the Gatekeeper. “Also, I knew of your contact with the creatures. I couldn’t help but think your sudden disappearance and apparent death a tad too neat, and I knew that if you lived a strike against them would draw you out.”
That ... okay, that did kinda make sense, if you subscribed to the utter cold bastard school of logic. “So you went to the land of Saturday morning cartoons, turned the ponies against each other, shattered their innocence and tried your best to kill them while unleashing a god of disharmony—all to needle me?” In a way, it was almost flattering.
Naturally, Nicodemus was quick to deflate my ego. “Drawing you out of hiding was hardly the centerpiece of my plan, but it was certainly a useful side-benefit.” Nicodemus’ voice turned almost musing as he added, “You know, Dresden. there was a time when I was not so different from you.” He gave me a mocking little smirk, and amended, “Well, I was never quite the unthinking fool you were, but there was a certain similarity...”
Oh hell no, he's monologuing about the Good Old Days. Anything to keep that knife away from my neck for the next couple minutes, I guess—though I'd probably change my tune a bit if he started recounting his first encounter with a woman. Especially if it was Tessa.
Thankfully, Nicodemus wasn’t going down the route that might prompt me to save him the trouble of doing me in. “However, there was an important difference between myself, even in my youngest days, and you. I was never as ignorant or as foolish as you are, and unlike you I have the strength to do that which is necessary. Such as killing idealistic fools who stand in my way.”
Yeah, that last bit didn’t sound ominous for my chances of survival at all. If I were a guessing person, I'd wager he's wrapping up. I suddenly found a renewed interest in where that sword of his was in relation to me. I needed more time. “You can't kill me, you'd lose the smartassed foil that's been driving you towards tormented amusement for the past decade.”
“I think I shall find a way to endure.” Nicodemus countered dryly.
“Aw, c'mon Nicky.” I tried to give him a cocky, smartassed grin, even though I was actually desperately staving off panic. “That's just cold.”
I guess the pun must have done the trick, because instead of killing me Nicodemus offered me another conversation opener. At this rate, I could look forward to him talking my ears off until I was done bleeding out. “Tell me something, Dresden. Since, as the cliche goes, you're about to die anyway, there’s really no harm in it letting a few secrets go. Why did you need power so badly that you sold yourself to Mab?”
I tried to keep a confident grin plastered on my face, but it was pretty hard to keep faking a lack of fear when I couldn’t help remembering what happened the last time I showed my hand. “C'mon Nicky, you expect a servant of the Fae to give out information for free like that, and not get anything in return for it?”
“Ah, you truly have become Mab’s creature, it would seem.” That one might have stung a bit if I was in any condition to care about verbal barbs right now. Nicodemus offered me a conciliatory nod. “Shall I offer an equal exchange then? Your tale for mine?”
Well, if I wanted to buy some time, swapping life stories was a pretty good move. He sure did seem to be in a chatty mood now that I was minutes away from death. Aww, I guess he really did care about me after all. Or maybe he was just hoping that while I wouldn’t sign on for Team Evil with the prospect of a quick death staring me the face, my will would crack if I was slowly bleeding out. “Riiiight ... how about laying off the stabbity tendencies first as a sign of good faith?”
Nicodemus thought it over a moment, then sheathed his blade. I’ve read enough fantasy paperbacks to know that sheathing a bloody sword tends to make for a huge mess to clean up later. I guess that’s not Nicodemus’ problem though—he had cultists for that kinda drudgework. Heh, Nicky’s cultists were gonna polish his sword. Man, my sense of humor gets a little juvenile when I’m on the verge of death.
Now that he’d sheathed that katana of his, Nicky would need to take about a quarter of a second longer than before to finish me off if I crossed the line. Not much for a margin, but I’ll take any edge I can get. Nicodemus certainly didn’t seem to see me as any kind of threat. “I see no harm in putting my blade away. In your current state, I hardly need do anything to kill you—I simply need to wait a few minutes while nature takes its normal course with you.”
I took the excuse of Nicky changing postures on me to shift around a bit myself, getting one of my hands a little closer to that nasty chunk of cold iron sticking out of my leg. If I could get that out, I should be able to at least stabilize myself a bit better. Maybe even, if I was luckier than I’d been in any day of my life up to this point, find a way to take him down. I still had one last little ace in the hole, and if I could buy some more time my plan to turn the tables on him could actually work. First things first, keep his mind on storytime. Kinda like Arabian Nights, except more horrifying. “You ... you were saying?”
Nicodemus’s demon-shadow thing went and formed itself into something almost resembling a chair, and Nicodemus settled down into it like he had all the time in the world. I guess he did—he wasn’t the one who was bleeding out. “Your tale for mine, Dresden. As I asked first...”
