Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

I grunted and said, “Wonderful. Just the attention I need in my life.”

And then I shoved my shoulders and head into a narrow, lightless, handleless stone shaft and started wriggling down it in my underwear.

26

Going headfirst down a three-story shaft in complete darkness isn’t ever going to do well as a recreational business. I was completely reliant on keeping pressure against the walls to prevent me from falling. In that, the limited space was actually useful—it meant more of my body’s surface area could be pressed against the walls, and less strain being placed on any one spot.

Unless the hand-cut stone shaft narrowed along the line and I got stuck, in which case I was just screwed. Or if it got a lot wider, in which case, also screwed. I might be kind of tough, but a three-story fall onto my head wasn’t going to end well.

I started shimmying down. It was tough work, but I’d been doing a lot of cardio.

Lara had evidently left the dumbwaiter door open behind her, because there was dim light coming through, showing me a lumpy mass of white towels at the bottom of the shaft, as well as the shape of the walls. Once I had an idea of distance, it was possible to move more quickly—I could just relax a little and half slide down.

I paid with a little skin, but it wasn’t as bad as it could have been. The stones of the castle were ancient. Time (and I didn’t want to think too closely about what else) had worn off many of the rough edges. As long as I didn’t start bleeding and making the walls slippery, I should be fine.

Fine. I felt like a wad of paper trying not to be blown through a straw, but other than that, everything was super.

I went down carefully, moving only one limb at a time, like the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. Except that I couldn’t actually stick to walls. And if I slipped, I didn’t have any webbing to save myself with, and I’d fall and break my neck.

“ ‘Friendly neighborhood Spider Man,’ ” I sang under my breath, and inched lower.

My shoulders stuck.

My heart started beating a lot faster.

Not because I was scared or anything. This was just cardio.

It’s not like I was experiencing claustrophobia. I was a wizard of the White Council. We don’t let our emotions control us.

I forced myself to breathe slowly, to stop moving, to think. I was stuck because my muscles were contracted, holding me against the walls of the shaft. I had to relax. But if I relaxed, I would fall and die and that would be counterproductive, too. So the trick was going to be to relax part of me while keeping the rest of me tense.

I stretched out an arm, trying to get my shoulders unsquared to the walls, but it didn’t work. I felt myself wedge in further, and my breathing increased. I strained harder and felt the pressure on my joints increase.

“ ‘Can he swing, from a thread?’ ” I gasped.

Wait.

Stop, Harry. Think. Use your brain.

“ ‘Take a look overhead,’ ” my brain kept on muttering.

Right. Overhead.

This was a Chinese finger-trap problem. The harder I tried to work directly against it, the more impossible it would be to escape it.

So I tensed and pushed myself back, upward. It was difficult, but I’d been working out a lot of late. Fighting the Winter mantle’s pull had reaped me some physical benefits. I was able to back up several inches, readjust my shoulders, and slither past the close spot.

“ ‘Hey there!’ ” I breathed, “ ‘There goes the Spider-Man.’ ”

I kept going down, trying not to think of how hard it was to get my breath, or how I was trapped with my hands up over my head, and how if one of those giant spiders (they have those; I’ve seen them) started coming down the shaft after me, there wouldn’t be a damned thing I could do about it.

Thanks, imagination. I didn’t have enough problems, so I really appreciate you making up another one just to keep me on my toes.

I tried to keep my puffing as quiet as I could as I reached the bottom of the shaft and found a pile of sweaty towels and enough dim light to see them.

Well. There wasn’t going to be a way to get out of this gracefully. I stuck my arms out through the door and started wiggling out after them, bending my neck to take my weight on my shoulders as I came out.

I finally shimmied my head out of the bottom of the shaft and into a wall of absolute lust.

Seriously. It was like suddenly being fifteen again, with my hormones exploding and me having no idea at all of how to deal with them. My skin turned hypersensitive, and I was suddenly, acutely aware of the sensation of stone against my back and legs, and that I’d gotten covered in dirt and dust on the way down. The pains of my body came rushing back onto me: soreness of muscle that should have been severely limiting my mobility, old injuries pounding with a steady ache, and the more recent damage to my hands throbbing insistently, all of which were normally muted by the Winter mantle.

Evidently, when a powerful vampire of the White Court wants you to pay attention to how your body feels, you do it. Period.

I turned my head and found my muscles responding only slowly, sluggishly.

The shaft had come out into a dim hallway, with the only lighting coming from a lamp on a desk, placed across one side of the hallway next to a heavy plastic frame that looked like some kind of metal detector.

One of the Einherjaren was standing in front of the desk. The man was at least as tall as me, only built with seventy or eighty more pounds of muscle, with a short buzz of black hair and a bristling black beard. He was standing in front of the desk, holding a heavy rifle, one of those ARs modified for anti-matériel rounds, at his shoulder, aiming down the barrel.

But he didn’t matter.

The only thing that mattered was Lara Raith.

She stood maybe three feet from the Einherjar, balanced on her toes as one lovely leg slowly, slowly shifted, sliding forward. The motion made muscles stretch and bunch, and shadows rippled over her body in ways that should not have been possible, much less maddeningly arousing.

I forgot what I was doing on the floor of the castle.

That didn’t matter.

Lara mattered.

I found myself just staring at her, at the most vibrant, dangerous, glorious woman I’d ever seen, only a few feet away, naked and pulsing with erotic energy. I didn’t care about the smudges of dirt on that pale, perfect skin. I didn’t care that my own body was smudged with filth. I didn’t care about the mission, or the nightmare spider shaft I’d just slithered down, or the now-unfamiliar aches and pains, just so long as I didn’t have to stop looking at the most incredible sight any man could ever s—

I sneezed, out of nowhere, hard, five or six times.

Magic surged out of me, energy pouring out with each involuntary contraction.

Lara’s head whipped around toward me, her silver-blue eyes wide like a cat’s.

Black widow spiders with bodies the size of basketballs came boiling out of the shaft behind me—five or six of them.

The Einherjar’s glazed stare abruptly snapped into focus, and his cold grey eyes snapped from Lara to me to the spiders. His finger moved from ready position along the receiver to the trigger of the rifle.

Lara blurred.

She was inside the Einherjar’s guard before I had fully realized she had begun to move, dipping down and coming up inside the circle of his arms, between the man and the rifle, her back to his chest. Before he’d begun to do much more than twitch in reaction, she had ahold of the weapon and had knocked his hand away from the trigger. The two struggled over the rifle. The Einherjar gave up trying to recover the rifle and clamped his huge right hand down on Lara’s throat. Muscle and tendon in his forearms stood out like cord as he began to crush her neck.