Peace Talks (The Dresden Files 16)

My brother forced his eyes open and tried to find me. “J … J …”

“Justine,” I said. “I know. I’m on it.”

He sobbed. That was all he had left in him.

I stood away from him, leaving him within the light of the crystal. Alfred loomed over Thomas. “YOU HAVE THE CAGE. YOU HAVE THE BLOOD. DRAW THE CIRCLE AND SPEAK THE WORDS, WARDEN.”

My instincts twitched. I looked back over my shoulder.

Freydis stood at the very edge of the dock, staring up the slope at me. Even as I watched, she turned and rushed back to the ship, leaping up onto the deck and vanishing into the hold.

There wasn’t much time. My brother was fading, being devoured by his own demon.

I rose and drew in my will, while I used my staff to gouge a circle into the earth around my brother. Once that was done, I bent over, touched the little trench with my fingers, and raised the circle by unleashing a tiny amount of energy into it. It snapped up in an invisible screen around my fallen brother and began to gather and focus magical energy.

Then I raised the pocketknife overhead in one hand.

“Bound be Thomas Raith,” I hissed. I felt resistance against my will begin to rise, the reluctance of this world to open a passage to another. “Bound be my wounded brother,” I growled, forcing my will into my voice, making it ring from the stones and trees and water. “Fallen warrior, father-to-be, I name him bound, consigned to thee.”

I heard a brief cry from behind me.

I released my will with the third repetition of the binding.

And Demonreach went to work.

I didn’t have the kind of power it would have taken to do what the genius loci did. The energy I’d had to pour into the incantation had simply been to release a portion of the spirit’s power—like turning the key in an enormous, stiff, stubborn lock. Demonreach was not meant to be used by the weak-minded or the uncertain, and the effort it had taken to set it into motion was not one I would care to repeat on a regular basis for exercise.

The crystal flared with light. It bathed Thomas so brightly that I could see his bones through his skin.

And then my poor, battered brother began to scream. It was a thin, shrieking sound, a sound that embraced more emotion, more agony, than his broken body could possibly bear. It ripped at me, that sound, causing me pain that the Winter mantle could do absolutely nothing about. I had just condemned my brother to a punishment that I would have been terrified to face myself.

Thomas screamed and screamed, and the vast form of the genius loci towered over him, bending down.

And then the screams ended.

The light vanished.

I stood alone on the cold stones.

Where my wounded brother had been, there was nothing but a very faintly glowing cloud of green mist, dispersing rapidly, sinking into the stone and earth of Demonreach.

I sagged, dropping down to one knee and bracing my arms on the ground.

Stars and stones.

What I had just done … there had been no choice, especially not now.

But my brother.

I heard a single low cry, raw and ugly with pain.

I turned to see Lara land on the dock and rush toward me, a pale blur of supernatural speed, something that gleamed and caught the moonlight in her hand.

35

Lara Raith didn’t like to fight—it was what made her such a deadly opponent when she had to do it. Once the knives were out, she didn’t let pride come into it at all. If she decided to kill you, it was going to happen as quickly and efficiently as she could arrange, and that would be that.

I had personally seen her walk through a battlefield full of ancient foes armed with nothing but a pair of long knives. She hadn’t just beaten them—she’d made it look easy. She was older than my brother, and she’d taught him to fight. Thomas had walked into a svartalf fortress and damn near assassinated its chief executive, through all the security, all by himself. Lara was faster than my brother, stronger than him, and more experienced.

And now she was coming for me.

I got it. I mean, this was the only place on the planet I was sure Thomas would be safe, but if she’d known the details she’d have fought me on it, and there just hadn’t been time. For all she knew, I’d just disintegrated her brother. If I’d been in Lara’s shoes, I’d have been freaking out, too.

She probably didn’t realize she’d chosen her ground even more poorly than my brother had.

Demonreach had been constructed by Merlin. The Merlin, the original, Camelot and Excalibur, that Merlin. He’d broken at least one of the Laws of Magic to build the place, romping about through time in order to lay a foundation strong enough to bear the supernatural weight of the prison. As a result, the island absolutely seethed with power—and if one knew the layout of the defenses, and the painstaking geomancy that had gone into laying all that energy into usable patterns, it was possible to use that energy at almost no cost to one’s own store of personal power.

Behind Lara, Freydis and her shotgun vaulted off the ship and onto the shore, the Valkyrie following her boss into battle.

Except it wasn’t a battle.

It wasn’t even close.

I made a gesture, hissed part of a word, and the soft ground beneath Lara’s feet abruptly gave way and then snapped back, sending her into a sprawl in the air. She hit the ground, and the brush and grass of the island wrapped her swiftly and completely.

I made a swatting gesture with my right hand, sent out a mental command to utilize some of the waiting energy of the island, and a hickory tree that towered above the landing site abruptly swept down like an angry giant and slammed an enormous branch into the ground a few feet in front of Freydis. The impact knocked the Valkyrie from her feet—and at a second gesture the tree hit her hard enough to send her flying back into the water of the lake.

I turned back to find Lara tearing her way wildly out of the grass and brush, and I had to lift both hands and expend a mild effort of will to have the ground simply swallow her to the neck.

Lara struggled briefly, savagely, and silently, her silver eyes bright. It took her about half as long as it would have taken me to realize the hopelessness of her position. The struggle ceased then, and she went cold and so still that her head might have been something severed from a statue rather than part of an actual near-human being. Only her eyes moved, tracking me. There was nothing playful in her expression now. It was like looking at the eyes of a big cat. An angry one.

“That wasn’t necessary,” I said, turning to track Freydis’s progress in the water. My intellectus was a little fuzzier out there, like peering through smudged glass, which was probably the penalty for my merely human brain struggling to be aware of the constant shifting of every individual molecule of water in the area.

I found Freydis just as she kicked off the bottom of the lake, churning the water into swirling helixes with the power of her limbs as she stroked for the surface, and flew out of it with enough momentum to clear the railing of the Water Beetle—and collide with Murphy on the deck.

“No!” I shouted, and with an effort of will and another flick of my wrists, a pair of trees bent and reached for the ship, wood straining, limbs creaking with threat.

Freydis was fast as hell—and Murphy didn’t even try to fight her. The Valkyrie got behind Murphy, close, one hand on her waist and another on her throat. I knew how strong she was—she could just rake a pound of meat out of Murphy’s neck with a flick of her wrist. Freydis’s eyes were bright and cold. “Back off!” she screamed.