Well damn. Making sure I told a good enough story to keep his attention while not giving away anything that could get me in big trouble if he made it out of this alive wouldn’t be easy. I’m not at my best when a big chunk of my mind is focused on keeping pressure on my gaping wounds. “I've made a lot of connections in my life. A few—a precious few—are worth taking that plunge for.” Huh, I didn't actually shoot myself in the foot that time. Hanging out with the Fae was starting to affect my sense of honesty.
Mental note: do not introduce Applejack to the Fae. Ever.
Nicodemus gave an almost bored shrug. “Ah, a matter of sentiment then. I am unsurprised.” I guess it was an easy guess for anyone who really knew me. It’s not like I would just randomly start having psycho-murderer impulses for no reason.
Nicodemus mulled things over a moment longer, and very slowly nodded. “A satisfactory answer, Dresden. Albeit a bit vague and lacking in details.” Yeah, that was kinda the idea, Nicky. Even if it was a virtual certainty one of us was gonna be corpsified soon, I wasn’t about to start giving the goods away now. “I shall respond in kind. As I’ve told you more than once in the past, we share common interests. There are some forces in this world that must be stopped, no matter the cost.”
I felt my eyes go wide, and the pit would’ve dropped out of the bottom of my stomach if it wasn’t busy bleeding. Son. Of. A—no, I can't even say that 'cause that be an insult to moms everywhere. Gimme a slightly different timescale or a 'no' from the Winter court, and that could easily be my reflection in the mirror.
Nicodemus could see it in my eyes, and a triumphant little grin appeared on his face. “Ah, now you begin to understand. You've seen the signs, haven't you? There are forces far beyond your comprehension at play in this world. Surely you do not think their actions in your home city were their first appearance?”
I knew what he was talking about. There have always been baddies running around, but lately they’ve been hitting a whole new level of nasty. Low-level magical thugs were somehow getting their hands on serious mojo, major players like the Red Court had gone off on utterly insane plans that tore the status quo to bits, there was some kind of secret cabal of dark wizards in the White Council itself, stuff like that. The worst part was, I couldn’t shake the feeling that all this was somehow being coordinated, that all the different bits of nasty I’d been stuck dealing with over the years were just pawns in someone or something’s master plan.
Nicky must have been able to see me connecting the dots, because his smirk was only getting bigger. “Now do you understand, Dresden? Against such forces, any measure is justified.”
“You've...” I very slowly nodded. “I guess there is a kinda logic to it all. I mean—hell, I’ve gone up against plenty of nasty things in my time. There’s been more than once that I had to do some pretty questionable stuff for the Greater Good and all that.”
I’ve never outright gone over to the Dark Side, but I’ve spent half my life messing around with the Grey Side in one form or another. Sure, using necromancy to create a zombie T-Rex technically doesn’t break any of the rules against using necromancy on human dead, but that’s a damn fine line to tread. When you’re constantly skirting the edges of the rules, it doesn’t take much to push you over the edge into breaking them outright. Hell’s bells, I’d done exactly that when my daughter was in danger. I’d taken a big step along the path to looking like Nicodemus.
Somehow, the whole thing just seemed ... ridiculous. I don’t know, maybe the blood loss was making me get a little giddy. Next thing I knew, I was laughing.
For the record, laughing when your stomach’s been cut halfway open is not a fun experience. Talk about busting your gut.
Nicodemus didn’t seem to know what to think of that. It always seems to throw the bad guys off when you start laughing your ass off at them. “I don’t know what’s more pathetic.” I managed to gasp out between pained cackles. “The possibility that you really think you’re some kinda hero and that everything you’ve done has all been for the Greater Good, or the possibility that you’re lying your ass off and actually think I’m dumb enough to fall for a line like that.”
Nicodemus went stiff with surprise. “Y’wanna know the simple truth, Nicky? If you ever were some kinda wanna-be hero, then you jumped off the slippery slope so long ago that your feet don’t even remember what it feels like to touch the ground. If you’re a liar, then you’re a crappy one. Either way, I’m not buying the shit you’re selling, because the simple truth is that you’re an asshole.”
Nicodemus let out a strangled gasp and twitched. “Oh yeah, while we’re on the subject, here’s one last bit of truth for you, Nicky-boy. Sabers are one-handed weapons.”
Esperacchius’ tip burst out of Nicodemus’ chest.
Sanya managed to shoot me a quick wink and a grin over Nicodemus’ shoulder before his body failed him. If he’d still been conscious, he probably would’ve said something about how being sliced open almost from gullet to groin was still pretty mild compared to enduring a Russian winter.
