Proven Guilty (The Dresden Files 8)

There were still about twenty people in the room. Immediately beside the door was an old woman, curled on her side on the ground, sobbing in pain. Nearby a wheelchair lay overturned, and a man with braces of some kind on his legs and hips had fallen into an awkward, painful-looking sprawl from which he could not arise. One of his arms was visibly broken, bone pushing at skin. Other people cringed against the walls and beneath chairs. When my wizard light flooded the place, they got up and started staggering away, still screaming in horror.

Straight ahead of me were bodies and blood.

I couldn't see much of them. Three people were down. There was a lot of blood around. A fourth person, a young woman, crawled toward the door making frantic mewling sounds.

A man stood over her. He was nearly seven feet tall and so thick with slabs of muscle that he almost seemed deformed-not pretty bodybuilder muscle, either, but the thick, dull slabs that come from endless physical labor. He wore overalls, a blue shirt, and a hockey mask, and there was a long, curved sickle in his right hand. As I watched, he took a pair of long steps forward, seized the whimpering girl by her hair, and jerked her body into a backward bow. He raised the sickle in his right hand.

Rawlins didn't bother to offer him a chance to surrender. He took a stance not ten feet away, aimed, and put three shots into the masked maniac's head.

The man jerked, twisting a bit, and released the girl's hair abruptly, tossing her aside with a terrible, casual strength. She hit a row of chairs and let out a cry of pain.

Then the maniac turned toward Rawlins and, even though the mask hid his features, the tilt of his head and the tension of his posture showed that he was furious. He went toward Rawlins. The cop shot him four more times, flashes of bright white burning the image of the maniac and the room onto my eyes.

He brought the sickle down on Rawlins. The cop managed to catch the force of it upon his long flashlight. Sparks flew from the steel case, but the light held. The maniac twisted the sickle, so that the tip plowed a furrow across Rawlins's forearm. The cop snarled. The flashlight spun to the ground. The maniac raised the sickle again.

I braced myself, raised my staff and my will, and cried, "Forzare!"

Unseen power lashed from my staff, pure kinetic energy that ripped through the air and hit the maniac like a wrecking ball. The blow drove him back down the aisle, through the air. He hit the projector on its stand. It shattered. He went through it without slowing down. He kept going, the flight of his passage tearing through the large projection screen, and hit the back wall with a thunderous impact.

I sagged in sudden exhaustion, the effort of the spell an enormous drain on me, and had to plant my staff on the ground to keep from falling over. My headache flared up with a vengeance, and the light of my amulet and staff both faded.

There were a few more screams, the quick, light sound of frightened feet, and I whirled. I saw someone flee the room from the corner of my eye, but I didn't get much of a look at them. A second later, the room returned to normal, the lights back, the broken projector still spinning one reel at reduced speed, a loose tongue of film slap-slap-slapping the broken casing.

Rawlins advanced, gun still out, his eyes very wide, down to the far end of the room. He went past the screen and looked behind it, gun in firing position. He looked around for a second, then back at me, his expression baffled.

"He's not here," Rawlins said. "Did you see him go that way?"

I just didn't have enough left in me to speak right at that moment. I shook my head.

"There's a dent in the wall," he reported. "Covered in... I dunno what. Some kind of slime."

"He's gone," I grunted. Then I started forward, toward the downed people. Two of them were young men, the third a young woman. "Help me."

Rawlins holstered his weapon and did. One of the young men was dead. There was a crescent-shaped cut in his thigh that had opened an artery. Another lay mercifully unconscious, a bruise on his head, several hideous inches of bloody innards protruding from a slash across his belly. I was afraid that if we moved him, his guts might come popping out. The girl was alive, but the sickle's tip had drawn a pair of long lines down her back along the spine, and the cuts had been vicious and deep. Bits of bone showed and she lay on her belly, her eyes open and blinking but utterly unfocused, either unwilling or unable to move.

We did what we could for them, which wasn't much more than jerking the tablecloths off the water tables in the corner and improvising soft pads out of them to apply to open wounds. The second girl lay on her side nearby, sobbing hysterically I checked on the old woman, who had just had the wind knocked out of her. I hauled the guy who'd fallen from his wheelchair into a slightly more comfortable position and he nodded thanks at me.

"See to the other victim," Rawlins said. He held the pad against the boy's opened abdomen, putting gentle pressure on it as he jerked out his radio. It squealed with feedback and static when he used it, but he managed to get emergency help headed our way.

I went to the sobbing girl, a tiny little brunette wearing much the same clothes as Molly had been. She'd been bruised up pretty well, and from the way she lay on the floor she could evidently not move without feeling agony. I went to her and felt over her left shoulder gently. "Be still," I told her quietly. "It's your collarbone, I think. I know it hurts like hell, but you're going to be all right."

"It hurts, it hurts, hurts, hurts, hurts," she panted.

I found her hand with mine and squeezed tight. She returned it with a desperate pressure. "You'll be all right," I told her.

"Don't leave me," she whimpered. Her hand was all but crushing mine. "Don't leave."

"It's all right," I said. "I'm right here."

"What the hell is this?" Rawlins said, panting. He looked around him, at the corpse, at the movie screen, at the dent in the wall beyond. "That was the Reaper, the freaking Reaper. From the Suburban Slasher films. What kind of psycho dresses up as the Reaper and starts..." His face twisted in sudden nausea. "What the hell is this?"

"Rawlins," I said, in a sharp voice, to get his attention.

His frightened eyes darted to me.

"Call Murphy," I told him.

He stared at me blankly for a second, then said, "My captain is the one who has to make the call on that one. He'll decide."

"Up to you," I said. "But Murphy and her boys might actually be able to do something with this. Your captain can't." I nodded at the corpse. "And we aren't playing for pennies here."