Dead Beat (The Dresden Files 7)

Snakes.

I was covered in snakes.

There were too many of them to count or identify, and they were all furious. Some dark green reptile as long as my arm struck at my face, sinking fangs into my left cheek and holding on. More of them struck at my neck, my shoulders, my hands, and I screamed in panic and pain. My duster took several hits, but the enspelled leather held out against them. I tore at my neck and shoulders and head, ripping snakes free of me by main strength, their fangs tearing at my flesh as I did.

I struggled to order my thoughts and rise, because I knew Grevane would be coming. I tried to gather my shield as I pushed myself to my hands and knees, but I saw a flash of a heavy boot driving toward me and light exploded in my eyes and I flopped back to the floor, briefly stunned.

I blinked slowly, waiting for my eyes to focus.

Liver Spots appeared in my vision, weathered and strange, white hair wiry and stiff beneath his hat, his loose skin somehow reptilian in the dim light.

"I know you," I slurred, the words tumbling out without checking in with my brain. "I know who you are now."

Liver Spots knelt down over me. He took my wrists and clamped something around them.

While he did, Grevane came up and took The Word of Kemmlar from my limp fingers. He opened it and began scanning through pages until he found the passage he'd been looking for. He read it, stared at it for a long moment, and then opened his mouth in a slow, wheezing cackle.

"By the night," he said, his voice dusty and amused. "It's so simple. How could I not have seen it before?"

"You are satisfied?" Liver Spots asked Grevane.

"Entirely," Grevane said.

"And you will stand by our bargain."

"Of course," Grevane answered. He read another page of the book. "A pleasure working with you. He's all yours." Grevane turned, still beating a slow rhythm on his leg, and the shambling zombies followed him.

"Well, Dresden," Liver Spots said once they were gone. His voice was a rich, rough purr. "I believe you were saying you recognized me?"

I stared up at him blankly.

"Let me help your memory," he said. He took an olive-drab duffel bag from his shoulder and set it on the ground. Then, mostly with one hand, he opened it.

And he drew out a Louisville Slugger.

Oh, my God. I tried to move, but I couldn't. The metal bindings burned cold on my wrists.

"You," I said. "You busted up my car."

"Mmmm. Much as you broke my ankles. My knees. My wrists and my hands. With a Louisville Slugger baseball bat. While I lay helpless on the floor."

Quintus Cassius, the Snakeboy, the serpent-summoning sorcerer and former Knight of the Order of the Blackened Denarius, smiled down at me. He leaned over, kneeling and far too close to me for comfort, and whispered to me as if to a lover.

"I have dreamed of this night, boy," he purred, and gently stroked the side of my face with the baseball bat. "In my day, we would say that revenge is sweet. But times have changed. How do you say? Payback is a bitch."

Chapter Thirty-seven

I stared up at the withered old man I'd called Liver Spots, and behind the loose skin, the wrinkles, the white wiry hair, I could see the man who had been one of the Order of the Blackened Denarius.

"How?" I asked him. "How did you find me?"

"I didn't," he said. "The coroner's apartment was easy enough to find. I took hairs from his brush. Since you were so eager to keep him sheltered under your wing, it wasn't too terribly difficult to keep track of him-and you-once we had destroyed your wards."

"Oh," I said. My voice shook a little.

"Are you afraid, boy?" Cassius whispered.

"You're about the fifth-scariest person I've met today," I said.

His eyes became very cold.

"Don't knock it," I said. "That's really better than it sounds."

He rose slowly, looking down at me. The fingers of his right hand tightened and loosened on the handle of the bat. Hatred burned there as well, mindless and irrational and howling to be slaked. Cassius hadn't exactly been stable when I'd faced him two years before. From the look of him now, he was preparing a campaign for the presidency of the World Psychosis Association.

I knew that Cassius was a killer, like few I'd ever seen. He had spent what might have been fifteen or sixteen centuries bound to a different fallen angel within his own silver coin, working hand in hand with the head of the Order. He had, I was sure, personally done away with hundreds of foes who had done far less to him than I had.

He would kill me. If a flash of rage took him, he'd cave my head in with that bat, screaming the whole time.

I shuddered at the image and reached out for my magic, seeing if I could draw in enough to try to sucker punch him. But when I tried, the manacles on my wrists suddenly writhed, moving, and dozens of sharp points suddenly pricked into my wrists, as if I had swept my hand through a rosebush. I winced in pain, my breath frozen in my chest for a second.

Cassius smiled at me. "Don't bother. We've used those manacles on wizards and witches for centuries. Nicodemus himself designed them."

"Yeah. Ouch." I winced, but no amount of writhing would move my arms very much, and I couldn't move to try to make the thorny manacles hurt less.

Cassius stared down at me, his eyes bright. He stood there, watching me try to writhe, enjoying my helplessness and pain.

An image flashed through my mind-an old man of faith and courage who had willingly given himself into the hands of the Order in exchange for my freedom. Shiro had died after sustaining the most hideous torments I had ever seen visited upon a human body-and some of them had come at the hands of Cassius. I closed my eyes. I knew what he wanted. He wanted to hurt me. He wanted to see how much pain he could deliver before I died. And there was nothing I could do to prevent it.

Unless...

I thought of what Shiro had told me about having faith. For him it was a theological and moral truth upon which he had based his life. I didn't have the same kind of belief, but I had seen how forces of light and darkness came into conflict, how imbalances were redressed. Cassius was in the service of some of the darkest forces on the planet. Shiro would have said that nothing he did could have prevented a balancing force of light-such as Shiro and his brother Knights-from being placed in his way. In my own experience, I had noticed that when something truly, deeply evil arose, one of the Knights tended to show up.

Maybe one would show up to face Cassius.

Hell's bells. That was mighty thin.

But it was technically possible. And it was all I had.