Nicodemus slowly brought his hands up to the tip of the sword, as if he wanted to push it back out of his body. He probably did, come to think of it—as I’d recently discovered myself, getting stabbed hurts. As soon as his hands came close to the blade, it flared up in a burst of holy light, and Nicky pulled his hands back as if they’d been burned.
Unfortunately, my earlier guess about the effects of getting stabbed seemed to spot on—Nicky was not a happy customer at all, but he didn’t seem to be suffering from a case of death the way most folks would after having a sword run through their chest.
On the bright side, getting stabbified seemed to have taken his mind off little old me. This could be my chance. I could get that chunk of cold iron out of my leg, and with a couple minutes to work I should be able to patch myself up enough to survive until someone got around to calling an ambulance. Hell’s bells, I might even be able to save Sanya on top of that. He’d been up and moving a minute ago, he couldn’t be that far gone.
There was just one downside to that plan. Nicodemus was already staggering away as best he could with a holy sword through his chest, and he was making surprisingly good time. If I spent a couple minutes patching myself up, and a couple more fixing up Sanya, he’d be gone. It probably wouldn’t be that hard to find a paramedic or someone he could con into taking that sword out for him, and then Nicodemus would be right as rain.
He’d be getting away scott free with all the crimes he’d pulled. And he’d be escaping with one of the Swords of the Cross in his hands (chest, whatever) in the bargain. No way in hell I was letting him get away with a prize like that.
I quickly pulled out the chunk of cold iron, probably doing more damage to my leg in the process, but I didn’t have time for finesse. “Infriga!” Not the neatest work I’d done, but hopefully the ice would keep enough blood in for me to survive the next few minutes. Maybe. If I was very lucky. I was planning on doing something pretty stupid, after all.
Getting to my feet hurt like hell, but now that I didn’t have cold iron cutting me off I could pull on the Winter Knight mojo to keep me going. Mab’s power made all those injuries ... well they still hurt, but that pain seemed a lot less important now. Still there, but not something that was gonna stop me from taking care of what I needed to get done.
Even without pain as a factor I was limping more than ... something that really limps a lot. Lucky for me, Nicodemus was going even slower. After a minute I finally caught up with him and got my hands on that magic noosetie of his. One handy thing about the fact that his artifact of doom was an evil noose, it didn’t take much creativity to find a way to start killing him with it. I just had to tighten it.
He tried to fight back, but I was pulling on every bit of Winter Knight mojo Mab had given me. Meanwhile, Nicky was pretty badly gimped by the fact that he had a holy sword sticking through his chest. Last time we’d thrown down, just having one of the Swords lying unattended a couple feet away had been enough to give me a fair chance against him, he’d been stuck with no more strength than an ordinary mortal, and no demonic shadow-buddy to help out. Now he was worse off, and I had stacked the deck a little higher in my favor.
That’s not to say he was completely helpless. With all the injuries I’d picked up there were some obvious things he could do to make it bad. Going after my legs, hitting me in the gut, stuff like that. It hurt like hell, but by now I was in full-on bulldog mode—there was absolutely nothing he could do that was gonna make me let go. When my legs eventually gave out on me, I kept my grip on him and brought him down to the ground with me.
After a minute or so, his struggles started slowing down a bit. I wasn’t dumb enough to fall for a possum play like that—I just drew the noose a little tighter. “Just ... fucking ... die ... Nicky.”
I’m not sure how long I kept holding on, things got a little fuzzy after that point. Somewhere in the fight either Nicodemus had hit the ice covering my wounds hard enough to crack it, or my own exertions had done the job for me. I thought about trying to fix it back up, but it was hard to focus on that idea, especially when the rest of my brain was telling me that I needed to keep everything I had on that noose. I could patch up after Nicodemus was taken care of.
After a while the ground started shaking. I looked up, and saw that the Vancouver skyline was slowly turning back to normal, and there was a huge rainbow hanging over the city. They’d done it. “Good job, girls. Damn good job.”
I looked down at Nicodemus. Then I checked him with my Sight, just to be sure.
Dead.
It was over. It was finally over.
The mad determination that had been pushing me forward for the last couple minutes left, and a wave of utter exhaustion took its place. I brought my hands up to my stomach wound and tried to find the power to seal it up, but the magic just kept slipping from my grasp. I guess it wasn’t that important though—the bleeding had just about stopped anyway.
I was tired. So tired. I decided to lie down and take a nap for a bit.
Right before I could get to sleep I heard a woman’s voice, and then the darkness claimed me.